A Productive War Week

As mentioned previously, last week was Total Galactic War once again. It was a very successful one for my guild, as we conquered Hoth, which was one of four planets remaining that we had never won before (this includes the two planets added with Legacy of the Sith by the way).

That aside though, I just had a really good time playing. Total Galactic War is one of the rare occasions when I make a point of logging into and playing every single one of my (Republic) alts in the same week (in order to spread out the Conquest points and maximise my rewards), which makes for a pretty varied week of gaming. Sure, a lot of my focus was on high-yield objectives like the GSF and warzone weeklies, but once those were out of the way, I'd usually also do a bit of whatever progression was specific to that character.

I got two more alts to 80, and another three are now sitting at 79, with less than a full level to go to the cap as well. In fact, I realised that it's been so long that I made a new Republic alt on Darth Malgus that I only have a single character left in the lowbie PvP bracket (sub level 45) and even she will outgrow that soon. In midbie, I also have only three more characters left, aside from the level 79s I already mentioned. That feels strange and like I should really roll up some fresh lowbies at some point.

Then again, keeping track of how to play all these alts is a challenge by itself. One of the characters I got to 80 was my Sentinel - probably my least favourite combat style in general. I did a story mode operation on her to progress the implant mission and realised only afterwards that I'd done so without realising that one of my spec's main abilities wasn't even on my bar.

Two other lesser-played alts that got some love were my Serenity Shadow and my Balance Sage, who both saw some PvP action. DoT specs are pretty flavour of the month (year?) at the moment but personally I don't tend to get along with them that well. However, my Shadow had an absolutely insanely good time in warzones and it definitely made me re-evaluate my stance on the spec. Balance was a bit more of a mixed bag... I could kind of tell how extremely OP it was, but I repeatedly ended up in matches where the enemy enjoyed ganging up on me, and even as I was keeping three or four of them busy for a while my team mates got nothing done, which did not feel great.

I also pugged a few flashpoints, something I hadn't done in a while, and it was... interesting. With 336 gear being very accessible now, the content doesn't feel so tough anymore, but it's still possible for things to go wrong if people don't try at all. In a master mode Assault on Tython that I tanked, we got a Shadow dps with pretty low gear - I didn't think anything of it at first, nor was I upset when they wiped us by accidentally pulling an extra group on trash. After all, that can happen to anyone.

However, on the first boss I started to notice that things were dying really, really slowly, and just from the visuals, it didn't look like the guy was doing more than spamming a single attack. Okay, maybe someone new to the game and not great at it... that still would've been fine. However, by the second boss, he periodically stopped attacking at all, began spamming target markers around the area, and kept taunting the boss even though I asked him not to do that. By the end of the fight (which felt like it took ten minutes with only a single damage dealer really doing anything), the group had had enough and initiated a vote kick, and for once I had little sympathy. We'd really tried, but the guy was just not responding to anything and making things way harder than they needed to be.

After that much action, I've been taking it easy again this week... and we now know that next week will already bring the new seasons patch, meaning a return to that grind. I don't really feel ready, but I guess we'll see what it's like.