Shintar's Galactic Season 6 Diary, Week 8

Week eight was a surprise in terms of Galactic Seasons weeklies as the devs took their recent experiments with doubling up on certain objectives to a new level, with all three of the companion kill achievements being active in the same week. Here's the full list of everything that was on offer and my thoughts on each objective:

• Earn 200k Conquest points: Naturally.
• Earn the seasonal currency: Would also get done automatically.
  
• Visit another player's Tatooine stronghold: Another one for my "drop-in" series of posts, so sure!
  
• Kill 100 mobs with a healer companion: I mean, as previously established, this is really easy to do, so I was probably going to do it on all servers.
  
• Kill 100 mobs with a dps companion: ... even if I needed to kill 200 mobs.
  
• Kill 100 mobs with a tank companion: ... or 300, for that matter.
  
• Kill the Quesh and Nar Shaddaa world bosses: I'd had decent luck getting these done on several servers in week one, so I was up for doing that again.
  
• Earn 40 medals in warzones: I'd actually finished my last PvP season achievment on Darth Malgus the previous week, but this was going to be easy enough to do. I just wasn't sure whether I would feel like investing the time on other servers or whether I would even be able to get pops.
  
• Heroic space missions:  As mentioned previously, I'm not good enough to do these as I never even finished all the normal space missions.
  
• Play 5-10 arenas (wins count double): Since I no longer needed any PvP season objectives, I thought it was unlikely that I was going to bother with arenas.
  
• KotFE chapter 13 on veteran mode or higher: Once again, a chapter I wasn't going to bother to repeat.
  

Day 1 - Tuesday

After a day in the office I had limited play time in the evening, though ops was cancelled so that awarded me a couple of hours extra. I did the world boss objective on Leviathan, Tulak Hord, Star Forge and Satele Shan. On Tulak Hord I also did the Coruscant world boss since I initially replied to the wrong group request in general chat (lol). On Star Forge I also got lured into healing a master mode Dash'roode/Nefra pug while waiting for more people to show interest in the world bosses. On Shae Vizla and Darth Malgus I just focused on getting my daily objective done with a bit of questing/clicking.

Day 2 - Wednesday

In the morning I logged into Shae Vizla to check for world boss groups and tried to queue for some warzones, but had no luck on either front. 

I then didn't log in again until relatively late in the evening, when I did the daily Conquest round on all servers, mostly by continuing my class story on different characters. This always made at least a little bit of progress towards one of the companion kill achievements as well.

Day 3 - Thursday

Thursday was another office day, and when I came home I didn't feel like doing much more than what I'd done the night before. It was kind of funny to me that I ended up working on my class story on Alderaan on no fewer than three different characters/servers. I'm not trying to keep them in sync - rather the opposite to be honest, to avoid repetition - but for some reason I have a lot of characters on the secondary servers that are more or less at exactly the same stage in the story. Might be related to me always playing them for seasons at the same time...

Day 4 - Friday

Another similar day seasons-wise, as I did ops with my guildies in the evening and then did the rounds on the other servers doing various quests. The "kill things with your companion" achievements were slowly starting to get ticked off as well, though it was interesting to me how few mobs you actually have to kill on some of the earlier planets and how much it ratchets up later on. Taking a more progressed character for a spin for this definitely worked better than doing it on a lower level if you were just following the class story.

Day 5 - Saturday

In the morning I logged into Darth Malgus to do a few warzones and a bit more questing. I also did a quick check on Shae Vizla to see whether any world boss groups were forming or level 80 warzones were popping, but there was no sign of either.

I played again in the evening, first killing the two world bosses with my guild on Darth Malgus, followed by some PvP which got me the warzone medals objective. On the other servers I did another round of questing once again, with most of them ticking off one or more of the companion objectives by this point. Again I had some weird parallels as my trooper on Tulak Hord and my knight on Leviathan were on literally the exact same planetary story quest on Balmorra.

Day 6 - Sunday

I didn't play until the evening, when I did some PvP and questing on Darth Malgus, getting me to 5/7 there, with just some more mob killing left to go. On Leviathan, Tulak Hord and Star Forge, I visited a Tatooine stronghold and also did some more questing. As it was late by that point, I decided to save the daily objectives on Satele Shan and Shae Vizla for the next day.

Day 7 - Monday

It was a holiday in the UK, so I had all day to devote to non-work activities. I logged into Satele Shan and Shae Vizla in the morning, visiting a Tatooine stronghold on each and knocking out the daily objective with a bit of questing.

In the evening I returned to do the rounds on all servers again, once again completing story missions on characters everywhere to get the last few companion kill objectives and finish various personal Conquest targets. This left me with 7/7 weeklies completed everywhere except on Shae Vizla, where I'd failed to get a world boss group or any warzone pops for the PvP objective.

Week 8 Thoughts

The triple companion objective resulted in a pretty wild week as you could basically get to 5/7 without doing anything truly season-specific - as long as you did any kind of non-instanced content that involved your companion and rotated through all the different roles. I used this mostly to advance my class story on different characters on all servers (and didn't feel the need to go into a lot more detail about which character was on exactly which step). With the stronghold visit and the world bosses I could then get to an easy 7/7 everywhere except Shae Vizla, where I ended on 6/7 as I couldn't find a world boss group this time around (though I'll confess that I didn't try all that hard either).

I'm not really sure how I feel about this particular experiment in having all the companion objectives active at once. On the one hand, easy season progress, yay! On the other hand though... it almost felt like it wasn't really a season since I could get points for just questing, which is usually not the way this works.

There won't be a Week 9 Diary by the way as I'm travelling, and while I have my laptop with me, I don't really feel like spending much time on gaming. I'm not too worried about missing a week as I'm seasons level 90 on Darth Malgus and around 80 everywhere else at this point, so I'll be able to ease up on the other servers soon anyway.

Shintar's Galactic Season 6 Diary, Week 7

This is being published a bit late since I wanted to get my April round-up and the dev stream highlights out on time, but I didn't forget! To clarify, this is about the period from 23rd to 30th of April.

I'd been pretty excited about doing Galactic Seasons objectives for the first six weeks, but week 7 was the first one where I looked at the weekly objectives and kind of thought "meh". I think this was mainly due to the fact that repetition was starting to become noticeable to me for the first time. Here's what I thought about each weekly objective:

• Earn 200k Conquest points: Yes, I'd do that one.
  
• Complete the GSI weekly mission: Somewhat time-consuming so I definitely wasn't going to do this everywhere, but I do like me a bit of GSI action every now and then, so I figured I was going to do this on some servers as least.
  
• Earn the seasonal currency: Will get done automatically, so yes.
  
• Blow up enemies with destructible barrels and the like: I was probably going to do this one one way or another because of how easy it is to complete.
  
• Do the Black Hole weekly twice or the Onderon weekly once: This was the first objective that made me sigh a little. Didn't we just have this one? Oh, apparently that was five weeks ago. Didn't feel that long ago, somehow.
  
• Complete 8 repeatable or side missions and kill 100 mobs on the Hutt Space planets Nar Shaddaa, Quesh, Voss, Makeb, Darvannis or Ossus: This one also felt like I'd done it before, but I triple-checked and it hadn't been featured yet this season. I can only guess it felt that way since I'd done a fair bit of questing on Nar Shaddaa while working on other objectives in previous weeks. Still, this wasn't too bad and I was definitely going to do it.
  
• Craft invasion forces and dark projects: As usual, yay for crafting on Darth Malgus but nowhere else.
  
• Complete four uprisings on veteran or master mode: Still not a huge fan of uprisings and I could still feel the after-effects of spamming them for Total Galactic War. I figured maybe I'd do this on Darth Malgus, but surely nowhere else.
  
• Complete 2 out of 4 selected flashpoints (Battle of Ilum, False Emperor, Legacy of the Rakata, Shrine of Silence): Now this one was definitely repetitive because these exact same flashpoints were featured only two weeks ago. I appreciated them then, but going through the exact same routine only two weeks later was definitely going to be a no from me.
  
• Earn 25 medals in Galactic Starfighter: And the more annoying one of the two GSF objectives again... I figured I probably wasn't going to bother with this one, except maybe on Darth Malgus.
  
• Karagga's Palace on story mode: Now this was one objective that made me happy, as I was pleased to see that like the vet mode ops objective in week two, it had been reduced to requiring only one run - instead of previously four! I was hopeful that I'd be able to get this done on multiple servers since I figured it shouldn't be too hard to find pugs for it.
  

Day 1 - Tuesday

I got home very late that day as I attended a memorial for the recently deceased co-worker after my shift at the office. I didn't really feel like playing games after getting home, so I just logged into each server briefly to collect my daily login reward and achieve my daily allotment of Conquest point via various clicky objectives.

Day 2 - Wednesday

I had a lot more free time that day but still didn't really feel much like playing SWTOR for most of the day. I did eventually log in late in the evening to do the rounds again. On Darth Malgus I just did some crafting, followed by some GSI dailies on Leviathan.

I've settled into a routine when it comes to doing the GSI weekly, which involves doing Buried in Time on Tatooine, followed by two of the missions on Alderaan, digging up ancient weapons near House Teral and toxic waste barrels near Outpost Luurdes just a short ride over. This is very quick and easy, and I just do it several days in a row. This time, I also did the heroic on Tatooine (since you need to do one for the weekly) and blew up the womp rats near the barrel in Anchorhead a couple of times while I was there.

I then logged over to Star Forge to see whether any ops pugs were advertising for KP story mode in general chat. It took a little while, but eventually I saw a group form on Imp side. It was a nice and smooth run that also got me some achievements, as I'd never done KP SM on Star Forge before.

On Shae Vizla, I did a bit of questing on Nar Shaddaa until I'd earned enough Conquest for the daily objective. By that point it was late though and I was tired, so I decided to leave the remaining two servers for the next day.

Day 3 - Thursday

In the morning, I logged into Satele Shan and did a round of GSI dailies mirroring what I'd done on Leviathan the night before.

After that, I logged into Tulak Hord and did the Nar Shaddaa bonus series, since I couldn't remember whether I'd completed it on that server before, just that I had all these issues with false starts and bugs. It's a shame that you pretty much have to do them in a single day now to make sure they don't bug out, and with that in mind I've found it best to be laser-focused on only the missions actually part of the chain, while making a note to come back for any heroics or unrelated exploration missions in the area another time. Either way, this completed my Hutt Space missions weekly.

In the evening, I spent some time on Darth Malgus doing stuff not strictly related to seasons, such as PvP, ops with my guild and a bit of questing (though this did also get my daily objective done).

When I visited the other servers afterwards, I did another "round" of GSI dailies (meaning the eggs on Tatooine and the two dailies on Alderaan) on both Leviathan and Tulak Hord, followed by a round of the Black Hole on Satele Shan (since that's the only server where my main's a stealther) and a round of Ossus on Star Forge (the only secondary server where I have access to that planet). Finally, I continued doing non-class missions on Nar Shaddaa on Shae Vizla until my daily was done there as well.

Day 4 - Friday

I didn't log in until the evening again. Starting on Darth Malgus, I did a variety of activities there, including a GSF weekly. I'd originally planned to skip that particular objective, but our Imperial alt guild was a bit low on Conquest points, so doing the GSF weekly a couple of times seemed like a good way to boost our score. Winning two matches only got me to 7/25 medals however.

On Leviathan, I went out to Nar Shaddaa - I knew that I'd completed the bonus series before, but I could've sworn I had some other side missions left to do in the area. This turned out to be wrong as I couldn't find a single one - clearly my spreadsheets to track progression across different alts aren't detailed enough for this. I instead started questing on Quesh until I hit my daily Conquest.

On Tulak Hord, I did some more GSI dailies, after which I logged over to Shae Vizla since I thought a KP guild run might be about to start. However, when I double-checked the time it turned out that I was wrong and the actual start time was something like 2.30 am my time, so I went and did some more quests on Nar Shaddaa instead. (I was clearly not having the best day in terms of knowing WTF was going on.) It didn't take long for me to complete my Hutt Space objective, so I went and started another GSI weekly mission. The Imperial version of the heroic on Tatooine has a bugged spot so you always need to check there first to make sure RNG hasn't assigned it to you, else you need to come back the next day (some say resetting the mission can also work but I've had no success with that personally). Fortunately I was lucky that day and the bugged spawn was not included in my objectives. On Alderaan, I realised I'd forgotten how much more of a pain the Killik weapons are to dig up on Imp side, as the nearest location for Imperials requires going up a long and winding mountain path with lots of bugs in your way. I eventually got there, but I vaguely seemed to remember actually preferring a more distant location with less of a hassle to get there...

On Satele Shan I did another round of Black Hole, and on Star Forge a round of Onderon for the daily area objective.

Day 5 - Saturday

I only played for a couple of hours in the evening, and only on Darth Malgus. Not everything I did was about seasons either, though I did do Karagga's Palace on story mode with my guild, and another GSF weekly. I got it in two wins again, though this time they yielded ten medals, getting me to 17/25.

Day 6 - Sunday

I got up late but with enough time left before the reset to do the rounds on the other servers. On Leviathan and Tulak Hord, I completed my GSI weeklies, and on Star Forge I figured I had it in me to do one more of these this week, so I started it on my trooper (including the heroic on Tatooine and blowing up some womp rats). On Satele Shan, I did some side questing on Nar Shaddaa.

When it came to Shae Vizla, I only had twenty minutes left before reset, but I figured that should be enough for a quick round of the Black Hole, right? Even on a character that is a healer (my level 75 consular)? Even if their highest-level companion is only influence level 12? (I hope you can tell where this is going...) I started but quickly realised that things weren't going fast enough. I decided to skip ahead to the heroic, since I figured I could at least finish that, but it was going so. Slow. Just as I was starting to wonder what would happen to someone inside a mission phase if the reset happened while you were doing the quest, I actually managed to die on a pull and just gave up. I quickly relogged my warrior to get my last few Conquest points for the daily objective before reset, but even that took too long and reset arrived with me being only 150 Conquest points off the daily objective. I was so annoyed I just logged off.

I logged back in later in the evening, completed the partially done Black Hole weekly on my consular and then did some GSI dailies on my warrior again (opting to take a taxi to the more distant but less awkward location for Killik weapons this time), followed by some more of those on my trooper on Star Forge.

By then it was time for ops with my guild, which took up a good chunk of the evening. Afterwards I did another GSF weekly, which was done within two wins again, and yet I was still only on 23/25 medals after that. This is what makes this weekly so frustrating. It doesn't even matter if you play well/win, whether you get any medal credit feels like a complete roll of the dice. Like, how many weekly missions should a single seasons objective require? It's ridiculous. After that, it took two more matches to get those last two medals. Yes, two matches for just two more medals.

After a couple more warzones, I switched to the remaining servers where I hadn't done the daily yet and got my daily Conquest allocation done with some questing on all three.

Day 7 - Monday

In the morning I logged in on Darth Malgus and quickly knocked out two more weekly objectives by doing a round of Onderon dailies and blowing up some womp rats. I'd held off on my last two objectives until close to the end in case Mr Commando felt like doing flashpoints or uprisings over the weekend, but that didn't happen, so I had to get to 7/7 by myself.

I then logged in again in the evening to finish off my personal Conquest on a couple of alts and get my daily objective done that way. On Leviathan, I completed my bounty hunter's personal Conquest on Quesh (a good Hutt Space planet to jump ahead to, and I was kind Nar Shaddaa-ed out).

On Star Forge I did two heroics on Makeb to get some more Hutt Space kills - the Ossus dailies on Thursday had taken care of the mission part of that objective but I had barely killed any mobs. Makeb was good for achieving the opposite.

On Satele Shan, I'd left things off with several Conquest objectives partially completed so that I only had to do a single mission hand-in on my agent to be done for the day.

Finally, I finished my SWTOR week on Shae Vizla by doing one more round of Black Hole and completing my GSI weekly.

Week 7 Thoughts 

I started this season with a promise to myself that I wasn't going to burn myself out doing objectives I didn't enjoy, but then I was so excited that I did 7/7 weeklies on all servers for several weeks anyway. This week though, I could definitely feel my enthusiasm wane for the first time, with several days where I just didn't feel like playing much at all. I was still going to get 7/7 on Darth Malgus, but I quickly resigned myself to probably only getting three or four weeklies done on the other servers. In the end I still did a bit better than that, achieving 6/7 on Star Forge and Shae Vizla, and 5/7 on all the others.

I didn't even think that the objectives were particularly bad, but there was definitely little to no synergy, and the feeling of repetition got me more than anything else. This was the first time this season where I really felt the conflict between "wanting to do the thing because I want to have the thing completed" and just not feeling the actual gameplay in that moment. It's a pretty normal thing to feel, but also something I personally like to keep an eye on, as I'm quite capable of making things un-fun for myself by being too determined to get things done no matter what. With that in mind, I was glad that I was able to recognise that I was not really feeling it this week and say "oh well, not gonna go all out this week then" pretty easily and early on.

7.5 Dev Stream Highlights

Yesterday it was time for another SWTOR dev stream, hurrah! As usual, this is not the place to find all the details about everything that was said, but rather a summary of what I thought were the most important points, with my own opinions sprinkled on top. If you're looking for something more comprehensive and less editorial, let me point you towards one of the sites below instead:

• Swtorista
• Today in TOR
• Vulkk

Now, on to my own thoughts...

7.5 Story "Desperate Defiance" on Hutta

We got a little more detail about the next story update coming with 7.5, without really getting into spoilers. As previously established, it will take place on Hutta where we'll be interacting with a number of new characters. My favourite of these was a Hutt called Yusinduu with a cool new look.

Again, without really going into spoilers, they said that Sa'har will follow up on what was said at the end of the 7.4 story, and apparently how we respond to her will have an impact on her development going forward - curious to see what that means.

My only slight disappointment was hearing that the new area on Hutta won't contain a new daily area or anything. It's not so much that I'm particularly dying to have a daily area in every patch, but it kind of sounds like there's literally nothing there other than whatever you do for the main storyline, which sounds kind of wasteful to me if true. We'll see I guess.

Graphical Updates for Hutta

They'll use the addition of the new area on Hutta as an opportunity to also give the planet as a whole a graphical update, which sounded good to me. I mentioned it in the past when they made similar changes on a smaller scale on Tython and Korriban.

The only thing that threw me for a bit of a loop was how utterly different the skybox looked in the footage with the updated graphics. Hutta's sky is currently dominated by yellow clouds that cause the whole planet to be basked in a yellow-ish hue, while the updated version seems to feature a uniform grey cloud cover that looked like it strongly changes the vibe. I don't know how I feel about that yet. If you like the yellow, go and take some screenshots while it lasts I guess!

Below you can see before and after shots of the sky over Jiguuna that I took in the live game and on the PTS. I'll admit the change didn't feel as drastic in game as it looks in the screenshots and the new version is definitely much crisper and more detailed.

I'm curious whether this update will also affect the Karagga's Palace operation, since it is also set on Hutta so might be sharing some assets (but I can't be bothered to check that out on the PTS).

Dantooine Spring Event 

We currently have Nar Shaddaa Night Life in summer (which will start on the 9th of July this year by the way), the Feast of Prosperity in autumn and Life Day in winter, so there was a gap in the calendar that the SWTOR team wanted to fill with this new event. It's going to be full of chill activities like growing crops, dancing around the Star Wars equivalent of a May pole, hunting for eggs (random Easter vibes?), looking after animals, baking and eating pies, and finally... fishing. Yes, after more than twelve years, SWTOR finally gets its own version of fishing!

I don't know, I can't claim to think that this was something that was desperately needed, but I've enjoyed it in other MMOs that have it as an activity, even when it worked in very different ways. The appropriately Star Wars twist on it is that you basically make a little probe droid do the work for you, the notion of which amuses me greatly.

Yes, I actually logged into the PTS to check this out.

I think this sounds like a lot of wholesome fun and I look forward to experiencing it in full once the event goes live.

Our Own Little Basilisk Companion

Another thing that will happen in 7.5 is that Lane Vizla finally manages to fix that little basilisk from Ruhnuk and it will become our companion - a proper one that fights and everything, not just a non-combat pet. It'll be called B3-S1 or "Bessie" for short. However, there'll be a twist, as we'll have to train the little bugger to truly make it ours, which will involve something called "ventures" and will require you to take Bessie out to do dailies over the course of a longer period of time. I have to admit my initial reaction to this were somewhat mixed feelings.

On the one hand: new companion that we actually have to work for and build a relationship with! Yes! I'm 100% on board with that concept, and we haven't really seen anything like this since the release of HK-51.

However, from the way it was described, I'm not sure why we need a new "feature" with a new UI just for this instead of it simply being a quest chain or tied to an achievement, because it doesn't sound that dramatically different from anything already in the game. In fact, it sounds a lot like yet another way of making us go back to old daily areas, which makes me somewhat less happy. Also, I'm waiting for clarification on whether there's going to be an option to just unlock Bessie for your alts via the legacy system after you've jumped through all the required hoops the first time.

PvP Season 6

This was a bit of a weird one. First off, they announced that they'll be changing the launch timing of PvP seasons and have them more regularly start alongside the big patches. I'm in favour of that in so far as it should avoid some of the weird overlap issues that have been occurring with Galactic Seasons sometimes, assuming that those will continue to go live on the x.1 patches between the major ones.

However, then the devs also said that they wanted to make PvP seasons longer to give people more time to complete them, which sounded fine enough to me, but then they also want to add extra levels and make each level require more points... someone on the forums immediately did the maths and it sounds like you will still need to play pretty much just as many matches each week as before, only for more weeks, which doesn't really sound like an improvement.

Also, they talked about adding warzone medpacks and adrenals as rewards for the extra levels, which made every PvPer go "what?" - you already get more of these through normal gameplay than you could possibly use (because of their internal cooldown, you literally earn them faster than you can click them), and every character that does PvP already has hundreds if not thousands of these. That just seemed... odd. I hope they'll review that particular plan based on people's feedback.

What Now?

There isn't an official launch date for 7.5 yet, but we're probably looking at a late May/early June release.

The Public Test Server is up and you can check out the graphics updates, the spring event and some of the "venture" stuff there if you like (no story content though).

The reward code they gave out during the stream this time was "MalgusWhen", which grants a Darth Malgus in-game poster decoration - if you don't already have it, because unfortunately this one's a repeat of a reward they handed out previously. If, like me, you already had it, you can still enter the code and it will say that you successfully claimed it, but you'll get nothing. It's valid until May 16th.

Speaking of things that are valid until May 16th - in order to celebrate Star Wars Day, there's also some other goodies available. Logging in between now and then will grant you another floating cube droid non-combat pet, there's double XP going on, a Cartel Market sale, and a 50% off Collections sale. Enjoy!

Around the SWTOR-sphere: April 2024

April has been a busy month for me! I spent a lot of time both playing and writing about Galactic Seasons, to the point that I thought I wouldn't have a lot of other people's content to point to at the end of the month, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that I'd managed to accumulate a decent number of links anyway.

• April started with April Fools' Day of course. I remember simpler times, at the height of the MMO hype, when every MMO dev would post their own fake patch notes or whatever to join the fun every year. (This included SWTOR.) Sadly, in times when people are spreading blatant lies on the internet all year round, the whole thing just isn't as funny anymore... so I was surprised to see Kal from Today in TOR go ahead and post a fake announcement for an expansion called "The Rise of Malgus", but I did still appreciate the effort. I'd only deduct some points for the bottom half of the page being an obvious copy and paste of last year's "The Ring Forge of Morrod".
• ... that said, Kal immediately earns those points back for releasing a full list of all the fitted armours with images at the end of the month. Last month I said that I was optimistic that it was only a matter of time until someone released a more detailed guide about all the new ancient armaments and it turns out it only took a bit over a month. Nice to see!
• A different kind of guide that caught my eye earlier this month was "How to Hide Your Lightsaber as a Sith Sorcerer or Jedi Sage in SWTOR" on Vulkk.com, authored by Endonae. Mostly I saw the headline and thought "What? Why? And how?" - so I clicked. Endonae gives a lot of explanation for the why, and the how is basically a combination of a specific weapon and a specific tuning to make your saber look so opaque as to almost be invisible (though it's not truly hidden). I thought that was interesting, though I wouldn't go for that effect myself as I don't mind my Sages or Sorcerers holding a weapon, and as someone who enjoys lowbie PvP, Saber Strike is definitely not worthless in an environment where you can find yourself running out of Force quickly with no means to regenerate it yet. Better to keep fighting with a low damage ability than to die picking your nose! Though I guess whacking people with a near-invisible saber could still be entertaining for its sheer confusion value...
  
• I feel a bit silly giving Swtorista a shout-out every month - it's not like she needs me to give her publicity! - but I admire how she's got something major coming out pretty much once a month. The big thing in April was the unveiling of the new and improved decorations section on her website, now that TOR Decorating is supposed to be gone soon. I like that it doesn't just list all the decorations, but that there are also collections of similarly themed items, for example if you're looking for items to create an office space or need some decos that emit light. It was only the latter that made me realise that a lot of things that are officially classified as "lights" don't actually produce any, which is very weird and I can't believe I hadn't noticed that before.
  
• On the YouTube front, this month's entry in the "how's SWTOR doing this year" genre was "SWTOR In 2024 - Is It Worth Playing?" by Gaming For Immersion, whose channel is still small but whose voice I found very pleasant to listen to. What I liked about this impressions piece was that it didn't focus too much on the nitty-gritty of gameplay details, but talked about how the ease of combat kind of clashed with his overall enjoyment of the story, which I thought was an interesting point to highlight. I do agree that combat in the open world is still quite easy, but the rebalancing of level scaling a couple years ago has improved things a lot compared to where we were shortly after KotFE, and I actually see the occasional reddit post going "I keep dying and I don't know why" again nowadays, proving it's not impossible to struggle.
• Another type of "evergreen" SWTOR content I enjoy is class story rankings, and this month, "SWTOR All Classes Ranked From WORST to BEST" from tiny YouTuber (only 71 subscribers at the time of writing this!) basiccTV ended up on my feed. Not gonna lie, I found this one a bit hard to listen to since he's got a strong accent and doesn't seem to believe in doing another take whenever he ends up stumbling over his own script, but his thoughts were still interesting and I can respect his ranking. Not like when I saw Nixxiom ranking SWTOR's class stories last year and went "WTF" at some of the choices.
• On the SWTOR subreddit, there wasn't a single post that really grabbed me in April, but there were a couple that were kinda neat. Both "What character or group introduced in SWTOR would you have liked to see expanded on in other SW media (books, comics, etc) " and "What are some wasted story potential swtor just gave up on or never advanced?" touch on interesting side characters and plot points that were never fully explored but had the potential to be more.
  
  This meme made me smile even though I'd seen it on /r/SWTOR_memes before - I didn't even realise it was a movie reference at first, but it was still funny to me because it's wild how tiny the objectively normal-sized rooms in the Copero stronghold feel when compared to the absolutely bombastic layouts everywhere else in the game.
  
  Finally, someone linked to an old Games Radar article from two years ago that is pretty thin and whose contents are basically "a dev said some stuff on Twitter", but I liked it for the headline if nothing else: "Star Wars: The Old Republic's exploding barrels are filled with shrunken invisible people"

Drop In: Rishi

Last weeks' season objective to visit a Rishi stronghold had me a little worried in the sense that like Alderaan, the Rishi stronghold is huge, and I was wondering whether it would get a bit boring again to look at how the chairs had been arranged in every single room. There was definitely a bit of that, but I somehow felt it less on Rishi because it has less of a focus on those small rooms (though there are a few) and it was easier to quickly get the general lay of the land when comparing the different outdoor environments.

Like in previous weeks, I visited a stronghold on all servers except Darth Malgus. The first one was once again Shae Vizla, where there isn't that much going on (yet) in the stronghold scene and the most "filled up" stronghold I could find was Zenna Dusk's stronghold at 16%. This percentage sounds very low, but the owner did the best they could by placing at least a few decorations in every major location. Since this was also my first Rishi stronghold of the week and I couldn't even remember all the different sub-zones anymore, this felt a bit like a game of hide and seek, trying to find the most interesting spots. I didn't take any screenshots of it since I only noticed it towards the very end, but the Overlook seemed to be their main base of operations as thats where they had actually put their utilities and more "regular" furniture like a bed.

On Satele Shan, I visited Senséi's Pirate Roost at 100%, which was immediately a dramatic contrast because of how full it was. The most striking thing about this stronghold was that the owner was clearly a big Republic supporter as Republic guardsmen were everywhere. I was so impressed by how many there were, I ended up looking up the source of that deco and was reminded that it's accessible for cheap from a vendor, something I'd completely forgotten about myself even though I'd unlocked some myself in the past.

Oh, and dancing twi'leks, there were quite a few of those too.

On Leviathan, I ended up visiting Alita Darkangel's Marketplace Cantina at 96% completion, and was immediately delighted when I zoned in right next to the giant cat droid from Nathema Conspiracy (a decoration I use in one of my own strongholds too). I generally noticed that whatever I found at the default zone-in spot usually made quite a strong first impression, and it was annoying that it was hard to get good screenshots of everything on that slightly elevated platform.

Exploring the stronghold further, I saw more of the holo Christmas Life Day trees and indicators that unlike the last place I visited, this one was owned by a staunch Imperial. I actually giggled when I found that they had used one of the rooms on the patrol carrier to construct a prison, with Republic troops in a cage guarded by Imperial soldiers. Pretty inventive!

On Tulak Hord, I visited Ghost Leathercoat's Jedi Academy at 99% completion, because I hadn't seen a Rishi stronghold with a Jedi theme yet and was wondering whether this one would deliver. The answer was: partially - they definitely made use of a lot of Jedi shrines, but there wasn't much of an academy vibe, more of a general stronghold since there were also a lot of Republic guardsmen around again.

I haven't mentioned the PvP areas yet, which are unique to Rishi - in the free-for-all zone at the arrival point, it was interesting to see most players place different kinds of obstacles while seemingly still preserving its general purpose, while this person seemed to be like "screw it, I don't care about PvP" and just filled it up with mounts, trophies and plants as if it was any other space. I never looked too closely at the Huttball area on the patrol carrier in any stronghold since I figured it has limited customisation options, though this person had plopped a tree in there too.

Inside the patrol carrier there was also this giant root, which had me a bit baffled - is "giant root that sticks from floor to ceiling" an actual decoration (in which case this seems quite out of place) or is something clipping in a weird way there?

I also had a funny experience in the Overlook in this stronghold as one of the rooms in it contained a bar and a few NPCs. I turned around to run into the next room and... was wondering whether I'd accidentally turned myself around completely since I saw the exact same room again. It took me a few moments of of running back and forth to confirm that no, they had actually decorated two adjacent rooms in exactly the same way for some reason.

My final destination for the week was Akiara's Black Market on Star Forge, which also sat at 100%. I liked that this one had some very strongly themed areas, such as a "junk shop" with droids in various stages of (dis)repair and housing the jawa vendors.

I also liked these barracks on the patrol carrier. 

This med bay impressed me as well, except that something clearly went wrong in that tank on the right, ew!

I did find this one corner though that felt like they had just placed down random small items to get to full completion, never mind the visual result.

What do you think of the Rishi Hideout? Did you encounter anything particularly interesting while visiting other players' version of this stronghold?

Shintar's Galactic Season 6 Diary, Week 6

Week 6's objectives excited me for two reasons: It was the first week without a flashpoint objective, and it was the first week with not just one, but two PvP objectives. I don't like that it took six weeks to get any overlap between PvP Season 5 and GS6, and looking at the PvP track made me realise that after my initial excitement about the new PvP season, with plans to do at least the basic reward track on multiple servers, too much time had passed already for me to still complete the PvP track on Star Forge and Shae Vizla without buyouts, due to how focused I'd been on Galactic Seasons instead.

Anyway, in detail, the weekly objectives were:

• Earn 200k Conquest points: As usual.
  
• Visit another player's Rishi stronghold: Easy enough to do.
  
• Craft war supplies and two invasion forces: Once again something I was likely going to do on Darth Malgus but nowhere else, due to the lack of skilled crafters in my stable of alts.
  
• Dig up 3 treasures at a seeker droid dig site: Probably something I was going to do at least on some servers.
  
• Complete 15 missions as a trooper or agent: I was definitely going to aim for this one everywhere, as I usually do with the origin story objectives.
  
• Kill four named champion mobs on Corellia (2 Republic, 2 Imperial): Once again, not my favourite but one I was likely going to do at least on some servers to get the numbers.
  
• Kill both Taris world bosses: Easy and fast to do, I was counting on getting this one done on most servers again.
  
• Play 5-10 arenas (wins count double): I was definitely going to do that one on Darth Malgus, and maybe on other servers depending on whether I could get pops in the sub-80 brackets.
  
• Heroic space missions: I've never been good at space missions, to the point that I haven't even completed all the normal ones, so this was a definite no.
  
• Play 4-8 warzone matches (wins count double): I was probably going to aim to do that one on all servers, even if it's a bit time-consuming, but I do love warzones.
  
• Do dailies on Ruhnuk or Kessan's Landing: I figured I might do that one on Darth Malgus with Mr Commando, but nowhere else as I don't have that much story progression on any of the other servers.
  

Day 1 - Tuesday

I had another surprise working from home day after it turned out that the previous night's heavy winds had caused damage on my usual train line and I couldn't get into London. I was also feeling a bit tired and unwell though, so instead of using the time saved not commuting for gaming, I ended up napping instead.

In the evening I did ops with my guild, and then expanded my Copero stronghold to hit the daily seasons objective (I'd been saving up the unlocks for this kind of thing instead of using them the moment I got them).

I then logged over to Leviathan, where I had weird server lag problems when trying to transition between areas. It didn't just seem to be me either, as I played a warzone match and everyone else seemed to have issues leaving at the end as well, though it did eventually resolve itself. I then killed the Taris world bosses on both factions, which was nice and easy as lots of people were doing it and it basically took no time at all to find an impromptu group. I did the same circuit (one warzone plus both world bosses) on Tulak Hord, Star Forge and Satele Shan.

On Shae Vizla, I had no luck with warzone pops or world boss groups at this time of night, so I just parked two characters at their locations, visited a Rishi stronghold and did a couple of missions on my trooper.

Day 2 - Wednesday

In the morning I logged into Shae Vizla since I figured that was a better time for group content with the Aussies. I got both world boss kills done, and since level 80 warzones were popping instantly for me, I also played enough matches to complete the weekly. 

After the reset at lunch time, I returned to Shae Vizla to do some questing on my trooper, followed by a Black Talon run with my agent on Leviathan, which counted as 7/15 missions completed.

Later I was supposed to help out with an ops run on Star Forge, but it kinda ended up being cancelled, so the four of us that actually showed up ran a couple of master mode flashpoints instead (in the one week where this wasn't a seasons objective - typical! Still, it counted as ten missions done as a trooper.)

In the evening I first logged into Tulak Hord, where I did a warzone and a couple of missions on my trooper over there. I then spent some time PvPing on Darth Malgus, and finally I did exactly one warzone again on Satele Shan; plus I paid a visit to a Rishi stronghold.

Day 3 - Thursday

I was back in the office so didn't get any play time until relatively late in the evening.

On Leviathan, I visited a Rishi stronghold, did some warzones and killed the Imperial named champions on Corellia. Logging over to Tulak Hord, a single warzone there was enough to get my daily Conquest done, so I left it at that.

I then did some more PvP on Darth Malgus (both warzones and arenas), followed by a few warzones on Star Forge. While in the queue there, I also went around and killed the Republic champion mobs on Corellia. I started doing a couple of missions on my agent on Satele Shan, but it was late and I was tired, so I decided to leave any additional action for the next morning.

Day 4 - Friday

In the morning I logged back into Satele Shan and did an Esseles run on my little trooper there. Because of the Galactic Rampage Conquest objective, this completed her personal Conquest immediately, while also giving me several missions worth of credit towards questing as a trooper or agent. I then logged onto Shae Vizla and continued my trooper's class storyline on Belsavis for a bit.

In the evening I did more PvP on Darth Malgus, which resulted in me completing the arena weekly before it was time for ops. After that I logged into Leviathan where I played exactly one more warzone for the weekly mission (it was a Vandin Huttball in which I rocked by the way). Then I did the same thing on Tulak Hord, except that the match I played there was a Voidstar where we got properly spanked but still won on objectives.

On Star Forge I queued for a few midbie arenas (since this was the only other server where I could get them to pop without too much of a wait), followed by a couple of level 80 warzones on Satele Shan. Finally I did some PvP on Shae Vizla as well, even though I didn't need any more games for seasons there, but the guild I'm in was organising some level 80 warzones and I wanted to take part, so I completed another warzone weekly mission while killing some champion mobs and digging up treasure between matches.

Day 5 - Saturday

I didn't play until after reset, and then I started by going to Leviathan, where I dug up some treasures on my knight and did a few missions on my agent. Later on Tulak Hord, I visited a Rishi stronghold, and since that was my fourth weekly objective, I was immediately close to being done with the daily, so I just hopped over to Corellia and killed the named champs there to get myself over the finish line.

On Satele Shan I did some more missions on my agent, before logging into Shae Vizla to kill the champion mobs on Republic side. I was surprised by how tough this was on my level 74 Sage (my highest level Republic character on the server). I basically spent five minutes kiting Lord Rashal around a nearby pillar, whittling down his health one DoT at a time, until finally someone else showed up and helped to kill him. This was relevant in so far as I'd kind of forgotten at the start of the week that the reason I never did this objective on all servers before was that I never had a high-enough level Imperial character to kill stuff on Corellia. Now my Imps on Leviathan and Satele Shan were in their low forties, which is high enough to go to Corellia, but still low when it comes to killing level 48 champions. I'd been optimistic about my chances since I previously had pretty good experiences while doing the equivalent objective under-levelled on Taris, but my level 74's struggles made me seriously doubt myself.

I wanted to put the matter to the test right away, so I returned to Leviathan and took my level 42 bounty hunter to the first Republic champion on Corellia. Killing any mobs that dismounted me during the trip was definitely a lot slower than usual, but perfectly doable. I was happy when I got to the droid's spawn spot and saw someone else already waiting there. Unfortunately it turned out that person was also in their low forties and clearly waiting for help! Fortunately an 80 came by and took charge, so we were able to leech off their success easily. Unfortunately the trip to the next champion took a while since I didn't have any of the quick travel points unlocked yet, so I arrived just in time to see the 80 port away from the second champion's corpse. Fortunately another 80 was right there when he respawned.

I then re-did the same tour on Tulak Hord, where I'd forgotten that I actually got my Sorc up to 51 already. She killed the droid by herself with no problems whatsoever and would have done the same with Jimmy Weasle if someone else hadn't shown up to contribute some damage near the end. Are the Imperial champions just that much harder than the Republic ones? Let me know your experiences in the comments!

Emboldened by my success, I was going to try my luck soloing the champs on my level 42 Sniper on Satele Shan, but it just so happened that there were always other players present to support her anyway.

In the evening it was time for social ops with my guild on Darth Malgus, and doing Scum and Villainy on 16-man counted as completing four missions as a trooper. I finished the evening by completing the arena weekly in the midbie bracket on Star Forge.

Day 6 - Sunday

In the morning I logged into Shae Vizla and did a few missions on my trooper there, since I hadn't quite hit the Conquest target before getting distracted by the whole thing with the Corellia champions the previous day. This also took me to 7/7 weeklies completed.

In the evening I did a round of Kessan's Landing dailies with Mr Commando, which got me to 7/7 on Darth Malgus as well. On Leviathan, I did some questing on my bounty hunter for the daily - I still needed a few more missions on my agent as well but wanted to work towards my bounty hunter's personal Conquest target first. This was followed by a round of freeing Sobrik on Tulak Hord to get credit towards 15 missions completed as a trooper.

On Star Forge, I continued my trooper's class story on Corellia until I hit 15 missions completed there too, and swung by the remaining two champions as well since I was already in the neighbourhood, taking me to 6/7. Similarly, I did two warzones on my consular on Satele Shan and killed the champions during the wait time between matches, which took me to 5/7 weekly objectives completed.

Day 7 - Monday

In the morning I wanted to quickly catch up on what I had been a bit too tired to finish the previous evening. I did some quests on Shae Vizla for the daily and visited a Rishi stronghold on Star Forge. On Satele Shan I wanted to "quickly" dig up three treasures on Hoth but had the worst luck. The first dig site I visited was inactive, and the second had a guy already there who found the special treasure and depleted it just as I was honing in on my first target (and this was middle of the night for the west coast, FFS). I went to the last remaining site on Hoth in the Glacial Fissure and eventually got my objective done there, but for some reason every single treasure I found was inside a lava flow, which made it a pain to hone in on it without getting my poor guy set on fire. 

In the evening I logged into Leviathan to finish off my last few agent missions, though since I also had some juicy Conquest objectives close to completion, I also played other alts for a bit to easily reach their personal targets for extra rewards. On Tulak Hord I dug up some treasure (less painful in the Outlaw's Den this time) and then did some questing on my inquisitor for the daily Conquest.

On Satele Shan I completed my agent's class story on Tatooine to tick off my daily and last weekly objective, and on the other servers I only needed to do a bit more stuff on alts to finish off the daily objective there too.

Week 6 Thoughts

I had weirdly mixed feelings about this week. On the one hand I was happy to finally see a PvP objective pop back up as part of the regular season, but on the other hand they take ages to complete across all servers (and I was actually quite lucky with wins vs. losses). I think I completed a total of seven warzone weeklies and two arena weeklies this week, which is similar to the kind of craziness I would usually only engage in during a Total Galactic War.

In general there was little overlap between objectives, so getting to 7/7 felt quite time-consuming, no matter which route you decided to take - though again, this is in the context of doing it all on multiple servers. If I had only focused on a single one, it still would've been a breeze.

Shintar's Galactic Season 6 Diary, Week 5

I didn't have any particular feelings or expectations going into this week beyond what I'll note down about the individual objectives:

• Earn 200k Conquest points: Yes, naturally.
  
• Earn the seasonal currency: After last week, I was happy to see this objective return as another easy one to complete on all servers.
  
• Visit another player's Nar Shaddaa stronghold: Of course.
  
• Kill four named champion mobs on Nar Shaddaa (2 Republic, 2 Imperial): Like the Quesh objective in week one, not my first choice to complete but an easy filler to round things out if needed.
  
• Complete 8 repeatable or side missions and kill 100 mobs on the Unknown/Wild Space planets Ilum, CZ-198, Iokath and Zakuul: Easy to achieve with dailies, but one to watch out for in terms of not burning myself out with a billion CZ-198 runs.
  
• Kill 100 mobs with a healer companion: Easy to do in combination with something else.
  
• Complete 2 out of 4 selected flashpoints (Battle of Ilum, False Emperor, Legacy of the Rakata, Shrine of Silence): Now, I actually liked this one because two of the featured flashpoints were ones that are also required for the first GS6 story mission, and I'd only completed that on Darth Malgus so far, so I figured this could help with progressing it on the other servers (even if sticking to those two was going to make it particularly repetitive).
  
• Earn 25 medals in Galactic Starfighter: Same as last week, not a fave due to how many matches it takes me to get there.
  
• Play 3-6 GSF matches (wins count double): ... however, combined with this one it certainly seemed like an attractive combo to do on Darth Malgus at the very least.
  
• Kill Nightmare Pilgrim: Since you can get credit for at least the seasons objective without even being in a group nowadays, this actually seemed somewhat viable to do on multiple servers, as you just need to hang out at the boss's spawn point and wait for a group of either faction to show up (and due to the nature of the fight, the groups always take a while to sort out, so you can usually tell some time in advance that it's a work in progress, it's not a quick "blink and you'll miss it" job like on some of the other world bosses)
  
• KotET chapter 2 on veteran mode or higher: Now, I've always rejected the chapter objectives so far because I don't like repeating chapters... however, with this one, I actually had a character on Darth Malgus that was exactly on this step of the story, so I figured I might do it as a two-for-one.
  

Day 1 - Tuesday

What was supposed to be a normal office day turned out to be very sad as it was revealed to us that a (fairly young!) co-worker had surprisingly passed away over the weekend. As everyone was upset and in shock, people were allowed to go home early, and unsurprisingly, I didn't feel like doing much of anything for most of the day.

In the evening I was ready for some distraction though and logged on to do ops with my guildies, followed by a GSF weekly, which progressed me to 4/6 on one objective and to 9/25 medals earned.

On Leviathan, I put myself in the queue for False Emperor and Legacy of the Rakata and instantly got a vet mode pop for the latter. This resulted in a nice triple whammy of seasons progression, credit for the GS6 story mission and credit for the Prelude to Shadow of Revan story mission. I then meant to park myself at Nightmare Pilgrim to hopefully get a kill later, but there was already a group of Imps assembling there so I hung around (I was on a Republic character so couldn't join them). Sadly they wiped on their first attempt. The second one went better, though I myself got mowed down by the Pilgrim's Rapid Fire that time. Funnily enough, since I wasn't actually in the ops group the fight "belonged" to, I could just revive on the spot even as the fight continued.

On Tulak Hord, I did a round of CZ-198 dailies and then parked myself at Nightmare Pilgrim's spawn spot. It being past midnight in Germany, I wasn't surprised that nothing was going on anymore.

On Satele Shan, I decided to just do the Ilum heroic, including the bonus. As I also gained a legacy level while doing so, this was enough to complete the daily objective. Still, I wanted to park myself at Nightmare Pilgrim again before logging out, and once again there were some Imps already there. I waited for a bit, but when nothing seemed to move for more than ten minutes (and there weren't that many of them), I started to wonder whether this was actually a group or just some randoms doing the same thing I was, waiting for someone else to do the actual work. I actually relogged to Imp side just to check whether there were people actually LFM on the fleet but saw nothing. When I returned to my Republic character, there were suddenly a lot more people there and the battle was already in progress, but fortunately I had enough time to join in.

On Star Forge I just did a round of Iokath dailies on my boosted Sith inqusitor, before logging over to Shae Vizla to join a Nightmare Pilgrim group organised by my guild there.

Day 2 - Wednesday

After reset, I briefly logged into Leviathan to visit a Nar Shaddaa stronghold and knock out the named champion mobs for both factions. Some clickies pushed me over the required Conquest point amount for the daily objective.

Later in the evening, I logged into Tulak Hord and once again, there were some Imps at the Nightmare Pilgrim's spawn spot. Why is it always Imps? I once again waited for them to assemble and do their thing, but unfortunately this group just wiped three times and then gave up. Since I was having dinner around that time and was mostly AFK in game anyway, I hung around to wait for the next group to come by (the area had never fully emptied out). Eventually a huge Republic group came by and got me the kill. Then I just did the Ilum heroic plus bonus to complete the Unknown/Wild Space missions objective and the daily.

After that, I returned to my home turf on Darth Malgus for some PvP and GSF. One of the characters I did PvP on was a lowbie on whom I did some quests while waiting in the queue, which got me a good way towards the companion kills objective already. The GSF matches completed one of the related weeklies and brought the other one up to 16/25 medals.

When I visited Star Forge later, my inquisitor (whom I'd also left at the Nightmare Pilgrim's haunt) logged in to sounds of a battle and a group having the boss down to 20% or so already. I quickly ran in to hit him for credit before travelling to Ilum and doing the Imp side heroic there (including the bonus again) to complete the planetary missions objective.

Over on Satele Shan, I put myself in the queue for False Emperor and Legacy of the Rakata just to get an instant pop for the latter on veteran mode. The run was smooth and fast, bringing me one step closer to completing the GS6 stronghold mission on this character. I then also did a round of CZ-198, which ticked over three things at once: the planetary missions, killing things with my companion and the seasonal currency.

On Shae Vizla, I did the same thing with the group finder but without getting an instant pop, so I took care of my GTN listings and started on a round of CZ-198 in the meantime. Just as I was about to get to the final mission in the waste disposal area, I got a pop for veteran mode False Emperor. It was another smooth and fast run, and we even did the bonus boss.

Day 3 - Thursday

The first thing I did in the evening was log into Leviathan and do some quests on my bounty hunter to work towards the "kills with a healer companion" achievement until I'd hit my daily 25k Conquest points. (Reminder: My knight is a healer and doing stuff with double heals is a no-no even for me.)

On Tulak Hord, I queued for False Emperor and Legacy of the Rakata and got into a vet mode run for the latter, which I did not enjoy. We had two healers, which can make things a little slow but isn't usually a big deal... unless both of your damage dealers are really slow and erratic in their participation (one of them spent half of the first boss fight AFK from what I could tell) and the other healer absolutely refuses to press a single damage ability despite the group comp, both of which were the case here. I actually opened up Starparse purely to see whether the other healer was doing anything other than run in circles and spam AoE heals while we were all at 100% health anyway, and the answer was no. Nobody talked either, not even to respond to my greeting at the start, so I was just glad to get out of there (eventually). To cheer myself up, I went and visited a Nar Shaddaa stronghold, which got me to 4/7 weeklies completed.

I then spent the biggest chunk of the evening on Darth Malgus, first getting myself to 4/7 weekly seasons objectives there as well by completing one more GSF weekly mission, then by helping out another ops team by wiping in Dxun master mode for two hours.

After that I logged into Star Forge, where I basically did the same things as on Tulak Hord, only that the Legacy of the Rakata run on this server was smooth and pleasant. This was followed by a similarly smooth False Emperor pug on Satele Shan (bonus boss included again). Finally, I logged into Shae Vizla and just did the heroic on Ilum there, which ticked off three more weeklies there as well.

Day 4 - Friday

I had made such good progress over the first three days, I felt like a could relax and not fret about seasons too much for a day. I just logged into Darth Malgus in the evening to do a bit of PvP and that was it for my day in SWTOR.

Day 5 - Saturday

Late in the morning/shortly before lunch time, I did a round of all the other servers to get my daily done. On Leviathan, Tulak Hord and Satele Shan I did some story missions on Imp side, plus on the latter I also visited a stronghold since I hadn't done so yet. On Star Forge I queued for False Emperor and got a quick run in, which was okay, though a bit rushy and nobody responded to my saying hello.

Finally, I queued for Legacy of the Rakata on Shae Vizla and got a pop, but one person timed out so it didn't go through. It was getting close to reset time so I started work on getting Conquest points from some other sources to be on the safe side, but I did eventually get another run just in time to finish it before the reset. This one had two guys always pushing ahead while one always lagged behind, and the lagging guy actually apologised for his slowness, bless him. 

I didn't play again until the evening, when I killed Nightmare Pilgrim with my guildies on Darth Malgus and then did a couple of operations with them. After that I did some more PvP, and the questing I did between pops finished my companion kills objective. I finished the evening by doing KotET chapter two on veteran mode on the smuggler who was actually at that point in the story. I died a few times, but that wasn't entirely unexpected. With that, I was on 7/7 on Darth Malgus.

Day 6 - Sunday

On Sunday morning I decided to visit the other servers again. On Leviathan I did a False Emperor run in which someone was chattering away in French for a while until they rage-quit after the second boss. I couldn't entirely make sense of what they were saying so I opened up Google Translate on my second monitor, but it was of limited help in this instance as it didn't know what "tous au cac" meant either, a phrase that was repeated several times. Considering the context in hindsight, I can only guess it meant something like "everybody stack"? But then I'm still not sure why this was important enough to rage-quit over, especially on the second boss in False Emperor. All I did was run to the cannon to make the ship go away... I took some solace from the fact that I understood what someone else in the group said after the rage-quit: "what an angry guy".

Interestingly, I seemed to get the answer to what had upset that French guy on Tulak Hord later, when I did another False Emperor run there too, and someone complained about me using the turret on the Jindo Krey fight there as well. At least they made it clear why: they felt that the absorb shield it puts on him for a few seconds "wastes time". I appreciated being able to have a conversation about it, but to be honest my real (private) response to this was to file it away under "stupid pug strats", because I can't quite fathom why anyone would think it's a good idea to make a fight ten seconds shorter by taking 300% increased damage. Plus as a healer, I always hate the attitude of "let's ignore simple mechanics and let the healer deal with it".

On Star Forge, I just did some clickies for my daily Conquest, while on Satele Shan and Shae Vizla I played alts for a bit. On the latter I cut it so close that I only got the "influencing the galaxy" pop-up two minutes before the daily reset.

I went through all the servers again in the evening, mostly just doing a bit of questing on alts, as I was either already 7/7 everywhere or just missing a few more companion kills or Conquest points towards the 200k objective. On Darth Malgus I played a few PvP matches as well.

Day 7 - Monday 

All that was left to do was to cycle through all the servers and earn some Conquest points for the daily, which I did with a mix of questing and clickies. The only thing worth remarking on is that I finally finished my first class story on Star Forge while doing so! Oddly, it was the smuggler, not the trooper I've had since forever, but the latter is still working her way through some side missions, so the smuggler (on whom I only did the class story) ended up overtaking her on Corellia.

Week 5 Thoughts

After how much of a slog week four was, this week was a pleasant surprise in terms of how quick and easy it was to get to 7/7 everywhere. Also, I can't believe I'm already halfway through the season track on all servers! So much for not pushing myself too much... but it's still been interesting to document my progress.

Drop In: Nar Shaddaa

This past week's seasonal objective to visit other people's strongholds directed us towards Nar Shaddaa... and was honestly a bit disappointing to me, as an awkward part of strongholds' past reared its ugly head. More on that in a bit.

I once again toured strongholds on five out of six servers, skipping Darth Malgus once more as I easily got to 7/7 weeklies completed doing other things I enjoyed.

The first Nar Shaddaa stronghold I visited was on Leviathan, where I took a trip to Rhodania's Jedi Academy, mostly because the name intrigued me. Alderaan may have been a popular place for Jedi-themed strongholds, but Nar Shaddaa didn't strike me as a location that naturally leant itself to that, so I was curious to see what the owner had done with that theme.

Sadly, the answer was "not much". I'm honestly not sure why they chose the "Jedi Academy" moniker for their Sky Palace, because there didn't seem to be anything particularly Jedi about it.

For the most part, the decorations were just a slightly random mix of basic furniture, plants and (presumably) favourite companions standing about. Plus the owner seemed to be fan of Valkorion:

Nothing wrong with that, I had just hoped for more based on the name. Also, this giant dead tree on the balcony struck me as a bit out of place:

Next I opted to travel to Teyla Yue's Lair of Shadows on Tulak Hord. The listing said it was 100% complete and that with over 1.5 million prestige! Yeah, I was today years old when I learned that that number has absolutely nothing to do with what you'll actually find inside the stronghold. I didn't think too much of it at first when I saw nothing but a bunch of utility decorations at the entrance - I figured it was someone being very practical and wanting to have them close at hand when zoning in - but I sure was baffled when I moved on to the next room and found it to be completely empty.

Then I turned into one of the side rooms and... oh.

For those who don't know, when strongholds were first added to the game, the Conquest point bonus they granted was based on stronghold completion percentage, not on how many strongholds you owned and whether they were fully expanded. This meant that in order to min-max, people who didn't care that much about decorating would fill their strongholds with cheap random decos just to maximise their Conquest bonus, and Nar Shaddaa was a popular target for this as all subscribers got it for free when Galactic Strongholds launched. I resisted initially but eventually gave in too and was glad when this system was changed in 2018. However, I never went back to undo the mess in my Sky Palace either, so its walls are still plastered with boss kill posters to this day, and I'm not surprised that other strongholds of this type are still around... just that the owner thought this was worthy of being made into a public listing.

I guess I was kind of surprised by how many rooms they managed to leave entirely empty while still getting to 100%. I went back to double-check my own Nar Shaddaa stronghold and it had to have posters on every single wall, plus a bunch of speeders and pets on various floors to get to 100% completion.

Fortunately Bubba's Game Room on Star Forge (pictured above) was a much nicer place to visit. It actually matched its theme, welcoming both Republic and Empire players (I liked how one of the dual stairways was Republic-themed and the other Imperial) while offering the kinds of amenities you'd expect in something called a "game room", such as a bar, slot machines and a dance floor.

However, my favourite stronghold of the week was undoubtedly Dalroti's Marketplace Cantina on Satele Shan. The owner really put some thought into what it would mean for something to be both a marketplace and a cantina, starting with the entrance featuring a receptionist on a red carpet, flanked by security.

Inside you'll find a Hutt with cronies, as well as tables with food laid out, plus of course the obligatory bar and dance floor.

Finally, I visited Gracey's Stronghold on Shae Vizla and... I guess it should've been a warning sign when there were once again nothing but utility decorations at the entrance. Just... why?

At least this "forest" of lightsaber displays managed to look kind of ominous in an abstract way:

The thing that gets me with this one is... it's on Shae Vizla, a server that only opened last year! While we have server transfers now, your stronghold's layout doesn't transfer with you, so this cannot possibly have anything to do with the way Conquest used to work back in the day. This was someone deciding in 2023/2024 that haphazardly stuffing their stronghold with chairs and benches to get it to 100% completion would be a good idea; I'm just not sure why.