Cruising Along

Apologies for the (relatively, by this blog's standards) long period of silence. I generally try to get a new post up every 3-5 days, but as I mentioned previously I went on holiday last week and while I had well-intentioned plans to prepare a post or two in advance, I didn't end up having the time and energy for it in the end.

Since my return I've been thinking about how to best get back into the groove of things, and I decided that I might as well do a general "state of my game" post as I haven't done one of those in a while.

Generally speaking, I don't play as much as I used to right now, mainly for two reasons: first, work stress leaving me with less free time and energy for any hobby pursuits in general (ugh), and second, social pressure to try out different MMOs! The latter has been particularly "bad" this summer - I already wrote about my foray into Lord of the Rings Online, and I'll be trying out another game soon, so there might be another off-topic post coming later in July!

When I do play SWTOR though, I noticed that my play patterns have once again shifted a bit. Specifically, I find myself spending a lot less time playing solo in any capacity, and doing almost nothing but group content. It's as if I subconsciously adjusted to the new road map without even thinking about it!

So I'm spending virtually no time on things like regular questing or solo chapters, and most of it on things like operations, flashpoints and PvP. Even the Iokath dailies didn't end up holding my attention for very long, and I've still only done the story on the two characters that I took through it in the first week. I had hoped that wanting to max out the associated reputation would serve as an incentive to bring more alts into it like it did on Oricon, but since the reputation tokens fell from the sky like rain, doing the weekly a couple of times on one character per faction was more than enough to get there with ease... I even ended up with big stacks of spare tokens to vendor after having hit the cap.

I'm looking forward to the new flashpoint coming out soon, as well as the next encounter in the Gods from the Machine operation. Unfortunately my guildies lost their luster for working on Tyth hardmode pretty quickly, so we haven't visited him in a while. Instead we've been working on Revan hardmode, an older encounter that we've yet to beat. Progress has been so-so, sometimes good, sometimes hampered by changes in the roster and having to scale down to something easier for the evening due to a lack of geared and capable players. However, I'm starting to see why so many people cite Revan hardmode as a fight they like. It contains some pretty inventive mechanics, the distinct phases make progress easy to measure, and the tuning along the way is tight, but not so tight that a single, small mistake is immediately going to wipe you, leaving some room for recovery at several points. I still think we have a very long way to go however.

How are things with Galactic Command? Well, as I remarked when I hit rank 300 on Shintar, since they reintroduced more reliable gear acquisition outside of Galactic Command, its ranks have mostly been shrug-worthy to me. It's just another number to raise - but that's not totally unappealing, it's just not a big priority. I actually got my Sage to 300 as well recently, and have now shifted my efforts to working on my Scoundrel next. Why? Why not!

I just wish I had a better ding shot than me losing to my own guildies in Odessen.

Speaking of gear though, I'm also proud to say that Shintar is actually close to having full 248 gear now... the only thing missing is one relic, but that should be easy to upgrade once I get enough PvP tokens. I'm quite pleased by the prospect of soon being "done" with her gearing for a while. MMO devs often seem to be afraid of letting the player enjoy that feeling, but it's really not a bad thing! It just feels good and opens the door for engaging with other things for a while (such as alts).

I hope everyone is having a good summer and business as usual should resume shortly!