Ranking the 7.7 Dynamic Encounter Planets

I've been meaning to write more about the dynamic encounters that were added with patch 7.7 for a while, but I struggled to make up my mind about what format I was going to use for the post. I had fun with the top ten lists I made for Hoth and Tatooine, but that format doesn't work so well when you're dealing with a larger number of planets, each of which has a much smaller number of dynamic encounters than those two.

I ultimately decided that I'm just going to rank the planets against each other instead, talking about each planet in more general terms instead of discussing too many individual encounters in detail.

Going from best to worst, I would start with: 

1. Dromund Kaas

If you split the seven planets that had dynamic encounters added in 7.7 into three groups - capital worlds, starter planets and Ilum - I think both of the capital worlds definitely came out on top. With more than twenty unique encounters per planet they offer the most variety of the bunch, as well as offering an easy way to grind Conquest points.

The encounters on Dromund Kaas are thematically very varied, mostly leaning into the different regional "themes" previously established in side missions, such as the spaceport being somewhat in disarray or the lightning spires being under attack. They mostly seem to be set in the same time period as those original exploration missions, though I noticed while dispersing unruly Imperial citizens in Kaas City that one of them yelled "What is Xarion hiding?", which I thought was an interesting detail that would place that one after Onslaught in the timeline.

In general, most of the encounters are quick and fun, and strategically placed in locations where people are bound to come through on their way to some other mission objective, making it very temping to allow yourself to be distracted for a moment to complete an encounter. Prime examples of this are doing "Bad Monkey" just after arriving at the spaceport, or hunting down the rogue bounty hunter while passing through Kaas City.

If I had to cite anything negative, I'd say that there are a couple of encounters with flaws. The Apex Predator in "Shock and Awe" feels way overtuned for levelling players (trying to solo it on a level thirty-something with a healer companion I was chunked to death within only a couple of hits), and the final boss for "Kubaz Incursion" can be a bit annoyingly hard to find. "Powder Keg" actually being possible to fail is a neat idea but the fact that it's the only encounter of this kind and that it's not obvious at all what is going on unless you're already in the know makes it a bit unpleasant in that regard.

Also, I wish they'd fix encounter voice lines sometimes playing when the encounter isn't even up, because every time my speeder rides past the lightning spires I get spammed with yells about multiple encounters that may not actually all be active.

Anyway, all in all it's still a fun romp, and the reason it's edging out Coruscant for first place in my opinion is that the map makes it both cheap and easy to get around if you want to do multiple encounters. Which brings us to...

2. Coruscant 

In general, Coruscant is one of my top three planets in the entire game, and most positive things I said about the dynamic encounters on Dromund Kaas above also apply to Coruscant. The reason I put it in second place is simply the fact that it's a bit of a pain to travel between dynamic encounters due to the planetary layout with the different sectors, which all count as being really far apart, which in turn means that moving between them always requires either a looong taxi ride or paying the maximum price for quick travel. Even if you do opt for quick travel though, the sectors are still laid out in such a way that it can be a pain to just travel from one dynamic encounter within the same sector to the next one.

The said, I adore most of the encounters in the Senate Plaza, which is where I'm always passing through when I exit my stronghold, and I basically never pass on an opportunity to set off some fireworks or to help clean up the party's aftermath.

Negatives are that some of the Black Sun and Justicar encounters don't have nearly enough clickies if there's even more than one person trying to do the encounter at the same time, the way Ugnaught Engineering was horrifically bugged when it first came out and made people get into fights about who was supposedly causing it to bug, stealing kills or whatever (regardless of whether it was true or not), and the one encounter on the Senate Plaza that I don't like, "Understaffed". Like with "Powder Keg", you can tell someone just wanted to try something different there, but the final result is just too undercooked, with a tutorial mode that teaches you to do things the wrong way, and people being able to ruin the encounter for each other - both intentionally and unintentionally - which is never a good thing.

3. Tython 

Next we have the starter planets, which I think are all pretty similar in quality, and I don't feel particularly strongly about the order in which I've ranked them against each other. The main reason I consider them worse than the capital planets it that there are very few encounters, so you'll run out of things to do pretty quickly if you're just trying to grind on a single planet, and that none of the DEs on the starter planets give Conquest points. I can see why the devs decided to have that limitation, but it still means that for someone who's very Conquest-focused like me, they tend to have a lot less replay value.

With that general preamble out of the way, Tython is definitely my favourite of the bunch, since it's my favourite of all the starter planets and I think all its dynamic encounters are very on point, whether you're doing simple chores at the Jedi Temple or beating back the flesh raiders.

The only thing I'll say is that I do wonder a little how having a dynamic encounter pop up the moment you leave your intro phase is going to affect new players' perception of the planet and the game as a whole, and whether it might make things come off as a bit "loud" and overwhelming to less experienced gamers. I would love to have insight into the devs' behavioural metrics on the starter planets for that one... 

4. Hutta

Hutta is actually one of my least favourite planets, generally speaking, but I think in terms of dynamic encounters it works well enough. Again, the themes of the encounters go very well with what's also conveyed via the existing side missions, from dangerous wildlife to rebellious evocii.

The only thing I'm not so sure about is having an encounter that is basically a vehicle quest right outside the spawn phase, because it makes me wonder whether that isn't a bit confusing/overwhelming for new players. Even if seeing a bunch of droids enter the gang wars right outside the Poison Pit does serve to drive home the point that the town is a bit of a mess. 

5. Ord Mantell

Ord Mantell is one of two planets where I actually feel like some of the encounters are slightly off in tone. This may very well be my personal bias speaking, as someone who mains a trooper and was instantly scarred by being blamed for the death of Bellis the informant at the hands of the separatists by multiple people, but I always perceived the whole setting with the separatists as very dark and desperate. Even the smuggler story with all its goofiness has a pretty dark turn here with Corso's parents being dead because of the separatists and him having that one moment where he wants to execute that random sep in cold blood.

With that said, I just feel like some of the encounters involving separatists feel a bit too silly. Like that mad scientist type sending you out to shoot separatists with one of his droids? It's one thing if there's a specific NPC that's bit ridiculous when you talk to them, that's clearly just that one character, but the fact that you hear the dynamic encounter yells repeated endlessly even when you're just driving by gives them a much stronger impact on the mood in my opinion. Might just be me.

6. Korriban

That's also the reason why I rate Korriban last of this batch, because again, several of the encounters just feel a bit too goofy to me personally. Don't get me wrong, both the Sith warrior and inquisitor stories have plenty of humorous moments even on Korriban, but I still always got the vibe that as a setting, the planet is clearly meant to be very grim, with all the racial purity nonsense and dog-eat-dog behaviour encouraged in the acolytes. Stuff like k'lor'slugs running wild around the academy feels more like the kind of hijinx you'd find in a young adult book series about a magic school. (That said, looking at how busy each planet is, this one actually seems to be very popular with people, so again, this might just be me.)

7. Ilum 

Finally, in last place - alas, poor Ilum. I really wanted the addition of dynamic encounters to this planet to feel like a revival for it. I have some fond memories of Ilum from the game's early days, even though it felt somewhat unfinished even then, but over time it's only ever declined in relevance. Sadly I can't say that I feel like dynamic encounters have put it back on people's radar, and based on the small number of other people I see doing encounters there, I get the impression that it didn't really land for the majority of the population either.

Good things first: the theming is once again spot-on on this one. They really leaned into the Republic vs. Empire conflict from the original storyline and even added some encounter achievements that are meant to encourage world PvP. (I'm 99% sure that almost nobody will bother with those, but I appreciate the effort.) On the Western Ice Shelf, they've expanded on the lore of the Tonvarr Pirates that were previously only really relevant during the Gree event. It all works.

The problem is simply that too many of the encounters are just not very fun. Too many of them have multiple stages and feature a large number of mobs - when sometimes mob-killing isn't even part of the main objective, which makes it feel like you're just endlessly wading back and forth through constantly respawning mobs to actually get to the next clicky you need. It just feels tedious to the point that my brain keeps trying to forget that Ilum is another planet that has dynamic encounters now and I very rarely even remember to go there.

All that said, I wanted to also give a shout-out to a change to dynamic encounters in general that came with 7.7 but that I didn't see in the patch notes: When they released these new encounters, they changed it so that on staged DEs, you no longer need to complete every single stage by yourself to get credit, but rather you can join in at any time and still get completion. I feel that this has been a great change and has been most noticeable for me during encounters such as the base attacks on Tatooine and Hoth. It used to be that I felt that there was no point in joining in if people were already fighting the stage two walker, as it wouldn't give me anything and I'd just have to restart the encounter from scratch afterwards anyway. Now I'll gleefully jump in and help out because I'll actually be rewarded for it too, which I think has been a great change.

How many of the new encounters have you done at this point? And do you agree with my ranking of the planets or not? Let me know in the comments. 

Shintar's Galactic Season 6 Diary, Week 4

After the madness of trying to push for a win in Total Galactic War while also doing seasons across all servers at once, week four looked like it was going to be positively chill. There was some oddness in the weekly objectives though, as there were two origin story objectives as well as two flashpoint objectives. Here's how I viewed the lot of them:

• Earn 200k Conquest points: Yes, easy, no problem.
  
• Visit another player's Manaan stronghold: Sure, of course.
  
• Complete 8 repeatable or side missions and kill 100 mobs on the capital worlds Coruscant or Dromund Kaas: I was definitely going to do this one, as I had plenty of alts in that level range across all servers.
  
• Complete 15 missions as a Jedi knight or Sith warrior: Another definitive yes.
• Complete 15 missions as a Jedi consular or Sith inquisitor: While the doubling up seemed weird to me, I saw no reason not to do both.
  
• Dig up 3 treasures at a seeker droid dig site: So, I generally like this one and there's a reason I made sure to unlock the seeker droid on at least one character on all servers. It's very chill and can be done while queueing for something else, but it can be kind of time-consuming as well if you're unlucky with your digs, so I figured I was going to do it on some servers, but not all.
  
• Complete 2 out of 4 selected "Underworld" flashpoints (Mandalorian Raiders, Cademimu, Directive 7, Spirit of Vengeance): I figured I might do this on a couple of servers, but not all.
  
• Complete 2 out of the 4 Revan flashpoints (Taral V, Maelstrom Prison, Boarding Party, The Foundry): Now this was super odd to me and I figured I might do either one flashpoint objective or the other, but there was no way I was going to do four flashpoints on each server.
  
• Earn 25 medals in Galactic Starfighter: I'm not a huge fan of this objective as I'm not great at GSF, so this one takes me at least three times as long as the regular "play matches" one. Still, I figured I might maybe do it on Darth Malgus.
  
• KotET chapter 7 on veteran mode or higher: As usual, no.
  
• Colossal Monolith on any difficulty: Like other lair bosses, I figured this was a given with my guild on Darth Malgus, but unlikely (though not impossible) to happen anywhere else.
  

Day 1 - Tuesday

I slept very little that night, followed by a long day in the office (where I was biting my nails around lunch time waiting for the results of Conquest to come in). As soon as I got home, it was time for our usual Tuesday raid, where we all (somewhat unusually) played like muppets. I had a brief look at the Conquest results that our... "Conquest accountant" sent me but was otherwise happy to go to bed early, not doing anything for seasons that day at all.

Day 2 - Wednesday

I decided to do a quick round of all the servers around lunch time, but before the reset. On Leviathan and Tulak Hord, doing few missions on Dromund Kaas on my inquisitors there got the daily objective done quickly (and offered nice synergy for the weeklies).

On Satele Shan, my knight still had a bunch of completed side missions from Coruscant in her log from god knows how many months ago, so I started by running around and handing all of them in. I was somewhat dismayed to find that only one of them counted as an exploration mission for the Coruscant seasons objective, but nonetheless I picked up some more where I had left off. As Conquest gains for low-level missions were much lower on a higher-level character, I eventually relogged my consular to finish off the seasons daily with a quick companion level-up.

On Star Forge, I logged into my lowbie consular and did some more missions on Tython. I smashed some flesh raiders and levelled up a couple of times until the daily objective was done.

Since it was getting close to reset at this point, I just expanded my Coruscant stronghold on Shae Vizla and ranked up a crew skill. On Darth Malgus I gave a companion gift to push me over the daily requirement (the previous night's ops had earned me some points already).

It was a busy day for me and I didn't get to play more until relatively late in the evening. I started by playing two GSF matches on Darth Malgus, before switching to Leviathan to continue questing on Dromund Kaas on my inquisitor. I only had to hand in two missions before hitting the daily objective.

On Tulak Hord, I decided to mix things up a bit by queueing for a random veteran mode flashpoint on my inquisitor. She was only eligible for nine of them, and five were featured seasons objectives, so I figured what were the odds? Of course I then got Black Talon, which was one of the not featured ones. Someone expressed annoyance as soon as we zoned in and quit the group the moment not everyone space-barred on the first cut scene. Ironically it went much faster after that person had left... at least the run completed my daily objective and counted as my inquisitor completing several missions.

On Satele Shan, I did a few more missions with my knight until I hit the Taskmaster Conquest objective and with that also my seasons daily. On Star Forge, I continued on Tython with my baby consular, and it didn't take long until she achieved Taskmaster and the daily objective too.

On Shae Vizla, I was about to continue my consular's class story for the missions as a consular when I realised I'd never done the Coruscant or Dromund Kaas side missions on this server. So I returned to Coruscant, hoovered up all the exploration missions and killed Migrant Merchants Guild members until I saw that lovely "influencing the galaxy" pop-up. I was ready for bed by then.

Day 3 - Thursday

After another long day at the office, I logged into Darth Malgus and just played a GSF match there. We won and this completed my 200k Conquest points objective, but only advanced me towards the 25 medals for GSF by one.

On Leviathan I did some more Dromund Kaas missions on my inquisitor, and on Tulak Hord I decided to spin the wheel in the group finder again. This time I got Cademimu and had a smooth enough run. The lowest-level person got a bit lost at one point after dying and having to run back, but I'm happy to say that we backtracked to rescue them and no unfriendly words were said. Apparently this counted as having completed 15 missions as an inquisitor already.

On Star Forge I continued on my baby consular on Tython, until she too hit the 15 missions completed objective. On Satele Shan, my knight handed in one mission on Coruscant, which completed her business there - since I still needed to complete more missions as a knight, however, I then continued with her class story on Alderaan until the daily objective was complete too. My consular on Shae Vizla also finished the objective on Coruscant before getting her daily done.

Day 4 - Friday

I did a bit of PvP on Darth Malgus around lunch time, and got put into four Voidstars in a row, three of which were losses. Thanks, game!

Later, I logged through all the servers to do a bit of tidying up - one side-effect of last week's Conquest mania was that while I had found time for some seasons objectives, I'd neglected to clear out my bags and they were full of junk everywhere. On Leviathan I followed this up with a few more Dromund Kaas missions on my inquisitor, and on Tulak Hord I decided that my inqusitor there might as well finish her "Searching for Allies" weekly mission by queueing for one more random flashpoint. I got the Foundry this time, which was also on the list of featured flashpoints. I also liked this run because we actually had a polite conversation about whether to do the bonus or not - we ultimately decided not to, but only after talking about it!

On Star Forge I decided to try my luck with the random queue on my knight, but unfortunately she just got a Hammer Station. At least that completed the daily objective, and somehow counted as no fewer than six missions completed as a Jedi knight. On Satele Shan, I completed my knight's class story on Alderaan, which ticked her over the 15 missions completed there.

On Shae Vizla, I decided to queue for a random veteran flashpoint on my consular. After a few minutes of waiting I realised that since it was still relatively early in the evening for me, most APAC players were probably still asleep, but just as I thought about going to do something else I got a pop after all. After a quick Taral V run with lots of trash skipping, I was halfway towards another flashpoint objective and had 15 missions as a consular ticked off on this server as well.

Later in the evening, I returned to Tulak Hord and did 15 missions on Tython on my littlest Jedi knight who is too low-level to do Conquest as of yet. By the time he completed the objective, he was level 9.

Day 5 - Saturday

In the morning I decided to log into Shae Vizla and queue for all the featured flashpoints on both veteran and master mode on my warrior. I got into a vet mode Boarding Party with a level 80 Sorc healer who used their knockback on cooldown to scatter trash mobs to the four winds. After one particularly egregious example where one of my smashes went into thin air after they'd knocked three mobs away from me a half-second before I would've hit them, I politely asked if they could stop doing that. They didn't respond and continued doing their thing, so I put them on ignore at the end of the run. Kind of petty, I know, but Boarding Party is a long flashpoint, and being trolled on every single trash pull was getting pretty damn aggravating. At some point I don't care anymore whether they were doing it intentionally or just a complete newbie who doesn't know their abilities and doesn't read chat, I just didn't want to get grouped with them again. At least this completed one of my flashpoint seasons objectives, plus it counted as completing five missions on my warrior.

I queued again for the remaining four flashpoints and got Mandalorian Raiders this time. I had a brief sweat drop moment when on the second pull the Sniper in the group catapulted a group of mobs away from me, but he was actually trying to defend himself and it was just a one-time thing. I enjoyed this run otherwise.

In the afternoon I mostly played GSF and did PvP on Darth Malgus. The GSF matches went a bit better than before and got me to 20/25 medals for the seasons objective.

In the evening I used our social night to kill the Colossal Monolith and get both flashpoint objectives done with Mr Commando. We chain-ran master mode Boarding Party, Spirit of Vengeance, the Foundry and Mandalorian Raiders in a single session. It felt long. On the plus side, since I made a point of asking to do this on Imp side (where we usually spend less time), we also got a bunch of achievement progress.

On the other servers I did the following things in the evening:

On Leviathan, I did a couple more Dromund Kaas missions on my inquisitor. The daily was done after only two of them and I was starting to realise that, since I usually switched servers after hitting the 25k Conquest for the daily and for some reason that was happening really quickly while playing my inquisitor, I had completed zero weeklies on Leviathan yet. I made a mental note to push myself a bit more on Sunday.

On Tulak Hord, I did a Dromund Kaas heroic on my inquisitor since I had run out of exploration missions for her to do. Interestingly, when you do this objective via the optional one-time quests, you'll usually get your kills way before you've completed enough missions, but the heroics seemed to be shaping up the opposite, though she did hit the 200k Conquest points earned objective. Logging over to Republic side, I put my trooper into the queue for all the featured flashpoints on master mode, though it was kind of late and nothing popped. I went and did a heroic on Coruscant to pad my kill count on the capital worlds and push myself over the 25k required for the daily objective.

On Satele Shan, I thought I'd queue for some seasonal flashpoints while digging for treasure on my consular, but I got a pop before I even made it to the dig site. I got into a vet mode Taral V that was... stressfully fast. Look, I've resigned myself to people wanting to skip and rush to some degree, and at times I even welcome it! But there are degrees, and the guy who took the lead in this run was just driving on and pulling more while completely ignoring the rest of the group, whether anyone got dismounted or aggroed a group we were trying to skip... the vibe was definitely "I can solo this so the rest of you don't matter to me". We completed the run smoothly enough but I felt unhappy and wished that people weren't like that.

Since I was now halfway done with one flashpoint objective and I wasn't sure I wanted to do both on this server, I queued again for Taral V and Maelstrom Prison only. And I got Taral V again! With the same guy! This time I managed to fall off a bridge at one point, something that hasn't happened to me in ages, though I was fortunate enough to not die... I landed safely further down the path we had originally taken, so just had to loop back around while the rest of the group continued on. To the guy's credit, they did give me a moment to catch up eventually... or maybe they were just slowed down by the unskippable mobs on the bridge... Either way: so not necessary.

On Star Forge I braved the random veteran queue on my Jedi knight again and got a Cademimu run this time, which counted for one of the flashpoint objectives. Nothing remarkable about that one other than that General Ortol almost forgot about his rockets... he only fired a single one towards the end, just before he was about to die.

On Shae Vizla, I queued for the set of four featured flashpoints again and went to visit a Manaan stronghold in the meantime (fortunately a public one was available). This gave me a bunch of Conquest for completing four weekly objectives, so when nothing popped after ten minutes or so, I just used a rep token to push me the last bit of the way to the daily requirement and called it a night.

Day 6 - Sunday

Around lunch time before reset, I logged into Leviathan to play a bit of catch-up. I queued for the featured underworld flashpoints and got into a vet mode Mandalorian Raiders that was interesting in a couple of ways. First off, we killed Braxx before his hounds and the world didn't end... I thought they had an enrage or something! But then on the last boss, most of us were still killing the turrets outside his room when one guy charged in and pulled the boss, and by the time we joined him, the boss was almost dead while only having spawned a single set of turrets? I have no idea how that went down. Anyway, the guy /stucked because of course the remaining turrets kept us in combat and he told us to do the same, but we just killed them instead. Afterwards I dug up some treasure with my seeker droid. While I was still only on one weekly completed at that point, I was partially done with a lot of others and felt like I was in a much better place.

I then logged over to Tulak Hord and queued for all the featured flashpoints on master mode again. I got into a Cademimu run where we even did the bonus boss and I was happy with that.

After reset I logged into Shae Vizla and queued for the underworld flashpoints first and got an instant pop for Mandalorian Raiders vet mode. This run completed both that flashpoint objective plus 15 missions as a Sith warrior, taking me to 7/7 weeklies completed on this server.

A bit later I logged into Leviathan and queued for the underworld flashpoints on my knight again. I got an instant pop and was pleasantly surprised to find myself in Spirit of Vengeance. Having four flashpoints to pick from for variety is less effective when a lot of people specifically avoid certain ones - I was fully expecting to see nothing but Cademimu and Mando Raiders in the public queue all week. It went fine and completed that flashpoint weekly objective for me.

Afterwards I visited a Manaan stronghold and since I was still short a few missions as a knight, I took her to Balmorra (where she's currently in her class story) and cleared out Sobrik to get that done as well. This put me at 5/7 weeklies completed on Leviathan, with two more almost complete and easy to finish off the next day.

I visited Star Forge next and decided to complete my knight's vet mode flashpoint weekly by queueing for one more random. I continued to have bad luck and got into a Hammer Station. The group had a level 80 Sage healer who took point. When we expected them to make the first corner pull, they just kept running... and running... all the way to the drill, where they then stood and spammed heals on themselves. We eventually caught up and AoE-d everything down that they had pulled, but I was glad I wasn't the only one who expressed confusion about this strat in chat. When we got to the retractable bridge, they raced across just before it turned off, and then slowly soloed the next pull on the other side while the rest of us actually killed the turrets. I got the feeling they quietly cursed our "inefficiency" as they didn't say another word the entire run and quit instantly the moment the completion message came up. While I'd now completed 15 missions as a Jedi knight, I was only on 3/7 weeklies otherwise and not too happy about that, but I wasn't sure whether I could be bothered with a push for much more.

I decided to log over to Darth Malgus for the time being, where I did a GSF weekly on one of my Sith warriors, pushing me over the 15 missions completed as a knight or warrior and earning the last medals I needed. Then I visited a Manaan stronghold to take me to 7/7.

I logged into Tulak Hord while eating dinner and put myself in the queue for master mode Taral V and Maelstrom Prison, but nothing popped. I ended up just doing a couple of Coruscant heroics and logging off to do something else for a while.

Late in the evening I hopped onto Satele Shan, dug up some relics, visited a Manaan stronghold and did a few missions on my consular until I hit 200k Conquest points.

Day 7 - Monday

I logged into Star Forge shortly before reset, visited a Manaan stronghold and knocked out a couple of Coruscant heroics on my trooper main. After the reset, I knocked out the last couple of missions on Dromund Kaas on my inquisitor on Leviathan, to get that server to 7/7.

I then put myself in the master mode queue for the Revan flashpoints on Tulak Hord again, even though I knew it was a bad time and ultimately nothing popped, but I was able to also do the seeker droid objective while waiting.

In the evening I logged back into my trooper on Tulak Hord again and put myself back in the queue while questing, but I barely lasted ten minutes before also listing myself for the veteran versions. I just wanted to get that last objective done! I was surprised that it then still took another ten minutes to get a pop, considering this was German prime time. The actual Taral V run then only took another ten minutes too, though this time I was quite grateful for that. Also, the guy leading the skips in this one would instantly turn back and help kill any extra mobs that were aggroed, which I thought made a world of a difference. I guess it's less about skipping or not skipping and more about working together and with the other members of your group. Anyway, this brought me to 7/7 on Tulak Hord as well.

Hopping over to Star Forge, I put my trooper into the master mode flashpoint queue for the underworld flashpoints and did more heroics on Coruscant until the related seasons objective was ticked off. Just as I was about to start digging for treasure, I got a pop for master mode Mandalorian Raiders. This was a smooth and pleasant run that stood out to me for the tank's perfect calculation of number of mobs needed for the bonus boss, as we killed exactly 80 and not one more (and the reason I could tell this was calculated was that he was a Shadow, which allowed us to skip some pulls, but he got just the right number for us to unlock the bonus boss too). Once done, I dug up three treasures on Alderaan and with that, was 7/7 on Star Forge as well.

On Satele Shan I just had to complete a couple more story missions on Belsavis with my consular to go 7/7, which just left me to earn 25k Conquest points for the daily objective done on Darth Malgus and Shae Vizla, which was achieved easily enough. (Incidentally, one of the random master mode flashpoints I decided to run on Darth Malgus ended up being Ruins of Nul, but that has nothing to do with seasons... let's just say it was still a pain but we got there in the end.)

Week 4 - Thoughts

I was kind of surprised by how much effort this week took. By Sunday I was definitely considering forfeiting full credit for the week on some servers, but then I was pretty close already, so giving up so close to the finish line would've been annoying as well. In hindsight I think the problem was that this week was one that greatly benefitted from synergies between different objectives (such as doing the planetary missions or flashpoints on one of the featured origin stories) but I didn't always min-max that aspect and when I didn't, it actually increased the time required by a lot. I also wasted some time on the random queue without getting into the flashpoints I actually needed, clearly overestimating my odds with a total of eight flashpoints eligible for seasons objectives. I need to learn to resist the lure of that, even if it's much easier than trying to find the correct boxes to tick in the unsorted jumble that is the full flashpoint list in the group finder panel nowadays.

Some of the objectives also highlighted to me the differences between the "efficient" way to do them and what I find fun, and again, they didn't always align. Doing four flashpoints on master mode with my guildies, including all the bonuses, was certainly interesting and enjoyable, but it also took us more than two hours. Comparatively, veteran mode Taral V with a pug that just rushes to the end barely takes ten minutes, but is also quite boring. Same with doing exploration missions on Coruscant or Dromund Kaas on a lowbie that's levelling (which includes watching all the cut scenes) vs. just blasting through the heroic circuit on a level 80.

Shintar's Galactic Season 6 Diary, Week 3

The tale of epic planetary Conquest in my last post may have left you wondering what happened to my ambitions in regards to Galactic Season 6 last week. Surely I didn't have time to grind Conquest points all day on Darth Malgus and do seasons objectives on the other servers? I'll be honest, I wasn't sure how well that was going to go myself, but I wasn't going to discard the idea entirely without even trying. Looking at the objectives for week three, my tentative thoughts on them were as follows:

• Earn 200k Conquest points: I figured this should hopefully still be a freebie on all servers, assuming I'd manage to get enough play time in on each one.
  
• Earn the seasonal currency: Same for this one.
• Visit another player's Alderaan stronghold: This was the one objective I was certain I'd be able to do everywhere.
  
• Blow up enemies with destructible barrels and the like: Easy enough to do, but I'd have to sit down and devote a little bit of time to it.
  
• Complete 15 missions as a smuggler or bounty hunter: I would have loved to do this one if possible, but I wasn't certain I'd have enough time to do that many missions across multiple servers.
  
• Craft war supplies and an invasion force: I usually do the crafting objectives on Darth Malgus, but on the other servers I'm not really very established with crew skills, making these an unattractive proposition unless I'm willing to buy a lot of the base materials (instead of gathering them for myself).
  
• Complete 2 out of 4 selected flashpoints (Kaon Under Siege, Blood Hunt, Traitor Among the Chiss, Objective Meridian): I figured flashpoints were definitely going to be out of the running this week due to time constraints.
  
• Kill champion guards or turrets on selected planets: I might do this one with guildies on Darth Malgus, but otherwise I didn't expect to get this done anywhere else.
  
• Kill the Coruscant and Dromund Kaas world bosses: These are popular targets and don't take long to kill, but there's still a degree of luck involved with getting a group, so I wasn't sure how well that would work out for me, especially while also not wanting to spend too much time on the other servers.
  
• Kill 2 bosses in R-4: Hah, no.
  
• Kill the Kessan's Landing world boss: Like in week one, quick and easy to do if there were other people around that were interested, but that was a big "if".
  

Day 1 - Tuesday

I got home super tired from work and it was immediately time for an operation with my guild. I assessed the Total Galactic War situation but couldn't decide on a planet to invade yet, so after lining up some bits of crafting, I hopped onto the other servers with the goal to just get the daily objective done with clickies.

However, someone was advertising a Coruscant world boss group on Leviathan and I thought "eh, might as well"... unfortunately I was the only healer and instantly died on pull, so the group wiped and didn't want to try again until they could find more people, something that felt like it dragged on and on... eventually they were willing to go again though and we killed it.

I logged over to Tulak Hord and... saw the same kind of world boss advert there! I joined again, and this group killed it on the first attempt. I also noticed that the other guy in my guild hadn't logged in for long enough that I had indeed usurped him as guild master this time.

On Star Forge I logged in on the fleet and... guess what? I saw a world boss group! This time I died again but that didn't matter for credit. I logged into Satele Shan, thinking that surely I wouldn't run into any activity there considering my usual problems with the time zone... but no! Immediately there was someone calling for people for the world boss in general chat. In this run I took on the role of fleet recruiter. I could've sworn that at least one of the names in the group was someone I'd also seen on Star Forge just earlier... perhaps other people were cycling through the servers just like I was.

After all that I was actually hoping to get the same experience on Shae Vizla, but while I saw a couple of people talk about the world boss on Coruscant, nobody wanted to start a group and I didn't have the energy to do it either, so Conquest via clickies it was.

Day 2 - Wednesday

As our Total Galactic War plans started to take shape on Darth Malgus, I went into full grinding mode. Seasons were all but forgotten as all I cared about was helping my guild take first place on Manaan. Both in the morning and in the evening, I did every Conquest activity under the sun, from questing on a lowbie to crafting to PvP. (I also had my worst warzone weekly in a while, as it took me ten matches to complete the mission, with nine of them being losses.)

There was no room for thoughts of seasons objectives, and I didn't even log into the other servers. I did complete three of the weeklies on Darth Malgus though, simply as a side effect of playing a lot, namely the 200k Conquest points, seasonal currency and the crafting one.

Day 3 - Thursday

I did more Conquest grinding in the morning, but by lunch time I figured it was safe to at least quickly check in on the other servers and achieve my daily seasons objective before the reset with clickies.

In the evening I did more Conquest grinding on Darth Malgus and completed the "affect enemies with exploding barrels" weekly objective during an Esseles run.

Day 4 - Friday

It being Good Friday, I had the day off and immediately launched myself into more Conquest activities in the morning. Before we went out to do our shopping for the weekend, I did another quick round of the other servers to complete the daily season objective with clickies. I also had a quick peek on some servers to see whether anyone was doing the Dromund Kaas world boss but had no luck at the time. 

My afternoon was once again spent conquesting on Darth Malgus, but by the early evening I was starting to feel a bit burnt out. I decided to take a break from Conquest... by doing a bit of seasons content on the other servers. I visited an Alderaan stronghold on Leviathan, Tulak Hord, Satele Shan and Star Forge, and managed to knock out the Dromund Kaas world boss on all four of these servers as well. This completed three weekly seasons objectives at once per server: the capital world bosses, the stronghold visit, and the blueprint fragment gathering. On Shae Vizla I had no luck with the world bosses and was disappointed to find that nobody with a public Alderaan stronghold was online either, so I decided to leave that for later.

Returning to Darth Malgus, I found people forming a group for some social Conquest activities so I joined that for the next couple of hours. Towards the end I saw a ping from my Shae Vizla guild that they were about to go for some seasons objectives, so I decided to tag along for that. This ticked off four weekly objectives at once for me (champion guards, capital world bosses, FR3-D0M and the seasonal currency), and between world boss summons I also spotted some public listings for Alderaan strongholds and quickly hopped into one of those, taking me to 5/7 on Shae Vizla.

Day 5 - Saturday

I continued to focus on Conquest on Darth Malgus, playing there for most of the day. In the evening we had our usual social night, where we knocked out the two world boss seasons objectives and killed some champion guards on Tatooine. This took me to 7/7 weeklies completed on Darth Malgus, but I didn't log into the other servers at all.

Day 6 - Sunday

In the morning before reset I decided to check in on the other servers again, as I'd kind of run out of steam for Conquest anyway. On Leviathan I got the "affect enemies with explode-y things" objective done by blowing up some womp rats on Tatooine. There are a lot of different ways to complete that particular objective, but when I don't want to faff around too much, going to a specific barrel on the edge of Anchorhead is my method of choice. I also logged into my bounty hunter and handed in two story missions on Balmorra that I'd completed previously.

On Tulak Hord I did the same thing with the womp rats and played my little bounty hunter on Hutta a bit to work on the "complete missions as this origin story" seasons objective. On Satele Shan I did the same with my little smuggler on Ord Mantell. As it was getting close to reset by that time and I didn't want to stress myself out, I just logged into Star Forge and Shae Vizla briefly to get the daily objective done with some clickies there.

The rest of the day was once again spent on doing Conquest on Darth Malgus.

Day 7 -  Monday

Easter Monday meant another day off and another day spent on Conquest. Once again I kind of ran out of things to do for Total Galactic War shortly before the reset, so decided to use this as another opportunity to check in on the other servers. I once again did a few missions on my bounty hunters on Leviathan and Tulak Hord as well as on my smuggler on Satele Shan. On all three of those servers, that pushed me over the 200k Conquest points needed for the weekly objective. I ran out of time before I really had a chance to devote time to Star Forge and Shae Vizla again, just quickly logging into them and getting the daily objective done by expanding my strongholds there.

The rest of the day was once again spent on earning Conquest points for my guild on Darth Malgus, and it didn't really hit me until quite late in the evening that due to the fact that I had to be in the office the next day, I wouldn't be able to do everything I wanted, as I wouldn't have time to log into the game the next morning and would have to go to bed at a somewhat sensible time. I decided that even though victory wasn't guaranteed, I'd done enough for my guild's ambitions and that I could take an hour or so out of my time before bed to do one more round of the other servers to polish off some partially completed objectives.

On Leviathan I did more missions on my bounty hunter until I hit the target of 15, which left me at 6/7 weeklies completed. I did the same on Tulak Hord, with the same result. 

On Satele Shan, I brought my smuggler up to 15 missions completed, and since I hadn't done the explode-y barrel objective on that server yet, I decided to also pay the womp rats on Tatooine a quick visit. This left my poor guy sick with womp rat fever, but hey, at least he got a codex entry for his trouble and Onna, the stims vendor with the cure, was just around the corner. This brought me up to 6/7 on Satele Shan as well.

On Star Forge I was the most behind, with only 3/7 weeklies completed, but blowing up some womp rats there as well plus a few extra Conquest points from clickies to push me past the 200k mark ultimately left me at 5/7.

On Shae Vizla I was already on 6/7, so I just blew up some more womp rats to get to 7/7 and clicked my way to some Conquest points to complete my consular's personal Conquest objective and the daily.

Week 3 Thoughts

At the risk of sounding a bit conceited, I was kind of proud of myself for how much I got done this week. I was pretty much ready for a worst case where I'd have time to do nothing but the daily objective and through that get to 3/7 on the weeklies maybe... instead I got to 7/7 on two servers, 6/7 on three, and 5/7 on the "least lucky" one.

The Hunt for the Best View Returns... Again!

Last year, I mentioned that the "Best View in SWTOR" contest, first held in 2021 for the game's tenth anniversary, made an unexpected return. I was even more surprised when I saw the announcement yesterday that it was coming back for a third round this year. If the SWTOR team wants to make a habit out of this, they'll have to give us a lot of new planets this year or else start repeating some of them on the featured planet list next year.

Anyway, I immediately felt inspired and spent some time traipsing around the galaxy and taking screenshots - none of which I'm going to show here yet of course. Instead, I'll share my submissions from last year. Back in 2021, I only submitted shots for three out of ten possible planets, but last year I actually entered nine out of ten possible screenshots, with Odessen being the one planet I left out since I just couldn't find an angle I was happy with there. Anyway, these were my submissions - you can compare them to the actual winners here.

Coruscant will always have a special place in my heart, and the quintessential experience of the Republic home world is stepping out of the spaceport into that perpetual dusk while the music swells and sky cars roar past overhead. There was no question that this was going to be the focus of my screenshot, and it was for the winner as well, but they basically faced the other way. It's a worthy shot, but I'll admit I still prefer my own submission in this case.

The winning shot of Quesh shows grass, water, trees and part of a Hutt Palace, and it's interesting to me that I took some similarly-themed shots during my own exploration of Quesh, but ultimately I opted for submitting the refineries blowing smoke into the sky, since to me, the toxic air is what defines Quesh more than anything else.

I had a hunch that this one wasn't going to be winning shot material, since I noticed that while NPCs are technically allowed to be featured in your submission, no winner has ever included one in the foreground. However, to me it was perfect since swamp and rakghouls are what defines Taris above all else. The winning shot was of the wreck of the Endar Spire instead (I think?) which is of course a KOTOR reference but never meant much to me personally.

There's something to be said for the stark beauty of driven snow, but while taking shots of Hoth I struggled with how empty it always looked, which is why I opted to include these tauntauns in my submission. Same problem as with the rakghoul I guess... though I also notice now that perhaps I've been using the full width of the screen too much, seeing how the winning submissions get cropped down to 4:3 for the in-game decorations. Half of that tauntaun wouldn't even be in the shot then.

Alderaan is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful planets in the game, but I find that this beauty can be a bit challenging to capture accurately in screenshots, so I was quite pleased with myself for managing to take this wide shot of the Glarus Valley. The winning shot ended up being one of Castle Panteer however, which I guess was kind of the more obvious choice. I had taken pictures of it myself as well, but opted against submitting them.

Dromund Kaas is an interesting mix of rain-swept jungles contrasted against the stark, futuristic spires of Kaas City, and I simply decided to submit this rather old screenshot I took of the city since I really liked it. The winner shows both the jungle and parts of the city in the background, which I really can't fault.

With Manaan there was the question of whether to screenshot the new invasion zone or the serenity of the old entrance area. For me it was an obvious choice since I really don't like the visuals of the invasion zone all that much. This particular shot was actually taken inside the Depths of Manaan flashpoint. The contest winner was from the new area though.

Iokath was a challenging place to frame, since it's incredibly cluttered visually, in a way that I honestly find kind of ugly. I eventually found this view at the edge of the expanse, which looked much cleaner and more serene, with just the Eternal Fleet ships taking to the sky in the background. I will admit that this isn't very "typically" Iokath though. The winner managed to take a much better shot of just outside the Republic (?) base that manages to be visually busy but still look good.

Rishi was a tough one because I couldn't decide whether the Rishi Maze or Raider's Cove were more iconic for the planet. I eventually opted for the former, with a grophet in the foreground because I love grophets, OK? I was quite surprised that the chosen winner actually included neither.

Anyway, I'm off to take more pictures of this year's featured planets! If you want to take part, you can find all the details here, and you have until the 29th of September to make your submission(s).

DvL Bosses Defeated At Last

Looking back at past blog entries, I wrote about the dark vs. light world bosses exactly twice before. Once in late 2016, when I basically went "Hey, these are a thing!" and once in mid-2018 when I noted that my guild was having another go at killing some of them for the achievement. We did kill a few of them back then, but ultimately people lost interest again before we got anywhere close to getting them all.

I think there were a number of reasons for this: All the driving around to find bosses could be quite time-consuming without necessarily leading to success, and their availability being tied to a light or dark side victory meant that going after them was often only an option at inconvenient times. They also caused a significant amount of deaths and repair bills for very little reward. I think too many people just decided eventually that they'd rather be spending their time doing other things.

The other week however, a bored officer seemed to get it into his head that we should give hunting the bosses another go, and enough people were available and happy to come along to at least make a start. We still had the issues mentioned above, but we actually got better at dealing with them, and a couple of days ago the first few people started to have their achievements pop up (though since these world boss hunts have been quite irregular, and different people have attended them at different times, we'll definitely have to keep going for at least a little longer to make sure everyone gets all the bosses they still need). I thought I would share more of what we learned along the way.

First off, general resources about these bosses still seem to be quite thin on the ground, but we found this German site which lists a lot more boss spawn locations than the old Dulfy guide. (It's quite a peculiar site; a blog set up in 2017 that clearly had ambitions to become a bigger source of guides but ultimately only posted two entries, one of which is the linked DvL post.) Back in 2018 I noted that I didn't think bosses were tied to particular planets, but this turned out to be at least partially wrong - there are a couple for each alignment that can indeed spawn anywhere in the galaxy, but most of the others are exclusive to specific planets, so if you want to catch them all you can't be too choosy about where you go hunting. The linked guide lists which boss can be found where and also which of the two ability sets each one uses.

Killing the bosses can be a challenge but simply finding them up is an even bigger one. In hindsight it feels like it was a really bad idea on Bioware's part to make these guys despawn if the first attack on them fails, particularly with no in-game indicator that this is a thing. They are way too easy to mistake for regular mobs at a casual glance, causing many a newbie to pull them and then die or run away, thus despawning them. This is an issue on all the planets but particularly aggravating on Coruscant, where it's always busy and many of the spawn points are near frequently visited quest locations, meaning that it's not unusual for a boss to get despawned by a hapless noob mere minutes after their initial appearance. We had quite a few occasions where we were just lining up to pull when a random newbie did a sudden drive-by charge-in, costing us the boss and inducing a lot of rage in some people even if I personally don't think the lowbies can be blamed for their ignorance.

We eventually learned to try and prepare for the victory state in advance: while you'll never know when it'll pop exactly, once one side seems to be on the way to winning you can extrapolate at least the rough time when the victory state will be achieved (taking into consideration that the indicator tends to move one step about once every ninety minutes). We would then make sure to form an ops group in advance and have people park themselves near various spawn points, so that anyone who laid eyes on a boss when it appeared could instantly use the guild flagship transport to summon the rest of the group to their location and grab the boss right there and then.

Also, it's good if people have characters on both sides of the faction divide, because the Dromund Kaas spawn locations are slightly more out of the way, meaning that if you had no luck on Coruscant, you could usually go there instead and still find a couple of the same bosses up in the jungle even after everything on Coruscant had already been cleared out.

As far as boss difficulty goes, we learned that while the bosses effectively all use one of just two ability sets, there can be huge variations in difficulty based on the planet they are on and the exact spawn point. The planet matters because the scaling is pretty wacky: on Coruscant and Dromund Kaas the damage is relatively mild, on Tatooine and Alderaan it's mostly manageable, but on Hoth it's a real nightmare. For example one of the boss abilities is a saber throw at a random person, and on Hoth that pretty much one-shots people if they aren't at 100% health when it hits them, causing a lot of very annoying and seemingly unavoidable deaths.

Spawn location also matters because both sets of boss abilities include people leaving circles of pain on the ground, which means that the fights are easier on open plains and super awkward in tight spaces as you quickly get boxed in. On bright, snowy terrain the circles can also be hard to see sometimes. In addition it matters whether there's a medical droid for your faction nearby: some of the boss locations are quite close to respawn points, making it easy to keep zerging back if people die a lot; others will revive you at the other end of the zone, making a wipe likely if too many people die in quick succession as they just won't have time to make it back before even more people die and things snowball from there, even if characters that can get out of combat use a guild summon occasionally to speed up the return of any fallen comrades.

One thing I already mentioned back in 2018 is that group size definitely matters: these bosses seem to have been designed for ops groups of twelve people or more, and they don't scale downwards very well at all. Basically each boss will target a certain number of characters with each of their abilities, and if there aren't enough of you? Too bad, that just means that some players are going to get more than one effect on them at the same time and will basically die within two seconds. You simply have to be able to accept that this is a thing and be willing to get up again, dust yourself off and keep going. One of our guildies who wasn't particularly fussed about the achievement but came along when first invited got so frustrated with dying constantly and having no way to prevent this through skilled play that the next time we asked him to join he said something along the lines of preferring to be kicked in the nuts for half an hour over ever doing another one of theses bosses again. So your mileage may vary!

Ultimately it remains an achievement that requires quite a lot of commitment, as you'll likely have to take part in several boss hunts over the course of days and weeks until you get all of them. (I don't know what the percentages are, but bosses aren't guaranteed to appear at each spawn point, so sometimes whole maps will be empty despite of a recent victory state.) And while getting the achievement and the associated flag decorations is definitely cool, it'll cost you a lot of time and probably also money in repair bills from all the random deaths that can be hard to impossible to avoid.

Peaceful on Coruscant

Another Pirate Incursion meant another round of peaceful adventures in places other than Dantooine for my pacifist Jedi Pacis.

She had pretty good luck with the side missions in Black Sun territory - deliver some information here, disarm some bombs there: all of it possible without killing anyone and therefore available for her to complete!

In the Justicar sector she hit the ultimate jackpot: a repeatable heroic that could be done without fighting. I vaguely recalled hearing before that "Trouble in Deed" was soloable by stealth, but I couldn't remember whether you had to fight the guy at the end or not. Fortunately it was not necessary! I could just stealth my way up to the vault, grab the deed and then hit Force Cloak when the mobs next to it inevitably aggroed. Job done!

The greatest thing about finding a heroic that I could repeat was that heroics reward two random gear pieces appropriate for your level. I haven't really mentioned it yet, but as it turns out it's kind of hard to come by new gear organically when you refuse to fight anyone and therefore get no loot drops and only the occasional quest reward here and there.

I suppose you could argue that a pacifist doesn't really need gear since she doesn't want to fight anyway, but a bit of extra endurance and such still come in handy whenever you aggro something by accident and have to run away. Repeating the heroic every day of the week soon saw Pacis kitted out in a set of level-appropriate blues.

I had somewhat less luck with the side missions in Coruscant's remaining areas. There were a couple more that I could do, but there were just as many if not more that I had to abandon because they asked me to fight things. Sorry, creepy girl child, your brother will just have to stay in jail if the only way to free him involves beating up thugs.

I even started the heroic in the Jedi temple, vaguely recalling that it "only" involved retrieving some astrogation charts, but of course a Sith jumps out of the shadows at the very end and demands that you fight him. I noped right out of that one in front of the Sith's eyes (he didn't seem to care) and abandoned that quest too.

By the time I'd finished my tour of Coruscant the event was pretty much over again, so I only visited Taris very briefly to have a peek at a couple of heroics that looked like they might be doable without fighting. Again, I don't do these often enough and am so used to just killing everything anyway that I often wasn't sure what exactly was required to progress each objective.

In most of them it became clear pretty quickly that there was no progressing without a fight, whether because trying to click on a shiny would be interrupted as soon as you got into combat or there were just too many mobs too close by. In one heroic I got tantalisingly close to completing the thing without a fight just to get a rude awakening when the final step demanded I kill an elite mob to finish. So that one went into the bin as well.

One interesting side effect of these failed heroic attempts was that there were several occasions when I got into combat with multiple mobs and had to run for my life. I'd excitedly filled my bar with various utility abilities that I'd got from levelling up such as slows and stuns, anticipating that I'd still get a good amount of use out of those, just to find that most of them couldn't be executed without a main hand weapon equipped. I'll admit that this made sense for some of them, such as Deflection, but why I couldn't Force Lift anyone without a saber in my hand for example mystified me. I guess I'll have to consider re-equipping HK's vibroblade purely to be able to use some abilities, but then I'd worry about accidentally hitting things with it. Decisions, decisions.

Either way I intend to explore more of Taris next time around.

Pacifism Continued

Last week was Pirate Incursion week again, which meant that it was time for Pacis, my pacifist Jedi, to venture out into the world again, since Dantooine was too hostile for her and the event's quick travel option made it possible for her to go places without losing the option to return home.

I hadn't been particularly diligent doing the two daily quests on Dantooine during peace time... but I had done them often enough to get her up to level 19. Nothing much of interest happened during those routine circuits, except for that one time when so many of the Kath Hounds I tried to cure got mad at me that I didn't even manage to complete the "pet five friendly Kath Hounds" bonus. Talk about some bad luck!

Anyway, with the event on, I decided that her first order of business should be to return to Tython. While I had already fully explored it, Pacis had only been level five when she left, so I wanted to check back to see if I'd be able to do some more quests that didn't require her to fight anything.

I started off by having another poke at my class story and daring to go into the cave to confront Nalen Raloch. I couldn't remember what exactly happened in there, though I had a feeling there would be hostile mobs - but hey, I had stealth now! Indeed, Nalen summoned some flesh raiders who tried to kill me. Sadly they saw right through my stealth, but I just ran past them and out of the phase without coming to any harm. Hurray for cowardice!

I did eventually run into a dead end when I got to the part where you're supposed to defeat some training droids to earn the right to the first hilt. I'll admit: I did hesitate there, wondering if it really counted as an act of aggression to attack a training droid, but in the end I decided that this was a slippery slope and that Pacis should remain a strict non-combatant.

In terms of side missions, I dealt with the two padawans in a secret romance - it will never cease to amaze me how Bioware managed to take a situation where I think most players would naturally gravitate towards wanting to violate the Jedi code to side with the lovers and fill it with nothing but awkward and bone-headed dialogue, to the point where you really just want to turn the two of them in to be rid of them. I persisted and let them go though.

I also helped out the Jedi who wanted to analyse the memory cores of droids from the ruins - I felt a certain pride in that one since the quest said to destroy droids and scan them, but I realised that in actuality just the scanning was enough to update the quest progress. So I just waited near the entrance of the ruins and whenever another player came by and wiped out the guardians by the door on their way through, I had another couple of bodies to scan without having to lift a finger myself.

Another interesting experience was the quest to destroy the vats of flesh raider elixir - another perfectly peaceful mission I figured, until I stood in front of one and got an error message telling me that I was unable to destroy it since I didn't have a weapon equipped. D'oh! So much for vendoring my training blade because I wasn't going to need it...

I didn't want to spend money on a proper new weapon, so I just made a quick trip to my stronghold and got HK's vibroblade out of the bank - not a Shadow's preferred weapon, but using it to fight wasn't the point anyway. It just allowed me to complete the mission.

I would also have liked to help Flingeld lift his rock and to help find the missing Twi'lek boy, but neither of those quests showed up as available to me so I can only guess that they are tied to progression of the class story.

Once I'd run out of things to do on Tython (as far as I could tell) I used the shuttle to go to the fleet (which also answered my question from last time: the ability to use it is tied to level, not story progression). There I did the introductory missions for housing and crew skills. I also picked up bioanalysis, scavenging and slicing. Crafting or running missions didn't seem like a good idea for a character who'll only ever have very limited income.

Continuing to Coruscant, I was pleasantly surprised by the number of side missions I was able to complete there too: repairing network access nodes, retrieving stolen microchips and telling Nik Deleru to shove it. I'm so used to doing all the bonuses to kill x mobs that it actually took me by surprise how many main mission objectives haven't actually required any killing so far.

My only disappointment was that like on Tython, additional missions that I knew to not involve any combat were unavailable to me, presumably due to my lack of class mission progress, such as the one to intercept a parcel, to help out the security officer outside the Dealer's Den cantina, or the Gree quest chain.

As I didn't have that much time to play last week, I didn't progress any further than that before returning to Dantooine. However, the whole adventure did manage to gain Pacis another two levels and makes me feel optimistic about her next excursion: There seem to be a lot more non-combat missions than I remembered.

Day 5: NPCs #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.

Paring down the number of screenshots for this one was extremely hard because a) SWTOR features a lot of interesting non-player characters, and b) I've taken even more screenshots of them in the past year. In the end I just accepted that this would be a big one with lots of pictures.

Okay, this is neither a great screenshot nor are these great characters, but I just felt like including it anyway as a reminder of just how creepy the few child characters in SWTOR are. Rav made a whole post about this once. Why does a boy who's apparently meant to be about eight have half his head shaved (not to mention that the rest of the haircut is terrible)? Why does a girl of presumably the same age have an adult figure and boobs? Yikes.

I really like the subtle ways in which the original class stories are intertwined with the world story arcs, meaning that while they work perfectly fine as self-contained tales there are plenty of "Easter Eggs" to be found for those in the know. For example Doctor Ianna Cel here, whom you encounter on Imperial Taris as an Imperial agent, is a quest giver for all Republic players on Republic Taris.

For me it's quite rare that I meet an NPC that makes me go "huh, this guy/girl is quite good-looking" but this Sith Pureblood was a rare exception. His name is Lord Torius and he features in the trooper class story on Voss.

Another interesting connection between class and world stories is the fact that while "The Three", the rulers of Voss, are mentioned pretty much all over the place, the Imperial agent is the only one who actually gets to meet them in person during their class story... and in the process finds out just why the Voss have been so stubbornly neutral for a long time.

 

Captain Hanthor on Makeb is an NPC that I found quite memorable, what with being the first Cathar we see in the service of the Empire. He serves to illustrate the somewhat increasing Imperial tolerance for aliens after the whole Malgus debacle. I also think it's quite clever that while he's only a very minor character in the main story, you have the option to talk to him and get a bit more background in at least one of the side missions.

 

I just love this screenshot of Revan and every time I look at it I feel the urge to turn it into a meme saying "Sad Revan is sad".

That sad face totally runs in the family by the way.

I'm really proud of this shot of Master Surro because it took me several playthroughs of Ziost to actually capture this split-second frame of her Force-pushing someone away (I think it was Lana). Master Surro in general is quite a striking and memorable character, but if you think about it properly, we actually know virtually nothing about her as she spends 99% of the Ziost story being possessed by the Emperor.

 

I really loved the looks of these two Jedi you meet in the People's Tower on Ziost. I think I may have subconsciously modelled my Guardian Starberry after the Mirialan here because I just love the contrast of the sassy pink hair against the green skin.

This screenshot may superficially appear to be centred on everyone's favourite cranky engineer Tora, but the real reason I saved it was that it made me notice the diversity of Vik's stable of thugs! First we have that lady to the left who appears to be a Bothan, making her the... what, third one in the entire game? And to the right of Tora there's that walrus guy... I don't know what they are called, but I know they exist in KOTOR as well and I had never seen one in SWTOR until then.

While I think that Vaylin's character in KotFE is quite underdeveloped for someone with this much screen time, she seriously has the best facial expressions.

IntPiPoMo count: 43