Shintar's Galactic Season 6 Diary, Week 6

Week 6's objectives excited me for two reasons: It was the first week without a flashpoint objective, and it was the first week with not just one, but two PvP objectives. I don't like that it took six weeks to get any overlap between PvP Season 5 and GS6, and looking at the PvP track made me realise that after my initial excitement about the new PvP season, with plans to do at least the basic reward track on multiple servers, too much time had passed already for me to still complete the PvP track on Star Forge and Shae Vizla without buyouts, due to how focused I'd been on Galactic Seasons instead.

Anyway, in detail, the weekly objectives were:

• Earn 200k Conquest points: As usual.
  
• Visit another player's Rishi stronghold: Easy enough to do.
  
• Craft war supplies and two invasion forces: Once again something I was likely going to do on Darth Malgus but nowhere else, due to the lack of skilled crafters in my stable of alts.
  
• Dig up 3 treasures at a seeker droid dig site: Probably something I was going to do at least on some servers.
  
• Complete 15 missions as a trooper or agent: I was definitely going to aim for this one everywhere, as I usually do with the origin story objectives.
  
• Kill four named champion mobs on Corellia (2 Republic, 2 Imperial): Once again, not my favourite but one I was likely going to do at least on some servers to get the numbers.
  
• Kill both Taris world bosses: Easy and fast to do, I was counting on getting this one done on most servers again.
  
• Play 5-10 arenas (wins count double): I was definitely going to do that one on Darth Malgus, and maybe on other servers depending on whether I could get pops in the sub-80 brackets.
  
• Heroic space missions: I've never been good at space missions, to the point that I haven't even completed all the normal ones, so this was a definite no.
  
• Play 4-8 warzone matches (wins count double): I was probably going to aim to do that one on all servers, even if it's a bit time-consuming, but I do love warzones.
  
• Do dailies on Ruhnuk or Kessan's Landing: I figured I might do that one on Darth Malgus with Mr Commando, but nowhere else as I don't have that much story progression on any of the other servers.
  

Day 1 - Tuesday

I had another surprise working from home day after it turned out that the previous night's heavy winds had caused damage on my usual train line and I couldn't get into London. I was also feeling a bit tired and unwell though, so instead of using the time saved not commuting for gaming, I ended up napping instead.

In the evening I did ops with my guild, and then expanded my Copero stronghold to hit the daily seasons objective (I'd been saving up the unlocks for this kind of thing instead of using them the moment I got them).

I then logged over to Leviathan, where I had weird server lag problems when trying to transition between areas. It didn't just seem to be me either, as I played a warzone match and everyone else seemed to have issues leaving at the end as well, though it did eventually resolve itself. I then killed the Taris world bosses on both factions, which was nice and easy as lots of people were doing it and it basically took no time at all to find an impromptu group. I did the same circuit (one warzone plus both world bosses) on Tulak Hord, Star Forge and Satele Shan.

On Shae Vizla, I had no luck with warzone pops or world boss groups at this time of night, so I just parked two characters at their locations, visited a Rishi stronghold and did a couple of missions on my trooper.

Day 2 - Wednesday

In the morning I logged into Shae Vizla since I figured that was a better time for group content with the Aussies. I got both world boss kills done, and since level 80 warzones were popping instantly for me, I also played enough matches to complete the weekly. 

After the reset at lunch time, I returned to Shae Vizla to do some questing on my trooper, followed by a Black Talon run with my agent on Leviathan, which counted as 7/15 missions completed.

Later I was supposed to help out with an ops run on Star Forge, but it kinda ended up being cancelled, so the four of us that actually showed up ran a couple of master mode flashpoints instead (in the one week where this wasn't a seasons objective - typical! Still, it counted as ten missions done as a trooper.)

In the evening I first logged into Tulak Hord, where I did a warzone and a couple of missions on my trooper over there. I then spent some time PvPing on Darth Malgus, and finally I did exactly one warzone again on Satele Shan; plus I paid a visit to a Rishi stronghold.

Day 3 - Thursday

I was back in the office so didn't get any play time until relatively late in the evening.

On Leviathan, I visited a Rishi stronghold, did some warzones and killed the Imperial named champions on Corellia. Logging over to Tulak Hord, a single warzone there was enough to get my daily Conquest done, so I left it at that.

I then did some more PvP on Darth Malgus (both warzones and arenas), followed by a few warzones on Star Forge. While in the queue there, I also went around and killed the Republic champion mobs on Corellia. I started doing a couple of missions on my agent on Satele Shan, but it was late and I was tired, so I decided to leave any additional action for the next morning.

Day 4 - Friday

In the morning I logged back into Satele Shan and did an Esseles run on my little trooper there. Because of the Galactic Rampage Conquest objective, this completed her personal Conquest immediately, while also giving me several missions worth of credit towards questing as a trooper or agent. I then logged onto Shae Vizla and continued my trooper's class storyline on Belsavis for a bit.

In the evening I did more PvP on Darth Malgus, which resulted in me completing the arena weekly before it was time for ops. After that I logged into Leviathan where I played exactly one more warzone for the weekly mission (it was a Vandin Huttball in which I rocked by the way). Then I did the same thing on Tulak Hord, except that the match I played there was a Voidstar where we got properly spanked but still won on objectives.

On Star Forge I queued for a few midbie arenas (since this was the only other server where I could get them to pop without too much of a wait), followed by a couple of level 80 warzones on Satele Shan. Finally I did some PvP on Shae Vizla as well, even though I didn't need any more games for seasons there, but the guild I'm in was organising some level 80 warzones and I wanted to take part, so I completed another warzone weekly mission while killing some champion mobs and digging up treasure between matches.

Day 5 - Saturday

I didn't play until after reset, and then I started by going to Leviathan, where I dug up some treasures on my knight and did a few missions on my agent. Later on Tulak Hord, I visited a Rishi stronghold, and since that was my fourth weekly objective, I was immediately close to being done with the daily, so I just hopped over to Corellia and killed the named champs there to get myself over the finish line.

On Satele Shan I did some more missions on my agent, before logging into Shae Vizla to kill the champion mobs on Republic side. I was surprised by how tough this was on my level 74 Sage (my highest level Republic character on the server). I basically spent five minutes kiting Lord Rashal around a nearby pillar, whittling down his health one DoT at a time, until finally someone else showed up and helped to kill him. This was relevant in so far as I'd kind of forgotten at the start of the week that the reason I never did this objective on all servers before was that I never had a high-enough level Imperial character to kill stuff on Corellia. Now my Imps on Leviathan and Satele Shan were in their low forties, which is high enough to go to Corellia, but still low when it comes to killing level 48 champions. I'd been optimistic about my chances since I previously had pretty good experiences while doing the equivalent objective under-levelled on Taris, but my level 74's struggles made me seriously doubt myself.

I wanted to put the matter to the test right away, so I returned to Leviathan and took my level 42 bounty hunter to the first Republic champion on Corellia. Killing any mobs that dismounted me during the trip was definitely a lot slower than usual, but perfectly doable. I was happy when I got to the droid's spawn spot and saw someone else already waiting there. Unfortunately it turned out that person was also in their low forties and clearly waiting for help! Fortunately an 80 came by and took charge, so we were able to leech off their success easily. Unfortunately the trip to the next champion took a while since I didn't have any of the quick travel points unlocked yet, so I arrived just in time to see the 80 port away from the second champion's corpse. Fortunately another 80 was right there when he respawned.

I then re-did the same tour on Tulak Hord, where I'd forgotten that I actually got my Sorc up to 51 already. She killed the droid by herself with no problems whatsoever and would have done the same with Jimmy Weasle if someone else hadn't shown up to contribute some damage near the end. Are the Imperial champions just that much harder than the Republic ones? Let me know your experiences in the comments!

Emboldened by my success, I was going to try my luck soloing the champs on my level 42 Sniper on Satele Shan, but it just so happened that there were always other players present to support her anyway.

In the evening it was time for social ops with my guild on Darth Malgus, and doing Scum and Villainy on 16-man counted as completing four missions as a trooper. I finished the evening by completing the arena weekly in the midbie bracket on Star Forge.

Day 6 - Sunday

In the morning I logged into Shae Vizla and did a few missions on my trooper there, since I hadn't quite hit the Conquest target before getting distracted by the whole thing with the Corellia champions the previous day. This also took me to 7/7 weeklies completed.

In the evening I did a round of Kessan's Landing dailies with Mr Commando, which got me to 7/7 on Darth Malgus as well. On Leviathan, I did some questing on my bounty hunter for the daily - I still needed a few more missions on my agent as well but wanted to work towards my bounty hunter's personal Conquest target first. This was followed by a round of freeing Sobrik on Tulak Hord to get credit towards 15 missions completed as a trooper.

On Star Forge, I continued my trooper's class story on Corellia until I hit 15 missions completed there too, and swung by the remaining two champions as well since I was already in the neighbourhood, taking me to 6/7. Similarly, I did two warzones on my consular on Satele Shan and killed the champions during the wait time between matches, which took me to 5/7 weekly objectives completed.

Day 7 - Monday

In the morning I wanted to quickly catch up on what I had been a bit too tired to finish the previous evening. I did some quests on Shae Vizla for the daily and visited a Rishi stronghold on Star Forge. On Satele Shan I wanted to "quickly" dig up three treasures on Hoth but had the worst luck. The first dig site I visited was inactive, and the second had a guy already there who found the special treasure and depleted it just as I was honing in on my first target (and this was middle of the night for the west coast, FFS). I went to the last remaining site on Hoth in the Glacial Fissure and eventually got my objective done there, but for some reason every single treasure I found was inside a lava flow, which made it a pain to hone in on it without getting my poor guy set on fire. 

In the evening I logged into Leviathan to finish off my last few agent missions, though since I also had some juicy Conquest objectives close to completion, I also played other alts for a bit to easily reach their personal targets for extra rewards. On Tulak Hord I dug up some treasure (less painful in the Outlaw's Den this time) and then did some questing on my inquisitor for the daily Conquest.

On Satele Shan I completed my agent's class story on Tatooine to tick off my daily and last weekly objective, and on the other servers I only needed to do a bit more stuff on alts to finish off the daily objective there too.

Week 6 Thoughts

I had weirdly mixed feelings about this week. On the one hand I was happy to finally see a PvP objective pop back up as part of the regular season, but on the other hand they take ages to complete across all servers (and I was actually quite lucky with wins vs. losses). I think I completed a total of seven warzone weeklies and two arena weeklies this week, which is similar to the kind of craziness I would usually only engage in during a Total Galactic War.

In general there was little overlap between objectives, so getting to 7/7 felt quite time-consuming, no matter which route you decided to take - though again, this is in the context of doing it all on multiple servers. If I had only focused on a single one, it still would've been a breeze.

Shintar's Galactic Seasons Diary, Week 6

Day 1:

We were back to week one objectives, and I got flashpoints and GSF for my weeklies. I decided to keep the flashpoints this time, since three of them are part of the Shadow of Revan prelude and I have a lot of alts that are somewhere on that step of the story (I don't like doing these on solo mode very much). So I figured this could be a good opportunity to progress their personal stories a bit.

My dailies were heroics and conveniently, more GSF. I returned to playing the latter on my Assassin tank, and I felt that I actually did incredibly well for once... I ended up being at the top of scoreboard in that match somehow, with most kills and the highest hit percentage. Sadly, we still lost by quite a margin, but at least I had fun. This also completed the character's first ever GSF weekly, which finished her Conquest three times over, so I knew that I'd want to do the remaining GSF matches for the week on another alt.

For the heroics I decided to return to Corellia, but this time on my Shadow tank to avoid having to kill too many mobs. However, this did not work as well as expected, as I'd forgotten that two of the three heroics I chose were full of mobs with super stealth detection, meaning that going into stealth didn't just not make me inconspicuous, but rather the opposite, sometimes causing mobs to come running from the other side of the room. This was quite amusing but fortunately didn't cause me to lose too much time (to some degree I could still get away with stealthing if I was fast enough running past the mobs with the detection skill).

Day 2:

This was kind of the ultimate test for my interest in Seasons as it was the day after the release of WoW's Burning Crusade Classic, which I was very excited about and therefore distracted by. I actually logged on extremely late at night to check out my objectives, re-rolled insectoid killing once again, but then decided that I couldn't be bothered anyway. However, in the end the FOMO won out and I logged back in the next morning to quickly get my objectives in before the reset after all.

One was to play a warzone, which I did on my lowbie Merc, and once again got into an arena. Now, this one definitely felt depressingly unbalanced in terms of levels - my team all in the thirties and the opposition between 65 and 74 except for one guy. I didn't expect us to stand a chance and we didn't, though I was surprised that I did manage to stay alive at least for a little while.

The re-rolled objective was to kill 75 mobs on a core world and I was unhappy to see from my spreadsheet that only a single one of my characters had any story quests there, and it was my little squid Sorc whom I'd specifically made to PvP and on whom I didn't care about doing the story anyway. Still, I logged into her anyway and flew to Balmorra. For a change of pace I also picked up all the other quests in Sobrik and then just went on a rampage in the nearby area. It was actually interesting to see those side quests again as it had been so long that I'd done some of them that they actually felt vaguely fresh again. I also "found" a datacron containing a green matrix shard and that required two people to unlock, again something I'd completely forgotten about... there was another person there clearly interested in getting it so I helped them out.

Day 3:

Once again I logged on extremely late at night and was therefore glad to see that neither of my daily objectives were group content, as PvP or GSF pops would likely have been non-existent at that time of night. Instead I was asked to do three core world heroics and kill insectoids on Balmorra... which I decided not to to re-roll for once, as the previous day's adventures had reminded me that this was actually quite a viable combo in more than one way, even if I was sick and tired of the Republic heroics featuring Colicoids.

So I logged my Sniper instead and picked up three heroics on Balmorra, two of which I was sure contained Colicoids, the third one I wasn't sure about (and it didn't). Still, after doing those three, I was most of the way towards being finished with the insectoid objective as well, so I just went to Bug Town and AoE-d down a couple of pulls of weak mobs there to finish off.

Day 4:

This time I logged in earlier in the evening and was presented with more generic core world killing and being asked to do a warzone. I played the latter on my Merc again and got into a Quesh Huttball. It was another loss, but I couldn't blame that one on levels; my team was sadly just a lot less co-ordinated than the enemy. Also, in a classic display, the one guy on my team who I could tell was really trying and of whom I thought positively early on in the match, then went on to be abusive in chat and AFK-ed out at the end. Because of course.

For the mob killing I returned to my little Sorc to do some more questing on Balmorra, even though she was long done with her Conquest, but I had no other characters that had anything useful to do on any of the highlighted planets. So I guess a lesson I learned about myself there was that while I generally like to spread out my activity to reach my Conquest target on as many characters as possible, when it comes to Seasons I'll prioritise making actual character progress over spreading out those Conquest points at all costs.

Day 5:

After three days of counting mob kills I was relieved to be presented with Black Hole dailies and a GSF match as my objectives for a change. The GSF match was one of those in which I played pretty abysmally, but everyone else somehow managed to be even worse, so it was no surprise that we lost.

For the Black Hole I decided to go on my Gunslinger, after having done the dailies on Imperial side every time they came up as an objective so far. I generally prefer to go Imp side for these things since our Imperial alt guild sometimes needs a bit of a push to reach the large Conquest yield, but for some reason I find the Imperial side of the Black Hole a bit irritating. I can't quite put my finger on it as I don't think it takes longer exactly, but it just doesn't seem to flow very well. Maybe it's just because I got so much more practice on Republic side back in the day when this zone first came out. On Imp side it always feels like I spend entirely too much time running back and forth to find a few more droids to kill.

Day 6:

My favourite combo of GSF and a warzone at last, woohoo! This GSF match went quite a bit better, and at the start it even looked like it might end up being an easy win, but somehow the enemy managed to turn things around and we ended up losing after all. It was pretty close though, and a good match overall.

The warzone I did on my healing Sage ended up being an Ancient Hypergates. That was another good match, despite of us losing - we were only four points behind, which is an absolutely minuscule difference in that game mode.

As it was Sunday and I had yet to even start on my flashpoint weekly objective, I also decided to run two flashpoints. First I did Depths of Manaan on my Powertech tank. The queue pop showed another tank and I hesitated for a moment as I tend to avoid double tank or double healer team-ups in veteran mode, but I decided to risk it. In the end it went fine, though the other tank was a bit odd. They were unusually chatty by flashpoint standards and seemed friendly enough, but they also bragged about their dps, seemed to pay little attention to any of our damage dealers lagging behind, and felt the need to quiz one of them about why their gear was so bad (not that this person responded).

On my second run I queued for Assault on Tython on my Shadow tank, again because she was on that step in the Shadow of Revan prelude (that had been my reason for choosing the Powertech as well). Funnily enough I ended up in a group with a guildie who was also trying to get his weekly done. I stealthily positioned myself to pull the first group but was instantly reminded that Tython is another one of those flashpoints where people will run all around the houses to skip as much trash as possible. I rolled my eyes a little but decided to let the "lead skipper" take point from then on and it all went very quickly and smoothly.

Day 7:

My last daily objectives for the week were to kill 75 mobs again and to play a warzone. I tried to re-roll the mob killing in hopes of getting a GSF match to synergise with my weekly but got bug killing on Alderaan instead.

I decided to finish my weeklies first and played one last GSF match, which we actually won decisively! First victory I had all week. Then I did Depths of Manaan with my Juggernaut tank and it was quite smooth. I liked that we had this one dps who pulled a couple of times but then actually apologised for it.

With just the dailies left, I joined a warzone on my Shadow, but it was a Hypergate that was less than a minute from ending, and my team was behind. Unsurprisingly, I didn't manage to pull off some miracle move to make us win after all, but at least it was quick completion credit. For the bugs, I couldn't be bothered to try and figure out some interesting activity that would maybe coincide with bug killing anymore, so I just grabbed my dps Sorc and did a round randomly AoE-ing down Killiks just outside the Imperial spaceport.

Week 6 thoughts:

Well, I kind of surprised myself with my persistence in this one, since this would have been the perfect time to end my perfect streak of doing all the objectives, but even in the throes of Burning Crusade hype I found the time to log on at least briefly every day and knock out my dailies. I'm just too much of a sucker for a routine I guess.

Having done the flashpoint weekly two weeks in a row now, I think I'll likely avoid it going forward as it just takes too long compared to anything else and has no synergy with any of the dailies. Like I said last week, it would be nice if there was a daily objective for flashpoints of some sort, but since there isn't it sadly doesn't line up with anything else.

Otherwise this week was kind of dominated by mob killing dailies, giving me a chance to grow tired of those. I'm generally somewhat ambivalent about this sort of objective, because on the one hand it gives you options and you can tie it into some other activity, such as doing story missions or heroics on that planet, but on the other hand it can be seen as a cue to just mindlessly AoE everything in sight for quick completion, which is not the sort of thing I'm fond of.

Shintar's Galactic Seasons Diary, Week 1

As I predicted when the Seasons system was first announced, while I dislike the concept of being incentivised to repeat old content yet again, that doesn't necessarily prevent me from engaging with it and being somewhat entertained anyway. As such, I thought it would be interesting to keep a diary of my first week of completing my personal objectives to document my experiences with the whole thing.

Day 1:

When I inspected the new Galactic Seasons objectives lumped in with my Conquest, I was initially confused why they were marked as "pee zero". Only later did it dawn on me that it's probably meant to be PO and short for "personal objective".

My weeklies were the one to do three veteran flashpoints from a short list and three warzones. The warzones were easy enough for me to do and I decided to jump into a few matches on a lowbie mercenary. I only found out on the day of the patch that 6.3 also included the merging of the lowbie and midbie brackets, meaning that now all players from level 10 to 74 are lumped into matches together. I can't say I was happy to see that change, but the matchmaker was with me and I was lucky that evening, so that my team absolutely stomped the opposition in all three matches that I played. Also, the two missing Huttball maps are back, yay! I got into Quesh once.

A group of guildies was doing a quick Scum and Villainy story mode run since that was a weekly objective for many as well. I was asked if I wanted to join but declined since I didn't have that one. Instead I posted in the Discord channel dedicated to chatter about Seasons objectives, which one of the other officers had set up with some foresight, and asked if anyone was interested in joining me for the flashpoints later. There were a couple of offers of assistance, though I found out shortly afterwards that apparently the flashpoint objective is currently bugged. Good thing I learned that before actively spending time on trying to complete it. I used the option to re-roll my second weekly and now got Scum too.

My daily objectives were to kill mobs on Alderaan or Balmorra as well as do three heroics there, which seemed nicely synergistic. I took my DvL Shadow to Balmorra since she also still had her class quest unfinished there, so I progressed it a bit and did the three heroics in the Colicoid area. I've never seen that place so thoroughly cleared out before, I actually had to fight people for spawns.

Completing all this allowed me to claim my first reward in the form of the new Kubaz companion, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that he had a short Alliance alert associated with him. For some reason I'd expected him to just be a clicky to unlock like the companions you can get from the Nightlife event.

Day 2:

We had previously assumed that you could re-roll weekly objectives more than once, but this turned out to be not the case, so I was "stuck" with operations for good or ill. Fortunately around lunch time another guildie with the same weekly decided to set up a Scum pug run (not many guildies were online). It was... an adventure, as pugs so often are, but we still completed the operation within the hour so it wasn't too bad.

I tackled the daily objectives in the evening and sadly they were less synergistic this time - but I wanted to at least give them a try once before re-rolling. One was to complete a GSF match, which was fine to me, though I got into a completely unbalanced death match on the losing side. It was over very quickly and I was the top performer on my team by having managed to earn one medal... everyone else finished on zero. Based on the general chatter about GSF, we seem to once again be back to the problem of Bioware adding extra incentives for participating to keep the queues popping, but this just ends up filling up the matches with people who hate Starfighter and may even intentionally decide to do nothing or even sabotage their own team by suiciding. I'm not sure what the solution to that is.

My other daily was to kill insectoids on Alderaan or Balmorra - and was already partially completed as it seemed to remember that I had killed a lot of bugs during my rampage the day before. So I went and did the Colicoid heroics again, this time on a different character - I could see now why the area had been so busy the day before, though it was a bit better that night. Still, killing 75 bugs specifically still felt like it took really long. I concluded that if I was going to do that one again I needed to find a better area to farm them in, with more weak mobs in it that are quick to kill.

Day 3:

One of my daily objectives was to kill enemies on "coreward worlds", specified as Alderaan, Balmorra, Corellia, Mek-Sha or Onderon. Something from the previous day must have carried over again because I was immediately on 63/75, significantly reducing the amount of killing required. Still, I couldn't quite decide on which planet to go to, so instead opted to go for my other objective first, which required me to do Black Hole dailies. Conveniently, this actually ended up also completing the other objective, as (somewhat to my surprise) the Black Hole did count as Corellia for the purposes of this particular counter, which is not something I expected. (I mean, yes, it's technically correct, but you never know with these planetary sub-zones.)

Day 4:

Got the same heroic objective as on day one, but this time combined with having to kill 75 insectoids on Alderaan in specific, so I went and did the three Killik heroics there. This time nothing had carried over and I had to kill the full 75 mobs to get credit, which felt quite tiresome, especially considering that the larvae didn't count. Not a fan of this whole insect theme so far.

Day 5:

I was not pleased to find myself saddled with the exact same daily objectives yet again, being asked to kill even more bugs. Deciding that nothing could be worse than dealing with more insectoids, I used a re-roll on that one and it changed to at least require only the killing of normal enemies. In order to not have to deal with Balmorra or Alderaan again, I opted to do three heroics on Corellia this time.

This was pretty relaxing, until I checked my progress about halfway through the third heroic and noticed that the counter was still on 0/3 - and that while the objective description listed several planets, the objective name actually specified Alderaan. I sighed to myself a little, finished off the last heroic on my Guardian tank, and since that had also completed her Conquest I relogged on my Gunslinger to go to Alderaan after all. At least the mob farming was done, so I could choose three heroics that were quick to do and required minimal killing.

When I completed the last one of these, I still didn't see a pop-up for the daily objective, so I checked my list, worried that I had messed up yet again, but it showed as completed. Now I'm not sure whether I just managed to miss the completion notification message or whether the three Corellia heroics had counted after all (which I definitely would have missed) and it was just the progression counter that was bugged. So confused.

Day 6:

When I saw that my daily objectives were to kill insectoids on Alderaan and to kill insectoids on Balmorra, I screamed. I immediately re-rolled the Balmorra one and got a generic "kill mobs on core worlds" instead, which I figured would at least synergise. Though I was then told by a guildie that the two bug objectives are currently also bugged in a weird way and if you have both they will complete at the same time if you just do one planet... or something. Who knows.

Since heroics weren't part of my requirements this time around, I decided to do some GSI dailies on Alderaan, since I remembered a couple of them taking place in areas full of non-elite Killiks. Unfortunately I'd forgotten just how much driving around they require. My daily objectives were actually long done before I finished the quests, especially the one to search for Big Red. The big thranta was unlocatable in two separate instances (yes, I checked all five spots in each), and I only found it in the fifth spot in the third instance I checked. Cannot recommend this particular experience.

Day 7:

This time my daily objectives consisted of GSF (yay) and yet more bug killing, which I immediately attempted to nope out of with a re-roll, and got lucky enough to get more Black Hole dailies instead. While these are hardly my favourite thing ever, they beat having to kill bugs for the fourth time.

For the GSF match I chose a random alt that had never even done a single match, so I probably ended up spending more time on purchasing and sorting out ships and components than on actually playing, but oh well. My team lost once again, but at least it was a fair and reasonably fun match. Basically we were all equally terrible, so that the match timer ran out with both teams only on twenty-something kills each, but at least it was close.

Impressions so far:

At the moment, Galactic Seasons features too many bugs of both kinds. I get that new releases are always a big buggy at the start, but when a system is all about offering rewards for completing content within a limited time window, being unable to do so because of bugs is extra annoying (even if the Seasons system has a considerable buffer for potential inactivity built in).

Also, it seems to me that the weeklies are skewed more towards group content while the dailies are more targeted towards the solo player, which would be fine if you could get by doing just one type, but you absolutely do need to do at least some of both to earn all the rewards in time. Given the nature of my play style, I was happy with my weeklies but the dailies to kill x mobs on a specific planet got old quite quickly and I barely seemed to get anything else, even when I used the re-roll option.

Funnily enough, when I went to the forums to check how other people felt about this, the first thread I found had the title "Galactic Seasons - Daily Priority Objectives - More Options Please!", so I thought hey, other people agree with me and think the same! Then I actually read it and the first few pages were mostly people complaining that one out of the eight listed potential daily objectives being "do a warzone" (wish I'd got that one!) was "forcing" them into PvP... good reminder of why the forums should never be approached with too high expectations.

Either way, I'm not hopeful that Bioware will make any major adjustments to things like the objective mix at this point beyond fixing obvious bugs. We'll see how long I can put up with the bug grind. At least next week should send me to different planets.

Musings on Onslaught's Story, Part 3: Corellia & Beyond

After either helping or sabotaging the Republic fleets on Onderon and Mek-Sha, it's time for the big battle for the Meridian Complex on Corellia. Once again, spoilers abound!

On both factions, the briefing before the battle includes a lot of exposition about ships and battle plans. I couldn't help but think that to the type of player who just wants to jump straight into the action to get up close and personal, this could be a bit boring, but personally I appreciated the call-backs to weaponry developed in previous storylines such as the Isotope-5 powered ships of the Empire, and just the general effort to convey that both sides have competent leadership with an actual plan. Also, your involvement in these briefings emphasises that though the Alliance may have lost a lot of its power, it and by extension you are still considered very important to the war.

However, since you are also known for being good at kicking arse in person, you get asked to assist the ground troops, which leads to you doing the new Objective Meridian flashpoint. I think the flashpoint will deserve a post of its own later on... for the purposes of this one, it's enough to know that you spend some time fighting either Republic defenders or Imperial invaders in the streets of Corellia, until you get into the Meridian Complex itself, where it comes down to either shutting down or protecting the installation's shields.

The first place where you expect to do this turns out to have been rendered useless as controls have been rerouted to another level... by none other than Tharan Cedrax, yay! That leaves only one consular companion unaccounted for now. I'm really pleased that Bioware managed to weave his return into the main story here, and it fits well too. The encounter with him also features some pretty funny lines depending on your choices - I have to admit that I had to chuckle when I ordered him killed on my Marauder, and his last words "Holiday, I'm sorry" prompted Major Anri to go: "Holiday? What a weirdo." Also, my Sage looked hilariously put out when she recognised him.

On Imperial side you also get the option to flirt with Darth Malgus himself around this point! His response is a character-appropriate "ugh" before moving on. I just loved this.

Finally you have the big showdown between either you, Tau and Arn vs. Malgus or you and Malgus vs. Tau and some unnamed Republic soldiers/Jedi. These are both pretty well done and the fights quite interesting - though I swear the first time I did them they either bugged out in some way or I was completely zoned out because I came away thinking that they were really boring and the boss(es) had seemingly no interesting abilities.

Then I heard others talk about the fight and was confused when they mentioned all kinds of stuff happening of which I had absolutely no memory. The second time around I definitely noticed the actual mechanics too, so I have no idea what was going on there. (EDIT: On replaying the fight again last night, I think at least the first instance of me failing to notice any mechanics may have been simply due to the fact that if you have both Tau and Arn set to dps, they burn everything down very quickly, even Malgus.)

The one bit I found a bit wonky is what happens immediately after the fight, as your big feat of heroism basically consists of making a superhuman jump in a cut scene to get to the crucial console in time, which... didn't feel very heroic to me personally. Even worse, both your wounded opponent(s) and allies roll off the platform in the final moments and you just run off without as much as a: "Gosh, I hope he is/they are alright!" At least to me it didn't feel right for my character (any of them!) to have zero concern for the people that just fought by her side only two minutes ago.

On the plus side, everyone does definitely survive, and I do highlight this as a positive thing because I went into the final fight actively worrying about Malgus or Tau dying, which would have felt like a colossal waste to me considering how little time we've had with these characters so far. I didn't even want to have the option to kill either of them, not yet! So I'm glad to say that they lived to fight another day. Some enemies are just too much fun to have around for me to want to defeat them too quickly.

After securing victory for your faction in the final battle (from what I understand this is one place where you can't sabotage/betray anyone), you get a lot of honours bestowed on you. Regardless of your class, you get asked to integrate fully into the Empire or Republic or to make a conscious choice to maintain your independence. I thought that was actually an interesting question even for a loyalist, because while my trooper was instantly on board with simply serving the Republic again for example, my loyalist agent never liked being under the heel of Sith who had a 50-50 chance at best to be either competent or capricious. So while she's still definitely loyal to the Empire, it's because she cares about the people of the Empire. She definitely had no interest in going back to subjecting herself to the direct authority of the Dark Council again.

Then there are some neat rewards for you depending on your class: troopers get promoted to the rank of Colonel for example, while Jedi get offered a seat on Master Gnost-Dural's newly reinstated Jedi council. My warrior was basically offered her old job back (yes!) and I haven't played through the story on my inquisitor yet, but I heard that you get the option to go as far as to claim your old Dark Council seat back. All of this is simply awesome, period. I don't know how they are going to keep this much class specific detail straight if the story is going to stay generic, but I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth here.

Also worth noting is that Republic characters finally get to meet the new Supreme Chancellor Galena Rans, and she seems pleasant enough to deal with, which is nice. Republic leadership has not been painted in the best light for the last few years, and we really needed someone actually embodying the Republic's values at the helm again.

Anyway, you won and got your just rewards, time to roll the credits and do dailies, right? Not so fast!

For the first time in an expansion story, Bioware decided to not just wrap things up, but to also make it very clear where we'll be going next. (At the end of KotET Lana was worrying about trouble brewing ahead, but that was all very vague.) Back on the fleet, Tau or Anri introduce you to two people who want to meet you and who helped them out of the rubble after the battle: Kira and Lord Scourge! Finally! Now people can stop spamming each and every one of SWTOR's social media posts with "When's Kira coming back?", regardless of the post's actual subject...

Also, it turns out that Scourge was the mysterious Sith that attacked you on Mek-Sha, to test whether there was anything of Vitiate left in you. Also, it turns out that these two were the "mysterious observers" you could see in the distance from your base on Odessen just before the expansion. I remember someone on Twitter calling it (unfortunately I don't remember who it was) and me thinking that this was a weird theory, but they were completely right! Good on you, whoever you were!

For the Jedi knight, it's a great little reunion and involves some romance too: Kira is now open for some same-sex loving and Scourge can be romanced too! I was really hesitant about how to react to the latter on my knight because I wanted to romance him so badly back in the base game, but that was seven years ago at this point... since then my Guardian's gone through a lot of story and ended up with Arcann. I chose some of the flirt options anyway, just to see where they would go, and then pulled out at the last moment. I kind of thought there'd be an "I can't, there's somebody else" dialogue option or something, but since there wasn't, my knight basically just ended up saying that she thought it wasn't wise to rush into anything and that they'd talk about it again later. Cheeky minx likes to keep her options open!

Anyway, the big question with Kira and Scourge was always going to be why they hadn't shown up any earlier, considering everything you went through with Valkorion and that destroying the Emperor was literally Scourge's entire purpose in life. Surprisingly, they have a good excuse! They were busy destroying the Emperor's original body, which he had still stowed away somewhere as a sort of life insurance. (I did remember hearing/reading about that before at some point, so it didn't come out of left field for me.) Afterwards they were afflicted with some kind of disease caused by Vitiate's decaying body that knocked them out for more than a year until they were rescued by Master Satele and her new students, but then it afflicted them and they are currently stowed away on a distant transport ship, more or less comatose until someone comes to rescue them. Kira and Scourge want your help in saving them and destroying the Emperor's last legacy.

I thought it was a very interesting choice to finish on such a... not cliffhanger exactly, but obvious plot hook for the next story update, whenever that's going to come. I guess the folks at Bioware felt that making players feel too obviously "done" at the end of the story wasn't good for long term engagement. I can't say I minded though; the main story still feels like it wrapped up in a satisfying manner, and this is more of a tease of what's to come next. That said, I thought that going back to the old Emperor in any way, shape or form was the last thing I really wanted from the story, but Kira and Scourge kinda sold it to me. Of course, it also sounds very much like this next story update is then going to be the same for both factions again, which I'm less keen on, but I guess we'll see.

Bonus for Imperials only: They also get a scene that shows Darth Malgus strapped to a medical table while a doctor and a droid talk about what a nuisance it is to have to repair all those cybernetics again. The droid remarks that even the explosive device was damaged and needed taking out (forget subtlety, apparently Acina just decided to plant a bomb inside Malgus' body, dang), though the damage doesn't seem to have been caused by the debris under which he was buried... we have a brief moment of the doc going "oh noes" as he puts two and two together before we switch to a view of Malgus having set the lab on fire and demanding to be off with the medical droid. Exciting! So he's going to be on the loose as well now, another potential future plot thread. I guess we'll find out where he really stands on the subject of Republic vs. Empire when he isn't being kept on a leash by Acina or Vowrawn.

All in all, Onslaught's story has been very enjoyable to me, ramping up nicely after a bit of a weak start and finishing with an ending that once again has me excited about whatever's going to happen next. It has it all: class-specific dialogue options, companion returns, hanging out with entertaining NPCs - I couldn't really have asked for more!

SWTOR's Top Five Worst Planets to Navigate

Thanks to commenter sootnsweep for giving me the idea for this post. I don't think they actually meant to encourage me to make this particular post, but creativity works in weird ways. Thanks for the inspiration anyway.

#5 - Zakuul

Some of you might be raising your eyebrows at this one, thinking something along the lines: "Zakuul barely even qualifies as a planet, how confusing can it be?" Not that confusing, which is why it's only in fifth place, but considering how few open areas it consists of, it's still quite impressive how awkward Bioware managed to make those to navigate.

Look at this screenshot of the landing zone. Do you know where any of those arrows lead to? I've taken the wrong elevator while attempting to get to the last area I was still missing to uncover the full map on more than one occasion. There's also this area near the tram station where I swear I've gone up and down the stairs repeatedly just to watch the quest indicator change its mind about whether I should be going up or down. And despite of having done "To Find A Findsman" on multiple characters by now, there's still always that one part where I initially go the wrong way because the seemingly obvious route ends in a dead end and you actually have to go round the long way.

#4 - Iokath

I bet some of you were waiting for this one. It seems everyone loves to bash Iokath! And I agree that it's pretty underwhelming as a daily area and awkward to navigate.

Still, I couldn't justify placing it any higher on this list because as I expected when it came out, the confusion about where to go for your quests diminishes greatly once you've done the dailies a couple of times, and what with the various teleporters it doesn't take you too long to get to any of the parts of the map that you need to visit to complete your daily round. There's just this one area in the south-east part of the map where you have to follow a pretty annoyingly serpentine path to get to an objective, but at least the related mission is easy to avoid.

#3 - Balmorra

Good old Balmorra. I'm sure everyone will immediately know what I'm referring to with this one. Most of the map isn't too bad, but this planet's problem are the lifts, which are mostly located in and around the Gorinth Canyon. Their problem is that a) they are located in annoying places that never allow you to just go straight from one objective to the next, and b) for some reason some of them aren't in the same places on Imperial and Republic side, so if you switch between factions a lot this can be extra confusing.

The Republic also has this one quest hub for the bonus series in the lower part of the canyon called Moraine Outpost which for some reason still doesn't have a quick travel point to this day, so the fastest way to get there is to QT somewhere else and then take a speeder. Why, Bioware?

Also, there are a bunch of broken bridges that tease you with the idea that you could be getting over there much faster if only the bridge wasn't missing a big chunk in the middle. I guess this teaches us that war is bad because broken infrastructure sucks.

#2 - Corellia

Corellia has two simple but persistent problems. The first and minor one is that all its areas look and feel extremely same-y. Except for the park, which I know has the zoo and Lucky in the middle, I couldn't tell you what's where. I still get confused about where to go every time we want to kill the Commander in the Imperial base or whenever I try to find one of the datacrons again. I know how they all work, but just finding the right general area they are in is more of a challenge to me these days than anything else and I usually quickly resign myself to consulting a guide rather than running in circles.

This is because of the second and larger problem, which is that Corellia's roads seem to have been designed with the intent to make the journey between any given points A and B as long as possible. It's pretty much a straight-up labyrinth. The worst thing is that the map can be very deceptive too, showing a path where actually the road leads to the dead end of a building wall or some collapsed bit of masonry prevents you from going any further.

I don't usually like to quote myself but I think I summed it up quite well in this post in which I was talking about levelling my Sniper: "[...] the maps are confusing and you constantly end up being lured into dead ends. There was one point where it took me something like fifteen minutes to find the right way to access one of my quest objectives... and I've been playing this game for nearly five years. FFS, Corellia."

#1 - Nar Shaddaa

I was somewhat torn whether Corellia or Nar Shaddaa should get first place, but I decided to give the award to Nar Shadaa for one simple reason: the Industrial Sector. I'll concede that most of Nar Shaddaa isn't too bad to find your way around, unless you're on a mission that tells you to go from one sector to the next and for some reason the quest indicator keeps telling you to go to the promenade first every time instead of simply pointing at your final destination. The smugglers' moon also suffers from a similar degree of "samey-ness" as Corellia, which always causes me to struggle to remember the datacron locations.

However, the Industrial Sector is the big one simply because it's three-dimensional, which is to say that there isn't a single overview map but that there are various ramps and lifts you have to take in order to navigate between different floors and which will spit you out in surprising locations.

If you know off the top of your head where each of these buttons takes you, I'll call you a liar. In fact, while trying to take this screenshot I initially quick travelled to the wrong place because of course I did, because who can remember what's where down there? And that's with me having gotten a lot better at navigating the area ever since the world boss that's located in a remote corner of the area became a Conquest objective, encouraging frequent visits.

Still, at the end of the day I think I can actually view it as a good thing that this list was relatively easy to come up with. While thinking about it I concluded that most of SWTOR's planets are actually fairly easy to get around on, which made the few exceptions to the rule easy to single out.

Conquerors of Corellia

Last week Total Galactic War came around again, and since it had been almost six months since the last one there was much excitement to be had. Not to mention that Bioware added two new planets to conquer in the form of Ossus and Ziost!

I happened to be home at the time of reset and the guild's Discord chat turned into a veritable war room as people discussed what would be the best course of action to take. With the 15% bonus towards the guild total that you now get for invading, there is once again pressure to get going as soon as possible, not to mention that there's also the psychological benefit of "staking your claim". At the same time we didn't want to accidentally go up against one of the big guilds by committing too early, however. While we may have become a bit blasé about all the small and medium planets we managed to conquer in the last six months, the large yield targets are still exciting because during a normal three/four planet week we don't stand a chance against the small handful of dedicated Conquest guilds that usually claim them. But with Total Galactic War there is a lot of spread and a chance for smaller guilds to punch above their weight, which we obviously wanted to make use of.

After some spying on Imperial side (since Balmorra and Taris are split by faction you can't see which guilds from the other side have committed to them) we settled on Corellia, which was our first choice in terms of how many people in the guild needed it for the achievement. We had a bit of a scare when we were soon joined by a relatively new guild called Exiles of Yavin which had been in the top ten for the large yield the previous week and a quick /who revealed that they had more than fifty people online... however from what we quickly gathered from their guild recruitment messages in general chat and their only slowly increasing score, they appear to be a social/casual guild who mostly just happen to score high due to their large number of active members. Let's just say that the Conquest-crazy Twins were more than a match for them and our lead over them was never really in question after the first night. I guess they had expected to go up against a guild of complete nobodies and didn't quite know what hit them.

While writing about the last Total Galactic War, I mentioned how the objectives got me to take part in activities that I don't usually bother with, such as the GSI dailies. The same thing happened this time, and I wasn't the only one either, which was really funny to me as guild chat suddenly had people who never do these quests talk shop as if we were all pros at doing them. In particular I remember a conversation that went something like this, about the Tatooine daily Looking for Droids:

A: Wow, they were in the very first sandcrawler I scanned!
B: Same thing happened to me!
C: Me too, how curious.
D: For me it was the very last one; I hate you all.
E: I just keep resetting the quest until I get them from the Anchorhead sandcrawler.
C: You can do that? Holy crap, I had no idea!

Made me laugh a lot.

A rich guildie also contributed some cash prizes for the biggest contributors this time around, and some people got really into it! It was quite fun to watch two players in particular race against each other - they were neck on neck until the last day. The winner had eventually earned an amazing 385k points for the guild. My own 195k spread across twelve characters were nothing in comparison!

Anyway, it was another very successful and fun event, and while the fact that it only occurs irregularly is part of the appeal, I do hope that we won't have to wait another six months for the next one.

Day 4: Missions & Conversations #IntPiPoMo

Wondering what the hashtag in the title is all about? Click here. Want to know all the themes that I have used and will be using for my 10 Days of SWTOR Screenshots? You can find the full list here.

My favourite thing about the story on Ziost is actually not the main events but the little sub-plot involving Agent Kovach. I had a whole little post written up about why that is, but for some reason it's been sitting in my draft folder for months... hmm... not sure why! I'll schedule it to go up after this one.

When the Imps take over Corellia, Darth Decimus holds a pretty impressive speech... well, actually I don't remember anything about the speech itself, but this visual from it was certainly nice enough for me to want to take a screenshot.

This screenshot is from an Imperial exploration mission on Alderaan called Bugs and Bombs which I find morbidly funny. Basically some Imps that carried valuable sensors have been killed and cocooned to the Kilik hives, so your mission is to bust them out to retrieve the sensors. However, from a mechanics point of view, the soldiers are still alive inside the cocoons, and when you pop them, the poor Imps fall to their deaths and give you XP as they die. It's so very wrong but I can't help but find it funny every time.

Speaking of funny, look at all these droids falling to their deaths on Makeb! Teehee.

What I imagine going through my Jedi knight's mind in this screenshot: "Nope, nope, nope, nope."

You might be wondering why I'm not featuring more shots from Knights of the Fallen Empire in this post, and in this series in general, considering how much I've praised its cinematic direction. And it does offer some great scenes for screenshots! The problem is that most of them are very obvious, so I've either used them before or they are just incredibly overused all over the web. This scene from Zakuul is a good example. Does it look cool? Hell yeah. Has every single person taken the exact same screenshot of their character standing with Lana and Senya? Probably. So there just isn't that much to show off here.

There is this neat little Imperial side mission on Quesh that has you observing a Republic walker blowing up through a set of binoculars. I really like this little cut scene. Shame I never feel half as cool when I use my own macrobinoculars.

I took so many screenshots of Kaon Under Siege for my Flashpoint Friday post about it, I didn't have room to use even half of them. It took me several runs to get this shot of Major Byzal getting jumped by a rakghoul and I'm quite proud of it... even if the rakghoul's pose mid-air is kind of comical.

IntPiPoMo count: 30

My 10th Level 55

Back in March I wrote a post called "Levelling My 10th Alt", in which I mused on how to keep the levelling process fresh when you've already done it more than a couple of times, and wondered which of my alts was going to be the next one to hit the level cap. As happens to me quite frequently in this game, I got distracted by max-level activities soon afterwards, and for the next six months, none of my alts really went anywhere. I think my Vanguard still hasn't finished her class story on Balmorra.

My Shadow actually hit 50 back in April but my pet tank and I felt little drive to continue levelling our consular duo for some reason and only got back to it very sporadically. This weekend however, we finally got there: while we're only at the end of Voss in terms of story progression, we went to Corellia to do some heroics for this week's conquest event, and those provided us with the last bit of XP we needed to hit 55.

I'm oddly happy to have reached the nice, round milestone of having ten characters at the level cap, and specifically to finally have a tank on Republic side. (Not to mention that Shadow/Assassin was the only advanced class I hadn't played to the cap in either of its incarnations yet.) While I levelled my Powertech in tanking spec last year, we don't run endgame content in our Imperial alt guild that often these days. I think I tanked Dread Fortress on story mode twice, Scum and Villainy once and that was it.

Based on my experiences back in WoW and in general, tanking isn't exactly my calling, but I can do a decent enough job at it with a bit of practice, and especially when it comes to alt runs tanks are often something that we're short on.

I'm also a very lazy raider to be honest, in so far as I tend to only really pay attention to the parts of each fight that are actually relevant to my role. Seeing how I'm playing a healer the vast majority of the time, with a healer main and two healer alts at 55, this means that I don't have much of  a clue about a lot of important fight mechanics. I vividly remember the first time I came along to Terror from Beyond as dps and just how much of a surprise I was in for during the second phase of the Terror fight. You mean I have to do something other than stand on a single platform most of the time and cast the occasional heal?!

While I've had a chance to do pretty much all operations as dps at least on the easier difficulties by now, tanking is still a great unknown to me when it comes to endgame. I think I'll quite enjoy getting a chance to finally unravel those old familiar fights from the one point of view from which I haven't seen them before.

(While my Guardian is one of my oldest alts, I've just never felt like speccing her for tanking. I'm not sure why; it just doesn't feel right for her.)

Saturday Night Ops

I originally wanted to do this five months ago, but sometimes it takes a while for an opportunity to present itself...



Also, I really love this screenshot, giving a whole new meaning to the term "being benched" - though in this instance it was actually simply a case of waiting for the bus boss to respawn...

I Should Be So Lucky

I often feel that SWTOR doesn't get enough credit for its open world content. I would never claim that it's the game's main selling point or that other MMOs don't offer more in that area, but if you listen to some people you would think that there is absolutely no reason for you to simply explore and enjoy the game's environments... but there is!

As an example of this, I really love all the named champion mobs that are scattered around the world. Often they won't drop anything interesting and only very few of them will give you a codex entry, but to me it's interesting enough just to find them. Why is this guy so much stronger than all the other mobs around him? Does his name tell me anything interesting? Am I strong enough to take him down on my own? There's just something intriguing about these mobs, and many of them offer a good challenge if you fight them at level.

Last night Pet Tank and I were making our way to Corellia to work on the main quest line that introduces the Seeker Droid mechanic. We were supposed to search Coronet Zoo, which had undergone some visible changes with the 2.0 patch - the most surprising of which was the fact that a ginormous rancor with the unassuming name "Lucky" was ambling around the area now. We weren't quite sure how to classify him. We hadn't heard anything about there being any new world bosses on Corellia, but he had over seven million hitpoints - more than many operations bosses - so he wasn't clearly just another champion mob.

Figuring that we were pretty invincible as a tank/healer duo (/cough), we attacked. We shaved off about 200k of his health (less than three percent) before he managed to flatten us. We were promptly rewarded for our failure by receiving a new codex entry and title: "Unlucky". Hah!

That immediately raised an obvious question of course: if we did manage to kill him, would that make us "Lucky"? The notion was proposed to other guildies who were online at the time, and they too were interested in finding out.

It took a while to get everyone together, but in the end we formed an ops group consisting of eleven people and took him down. Having a full group made the fight a lot easier, though it also helped that he seemed to be a bit buggy, which meant that some of his attacks turned into random raid warnings that read like error messages instead of actually doing any damage:

[damage] [caster=2397000097892] [target=4611686685367674842] [prim
=target] indeed...

The fight took something like ten minutes and was actually pretty boring in terms of mechanics. Personally I was still really happy to have been there though, because for me it was all about the experience of discovering this boss unexpectedly and then finding that there was more to him than met the eye.

He didn't drop anything too exciting, but we did all get "Lucky".

And now that I've written this post, with that title, I wish that I had thought of recording the fight and then making a video out of it to the tune of this song.

Day 1: Bugs

This is the first post in my 10 Days of SWTOR Screenshots challenge. Click on any screenshot to see a larger version.

Bugs in raids are rarely fun, because often they prevent you from killing bosses even if you are capable, or they make you jump through unnecessary hoops just to be able to re-attempt the fight (such as resetting the whole instance and clearing the trash again - I'm looking at you, HM Fabricator and pre-1.2 HM Ancient Pylons).

However, every now and then you do get a laugh out of one, such as in this case, where a trash mob in Karagga's Palace somehow became immune to damaging abilities but was also perma-stunned at the same time - so he just stood there, twitching helplessly and keeping us in combat. We eventually managed to resolve the issue by punting him off a nearby elevator shaft where he died from the fall damage, which we thought was most amusing. As an aside, I'm not sure my guild leader is supposed to be nothing but a floating double-bladed lightsaber either.

On Corellia you meet an alien race called the Drall (as Republic anyway), or as I refer to them, "the guinea pig men". On my consular I got to go into a library that was full of them, but they didn't all look entirely well. I mean, I see a leg, but everything else looks kind of... inside out?

This one might've been a graphics glitch more than a bug, but I still found it most unsettling: my twi'lek's lekku disappeared while questing in the Black Hole! And no, that didn't just make her look like a normal person with green skin... it was just wrong.

Into The Black Hole

The rakghouls are still running loose, but I wanted to break up the deluge of world event related posts (not just here, but everywhere else too) with something else by talking about the Black Hole, the new daily quest hub introduced in 1.2. There are a lot of aspects to it that made me think.

First off, there is the location. I have to admit that when I first heard that we were going to get a daily hub on Corellia, I assumed that it was going to be placed on the already existing map of the planet. After all, TOR's planets are pretty big, so I figured that it shouldn't be difficult to fit some more content into a corner somewhere. Worst case, if they really needed more space, they could always add another sub-zone and extend the tram line. Right?

As such I was kind of taken aback when I arrived in search of the new dailies and the quest marker led me to a shuttle, which presented me with a loading screen and then a new area that was entirely separate from the rest of the planet. I have to admit that this left me feeling a bit disappointed, because you get no sense whatsoever of where the Black Hole is supposed to be in relation to the areas of Corellia that you already discovered.

Having the Black Hole as a completely separate area also isn't conducive to getting groups for the heroic daily, as general chat only lets you talk to the people in the same instanced sub-zone instead of everyone on Corellia.

The impact of the extra loading screen is not to be underestimated either, as they are very long and unpleasant as it is - having to deal with no less than three of them just to get from the fleet to the Black Hole is honestly a bit off-putting.

When I first talked about the Belsavis dailies, I noted that they didn't feel like they had been designed to be dailies, what with how weird it felt to have the same NPC conversations over and over, and the way that it just made no sense to do some of those missions repeatedly. I appreciate that repeating most content in an MMO requires a certain suspension of disbelief, but there are degrees to this, and things like the crashed pilot on Ilum were just stretching it beyond my patience. (One of my guildies has taken to referring to that guy as "that hermit who hoards all our medical supplies" - that's indeed what he comes off as in the context of his mission being a daily quest!)

Comparatively, the Black Hole dailies clearly have been designed to be repeatable from the start. Killing Quick-Hands Quarl over and over again doesn't exactly make sense either, but at least most of the dailies present the player with fairly generic tasks that live up well to repetition: kill some gang members, retrieve stolen weapons etc. They are also handed out by a terminal, so it's not required that you space-bar through the same conversations over and over again just to pick up your dailies every day.

I was surprised that I actually had somewhat conflicting feelings about this. I mean, it makes sense and it is convenient! And yet... there is a small part of me that was actually a little disappointed to see that once I had done the initial breadcrumb quest that led me to the new area, there was no more talking and no more story. Just clicking "accept" to kill ten dudes simply doesn't really feel right for SWTOR; it's just not what the game is about! I'm hoping that my appreciation for the no-nonsense structure of these dailies will increase with time and repetition. I guess I was just hoping for a bit more from that first experience, even if it was an irrational hope, seeing how the quests don't treat you any differently depending on whether you pick them up for the first time or for the tenth.

I may have sounded somewhat critical so far, but in terms of gameplay I have to give the Black Hole a big thumbs-up. First off, I appreciate once again that Bioware didn't feel the need to incentivise doing the whole lot of them every day - in fact the weekly quest that rewards the precious new Black Hole commendations only requires you to do each quest once a week, which strikes me as extremely generous and friendly towards casual play. There are also only six new daily quests in total, which is a pretty piddly amount by most standards, but again it is something that I am extremely grateful for. If you're the kind of player who feels constrained by WoW's limit of 25 daily quests a day, you might feel cheated by SWTOR here and feel like there is "nothing to do"... but personally I appreciate the way this design truly adds the new dailies as something extra, something to do when you feel like it, instead of presenting them as important content that you're expected to spend your entire evenings on for the next two months.

I also think that some of the quest mechanics are quite inspired and amusing. The one to plant the listening devices is quite atmospheric, and if you're like me, you'll constantly curse yourself for clumsily setting off yet another sensor. Tip: Bring a dps-specced scavenger with you and they'll tell you that it's perfectly okay to summon hordes of sentry droids as they happily collect their Durasteel after another round of AoE.

The mission to plug the radiation leak is fun too - the first time I just ran right into the radiated water and died, not noticing that I already had a quest item in my bags that I was supposed to use to protect myself. Funnily enough, many people I talked to did the exact same thing. There's also this little island in the water that looks like you should be safe quickly running over onto it, but you keep taking damage while standing on it and will die quickly. Maybe it's morbid, but I enjoy silly mechanics like that. I've even heard of people intentionally killing themselves in the radiation to quickly res back at the base afterwards.

The heroic 4 daily at the end is quite nice as well, not too difficult but still rewarding proper use of abilities like crowd control and interrupts. Also, unlike the former Belsavis heroic 4s, it can't be soloed by stealthers, which I have to admit fills me with a certain amount of glee. We want you in our groups too, you Shadows and scoundrels, don't always go off to do your own thing! I just think it's a bit of a problem that general chat is limited to this tiny area, making it a bit of a hassle to pull in help from elsewhere if there aren't enough people in the immediate vicinity right when you need them.

On the whole, I'm happy with this addition, but I do hope that Bioware won't just add more and more dailies as new content with every patch. They have their place, but in my opinion they should never be the focus of a game, even more so one that's as story-heavy as The Old Republic.