Mysteries of Mek-Sha

I've been thinking about Mek-Sha recently. I had a good amount of fun at the Interpreter's Retreat, and people pointing out similarities to Mek-Sha made me want to reconsider my stance on that planet. I liked the story there back when it came out, but as I noted after three months of Onslaught, the repeatable content seemed half-baked and disappointing.

The other week Mek-Sha was one of the planets featured on the weekly seasons objective to do repeatable or side missions, and I thought I would use that as an opportunity to give it another look. I did so on my Shadow on Star Forge, and sadly I ended up being disappointed all over again, as most of the missions I completed didn't even count towards the objective. After I repeated one of the heroics for the third time without my mission counter advancing, I eventually gave up and finished the objective on another planet.

The "We're Wanted Men" heroic isn't even marked as one (which is why I guess it didn't count for the seasons objective) - though it did advance my "do heroics on Mek-Sha" achievement. It's also a bit "plain" compared to its predecessor "Turf War", as it just has you fight off waves and waves of mobs. I hadn't fully processed this previously, but they completely replaced the Turf War heroic with this "new" one back in 2020. Xam Xam still has the guide for the old version up, and I remember it being quite tough and having a sort of puzzle aspect to it. You'd get one of four different opponents that had a unique buff, and you'd have to interact with the environment to counter it (so for example you'd splash the guy with the "drunken rage" buff with a glass of water). I mean, there was a reason Mr Commando and I stopped bothering with it after a few tries, but that had more to do with bugged credit than the mission itself.

The two regular heroics are also quite a bit longer than most regular heroics, requiring you to move between phases in different areas, which makes them feel like a lot of effort for little reward.

Finally, I was reminded of how Mek-Sha has all these hidden achievements, but I couldn't be bothered to look them up online. I think the Interpreter's Retreat was much better at luring you in and getting you interested in what else there was to discover. Achievements that stay hidden until you complete them are not very intriguing, because unless you look up a guide in advance, you won't even know that you're already working towards something. I much prefer the approach of letting you discover the achievement as soon as you do something that progresses it.

I'm glad that the devs seem to have learned from those issues, considering how much better the Interpreter's Retreat worked, but part of me still kind of wishes that they'd go back and clean up Mek-Sha a bit too. Make sure heroics are labelled and counted as such, make sure exploration missions are labelled and counted as such, and allow hidden achievements to be found once you do something that triggers them, so you know you're actually making progress and have an incentive to keep going. Just one of those little things.