Patch 7.3.1 and Galactic Season 5 Are Here!

Here are some of my favourite items from the patch notes:

Update on Kai Zykken and the Spoils of War set bonus armors -  Kai Zykken will be removed and Set Bonus Armors will be available from a new vendor in the same location on the Fleet.

It's been a while since I last wrote about gambling away my Tech Fragments with Kai Zykken, but we've hit a point in the expansion where I once again have a lot of them to spare, to the point that I started visiting Kai again, even if the set bonuses are useless at level 80 and I was doing it purely for the achievements. There was supposed to be some sort of bad luck protection but it never really seemed to work for me - so it felt kind of vindicating to actually see a dev comment on the forums that it "[wasn't] working as intended".

I've been very pleased to just see the whole system get replaced by a vendor who'll simply sell you the sets directly, which should make filling out those last few achievements a lot easier. I also had a chuckle at the fact that the vendor is a droid called "S3T-BNS" (because he sells set bonus gear, get it?) and has dialogue about how Kai is under investigation for misleading his customers... which is basically a fun in-game jab at all the trash he used to sell us.

Decorations will now drop when killing enemies in the Interpreter’s Retreat area.

Nice to hear that they fixed that now, even if it's too late for many of my alts, who have been done with the area for a while.

"Pickled Space Worm" can be used as a crafting ingredient again. The Cantina Hoth vendor now sells a craftable version of this item. Players who acquired the item recently will need to repurchase the item from the vendor. 

At first I was like "what the hell is this even talking about", but then I looked it up and I had totally forgotten that this was an ingredient for Ice Scrabbler Jerky... dang, I had no idea that item was actually rare for a while due to this bug.

The debris piles for the mission "It's Really Piling Up" now respawn as expected.

Fun fact: I did this mission about a dozen times without actually knowing what I was doing because the things that looked like debris to me apparently weren't it... so I just ran around the area spamming the button until it completed.

Fixed an issue where weapon part VFX could be seen floating in areas.

Wonder if that will put an end to the "you seem to have forgotten your cannon" jokes that have been a thing for a long time...

The maximum number of Dark/Light alignment points is now 10,000 (down from 100,000).

Actually it's 11,000 right now for some reason! But still, good that they reduced this... the higher numbers made sense back in KotET when doing anything gave you a constant trickle of light or dark side points, but now that we're back to only gaining 50 points a pop from conversation choices here and there, requiring 100,000 of either type to fill out the bar was ridiculous.

Quick Travel costs will now scale with the player’s level.

I wasn't fussed by the introduction of quick travel costs, but this is a good change to make things easier for new players in particular.

When listing an item on the GTN, the default listing value will be based on recently completed transactions, if available.

I've seen this in action and it's actually quite funny... like when you see a weapon listed for 400,000 credits and then the GTN suggests you list it for 30k. The real value revealed!

Fixed various 7.3 Old Wounds Cinematic bugs including the NPCs clipping during the conversation with Oggurobb.

Oh, you mean like this? (May have to embiggen to see it properly.)

This happened during my first Imperial playthrough and it was admittedly quite distracting... though also hilarious.

All shrubs in the Athiss Flashpoint have been fixed.

I have no idea what this was about but I'm now extremely intrigued by what was wrong with those shrubs.

The queue icon now only glows when the group is queued for Warzone and PvP Arena matches.

I'm glad to see this one fixed as it was quite odd to see it glowing randomly when you weren't queued for anything (and vice versa, seeing it say you weren't in the queue for anything when you actually were).

Thrill of the Hunt / Forced March has been renamed to Mobile Protection / Frontline Medic.

I thought there weren't any class changes for Commando healers this patch as this innocuous "renaming" sounded purely cosmetic, but no, it turns out we've been nerfed because we can now no longer cast Full Auto on the run. I already noticed this being very annoying. 😞

“Inspired by” tabs have been created for the Cartel Market to help players easily find special items.

So this is fine, but personally I really just wish they added class filters to the armour sets, so you could e.g. see all bounty hunter style armours at a glance instead of having to click through dozens of pages of everything jumbled together.

Priority Transport: Personal Starship can no longer be used in Warzones or Arenas.

I hadn't heard of this bug before reading these, but man, I do love the mental image of someone just noping out of an arena for example by simply quick travelling to their ship.

Fixed issue where Galaxy Map would blink for new players before they had a ship.

Yes, finally! This bug had been there for years and also happened on new alts of existing players. As someone who must click on all the shiny things, I always found this one super annoying.

Fixed an issue where some areas would not allow Quick Travel or Stronghold Travel.

Another nice quality-of-life change as this bug was really quite annoying, blocking you from quick travelling in seemingly really random places, and the only way to "fix" it was basically to run a little in any direction and keep trying until it would let you. I mostly noticed it in Seeker Droid areas.

As for the new season, I don't have much to say about it yet. I had enough of a break since last season that I was happy to check back on my alts on the other servers and get back into the grind. Obviously there's no new companion this time to instantly judge... I wonder how popular that decision will ultimately turn out to be. I'll admit I kind of had to chuckle when Mr Commando, who's taken a bit of a shine to seasons but doesn't pay much attention to news about it, asked me "how to get the new person" and I had to be the one to tell him that there isn't a "new person" this time.

I did like the first of the new missions though (it was very silly), and I also like that there is now a hand-in box on the fleet for the reputation items that all your characters can access regardless of their storyline progress. I was not a fan of how how in Seasons 3 & 4, if you wanted to get reputation tokens on alts (for example for the "gain reputation" Conquest objective), you had to claim the companion on that alt first because you had to hand in to them personally on your ship.