Alts and Endgame

This week, I took some time to review the state of my alt stable on Darth Malgus. Nine months after Legacy of the Sith raised the level cap, I've got fourteen characters at level 80. You might consider that a lot or not, but to me it feels rather low, considering that I had twice as many characters at the old level cap and the expansion only added five more levels.

I think there are several different reasons for this. One that I already mentioned previously is that levelling from 75 to 80 can be relatively slow by SWTOR's standards, unless you're all caught up with the current story or like to spend an hour or two cheesing the penultimate boss in Nathema. Some avenues for levelling that were available in the past have also been closed off. As someone who spends a lot of her time in flashpoints and operations with guildies, I used to just take my close-to-max level characters along to social runs of master mode flashpoints or story mode operations, but both of these are now unavailable until you actually hit the level cap (presumably for the sake of pugs who hated having non-max level players along). If I had a penny for every time I've looked at my selection of alts to pick one for a group activity and found myself thinking "oh yes, that one", just to then realise that the character in question wasn't 80 yet and therefore couldn't come...

In a lot of content that you can access at lower levels, such as daily zones, certain rewards such as the daily currency are also unavailable if the character doing the content isn't 80 yet. This has often pushed me towards playing my existing 80s for the rewards rather than spending time on getting more characters to the level cap.

The way you gear alts nowadays has also felt somewhat clunky to me. I wouldn't say it's alt-unfriendly (I did still level and gear fourteen of them after all) but it just feels less smooth. Onslaught's loot showers that were always based on your existing item rating (and where hitting the maximum was easy to achieve) made it very easy to gear alts as you could just throw some of the excess into your legacy bank and pull out a full gear set on any new alt as soon as it hit the level cap. Gearing that way was obviously not going to be 100% optimised, what with missing augments etc., but it was pretty solid for how easy it was.

In 7.0, the way you could only upgrade your gear to item level 330 via master mode operations made it kind of awkward to do the same, as just getting your gear up to that level took a lot more time. And once you got there, more 330 drops could only be acquired by continuing to kill master mode bosses (whose loot drops were scarce when compared to 6.0), meaning it wasn't easy to get a full set of gear, what with all loot being randomised fixed-stat items with no mods. Plus there was a certain incentive to dissemble the gear for more ops currency at times because if you wanted weapons for your alts for example they had to go through a whole chain of upgrades as well.

I initially tried to save up gear for my alts the same way I had done in Onslaught, but it was just awkward to end up with six pairs of gloves and no chest pieces for example. Plus because I wasn't generally taking my alts into master mode ops, they themselves could only contribute non-Rakata gear to the overall gear pool (which only went up to 326 max).

With 7.1 Bioware added a gear vendor on the fleet, who - once unlocked - sells you 330 mods that you can send to all your alts. Easy, right? Well... easi-er I guess, but still clunky as the unlock is not account-wide, so you either need to do it multiple times or do all your shopping on one character who then has to mail dozens of mods around your legacy, eight letter attachments at a time.

Also, I hope you've got suitable moddable gear on all your alts to put all those mods in! I mean, armour sets and weapons are straightforward enough, but if I put you on the spot right now and asked you where to get a moddable generator for example, would you know? (I asked my guildies and they pointed me to the adaptive gear vendor in the supplies section of the fleet, next to the level 10 mod vendor. That one's actually very affordable, but you've got to know about it.)

Oh, and I haven't even mentioned the legendary implants yet! At first I thought the little mission to unlock them after hitting level 80, asking you to gather "activity points", was quite cute, but after the tenth time it becomes a bit of a chore to be perfectly honest, just to be able to access the implant vendor. It's all... not terrible, but just noticeably more clunky than back in Onslaught and I've got to admit I'm not loving it.

If you're a certain type of raider, you might wonder why I bother to get any gear for my alts at all - since it's all legacy-bound, many of my guildies just operate with a single gear set (plus weapons for different combat styles and such) that they constantly shuttle back and forth between all their alts. The reason I don't do that is that I simply find it annoying. It feels dumb from an immersion point of view to effectively strip all your characters bar one naked most of the time, and it's annoying to always have to wait for people to send their gear back and forth (never mind the inevitable delays when someone can't find their Tactical of whatever), especially when all you're doing is a story mode where you really don't need to be wearing gear that is 100% optimised. I'm a bit more sympathetic when it comes to progression.

Either way I kind of find myself missing the simplicity of Onslaught's gearing, and being able to ease characters into endgame more gradually instead of having to hit max-level first. I know there've been other times in the game's life when gearing was more convoluted and even less alt-friendly than it is now, but that was so long ago now. The ease of 6.0 is still much fresher on my mind and easy to miss.