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

May the Fourth Be With You

Happy Star Wars Day! It's that day when even people who aren't superfans are suddenly reminded of Star Wars, resulting in a bit of an activity bump for SWTOR every year (at least if Twitch stats are anything to go by).

It's also commonly a time when the devs are particularly generous with giveaways and freebies, and this year is no exception. The free pet and 50% off collections sale are pretty much expected at this point, but no less welcome for it. There's also a double XP event running until May 16th, which has never really been my jam but I do know plenty of people love levelling during double XP.

The thing they really got me with this time was additional sales on various Cartel Market items. I'd been keeping an eye on the Gothic Master set for a while now since I wanted it for a specific character but didn't want to pay full price, and I didn't like the credit price it was commonly going for on the GTN either. At 40% off I finally picked it up, as well as copies of the Coruscant and Dromund Kaas utility decoration bundles on every server. (I'd bought both on Darth Malgus for full price, and decided that I was going to get them on the other servers eventually, once there was a sale. They are also 40% off right now, so I went for it.)

This resulted in me dropping below 1000 Cartel Coins for the first time in what must be more than a decade at this point. I have this post from 2014 as a record of me buying Cartel Coins, but after that I was more than sustained by the refer-a-friend program for a long time. (In this post from 2018 I mention casually that I was close to hitting 50k Coins from this passive income "again".) Once the RAF system was shut down, my virtual wealth slowly started to decrease, but my subscriber stipend and Galactic Seasons were still bringing in plenty since I didn't spend CC very often.

Now, however... I might actually have to think about giving Broadsword some extra money if there's anything I want soon! Though since I rarely do, odds are good that my balance will be topped up with more free coins soon enough before it becomes an issue.

Pugging Trench Runner

I've previously talked about how the current Galactic Season's focus on uprisings was off to a rough start, though things improved once Broadsword applied some difficulty nerfs and replaced veteran mode in the group finder with story mode.

Since then, I've pugged the uprising of the week on at least some servers pretty much every week with no issues. Until last week that is, when it was Trench Runner time. It had been a little while since I'd last run that particular uprising before that week, but from what I'd heard from people who'd given it a go more recently, it was both very good for progressing the seasonal meta achievement to kill empowered mobs and one of the more challenging uprisings.

I got to experience that for myself when I got into a run on my level 63 Sniper on Satele Shan. Everyone else in the group was also still levelling, with the highest level being a level 79 Juggernaut. The other two members of the group were another Juggernaut in their 40s and a low-level... something, I forget what their combat style even was, but they were only level 18 and by their own admission fresh off of Hutta and new to uprisings as a whole.

Things did not start off too well as we suffered several deaths right at the start, and the low-level quickly became very apologetic, clearly assuming that it was their fault somehow. I assured them that it was alright and that this was simply one of the tougher uprisings.

However, things continued to be messy. I kind of expected one of the Juggernauts to pull by virtue of being melee, but everyone kept standing around awkwardly, waiting for someone else to pull. Eventually I got impatient and did so myself, just to die on every pull where I did so. At one point I realised that I was high enough level now to spec into the Sniper's OP self-heal in cover and did that in hopes of increasing my survivability, but it still wasn't quite enough. I tried kiting, but if I wasn't shooting things, they just weren't dying.

It just felt like nobody but me was really doing much damage to anything at all (not least because whenever I pulled, I'd keep aggro on absolutely everything until I died). I even fired up Starparse to understand what was going on and it showed people doing about 3k dps each, which seemed crazy with everyone being scaled up to 80. I figured that simply couldn't be correct and had to be distorted by the long periods in combat when you were just waiting for things to spawn. (After the run, I had a closer look at the log and at least one of the Juggernauts was spending most of their time just hitting their basic attack.)

Regardless, we slowly bumbled onwards despite the dying and sometimes full wiping, until we got to the third bunker, where we just ran into a hard wall, always wiping within a minute at best. "Alright, tactics time," I said and started to explain how the turret worked and how we needed it to kill most of the adds at the top. I explained how we needed to kill at least some of the adds on the ground as well and couldn't just nuke the boss because we were taking too much damage. And to their credit, people tried! But we just couldn't do it.

I think on our best attempt, the low-level handled the turret while we killed the first few rounds of unavoidable adds, but things were dying so slowly and we were taking so much damage in the process that we used up both kolto buffs in the vicinity and they took ages to respawn. At some point the lowbie would get kicked out of the turret controls and I would take over, but while I was shooting the walkers and droids at the top, the rest of the group in the trench would wipe quickly, at best having gotten the boss to about fifty percent health.

I don't recall how many times we tried this, but eventually I just didn't know what else to suggest. The lowbie was a bit helpless by nature and neither of the Juggernauts seemed to be using any survival cooldowns from what I could see, but trying to teach people how exactly to use their class toolkit seemed to go a bit beyond what's appropriate in a piece of group content that's meant to take about ten to fifteen minutes.

Eventually I just thanked everyone for trying and left (after sending the lowbie one more reassuring whisper that it wasn't their fault and that the combination of people not using their abilities and being put into one of the tougher uprisings was just unfortunate.) A few minutes later I re-queued and got another pop quite quickly - this time with a group of three eighties with whom we blitzed through the whole thing without any real issues. However, I still felt bad about the group I had abandoned, especially for that lowbie who'd tried an uprising for the first time ever and had been keen to follow instructions but we just couldn't make it happen. I can only hope they weren't completely discouraged by the experience, and that the devs maybe revisit this uprising in particular in terms of tuning before the season is over.

This was just one of those situations where I'm never quite sure what the right solution should be. Does story mode content really need to be tuned down to the point where it can be completed with a group of people just hitting their basic attack? Part of me wants to yell no and argue that it's okay to push people a little bit to learn how to play the game. But then, how are people supposed to learn how to play while being put into group content with strangers where there's an expectation that it's supposed to be super accessible and that you can be in and out in ten minutes?

(As a side note, the swarms of mobs gave crazy XP. Just from that one aborted run followed by the full run that I completed shortly afterwards, my Sniper gained three levels. So there's that, I guess.)

SWTOR Teases the Return of a Popular Character

This weekend the annual Star Wars Celebration event took place, this time in Japan, and several SWTOR devs were in attendance. They were also able to arrange for a short segment about SWTOR to play on the big screen, which is not an unimpressive feat and makes good business sense. Most of it consists of Narrative Director Ashley Ruhl basically talking about how great the game is while old footage runs in the background, which should work well enough to intrigue Star Wars fans who may have never heard of the game and/or to remind lapsed old-timers that the game is still around and getting updates.

The last minute of the video clip features a teaser for the next story update that is a mix of old and new footage, so it's not quite clear whether the new bits are from 7.6, 7.7 or what. (The fact that locations in the new shots are recognisable as Tatooine and Ilum makes me think it might be footage from the unreleased 7.6 story, based on what we were told about that update last year.) Since this whole thing went down in the middle of the night in my time zone, I woke up the next morning to find a lot of chatter on social media involving the word SPOILERS (in all caps).

This actually made me a little hesitant to click on the video since I don't like to be spoiled, but then I figured what the heck - one area in which the SWTOR devs have never disappointed me is in terms of treating the story with respect, and I don't recall a single instance where they gave away crucial plot points in advance. And indeed, after watching the video it seems to me that all the people warning of spoilers were perhaps a bit overzealous. I appreciate that the community is overprotective in that regard instead of lackadaisical - and there are people who don't want to know anything about new content in advance - but to me things like a brief action shot or a mere mention of a certain character making an appearance do not qualify as spoilers. So I will go ahead and talk about the content of the teaser trailer in this post, which means that this is also your heads-up in case you really don't want to know anything at all about upcoming content, to not watch the last minute of the below video or read the rest of this post.

Now, as I mentioned, the teaser doesn't really tell us what exactly is going to happen next in the story, as the voice-over is just Darth Malgus monologuing once again - which is well done, don't get me wrong, but it's also becoming a bit of a trope at this point with how long this particular storyline has been going on.

However, the bit that got everyone excited (and what probably triggered everyone's spoiler alarms) is a shot in which we see a hologram of Darth Jadus. If you're not that big a SWTOR nerd, you may be wondering who Darth Jadus even is. The answer is that he's one of the main antagonists in chapter one of the Imperial agent story, and he's popular with people for a number of reasons.

One is that he's simply a cool-looking character, with a shiny mask that hides his face and a smooth voice. The second is that he's a sort of evil mastermind (those always tend to be popular), and the third is that the big confrontation with him at the end of chapter one of the agent origin story probably has one of the most interesting multiple-choice options of all class stories, in that you can outright side with the bad guy and the game lets you get away with it. It doesn't really change the following chapters as much as you might expect, but it's a cool touch nonetheless.

No matter your character's choices, Darth Jadus is never killed on screen, and worst case for him he's taken prisoner at the end of the chapter and expects to be killed by the Dark Council, but this was never followed up on, so people have long suspected that he might still be alive and were hopeful that he'd make a comeback some day.

Now, we don't know whether that will actually happen - the teaser only shows us a static holo of Jadus, which for all we know could just be a display used as an illustration while somebody mentions him in conversation. That would be a pretty epic troll on the devs' side... but if he does indeed come back, it would certainly be an opportunity to take the story into an interesting new direction.

Social for Seasons

Galactic Seasons are clearly designed to appeal to all kinds of players, from soloer to raider. The mix of weekly objectives isn't always perfectly balanced, but over time things should even out enough so that everyone can complete at least the main season track by only taking part in activities they enjoy. So even if you don't like doing group content for example, and there's a week where most weekly objectives require a group, you should be fine skipping that one while still being able to achieve your goals.

Personally, I'm kind of the opposite of that hypothetical example as I rather like the group objectives. We have a thing called "social night" in my guild, and during seasons we always knock out whatever items require a group on that evening.

Usually there's one or two of these per week, but last week was unusual in that no fewer than five of the eleven available objectives required a large group, plus there were a few more for which having a small group was at least beneficial. My guild group knocked out all five of the large group objectives in short order (pulling in some pugs for Nightmare Pilgrim, but that barely took five minutes) and a few of us also ran the uprising of the week afterwards. I'd initially felt a bit awkward making almost no progress towards any of my seasons objectives for most of the week, just to go and reach 7 out of 7 completed within a single evening on Saturday.

Several guildies also expressed delight at having been able to max out their progression for the week within only a couple of hours. The group objectives are really great that way, in that they require a bit of extra effort to get the group put together, but if you can be efficient about that part, actually completing the tasks themselves is super quick.

That said, I didn't expect to make much progress on the other servers during that week, as I don't have guild events to rely on for progression there, as they are either non-existent or take place at bad hours for me. However, I was really surprised that pretty much on every server, the moment I logged in, went to the fleet and took a look at general chat, someone was putting together a pug group for something, and I managed to join at least one such event on every server.

It wasn't always the same thing either. On Leviathan I got pulled into a DvL boss group for example, while I joined a Sparks of War group on Tulak Hord, and a Nightmare Pilgrim run on a different evening (which got me invited to a large German guild's TeamSpeak server).

It was all rather delightful. I know people often say that SWTOR's MMO parts were an afterthought and not well done, but my experience was always the opposite. When I first started playing back in 2011 I enjoyed the storylines for sure, but the reason I stuck around and didn't go back to WoW was the social aspect and that I was having such a blast raiding and doing group content in the open world. This week actually made me really nostalgic for that, and also made me wonder whether I don't spend too much time in my stronghold nowadays instead of on the fleet. I usually hide general chat because in the places where it's busy it tends to be filled with nonsense at best or utter toxicity at worst, but seeing all those random "looking for more" requests last week really took me back and I wanted to see more of that. 

This week has actually been similar, with another five objectives for large groups. I don't know yet how things will go for my guild on Darth Malgus tomorrow, but since I'm on holiday for a few days, I actually stayed up late on Wednesday and Thursday to join guild events on Shae Vizla and Star Forge, which might see me hitting 7/7 objectives on those servers this week, which hadn't really been my intent at all.

However, even without guild support the ease of objective completion has been amazing. The combination of Dark vs. Light world bosses and the regular world bosses on both Coruscant and Dromund Kaas both being objectives had people logging back and forth between both factions and looking for groups constantly. Leviathan may generally be a small and quiet server, but I've never seen it as packed on Coruscant as when I was killing the bosses there this week. On Star Forge I didn't even bother to look for a group, I just kind of hung around the boss spawns for a bit as a new group was coming by to kill them pretty much every five minutes or so anyway.

I don't think this is the first time I've gone on about how open world group content in this game makes me feel nostalgic, but it's simply true that nothing brings back memories of launch day crowds for me like these kinds of events do.

Lacking Enthusiasm

It's been a bit quiet here recently, and I think it's going to stay that way for a while longer. I'm still playing the game and having fun, but I do kind of feel like I lack things I want to talk about at the moment. I'm a firm believer in the adage that there's never nothing to talk about when it comes to MMOs, but you do need to feel sufficient motivation to sit down and create content about your game of choice, and I haven't had a lot of that recently.

Part of that has had to do with real life, but primarily I'm just a bit down on SWTOR to be honest. Not so down that I don't want to play at all, but lacking that extra level of excitement that makes me want to share my thoughts about it all the time. With the devs seemingly focusing most of their resources on building new story content that they then can't release because of the voice actors' strike and the new season being focused on a theme I don't love, I'm just finding myself a bit short on nice things to say at the moment.

I have a few half-baked posts about evergreen topics in my drafts but those require a bit more energy and work than the more rambly takes about whatever's been going on more recently. And the detailed diaries I kept about my Galactic Seasons progress in the past were something that entertained me at the time but is no longer interesting to me at this point.

Last week I was actually thinking about cutting back my investment in seasons, since I was once again starting to feel a bit stressed out trying to complete my objectives for the week on all servers. It's kind of funny how much more that's become an issue since the addition of Shae Vizla, since you'd think that six servers is only one more than five servers, but looked at differently, doing seasons on all servers now basically requires twenty percent more time, and that's not nothing. I looked back at my posts from Galactic Season 2, when I first started this whole multi-server completion project, and at how much fun I had with it back then, while barely ever feeling stressed at all. I've been wracking my brains about how to get back to that and what might be the best way to perhaps apply some more limitations to my seasonal efforts while still hitting level 100 everywhere, but that's turned out to be trickier than I thought.

The easiest way to go about it of course would be to simply cut a few servers, but that then leaves the question of which ones. Star Forge and Shae Vizla are the ones where I'm the most involved with guilds so surely those should stay no matter what, but I really love my stable of alts on Leviathan too, even if I don't know anyone there... you can't ask me to choose between my babies like that! So I just keep on trucking for now.

At least the weekly uprising is quick and easy now since the devs put story mode into the group finder, and this week has generally been very easy for earning my daily Conquest points since it was Death Mark, a Conquest event that we haven't had in many months due to Galactic Season 7 locking it out for its entire duration, and which makes it incredibly simple to rack up points due to to the repeatable Taskmaster (complete missions anywhere) and Galactic Rampage (kill any mobs, anywhere) objectives.

Sometimes you also get an unexpected windfall in terms of seasons objective completion. I hadn't planned on doing DvL bosses on any server other than Darth Malgus for example, but on Leviathan a guildie was building a pug for them just as I logged on on Tuesday this week, and on Saturday I was up and awake late enough that I managed to leech kills off my guild on Star Forge. On Sunday morning I even stumbled my way into a pug for Colossal Monolith on Shae Vizla of all places, something I definitely hadn't been counting on or actively trying for.

So I'm doing all these things and having fun with them, but that's about as much SWTOR as I can take at the moment, with not much energy or enthusiasm left over for writing about it. I can only hope that 7.7 will bring a couple of new talking points with it whenever it arrives. While I expect that we still won't see any story by then and that master mode Propagator will be out of my league, I've heard talk of the PTS showing dynamic encounters on some new planets, which would definitely be something to get excited about. And well, whenever the voice actors' strike does end, we'll hopefully get one massive story dump all in one go. I'm just not holding my breath for that one at the moment, since we really have no idea when an agreement will be reached and it could still be a while.