Pugging Trench Runner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best Ding in a While

I overestimated my guildies' interest in generating Conquest points on Imp side this week... which meant that I buckled down over the weekend and put in extra effort myself to make sure that we'd still hit our large yield target. As part of this I dusted off my old DvL Merc, who'd been sitting at level 79 for ages, and did some PvP on her, even though I finished the PvP season a few weeks ago.

PvPing at level 79 can feel a bit like cheating, considering how much more powerful you are compared to most other characters in the bracket, but since you can't halt your XP gains, it's a fleeting pleasure that I'm simply happy to enjoy while it lasts. Even without any augments and with gear that had never been the best even back when 75 was the level cap, my Merc was rocking the damage charts hard, and the matchmaking algorithm blessed me with a winning streak to boot. There was one match where I was startled to find upon consulting the scoreboard at the end that we'd apparently been a man down the entire time but had still come away victorious somehow.

With only a tiny sliver of my XP bar left to go, I knew that my next match was going to be my last one in the midbie bracket, and since my warzone weekly mission was on 9 out of 12, I really wanted one more win in order to complete it before levelling up. I still would've been able to finish the quest at level 80, but then I would've had to sort myself out with level 80 gear before queueing again, which would've meant extra effort.

I got into a Voidstar that started with both teams severely under strength and my team on attack during the first round. I wouldn't swear by it, but it certainly felt like we were a man down again at least to begin with, which made it difficult to make any headway for a long time. However, we did eventually manage to breach the first door and cross the bridge, with the round ending at the second door - a situation that isn't really a clear indication of an impending win or loss, as matches that end there can very much still go either way.

As we started the defence round, it quickly became apparent that the rest of my team (which had filled out by then) seemed decent enough at watching the doors, however there was zero communication going on. I just kept running back and forth between both sides as I noticed our opponents changing their angle of attack repeatedly.

At one point I ended up fighting on the left side with only one other person against about four enemies. The other guy died and I soon followed, realising too late that nobody else had moved over and I had been the last person standing. I typed "left" into the chat but it was too late. Waiting inside the respawn area, I saw one person still try to reinforce from the right but they didn't make it over in time to prevent the enemy team from planting the bomb.

I got out of the respawn just as the door was blown off and hurled myself right back into the fray in an attempt to stall the enemy forces. They enjoyed taking me down but sadly I barely slowed them and soon found myself in the respawn again, this time on the other side of the bridge. However, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as the rest of my team did not do a great job at halting the enemy advance at this point, and one of the bridges was activated mere seconds later.

I typed "bridge open" into the chat in an attempt to get those who were still brawling wherever to pay attention to the objectives, and then ran forward to shoot the first enemy that came into my range, to make sure that I was in combat and couldn't be CCed by one of the enemy's stealthers.

I frantically shot two attackers going for the right door, but then saw a stealther appear at the left door as well, so I quickly whirled around and interrupted them too. I knew I wouldn't be able to hold both sides by myself for long, but by god I was going to try (while hoping that nobody had a stun or root up because that definitely would have screwed me over in that moment).

After what can't have been more than thirty seconds but what felt like an eternity of me having to cover both doors by myself, a friendly arrived and started defending the left door, freeing me up to fully focus on the right one. Eventually the rest of the team trickled in as well and we established a more solid defence.

Finally, it was over, my quest ticked over and I dinged 80. The final scoreboard showed me as having the most kills and damage taken out of everyone (the enemy clearly hated me), most damage and healing on my team (apparently we had a proper healer at one point who had left), and third highest objective points to boot.

It's rare that I get to rock the numbers like that in a warzone (I'm not usually focused on them and happy to spend a match just standing guard for example), nor do I generally feel like I did the bulk of the work, but in this one I feel confident in saying that I carried a heavy load for my team, especially with that solo defence of the two doors across the bridge. Too bad there are no more MVP votes to earn, so I'll never know whether any of my team mates appreciated it... but it sure was a great and memorable way to hit max level.

Legacy Level 50 on Star Forge

The other week I hit an interesting milestone by reaching legacy level 50 on Star Forge. While I have characters on all servers, I've never done a transfer between any of them, so my legacy levels are entirely independent of each other and purely a reflection of how much time I've spent playing on that specific server.

It's not really a surprise that Star Forge was the first secondary server on which I maxed out my legacy, considering that Shintar the Cathar trooper, created in 2016, was one of my first and most-played alts created on a different server than my home.

Still, at the same time it's kind of funny to think that it took me eight years of real time to get there, and to consider just how little in terms of story content I got done in all that time. When I hit legacy level 50 on The Red Eclipse (which would eventually get merged into Darth Malgus), I had only been playing for about ten months and had already completed four out of the eight class stories. On Star Forge I've still only completed one of them! So much legacy experience acquired from random nonsense like running dailies I guess...

Another thing that cracked me up was that I once again failed utterly at actually capturing a screenshot of the big ding, just like I did back in 2012. I'd been well aware that I was sitting at legacy level 49 and was creeping up on 50 but then... I just kinda forgot about it again, and when I realised that the ding had happened without me actually noticing, I checked my achievements just to find that it had actually happened several days ago. Seriously.

Anyway, I know that legacy levels are pretty meaningless, and have been so since forever. I reckon most long-term players have been 50 for so long, they haven't even thought about the concept in years. But to me, it was still an interesting milestone to reach on a second server. I'll probably post again whenever I get there on the other servers, but if I recall correctly, all the others are still only somewhere in the thirties, so it's probably going to be a while.

Guild Level 600

Back in December, I noticed that Twin Suns Squadron, my guild on Darth Malgus, had hit guild level 600. I gave it a brief mention in the guild message of the day but didn't really think about it beyond that. Until a few days ago that is, when I noticed that we were still level 600... and that our guild XP bar had stopped moving.

It was only then that I realised that we'd in fact hit the level cap for guilds. I'd had no idea that there even was one. I mean, I guess I always figured that there had to be one for practical reasons, but I expected it to be a really high number that we weren't going to reach for many more years, such as 1000.

However, apparently the cap of 600 was well known before anyone even got to it, as a quick Google search for "swtor guild max level" revealed a reddit post from over five years ago that already stated it to be 600 back then. Though that same post also posited that "guilds can first reach it in the week of August 27, 2024", which obviously turned out to be very wrong. (It's possible that XP rates were changed at some point after said post was made though.) I couldn't find anything on which guild was the first to hit level 600 or when, but apparently Stroke my Wookie of Darth Malgus hit level 500 in June of 2022.

I feel slightly sad now, both that I missed the opportunity to celebrate the ding itself due to not even realising that it was going to be special, and because our guild has no more levelling to do now. I just like making bars go up and I'll miss that.

When Twin Suns Squadron first hit level 100, I was so excited that I made a whole post about it. Then again when we hit 200, and again when our smaller Imperial alt guild hit 100. At some point it stopped feeling that exciting though, and like I said, I kind of started to think that we were (effectively) going to continue levelling forever. Now I wish I'd continued commemorating those milestones.

I figure there's no point in getting my hopes up that the devs will actually raise the guild level cap some day - after all, they never raised the maximum legacy level from 50 either. Plus the guild levelling/perk system hasn't really received much love over the years in general. I thought it was a really neat new feature when it first came out over five years ago, and Musco said at the time that they intended to "support [it] for a long time going forward".

I guess they technically did that in the sense that it's still functional and in the game, but it hasn't really received any more feature updates. They just fixed some small issues and bugs, and not even all of those at that. For example the "previous leaders" column in the Conquest leaders tab remains blank to this day, and we still don't have a way to tell when guild perks are rotating other than by checking the Jedipedia page, because there's still no in-game indicator for that five years later.

I don't know, it all just makes me feel a little melancholy. I suppose for whatever flaws it may have, SWTOR's guild levelling system remains solid and generally does its job. I certainly feel engaged by helping the guild I'm in on Shae Vizla grow and progress. I'm just a bit sad to see that particular part of the game come to an end for my main guild. I'll try to enjoy the 184 levels we have left on Imp side while I can.

A Week of APAC Adventure

The Shae Vizla server has now been out for a week, and its first weekly reset has come and gone. At the time of writing this, I'm up to about 24 hours /played on there, which is quite a lot considering I've been working full-time as normal and also doing other things. Before the first reset I'd accumulated over a million personal Conquest points despite only having a stronghold bonus of 15% (from claiming my free Nar Shaddaa stronghold and nothing else).

Levelling is always good for Conquest, but I think most of my points actually came from PvP, as I completed both the warzone and the arena weekly twice on the same character, something I don't think I'd ever done before. I've just been having so much fun with the lowbie PvP. It's always been my favourite bracket, but at the same time it's also the one that sees the least activity on the other servers nowadays, meaning that it pretty much only pops during prime time of whatever the server's time zone is.

On Shae Vizla on the other hand, the vast majority of the population is still low level right now and doesn't have a choice but to queue in that bracket, plus the server is in the unique position of currently attracting players from all over the globe for that "new server smell", meaning queues are popping quickly all around the clock (though I haven't tried playing during Australian night time yet). It's simply delightful.

It's also been fun to watch the guild I'm in (Heroes of the Republic/Empire, founded by Kal from Today in TOR) thrive and grow. The guild bank is effectively not functional yet due to the withdrawal wait timer the devs added when they introduced the trade tax a few months ago, but getting a guild ship felt like a matter of urgency to start earning Conquest rewards.

I remember when guild ships were first added, I wrote a post called "Want a guild ship? Hope you got 50 million lying around". Back in 2014 that seemed like a pretty steep price, but with how much inflation there's been since then, I could single-handedly afford a hundred guild ships without breaking a sweat.

On a brand new server though, where every credit has to actually be generated through gameplay from scratch and people have a lot of expenses to begin with, things are not as simple. Even with the cost of guild ships having been dramatically reduced to only eight million credits recently, that still wasn't a number a single person starting fresh could just pull out of their pocket in week one, so Kal solicited donations/loans (he said he'd pay people back with interest) from the guild membership to speed things up. Thankfully everyone was feeling very excited and generous, so both the Imperial and the Republic guild were able to fund their guild ship and invade a planet in time for the first week of "proper" Conquest. At the time of writing this, it looks like the Imperial guild is set to win first place on the large yield target, and the Republic guild might win first place on the small yield planet.

Other guilds haven't been slacking either, with the large yield scoreboard being completely filled up already (showing ten active guilds) and three guilds competing for medium and small yield currently. It makes sense that larger guilds would get there first, but I'd expect a number of smaller guilds to also be able to afford guild ships after the first few weeks.

It's definitely going to be interesting to monitor activity on this server over time. Right now everyone's excited because it's the new place to be, but it does feel like even beyond its purpose of serving as a new home for APAC players, there's also a real chance of establishing it as a unique space where players from all regions come together. However, over time many will probably feel the pull of returning to focusing on their legacy on their main server. I suspect the first real litmus test is going to be the release of 7.4, when people will want to see the new story on their mains.

Of course there's also the option of opening up transfers, but I also think the devs will want to be careful with not doing that too quickly so as not to kill the mood. It's going to be a challenging balance to strike between preserving the fresh start excitement as long as possible and not losing too many players to inertia pulling them back to their old homes.

Enjoying the New Server Smell on Shae Vizla

There are about a dozen different MMO-related things I'd like to be doing right now, but I just had to make some time for checking out the launch of the new APAC server. I started by securing my name on a trooper, but then began levelling a Sith warrior instead, simply because one of the weekly seasons objectives was to complete fifteen missions as that origin story. I named her Apacella, which I thought was quite a clever pun for the occasion. In no rush to level up quickly but still keen to play, I made it to level 13 in my first play session.

I got myself invited to Kal's guild on Empire side but also kept general chat open - something I usually don't do - because I wanted to see what people were talking about on the server's first day. There was some silliness going on, but no real toxicity that I could see. Mostly people seemed to be talking about what a strange experience it was to start from scratch again and to have no legacy perks, whether this experience made them miss their legacies or filled them with nostalgia.

I was somewhat ahead of the pack in that sense as I already got to wrestle with that particular sensation early last year, when I started from scratch on Tulak Hord and Leviathan. Still, at this point my legacies on those servers are at least moderately progressed too, so being back to square one on Shae Vizla was certainly a noticeable shift again. Killing that gold k'lor'slug in the blood pool at level nine was a proper life-or-death battle that I only won very barely - same with soloing the Korriban heroics later.

I also had to resist the urge to open my mail initially, since I did not have a stronghold yet that I could travel to and use to dump all my freebies in my legacy cargo hold. I figured that the ancient promotion that granted the Nar Shaddaa stronghold for free to everyone who was a subscriber at the launch of Galactic Strongholds (or something like that) doesn't apply on Shae Vizla, but I did see later on that it showed up as available for free on the stronghold directory; I just had to actually go there and activate it. Either way I opted to sort out my mail and bags once I got to the fleet.

I queued for my first PvP match at level ten, something I'd usually never do because of just how low-level and weak you are that early on... but I figured hey, the server is brand new and we're all low-level and weak, so why not. I certainly didn't feel like I was doing particularly worse than anyone else and it was good fun. I even did some arenas and the matches felt pretty balanced, with no twinks AoE-stunning everyone with grenades and nobody getting salty about losing.

Another thing that was really interesting to me was Conquest. Since there haven't been any fresh servers since launch, I hadn't considered how that system would function on a brand-new server. Since there are no established guilds yet, the Conquest leaderboard is currently completely empty as nobody has the funds to buy a guild ship yet - though even if they did, nobody's Conquest points contribute towards the guild score in their first week of joining, so it's literally impossible for any guild to score points this week. It'll be interesting to see who'll be the first ones to actually launch a guild ship invasion after the next reset.

For now I'm up to level 24, though I'm still not even done with Korriban as a lot of my XP came from doing random things like PvP or joining a world boss group. We killed the world bosses on Dromund Kaas and Balmorra for example and I levelled up twice from the insane XP payouts. The Balmorran world boss also nearly wiped us, because it turns out that a full raid group of piddly dpsers takes a lot of damage and we barely had enough healing going around. Truly, everything's an adventure again.

A Productive War Week

As mentioned previously, last week was Total Galactic War once again. It was a very successful one for my guild, as we conquered Hoth, which was one of four planets remaining that we had never won before (this includes the two planets added with Legacy of the Sith by the way).

That aside though, I just had a really good time playing. Total Galactic War is one of the rare occasions when I make a point of logging into and playing every single one of my (Republic) alts in the same week (in order to spread out the Conquest points and maximise my rewards), which makes for a pretty varied week of gaming. Sure, a lot of my focus was on high-yield objectives like the GSF and warzone weeklies, but once those were out of the way, I'd usually also do a bit of whatever progression was specific to that character.

I got two more alts to 80, and another three are now sitting at 79, with less than a full level to go to the cap as well. In fact, I realised that it's been so long that I made a new Republic alt on Darth Malgus that I only have a single character left in the lowbie PvP bracket (sub level 45) and even she will outgrow that soon. In midbie, I also have only three more characters left, aside from the level 79s I already mentioned. That feels strange and like I should really roll up some fresh lowbies at some point.

Then again, keeping track of how to play all these alts is a challenge by itself. One of the characters I got to 80 was my Sentinel - probably my least favourite combat style in general. I did a story mode operation on her to progress the implant mission and realised only afterwards that I'd done so without realising that one of my spec's main abilities wasn't even on my bar.

Two other lesser-played alts that got some love were my Serenity Shadow and my Balance Sage, who both saw some PvP action. DoT specs are pretty flavour of the month (year?) at the moment but personally I don't tend to get along with them that well. However, my Shadow had an absolutely insanely good time in warzones and it definitely made me re-evaluate my stance on the spec. Balance was a bit more of a mixed bag... I could kind of tell how extremely OP it was, but I repeatedly ended up in matches where the enemy enjoyed ganging up on me, and even as I was keeping three or four of them busy for a while my team mates got nothing done, which did not feel great.

I also pugged a few flashpoints, something I hadn't done in a while, and it was... interesting. With 336 gear being very accessible now, the content doesn't feel so tough anymore, but it's still possible for things to go wrong if people don't try at all. In a master mode Assault on Tython that I tanked, we got a Shadow dps with pretty low gear - I didn't think anything of it at first, nor was I upset when they wiped us by accidentally pulling an extra group on trash. After all, that can happen to anyone.

However, on the first boss I started to notice that things were dying really, really slowly, and just from the visuals, it didn't look like the guy was doing more than spamming a single attack. Okay, maybe someone new to the game and not great at it... that still would've been fine. However, by the second boss, he periodically stopped attacking at all, began spamming target markers around the area, and kept taunting the boss even though I asked him not to do that. By the end of the fight (which felt like it took ten minutes with only a single damage dealer really doing anything), the group had had enough and initiated a vote kick, and for once I had little sympathy. We'd really tried, but the guy was just not responding to anything and making things way harder than they needed to be.

After that much action, I've been taking it easy again this week... and we now know that next week will already bring the new seasons patch, meaning a return to that grind. I don't really feel ready, but I guess we'll see what it's like.

Alts and Endgame

This week, I took some time to review the state of my alt stable on Darth Malgus. Nine months after Legacy of the Sith raised the level cap, I've got fourteen characters at level 80. You might consider that a lot or not, but to me it feels rather low, considering that I had twice as many characters at the old level cap and the expansion only added five more levels.

I think there are several different reasons for this. One that I already mentioned previously is that levelling from 75 to 80 can be relatively slow by SWTOR's standards, unless you're all caught up with the current story or like to spend an hour or two cheesing the penultimate boss in Nathema. Some avenues for levelling that were available in the past have also been closed off. As someone who spends a lot of her time in flashpoints and operations with guildies, I used to just take my close-to-max level characters along to social runs of master mode flashpoints or story mode operations, but both of these are now unavailable until you actually hit the level cap (presumably for the sake of pugs who hated having non-max level players along). If I had a penny for every time I've looked at my selection of alts to pick one for a group activity and found myself thinking "oh yes, that one", just to then realise that the character in question wasn't 80 yet and therefore couldn't come...

In a lot of content that you can access at lower levels, such as daily zones, certain rewards such as the daily currency are also unavailable if the character doing the content isn't 80 yet. This has often pushed me towards playing my existing 80s for the rewards rather than spending time on getting more characters to the level cap.

The way you gear alts nowadays has also felt somewhat clunky to me. I wouldn't say it's alt-unfriendly (I did still level and gear fourteen of them after all) but it just feels less smooth. Onslaught's loot showers that were always based on your existing item rating (and where hitting the maximum was easy to achieve) made it very easy to gear alts as you could just throw some of the excess into your legacy bank and pull out a full gear set on any new alt as soon as it hit the level cap. Gearing that way was obviously not going to be 100% optimised, what with missing augments etc., but it was pretty solid for how easy it was.

In 7.0, the way you could only upgrade your gear to item level 330 via master mode operations made it kind of awkward to do the same, as just getting your gear up to that level took a lot more time. And once you got there, more 330 drops could only be acquired by continuing to kill master mode bosses (whose loot drops were scarce when compared to 6.0), meaning it wasn't easy to get a full set of gear, what with all loot being randomised fixed-stat items with no mods. Plus there was a certain incentive to dissemble the gear for more ops currency at times because if you wanted weapons for your alts for example they had to go through a whole chain of upgrades as well.

I initially tried to save up gear for my alts the same way I had done in Onslaught, but it was just awkward to end up with six pairs of gloves and no chest pieces for example. Plus because I wasn't generally taking my alts into master mode ops, they themselves could only contribute non-Rakata gear to the overall gear pool (which only went up to 326 max).

With 7.1 Bioware added a gear vendor on the fleet, who - once unlocked - sells you 330 mods that you can send to all your alts. Easy, right? Well... easi-er I guess, but still clunky as the unlock is not account-wide, so you either need to do it multiple times or do all your shopping on one character who then has to mail dozens of mods around your legacy, eight letter attachments at a time.

Also, I hope you've got suitable moddable gear on all your alts to put all those mods in! I mean, armour sets and weapons are straightforward enough, but if I put you on the spot right now and asked you where to get a moddable generator for example, would you know? (I asked my guildies and they pointed me to the adaptive gear vendor in the supplies section of the fleet, next to the level 10 mod vendor. That one's actually very affordable, but you've got to know about it.)

Oh, and I haven't even mentioned the legendary implants yet! At first I thought the little mission to unlock them after hitting level 80, asking you to gather "activity points", was quite cute, but after the tenth time it becomes a bit of a chore to be perfectly honest, just to be able to access the implant vendor. It's all... not terrible, but just noticeably more clunky than back in Onslaught and I've got to admit I'm not loving it.

If you're a certain type of raider, you might wonder why I bother to get any gear for my alts at all - since it's all legacy-bound, many of my guildies just operate with a single gear set (plus weapons for different combat styles and such) that they constantly shuttle back and forth between all their alts. The reason I don't do that is that I simply find it annoying. It feels dumb from an immersion point of view to effectively strip all your characters bar one naked most of the time, and it's annoying to always have to wait for people to send their gear back and forth (never mind the inevitable delays when someone can't find their Tactical of whatever), especially when all you're doing is a story mode where you really don't need to be wearing gear that is 100% optimised. I'm a bit more sympathetic when it comes to progression.

Either way I kind of find myself missing the simplicity of Onslaught's gearing, and being able to ease characters into endgame more gradually instead of having to hit max-level first. I know there've been other times in the game's life when gearing was more convoluted and even less alt-friendly than it is now, but that was so long ago now. The ease of 6.0 is still much fresher on my mind and easy to miss.

Levelling from 75 to 80

Adding five more levels to the level cap whenever a new expansion comes out seems to be one of those things that SWTOR just does at this point, but as much as I like levelling in general, I do have to wonder a bit about the purpose of those extra levels nowadays. Levelling is generally so fast that you'll hit max level long before you run out of content, so it doesn't feel like the extra levels are there to preserve some kind of pacing or anything.

Legacy of the Sith has really kind of highlighted the absurdity of it all because the amount of story content added wasn't really that much, yet Bioware still had to make sure that it would cover five levels, even if people stealthed past most of the trash mobs and didn't do the bonus missions. As a result, each completion of a story mission on Manaan gives an absolutely absurd amount of XP - even without having any sort of XP booster active, several of my characters actually jumped up two levels at once when handing in a quest.

My main hitting 80 at the end of Manaan.

For characters who were fully or mostly caught up with the story, this has meant that levelling from 75 to 80 is both quick and easy. For anyone who wasn't up to at least Ossus or beyond however, it's been a very different experience. In recent weeks I've been levelling some of my alts that were level 75 before LotS but were also at a much earlier point in the story from a narrative point of view, and it's been super weird.

My tanking Guardian Starberry, originally created during the Dark vs Light event many years ago now, actually still had the end of her class story to do. I took her to Corellia and because it coincided with a season objective or two, I didn't just do her class story there, but also the planetary storyline and all of the non-heroic side missions. Then I did the final Jedi knight mission on Dromund Kaas. Then I continued on to Makeb and cleared out two and a half mesas there (again, including non-heroic side missions) before I hit 80.

I know that still working on my class mission at 75 meant that I was very much behind (or is that ahead of?) the game's original levelling curve, but with everything being scaled you should still get decent XP everywhere you quest, regardless of what planet it is, right? So having to do a whole planet worth of quests and then some to get through five levels felt quite odd. It reminded me of the way levelling was paced when the game first came out, and I haven't had reason to reminisce about that in a long time!

As a different example, let's take my Scoundrel Racelle, who hadn't really done any story content since Shadow of Revan. Since 7.0 I did all of Ziost with her, a round of dailies there, and then got her started on KotFE. I didn't really get into the Alliance alerts when those became available, but I did do the introductory mission for Star Fortresses. In addition to those things, it took thirteen and a half chapters of KotFE to make it to 80. That's only about a third of a level per chapter! Then again, chapters giving poor XP shouldn't really be news I guess - I noted as far back as 2017 that I managed to complete all the Fallen Empire chapters without gaining a full five levels on my Sith inquisitor at the time.

For yet another example, my Sniper Corfette was on KotET chapter six when the expansion came out, and made it about halfway through Traitor Among the Chiss before dinging 80, though it's worth noting that this included a fairly extended stay on Iokath during which I did the weekly there about three times. So levelling was kind of speeding up by that point, but still far from fast.

Soon after 7.0 launched, I noticed that a lot of people were looking for ways to speed-level their alts from 75 to 80 if said characters weren't caught up with the current story. Several of my guildies took to running heroics as a group to level up and seemed to be quite happy with the results. I was kind of shaking my head at them initially, considering how fast levelling in SWTOR is most of the time, but after having taken more of my own alts through that stretch I have a bit more sympathy for their impatience.

The most bizarre (to me) outgrowth of this desire to speed up levelling from 75 to 80 has been the "Nathema farm". I quizzed a guildie about it after he kept bringing it up in guild chat and eventually learned that this particular speed-levelling method involves running the Nathema Conspiracy flashpoint up to the penultimate boss, Gemini 16, and fighting her to the point where she splits. Then you kill all her clones and jump off the platform to reset the fight. There are even videos advocating for this.

As far as I can tell the reason this works is because killing a flashpoint boss gives a decent chunk of XP, and for some reason Gemini's clones all reward the same amount as you get for killing the boss herself properly. So every aborted boss attempt counts as killing four flashpoint bosses and it only takes a couple of minutes to reset and do it over.

It's the very definition of degenerate gameplay, something I'm generally not fond of, but at the same time I have to admit I was kind of amused by the irony of all of this happening in Nathema of all places - a flashpoint that hasn't been super popular in the past due to its length and perceived difficulty.

Either way I had no plans to take part in that silliness myself, but as these things so often go, circumstances conspired against me. Last night we had our first social ops run on Empire side since 7.0, and someone raised the question of whether it was possible to quickly level an Imperial character from 75 to 80 between his return from work and the start of ops, so of course someone brought up the Nathema method. Before I knew it I had another guildie giving me puppy dog eyes about whether I wasn't going to "help" the two of them level their characters for the op (I am leader of the Imperial alt guild after all), so I had my level 75 Powertech tank strap on her helmet and off we went.

Our expedition took about an hour. We didn't have a stealther to skip a lot of the trash as people sometimes do, so we had to clear the flashpoint properly, which took about half an hour and awarded me about three quarters of a level on its own. Then we spent another half hour killing Gemini's clones a few times and by that point we were all 80. I was actually the last to ding as the others seemed to have additional XP boosts active, while I only remembered to pop a normal consumable when we started on the dedicated farming portion instead of at the start of the flashpoint.

Still, it was impressively fast - though this was of course helped by the fact that there's a double XP event happening this week. I'm not sure I would have enjoyed the whole process if it had taken twice as long. As it was, it was a fun little one-time adventure, but I have no particular desire to go back and repeat it.

My Powertech tank dinging 80 in Nathema.

How have you been levelling your alts to 80?

The New Character Experience in LotS

I'm kind of at a point in SWTOR where I feel that my several dozen alts are enough to experience what I primarily want out of the game and that I don't really "need" any more, but that doesn't prevent me from occasionally rolling up a new alt for a specific purpose anyway. For example I've been very curious about how the 7.0 class and UI changes feel on a brand-new character. Long-time players like me complaining about losing their 29th ability button are one thing, but I was under the impression that a lot of these changes were primarily targeted at new and returning players anyway, in order to make things more appealing and less complicated for them.

While I can't un-know everything I know about the game after ten years of playing, I could roll up a new character on a server where I don't usually play very much and where I have no notable legacy unlocks, to see what that experience felt like. I already mentioned in a previous post that I created a new Jedi knight on Star Forge, but with the Shadow combat style, which was previously reserved for consulars.

First off: character creation. My opinion on the new character creation screen has largely stayed the same since I first saw Swtorista tweet a screenshot of it during LotS PTS testing. It looks good, but the overall look is just very generic. Obviously changing the first half to accommodate the decoupling of base and advance class was needed, and I also like that gender is simply a toggle now instead of a separate "step", which always felt unnecessary to me. But I do miss some of the flavour that was lost, such as having information about the different species. Also, before this change I'd never really thought about it, but the previous way of having character creation take place on a space station was actually a nice story tie-in, as each class story starts with your character taking a shuttle down from orbit to the planet. Now your character's simply "born" in a black void like in some generic shooter game.

Some problems are still the same old, same old, such as finding a name. They really need to do another round of freeing up the names of unplayed characters some time, because none of the suggestions the game itself provides are ever available. Also, I found myself wishing for a back button when I accidentally overwrote all my initial choices by hitting "random". (I thought it was for randomising the name, not the appearance...)

Anyway, enough about character creation. Once you get into the game properly, the traditional scrolling Star Wars intro is notably absent, but this has been acknowledged as a bug. I know many people still hold up the class stories as the best SWTOR has to offer, but I've got to say that going back to the starter worlds it always strikes me how far the game's come in terms of its storytelling. Sure, the original class stories are still engaging, but everything from the writing to the cut scenes to the quest flow has come a long way in my opinion and is actually a lot more enjoyable in newer story installments. It's just the fact that you've got those eight completely different stories to choose from at the start that makes going back there so appealing I think.

Gameplay-wise things immediately felt a little off though. No, I don't expect the starter planets to be a huge challenge, but that's not what I mean. For example, one of the first abilities a Shadow is given is Force Breach, which starts as a damage-over-time ability. It immediately struck me what a terrible choice that was in terms of fun, because every enemy in those early levels dies within literally one or two hits, so that applying a DoT is utterly pointless.

New abilities now appear on your bar automatically whenever you level up, which is something I grumbled about when WoW first started doing it and I'm still not convinced it's an entirely good move for SWTOR either. Mostly because I think there's value in making a conscious choice to see a trainer at a time that's convenient for you, so you can actually take the time to read your new skills and acquaint yourself with them at your leisure. A new button just appearing on your quickbar in the middle of combat is easy to overlook... admittedly less so during the earlier levels when there isn't much on there yet, but it becomes more of an issue as things fill up and become visually busy.

I also found the lack of AoE for the first few levels very noticeable, as all the mobs come in groups so you're just running up to them and then whacking them to death one by one. I don't remember when you got your first AoE under the old system, maybe it took just as long, but I don't recall it feeling quite so bad... maybe because you generally got more abilities sooner. This time around, I only had enough combat abilities to fill up a little over half a bar by level ten - again, I don't have exact numbers, but I remember those skills coming in much faster during the early levels within the old system.

At level ten I also went to look for some sort of prompt to choose a specialisation and was surprised to find that the game had just put my Shadow into Infiltration spec by default. I guess I can see why the devs would do that, to avoid players accidentally gimping themselves by potentially never even choosing a spec at all. If you do discover it later, the game now let's you change specialisation with the push of a button anyway, without requiring a special legacy perk or that you visit a guy on the fleet. On the other hand though, it makes specialisation a very passive thing to begin with, and I suspect that might lead to casual players being even more likely to remain completely unaware of the concept.

For the Shadow in specific, I also found it interesting that I gained stealth at level ten, but not a single ability that only works from stealth or that behaves differently from stealth, which means it's kind of introduced as just a way of avoiding mobs instead of something that affects the way you do combat. Again, my memory may not be 100% on point here, but I seem to recall that stealth pretty much used to come combined with things that you could actually do from stealth.

On a totally unrelated note, "Introduction to Conquests" is now granted automatically when hitting level ten, which I did think was neat, as it was too easy to miss on the fleet terminal previously.

In the area leading to the Forge on Tython, there's an optional champion droid which used to be quite tough back in the day when you couldn't have a healer companion at this level, and who became utterly trivial to solo after 4.0. I thought I'd give him a go to use him as a sort of measuring stick and was kind of pleasantly surprised to find that while T7 kept healing me, without legacy buffs or anything he couldn't entirely keep up with the damage, so that my health started to slowly but surely decline. In the end I ran away and had to start kiting the droid around a pillar for the last part of the fight in order not to die, which was quite satisfying actually.

Another thing I liked was that upon finishing up my class quest at the Forge, I actually received a dual-saber right away. That may not be a brand-new change actually, but I do remember how awkward it used to be to forge yourself a special one-handed lightsaber, just to then instantly have to replace it with some green that was actually suitable for your advanced class/combat style.

After finishing Tython, the first thing I did on the fleet was to queue for a PvP match, which was a stark reminder that you really shouldn't do that at level 13. I mean, it's always been a bad idea at such a low level, but now it was even worse because I had even fewer abilities than I would have had previously. I could stealth but had no crowd control, so literally all I did for most of the Voidstar match I got into was put my single DoT on every enemy and spend the rest of the time saber/double striking. Unsurprisingly we lost, though at least the Introduction to Warzones quest gave me a few nice pieces of starter gear.

I also thought it was quite noteworthy that I didn't gain any skills at levels 11, 13 or 14, but then when I dinged 15 in the middle of a Coruscant heroic I suddenly got four new actives and a new passive at once - and worse: the passive was the one that completely morphs the way Force Breach works. I was just getting the hang of putting my DoT on every mob, then I dinged, and suddenly my DoT wasn't a DoT anymore, and couldn't be used at all unless I used other abilities to build buff stacks first... not the best experience to have while buried under a pile of mobs in the middle of a heroic. Again, this is why trainers are a good thing in my opinion.

At the end of the day, I'm not a truly new player though, so who can say how they perceive this kind of thing? To me personally it doesn't seem like a significant improvement, at least not in these early levels. For my taste, you spend too much time spamming your most basic attack simply because nothing else is available yet, and the pacing of new abilities feels awkward. I may keep experimenting with it some more though, to see how it feels as you go up in levels or when you play a combat style other than Shadow.

Maximum Pacifism Achieved!

At last, the time has come! Last night my pacifist Jedi Pacis hit level 75 after another round of Cantina Rush on Nar Shaddaa. The Feast of Prosperity turned out to be nothing short of a fountain of XP for her. Two daily quests each for cooking and serving food plus a weekly associated with both, plus the ingredient gathering that she could at least do when it involved picking fruit on Belsavis or gathering ice crystals on Hoth. Three weeklies completed then also granted the meta weekly, and all this with double XP - what more could you ask for?

The only slight disappointment was that she couldn't do any of the one-time story quests past the intro. The mission to Rishi doesn't require any combat and therefore would have been compatible with her ideals, but alas... Rishi doesn't have any heroics or other accessible quick travel options, so she can't actually go there.

Want to know what was the first thing I did upon hitting max-level? I went to the fleet, bought the "Go to Sleep, Go to Sleep!" Tactical and then returned to Tatooine to rescue Raith's loved ones. Yes, I never deleted that quest from my log and it had been staring at me from my mission tracker ever since. The funny thing was, after I used the double CC to peacefully remove the toy robots from the chest, I ran into another player on my way out who was just barrelling through and killing all the mobs anyway. If that had happened back during my first visit, I could have completed that quest over a year ago, but of course at the time nobody else just happened to come through at the right moment.

As for what's going to happen to Pacis now... I don't know, I'll probably let her participate in the Feast some more and then give her a bit of a break. Next time the swoop event comes around I might have a go at seeing how many of the one-time story quests for that I can do - I picked them up last time with the intent to just do them whenever, but then found out that the quest NPCs on other planets also disappear when the event isn't on, so you can't progress the off-Dantooine steps during that time either. When LotS raises the level cap to 80 I'll probably get her up there as well at some point, but certainly not as a priority over my regular characters.

I would say something about what a long, strange trip it's been, but it really hasn't been all that long. I created Pacis back in August 2019, over two years ago now, but the only reason it took this long to level her was that my interest in the project has been very on and off. Her actual /played time after hitting the cap was only two days and six hours, which isn't long at all, especially when you consider how much her pacifism hobbled her ability to level up normally.

Either way this has been a very interesting experiment. In a way I was both surprised by how much full pacifism limited me and by how much I was still able to do despite of all the additional limitations I put on myself. As an example of the former, I'm thinking of things like being unable to click certain quest items or use a lot of abilities without a weapon equipped (even when the ability didn't sound like something that should require a weapon), or how many side quests didn't even unlock without having made sufficient progress on the main storyline. And of course there was being unable to leave Tython via shuttle after having fully explored the map at level five.

I actually think that you wouldn't be able to replicate Pacis' exact levelling path today, since she only managed to "escape" the planet via the Pirate Incursion quick travel option to Dantooine, which was originally accessible from level one, however this has now been patched out to require level twenty (at least according to this event guide by Vulkk) and is therefore no longer an option.

On the other hand though, I was surprised by the sheer amount of quests that didn't strictly require any fighting or killing, despite of SWTOR's early levelling being very much designed in the classic "kill ten rats" tradition. As players we just tend to kill everything that's in the way because it's the "natural" and easy thing to do, and the game also pretty much assumes that you will do this - it never ceased to amuse me when some NPC dialogue referred to me supposedly beating people up when I had done no such thing.

Travel without a ship was also more feasible than I had expected. Generally speaking, the game really expects you to do your class mission up to the end of Coruscant at least and to definitely get your ship asap... without it, you can't freely fly from planet to planet, you can't accept guild ship summons, and you can't use the "exit to planet" option from a stronghold. But the quick travel items added for heroics in 4.0 and later even for some other missions make no such distinctions and were a surprising godsend in terms of getting around. I would have been quite content to level from 5 to 75 purely by running the two dailies on Dantooine (though that would have been quite boring) but being able to planet-hop via these quick travel items certainly made things a lot more interesting and varied.

EDIT: This was a big enough deal for me that I also made a post on the subreddit.

Expansion Prep

We still haven't got a release date for Legacy of the Sith, but if Bioware wants to stick to the originally announced end-of-year holiday period, it can't be more than three months away. This got me thinking about whether there's anything I need to do to metaphorically "get my house in order" before the expansion or whether there are any goals I should try to achieve before the level cap goes up again. With the way SWTOR tries to keep all content relevant these days, it's not that much of a rat race, but still, sometimes there are things that are better done sooner rather than later.

I came up with the following list of goals for myself: 

1. Get my main to Renown rank 999. 

Bioware may have dropped the idea of resetting Renown ranks seasonally, but I'll be very surprised if they don't make us start these over with the expansion. I got the achievements for getting all classes to rank 100 at the end of last year, but raising my main's rank has remained slow-going due to my love for alt play. At the time of writing this, she's in the mid-800s, and I realised that I'm not going to gain the last 150 ranks or so in time without putting some sort of concerted effort in.

It's not a particularly difficult or time-consuming task; it just requires me to focus. Based on some simple napkin maths, earning about two to three ranks a day should be plenty to get me there for the start of December, so that's what I've been aiming for these past couple of weeks.

2. Get my "main eight" all caught up.

I did the Onslaught story on one character of each class, but haven't exactly been religious when it comes to keeping up with new story releases on my alts since then. Content like Echoes of Oblivion or Spirit of Vengeance was fun enough to play through once or twice, but the lack of class- or even faction-specific variations has made it less interesting to repeat overall. Still, Secrets of the Enclave had at least a faction split again, and I'm hopeful that Legacy of the Sith will also offer content that is interesting to play through on alts, so I want mine to be ready.

3. Get a saboteur all caught up.

The main thing that has been absent from my "story roster" is a saboteur after that option was introduced, since all my characters have been loyalists. (And since their integrity is important to me, I couldn't just "make" one betray their faction just to see what would happen!) People have been telling me for ages that the saboteur story is awesome and I really need to get to it, and I'd always smile and nod but then not focus on it.

I did do some work on getting my Republic-aligned Sniper caught up, since she struck me as the perfect Imperial saboteur, but at some point in late KotFE things just kind of fizzled out. Recently I've picked her up again, and I'm telling myself that as little as one chapter/story installment per week would be enough to get caught up in time for the expansion. I just need to stick with it!

4. Finally get my pacifist to 75.

No special reason for this other than that I'd like to actually reach the level cap before it goes up again. Then I'll probably make a post on Reddit about it. Again, this is something that I can quite easily chip away at in small chunks, one week at a time.

5. Continue clearing out my materials tab a bit.

This kind of ties into what I wrote about making money in my last post. I've not just been selling jawa junk, but also realised that I've got a ton of stuff stashed away in my materials tab that's actually quite valuable. I kind of predicted that this would happen with how "out of sight, out of mind" crafting materials have become since the addition of this special inventory with Onslaught, but that hasn't prevented me from falling prey to it myself.

I don't know how many of these things will retain any value come expansion time, but even if I want to be cautious and keep some for myself just in case they remain useful for something, I won't need hundreds and thousands of each of the rarer items, so off to the GTN they go! I don't exactly need the extra credits either, but you never know.

6. Also-rans...

All of the above should be quite enough to keep me busy to be honest, but there are of course always other alts to progress as well. The question of who could even be a saboteur among my Republic characters has me pretty stumped... I'm leaning towards one of my Scoundrels, but even there I'm not sure I can really see her siding with the Empire to this degree. Either way, whichever one I'd pick would have all of KotFE, KotET and more to get through to get all caught up.

12 Things That Are Very Different in SWTOR after 10 Years

The other week I was having a chat with some WoW players I know and the subject of SWTOR came up. Knowing that I play it as my main game, one of them said something along the lines of: "I tried it at launch but it didn't really stick with me. I assume it's a much better game now?" To which I probably should have replied with a simple "Yes, of course!" but since I'm both rubbish at being an ambassador for my favourite MMOs and always have to complicate everything, my answer was some muttered deflection about how I was clearly too biased to make that judgement. Truth is, there are some things that I liked better about the way the game was at launch, which is something I worked through in this post from a few years ago.

But it did get me thinking about what the experience would be like for someone deciding to return now who only played for a little while at launch, or who has at least been absent from the game for more than a few years. With SWTOR's ten year anniversary coming up, I wouldn't be surprised if more people were thinking of checking it out again just to see how it's doing! So I tried to think of some major aspects of the game that have changed since then and compile them in the form of a blog post. Maybe this will alleviate some returning players' confusion... or encourage others to come back if they were on the edge and find out this way that something that put them off back in the day is no longer an issue. Without further ado: Twelve things that make SWTOR very different now compared to how it was at launch.

1. There've been a lot of server merges.

If you still remember the name of the server you played on back in the day... it won't be there anymore. SWTOR launched with a huge amount of servers, just to have to merge them together again and again as the game's population declined. We seem to have settled on there being only five, though that's not as dire as it sounds as they are all "mega servers" and considerably bigger than the average server used to be back in the day. There are three European ones for each of the supported languages (English, German and French), and two US ones for the east and west coast respectively. Note that while the Satele Shan server is nominally considered the west coast server, in terms of physical location, both servers are located on the east coast now.

If you used to or want to play on an RP or pure PvP server, you're out of luck now as neither exists anymore. The RP community just doesn't get much love, period, and world PvP was changed to a purely optional thing on all servers. Basically you have the option to switch to a "PvP instance" on any planet accessible to both factions, in which all players are flagged. There are no special rewards for it though other than sometimes having reduced competition for mob spawns.

2. The game has a free-to-play/freemium business model now.

I know this is a change that happened in SWTOR's very first year, but if you really quit within the first few months, I guess you never would have seen even that get implemented. It's kind of weird to think back to what a drama that was back then, when being subscription-only was considered the gold standard and dropping the mandatory subscription was considered a sign of a failed game. I feel like people have become a lot more chill about that nowadays and seem to consider the business model less important as long as the game is fun and no particular monetisation scheme is too annoying.

The way SWTOR's free-to-play model works is that it gives you access to a huge amount of content for free, but then tries to make you vaguely uncomfortable in terms of quality of life at every opportunity to get you to pony up for the optional subscription. If that sort of thing bothers you, I always suggest subscribing for at least a month if you think you're having any fun at all, as that immediately removes all of the restrictions and unlocks even more content.

The cash shop is fairly inoffensive unless you're a fashionista who needs to own all the outfits as that'll set you back by quite a lot. Note that everything from the Cartel Market can be traded and sold in game though, so if you've got enough credits you can get most things from other players via the Galactic Trade Network.

Aside from cosmetics the Cartel Market only contains a few unlocks that make life as a free/preferred (lapsed sub) player marginally less annoying, but really, if that's your goal it's much easier and better value for money to just subscribe. I wrote a post comparing SWTOR's and ESO's business models a couple of years ago if you find that kind of thing interesting.

3. Levelling has been simplified and sped up massively.

Not that it was ever really hard... but you could die on some solo story missions, and you sometimes had to worry about upgrading your gear or doing some side content for extra XP. None of that is really the case anymore. In terms of combat, I found it quite striking that when Bhagpuss gave the game a try a couple of years ago, he described the levelling journey as such: "Games intended for very small children not excluded, TOR is by far the easiest MMORPG I have ever played." And he's played a lot of MMOs! It does ramp up a bit later on, which is a point I don't think Bhagpuss ever got to, but it's still a far cry from what it was like during the first couple of years, when you could even die on the starter planets if you didn't upgrade and use your skills appropriately.

The XP you get from main story missions has also been multiplied so many times that doing anything but the main storyline(s) is now redundant for levelling purposes and if you engage with things like side quests or group content at all, you'll be over-levelled for the story in no time.

4. Side quests are now hidden by default.

Speaking of side quests or "exploration missions" as they are now called, not only are they not needed anymore to fill your XP bar, someone at Bioware also decided at some point a few years ago that their mere presence was confusing and/or off-putting and decided to make them hidden by default. If you still want to find and do them, you have to open your map and tick the "show exploration missions" box on there to make quest markers appear over the relevant NPCs. You're welcome.

5. The game is fully level-scaled now.

On the subject of being over-levelled for the story, a few expansions ago SWTOR introduced level-scaling. The way it works in most cases is that each planet has a defined level range, and if you are within that range or below, you'll simply play as your current level, but if you exceed it, you'll be down-levelled to the highest "permitted" level for the planet, while keeping all your higher level abilities and secondary stats, meaning that you're still going to be pretty OP. But it does mean that you can't simply run around lower-level planets one-shotting everything, and that you do keep getting XP for doing quests no matter where you are (with the exception of some low-level areas on Coruscant and Dromund Kaas), so if you're enjoying the lower-level content you can do most of your levelling by simply doing that.

6. Travel around the galaxy is faster now.

Something I'd almost forgotten until I re-read the post by Wilhelm that I linked earlier is how annoying planetary travel used to be sometimes, what with having to go to your hangar, loading into your ship, picking your travel destination, getting off there, exiting the space station or spaceport, and so on and so forth. Nowadays, the only reason you'll have to do that is if you have a quest inside the hangar or on your ship while levelling, but otherwise you can open the galaxy map from (almost) anywhere, click on your desired planetary destination and simply go there instantly. You might just have to briefly navigate out of a spaceport or station after arriving.

There are also a lot of other convenient travel options. Planetary taxis are now all available without having to unlock them first. Both quick travel and the emergency fleet pass had their cooldowns shortened drastically, to the point where subscribers with legacy perks have no cooldown on either of them (when it used to be something like half an hour and... twenty hours? respectively).

Strongholds (more on them below) also offer a way to instantly travel to a safe place and back if you need it. And people in a guild with a guild ship can instantly summon a group from anywhere in the galaxy to their location. WoW used to have this as a guild perk called "Have Group, Will Travel" that they took out at some point because it was considered too overpowered or something. Not so in SWTOR! I've written about the evolution of travel in SWTOR in a bit more detail here.

7. There's housing now, called strongholds.

Housing is one of those things that I really don't care that much about in an MMORPG, but I know that there's a dedicated audience for it that considers it an absolute key feature. Again, this is something that's actually been in the game for quite a while now (since 2014 to be exact), but if you left in the first year you might not have known that. You can purchase various apartments and estates on a number of planets and decorate them to your heart's content.

The way decorations can be placed is hook-based (so not completely free-form) but at the same time not as restrictive as in other games that use similar systems, as you can change the layout of hooks you use (e.g. by choosing whether a room should contain a lot of small hooks, a couple of big ones, or a mix).

8. The way companions work has been changed quite a bit.

At launch every class could acquire a total of five unique companions by completing their class story. Each companion had likes and dislikes, and you could only progress their personal story if they liked you enough. They also required constant gear upgrades to remain effective (the same way as a player) and each companion was locked into only being able to perform one trinity role (tank, dps or healer).

With the launch of Knights of the Fallen Empire, everyone's class companions were taken away (once you start that part of the story), though you later get to re-unite with them as the story progresses. However, now all characters get access to (almost) all companions, plus a whole bunch of new ones.

Companion stories aren't locked behind whether they like you anymore, and instead unlock automatically once you've progressed far enough in the overall story. "Liking" you isn't that important anymore either, as affection has been replaced with influence, which also goes up if you make decisions that they hate. Gear also doesn't affect companion performance anymore; instead they simply get stronger as your influence increases.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, all companions can perform any trinity role now, so you're no longer locked into dragging a specific companion that you don't like around just because they're your only healer. They've also been boosted incredibly in terms of power and are much more effective at keeping you alive now, which also contributes to the whole levelling being much easier thing (see point three). Again, if you're interested in more detail, I've written more about the evolution of companions in SWTOR in this post.

9. The gear treadmill is minimal.

Speaking of gear affecting power levels, the gear treadmill in SWTOR is minimal nowadays. With the launch of the last expansion they added a new item level of gear but this has stayed the same throughout the whole expansion, even though it was really easy to max out within a couple of weeks after launch. You don't need to do the hardest content to acquire max-level gear either - people have the option to gear up through different activities depending on what they find fun. Additionally, most gear is bound to legacy, meaning that you can freely send it back and forth between your alts, so that a new alt can instantly wear a full kit of max-level gear once you've ground it out once. If you feel like other games are too demanding in terms of making you grind for gear as you'd really rather just chill and enjoy the story or whatever, SWTOR might be for you.

10. The easier group content is role-neutral now.

I thought about starting with "SWTOR has an automated group finder now" since strictly speaking that wasn't in at launch either, though it did get added very soon after. Still, I can imagine few players being surprised by this. What does throw people off more often is that the easier group content (veteran mode flashpoints and uprisings) has been tweaked to be role-neutral now, meaning that you can run it with four damage dealers if you want - no long queue times to wait for a tank. So if the game puts you into a group with no tank or healer, this is not an error but working as intended! The only thing to keep in mind here is that in somewhat of a contrast to the easy solo-levelling, group content without a tank or healer can actually be quite a challenge (depending on the instance and your group make-up), potentially forcing you to actually take care with pulls and use cooldowns to not die.

11. The post-launch content is not unique for your class.

Many hours of new story content have been added since launch, however due to the game not meeting expectations they had to lose the whole "eight parallel class stories" angle and unify the storyline. If this makes you wonder which character class might be best to return to to get the best experience out of the new content, I've got a post for you here!

Still, it's important to know that there's not as much replayability for alts as there used to be. There is some depending on the content - as there are references to your old class sprinkled in here or there, and some storylines are different for Republic and Empire at least. However, eight unique class stories it is not.

12. There are options to skip ahead now.

I'd always advise players not to skip story the first time around, but if you were stuck on something you really didn't enjoy, or on an alt that stalled out while progressing through a piece of content you found too repetitive to do again, there are options to skip ahead to different points in the story now. So for example if you've only been gone for a few years but got bogged down in the "Knights of" expansions because you really didn't enjoy them, you can skip right ahead to Jedi Under Siege, where the story returns to a more traditional Republic vs. Empire setup.

Are you someone who hasn't played SWTOR in a long time and thinking about returning? Got any other burning questions about what has changed since the last time you played? Feel free to leave them in the comments!

The Longest Journey

I've mentioned previously that I've not been very good at getting new alts through story content ever since 4.0 dramatically increased levelling speed. It used to be that I just engaged in a variety of activities to level up - including my class story - but since 4.0 changed it so that doing multiple things is not a requirement anymore, I always end up outpacing it by doing group content, and level sync or not, I just tend to not feel very inspired to hang out and do story quests on Coruscant once I'm past 50 or so. It just doesn't feel good.

As a result, it always takes a concerted effort for me to get high or even max-level characters back on track story-wise. Being able to (slowly) earn Conquest points that way too has certainly helped my motivation.

There is one character though whose journey I've been putting off for longer than any other: my Sage Tiranea. She was the second Sage I ever created, and possibly even the second consular? I don't recall for sure whether I created my first Shadow before or after, but I'm pretty sure it was after.

Tiranea was created for the express purpose of levelling with a couple of friends whom I tried to get into the game after it went free-to-play in late 2012. I had helped them out with heroic quests on my main, but I wanted to be able to just level with them organically. Unfortunately, by the time she had caught up to them in the mid-twenties, they had already lost interest in the game again (because that's how these things always go for me for some reason).

So I let Tiranea idle for several years, just in case they were going to come back. Once level sync was introduced I realised that trying to stay around their old characters' level was pretty pointless, and I started to log her occasionally at least, to help the guild with Conquest or to play a midbie PvP match here and there. But she always remained neglected, and never hit the level cap in any expansion. Until now that is, as I finally finished her class story the other night.

I realised that for all the countless times I've played through the Tython starter experience on new alts, I hadn't actually seen the end of the consular story since 2014. In the final boss fight I got one-shot by the cave-in ability and it was like meeting an old friend: Oh yeah, I remember that!

On the whole though, dragging her class story out over eight years has not done the experience any favours. In the confrontation with the final villain he talks a bit about your previous deeds, and when he referred to me killing the boss at the end of chapter one (instead of redeeming him) I was like: "I did that? I guess I must have."

This did bring back vague memories of how my original idea for the character had been to go slightly dark side (since I had just experienced the light side on my first Sage) but over time I found myself drifting back to making more light side decisions. I'd like to come up with some sort of roleplaying excuse, such as that she had impulsive tendencies when she was younger but grew and matured over time, but the truth is that I just forgot and going light side is simply my default.

The character has been malleable in other ways as well: I tend to pick a look and spec for my alts very early on and then pretty much stick with it. Tiranea on the other hand alternated between healing and dps several times, changed both her haircut and her hair colour (I even wrote about that at the time), and I gave her a completely new outfit about three times as well. I'm still not sure what her exact role's supposed to be in my stable of alts, which means that she probably won't see a lot of play time after this. But hey, at least she actually got to complete her class story.

On the subject of that, defaulting to my usual light side options meant that I didn't really get to see anything new in terms of content variations, but I did romance Lieutenant Iresso for the first time. It was a decision that came about on a bit of a whim after I'd just recruited him and I read in a reddit post that his romance was supposed to be quite enjoyable.

Ultimately I agree with the comments made there that he seems to have one of the most "mature" romances - no crazy advances or awkward shuffling of feet as someone struggles to express their feelings. Iresso and the consular just really like each other and say as much. There was one conversation cut scene where instead of the default smoochies animation he just gives her a peck on the cheek and funnily enough that was more memorable to me than anything else; it just felt like such a small but natural thing.

Anyway, that's that done - next on my list of characters that are working on finishing their class stories is my Jedi Guardian from the DvL event.