GS3 Review: Satele Shan

I've given my general thoughts on Galactic Season 3, but I also wanted to write more specifically about my experiences completing it on all servers again. Part of what has made this project so appealing to me is being able to observe different server communities; another has been re-experiencing a bit of that newbie life, in the sense of not having a max-level legacy with all the perks maxed out and actually being able to benefit from things like picking up datacrons.

I thought I'd start with Satele Shan, which is the first server on which I finished the 100 weekly objectives achievement (outside of my home on Darth Malgus that is), even if the other servers were only days behind.

My main on Satele Shan is my Shadow consular Zilek, who was level 66 by the time I finished Season 2, and on Balmorra in terms of his class story. He hit max-level during Season 3 and progressed up to Hoth story-wise. He also accumulated what I felt was a decent amount of gear, considering that gearing up wasn't really a goal I was actively pursuing - I just went to buy upgrades and trade in currency whenever I got close to hitting some kind of cap. At the time of writing this he's got an average item rating of 328, which is also the level of both of his legendary implants.

I made no effort to make any progress in the PvP season on servers other than Darth Malgus, but it kind of happened automatically as I did some warzones for weekly objectives for the regular season sometimes, which got me up to PvP season level four on Satele Shan. In general I wasn't too excited about PvPing on Zilek though - while he was still levelling, being an Infiltration Shadow felt pretty OP sometimes, but the closer I got to the level cap the weaker I started to feel compared to other specialisations. It was actually much more fun to do a bit of PvP on my lowbie Guardian knight as Focus, a spec I'd never really played before and which made me feel like an absolute monster even as I had no clue what I was doing. However, she recently levelled up into the midbie bracket, and it doesn't feel great to play anything at the low end of that bracket either.

Aside from that bit of PvP I didn't do much on the Guardian except for a few missions when there was a weekly objective that demanded I play a knight and I think she only gained a couple of levels. While they are still small, it felt like I made more progress dusting off my ancient agent and trooper, with the former getting to level ten and the latter to fifteen. My overall legacy level is also up to 22 and I was kind of surprised that I found myself even caring about that, but there are actually perks that you can't unlock with credits until you've hit a certain minimum legacy level, something I don't recall ever running up against on Darth Malgus back in the day, probably because I levelled more quickly than Bioware actually added new perks.

Finally, I noted in my Season 2 in review post that I had joined a guild that had invited me randomly and that felt quite organised. I had a hunch that they wouldn't keep me around for long once the season ended and I became inactive for a while, and this assumption was proved correct as I logged in at the start of Season 3 to find my characters unguilded again.

Ironically, I received a generic recruitment whisper from the exact same guild within days of starting to play again, but this time I didn't respond to it. I could've benefited from the guild perks again, which certainly would've made Conquest easier as well as earning me extra rewards, but I'm just not a fan of such a purely utilitarian approach when it comes to guilds. They would've just kicked me again as soon as I stopped logging in and somehow that didn't sit right with me on an emotional level, even though I completely understand it from a purely practical point of view.