17/06/2021

Shintar's Galactic Seasons Diary, Week 7

I apologise for Seasons being all I'm talking about at the moment, but similarly to the Dark vs. Light event back in the day, I'm honestly kind of fascinated by my own interest in it despite of my initial reaction that the concept wasn't all that great. I'm currently planning to keep writing these diaries until I reach level 100 (which, at my current progress, should be in three to four weeks) and then maybe post a summary of lessons learned.

Anyway, without further ado: The seventh week of the Season was Total Galactic War, which meant that I was more focused on Conquest than Seasons for the first few days at least, though there is overlap between the two of course. This shift in focus meant that I kind of completed some Seasons objectives almost accidentally and without paying too much attention to them.

Day 1:

Seeing how I'd got the flashpoint weekly again and considering what I said last week, I re-rolled it so that I ended up with both warzones and GSF as my weekly objectives. My dailies were also to play a warzone and to do some outer rim heroics.

For the latter I enlisted my DvL Shadow and for once I was actually pretty good at getting in and out of various heroics on Belsavis stealthily, meaning that I finished in good time. In the evening I did a fair amount of PvP for Conquest, which completed both my daily and my weekly. I remember that the first match was a Voidstar on my healing Sage, in which we managed to defend the first set of doors for the full duration, and during the second round I was the one who succeeded at planting the bomb, which is the sort of thing that always makes me happy. The matches after that I don't recall that well, I just know that they didn't all go that swimmingly for me.

Day 2:

My dailies were once again to play a warzone and to kill 75 enemies on outer rim planets. My first PvP match of the day was a Huttball on my Vanguard tank where I rocked pretty hard, pulling enemy ball carriers into the fire repeatedly, and we ended up winning 6-0. After that I descended into a major losing streak though, until I got annoyed enough to stop for the day.

For the outer rim rampage I decided to return to my DvL Assassin and continued questing with her on Belsavis. I felt slightly naughty playing on Imperial side since we needed more points on Republic side to win first place on Onderon, but we already had a healthy lead after only one day, so I wasn't too worried about taking a little bit of time away from that.

Day 3:

On the Thursday, my dailies were a convenient GSF/warzone combo. (I think one of them may originally have been something else, which I decided to re-roll, but I don't remember the details.) The GSF match was one in which my team was abysmal. The warzone, played on my Vanguard tank, was a Voidstar where we once again mounted a flawless defense during round one and then broke through the doors almost immediately in round two.

Day 4:

More GSF for my daily objective, which also brought my weekly count up to three. This one was one of those games in which both sides were bad and struggling to kill each other, which is usually something I find amusing, but less so on that day since I was lagging pretty badly for some reason, constantly getting "on cooldown" messages when trying to fire my railgun, and it annoyed me. Alas, even though it was quite close, it was still a loss.

My other daily was originally 75 mob kills, but I re-rolled it into heroics. I considered repeating the Belsavis combo that I'd found so efficient on day 1, but decided to try Hoth instead for a change of pace. I did aim for a stealthy run again, taking my Shadow tank this time, and actually succeeded again! I even picked up two heroics that were in the exact same area without realising. I found myself thinking that it would be handy to have a guide for which heroics are quick and stealthy to do, but of course these already exist; I just hadn't been looking. This spreadsheet is a good example, if not entirely comprehensive (though I'm not sure about all the random profanity).

Day 5:

My dailies were GSF and heroics again, but I felt daring, so I re-rolled the heroics and got mob killing instead... but the objective counter was already sitting at 74/75, so I literally only had to kill a single mob to get completion. Best bug ever.

For GSF I queued on my Assassin tank again while some of my guildies were queueing on Republic side, and we got into the same match on opposing sides. I was a bit uneasy since at least two of them are pretty good at GSF while I'm not, but the match actually ended up being quite balanced and extremely close. My team won though, which also completed my second weekly objective for the Season.

Day 6:

This time I got PvP and heroics, and re-rolled the heroics into mob killing again, though this time it was sadly at the (expected) progress of 0/75. For the warzone I queued with a group of three guildies this time since several of them had the same objective, and we got into a Novare Coast. Since I was on my Nautolan Shadow, I volunteered to guard our side base. It was pretty quiet for most of the match, except for one time when two people came to try and cap it and I pretty much deleted one of them before they even got close to killing me... I forget how ridiculously OP burst spec Shadows and Assassins are in PvP. The match as a whole was a decisive win too.

For the mob killing I decided to change scenery to Rishi, where my dps Sorc was just starting up the Shadow of Revan storyline. I simply quested until I had enough kills, though considering how many of the early missions are simply about running around and talking, that took me quite a while. Also, I learned that Rishi has a weekly mission now? I do vaguely recall hearing something about that being added at some point, but I'd kind of dismissed it because I didn't think Rishi had enough daily missions anyway. I was wrong!

Day 7:

Finally, I closed out the week with a combo of heroics and mob killing, neither of which I re-rolled this time because they were quite synergetic. One planet I hadn't visited yet this week was Tatooine, plus our Imperial guild still needed some Conquest points too, so I picked three Tatooine heroics off the fleet terminal on my dps Juggernaut and off I went. I was initally worried whether I'd judged their length badly when I wasn't even halfway towards completing the kill objective after two heroics, but "fortunately" (in this case) the third one included a lot of running around and mob killing, so that I actually ended up completing both objectives nearly simultaneously.

Week 7 thoughts:

I think I've developed a clear preference in terms of the daily Seasons objectives now: I'll always be happy to do a warzone or GSF match. Heroics and mob killing I'm generally OK with, but I might try to re-roll them anyway if I get the same type of objective too many times in a row or just don't fancy it that much on a particular day. Insectoids I still avoid like the plague.

That said, two months in, things are definitely getting a bit repetitive. I do try to to mix things up by doing things like heroics on different planets every day, but there's only so much you can do to spice things up on that front. I'm looking forward to being properly "done" with this Season and having a bit of a break from caring about these daily and weekly objectives before Bioware intends to start the second Season (in September I think?).

7 comments :

  1. Oh, I have to agree. It's not that it's absolutely bad, but it barely scratches the surface of what the game has and it ends up being repetitive. Sure, for the first cycle even the repetition works well, but considering we're going to have (I guess) 3 whole cycles... Honestly, killing these many bugs is bad for the environment.

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    1. Even leaving aside the thing with the bugs (which we talked about), I just think they could have more content represented in the objectives. It's fine that the random nature of it encourages you to do different things depending on what you get, but it's basically PvP, GSF, heroics or random mob killing every day and not much else. Like I said last week, completing a flashpoint on any difficulty would be a good addition in my opinion, as would be something like "complete a KotFE/KotET chapter" or to do a Star Fortress... at least during some weeks.

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    2. Preach it Shin!!! More control over our objectives and more and varied objectives seems to be what everyone is asking for.

      I'll probably finish this season since we're halfway through, but the next season will come with a decision. If they haven't restructured the objectives, I'll be sorely tempted to skip the whole thing.

      I'll be tempted to skip it even if the cosmetics are good.

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    3. I think in terms of control it's fine actually, as the re-roll option works well enough to get out of something you really dislike. I'm not sure they could tweak that much more without losing the whole "nudging people into doing different content" aspect of it.

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    4. I tried all these "different content" options years ago. In fact, I had tried them all out in WoW where we called them different things but they played the same. Everybody has their "favorite" thing from the buffet that is the MMO.

      Consider Chuck from the bad feeling podcast, who just wants to launch straight into a warzone. Even though PVP is a major component of this season, he could go days or even an entire week without making progress. He'll have to stop PVP'ing and go punch bugs on Tatooine like the rest of us.

      As long as I'm forced to do things I wouldn't do every day, that's not play time that's a chore. Do you really want to keep doing SWTOR "chores" 365 days a year, every year? I want to get back to PLAYING!

      We're going to be under one season or another from now on, day after day, month after month, year after year. Unless we just decide to skip the whole thing and spend our time doing fun stuff instead! Even though our definitions of fun stuff are different, dropping seasons like a bad habit works for all of us!

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    5. A lot of players aren't like you and me though who've done it all before. I've had a few comments even on this blog from people who admitted that Seasons got them to try an in-game activity that they'd never done before, so it's working at least for part of the player base.

      And you're not really being "forced" to do anything. It's all cosmetic stuff, there are buy-out options for credits and CC if you don't want to play, and even if you aim to attain it all by completing objectives you don't actually have to do all of them every day. I'm not sure how they could make it any more optional without turning it into just another login reward.

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    6. "And you're not really being "forced" to do anything. (...) I'm not sure how they could make it any more optional without turning it into just another login reward."

      I have learned something about this game. Or the people playing it or developing it:

      if you complain long enough, you will get it.

      They already got a reroll option, a quick fix. And i'm pretty certain, there will be major changes coming for the second Galactic Season.

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