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.