Around the SWTOR-sphere: December 2024

It's the end of December, which means that I successfully made it through another year, and I was actually able to keep up with this series pretty well! Summer was a bit of a quiet season where I skipped a couple of months when I didn't really have much to share, but other than that I've managed to find some things to recommend pretty much every month.

• December seemed to be a month for more casual players to come back to SWTOR, whether it was because of the anniversary celebrations or because of the threat of the impending name purge for inactive characters. Roger from Contains Moderate Peril was inspired to return by the latter and wrote down some thoughts about his most recent experiences in "Revisiting Star Wars: The Old Republic Part 3". He also made a separate post about dynamic encounters. If the "part 3" in the title of the first post makes you wonder where parts one and two are, the answer is that those were made in 2022 and can be found here and here respectively.
• Another MMO blogger that gave the game another spin was Syp from Bio Break, who decided to make a new smuggler for what's probably the sixth time or so. I'm always kind of surprised he isn't more curious about all the class stories he's never seen before. Think I'm exaggerating his love for smugglers? Check out his blog's archive for the SWTOR tag.
• Speaking of personalities from the wider MMO space, if you haven't seen it yet, you'll definitely want to check out Josh Strife Hayes' magnum opus of a video called "The Ultimate MMO Tier List (Backed by SCIENCE) (sort of)". It's (obviously) not about SWTOR in specific, but SWTOR is included in the ranking. If you do want to know more about his thoughts about that game in specific, I did write about it when he gave it its own dedicated review back in 2022.
• Looking at SWTOR content creators in specific, Kal from Today in TOR posted a great dev interview with Ashley and Caitlin this month in which they talked about things like lore and their writing process, which was extremely insightful if you're interested in that kind of stuff at all. Full disclosure: part of why I was so pleased with this interview was that Kal collected questions from the public to submit for the interview, and literally half the questions they chose to answer were ones submitted by me. (Others may have proposed similar ones, I don't know, but the point stands that I apparently ask good questions.)
• Meanwhile Swtorista decided to go down the rabbit hole of Rare Blue and Purple World Drop Gear in SWTOR, which is such a convoluted and historically complicated system it makes my head spin, and I'm impressed that she was interested enough in the subject to actually do the research and put it all together. I know it's a meme that "fashion is the real endgame" but I'm not sure even World of Warcraft has as many content creators posting about how to collect outfits as SWTOR does.
• On the PvP front, Ivano 1337 caught my eye with his video "SWTOR 7.6 PVP TIER LIST | Best Classes for 8v8 Warzones". Now, tier lists can be entertaining content by themselves, but one thing I appreciate about Ivano's content (and I think I mentioned this before) is that as a more casual PvPer myself, I will often notice that something feels "off" somehow, but not being an expert in the field I can't quite put my finger on what exactly is wrong. In this specific case, I've been doing a lot of my PvP as Vigilance Guardian/Vengeance Juggernaut, which more recently just hasn't felt as good for some reason. Seeing Ivano put their current strengths and weaknesses into such clear terms while also ranking them as the weakest of the Guardian/Jug specs in the current environment was a real a-ha moment for me. Since then I've respecced to skank tank and while it hasn't suddenly improved my win rate (probably because I'm still figuring out what I'm doing) it's been really refreshing and a lot more fun. Not to say I necessarily encourage everyone to play whatever's the latest flavour of the month, but if you're struggling to make a particular spec work for you, understanding why that is and how you might have a better experience is really helpful I think.
• Finally, YouTuber /JawaFace got very excited about the introduction of the new companion mount with patch 7.6 - just for said excitement to turn into bitter disappointment when it turned out that his favourite Jawa Blizz doesn't fit into the sidecar for some reason. He expressed his feelings in a creative way with a short video simply called "Companion Mount", which gave me a good chuckle. Are you seeing this, devs?