Treading Water

I feel like that's what I'm currently doing in SWTOR, which is why things have been a bit quiet on this blog. I wanted to reflect a bit on why that is.

Primarily, there are two things going on: The first is simply that I'm spending less time in SWTOR in general, just because there are other things I'd rather be doing at the moment. People who also follow my WoW blog will have seen that I've still been active there for example.

I hate comparing those two MMOs because they do very different things on a very different scale and appeal to me in different ways, but it's hard to deny that WoW simply has a lot on offer right now, and if you like at least some of the new content they're currently releasing (which I do), there are plenty of reasons to log in.

Comparatively, I'm in a bit of a lull with SWTOR. Galactic Season 10 is going on of course, but as I already hinted at in a previous post, I've been less enthused by that than I expected. Every week I look at the available objectives and every week there's little that excites me (unless the master mode flashpoint objective is up). Mostly I've been running a lot of dailies, which is not one of my favourite activities and can be quite dull and time-consuming across multiple servers.

I've been really surprised by just how much this season's objective structure has been bothering me. I think it's because I'd kind of settled into a pattern of progressing the season - on the other servers in particular - in a way that wasn't necessarily optimal but allowed me to advance unrelated personal goals at the same time.

To give an example of what I'm talking about, if there were weekly objectives to do fifteen missions as a smuggler, kill one hundred mobs with a healer companion and do fifteen dynamic encounters, the "optimal" way to tackle this in the least amount of time would've been to do fifteen dynamic encounters as a smuggler with a healer companion. However, I still had the freedom to go, "nah, I don't feel like doing DEs this week" and just progress a smuggler character's class story instead. That choice was slower and I'd only get two out of the three objectives done, but it was more enjoyable to me that way.

The strict focus on Altuur and PH4-LNX this season really locks me into doing activities that work with those two (as I already bemoaned in the post linked above), and there just aren't as many options, which is simply a bit of a drain on me. I've repeatedly found myself wondering whether I really want to keep at this on multiple servers, but then I look at my progress and see that I'm already past the halfway mark everywhere and surely I can just hang in there a little longer... not wanting to break a streak can be one hell of a drug.

The sad irony is that I actually thought that Master's Enigma, the last story update, was really great and I still haven't written a post about it because I've only played through it once. I've got a draft which I meant to finish after playing through it another two or three times, but... seasons objectives need doing now! 

I thought a patch with both a story update and a new season launching at the same time would be a cool thing, but in practice it's kind of stopped me from enjoying the story as fully as I would've liked, as I have only so many hours a week I want to devote to SWTOR and the FOMO aspect of Galactic Seasons has led me to prioritise that over replaying the story, even if it's less fun, which is just a weird situation to be in.

I expect that I'll push through at my current pace until the end of the season, but whenever GS11 comes around I'll need to have a long, hard think about whether I want to continue bothering with it beyond my home server. 

A Week on Oricon

One of last week's weekly seasons objectives was "Seat of the Hutts Daily Sweeps", which requires you to either do the Oricon weekly twice or the Ossus weekly once. I've always thought this was a strange equivalence because since 7.0 the Ossus weekly takes less than ten minutes to complete (depending on your choice of dailies you don't even have to fight any mobs for it), while a single run of Oricon can require slogging through a full 100 mobs or so if you don't have stealth or someone else happened to come through just before you to clear things out already. And then you're asking me to do the one that's already longer twice?

I guess the one thing that Oricon has going for it is that it's more accessible since you unlock access to the area earlier in the story. On my secondary legacies on the other servers I didn't used to have access to Ossus, so I did some Oricon runs for seasons there in the past - though less so recently, precisely because of how tedious the whole affair tended to be. Since the release of the Bessi venture made daily access fully account-wide (meaning it applies cross-server), I could've just gone to Ossus to make my life easier, but I still feel a bit bad about "skipping ahead", even if it's just to do dailies.

This week I happened to have a few days off around Easter, so I thought why not take a few alts through Oricon since I have a bit of time? Only a couple of them had done the story before, so by the end of the week I had taken four new characters through the storyline, two on Republic side and two of my Imperials. I didn't do this all at once but staggered progress over the course of several days, and it occurred to me that I probably hadn't spent this many hours on Oricon since it first came out and I was farming reputation on all my original (then) max-level alts.

I did feel like the craziness was rubbing off on me a bit after a few days, but overall it wasn't a bad experience. Lord Hargrev's voice acting still holds up as top notch over a decade later, and I always love the bit where he goes: "Knives! They can't even resist carving one another like roasts!" Though it's distracting nowadays how much his assistant sounds exactly like Lana, not just because it's the same voice actress but also because she uses the exact same kind of voice/tone that would later become Lana's.

Being able to combine the storyline with the dailies and weekly these days is a peculiar experience that I already talked about about one and a half years ago, when I first went through Oricon that way on my Shae Vizla main. Back then I did find it a bit frustrating how all the missions tended to bug out one way or another since they had clearly never been designed to be done at the same time - this wasn't something that was impossible to overcome, but it still required me to backtrack and redo things several times.

Since I already knew what to expect this time, I was able to take some notes on the best way to circumvent the bugs tied to each mission, and I thought I might share my learnings here as well, even if it's an extremely niche topic.

[DAILY] Fallen Forces

For this one, the objectives for the story and daily quest are exactly the same and there are no issues, both progress at the same time. 

[DAILY] False Paradise

For this one, unfortunately there seems to be no way to avoid doing the phased bit twice. The story mission requires you to loot ten bioenergy enhancers while the daily requires only five. The problem is that interacting with the quest items will only progress one mission while still locking you out of progressing the other one if they were both at the same step. So the best way I found of doing this was to loot five items for the daily, use them, and then go ahead and do the phased bit for the daily mission. After exiting, any spare bioenergy enhancers you may have already collected towards the other quest will have been deleted from your inventory so you'll need to collect a full ten again, but at least you'll be able to do so straight away without resetting anything.

[DAILY] Dread Engines

Funnily enough, this quest is the exact opposite of the above. You need to destroy three/five terraforming devices, but if you enter the phased bit while one mission is done with that step and the other one isn't, both of them will bug out. Bad! Instead you have to make sure to destroy the full five terraforming devices for the story mission before entering the cave. You should then be able to progress both the daily and the story at the same time inside. 

[DAILY] The Tower’s Core

This one is probably the trickiest one to get right. The first thing to note is that when you enter the control room at the top of the tower, only the daily mission will update to the next step, so you'll want to instantly head back out of the phase and walk back in a second time, which will then cause the story mission to update as well. Inside you can disable the defences and fight Commander Zaoron for both missions at the same time with no issues. When finishing up, it's important to click the cube for the daily mission first, then interact with the panel for the story mission. If you click the panel first, you won't be able to pick up the holocron for the daily afterwards and a reset will be required.

Another thing that's worth mentioning here is that both missions require you to pick up the same unique quest item at the end, which the game doesn't allow, so what will happen once you complete the story conversation is that you'll get a pop-up saying that your inventory was full and that you got an item in the mail. Exit the phase to complete the daily (which will remove the associated item from your inventory), then pick the holocron out of the mailbox back at base before handing in the story mission. Important: You won't be able to hand in the story mission without it! In one of my earlier attempts I made the mistake of just deleting the item in the mail, thinking it was a glitch that I had been mailed a second copy. However, if you don't have this in your mission inventory, you won't be able to start the follow-up story conversation! When this happened to me, I had to reset the story mission and redo the whole tower part a second time. Don't be me. 

[HEROIC 2+] Preemptive Strike 

This is another mission that simply progresses for both story and daily mission at the same time. Phew.