Peace Out, Again

My pacifist character Pacis hit the level cap taking part in the Feast of Prosperity. Again!

I last wrote about her back in April, when the introduction of Amity inspired me to pick her up again as she could finally go on adventures with a (supposedly) fellow pacifist friend for the first time. I was really hoping that this would rejuvenate my interest in the character and the project, but it didn't really work out.

Having the two of them hang out on Dantooine and doing the peace time dailies did initially give me a bunch of new things to think about. For example I was baffled when I found Pacis drawing a lightsaber one day, considering that unequipping her weapon was one of the first things she ever did. 

Eventually I realised that the following had happened: I had completed a Conquest on her, which rewarded me with a gear create. I haven't found crates from solo activities to be very reliable when it comes to detecting which piece of your gear needs an upgrade the most, but it clearly noticed that I was missing a weapon and therefore rewarded me one. And of course another change that came with 7.0 meant that if one of your gear slots if empty and you receive an appropriate piece of gear for it, it now gets auto-equipped, so I hadn't even noticed that saber sneaking in there. What can I say, this game really wants you to be ready to inflict violence!

The other thing that happened was that while gathering on Dantooine, a slicing node gave me my first rare crew skill mission. Considering how long Pacis had been doing this without ever getting one before, I kind of wonder whether there's something preventing you from getting these if you don't actually have a companion that could run missions... or maybe it was just bad luck.

Either way, she had Amity now, so I was of course happy to send him out. As I awaited his return, a vision of a whole new future for Pacis briefly unfolded in front of me. Crew skills as a pacifist activity! I'd actually have to read the mission text again to make sure it was compatible with her ideas though. And she could drop one or more of her gathering skills to start crafting instead! A true pacifist's career!

However, I don't think I even contemplated this for five minutes before the idea lost its lustre. Crafting is a peaceful activity, sure... but Pacis wouldn't be the one actually doing it, and it would be no different from any of my other characters sending their companions out to do stuff for them; she would just be worse at it than those with larger, more developed companion stables. Plus the materials would come out of my legacy-wide material stash, fuelled by all my regular characters who'd done who knows what to acquire them. It just didn't seem very... satisfying.

So that idea went nowhere and I just continued running the Dantooine peace time missions for a little while - until I got a bit annoyed with Conquest. As I already alluded to in my last pacifism post, Conquest as a pacifist post-7.0 is annoyingly hard. Doing one round of dailies on Dantooine, she now just gets "Dantooine: Mission Complete", "Missions: Bonus Missions" (for petting the Kath Hounds), the one for getting a crew skill skill-up and the one to harvest ten gathering nodes. That's not a lot, and meant that I had to be diligent in doing those tasks every single day of the week or she wouldn't be able to hit her personal Conquest target.

Maybe you're wondering why it matters, but I really like Conquest as a pacing tool and like to hit my personal target on all characters I decide to play in a given week. Inevitably, a week came when I forgot to log in and do my Dantooine round one day, which caused me to barely miss my personal target for the week and made me quite annoyed. After that I kind of stopped playing her again, except for doing a bit of swooping at some point (I think?) - though I still haven't looked further into those one-time swoop story missions I meant to attempt two years ago.

Until the Feast of Prosperity came around again that is, and I decided to leave Dantooine to do charity for the Hutts again, which is such a nice and peaceful pastime, while also being great for both Conquest and XP, and resulted in Pacis eventually hitting level 80.

I'm a little disappointed that I didn't feel inspired to do more with her on the way to the new level cap, but I'm also reminded of this post I wrote back in 2021 about how my pacifism experiment had essentially become a solved problem. That's still the case, plus 7.0 also took some of Pacis' more fun tools away, such as the ability to CC multiple targets or to keep missions with quick travel items in her log to get around the galaxy at any time. So it's just generally not as fun as it used to be. Which is fine I guess, as this was only an experiment and I have allll my other characters to play with. But it's still a little bit of a shame as well.