09/01/2022

Daily Tour: Iokath

I've been meaning to write about Iokath. Intisar wrote an excellent blog post called "Iokath is Good, Actually" back in November, which I meant to comment on at the time but didn't for some reason, and then it was too late because the comment section for that particular post had closed.

So I'll let you in on a secret here: Somehow, Iokath has become one of my favourite daily areas. No, really! I think a large chunk of it is the ridiculously high amount of conquest points it awards compared to the relatively low time and effort required to complete the weekly quest, but also, I just kind of like how different it is. So it's about time I continued my kinda-sorta series of posts about my daily routines and wrote about Iokath. Especially since I'm not sure whether it will continue to be viable once Legacy of the Sith hits, what with the planned changes to daily and weekly resets. If you're someone who investigated this on the PTS, please let me know in the comments.

Anyway, one of Iokath's biggest drawbacks as a daily zone is that you can't just go there, pick up all the available quests and get your weekly done in a single day. However, there's a simple big brain workaround around this: Go to the mission board - just the board, don't do any quests - two to three days in a row and keep adding to your log. Once you've got at least ten dailies that you're happy with, you can get your weekly done in one go. This still has the disadvantage that your quest log is pretty clogged up for a couple of days, but since I'm not much of a daily runner in general, this isn't usually a problem for me.

You may have taken note of my choice of words in the previous paragraph: "ten dailies that you're happy with", because god knows I don't like all of them myself. The colossal droid requires a group for example, which is not ideal in most circumstances. Both the scouting mission and the one to disable enemy defenses require too much running around for my liking. And unlike Intisar, I don't like the one to kill forty droids as a walker either.

I remember at the start you couldn't loot while in "vehicle form" and I'm someone who's very obsessive about making all the loot beams disappear, so being unable to deal with that quickly made this one a no-go. I do think they might have fixed this issue later on, but by that point it was too late for me. Plus being a walker prevents you from doing certain activities required for other missions, and you'll already have to kill dozens of droids just to get all those other things done, so adding another forty unrelated kills on top of that just doesn't appeal to me.

I do like the vehicle quests with the mouse droid and Iokath monitor, the one to defend the base, as well as everything in the docking ring and weapons factory plus the more generic kill quests. So this is how it goes then:

Starting in my faction's base, I first do everything that can be done right there, which covers the base defense and the aforementioned vehicle quests. For the kills with the monitor, I go just outside the base and up the ramp, where weak mobs come in singles and pairs, which are easy to kill even for the fragile monitor, and while I'm there I can also enable some laser defenses (because that's something you can apparently do in vehicle form).


Next I go back to the landing zone and enter the docking ring, which can contain up to four daily missions, though I'll also go if I've only got two or three. I disable the two lasers in the first room and do the little event there, and then proceed to the easternmost room, which contains one of the AA batteries (assuming I have that quest). Then I make my way north for the second one. If I don't have that particular mission, my circle will be condensed to just get a few more lasers and droid control stations.


Once done in here, I use my quick travel to quickly get back out, and then run out onto Iokath proper, just to make a quick beeline towards the tram that takes you to the weapons factory (pictured here is the Republic version of that). In there I first go to the southern room to play the weird ball game there (my inner SEO optimiser is screaming at me for not calling anything by its proper name, but I can't be bothered to look up the names of each mission - plus I wouldn't want people to find this while searching for a guide and then leave me angry comments about what a useless guide this is). I click on the panels along the walls if I have that particular quest, and then go north if I need to vent heat. At some point during this, I should usually be finishing my weekly, and once done, I can once again quick travel out.


I think the fact that the description of the actual daily "round" only took me three paragraphs should tell you how quick and easy the Iokath weekly actually is if you stack enough quests, as there are several places where you can get three to four of them done almost all at once - which is more than you can say for most daily zones to be honest!

8 comments :

  1. Iokath... biggest piece of garbage in the game. Everything about it. World building, aesthetics, playability, story, daily zone, bug fest, path finding. There is not a single piece of this "planet", that is up to any standards known in the industry or in this game. Overall just useless.

    Best feature about this part... you can skip it, if you want. And you will.

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    1. Funnily enough, for all the agonising I've done about skipping KotFE and KotET on my alts (though I still haven't actually gone ahead and done it on any of them), the idea of skipping Iokath never even occurred to me. It's a bit of a low point in terms of writing, but in terms of roleplaying I love the opportunity to re-evaluate my character's relationship with their old faction.

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  2. First off, thanks for the shout-out. As I wrote in my post, I do enjoy running Iokath. The extra step of having to collect quests over multiple days is the worst part, but I’d rather do the weekly on Iokath than, say, Yavin or Republic Section-X. I like that if I want to do standard daily questing, the Docking Ring quests fit that bill exactly: Run through the area, kill the mobs, click the things, just like CZ or Black Hole. The vehicle quest in the expanse let me mix it up if I’m in the mood for something different.

    And, as the previous commenter indicates, Iokath is so notorious that most folks tend to avoid it, and even the PVE instances are quiet. Even a few extra people on CZ can make completing quests there a pain, so it’s nice when I have Iokath to myself.

    I would like to see Bioware make it easier to collect the dailies on Iokath, and since the secret to quickly traversing the zone is to use the trams and teleporters, they could stand update the map to make it clearer how all those connect together.

    In the meantime, it’s a great source of Conquest, credits, and for a few more weeks Renown.

    Finally, I’ve expanded the window in which visitors can leave comments on my older posts for This Week in Aurebesh. I’ve always been nervous about comments and commentators, but it’s actually been fine, so I think can stand loosen up a bit more. I’m not quite at the point where you are where you encourage folks to comment on even your oldest posts, but I might get there yet. As always, thanks for the prod in the right direction!

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    1. That's nice to hear about the extended comment window! To be honest I don't get many comments on older posts, but when it does happen it always makes me glad that the option is there.

      The common reasoning I've heard for closing comments after a while is to avoid having to dealing with spam on older posts, but at least in my personal experience, spam commenters generally prefer the newer ones anyway.

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  3. In 7.0, daily zones will still have missions available on a daily basis. Only a select few will have their weeklies available for completion, including as Conquest objectives.

    So even if Ziost, Yavin, Black Hole, and Section X are the highlighted zones for that week (randomly pulled from thin air, not an actual rotation that I've seen), you could still go and do missions on Iokath throughout the week and complete the non-weekly-mission Conquest objectives.

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    1. The thing that has me questioning was them saying that incomplete dailies and weeklies would be removed from your log at reset time, which sounded like it would make it impossible to pick up several days worth of Iokath dailies at once. Did you have a chance to test that as well?

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    2. Not for dailies, although as they have a timer that resets after 24 hours it does seem like they will also be removed. I'll report back tomorrow once the PTS timer has elapsed, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if the daily I picked up disappeared based on how weeklies of any kind operate.

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    3. Update: I ended up picking up a heroic as well as the Iokath daily, just in case there were any differences with the missions that were always available on a daily basis, and both were removed from my log upon logging into the PTS.

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