Legacy-wide DvL Tokens and More

Yesterday's patch 7.5.1b was an interesting one despite being only a minor patch. For one thing, it changed dark and light side tokens from being character-bound currencies to legacy-wide. It seems the cynicism I expressed about the chances of this happening a few weeks ago was unwarranted, though I do still wonder why converting the Soovada slot machine chips to a legacy currency would be such a big deal but they were able to convert the DvL tokens within a couple of weeks.

Maybe it's simply the difference between a clean and a "sloppy" implementation, as we weren't able to log in and find all our tokens in one place yesterday, but it was necessary to manually log into every single character that had tokens to get them added to the total (which would let you go over the cap by the way, in case anyone was worried). I finished my rounds of alt-hopping with a total of 1,310 tokens.

For fun, I'd held a little contest on my guild Discord beforehand, asking people to guess what my total was going to be after the patch. One guildie actually managed to guess this exact number!

Of course I then had the problem of what to do with all this currency, since I wanted to get back down to below the cap, or else I wasn't going to be able to earn any more tokens from boss kills. Even though the devs added some more items to the vendors, there wasn't really anything I was super keen on. Still, I ended up buying eight of the armour sets as well as a couple of the weapons.

That still left me with more than 300 light side tokens, at which point I just gave up and bought a bunch of speeders to throw into my legacy cargo bay. A lot of my more frequently-played characters already had all of these from back in the day, when the tokens were very easy to earn and I was constantly trying to find ways to avoid bumping up against the cap, but I'm sure I'll find some toons that can actually use them.

It's a good thing I didn't rely on these vendor rewards for motivation to take part in world boss kills this season...

One of my inquisitors trying to decide whether the Dread Harbinger set from the vendor works for her.

There were a few other interesting patch items as well though. For example it was announced that Galactic Season 7's end date, which was originally meant to be the 7th of January, was pushed back to February 18th. I have no issues with that, and the official justification was to give players more time to finish the season without having to be online all the time during the holiday period. It does make me wonder though whether they're behind schedule in some way in terms of content production, seeing how we're supposed to have this ongoing cadence of 7.x patches with story updates and 7.x.1 patches with Galactic Seasons.

Finally, one patch note that seemed to inspire a (to me) surprising amount of anger on reddit was this one:

Players must now defeat the security cannons in the Hammer Station Flashpoint in order to disengage the bridge in Section Zero.

For anyone who doesn't know what this is about, Hammer Station is generally considered the easiest/fastest of all flashpoints and therefore very popular with people who just want to farm flashpoint currency quickly. People's attempts to optimise this speed-running have included not fighting a pair of champion turrets at a bridge near the end of the flashpoint - the "popular" strategy was to just run past them, which would keep you in combat until the end of the flashpoint.

The upside of this was that it would save you about a minute of combat time. The downside was that being stuck in combat meant being unable to regenerate health, so if your group didn't have a healer and/or included low-level characters without a lot of cooldowns, people would sometimes die during the last few trash packs before the last boss (the boss himself is surrounded by kolto stations). Also, being stuck in combat prevents you from exiting the flashpoint, so it was required to suicide-jump off the ledge behind the boss after killing him to get out of combat again.

I think it's fairly obvious from this description that this was never a good risk-reward trade-off in a pug. It was basically the same problem we used to have in Athiss with that damn ledge jump, where people would rather spend five minutes waiting for everyone to climb up a ledge than spend thirty seconds killing two easy mob packs (and which was thankfully patched out in 7.4). Only in this instance they'd rather risk getting some of their group mates killed as well as give everyone a repair bill rather than kill two mobs.

So while reddit may be mad, most people I've talked to are actually glad about this fix, and so am I. Now if they could do something about the craziness of players attempting to run past/skip all the trash leading to the first boss as well... I'm just continually saddened by the weird and degenerate gameplay that has infested what I once used to think of as a nice little starter flashpoint.