18/05/2021

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.

14 comments :

  1. Oh, I am running it every day on SF, some 4 days on Malgus, and I think I got the Voss one some 6 times in between them... It was terrible. I understand insectoids on other previous planets, but Voss was a terrible, terrible idea. If it were beasts, and included Vorantikus, at least would count for achievements... Alas.

    I didn't have any problems with any weeklies and the flashpoints hotfix, at least, seems to have worked. I also didn't do Makeb a single day, but Nar Shaddaa and Voss... When I'm unsure, I'll take instanced heroics as they seem to always count. IDK.

    Let's see what they'll bring us in a couple hours... x.x

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  2. Delfae @Star Forge18 May 2021 at 13:10

    Several of my guildies got the Insectoids on Voss objective. Not a well-designed one, honestly. Like you, everyone ended up just resetting Ancient Guardians 8 times to clear it.

    For all that people complain about being "forced" into different objectives, I'm enjoying the way that seasons is pushing me out of my comfort zone. I'm still rerolling my GSF objectives, but the more I hear about it, the more it sounds like it might actually be kind of fun. Maybe I'll try some this week. And I was pleasantly surprised yesterday to get the Makeb GSI objective--had no idea it was even on the list! But it turned out to be super relaxing, so I'll probably do more of that in the future.

    Now if only we didn't have the "go kill 75 bugs" objectives. Those are just tedious :/

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    Replies
    1. I agree that it's nice to be encouraged to try different things. The re-roll option already gives you a get-out-of-jail-free card if you get something you really don't like, and you can miss/skip quite a lot and still complete the Season without needing to use the buyout.

      But yeah, I have yet to meet anyone who actually likes the bug-killing objectives. (If you do, please comment and tell me why!)

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    2. Yes, the whole thing has pushed me to do stuff I don't normally do... And I've been even doing GSF. I still don't *like* it, but it's getting less awful and I'm getting at least less confused about it, not to mention it does good cq. I even didn't re-roll the gsf weekly I got...

      I don't even mind the bugs in general, I certainly don't mind them on Core/Outter Rim as you can just do heroics that will provide the kills (and even on Tat, the heroic is a open-world, unlike Voss). For weeks 4/5, they have made it "across the galaxy", and that is even less problematic to me, the problem is being limited to one time on one planet that barely has it spawn (nothign like, say, Bugtown - but Balmorra also has the great benefit of being faction-sensitive, so...)

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  3. Yes, that heroic is the one that I saw mentioned. I'm terrible about remembering the specific names of the heroics these days. I've gotten used to just looking up a list of those heroics which are both instanced and fast when I need to do one. I'm also mostly on my Republic main so Imperial stuff is even more fuzzy to me.

    I suspect all of this will change as my interest in another MMO has fallen off a cliff, so to speak. I'm finding that Galactic Seasons has come along at the right time to start having Swtor being a major focus for me.

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  4. I started to get into PvP. Thanks to Galactic Seasons. First match was nice. Top objectives, top damage, made the decisive play to win the huttball match. Overall a pleasant experience.

    But after that. The horror. Who had the idea, to put four level 20s against four level 60s in a deathmatch? The enemy commando (level 73) had more defensive cooldowns, than my whole group.

    Why do you encourage your playerbase to dip into pvp, just to give them a zero chance for a fair fight?

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    1. Yeah, I don't know how I feel about the unified levelling bracket for PvP yet... or rather, I know that I don't like the idea, but I understand why they did it. I'm just not sure it's worth the trade-off for faster queue pops. At least Chris posted on the forums that they are still monitoring it and gathering feedback.

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    2. I could have lived with a fast loss, but being mocked by the enemy team, laughing at us, because in the two rounds everybody from us got more or less globaled at one point... yeah... that part was not fun at all.

      What are people thinking? Being fiftytwo levels above you, and you won because of superior skills? Just sad the pvp community.

      But Bioware should implement at least some kind of matchmaking. Four 20s against four 60s+. In what world is that fun?

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  5. I did end up trying veteran flashpoints for the first time to complete the weekly objective. I liked that by limiting it to three flashpoints, you can just read a guide on one, queue for that, and start within few minutes. (I did three runs of KDY for the reputation.)

    Unlike PvP, which I jumped into without reading any guides, you can't really get by in a flashpoint just by following the cues from other players and listening to the in-game instructions. (I kept *meaning* to ask for help/identify myself as a new player and psyching myself out of actually doing it.) I'll probably keep doing it for Seasons but not generally.

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    1. Flashpoints are good content generally, but there's a problem with the matchmaker. Sometimes it will match 4 dps that have no healing. Anytime it does that, the runs are guaranteed to be rough. For this reason, I think I'm skipping flashpoints as a weekly from now on.

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    2. Nah, that's how it's supposed to work; they are designed to be doable without a trinity group. For the bosses there are kolto stations that anyone in the group can use to heal. Though yes, depending on the exact group make-up and people's levels, some setups can be rough.

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    3. The only difficulty veteran flashpoints provide, are your teammates.

      If you have skilled players around you, no flashpoint in veteran is difficult in itself.

      But if the whole group consists of newer players or players, who took a long break,... yeah... it can result in a few death.

      The first sign for new players or players, who took a long break and are back again, is, when somebody says something along the line... "we are four dps. why? where healer?". :)

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    4. Veteran Flashpoints (formerly known as Tactical Flashpoints) are in the game since 2016. If i remember correct and a quick Google Search didn't fail me. Five years.

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  6. I got the dailies "Kill 75 Mobs on Taris" and "Do three Heroics on Taris". It felt like a jackpot. :)

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