Shintar's Galactic Seasons Diary, Week 3

So, hey! I guess me keeping a diary of my Seasons progress is a thing now.

Day 1:

New week, new bugs. When I logged in to check my new objectives, I found that I only had one weekly instead of the intended two. I could only add my voice to the forum thread talking about this bug and move on for the time being. The one weekly I had was flashpoints again. While I wasn't sure whether that one had been fixed, I wanted to wait a little with re-rolling to see if any more information was going to surface about the bug with the missing weekly first (in case it reappeared and I found myself wanting to re-roll that one).

My dailies were Hutt space enemies... and insectoids on Voss. I couldn't even think of any insects on Voss off the top of my head! Shaclaws count I guess, but still... I re-rolled it and got... three GSI missions on Makeb? Unexpected, but at least something different. I did them on the Scoundrel with whom I also did the GSI round on Alderaan in week one and made a point of not trying to be too sneaky so that I would naturally kill a decent amount of mobs on the way. This worked out well enough and I completed both daily objectives at almost the same time.

Day 2:

I checked the forum thread about the missing weekly and it was up to four pages of people saying that they had the same problem. There was some theorising going on about what might be happening, but nothing conclusive and no dev response yet.

My dailies were to defeat 75 enemies on any Hutt space planet and do two heroics on Makeb (I think - title and description disagreed on whether it had to be Makeb or could be another Hutt space planet). I figured I might as well go for it. I decided to go on my Vanguard tank, picking two Makeb heroics from the fleet terminal more or less at random. I know I've done them all before at some point, but it's been so long I honestly couldn't remember anything about them at all.

Then a funny thing happened when I charged into the first pull at the first heroic: I... died? And with hitting some cooldowns even! Another Vanguard was there too and threw me a group invite just before I died, which I accepted. Then he attempted what remained of the pull, and died as well. We both revived, and dusted ourselves off with slight embarrassment before proceeding to do the rest of the heroic together, which was of course much easier. The friendly fellow agreed to team up for another one as well, and he accepted me sharing my second choice of heroic (we did try the other way round but it said I wasn't eligible for the one he had picked).

I honestly can't remember the last time I grouped up with someone for a heroic other than to avoid fighting over limited spawns and it genuinely felt beneficial as well. Anyway, that little adventure took care of both of my daily objectives in short order.

Day 3:

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the devs had actually rolled out a hotfix for the missing weekly issue, and on login I now had a second weekly to do warzones. At this point I decided to risk re-rolling the flashpoints, as I was signed up for a Scum run with guildies the next day and it would have been nice to also get the operations weekly completion from that, but I got GSF instead, which I was also fine with.

It also aligned with one of my dailies being GSF, which ended up being a domination match during which I managed to blow myself up not just once, but twice, and yet still came out as the second highest ranked on my team. Unsurprisingly, with that being the average skill level of my team, we were three-capped and it was over quickly.

My other daily was more Makeb heroics, and that still felt novel enough to me that I didn't re-roll it. This time I took another one of my Scoundrels and picked two different heroics, hoping to save some time by stealthing since I didn't need the kills... probably needless to say that this once again didn't work out. I'd forgotten how involved some of those heorics were: fight three turrets that become immune to damage on a rotation - almost like a boss fight - pick up some explosives, free prisoners, plant explosive charges at four different points on an AA turret, start doing the same on another turret before a scripted interruption brings in an elite droid... and that was all in the same heroic! At least I didn't die this time.

Day 4:

My dailies were GSF again and more Makeb heroics. I decided that I didn't want to go to Makeb for a third day in a row (though according to my guildies the heroics on another planet should have worked as well, despite of the objective name only stating Makeb) and risked a re-roll while crossing my fingers in hopes of not getting shaclaws. I got the one to do a PvP match and all was golden.

My GSF match was another one of those in which everyone was so terrible that we ran out of time before achieving a sufficient number of kills, which I actually tend to find kind of fun, but sadly my team was still on the losing side. In contrast to that, my Sage's PvP match took her to the Huttball pit on Vandin once again, where she personally scored two of her team's goals (we won 5-0) and generally achieved some beautiful synergies with a few of her team members.

Day 5:

GSF and Makeb/Hutt space heroics again! I re-rolled the latter again and got the generic "kill mobs on these planets" objective instead.

For GSF I took a different character out for a spin since my Assassin tank was long done with her Conquest. My Powertech tank had never done a GSF match at all and did very badly, but as it happened that particular domination match ended up being a win anyway.

For the mob kills I did a couple of random quests on Quesh and Makeb on my DvL Assassin and my Juggernaut tank.

Day 6:

Got GSF as my daily yet again and the one to do a warzone. Honestly, that's pretty much the perfect combo for me, but if I was someone who hated GSF, I could see it being frustrating to get it as a daily objective four days in a row.

For GSF, I got into a death match where my team completely obliterated the opposition (no thanks to me), which also completed my GSF weekly objective to play four matches. My warzone ended up being another Vandin Huttball which was a pretty well-balanced game that we won 3-2 (and the enemy was close-ish to potentially scoring again so it really could have gone either way). Sadly I noticed in this Vandin that while Bioware did indeed address certain lag issues, de-sync still isn't a thing of the past, as I still witnessed people catching the ball while being nowhere near it on my screen and similar shenanigans.

Day 7:

On the last day of the SWTOR week, my daily objectives were GSF and Hutt space heroics yet again. I decided that I was okay with the heroics today and would just try a different planet than Makeb, but I didn't really want to do any more GSF after completing my weekly. I re-rolled it in hopes of getting a warzone maybe... and was promptly punished for this foolish gamble by being given the "kill 75 insectoids on Voss" objective, with no escape this time. D'oh!

I went to do a warzone on my lowbie Merc anyway, since I needed one more for my second weekly objective. I got into Vandin again (have I been doing anything else recently?), though this one was a 0-6 loss. I was tempted to blame it on the level disparity again (my team had no level 70+s, while the opposition had several) but if I'm honest it was probably just bad tactics. They had a stealther waiting on our line that nobody seemed to bother to dislodge for ages - I eventually went back myself and knocked them down twice but they kept coming back. Oh well.

As for my daily objectives, I remembered there being one or more Imperial heroics on Voss that had some shaclaws in it, though I wasn't sure which ones they were. I went on my Juggernaut tank and picked up both Ancient Guardians and Rock Eaters, since they sounded like likely contenders. Ancient Guardians turned out to be the right one, as it did have ten shaclaws in it, though it contained even more droids. Rock Eaters was also the heroic I'd expected it to be, but I'd misremembered the big mob at the end - it was a vorantikus, not a shaclaw.

I then swapped to my DvL Assassin to do Ancient Guardians a second time. I killed both groups of shaclaws in it and paused. My insectoid counter was on 20/75. It was really late in the evening and while I was sure there were plenty of shaclaws out in the open world somewhere, I didn't know for the life of me where exactly, and I knew that driving around blindly to find some would take me forever.

I remembered how commenter Pallais had mentioned the idea of resetting a heroic over and over (probably this one) in response to my last Seasons diary. It was only ten mobs... but they were all non-elites, right by the entrance, and as a stealther I could skip the pull consisting of strong and elite droids located between the two groups as well. So I exited, reset the phase (just the phase, not the heroic), went back in and killed the shaclaws again. Then I repeated this process five more times.

Once my insectoid killing objective was completed, I continued to actually complete the heroic, which took care of the second objective. (Fortunately the game had no qualms about giving me credit for doing the same heroic twice on two different characters.) All in all, this was actually reasonably quick, but I have to confess I felt slightly dirty. Talk about degenerate gameplay.

Week 3 impressions:

The bugginess hit a new high (or low?) for me with the missing weekly, though I appreciate that this particular issue was addressed quickly. Still, the amount of small bugs continues to be headache-inducing, as it feels like you should be visiting the forums every day just to check which objectives are reported as buggy before actually attempting to do anything.

In terms of RNG, I felt pretty lucky this week as about half of my objectives were things I liked doing anyway. I do kind of appreciate how the system encourages you to take part in different activities though, including things you may not have done in a while (or ever, in the case of some more casual players I guess). I'd seriously forgotten so much about those Makeb heroics...

I saw someone on the forums say that Seasons is basically what Conquest used to be (the personal part of it at least), back when it had more limited objectives and the weekly themes were more distinctive. This feels very true to me.