Ranking the 7.7 Dynamic Encounter Planets

I've been meaning to write more about the dynamic encounters that were added with patch 7.7 for a while, but I struggled to make up my mind about what format I was going to use for the post. I had fun with the top ten lists I made for Hoth and Tatooine, but that format doesn't work so well when you're dealing with a larger number of planets, each of which has a much smaller number of dynamic encounters than those two.

I ultimately decided that I'm just going to rank the planets against each other instead, talking about each planet in more general terms instead of discussing too many individual encounters in detail.

Going from best to worst, I would start with: 

1. Dromund Kaas

If you split the seven planets that had dynamic encounters added in 7.7 into three groups - capital worlds, starter planets and Ilum - I think both of the capital worlds definitely came out on top. With more than twenty unique encounters per planet they offer the most variety of the bunch, as well as offering an easy way to grind Conquest points.

The encounters on Dromund Kaas are thematically very varied, mostly leaning into the different regional "themes" previously established in side missions, such as the spaceport being somewhat in disarray or the lightning spires being under attack. They mostly seem to be set in the same time period as those original exploration missions, though I noticed while dispersing unruly Imperial citizens in Kaas City that one of them yelled "What is Xarion hiding?", which I thought was an interesting detail that would place that one after Onslaught in the timeline.

In general, most of the encounters are quick and fun, and strategically placed in locations where people are bound to come through on their way to some other mission objective, making it very temping allow yourself to be distracted for a moment to complete an encounter. Prime examples of this are doing "Bad Monkey" just after arriving at the spaceport, or hunting down the rogue bounty hunter while passing through Kaas City.

If I had to cite anything negative, I'd say that there are a couple of encounters with flaws. The Apex Predator in "Shock and Awe" feels way overtuned for levelling players (trying to solo it on a level thirty-something with a healer companion I was chunked to death within only a couple of hits), and the final boss for "Kubaz Incursion" can be a bit annoyingly hard to find. "Powder Keg" actually being possible to fail is a neat idea but the fact that it's the only encounter of this kind and that it's not obvious at all what is going on unless you're already in the know makes it a bit unpleasant in that regard.

Also, I wish they'd fix encounter voice lines sometimes playing when the encounter isn't even up, because every time my speeder rides past the lightning spires I get spammed with yells about multiple encounters that may not actually all be active.

Anyway, all in all it's still a fun romp, and the reason it's edging out Coruscant for first place in my opinion is that the map makes it both cheap and easy to get around if you want to do multiple encounters. Which brings us to...

2. Coruscant 

In general, Coruscant is one of my top three planets in the entire game, and most positive things I said about the dynamic encounters on Dromund Kaas above also apply to Coruscant. The reason I put it in second place is simply the fact that it's a bit of a pain to travel between dynamic encounters due to the planetary layout with the different sectors, which all count as being really far apart, which in turn means that moving between them always requires either a looong taxi ride or paying the maximum price for quick travel. Even if you do opt for quick travel though, the sectors are still laid out in such a way that it can be a pain to just travel from one dynamic encounter within the same sector to the next one.

The said, I adore most of the encounters in the Senate Plaza, which is where I'm always passing through when I exit my stronghold, and I basically never pass on an opportunity to set off some fireworks or to help clean up the party's aftermath.

Negatives are that some of the Black Sun and Justicar encounters don't have nearly enough clickies if there's even more than one person trying to do the encounter at the same time, the way Ugnaught Engineering was horrifically bugged when it first came out and made people get into fights about who was supposedly causing it to bug, stealing kills or whatever (regardless of whether it was true or not), and the one encounter on the Senate Plaza that I don't like, "Understaffed". Like with "Powder Keg", you can tell someone just wanted to try something different there, but the final result is just too undercooked, with a tutorial mode that teaches you to do things the wrong way, and people being able to ruin the encounter for each other - both intentionally and unintentionally - which is never a good thing.

3. Tython 

Next we have the starter planets, which I think are all pretty similar in quality, and I don't feel particularly strongly about the order in which I've ranked them against each other. The main reason I consider them worse than the capital planets it that there are very few encounters, so you'll run out of things to do pretty quickly if you're just trying to grind on a single planet, and that none of the DEs on the starter planets give Conquest points. I can see why the devs decided to have that limitation, but it still means that for someone who's very Conquest-focused like me, they tend to have a lot less replay value.

With that general preamble out of the way, Tython is definitely my favourite of the bunch, since it's my favourite of all the starter planets and I think all its dynamic encounters are very on point, whether you're doing simple chores at the Jedi Temple or beating back the flesh raiders.

The only thing I'll say is that I do wonder a little how having a dynamic encounter pop up the moment you leave your intro phase is going to affect new players' perception of the planet and the game as a whole, and whether it might make things come off as a bit "loud" and overwhelming to less experienced gamers. I would love to have insight into the devs' behavioural metrics on the starter planets for that one... 

4. Hutta

Hutta is actually one of my least favourite planets, generally speaking, but I think in terms of dynamic encounters it works well enough. Again, the themes of the encounters go very well with what's also conveyed via the existing side missions, from dangerous wildlife to rebellious evocii.

The only thing I'm not so sure about is having an encounter that is basically a vehicle quest right outside the spawn phase, because it makes me wonder whether that isn't a bit confusing/overwhelming for new players. Even if seeing a bunch of droids enter the gang wars right outside the Poison Pit does serve to drive home the point that the town is a bit of a mess. 

5. Ord Mantell

Ord Mantell is one of two planets where I actually feel like some of the encounters are slightly off in tone. This may very well be my personal bias speaking, as someone who mains a trooper and was instantly scarred by being blamed for the death of Bellis the informant at the hands of the separatists by multiple people, but I always perceived the whole setting with the separatists as very dark and desperate. Even the smuggler story with all its goofiness has a pretty dark turn here with Corso's parents being dead because of the separatists and him having that one moment where he wants to execute that random sep in cold blood.

With that said, I just feel like some of the encounters involving separatists feel a bit too silly. Like that mad scientist type sending you out to shoot separatists with one of his droids? It's one thing if there's a specific NPC that's bit ridiculous when you talk to them, that's clearly just that one character, but the fact that you hear the dynamic encounter yells repeated endlessly even when you're just driving by gives them a much stronger impact on the mood in my opinion. Might just be me.

6. Korriban

That's also the reason why I rate Korriban last of this batch, because again, several of the encounters just feel a bit too goofy to me personally. Don't get me wrong, both the Sith warrior and inquisitor stories have plenty of humorous moments even on Korriban, but I still always got the vibe that as a setting, the planet is clearly meant to be very grim, with all the racial purity nonsense and dog-eat-dog behaviour encouraged in the acolytes. Stuff like k'lor'slugs running wild around the academy feels more like the kind of hijinx you'd find in a young adult book series about a magic school. (That said, looking at how busy each planet is, this one actually seems to be very popular with people, so again, this might just be me.)

7. Ilum 

Finally, in last place - alas, poor Ilum. I really wanted the addition of dynamic encounters to this planet to feel like a revival for it. I have some fond memories of Ilum from the game's early days, even though it felt somewhat unfinished even then, but over time it's only ever declined in relevance. Sadly I can't say that I feel like dynamic encounters have put it back on people's radar, and based on the small number of other people I see doing encounters there, I get the impression that it didn't really land for the majority of the population either.

Good things first: the theming is once again spot-on on this one. They really leaned into the Republic vs. Empire conflict from the original storyline and even added some encounter achievements that are meant to encourage world PvP. (I'm 99% sure that almost nobody will bother with those, but I appreciate the effort.) On the Western Ice Shelf, they've expanded on the lore of the Tonvarr Pirates that were previously only really relevant during the Gree event. It all works.

The problem is simply that too many of the encounters are just not very fun. Too many of them have multiple stages and feature a large number of mobs - when sometimes mob-killing isn't even part of the main objective, which makes it feel like you're just endlessly wading back and forth through constantly respawning mobs to actually get to the next clicky you need. It just feels tedious to the point that my brain keeps trying to forget that Ilum is another planet that has dynamic encounters now and I very rarely even remember to go there.

All that said, I wanted to also give a shout-out to a change to dynamic encounters in general that came with 7.7 but that I didn't see in the patch notes: When they released these new encounters, they changed it so that on staged DEs, you no longer need to complete every single stage by yourself to get credit, but rather you can join in at any time and still get completion. I feel that this has been a great change and has been most noticeable for me during encounters such as the base attacks on Tatooine and Hoth. It used to be that I felt that there was no point in joining in if people were already fighting the stage two walker, as it wouldn't give me anything and I'd just have to restart the encounter from scratch afterwards anyway. Now I'll gleefully jump in and help out because I'll actually be rewarded for it too, which I think has been a great change.

How many of the new encounters have you done at this point? And do you agree with my ranking of the planets or not? Let me know in the comments. 

Some Interesting News From SWTOR's 7.7.1 Dev Stream

I was somewhat disappointed by the last two dev streams, but the voice actors' strike ended a few weeks ago, so I was positive that we'd get some good news about the next story update this time, and I was also hopeful that whatever they were going to announce about Galactic Season 9 was going to be more appealing to me than Season 8's uprising focus had been. I did get both of those things, but as I always do, I have some nits to pick as well.

Story is coming... but later and perhaps less than we'd hoped

At least when talking with some of my friends, there had been a hope expressed that the next story patch would be one big "catch-up patch" giving us a bigger chunk of story than usual, kind of like how Echoes of Oblivion and Spirit of Vengeance (which were originally supposed to be separate pieces of content) were both released at the same time after delays caused by Covid.

This... is not going to be the case. 7.8, which will come out before Christmas, will have the "Galactic Threads" story that was originally meant to be included in patch 7.6 last Christmas, and then they'll speed up a little bit and add "Master's Engima", the story originally built for patch 7.7, with 7.8.1, which should then launch at some point early next year and would usually have included only the start of Galactic Season 10 and no story update.

While I'm glad to finally have something close to a date, having to wait another four months or so until the next story drop still hurts - by that point the game will have gone nearly 18 months without a story patch, which is unprecedented in this MMO's history.

The other thing that stuck out to me is that if we're getting the story that was meant to be in 7.6 in 7.8, what was meant to be in 7.8 before that? No story? Ultimately it feels like aside from the delays, we also lost one of the twice-a-year story installments due to the strike, which sucks.

Same thing with date nights by the way - they mentioned working on one back in the 7.6.1 stream, but now we won't even get one with 7.7.1, with the next expected release (Torian and Kira) coming with 7.8.1 next year. 

Galactic Season 9: Flashpoint Resurgence

As for GS9, its theme is flashpoints. Yippee! There will be Czerka buffs involved like there were for uprisings during GS8, which I don't really care about, but I'm good with running flashpoints with or without buffs. Unfortunately it sounded like the objectives will be veteran mode only, which is a bit disappointing to me personally and will not encourage my guildies to group up I reckon, but still, it's flashpoints.

The most interesting bit of the stream to me personally was the devs talking about how they were using the occasion of this seasonal focus on flashpoints to make some changes to the activity finder. A big quality of life improvement they will make is that you'll finally be able to queue as multiple roles again, change roles while queueing (so that you can e.g. do dailies in a dps spec while queueing for a flashpoint as healer) and it will take both of your combat styles into account, meaning you could queue as all three roles if you wanted and have the right combat styles for it. Now, to be clear, only the last bit of that is actually new - both the ability to queue for multiple roles and the ability to queue as a different role than you're currently playing were in the game before but got patched out at some point, I think because they were buggy or causing issues of some sort. Still, I'm very glad to see these features make a comeback at last.

They are also going to improve the loot you get in flashpoints while levelling, though it's not entirely clear what that will mean - I'm guessing more gear that is actually appropriate for your level and combat style, because getting drops that you can't even use or not use for another twenty levels was definitely a thing sometimes.

For the max levels, you'll no longer have to queue for all flashpoints to be eligible for additional daily/weekly rewards, but can exclude a few that you may want to avoid. You still won't be rewarded for just spamming Hammer Station and nothing else, but you can untick a couple you don't like, which I guess is nice. 

No more "spacebar plz"

The thing that kind of shocked me was that in connection to all these flashpoint changes, queued veteran and master mode flashpoints will no longer feature any cut scenes or group conversations; everything will just be auto-skipped and if there was some sort of decision to be made (such as whether to kill or spare the captain in the Black Talon) it will just do so automatically. If you want to see the conversations and cut scenes in the future, you'll need to do story mode (where available) or manually walk into the higher difficulty with some friends.

Now, I completely understand why they are doing this and I'm sure many people will consider this a major quality of life improvement. I made a whole compilation poking fun at people's urge to skip the cut scenes seven years ago. I've seen it all, from the guy who drops group the moment you zone into the Esseles or Black Talon, to endless arguments about who isn't hitting their space bar and why. It was a source of friction for sure.

AND YET. I myself have always loved the group conversations in flashpoints and was generally happy to watch cut scenes if other people wanted to do so too. I enjoy running flashpoints, but I never "spammed" them to the point where getting the Esseles again made me frustrated. (The only flashpoint that I've managed to get utterly sick of is Hammer Station, and that has nothing to do with cut scenes and everything to do with the community.)

I also felt that the group conversations often inspired fun little interactions, such as when a dark or light side choice got people chatting. My guildies have seen me express (not-entirely-serious) outrage at killing the engineers or leaving Asara behind in the Esseles more than a few times. And some of the cut scenes also just genuinely looked nice! I have a whole collection of screenshots of pugs in Czerka Corporate Labs, from that last cut scene that shows your group walking into the room looking heroic.

And all of that is just going to be... gone? Telling me that you can technically build a group manually and walk in to still see the cut scenes is a bit of a cold comfort because let's be real, how often do people do that? How often have you run Kuat Drive Yards since it was removed from the group finder? I just feel like this is going to be one of those things that will end up having negative ripple effects that people won't fully feel until later down the line. Or maybe I'm just a relic of ancient times for having actually enjoyed interacting with my pug mates in small ways, even if there was friction sometimes.

Be free, F2P-ers!

A big change for free-to-play players that's coming with the next patch is that the devs will be dropping a lot of the old restrictions on that type of account. You will now also get sprint at level 1, have all action bars unlocked, be able to hide your head slot  and equip random purples that you get while levelling. Honestly, with some of the things they mentioned I didn't even know there were restrictions for that: What, F2P players couldn't display legacy titles before? Or equip companion customisations? WTF?

Even as someone who's always been subscribed, I think this is great news. SWTOR has had a reputation for having extremely draconian F2P restrictions for a long time - I remember how the limited action bars were a source of ridicule across the entire MMO community when the game first went free-to-play. I think the devs did the right thing by being cautious when they first changed payment model back in the day (mostly because other MMOs that followed suit later and kept crowing about how much more generous their F2P model was in comparison, such as Rift and Wildstar, did ultimately not end up doing well).

However, all of that was over a decade ago, times have changed, and there's just no reason to be quite so brutal with all those restrictions on what's effectively the game's free trial mode. Annoying players with arbitrary feature locks before they've even left the starter planet was just never great, and I hope that these changes will give more people a chance to actually fall in love with what the game has to offer and then spend some money on it happily instead of feeling nagged from the get-go.

What about subscribers though?

So as not to leave subscribers feeling unappreciated, the game will run a new "subscriber login event" from September to December where you'll earn a special currency if you log in at least four times a week, which you can then use to buy some goodies. I kinda raised my eyebrow a bit at one of those goodies supposedly being "endgame gear" but we'll see. I really don't need more free stuff myself, but I can't blame them for trying to offer subscribers a bit more carrot while easing up on the F2P stick.

Say farewell to endless free CC

Speaking of carrots and sticks, regardless of your subscription status, you've long gained 100 free Cartel Coins per month if you've got a security key attached to your account. I often saw delighted comments from people who came back to the game after some time away to find that they'd accumulated thousands of free Cartel Coins while not playing. While that was nice, considering for how long the game has been running at this point, I can't blame the bean counters for concluding that someone coming back after years and immediately finding $40 worth of Cartel Coins in their account was maybe not so good for their bottom line. No, that free CC is not going to go away, but it will only be awarded going forward if your account was actually active in the last 30 days. 

Decos, Graphics, DirectX

Under "other topics about which I don't have that much to say", we have the Feast of Prosperity returning this autumn with some awesome new decos that I'll definitely want to grind for. (I actually broke my habit of ignoring Twitch chat to type "LOVE LAMP" when they showed the new ceiling lights.) 

The character customisation updates continue, with Rattataki getting updated textures next, and dark-side corruption getting a much-needed revamp so that it no longer turns every character into a pasty white dude regardless of their previous skin colour. (I might actually give showing it on my dark-siders a try once this goes live - I previously always disabled it precisely because it changed your skin colour so much and I didn't want to look like an albino axolotl.) Also, after they added all those skin colours for aliens in the last patch, they are expanding on this by adding more hair and montral colours with 7.7.1.

Finally, in technical news that I have to file under "I don't know enough about this to have an opinion but I guess it sounds good", they are making good progress on updating the game to DirectX 12 but there's still some work left to do. 

As usual, if you want ALL THE DEETS, including things I didn't mention here and images of various rewards, here are some other places you can look:

• VOD on YouTube (Twitch had some hiccups and split it into several parts) 
• Official recap article
• Swtorista
• Today in TOR 

Fun with the New Outriders

I've mentioned previously that aside from being an officer in Twin Suns Squadron, the guild on Darth Malgus that I've been a part of for over a decade at this point, I also joined some guilds on the other servers on a more casual basis. The standout among these is probably New Outriders, a multi-gaming guild/community that has its SWTOR branch on Star Forge and in which Intisar is an officer.

I don't get to actually interact with the people there that often because of time zones, but when I do it's always cordial, and on the rare occasion when they have an event in the afternoon in their time zone, meaning that I can join in as well, I'm always excited.

Yesterday was one such occasion, and it started off in a way that was very flattering to me, as Intisar instructed me to come online a bit early, declaring that a few people would help me get the last three DvL boss kills I was still missing on Star Forge. So we did that, and it wasn't actually too painful, even on Hoth! The GS8 achievement for the boss kills by itself doesn't actually give anything worthwhile, but it turns out the original achievement to kill all the bosses from back in Knights of the Eternal Throne is also still active, so that triggered as well and I got lots of banner decos for it, which was nice.

This was also a good example of one of the things I do love about joining events on Star Forge - there I'm just another member and can rely on other people to carry me a bit. I don't mind being an officer in Twin Suns Squadron, but it is also work sometimes, and only the day before I'd been making lists and parking summon alts all over the place to help my guildies there tick off their last few achievements, so it was a nice change of pace to have someone do the same for me, you know?

Anyway, once the event got started properly, a lot more people came online, including a couple of the officers from the wider community that clearly hadn't played SWTOR in a while. I got quite wide-eyed inspecting them, with one of their characters being level 55 and the other one 75. It was like looking at a time capsule! I think I must have gasped lines like "OMG, he's got an Oriconian ear piece" out loud at my screen at one point.

The event itself was a very casual-friendly affair open to all levels that involved travelling across various planets, killing world bosses, collecting datacrons and just generally having a bit of fun. I was pretty impressed by how even though there was never a dull moment, I couldn't quite tell how much of it had been planned and how much was spontaneous. The characters that had been parked next to difficult-to-reach datacrons had obviously been prepared with intent, but other times we'd arrive on the scene of a dynamic encounter and Intisar would just go "oh, this one is fun" and we'd all do it together and I figure that can't possibly have been planned that way? I don't know.

The most whimsical detour was when we got to Tython and Intisar beckoned everyone to join him at the planet's 0,0 coordinate to marvel at the strange floating orb of light there. It's funny how something that's clearly just a random bug has developed into a kind of mysterious attraction and people like to make up their own lore about how the Uxibeast next to the flame must be Force-sensitive or something.

Since there were no level requirements for the event, I took part using my little Sage alt who had only just earned her own ship (that part was required to be able to accept summons) and she gained no fewer than five levels from gallivanting around the galaxy and trying to take part in killing world bosses. Plus she got a lot of random creature codexes from when people around her decided to kill all the wildlife in the vicinity.

It was just very wholesome and I'm always kind of impressed by the joyful energy everyone in the guild still displays while playing the game, even when they're off to kill the Coruscant world boss for what must be the 100th time. It probably helps that they have a seemingly endless supply of in-jokes that sometimes make my head spin, including every boss and their abilities having special made-up names. (I've got to admit, FR3-D0M being introduced as "the Hamburglar who does cheese and tomatoes" broke me a little.)

Either way, it's refreshing to me because even though I obviously love my guild on Darth Malgus, I think it's fair to say that we have... a considerable number of members who are a bit jaded about the game at this point and are much harder to excite. It may not be possible to go back to being a wide-eyed noob, but I for one am still capable of having a lot of fun with even the more basic aspects of the game and it's nice to hang out with others who feel the same sometimes.

(This Year) I Love the Night Life

When Nar Shaddaa Nightlife was mentioned in May's dev stream, I was grousing that they didn't address the one thing I cared about in relation to that event - whether they were finally making the casino chips a legacy-wide currency. And to be honest... I still don't know why they weren't shouting this from the rooftops, but this past week, one day before the event began, they announced that the chips were becoming legacy-bound after all - halfway down the page in a pretty long article.

As it turns out, this change wasn't without hiccups: Immediately after launch, it turned out that acquisition of any new chips was apparently causing all your old chips to be deleted, which led to an emergency server shutdown and quick fix, but once that had been handled, I was excited to log in and cycle through all my characters to get a tally of how many chips I had. It took a while, mostly because once I got to logging through them all, I also felt the need to check their mail, claim the latest set of freebies they'd received etc. but in the end I was left with what I felt was a pretty decent amount.

Fortunately the days when too many free chips would just make me feel anxious are long gone (the max bet machines are a thing now after all), and I've been happy to just do a few spins per day for the Conquest points. I'm pleased that now that the chips are legacy-bound, this is much easier than it used to be, when I'd have to log back and forth between different characters all the time just to find who still had several different kinds of chips left.

There aren't any particular prizes I'm chasing this time around, but that doesn't mean I'm not happy to collect some new mounts and pets on different characters. 

Conquest Events That Are Good for Small Guilds

This post has been sitting in my drafts as a personal reference for me for a while, and I figured it was about time that I actually finish and publish it so that other people can benefit from this information too.

If you're the guild master or an officer in a smaller guild, you're probably familiar with the dilemma of which invasion target to choose for Conquest each week. On the one hand you want to go as large as your guild can manage, to maximise everyone's rewards, but on the other hand you want to make sure that you don't bite off more than you can chew, causing your guild to struggle or even fail to reach its cumulative target.

Also, raise your hand if you've ever been in a situation like the following: You go for small yield and then someone decides to randomly be super active that week, causing you to way overshoot the required score. So the following week you go for medium yield, thinking that there's clearly more activity going on than you expected, and suddenly it's totally dead again, so you find yourself personally grinding out the missing points on Sunday or Monday just to hit target. It's annoying!

Now, I can't tell you what your guildies are going to do from one week to the next either, but one thing I've learned over time is that there are some Conquest events that are much better at generating points than others, which is something to keep in mind.

Death Mark

First we have the event that is tied to Bounty Contract Week and therefore comes around as frequently as once a month. You'll definitely want to bookmark this one as it contains the following two objectives:

• Galactic Rampage 
• Missions: Supreme Taskmaster

The former requires you to kill 200 mobs anywhere in the galaxy (and yes, flashpoints and operations count) and gives a little less than 100k points if you have the full Conquest bonus from strongholds. After completion, it also turns into a daily repeatable that's good for another chunk of points every day.

Missions: Supreme Taskmaster requires you to complete 35 missions of any type, awards over 200k points on first completion and then also turns into an only slightly less rewarding repeatable version.

The key thing here is that there are very few activities in SWTOR that don't require you to kill mobs or complete missions, so if your guildies are active at all during the week, they'll be generating Conquest points whether they are actively trying to or not. As a result of this, I've found that during Death Mark weeks, it's generally safe to put your guild's Conquest target one size up compared to what it'd usually be, meaning that if you usually go for small yield, it should be safe to go for medium, and if you usually go medium, you can probably go large.

Revenge of the Revanites

This Conquest is event is much rarer but features the same rampage and taskmaster objectives as Death Mark, so the same rules apply.

Swoop Gang Mayhem

This event is not as "powerful" in terms of points but includes the following noteworthy objectives:

• Missions: Heroic Pinnacle
• Activity Finder: Pinnacle

These give a large chunk of points for completing ten heroics or ten group activities (flashpoints/operations/uprisings/PvP matches) respectively, and they also turn into slightly less rewarding repeatable versions on completion.

Now, I'm not a huge fan of heroics, but many people do like doing them, and if they do they'll be adding a lot more points than usual to your guild's tally.

Similarly, not everyone is into group content, but again, if you have guildies that take part in any type of it repeatedly over the course of the week, they'll be adding more points than they'd usually earn from the same activity.

So this is another candidate for potentially going for a bigger yield than usual, though somewhat dependent on your guildies' preferences. 

The Balance of Power

Like Revenge of the Revanites, this is a rarer event since it's not tied to any world events, but it features the same two objectives as Swoop Gang Mayhem above and may be worth your consideration before choosing your guild's invasion target for the week.

Conquest of Pa...rison Planet

Last week it was once again time for Total Galactic War. I'm not going to rehash once again what that is or why it's important to me - if you need a refresher, I recommend reading one or both of these posts:

• April 2024: At (Token) War with the Czech Empire
• December 2024: Living the Degen Conquest Life

The two Conquest events recounted in the above posts taught my guild two important lessons: The first one was that Personal Conquest Requisitions have been a game-changer for small to medium guilds that are willing to plan for the long term, and the second one was that there were even more ways to game that system than simply saving them up over time. I didn't mention it in those posts at the time, but one guildie who ended up popping a particularly large number of tokens to help us achieve victory admitted that she had used a character transfer to shuttle in extra Requisitions from another server, where she'd been collecting them from her login rewards on the side.

Now, for additional context, my guild successfully conquered every single available planet at some point over the last decade - with one notable exception: Belsavis. For some reason that one always seemed to be taken by a top five guild that we couldn't possibly beat, even during Total Galactic War. I'm not sure why that is, but I can only guess that Belsavis might not come up as often in the rotation as other planets. A planet like Tatooine for example is tied to the Death Mark Conquest event, which in turn is tied to Bounty Contract Week and comes around once a month. Belsavis on the other hand is only available during Emergency Operations and The Dread War (outside of Total Galactic War), two events that don't seem to get slotted into the rotation very often.

Combining what we learned about Personal Conquest Requisitions and our growing frustration with being unable to lay claim to the one planet people still needed for the Galaxy Conqueror achievement, the biggest Conquest fan in the guild eventually proposed the following: that one of these weeks, we should just pool all our resources from all the servers (he and I both do Galactic Seasons on all servers) and simply go for Belsavis anyway.

I did some maths around this suggestion initially, and while I kind of liked the boldness of it, it still seemed a little too crazy. We had a lot of Requisitions saved up, but not that many.

Anyway, last week's Total Galactic War arrived and the matter was brought up again. Looking at the scoreboard, all the biggest guilds had committed early for a change, and the guild in the lead on Belsavis was none other than our frenemies the Czech Empire. They were not a top five guild, and we'd beaten them before... but it had also been the fight of a lifetime, and they were the reason we were so acutely aware of the power of Personal Conquest Requisitions in the first place, so there was no chance that we'd be able to surprise them.

I quickly had a look at possible alternative invasion targets (that we had conquered in the past but that newer members would've liked us to conquer again) but nothing stood out as an easy or obvious option, so after a bit of deliberation I decided to commit us to Belsavis. We agreed that we'd hold off on using any tokens for now and that we'd play it by ear, deciding our next steps later in the week depending on how it went.

Interestingly, it went quite differently than a year ago. Back then, we'd overtaken the Czechs quickly, and they'd been quite happy to trail us for the rest of the week with a steady ten million point gap between us. This time, they'd clearly made a push on launch day to get a solid lead from the beginning, and they did not want us to catch them. We were about three million behind by the end of the first day and I figured that this was a difference we should be able to make up quickly enough, but somehow we couldn't quite get there. In fact, by Thursday morning the Czechs had grown their lead to seven million, and by evening we were sixteen million points behind them.

There was a time when being that far behind would've been reason enough for us to fold, but I knew that the game wasn't quite over yet this time, as the other Conquest guy and I - if we went ahead with the server transfers - would have over 50 million points in tokens at our disposal. We did discuss amongst ourselves that if they kept gaining points at the same rate we'd likely have to give up, but for the time being, we kept going.

Even though I knew that we had a plan, it was honestly a bit demotivating to keep grinding away when we were so far behind. I heard more than one defeatist comment from guildies but still did my best to counter the psychological warfare. I basically told everyone that we'd let them know once the battle was lost, but as of now it wasn't over yet and they just had to trust me and keep going. (People knew about the saved up Conquest Requisitions, but I didn't tell anyone outside the leadership circle about the exact numbers since we're not very strict about removing people from our Discord for inactivity, and I was paranoid about information getting leaked to the competition somehow.)

And it seemed to work! While people weren't necessarily in the best of spirits, they kept at it. At its worst, the Czech's lead grew to around 18 million points, but they only maintained that for a brief while and most of the time the gap between us seemed to hover between ten and sixteen million.

Then the weekend came and with it a sudden and unexpected burst of energy. (I think I'm actually starting to notice a trend here, that my guild is better at Conquest in the second half of the week than in the first half.)

An officer that had been on hiatus for months popped his head in the door, asked how Total Galactic War was going and quickly ground out a half-million points in one evening. Another guild member who hasn't really been playing SWTOR in a while piped up to say that he had the week off and fancied randomly lending us a hand with grinding points. The funniest moment to me personally was when another guy who hadn't logged in in months showed up on Monday evening and we had a conversation that went something like this (paraphrased):

• Me: Look at you, logging in for the first time since the last Total Galactic War! [I could tell because on log-in he triggered the "Conqueror of Oricon" achievement.]
• Him: Hah, you got me there. Would you like me to pop some tokens?
• Me: How do you even have any? You haven't been online and you said you popped them all last time.
• Him: Oops, I guess I lied.

All of Sunday afternoon and evening the guild was absolutely buzzing with activity and achievements were popping left and right as people went out of their comfort zone and tried content they hadn't done before in order to earn Conquest points. Guild PvP was more active than it had been in months and there was plenty of banter. Point gains aside, it was a joy to see.

We could see that the Czechs were active in the evening and trying to bolster their score with some planetary rampaging, but we actually had a similar number of people online and were absolutely on fire. By the end of the evening, the gap between us was down to less than ten million.

I expected Monday to be more quiet, so I was both pleasantly surprised and had a good laugh when I decided to do a quick check-in on Monday morning and saw seven people online in guild. Clearly our members were less constrained by work than I'd expected.

We continued Sunday's trend at a slightly slower pace and the gap between us and first place continued to shrink all day. By the time the last person went to bed we were only about a million points behind.

Tuesday I was working from home and I had put a bit of time aside around the end of Conquest to pop my Personal Conquest Requisitions as needed. I had transferred four characters to Darth Malgus the day before (my first character transfers ever) and now held 182 tokens in my inventory and cargo hold. Several other people were online and trying to earn some last-minute points while buzzing with excitement. We were pretty much neck on neck with the Czechs, but still always about a million behind.

With eight minutes to go on the timer, I decided to start clicking my Requisitions. I'd told myself that I wasn't even going to look at the score, but was just going to keep popping the tokens. We didn't really care about overshooting and wasting points, as for us, this was the fight to end all fights. We wanted Belsavis and winning it was all that mattered.

While I wasn't looking at the board, other guildies were, and I was cracking up as several complained about their scoreboard going blank at some point. I'd like to think that we were pumping so many points into the system that we temporarily overloaded it. Anyway, it turned out that apparently the Czechs did not have a counter to a big final push this time, so I saw guildies cry out "twelve million ahead", "twenty million", "thirty million", "they are not doing anything" and: "Are you still clicking, guys?" 

I eventually stopped with about twenty tokens left in my inventory, though my fellow Conquest buddy used up every last one of his. It had been overkill indeed, as the final scoreboard showed us more than fifty million points ahead of the competition. But it was definitely worth it, as Twin Suns Squadron owned Belsavis at last, earning several of us the "Galaxy Conqueror" legacy title. I think I mentioned before that this isn't actually something that's hard to get if you simply join a large guild that wins a lot without even trying - it's how I got the title on the Shae Vizla server myself. But to have earned it in a smaller guild with hard work and communal effort, over the course of over a decade, that felt pretty good.

We wondered a bit why the Czechs folded as soon as we started our final offensive, and we can only guess that since the "surprise attack coming from behind" didn't work for them last time, they frontloaded more of their efforts (including token pops) this time in order to stay in first place from the beginning (and hopefully demotivate us). They probably didn't know that this exact strategy had failed Ace of Saints against us back in December as well, but that's how it goes.

I almost want to say that I feel like I can retire from Conquest, now that I've finally achieved it all, but I honestly enjoy it too much to just give up on it I think. However, any future planetary conquests for newer members admittedly won't quite carry the same weight or garner the same amount of excitement as this one did. 

Galactic Season 8 in Review

We're once again at the point where the current Galactic Season has several weeks left in it, but more and more people are done (or close to being done) with it. Personally, I've hit level 100 on all servers, and on Darth Malgus I just need a few more weekly objectives to complete the last meta achievement. So what did I think of this season?

I was very negative about it when the details about it were first revealed, and was then disappointed a second time when even the few hopes I had for the uprising theme were quickly crushed. All that said, it ultimately turned out... alright, I guess.

I would still put it near the bottom of my ranking of all Galactic Seasons so far, for having a theme I didn't really care for, not having any rewards that particularly excited me (there was quite a lot of stuff that was "nice", but I've said before that I consider it a downside when there isn't a big central reward that also supports the theme), and for feeling more repetitive than any season before it (I still can't quite believe they made me kill all the DvL bosses again for a third achievement). 

At the same time though, things were not as bad as I had feared. Once they made the fixes to make doing your weekly uprising via the group finder more viable, the system worked well enough to funnel people into that to guarantee regular pops even on the smaller servers. (I could even get it done on Shae Vizla, where I hadn't done anything through the group finder in a long time.) With Trench Runner being the one notable exception, the tuning was such that even a group of low-level or generally underperforming characters could muddle through without too much effort.

I saw more than one comment, whether explicit or implied, that indicated that the person making it was actually doing uprisings for the first time, which is something that's always nice to see. And while my overall opinion of uprisings hasn't changed (still not a fan), I'll admit that I liked them more as levelling content than as max-level content, if that makes sense. The XP was pretty good every time I went in there on a levelling character, and somehow mowing down hordes of weak mobs feels more "on-brand" on a low-level character. It's what you do on the starter planets after all, when you're just learning how to play and might not necessarily have that many abilities yet. As endgame content I've always found that kind of gameplay a bit unsatisfying though.

The other thing I did like about this season was how the devs incorporated the dynamic encounters on Hoth and Tatooine into the weekly seasons objectives. I think they're a fun new kind of gameplay and I appreciated their addition to this. Especially on the other servers, where I hadn't had any reason to do dynamic encounters before, so I enjoyed gathering a bunch of achievements all over again.

There are a few things I hope they tweak in coming seasons though: First off, there were two variants of each dynamic encounter objective as far as I could tell, one that required you to do 15 for the weekly, and one that required 25. I thought the first was reasonable, while the second was too much. I still did both types this time around because I also had the draw of wanting to work on the achievements to keep me motivated, but when that's no longer applicable I don't think I would bother with doing 25 again; it's just too time-consuming.

The second "issue" I had was that just having encounters on Hoth and Tatooine made things a bit repetitive. One of my favourite weekly seasons objectives up until now has been the one to do "repeatable or exploration missions" on a number of planets, and I think the dynamic encounter objectives largely replaced those this season. (I did a count, and in the same number of weeks, Season 7 had 17 objectives of this type, while Season 8 had only 7.) This makes sense in so far as they fill a similar niche and the DEs were the new hotness, but it also meant that what previously made this objective so much fun to do - that it was so varied in its locations and could be done in a number of different ways - was kind of lost as we were just stuck on either Tatooine or Hoth week after week.

We'll see how they'll handle this in future seasons, but I think my personal preference would be if they simply merged the two types of objectives together, into something like "Complete Dynamic Encounters, Repeatable, Exploration, or Bonus Missions while defeating enemies on Coruscant or Dromund Kaas", therefore restoring the "rotating between different planets" aspect while also including dynamic encounters in the mix.

Still, I've got to admit I'm going to try and temper my expectations for whenever they announce Galactic Season 9, because I'm definitely a bit bored of the repetition and lack of even small bits of newness at this point. And by god, if they ask us to kill all the DvL bosses a fourth time... I actually don't know how to finish this sentence, but I still hope they come up with something different for us to do next time.

Dread Master Shintar

I have a somewhat strange relationship with operations in SWTOR at this point. I think most raiders would posit that for them, raiding is about some sort of progression: seeing the content, beating the challenge, getting the gear... and once you've hit your goal, you move on.

SWTOR doesn't really support that kind of attitude towards raiding anymore, or at least not if you're a long-term player. If you're coming to the game completely fresh, there's plenty to do and many encounters to work your way through, thanks to scaling keeping all the old content relevant, but new operations come out way too infrequently to keep existing players busy for very long.

I sometimes find myself wondering why I'm still so focused on that part of the game after more than a decade to be honest. I've seen all there is to see, many times, and while my skill at the game has improved over the years from sheer repetition, if I haven't been able to beat a higher-difficulty encounter that's been in the game for over a decade at this point, I'm not holding my breath that it's still going to happen.

I guess it's just a habit, a way of hanging out a few times a week, and the fact that Mr Commando and I do it together has led to a sort of feedback loop where we keep each other going even if one person's interest flags at some point.

That said, there's been turnover in the people we raid with over the years, and every now and then we'll get some fresh faces who haven't yet seen it all and who'll be excited to tackle this or that operation for the first time, and I'll be like "sure", because what else am I going to suggest?

In line with that we cleared Dread Palace master mode again a couple of months ago, and it actually went so quickly and smoothly (considering that some people had never done it before), that I found myself daring to hope for some personal progression for the first time in a while, because I'd never gotten the achievement for the timed run, which requires you to clear the instance within an hour.

Everyone was game for working on it, so we kept going back every week, just to get better at the fights and progress that little bit more quickly, with fewer wipes along the way. Progression was far from smooth, as some nights would see us one-shot the first four bosses in a timely manner just to keep failing on the final Council fight, while on others, we would mess up repeatedly at the very beginning and then never even finish the instance.

However, improvement did happen, and this Wednesday we finally got there. We were actually off to a very bad start at first and wiped twice on the very first encounter. We'd learned early on that whenever this happened, it was possible and indeed recommended to just reset the entire instance and try again from the beginning, but it still didn't seem to bode well for the rest of the evening. However, it turned out that the third try was the charm, and we then proceeded to one-shot every boss after that, including the Dread Council themselves.

Embarrassingly for me, I died a few seconds before the end because I got into healer tunnel-vision mode, focusing so hard on keeping someone else alive that I missed my own health getting dangerously low - oops. Fortunately we'd basically won at this point so it wasn't a big deal; it just made my "victory" screenshot look a bit awkward.

A guildie also recorded the whole run and uploaded it to YouTube if you're curious, though he failed to record his own voice so some bits of conversation may sound like non-sequiturs without the inclusion of his comments.

Anyway, it was just nice to have one of those little success stories to share, as they've become more and more rare for me at this point.

Some Rambly First Impressions of 7.7

Patch 7.7 dropped this week! MassivelyOP's post about this fact started with the line "A big Star Wars: The Old Republic game update without a story is kind of like Christmas without the presents", which I found surprisingly poignant... but of course there were still interesting things to discover and look forward to.

First there were the new alien skin colours, which seemed to be thing that had people the most excited on social media from what I could tell, based on the number of screenshots and clips from the very first cut scene that I scrolled past and that were meant to show off the poster's newest character in a brand-new hue.

I myself ultimately didn't end up creating a new character, because I realised I still had a bunch of lowbies that I hadn't actually played that much yet. Also, am I the only one who doesn't necessarily create and start new characters at the same time? Sometimes I'll just feel like playing with the character creator and come up with a new concept that I then end up not actually playing until weeks or months later.

Anyway, this week did not feel right for creation, so I just changed the shade of yellow on my newest already existing Twi'lek. After using the character customisation station, he got teleported onto the roof of my Coruscant stronghold... the last time that happened I thought it was just a one-time glitch, but I might have to upgrade it to bug - then again, it might just get filed away under "weird stuff that happens inside player housing" anyway.

The new dynamic encounters were very fun. I took some lowbies to the starter planets to check them out as I would've felt a bit weird razing all those level 5 mobs on a max-level character in raid gear, though other people clearly had no such reservations. The new events brought a lot of existing players back to the starter worlds to check out the the new content and earn some new achievements, and the experience felt like absolute mayhem. Anyone who just so happens to start playing SWTOR for the first time this week must be wondering what the holy hell is going on once they leave their first story phase. Now, this particular level of craziness obviously won't last, but I do think that in the long run these new encounters will still serve to make things a lot more lively on the starter planets going forward, and I can't help but wonder how that will affect players' first impressions of the game in the future. 

Unlike when the first dynamic encounters were added to Tatooine and Hoth, I didn't check these newest ones out on the PTS this time, so it was all fresh and exciting to me. Even having only checked out the starter planets so far, I thought it was very charming how the new encounters were used to enhance the mood and setting of each area. For example the Jedi training grounds on Tython were always meant to be under attack by flesh raiders when you first arrive there, but it was all fairly tame, with the same couple of NPCs shooting at each other without anything really happening. Now there's an actual dynamic encounter about a flesh raider attack on top of that, during which you'll see way more mobs spawn, as well as a proper flurry of activity from players joining the fight or otherwise defending the area. It's quite cool. Jiguuna on Hutta was another good example, as there's always meant to be a gang war going on there when you arrive, but now that is dialled up to eleven when the associated dynamic encounter is going on.

I have yet to dip my toes into the encounters on the capital worlds and on Ilum, but I don't want to rush to "the end" and reach a point where I've seen it all too quickly. My ops team also wants to check out XR-53 on master mode, and while I'm personally not hopeful that we'll make much progress on it, it's at least another new thing to check out. 

Ranking the First 7 Galactic Seasons

We're getting to the point in Galactic Season 8 where I'm starting to - one by one - complete my various goals related to the season. Once I'm all done, I'll jot down some thoughts on the season as a whole as usual, but in the meantime, I've been finding myself mentally revisiting Galactic Seasons of the past.

Seasons have been with us for four years now, which isn't that long in the grand scheme of things, considering that Star Wars: The Old Republic has been live for more than thirteen years at this point, but it is long enough for things to have changed over time and for people (including me) to start getting nostalgic about the way things used to be.

So I decided it would be fun to try and rank past seasons based on how fun I think they were. I'll be able to give some objective arguments relating to things like objectives and rewards, but I think my main points are going to be subjective. Still, it could be interesting to see how much people agree or disagree (so feel free to chime in in the comments).

Galactic Season 5

Season 5, titled "Confidence in Power" lasted from September 2023 to January 2024 and was controversial among at least part of the player base for being the first season to no longer include a companion as a reward, but to me personally it was my favourite season so far. It's not that I was against companion rewards in principle, but I did feel that the way they were implemented was becoming a bit stale at this point, so focusing on something else for a change was fine by me.

I loved the little storyline that came with the season, even if it was entirely KOTOR style with no voice acting - I enjoyed its mix of intrigue and humour, and the choices were meaningful enough that it was fun to replay it on multiple characters to see different outcomes. I also appreciated that for the reputation tied to the season, they added a major quality of life feature by making it so that reputation tokens could be acquired by any of your alts on the fleet instead of needing to unlock the seasonal companion on each character first.

The reward track didn't have a major season-defining prize (as cute and iconic as the Loth-cat kitten turned out to be) but was otherwise very solid. I was pleased by the many stronghold decorations, and while I wouldn't want to wear any of the armour sets in full, they contained some very nice and versatile pieces that I've gone on to use on several characters since then. My main on Shae Vizla also still rides around on her Armasaur. Overall this season just fully delivered for me in terms of fun, and that's all I can really ask for.

Galactic Season 3

Seasons 2-4 were very similar in their format and I feel that they were very close in terms of quality as well. The reason I rate GS3 the highest of the three is that it felt slightly more refined than Season 2, but didn't suffer from too much staleness creeping in yet (which was something I felt started happening with Season 4).

I really liked PH4-LNX as a companion - I thought her dialogues were fun and she had an interesting backstory, which was significantly fleshed out compared to what had been done in Season 2. I also liked the seasonal activity of catching cheating gamblers in cantinas.

The bright yellow weapons and dyes that were part of the reward track during "Luck of the Draw" were a bit garish and didn't necessarily match with a lot of things, but yellow is my favourite colour so I still appreciated them. The Security Officer and Pit Boss outfits that you could earn were fantastic looks for non-Force-using characters, and my bounty hunter on the Leviathan server still sports a dyed version of the Pit Boss outfit to this day.

Galactic Season 2

"Shadows of the Underworld" ran from February to July 2022 and made a major splash. It released at the same time as 7.0/Legacy of the Sith, and for those of you who weren't around at the time, the expansion was not well received at all. Yet even the loudest complainers could find no flaw with the new Galactic Season, which was a particularly powerful compliment at the time.

At the end of Season 1 I'd written up a list of things that I felt would probably need adjusting going forward, but the devs went above and beyond anything I could've ever thought of and gave the system a major revamp with Season 2, in a rare case of Bioware iterating on something quickly and decisively in a way that was pretty much universally well-received. The changes felt refreshing and smooth and everybody loved them. I remember Swtorista discovering that Fenn Zeil had more than one conversation and being all "OMG, the drama, I'm so here for it", which made me laugh. Really, the only reason it's not closer to the top of the list is that I didn't particularly care for the underworld theme or Fenn Zeil as a companion, and I don't remember any of the other rewards knocking my socks off either.

Galactic Season 4

 "A Passage of Peace" lasted from March to August 2023 and continued to emulate everything that had been good about GS2 and 3. Amity is another companion that I quite liked, though the backstory to justify him being armoured from head to toe and yet another follower who just spouts alien gibberish was particularly convoluted. The armour sets from this season were also very good-looking.

The season's only problem in my opinion was that because it was so similar to the previous two seasons, there was a definitive air of the whole thing becoming very routine and a little stale, even if nothing was really wrong with it.

Galactic Season 6

GS6's theme was "Building a Foundation" and it was active from March to July 2024. I can see my ranking of this one being somewhat controversial, because I think depending on what you care about in the game, you might have had a very different experience with it.

The Copero stronghold is gorgeous and made for a fantastic reward, plus I thought the stronghold theme in general worked really well (I really enjoyed visiting multiple different public strongholds for the seasons objective every week). And if that's the primary thing you took away from the season, I can easily see this one ranking in someone's top three, if not in the top spot.

However for me, the completely linear storyline that ended abruptly and didn't seem to go anywhere felt like a major disappointment after the high bar set by Season 5, and the meta achievement to collect vendor trash was initially confusing, then grindy and frustrating. Maybe those things didn't really bother you, and that's totally fair. But for me it was ultimately a season both of great highs and disappointing lows, with the latter pushing it further down in my personal ranking.

Galactic Season 7

I was really hesitant about which season deserved last place and went back and forth on the decision a couple of times. I might honestly feel a bit differently about it depending on the day of the week. As it stands, "The Greatest Bounty" was decidedly meh in my opinion, but in an inoffensive way. The white Loth-cat kitten was cute, and I think it's good that the DvL bosses were brought back to the game, but ultimately the whole bounty hunting theme felt very weak to me and I thought the whole thing was a bit boring.

Galactic Season 1

The other week I saw someone on the forums get all nostalgic for Season 1, to which my immediate reaction was "no way". I can't really think too badly of "The Strange from Kubindi" since it was SWTOR's first season ever, the devs were still figuring out how things should work, and we as players didn't have any set expectations yet. However, I also can't deny that Season 2 was a massive improvement on it in pretty much every conceivable way.

Season 1's heavy focus on daily objectives was quite draining, and I spent way more time running dailies, heroics, or just grinding mobs than I'd ever consider fun. I appreciated that Altuur had a bit of an intro conversation on Odessen, but otherwise I didn't really care about him, and I didn't like the season's insect theme either.

Like I said, I never felt too bad about it all since it was all new and I didn't know what to expect - plus we got the fleet strongholds during this first season, something I'd almost forgotten about. Nonetheless, I think that every season that's come after has been an improvement on the concept.

Even though seasons have "only" been part of SWTOR for four years, it's hard to imagine the game without them now, especially considering how many other MMOs include similar systems nowadays. I can only hope that the devs can continue to come up with ways of mixing things up and keeping them interesting to do.

7.7 Dev Stream: More Alien Colours Are Nice, but Still No Story

Yesterday it was time for another dev stream, this time focused on the upcoming patch 7.7. There was some competition for my attention as the new pope had gone live mere moments earlier, but I loaded up Twitch on my laptop and dived right in.

There was a new Twitch drop to be earned (a purple-framed Dromund Kaas poster), for watching one hour of live SWTOR content, but apparently Twitch measures time a bit differently from the rest of the world as it took almost the full one and a half hours of the stream for it to show as earned. Yes, the stream lasted one and a half hours! I wish I could say this was a sign of it being chock-full of exciting updates, but to be honest I get the feeling that they've just got better at fluffing up what they have to make it look bigger. For example there was a whole section about fixing a bug with the sprinter guild perk, which... don't get me wrong, fixing bugs is a good thing, no arguments there! But is a single bug fix of that nature really important enough to warrant a segment with the game producer on your livestream to get players hyped up? Personally I don't think so.

The thing that we of course all wanted to know above all else was whether there was any update on the story content and sadly, the answer was not really. Basically, they've built 7.7, but the voice actors' strike is still going on, so we're still not getting anything. The only thing I noted down here was that they showed the little trailer from Star Wars Celebration again (the one that included [Spoiler?]) and the accompanying slide said it featured "a mysterious figure that has been pulling the strings behind the scenes", which does seem to confirm that this person's role is going to be more than a throwaway cameo.

Anyway, having the second major patch in a row release without story content will be a bummer, but I guess I can't really complain as we know the voice actors' strike is still a thing. I'd just gotten my hopes up a little as a "datamining-adjacent" friend had told me that something had happened and somehow the 7.6 story looked ready for release now. (You know who you are; consider yourself given the side eye!) But that's not the devs' fault, and just goes to illustrate once again why you shouldn't put too much stock in things that are datamined.

Anyway, they still managed to fill a one and a half hour stream, and it wasn't all bug fixes, so there obviously were some other things announced.

Among a number of UI updates to the mission log and map, the one that stood out the most was the addition of the so-called "eras window", a new tab on your mission log. All this does is basically show you the storyline split into "eras" (which mostly align with expansions, but not 100%), to show you where you are and what's coming up. This seems like it could be a major boon to returning players who don't remember where they left off in terms of story. It was also noted that it doesn't "currently" include notes on any decisions you've made, though I guess this is something they could expand on in the future. Either way, it's a good feature but won't do much for me as a "power user". I wrote about how I had to create a spreadsheet to keep track of all my alts' progress almost seven years ago, which is much more detailed and most importantly, let's me see where each character is at without having to log into them in game to check. I still rely on that to this day, but for less hardcore Swtorites this new window will be useful.

In terms of group content, we got the official announcement for master mode XR-53, which is cool for the relevant target audience but I suspect it will be too hard for me and my guildies so I can't muster too much enthusiasm for it right now. I was also a bit disappointed by the clarification that the new augment schematics it will drop will be brand-new gold augments that will outclass the purple ones that people spent the last few months researching and crafting. We don't even know whether you'll be able to reverse-engineer the gold ones by deconstructing the purple ones (it was asked in chat multiple times but not answered). So eh. As a side note to this, they said that PvP weeklies will start rewarding small amounts of corrupted bioprocessors, the (until now) unique crafting material dropped by XR-53, which is nice I guess, though for me personally the bottleneck has actually turned out to be other mats.

Speaking of PvP, PvP Season 8 will launch with 7.7 and in order to align it more with how Galactic Seasons work, it will now also include an option to just buy out levels with Cartel coins. I've got to admit there was a small part of me that bristled at this because isn't PvP about skill? You shouldn't be able to buy that, right? But then, these new PvP seasons have always been just about participation with no particular requirement to succeed, so I guess it's not that big a deal.

They talked about Nar Shaddaa Nightlife returning in July, which just felt weird to think about this early in May, but I guess summer isn't that far away. The main thing that irked me here was that there was no comment about making the various slot machine chips a legacy-wide currency. They talked about this last year and said it was complex and would take time - but then they managed to change the DvL tokens from character- to legacy-bound within a couple of weeks, so I was really hoping we'd be able to start this year's Nightlife with something similar. But nope, nothing. I guess I can still hope that it will be addressed later, but for now I'm just disappointed that the main thing I was curious about in regards to this event was not mentioned at all.

The biggest and most universally accessible bit of gameplay to be added with the patch will be new dynamic encounters on seven planets, which will include all the starter planets, the two faction capitals and Ilum. The starter planets won't have that many encounters due to how small they are, but still. I thought going for these early planets next was an interesting choice when I first heard chatter about it during the previous PTS. I thought Tatooine and Hoth made great sense as first locations for this new feature, and in my mind the best place to use it going forward were going to be other large planets with a lot of empty space, such as Quesh, Belsavis or Voss. Cramming them into the tiny starter planets is kind of the opposite of that, but I can understand the devs wanting to introduce the feature to new players early on in order to get people interested and familiar from the get-go. I'm still a little concerned that it might end up being a bit of a pain to have god knows how many players compete for the same six k'lor'slugs on Korriban (which would not improve the new player experience I reckon), but we'll see how it goes. In general I've really enjoyed dynamic encounters and am looking forward to getting more of them.

One interesting thing they announced closer to the end was "combat updates", which is to say they are going to make some changes to combat styles, such as which discipline is selected for new players by default and what order you get some abilities in. The example they gave was that Guardians/Juggernauts don't really have any AoE other than Force Sweep/Smash for a long time, so they want to pull Cyclone/Sweeping Slash forward and grant it automatically at level 7 instead of making it a level 27 optional choice like it is right now. This sounds like a good idea in principle, though I could have thought of better examples to choose. From what I recall there are currently some utilities that actually give you buffs to certain abilities several levels before you actually get that ability, which is just weird, and I'm hoping that this kind of thing will also be included in this overhaul. (I quickly logged in to find an example and e.g. Deception Shadows have a talent option at level 27 to add functionality to Force Cloak when they don't actually get Force Cloak until level 31.)

I do wonder a little though, as another example they gave about something they want to change was to make the default spec for Shadows Serenity (the dot spec) instead of Deception (the direct damage one). I just wrote down "why?" in my notes here as the latter is much easier to play, so why change to the more difficult one as default? So I have some reservations as well, not fully understanding what they are going for here.

The big surprise at the end of the stream (including one here seems to be a pattern they are settling into) was that they'll be adding lots more skin colours for aliens in the patch, and I do mean lots. Like, Nautolans will go from having 10 colours to 95 different shades. Now, only some of those will be completely new colours, like the (inexplicably, to me) popular purple Twi'leks, but just getting a lot more different shades of say, green, will be cool too. I think this was the most exciting announcement of the stream for many players, and I liked it too. It's just no replacement for actual story content, you know? I continue to wait.

Meanwhile, further info about the patch and stream, should you want it:

• VOD on Twitch
• VOD on YouTube
• Article on the official website
  
• Swtorista summary
• Today in TOR summary
• Vulkk summary