Finishing Up Ossus

Despite of how many posts I've written singing its praises, I don't think I've sufficiently conveyed just how much I freaking love Ossus. It's now been six months since its release and I'm still doing those dailies and killing those world bosses. Part of me is a little disappointed that the achievement for killing Kil'Cik and R8-X8 repeatedly only goes up to 25, because at this point I'm pretty sure that I must have killed both of them about a hundred times.

The fact that both Masterwork Crystals and the gear earned from them will become redundant in a few months hasn't really been a deterrent to me either. One person's grind is another one's fun gameplay, and I've just been enjoying slowly chipping away at my goal of getting all my characters on Ossus into full 258 gear (sans weapons on Imp side, because there's no way I'm pugging the queen on hardmode). Three out of the six recently reached that goal, and the other three shouldn't have much further left to go.

Last night I also finally sat down and tackled those "miscellaneous" bits of content that I initially put off at launch, such as the datacrons and achievements. I'd had multiple offers from guildies to summon me to some of the datacrons previously, but I wanted to see for myself what they were all about.

I started with tracking down the Ossus Cipher, which was only added with the Dantooine patch last month. I actually really liked the way this particular "find the clickies" achievement worked, because while I used a guide to find all the locations, the items weren't always in the exact same spot. For example the guide would show a screenshot of volume four lying on top of a crate inside a tent, but for me there was nothing there. So I roamed around the camp a little, and eventually discovered that for me it was lying behind a whole stack of crates on a raised platform off to the left. I like that this meant that consulting a guide didn't completely rob me of the fun of finding things for myself; it just made it a lot easier to know the general area each volume was going to be placed in.

Next up I visited Don the Exiled Knight and collected his journals. (By the way, I was so chuffed when I found out that this meme actually originated with fellow blogger Intisar of all people.) These I liked a bit less, mostly because the items weren't glowy the way lore objects and other interactables usually are, which made it very hard to tell them apart from the environment at times, even with a guide. That said, I actually enjoyed reading the short journal entries and finding out how Don's journey mirrored the player character's in parts.

Finally, the datacrons. Again, I went straight for a guide, considering that in six months of doing dailies I hadn't come across an obvious route to reach any of them.

The presence datacron with the grappling hook was decent fun, but it bothered me a bit how the point on which to use the grappling hook just appeared in thin air once you had found the tool. If they had made it part of the landscape / more obvious, it would have given players at least a hint in terms of what to look for.

The mastery one was the only one I could picture a player finding naturally if they are the type to investigate every nook and cranny, as it involved you climbing up a narrow shaft from inside a cave, and the point of exit is close enough to the datacron that you can hear it "twinkle" once you make it to the top. That said, I'd never noticed that crevice myself, or even the cave it resides in... in fact, this whole exercise with the achievements and datacrons caused me to find about five or six new caves that I hadn't even known existed - clearly I didn't get adventurous enough in my own exploration of the planet.

Finally, there was the endurance datacron, the most involved one of the lot, about which I had heard much complaining. In fact, I vividly remember one evening when I was busy doing my own thing (probably doing PvP or something) while a guildie was trying to get this datacron, and basically all that came out of him for hours was some swearing every ten to fifteen minutes. He really struggled with some of those jumps.

With that said, I was pleasantly surprised by how easy I personally found the whole thing. It sure is complicated and unintuitive in so far as it's hard to imagine anyone ever coming across it "naturally", but none of the jumps themselves were actually very challenging. The most challenging part was a section in the latter half which has you doing a jumping puzzle in a dark cave that's only illuminated by a small portable lamp you get and some glowing mushrooms that light the way for you. The limited visibility could be extremely disorienting sometimes, but as I said the jumps themselves were super easy as long as you could actually figure out where you were supposed to be going. I think I only fell down once early on during this entire section.

I also liked how the whole thing felt a bit like a story told without words. You actually go back to the same area where the big boss fight of the planetary storyline takes place, which seems strangely magical now that it's devoid of mobs, and after you've puzzled through all of that, you get to enter a personal instance to unlock the datacron's power where you meet a Jedi tree (no, really) called Ood Bnar. It's a Legends thing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What's really nice though is that completion also grants you a unique weapon tuning that doesn't bind, and this is repeatable once per character. So if you don't care for using the tunings yourself, you could make some decent money re-doing the datacron run on several characters and selling the rewards for several million credits each.

I'll say it again: The all-around awesomeness of Ossus really makes me extra hopeful and excited for Onslaught. Hopefully the dev team can stay on track.