A few weeks ago I made the decision to start my Gunslinger Talara on Knights of the Fallen Empire. This was a bigger step for me than you might think.
You see, Talara was the first smuggler I ever created (back in 2012), and was pretty important to me as an alt for a while. She was part of a levelling duo with a friend during the game's early days, though unfortunately SWTOR didn't stick for him. At max level, she was the first character on whom I actually tried to learn how to do a proper dps rotation. And when Knights of the Fallen Empire was announced, I got her all caught up with the story and was ready to use her to see the new expansion from a smuggler's point of view.
Of course, the KotFE chapters turned out to not be a lot of fun to replay, and the story didn't seem like a good fit for a smuggler at all, so I moved her to the back of the queue. Then the Dark vs. Light event came out and required that we all start new characters of every class from scratch and take them through a bunch of content. As it happened, the smuggler I made for this purpose ended up being the character I played all the way through KotFE for the sake of the achievement. Of course, also taking Talara after that seemed a bit redundant at that point.
And so she has lingered behind, watching the level cap go up again and again. I usually got her to the new cap doing whatever, but in terms of story progression she was forever frozen in time at the end of Ziost. I just didn't want to make that leap - yet at the same time that lack of play made me feel increasingly estranged from the character, which was a bit of a shame. Especially as she's super cute!
Funnily enough, Galactic Season 4 was what finally made the difference. I pretty much never do the seasons objectives to complete KotFE or KotET chapters as I don't like replaying them on characters that have completed the story, and whichever alt is currently working their way through it is usually not on the right step. But this time around, they started the first week of the season with KotFE chapter 1 as an objective, and the related news post stated that week five would feature chapter 5. If Bioware's intention was to encourage players to use the season to work their way through the expansions one chapter or so a week, it worked on me and I finally made the jump into KotFE, only eight years late.
I'll be doing chapter twelve this week as that's the next objective, and we'll see whether the trend continues whenever they release the list of objectives for the next few weeks.
It's just kind of weird to me that thanks to this, I've now taken three smugglers into the "Knights of" expansions - which is more than any other class - even though I think that their origin story is the least suited for the story those expansions try to tell. It's funny to me how the game just sometimes works out that way.
Ooo... Gunslinger?
ReplyDeleteYes? 🙂
DeleteEither way is perfectly fine, it's all about what playstyle you like.
DeleteI've been doing something similar with the chapters, only in my case I've been doing it for the related Steam achievements. I will say never having done the any of these in Veteran or Master mode, Veteran mode feels quite rough and a bit overtuned even when I have a character in blue 336 gear and legendary implants.
ReplyDeleteIt makes feel like I don't know how to play that alt. :) If I do Master mode I may need to recruit someone to help me! (The Eternal Championship feels overtuned, as well, since 7.0 so that's where I'm coming from.)
So, a long-winded way of asking how have the chapters felt for you since you've worked through them previously?
I've never replayed master mode because while I was happy to do it once for the achievement, it wasn't really a pleasant experience that I wanted to repeat.
DeleteI've recently been playing through veteran mode on my Scoundrel, in hopes of making the whole experience a bit less boring, but to be honest that can still be unpleasant at times as well. I'm not sure I would say that it's much harder than in previous expansions though. Looking back at my own posts about first doing veteran mode several years ago, many of the things that annoy me now sound like they were exactly the same back then, such as being deleted by random trash pulls of weak mobs, and certain bosses just hitting stupidly hard.
I do remember one chapter where I actually downgraded to story mode just to get it done when veteran mode hadn't been a problem in the past - I think it was Captain Lazna Delothrea in KotFE chapter 7, which was a nightmare in master mode but totally unremarkable in vet several years ago, but more recently her vet difficulty has felt more like master mode.
On the other hand I noticed that Bioware seems to have smoothed out some encounters that used to be massive road blocks on vet mode - KotET chapter 2 is pretty easy nowadays compared to the absolute nightmare it was when it first came out, and in KotET chapter 4 I noticed that during the droid attack, your companions seem to behave much smarter and the number of droids has been reduced considerably, which seemed to make things significantly easier there as well.
As a sort of follow-up, I did chapter twelve on veteran mode tonight and it was a major pain. I must have wiped about 20 times before I gave up on trying to do the Vaylin fight as a Gunslinger. I even rewatched my own video of doing this fight as a Sniper a few years ago, and it highlighted just how many abilities/cooldowns that class had back then that are no longer available. After I exited and unlocked Scoundrel as my second combat style, I beat it on the second try. Still, this one's definitely tuned a bit wackily.
DeleteThanks for letting me know. I haven't tried that chapter yet, so I wasn't sure if I would be able to complete it on my sage.
DeleteIt is good to find out that veteran mode was a pain originally and it isn't just that I suck in my old age. ^_^ As far as Master Mode goes, that sounds ugly enough that I'm likely to try to pull in another person to do it. While I like some challenging solo content, I don't like content where repeated failure occurs. I want to be challenged, not destroyed repeatedly.