Peaceful Adventures on Hoth & Belsavis

I took last week's Pirate Incursion event as an opportunity to take a break from having Pacis look after the Kath hounds and dig for relics, and instead had her resume her mission to explore the galaxy and find out what else there is to do that doesn't require you to fight anything.

As I mentioned previously, Hoth is where I lost interest in this part of the project at one point, but nonetheless I felt compelled to go back and at least finish it up. I tried to do the main story quest where you're supposed to trigger an ambush and then have Imperials come to your aid, figuring that maybe I wouldn't actually have to get involved in the fighting myself to get credit, but as it turns out the traitorous bastards don't even show up if you don't attack the ambushers yourself first.

Besides that, I re-did the one heroic that's doable without any combat and finished exploring the rest of the map. In the Starship Graveyard I ran into these two troopers that appear to be brothers or something and looked like they were sparring with each other. I don't recall ever seeing them before.

When I moved on to Belsavis, I was pleasantly surprised to find that this snowy prison planet perpetually stuck in a state of rioting is an unexpectedly great place to get things done without fighting! There is of course the perennial favourite of heroic runners everywhere, looting Agent Mynock's corpse, but I also found three other heroics that I could do.

Open Communications just requires you to loot an item and as a stealther you can vanish out when this act spawns a group of attackers, and of course doing the Stasis Generator without fighting anyone reawakened fond memories of the game's early days when these missions were part of the daily circuit that many people did in a group and it wasn't unusual for us to chill by the door while the stealther in the party took care of things. Doing it on my own was a bit more boring though since I didn't have anyone to talk to while waiting for Force Cloak to come off cooldown four times.

The biggest and most amusing surprise however was the heroic to save captured scientists from rioting Gand. Most of these "rescue" type missions require you to kill the mobs around the captives, but I couldn't remember that being the case with this one for sure, so decided to give it a quick go anyway. And what do you know, not only can you rescue the scientists without fighting anything, it doesn't even break stealth! So I just had to walk up to them, nudge them in stealth, and they'd just get up and walk away. Never mind the armed prisoners with guns pointed at their heads, clearly it was just their own negative attitude that was keeping them imprisoned. Life lessons!

After that I was planning to explore the map and look for some more one-time missions to do, but then the Feast of Prosperity came around and I realised that this was too good an opportunity to engage with some temporary non-combat content to pass up. The event missions also happen to give tons of experience, which is only enhanced by it overlapping with three weeks of double XP this year, so the level cap is now so close that I can smell it!