A Rocky Start

I've made it clear that I wasn't enthused by the announcement that the current Galactic Season's theme would be uprisings, but I was willing to give it a shot to see how things would play out. Specifically, there were three items that stood out to me as promising during the announcement dev stream:

1. The talk about the Czerka combat enhancers and the fun effects they'd have on your enemies reminded me of WoW's Mists of Pandaria Remix event from last year, which did something similar in an effort to make old content interesting to replay in a new way, with special gems empowering your gear in that content only. I played a lot of that and it was quite fun whenever I'd fire off a simple attack just to trigger a hail of meteors around everything in the vicinity for example. Now, things got a bit crazy in Remix due to the fact that the gems also levelled up, with people being able to one-shot raid bosses solo in the end, and I didn't expect (or even want) SWTOR to do anything close to that, but I figured there'd be some flashy effects and we'd get to feel a bit OP in uprisings compared to how our characters usually behave.

2. There was mention of uprisings being something that you could do solo, which implied to me that either as a side-effect of the above making us OP or through re-tuning, uprisings might become easy enough for the average player to solo, at the very least on story difficulty. This struck me as a solid idea to expand their appeal, especially considering that the three existing difficulties weren't really differentiated by much other than mobs having more health and doing more damage.

3. With the minimum level to queue for them dramatically decreased, I imagined levellers that had only just arrived on the fleet queueing up for uprisings instead of veteran mode flashpoints, and "levelling through uprisings" potentially becoming a new way to spice things up for long-time players who are levelling their umpteenth alt.

Unfortunately, none of the above actually matched the reality of what we got.

First off, there are only three different buffs you can get from the Czerka boosts, and they are mostly underwhelming. The one I've got most frequently so far is the one that supposedly makes every fifth enemy explode, but in reality only counts personal killing blows, so if you're in a group and/or (god forbid) not in a dps spec, you can forget about this doing anything at all. When I got this buff as a healer, I saw it go off maybe twice during a run. Utterly useless.

The one that makes you leak puddles of "radiation" is a bit better, though I wish they'd given it a different animation than the pink agony circles from the DvL bosses, because my brain does not like that the exact same visual effect is something to avoid on penalty of death early in the evening and then something to actively stand in two hours later. Still, it's decent in boss fights when you can place it directly under the boss's feet, though it's pretty useless on trash, especially if you're ranged, as you generally won't be pooping out circles anywhere near to where the actual mobs are.

The one that summons little droids seems to be the only one that manages to be both useful and fun, and naturally I've never gotten that one myself yet in more than half a dozen runs. As a result, most of the time the buffs feel like they make zero difference to your runs and you only apply them since they are required for one of the meta achievements for the season (something I wasn't aware of until I actually saw it in game).

The devs also did not retune uprisings to make them soloable in a way that is comparable to solo mode flashpoints. I know that someone, somewhere is gonna go "well, I solo them all the time" and you know what, good for you. But they are only soloable in the same way that other pieces of group content are technically soloable if you min-max your character's output and are willing to bash your head against the wall repeatedly until things go just right. I was expecting something that would be accessible to the average player and would be quick to do, in order to make the uprising of the week an attractive seasons objective to complete. This has not been the case.

Well, at least it should be easy to run them in group finder if they are kind of like veteran flashpoints now, role neutral and accessible from a low level? Also wrong! I was surprised to find that at the start of the season, story mode uprisings weren't in the group finder at all, only veteran mode. As all my own uprising runs have always been with guildies, I have no idea when this happened, but I'm pretty sure you used to be able to queue for story mode as well.

Anyway, having veteran mode accessible from level ten but still having it require a trinity group and be somewhat challenging was just a disaster. People were reporting everywhere that queues took ages to pop, even on the biggest server, and that the groups that did form seemed to struggle more often than not. I ran the first uprising of the week, Done and Dusted, on veteran mode with a group of guildies and was surprised by how hard everything hit. We were all max-level in top-end gear and still suffered some deaths, so I can only imagine the kind of shit-show a pug consisting of low levels would have been.

Oh, and the whole "levelling through uprisings" idea was also dead in the water since the devs changed it so only the featured uprising of the week is available in group finder. I mean, you could still technically just spam that one over and over again, but why would you want to? I can understand why they did that, but it was still another small disappointment.

Basically, my first impression was that the much-hyped buffs were boring and useless, and the devs were funnelling people into a mode that took ages to pop just to provide a terrible experience, something that players were understandably balking at. I was just baffled by how undercooked this all seemed. I can imagine people making arguments in defence of some of the decisions they made, but only having veteran mode in the group finder and funnelling low-levels into something with a similar difficulty to a master mode flashpoints was just such an obviously bad idea, I couldn't believe they went live with that.

Now, in my earliest draft of this post I was going to make a list of bullet points for what Broadsword could do to still salvage this whole thing, but fortunately they did actually take some actions already. Most importantly they took vet mode out of the group finder and put story mode back in, as well as further tuning down the difficulty of both modes.

Veteran Firefrost with my guildies this week already felt a lot easier to me, and I successfully pugged story mode on all the other servers. I even got a quick pop on Shae Vizla! A lot of people were clearly new to the content as well, as I saw visible confusion about where to go and what to do more than once, and in one run, two of my group mates immediately jumped to their death upon spawning in, not realising they had to wait for an elevator.

I was surprised by how many of them didn't use any of the Czerka buffs either. Yes, they are mostly useless, but usage is required for one of the meta achievements. I wonder if maybe people haven't quite "got" how this is supposed to work yet and buff usage will go up as the season progresses or whether they just don't care at all.

With the group finder and difficulty fixes applied, I guess doing a quick story mode uprising once a week will be an acceptable effort for a weekly seasons objective for many, but I still think it's a far cry from the way all this was promoted on stream. In my opinion the devs would have to go ahead and significantly buff at least two of the three combat enhancers to actually make them worthwhile and fun, but I'm not sure they'll actually go that far. It just strikes me as a missed opportunity.

A Farewell to the OotiniCast

According to the OotiniCast website, they posted their first episode on November 19, 2011, almost thirteen and a half years ago. I myself didn't find out about them until about two years later, with the first mention of them on the blog dating back to February 2014 and a post called "Some Podcast Recommendations". It's funny to me that even back then, more than eleven years ago, I described OotiniCast as "one of those SWTOR podcasts that have seemingly been around forever".

However, even "seemingly forever" eventually comes to an end, and I was slightly dismayed when I found out on Bluesky last week that they were going to record their very last episode this past Tuesday. I very rarely caught them live, as time zones meant that their recording time usually started around midnight in the UK, but as we're currently in the strange twilight zone of the US having changed to daylight savings while Europe hasn't done so yet, this particular show started an hour earlier for me than usual and I was able to stay up to tune in. It was a good and wholesome time, even if cried right along with Chill at the end when he wrapped things up, explained what was going to happen next and thanked everyone for their contributions over the years.

I'm not going to pretend that I was OotiniCast's number one loyal fan who listened to every single episode, because I didn't. I think I used to listen to them more frequently in the early days compared to later on, but even so my engagement was always a bit on and off from what I remember. It's not that the show wasn't interesting enough, but it never tried to promote itself as hard as other fan sites. They talked about the news, but they weren't your number one news source about SWTOR, and while their tip of the week could be insightful and useful, they weren't exactly aiming to teach you how to play the game either (a bit like me on the blog really). I reckon this was both a blessing and a curse.

I think it was clearly a blessing in so far as I don't think the show would've been able to keep going for as long as it did if it had tried to be something other than a couple of friends chatting about the game and inviting the community to join in. I watched so many other podcasts come and go over the years, and they often managed to entice me with catchy episode titles or in-depth discussions about specific topics - but two dozen episodes later they'd run out of interesting subjects to talk about at length, quickly followed by them burning out and/or losing interest.

I do however think that the more meandering nature of the podcast was a bit of a curse in the sense that it made it a lot harder to promote it in a way that grabbed people's attention. In the early days, they would at least have detailed show notes on the site that would give you a glimpse of what to expect from each episode, but at some point that was replaced by a simple copy and paste with just a bit of information about the show in general, including a link to their guild website which had stopped working years ago. I imagine that with every new episode announcement simply being summed up as some variation of "here's a new episode in which we talk about stuff", it became a lot harder to draw in new listeners.

That said, I feel like OotiniCast's influence on the community over the years should not be understated. I think due to its sheer longevity, pretty much anyone looking up anything about SWTOR online would stumble across it eventually. While most episodes were just the hosts chatting, over the years they also included interviews with devs, voice actors and other content creators, and I think you'll struggle to find people who've been involved in SWTOR fan spaces who haven't been touched by and/or involved with the OotiniCast at some point. (Checking my email, I found that I myself sent them some suggestions for questions for an interview with Charles Boyd back in 2020.)

I remember crying over nine years ago when Chill shared the story of his wife's death (which was absolutely heartbreaking), but there were also many more happy moments. OotiniCast was where I first heard about the notion of levelling from one to cap purely via GSF for example (yes, there was a time when you could queue for GSF at level one).

In recent years, Chill would always tell stories about wacky projects he'd start, such as farming Coruscant heroics on every single alt for Alliance crates, levelling without a companion, or levelling his newest alt named and dressed up based on another IP and the strange shenanigans they would get up to. In the last episode he talked about how he'd created a trooper called Zapp Brannigan (based on the character from Futurama), how he made him make all the worst choices, and how he was going to turn Yuun into his version of Kif. I always thought that was funny and fascinating, because it's not how I'd play myself but sounds really fun in its own way.

Chill didn't go into much detail about why they decided to end the show beyond mentioning changes in his real life and that he just didn't want to keep going with it. Considering that he was there from the beginning (unlike his co-hosts, who seemed to change every few years), I think he definitely earned the right to just go "I think I've done this for long enough; I want to do something else now." I appreciate that he did draw a clear line to end the show instead of letting it simply fade into oblivion, with updates just stopping with no further notice.

That said, I've got to admit I've been kind of surprised by how hard the news hit me, considering that I wasn't someone who listened to every single episode. I think it's because OotiniCast is the one SWTOR fan site I could think of that was actually older than mine and was still receiving regular updates. I feel kind of like when you've been employed somewhere for a while and find out that the last guy who's been there longer than you is leaving. Suddenly you're the most senior person in the room, and there's no longer anyone left who can reminisce with you about "the good old days". I mean, does anyone reading this in 2025 even remember Darth Hater, TORWars or TOROCast? I kind of feel like I'll be entering my "old lady yelling at clouds" era soon.

All that said, I salute Chill and the rest of the hosts for their dedication over the years (putting out more than 500 episodes of a single podcast over so many years is amazing) and I hope they can continue enjoying the game even without podcasting about it. Your contributions will be missed.

Best Ding in a While

I overestimated my guildies' interest in generating Conquest points on Imp side this week... which meant that I buckled down over the weekend and put in extra effort myself to make sure that we'd still hit our large yield target. As part of this I dusted off my old DvL Merc, who'd been sitting at level 79 for ages, and did some PvP on her, even though I finished the PvP season a few weeks ago.

PvPing at level 79 can feel a bit like cheating, considering how much more powerful you are compared to most other characters in the bracket, but since you can't halt your XP gains, it's a fleeting pleasure that I'm simply happy to enjoy while it lasts. Even without any augments and with gear that had never been the best even back when 75 was the level cap, my Merc was rocking the damage charts hard, and the matchmaking algorithm blessed me with a winning streak to boot. There was one match where I was startled to find upon consulting the scoreboard at the end that we'd apparently been a man down the entire time but had still come away victorious somehow.

With only a tiny sliver of my XP bar left to go, I knew that my next match was going to be my last one in the midbie bracket, and since my warzone weekly mission was on 9 out of 12, I really wanted one more win in order to complete it before levelling up. I still would've been able to finish the quest at level 80, but then I would've had to sort myself out with level 80 gear before queueing again, which would've meant extra effort.

I got into a Voidstar that started with both teams severely under strength and my team on attack during the first round. I wouldn't swear by it, but it certainly felt like we were a man down again at least to begin with, which made it difficult to make any headway for a long time. However, we did eventually manage to breach the first door and cross the bridge, with the round ending at the second door - a situation that isn't really a clear indication of an impending win or loss, as matches that end there can very much still go either way.

As we started the defence round, it quickly became apparent that the rest of my team (which had filled out by then) seemed decent enough at watching the doors, however there was zero communication going on. I just kept running back and forth between both sides as I noticed our opponents changing their angle of attack repeatedly.

At one point I ended up fighting on the left side with only one other person against about four enemies. The other guy died and I soon followed, realising too late that nobody else had moved over and I had been the last person standing. I typed "left" into the chat but it was too late. Waiting inside the respawn area, I saw one person still try to reinforce from the right but they didn't make it over in time to prevent the enemy team from planting the bomb.

I got out of the respawn just as the door was blown off and hurled myself right back into the fray in an attempt to stall the enemy forces. They enjoyed taking me down but sadly I barely slowed them and soon found myself in the respawn again, this time on the other side of the bridge. However, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as the rest of my team did not do a great job at halting the enemy advance at this point, and one of the bridges was activated mere seconds later.

I typed "bridge open" into the chat in an attempt to get those who were still brawling wherever to pay attention to the objectives, and then ran forward to shoot the first enemy that came into my range, to make sure that I was in combat and couldn't be CCed by one of the enemy's stealthers.

I frantically shot two attackers going for the right door, but then saw a stealther appear at the left door as well, so I quickly whirled around and interrupted them too. I knew I wouldn't be able to hold both sides by myself for long, but by god I was going to try (while hoping that nobody had a stun or root up because that definitely would have screwed me over in that moment).

After what can't have been more than thirty seconds but what felt like an eternity of me having to cover both doors by myself, a friendly arrived and started defending the left door, freeing me up to fully focus on the right one. Eventually the rest of the team trickled in as well and we established a more solid defence.

Finally, it was over, my quest ticked over and I dinged 80. The final scoreboard showed me as having the most kills and damage taken out of everyone (the enemy clearly hated me), most damage and healing on my team (apparently we had a proper healer at one point who had left), and third highest objective points to boot.

It's rare that I get to rock the numbers like that in a warzone (I'm not usually focused on them and happy to spend a match just standing guard for example), nor do I generally feel like I did the bulk of the work, but in this one I feel confident in saying that I carried a heavy load for my team, especially with that solo defence of the two doors across the bridge. Too bad there are no more MVP votes to earn, so I'll never know whether any of my team mates appreciated it... but it sure was a great and memorable way to hit max level.

Season Launch

Sooo... since I expressed my disappointment about the last dev stream, I've been feeling a little demotivated. However, the actual launch date for the new season followed soon after, and I'm not so disenchanted that I won't take part in it! I might do less if I don't find it that fun, but that's not a foregone conclusion (sometimes things turn out to be more or less fun than I originally expected).

It was certainly interesting to get some more details over the past few days that hadn't been revealed on the stream yet. I was kind of fascinated by how many people I saw going nuts over the thigh high boots reward for example... always makes me feel a bit alienated from the rest of the player base when I'm reminded that I don't care nearly as much about the Space Barbie aspect as a lot of others apparently do. I mean, I like my characters to look nice too, but I really don't have much of an eye for detail in that particular area. There was also a patch note about moving parts on helmets in cinematics that I saw some people get excited about and I didn't even know what they were talking about.

The main thing that caught my eye was that the DvL bosses are making a return for Season 8, both as weekly objectives and for the meta achievement, which made me scream a little on the inside. Don't get me wrong, I was all in favour of bringing them back in GS7, but after months of death zergs on Hoth I'd had more than enough of them. Learning that I'd be back to revisit them every week for this season as well made me wish the meta achievement would've been to just run 40 uprisings instead or whatever, even though I'm not a fan of those either. Just strikes me as a classic case of "be careful what you wish for" - things could get worse!

Yesterday the patch actually dropped, and the first thing I heard about it was a guildie complaining that he wasn't earning any Conquest points. A forum thread on the matter narrowed it down to the affected people being players who still owned multiples of any strongholds from the server merges years ago (such as two copies of the Coruscant apartment). This included me.

It was kind of a mix of funny and sad, as I believe this was the second patch in a row where they tried to fix something Conquest-related and then broke something else instead. At least last time my points were only reduced, not completely zeroed out...

As someone whose gameplay is very much driven by Conquest, I decided to just not play on Darth Malgus that evening and focus on dusting off my legacies on the other servers instead (where I didn't have any duplicate strongholds and therefore wasn't affected by the bug). I'll say that I like the new weekly objective to do dynamic encounters, as that's easy to do on multiple servers without feeling repetitive. Also, since dynamic encounters still count as missions, it also has nice synergy with another objective this week to complete 15 missions as a smuggler or bounty hunter.

I was a bit unsure before going to bed whether I should just go and deactivate my duplicate strongholds as some people had done. It apparently worked as a bug fix, and I hadn't actually used them much in ages, but at the same time they're something unique that you probably can't get back once deactivated. I decided to hedge my bets and hope for a hotfix overnight, and in this instance the devs did not disappoint, as I woke up to the problem having been fixed, meaning I was able to earn some Conquest points and complete the first daily objective of the season the next morning before the reset.

Around the SWTOR-sphere: February 2025

I'm a little late posting this due to real life reasons, but I certainly wasn't lacking in interesting material to share in February!

• First we have "I Soloed SWTOR's TOUGHEST Raid Bosses!" by Snoopster, which was posted on the 31st of January and therefore just missed getting into the January round-up, but which I loved so much that I just had to feature it here instead. For those who're not familiar with his work, Snoopster used to be known as SWTOR Snoopy and is an old-school content creator who's seemingly less concerned with maximising his view count and more with having fun, with many of his videos being goofy and silly. He just seemed to kind of lose interest in SWTOR at some point, so it was an unexpected (but welcome) surprise to suddenly see him coming out of the woodwork with a two-hour magnum opus unlike anything he'd done before. I know the length may be intimidating to some, but it's filled with his usual fast-paced editing throughout and at least to me, there wasn't a boring moment. As a bonus (for me) I unexpectedly got to see one of my guildies included, as Aregelle (who's featured in the section about Bonethrasher) is in my guild and ops team.
• It being a new year, it's time for a new round of "Is SWTOR worth playing this year" videos! Unfortunately the first one I saw in January was an utter disappointment (which is why it didn't get featured). I'd seen the creator's 2024 version and it looked like they hadn't even logged in during the past year. I (politely) queried this in the comment section, just for my comment to quietly disappear into the aether, which told me all I needed to know, really. "Is Star Wars the Old Republic Worth Playing in 2025?" by Emperor Bebop on the other hand was more to my liking, as even if it doesn't get everything 100% correct (I did leave a comment on the video about the point about inflation being outdated for example), he does show some knowledge about the game (including endgame, which is somewhat unusual for this type of video) and is pretty funny. The self-awareness at the start of the video sure made me chuckle.
  
  That said, if you're looking for something that's more factual and not aiming for five jokes a minute, Swtorista just released her own "Is SWTOR worth trying in 2025?" video a few days ago, which is still the gold standard for providing accurate and concise information for new players. Though I was a bit surprised that she apparently already forgot about the existence of the Shae Vizla server, as she talks about "all three English servers" at one point. Then again, she gave a warning that the population of Satele Shan isn't as high as it used to be, so maybe her not even mentioning Shae Vizla is meant to tell us something in its own way.
• Following the Bioware lay-offs in January (I shared some links on the subject last month), the Ask a Game Dev blog was asked "Why did SWTOR get shuffled to a different developer if it was apparently Bioware's most steady source of income for the better part of the last decade?" The answer isn't exactly going to shock and surprise anyone who's been following this blog and everything surrounding the move to Broadsword from the beginning, but it's nice to see someone else lay it out in even greater detail.
• Fellow SWTOR blogger Intisar continued his Pets of the Old Republic series (which I failed to give its proper due to when he first started it) with two new installments posted in February, about Dwedtoof and the Heartglow Mewvorr. I really like this series because I think there's generally not a lot of conversation about pets in SWTOR other than urgency to log in and grab them whenever they're being given away as subscriber rewards. Intisar's series goes into a lot of detail about the surrounding context for each creature, including lore from the wider Star Wars universe, and I always learn something new from each post.
• Speaking of learning new things, SWTOR content creator Illeva put out an updated companion customisation guide last month, which I took a look at because I was curious and wow, I didn't even know Treek and other Cartel Market companions had customisations! I used to not care about companion customisations that much because I generally quite like the default looks (plus some of them are quite iconic, let's be honest), but by the time you're levelling your tenth trooper it can be fun to make Aric look a bit different, you know?
• Getting in just under the wire, Chash Larol of the Old Republic Era blog posted about "The State of SWTOR's Economy Part 2" on the last day of the month, a subject that hasn't been getting enough exposure I think. What I mean is that people were crying endlessly when inflation was running rampant, yet ever since the devs actually fixed it, things have been conspicuously silent on the subject, so that I still see people talk about the economy being crazy (like in the video I linked above!) even when that hasn't been true in several years now. We need to be louder about the fact that this is no longer true. Many commodities and Cartel Market items on the GTN are probably the cheapest now that they've been in about eight years.

Got any SWTOR content of your own to recommend that was released in February? Feel free to leave a comment!