GS9, Week 4 Thoughts

This week was probably the least fun week of Galactic Season 9 for me so far, though I can't tell for sure whether the objectives were just less fun by themselves or whether my "new season enthusiasm" was slowly starting to wear off. That isn't to say that it was a bad week, just one that felt like it required more effort.

The dynamic encounter planet of the week was Dromund Kaas, which was weirdly enough quite a mixed bag. First off, it required 25 instead of 15 encounter completions again, which I found off-putting, though that didn't prevent me from doing the objective anyway, at least not this early in the season.

More strikingly though, Dromund Kaas was a weird inverse of Ilum last week - as mentioned then, I think the dynamic encounters on the latter are usually somewhat less fun due to the high mob density, so having more people around who were constantly clearing things out actually made everything more pleasant. Dromund Kaas on the other hand has a lot of encounters that are usually quite fun in my opinion... but they just don't scale with large crowds at all. Watching a dozen people all try to be the first to click that one terminal in "Rogue Droid Uprising" would have been funny if it hadn't also been very frustrating. The cherry on top was that this particular encounter has an achievement for clicking the terminal really quickly after getting to that stage of progression - not this week, bucko!

The veteran flashpoint of the week was the first part of the Jedi Prisoner storyline on each faction, which meant running either Taral V or Boarding Party and was another objective I wasn't too thrilled about. The Jedi Prisoner is an interesting storyline, but all the flashpoints involved in it are definitely in the bottom half of my list if I had to rank all flashpoints from best to worst. Gameplay-wise, they're all kind of long and boring, and while there are a lot of mobs that can be skipped, that just makes the whole experience feel a bit unsatisfying in a different way (to me anyway). Also, what's the point of doing Boarding Party if you don't get to confront Captain Yelto at the end?!

Unsurprisingly, my favourite run of this objective was the one I did with Mr Commando, who - despite not having run any flashpoints in what felt like forever - still remembered his exact pulling routine to unlock the Taral V bonus boss in what he felt was the most efficient way possible, which I thought was quite beautiful to behold. As it happened, we also had to pug one dps in that run, and I was a bit worried that we might get someone who'd be annoyed at us not skipping everything to finish the run as quickly as possible. However, we got lucky and got a level 15 who actually seemed quite delighted by the experience, gained six levels throughout the flashpoint and asked us at the end whether we wanted to do another one, which I thought was cute.

Running a master mode flashpoint was also an objective once again, and I was happy to do so on five servers (Shae Vizla is only being left out because I can't get the queue to pop there, even while queueing as tank or healer). My random pops this week were Blood Hunt, Cademimu, Mandalorian Raiders and Assault on Tython times two, which took me up to four runs of the latter this season already.

I'm curious whether that was just pure RNG or whether this is a side effect of the new exclusion rules. I have this theory that people primarily choose to exclude flashpoints from their random queue for three reasons:

1. They're perceived as too hard (e.g. Ruins of Nul, Shrine of Silence).
2. They're perceived as too long (e.g. The Esseles, Directive 7).
3. They're perceived as easy and overfarmed to an annoying degree (e.g. Hammer Station, Athiss).

If all four people that are up next in the queue have excluded five flashpoints for different reasons, that narrows the selection down by quite a lot - and I reckon Assault on Tython may simply be one of those that slips through the net either way, as it's neither faceroll easy nor particularly hard, and not terribly long either (especially if you skip some of the early trash). Has anyone else been seeing more of this one than usual? My hypothesis will need further testing for sure.

As for the other flashpoints, Blood Hunt was largely unremarkable, and Cademimu was the one I did with Mr Commando, which once again meant doing the bonus and just dragging a pug along whether they liked it or not, though they didn't complain about it. It was funny though when the guildie who was our fourth accidentally took the elevator downstairs in the middle of the bonus boss fight. 

That said, the weirdest/most amusing run was probably the Mandalorian Raiders I did on Satele Shan. I noted last week that I'm not a fan of dps running ahead and pulling when I'm the tank, right? Well, in this one there was a Guardian dps who took off like a bat out of hell the moment we zoned in and then kept pulling non-stop. I considered saying something like "you know this is master mode, right" but decided that this would've been too passive-aggressive - but also, I was honestly kind of confused more than anything because of how he kept getting away with it, in the sense that none of the trash seemed to hurt him too badly even when he got all the aggro. I was even starting to wonder whether I'd accidentally queued for veteran mode by mistake.

It wasn't until we killed Braxx the Bloodhound with the healer dead and everyone else on about ten percent health that the Guardian paused and said something along the lines of "I only just realised this is master mode since there were no kolto stations". So that was kind of humorous. He did stop pulling after that, we had a few more mishaps anyway, but ultimately it was all good.

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. 

First Impressions of GS7

I haven't had as much of a chance to immediately dive into Galactic Season 7 as I maybe would've liked, but I did check in on all servers this week and at least made a start. I said I wasn't going to keep a detailed diary of my seasonal progress this time, but that doesn't mean that I have nothing at all to say about my experiences.

The first thing I noticed was that there doesn't seem to be a seasonal story this time. You still get a mission item at level one, but all that unlocks is a quick intro on Hutta where you briefly talk to someone from the Bounty Brokers Association about hunting down some Force-sensitive types - to provide an in-character explanation for killing the Dark vs. Light bosses I guess - and that's it.

I can't say I was particularly surprised or dismayed by that. While I loved GS5's story, last season was a bit of a damp squib in comparison, and I can only guess that the devs decided somewhere along the way that this "seasonal story" thing wasn't working out the way they'd hoped, so they just ditched it. And I'm fine with that. Yes, GS5 showed that there was potential to do more with the idea, but if it's not working, I'm happy for them to focus on other things, considering that seasons were never meant to be about story anyway. I just hope they put those cut scene and dialogue tree building resources to good use somewhere else.

In my last post I wondered which way GS7 was going to pivot after seemingly everybody hated last season's insane vendor trash grind. The answer to that is: they just got rid of the whole currency concept and the "big" seasonal achievement this time just requires you to do a lot of bounty contracts and kill a bunch of DvL bosses. That seems... reasonable to me. It's still going to take effort, but it's much more predictable and easier to space out based on your own preferences.

If you wanted to and have done a lot of bounty hunting in the past to generate unlocks, you could even complete the meta achievement in the first week! One of my guildies got all 40 of the required DvL boss kills within the space of a few days just by idling on Dromund Kaas and tapping the DvL boss for the week whenever a group came by. Shared tagging for the win! I do imagine this achievement is going to be a lot harder to get on the less popular servers though. (Not that I was planning to do that, but I mean for the people who have their mains there.)

With the currency (real or fake) gone and one of the easy weekly objectives having been focused on currency acquisition in the past, the devs decided to have two season-specific weeklies this time: one to kill two DvL bosses and one to do a bounty contract. I think that's nice as it adds more flavour to the season, and should satisfy both those looking for something easy to do solo every week (the bounty contract) and those who like the group objectives to have something to do with their guilds.

My experience with the DvL bosses themselves has been a bit of a... mixed bag. As mentioned before, I defeated them all back in the day, so I roughly knew what to expect, but I knew the devs were going to have to fix the awkward spawning/despawning mechanics and I figured maybe they were going to apply some nerfs in the process as well. The spawning issues have indeed been fixed, as just two bosses are up each week in a fixed spot, and they respawn after something like five minutes of being killed, so there's no fear of missing out if you're in the process of assembling a group and someone else gets there first.

However, in terms of difficulty, they don't feel nerfed at all. This first week, the two active spawn points were on Dromund Kaas and Tatooine - both low-level planets, which always used to make the fights easier - though even here you could already notice a marked difference between the damage output on DK vs. Tat. My guild group had no real problems of course, though even that wasn't without deaths, as it's easy to get caught out by a circle-drop-and-stun combo even as a seasoned raider.

On Star Forge I joined an Imperial pug group as healer, and it felt like insane level whack-a-mole trying to keep everybody alive, though we did successfully kill the boss on Dromund Kaas. I immediately moved on to Tatooine but some people said they wanted to kill the same boss again to progress towards the meta achievement. It then turned out that I must've either been the only healer or maybe just one of two, as it looked like the group wiped when they pulled the same boss again without me (I couldn't tell with 100% certainty, but everybody died and people in ops group chat sounded disappointed). I then summoned them to Tatooine, where we succeeded again, though with more deaths than last time.

On the other servers I was less successful. On Satele Shan I joined a pug but people kept dropping out as fast as new ones joined, and someone insisted that we shouldn't even try the boss until we had at least 16 players, so after about half an hour of that I dropped out too to go to bed. At other times, I just went to the jungle to see whether I was lucky enough to find someone else already fighting the boss, but was unlucky enough to not encounter any groups. I just got myself killed more than once when what looked like random levellers decided to try and solo the boss, and apparently the range at which you get pulled into combat is really big, meaning that if a single person decides to pull and you're an innocent bystander some yards away, you'll pretty much immediately find yourself dotted and stunned to death.

I suspect I could've gotten kills on more servers if I'd just had the time and dedication to simply loiter near a boss or on the fleet for longer, but I didn't want to do that this time. I'm trying to stick to my plan of aiming for fewer objectives per week on the secondary servers, and there were a lot of other objectives this first week that required a lot less time and effort. I still ended up achieving more than four weeklies on most servers, but it definitely felt much more relaxed to have a goal of four and then maybe go "oh, I can knock out one more out today" rather than trying to work towards six or seven from the start of the week and then feeling stressed out as the weekly reset draws close.

One thing I'd forgotten about and which I saw people complain about is that the dark and light tokens dropped by the bosses are per character, and that many of the rewards you can buy with them have alignment requirements. I'd honestly forgotten about all of that. I found that a lot of my characters still had loads of tokens from back in the day anyway, because there wasn't anything of interest to me left on the vendors. Plus the tokens were actually really easy to get back then, as you'd get one every time your character gained a Galactic Command (and later Renown) level while the side of the Force that matched your alignment was in the lead in the galaxy-wide Dark vs. Light war, which was easy enough to achieve. I agree that like the Nightlife chips, this is another currency that really should be legacy-wide, but considering what the devs said about the former, I wouldn't hold my breath for these tokens getting fixed before the end of the season either.

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.

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.

KotET Chapter by Chapter - Chapter 2: Run for the Shadows

Time for another detailed and spoiler-laden discussion of a Knights of the Eternal Throne chapter. We're up to chapter two! Though if you missed it...

Click here to go back to Chapter 1.

The Story

The moment that many of us have been waiting for since 4.0 has finally arrived: We get to find out what's going on in the Sith Empire and the Republic. Well, one of them anyway, as the Outlander visits Empress Acina on Dromund Kaas to discuss the possibility of an alliance. With the Alliance. This is going to be a bit of a pain to talk about, isn't it?

You, Theron and Lana are welcomed by a certain Moff Minister Lorman, who starred in the Annihilation spin-off novel, but even though I actually read that book and even wrote about it on here, I have to admit that I had zero memory of him and wouldn't even have made the connection if someone else hadn't pointed it out to me. He takes you to Empress Acina, who welcomes you quite warmly and quickly gets annoyed by Lorman's comments, urging you to have a private chat with her in her personal shuttle. You agree and the two of you go on a ride across the jungles of Dromund Kaas. I have to say that first scene where the camera slowly zooms in on you inside the shuttle while it whizzes across the canopy amazes me every time! Even if it's a bit off from a logic perspective that Acina doesn't even bother to take a single bodyguard...

While Acina tries to convince you that allying with her is a good idea, the shuttle suddenly gets shot down. You manage to jump out before it crashes but find that communications aren't working as they should, so you can't call for help. Meanwhile, you (the player) see an incredibly chipper Minister Lorman tell Theron and Lana that you and the Empress have died in a tragic accident.

When you and Acina reach the shuttle crash site, you find that the emergency beacon is destroyed and a party of GenoHaradan scouts is looking for you... to make sure that you're dead. At the same time, Theron receives a call from former Republic Chancellor Leontyne Saresh, also offering her condolences about the Outlander's "death" and suggesting that her leadership skills would be a big boon to the Alliance. Theron and Lana say eff to that and decide that they really need to find you (alive, preferably) as soon as possible, even if the bad storms will make it difficult.

Meanwhile you traipse through the rainy jungles of Dromund Kaas with Acina to find the GenoHaradan's camp. When you do, you also find a datapad which reveals their employer: none other than Saresh herself. (Republic players who did the story mission for the Scum and Villainy operation probably already suspected this, as Saresh was shown to be their last known employer back then.) Immediately after this discovery a shuttle with more GenoHaradan shows up and they try to blast you straight from the sky, but you manage to scurry away into a nearby ancient Sith tomb before its entrance collapses behind you.

On the Eternal Throne, we see Scorpio informing Vaylin that rumour has it that you're dead. Vaylin shrugs this off as obviously false, but Scorpio informs her that the upheaval caused by the Outlander's disappearance is the perfect opportunity to strike a blow against the Alliance. Back in Kaas City, Lana and Theron's attempt to sneak off to search for you is thwarted by some guards that Minister Lorman posted in anticipation of this move.

You and Acina make it through the ancient Sith tomb, avoiding a bunch of traps and vicious critters along the way, just to run into the leader of the GenoHaradan accompanied by "Minister" Lorman at the end. As soon as you defeat the GenoHaradan, Lorman tells you to stay back as he claims to have your friends as hostages, but when he tries to prove this via holocall, it turns out that Lana and Theron have easily overwhelmed their captors. They tell you that Saresh is already on her way to Odessen to instate herself as the Alliance's new leader, leaving you to only deal with Lorman before hurrying back yourself: You can let him go, encourage Acina to make him her slave, or team up with her to execute him.

On Odessen, you bust in on Saresh, just as she announces to your Alliance that you're dead. She panics and tries to run, but of course you stop her with ease. She expresses no regrets about her actions, and you get to punch or even kill her, though you can also simply take her prisoner. Theron will love you for it either way!

Acina calls in one more time to apologise for everything that happened on Dromund Kaas and asks whether you'll still agree to an alliance with the Sith Empire, which you can either agree to or refuse.

The chapter ends with a view of a small freighter being chased by Eternal Fleet ships and a female voice calling for help. The Gravestone appears and Koth comes to its rescue, but as he takes the damaged freighter in for repairs, we see that its crew consists of none other than Scorpio, who was merely impersonating the ship's former captain, Vaylin and some of her troops.

My Thoughts

I was one of those people who has been waiting to get back to the story of our original factions, so I was initially delighted by this chapter, but I finished it with a sense of bitter-sweetness.

While it's great to return to an iconic starter planet like Dromund Kaas and see for yourself how the Sith Empire is holding up under its new Empress' reign, the chapter only goes on to cement your position as an outsider in this brave new post-KotFE world. Acina lectures you about how the Sith used to do things vs. how they do them now, which leaves Imperial characters wanting to scream: "I know all of this! I'm one of you, remember?" There is no way of seeking true reconciliation if you still consider yourself loyal to the Sith Empire.

While the chapter focuses on the Sith, Republic characters aren't really much better off in terms of connecting to their old home. As a trooper in particular I found it absurd that Saresh would seek to assassinate me after I had defeated one of the Empire's greatest generals in service to her, but I don't imagine it feels much better if you're a different flavour of hero of the Republic. Didn't she give the consular a medal at the end of the original class story?

The ending on Odessen feels like an attempt at fan service targeted at those who've expressed a strong dislike for Saresh for ages, but to me her blatant attempt at taking over just rang hollow. Yes, she was set up to be a dislikeable character, but her background has always been that she suffered a lot at the hands of the Sith Empire and is therefore willing to go to extreme measures to defeat them. I didn't feel that simply trying to take over the Alliance in what's portrayed as a mere grab for power fit her previous portrayal at all, and shunting her off the stage by either imprisoning or executing her struck me as a waste of a great character. Either way, the new Supreme Chancellor sends you a letter afterwards, in which he takes a similarly distant approach as Acina, talking about respecting your sovereignty and stuff. Why won't you let me be friends with you again? /cry

Those bigger issues aside, "Run for the Shadows" is another chapter that finds a good balance between story and gameplay. The character of Lorman is pretty funny and his over-the-top outrage at not being addressed by the correct title was a genuine laugh out loud moment to me. The Sith tomb also contains a bonus mission that requires the use of binoculars, which can additionally be used to spot and avoid traps. I completely missed that second use the first time around and just stepped into every flame and onto every spike like a noob, but it's nice to have another optional bit of puzzling thrown into the mix.

Speaking of traps though, what's that about Koth running straight into a trap...?

Onwards to Chapter 3!

Puzzling

Both of Bioware's most recent releases for SWTOR have contained puzzle elements. In chapter eleven, you had to find the right panels to shoot in order to progress past a forcefield, and this month's Alliance alert is pretty much one big puzzle to solve.

Both prompted similar reactions in me: First I was startled by the unexpected obstacle in my way, then delighted that it was something different from the norm. Then I got a bit annoyed when I couldn't figure out the solution quickly enough. I eventually made it past the forcefield myself, but for the companion mission I ended up looking up a hint online once I'd been stuck for a while.

This got me thinking about puzzles in SWTOR in general. I don't actually recall seeing a whole lot of them in the base game. The first one I remember encountering is during the interlude in the first chapter of the trooper story where you have to deactivate some laser beams in the right order to get to the middle of a room. A fair few datacrons have a puzzle aspect to them as well, but I didn't really bother with them on my first playthrough.

While levelling alts, I remember encountering the heroic mission Shadow Spawn on Dromund Kaas, which requires you to use the runes on a dark altar in the right order, and you figure out the correct order by following the lines of the Sith code. If you don't know them, they are engraved on the runes as well (and show up on their tooltip if you hover over them in your mission item inventory).

On Republic side, Traken-4's Legacy stands out, a former area quest on Balmorra, which requires you to solve a "lights out" puzzle on a three by three grid, which I don't know how to do to this day, but fortunately you can find automated solvers for that kind of thing online.

The operations were the biggest surprise in terms of puzzle aspects, because personally I'd never seen that kind of thing in large group content before. First there were the ancient pylons in Eternity Vault, which feature little combat but require you to figure out the fastest solution to a small puzzle before the fight. Then there was the Fabricator droid in Karagga's Palace, who required several members of your ops group to play Towers of Hanoi. In subsequent operations the "puzzle bosses" were toned down, but an aspect of problem-solving before the fight remained present for a while, from Colonel Vorgath's minefield in Explosive Conflict to Operator's colours in Terror from Beyond and Olok the Shadow's droids in Scum and Villainy. It's only with the Oricon operations that the notion of "puzzle bosses" seemingly came to an end.

In solo and small group content however, Bioware has continued to throw puzzles at us at irregular intervals. The Black Hole featured more than one daily that required a bit of puzzling. The whole Theoretika section of the HK-51 quest line stands out as a particularly memorable example of requiring brains over brawn. The Shroud quest line asked you to solve problems in ways other than fighting as well. Kuat Drive Yards has that ship-building scenario where you get a bonus for figuring out the little logic puzzle and choosing the right components. The Yavin quest line has the mission in the cave where you have to click on the right rune to activate the holocrons. On Ziost there is that short bit where you need to deactivate some panels to be able to run through a pool of water without being electrocuted. And now in KotFE we have the two examples mentioned above.

Do I like these puzzles? I think for the most part I do, but sometimes they've also caused me frustration. I generally like them in group content, because you can pool your resources and figure things out together. (Like when it comes to the aforementioned Traken-4 mission - the first time I ran into it, I was questing with a friend, and while I got annoyed with the puzzle, he enjoyed figuring it out and eventually got it done for both of us.) In ops, the puzzle bosses generally give one or two people the chance to shine with specialised knowledge without requiring everyone to be good at puzzles, though it can be very painful when you end up in a pug where nobody knows how to handle the puzzle aspect.

In what comes as a bit of a surprise to myself, I'm more likely to find puzzles annoying in solo content. It's probably because that's often the content that's focused on progressing the story, and it's annoying to hit a wall there just because you can't figure something out. Also, I'm generally more likely to get annoyed if several puzzles are strung together into one big puzzle, such as on the Theoretika or in the newest Alliance alert mission. I can generally appreciate a single puzzle inserted into a mission at random, though it can still sometimes feel a bit out of place simply because there aren't that many of them in game, so it's always a bit unexpected when instead of shooting things or talking to people, you suddenly find yourself hunting around the environment for the right thing to click or sifting through flavour text for hints. But if several of them show up in a row, it's even more likely that I won't be able to figure something out and will grow tired of the whole thing after a short while.

Do you like puzzles in your MMO experience?

Continued Adventures on the Progenitor

In the comments on my last post, reader DualBlastersGuy expressed some concern that rushing through the levels on a new server would result in me becoming destitute quite quickly. Fear not, gentle readers: Even if I'm going to make use of the epic story XP boost, playing in the described manner is absolutely out of the question for me. I'm simply incapable of focusing exclusively on my class story. I always get distracted, whether it's by gathering nodes, datacrons, unexplored pieces of the map or what have you. With that said, let me tell you about how Agent Shintar continued her adventures on the Progenitor by going to Dromund Kaas:

First off, I bought the stronghold there. I was actually positively surprised that I was able to afford it so easily (without any expansions of course), using just the quest money I had earned on Hutta. For some reason I always think of strongholds as this massive credit sink, so the idea that a newly rolled character fresh off the starter planet and with no support whatsoever would be able to actually afford a stronghold as soon as she hit level fifteen seemed kind of preposterous. But it's true! The ones on the capital worlds are really that cheap. I'm definitely grateful for the additional travel option, and I also plopped down the free level one slicing node that you get from the introduction to strongholds. It may not be much, but every little helps!

On Dromund Kaas, I managed to suffer my first death (not counting warzones)... by falling down the elevator shaft in Lord Grathan's estate. And when I say "falling", I actually mean "jumping". Because you know, why would you pay attention to silly things like whether the lift is actually there? It was annoying too since you can't res on a moving platform, so I had to respawn all the way back at the medcenter and promptly got distracted by nearby gathering nodes again the moment I tried to make it back into the compound.

I also realised that since I soloed the Black Talon instead of running it the "normal" way, Agent Shintar is social rank zero and couldn't complete her Social Points quest. I'll have to run a random flashpoint or something purely to amend that. Having no social points whatsoever is simply unacceptable.

In the Nexus Room Cantina, I actually ran into some people who were roleplaying. (I didn't see where they were and didn't go looking, but I saw their chat.) Up until then I hadn't even thought about the fact that the Progenitor is a roleplaying server. Fun fact: I actually spent most of my time in World of Warcraft on a roleplaying server (on Earthen Ring EU), though I wouldn't consider myself a roleplayer. I always feel a bit bad for roleplayers and how their servers get invaded by people who don't actually want to roleplay but who think that roleplayers somehow make for a better community. (At least that used to be the argument back in my day.) In WoW I actually got pulled into at least some roleplay by people who roleplayed in public, but towards the end of Wrath of the Lich King that kind of seemed to die out, or at least I hardly ever saw it happen anymore. It's nice to see that roleplay is still happening in SWTOR in any case. I wonder where else the roleplayers hang out? (These Sith were discussing how they'd like to be buried by the way; seemed very appropriate.)

While uncovering the last couple of pieces of map that I hadn't explored yet, I ran into a level 55 soloing the world boss (very, very slowly). I wondered if he doesn't have Shadow of Revan, to spend his time soloing lowbie world bosses at 55.

I also did a couple more warzones and continued to get about a zillion achievements for each match. It's pretty ridiculous really. I used 250 of my warzone commendations to buy a Makeb Pergola, which is apparently going for nearly 100k credits on the local GTN right now - I'm thinking that can't be right. However, even if it's not, I reckon that it's going to be an easy way of making at least a little bit of money quickly.

The GTN seems weird in any case - I was looking to sell a skill mod that I had found and expected there to be lots of them since agents are popular... yet there were only a couple of pages of similar items, and the highest level mod of that type was only level 29. Really makes you wonder if it's true what they say about roleplaying servers... (that people are too busy roleplaying to care much about regular content). Feel free to correct me, Progenitor players.