Legacy-wide DvL Tokens and More

Yesterday's patch 7.5.1b was an interesting one despite being only a minor patch. For one thing, it changed dark and light side tokens from being character-bound currencies to legacy-wide. It seems the cynicism I expressed about the chances of this happening a few weeks ago was unwarranted, though I do still wonder why converting the Soovada slot machine chips to a legacy currency would be such a big deal but they were able to convert the DvL tokens within a couple of weeks.

Maybe it's simply the difference between a clean and a "sloppy" implementation, as we weren't able to log in and find all our tokens in one place yesterday, but it was necessary to manually log into every single character that had tokens to get them added to the total (which would let you go over the cap by the way, in case anyone was worried). I finished my rounds of alt-hopping with a total of 1,310 tokens.

For fun, I'd held a little contest on my guild Discord beforehand, asking people to guess what my total was going to be after the patch. One guildie actually managed to guess this exact number!

Of course I then had the problem of what to do with all this currency, since I wanted to get back down to below the cap, or else I wasn't going to be able to earn any more tokens from boss kills. Even though the devs added some more items to the vendors, there wasn't really anything I was super keen on. Still, I ended up buying eight of the armour sets as well as a couple of the weapons.

That still left me with more than 300 light side tokens, at which point I just gave up and bought a bunch of speeders to throw into my legacy cargo bay. A lot of my more frequently-played characters already had all of these from back in the day, when the tokens were very easy to earn and I was constantly trying to find ways to avoid bumping up against the cap, but I'm sure I'll find some toons that can actually use them.

It's a good thing I didn't rely on these vendor rewards for motivation to take part in world boss kills this season...

One of my inquisitors trying to decide whether the Dread Harbinger set from the vendor works for her.

There were a few other interesting patch items as well though. For example it was announced that Galactic Season 7's end date, which was originally meant to be the 7th of January, was pushed back to February 18th. I have no issues with that, and the official justification was to give players more time to finish the season without having to be online all the time during the holiday period. It does make me wonder though whether they're behind schedule in some way in terms of content production, seeing how we're supposed to have this ongoing cadence of 7.x patches with story updates and 7.x.1 patches with Galactic Seasons.

Finally, one patch note that seemed to inspire a (to me) surprising amount of anger on reddit was this one:

Players must now defeat the security cannons in the Hammer Station Flashpoint in order to disengage the bridge in Section Zero.

For anyone who doesn't know what this is about, Hammer Station is generally considered the easiest/fastest of all flashpoints and therefore very popular with people who just want to farm flashpoint currency quickly. People's attempts to optimise this speed-running have included not fighting a pair of champion turrets at a bridge near the end of the flashpoint - the "popular" strategy was to just run past them, which would keep you in combat until the end of the flashpoint.

The upside of this was that it would save you about a minute of combat time. The downside was that being stuck in combat meant being unable to regenerate health, so if your group didn't have a healer and/or included low-level characters without a lot of cooldowns, people would sometimes die during the last few trash packs before the last boss (the boss himself is surrounded by kolto stations). Also, being stuck in combat prevents you from exiting the flashpoint, so it was required to suicide-jump off the ledge behind the boss after killing him to get out of combat again.

I think it's fairly obvious from this description that this was never a good risk-reward trade-off in a pug. It was basically the same problem we used to have in Athiss with that damn ledge jump, where people would rather spend five minutes waiting for everyone to climb up a ledge than spend thirty seconds killing two easy mob packs (and which was thankfully patched out in 7.4). Only in this instance they'd rather risk getting some of their group mates killed as well as give everyone a repair bill rather than kill two mobs.

So while reddit may be mad, most people I've talked to are actually glad about this fix, and so am I. Now if they could do something about the craziness of players attempting to run past/skip all the trash leading to the first boss as well... I'm just continually saddened by the weird and degenerate gameplay that has infested what I once used to think of as a nice little starter flashpoint.

7.5.1 Dev Livestream Notes

So there was a dev livestream today - you'll be excused if you're surprised to hear this, as for some reason the SWTOR team decided not to announce it anywhere... except on Twitter. I thought I was being bitterly hyperbolic in my last post with the whole "why do you think only Twitter users are worthy of knowing about what's happening with the game" line, figuring that they were still going to announce it somewhere else eventually, but they really didn't. What a bizarre marketing decision, especially seeing how they apparently want us to spend more time on Twitch...

Which is me segueing into the fact that the first item announced during the livestream was that they now have Twitch integration, and that once you've connected your account and patch 7.5.1 launches, you'll have 30 days to earn a purple speeder by watching four hours of SWTOR streams.

I hope this appeals... to the kids... or something? Sorry, I'm that old fogey that doesn't really "get" streaming and mostly finds it boring. To me, watching four hours of SWTOR livestreaming in a single month will be quite a big ask, but I guess I know Swtorista's schedule so I might be able to get there with some effort. I went ahead and linked my accounts, which seemed to be successful, but when I go into my SWTOR account now it still says that there's no linked Twitch account. There's already a post on the forum noting that there are issues. I guess that's why they announced the feature before it actually matters, so they have time to iron out any kinks before the actual eligibility period starts.

The stream's main focus was the next Galactic Season, which will be called "The Greatest Bounty" and whose theme will be bounty hunting. Interestingly, the Bounty Hunting event that is currently tied to the Death Mark conquest and only live about once a month will be active throughout the entire season. Even more interestingly, they'll bring back the Dark vs. Light bosses as targets to hunt for seasons objectives.

Amusingly, all the devs on the stream got the bosses' origins confused, as they talked about how these were supposedly part of the original DvL event from eight years ago. This is not true though - the DvL world bosses used to spawn based on the dark vs. light "world state" that was added in Knights of the Eternal Throne and removed with Legacy of the Sith. I hunted them all down back in 2020, and while it made for a fun guild activity for a while, it was also kind of a pain in some ways. It sounds like the issues with how easily they were to accidentally despawn will no longer be a thing, but we'll see what the difficulty tuning will be like - back then it was pretty brutal to be honest and not really pug friendly. (In the linked post I quoted a guildie as saying that he'd rather be kicked in the nuts for half an hour than ever fight any of these bosses again.) Still, I generally approve of these encounters being repurposed like this.

There was no mention of a central season reward like the past companions or the stronghold from the current season, so I'm not sure if it'll just be a more general reward track like in GS5? We will get a recoloured version of the Loth kitty apparently. We also weren't given a launch date, though Musco said that they're targeting "late August", so it sounds like we'll have about a month's break between seasons this time around. I just hope they don't repeat the whole blueprint gathering thing...

As promised previously, there'll also be two new date night missions, this time for Aric Jorgan and for Vette. As these are class companions, it was clarified that you won't be able to do these while just playing through the class story - you'll need to actually have reunited with your love interest in KotFE and locked in the romance before the date nights become available. I currently don't have access to either of these, so I can't get excited about them just yet, but I guess two more of these are another reason to work on getting those alts through the expansions.

There were some previews of new decoration rewards from the Feast of Prosperity and some new Cartel Market items. We'll finally get an Imperial trooper armour, which is something people have been wanting for a long time apparently, and there'll be two new weapon tunings which make either embers or flower petals float around you, which I've got to admit looked kind of amusing.

In terms of gear, there isn't going to be a new tier of gear or anything, but they are making some changes to make it even easier to get upgrades in the existing system. For example the various weekly missions will give you a choice between a gear box or just a flat amount of currency that will be much higher than just taking the gear and dissembling it (which is the only thing we can do right now if we don't need the actual item). All the ops weeklies will be back on the terminals every week instead of being on a four week rotation - I should be happy about that but I'll also kind of miss the way this made it easy to rotate different operations on social night without having to really think about it. You'll also be able to trade in gear boxes for higher-quality gear boxes, all the way up to Rakata... which does sound good in theory but also like it could be kind of clunky, depending on how many boxes you need to save up in your cargo hold before you can trade them for anything. We'll see.

Finally, there were some very brief teaser comments about 7.6, which we can expect closer towards the end of the year. Apparently this time the story will take us back to existing planets, where "an entirely new type of content" will await. *insert curiously raised eyebrow here* Even more importantly for those of us interested in group content though, there'll be a new lair boss a.k.a. a single boss operation. Again, I just want to be happy but unfortunately I don't have the best track record with lair bosses. I like the event-based ones like the Xenoanalyst and the Eyeless, but I've always hated the Colossal Monolith, and Golden Fury and the Hive Queen are at best kinda boring. I want it to be good though, honest!

Anyway... with that I've actually touched at least briefly on everything that was said in the stream I think! Still, as usual I recommend other places like Today in TOR for a more comprehensive and detailed round-up.

Limitless

I'm making good progress on my pre-expansion goals: My pacifist character hit level 75 a couple of weeks ago, and on Halloween night, a full month ahead of my original schedule, my main hit Renown rank 999 and earned the Limitless achievement. It was pretty well timed as well, as it happened in the middle of a Dread Guards 16-man master mode kill (you get Renown each time one of the bosses dies), which made it extra memorable.

Also, I'm very glad now that I made it a personal goal for myself to get this done before the expansion, as another one of last week's bombshell announcements included the bit of news that Renown will be completely removed in Legacy of the Sith. Several of my guildies have been scrambling to also quickly get the achievement now before it goes away forever, but depending on their current progress there might not be enough time left to grind out the remaining ranks on a sane schedule. I think most people expected that Renown ranks would be reset with the expansion, but not a complete removal of the system.

I can't claim to be hugely upset by this move - Galactic Command as the sole source of endgame gear was a nightmare, but once Bioware rebalanced it to be more supplementary than anything else, getting reward boxes for a sort of infinite levelling was kind of nice. When GC turned into Renown with Onslaught, it was nerfed so heavily though that the reward crates became only another piece of junk to deconstruct every so often; I don't recall getting a single interesting thing from them all expansion. If anything, I'll miss the concept of endless levelling more than anything else. I first saw and learned to appreciate it in Neverwinter, but they eventually got rid of it too...

Other systems on the chopping block are social points in their current form and the dark vs. light system as introduced in Knights of the Eternal Throne (not to be confused with the original character alignment system).

There's still going to be a social system of sorts, but instead it's going to count how many runs you've done in the group finder, similar to World of Warcraft, which is... meh. I always liked the idea of social points being awarded for more than just taking part in group conversations (and you did use to also get them for things like handing in quests as a group), but tying the system to the group finder leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth, as it just limits it in a different way. Now you'll be able to level up doing quests with a friend without being considered social, and I'm not sure that's an improvement!

I don't mind the group finder and I understand Bioware wanting to incentivise it, but from what I remember in WoW, the people who were flaunting their group finder achievements were usually the most impatient and obnoxious players of all to get in a pug because they were only after the achievement and nothing else. Let's hope that SWTOR's community is different enough to withstand that kind of pressure.

Finally, the galaxy-wide dark vs. light system... I guess it had a good run. I did kind of like the way I could use the state of the galaxy as the tie-breaker for which alt to play when I was unsure, and I had my fun hunting down all the dark vs. light world bosses with my guild last year, but I never liked the forced personal toggle and how it made it impossible to have a neutral/grey character anymore unless you constantly flip-flopped between both sides. Still, it doesn't sit quite right with me to see something like that just get removed with no replacement. The forum post said they're planning to reintroduce the world bosses at some point, but who knows when that will be...

I do feel Bioware has been holding out on us a bit, waiting until so shortly before the expansion launch to tell us all this stuff. I mean, I guess it's still better than not finding out until it actually goes live, but still. I wouldn't go so far as to call something like the removal of Renown "bad news", but it's not really good news either, and at least to me it just feels like an unnecessary dampener on everyone's expansion hype.

It's Not Easy Being Mean

I have long struggled with playing dark side characters in SWTOR. If you look at my characters page (which I actually haven't updated in quite a while, meaning that a couple of my newer characters are missing, but what's there is still broadly accurate), you can see that the vast majority of my characters are light-sided, and even those who aren't are generally described as neutral or at worst "moderately" dark-sided, meaning that they still make light side decisions pretty frequently.

I have started more than one character with the intent to make them evil, mostly whenever I felt inspired by comments about how this or that story twist is particularly engaging if you're dark-sided, but it never lasts very long. I always slip up and start drifting towards light side decisions, mostly because so many of the dark side decisions, especially in the base game, are flat out insane. As someone who always puts at least a little bit of herself into all of her characters, I simply don't want to play a psychopath.

There are some dark side decisions that I'm fine with making on my (supposedly) evil characters: Killing an enemy instead of sparing them after defeat, insisting on payment instead of simply helping someone out of kindness, or getting physically violent in the face of annoyance are but some examples. Sure, those are all bad things, but they are all based on basic human impulses (such as greed or anger) that everyone's at least familiar with, even if we do generally try to fight them in our everyday lives.

A lot of dark side options though simply do not make sense unless you are playing a psychopathic mass murderer who enjoys watching the world burn at every opportunity, such as when someone actively helps you out and at the end of the interaction you're basically given the option to say thanks or kill them just because you can. It's just... WHY.

My most recent attempts at living the dark side life have been the Assassin and the Juggernaut that I created back during the DvL event as I've finally been working on their class stories. Fortunately the built-in light/dark toggle introduced in KotET makes it easier to deceive myself about their alignments, because even if I make some light side decisions now and then, the constant trickle of dark side points awarded from simply having the toggle set to dark side easily drowns out any friendly or merciful impulses. I genuinely seem to have had some success sticking to my guns though, as evidenced by me running into some amusing conversation options that I hadn't encountered before (when you're only fighting with words, dark-siders can be quite funny, I'll give them that) and occasionally getting exasperated with the results of my own decisions.

A prime example of the latter occurred during the inquisitor story on Alderaan, where you're supposed to lure a Jedi onto the planet by having his former fiancée from many years ago contact him. I don't remember how exactly the light side version goes, but you can be nice to both of them and try to get them to reconcile after all those years (I just don't remember if it works). Playing dark side this time around though, I basically just bullied the lady into making the call, and when she expressed some nervousness about seeing her old fiancé again, I chose a conversation option that outright told her that I didn't give a damn because I was just going to kill him anyway. This - understandably - upset her, so she got mad and attacked me, causing her to die before the guy even arrived on the planet. Khem Val approved, but I seem to remember sitting back and actually saying out loud: "God, I'm such an asshole."

For the longest time I felt like a bit of an oddball for feeling so bad about playing dark side. It's just a game, right? I remember in the early days it seemed like all the big content creators were playing evil Imperial characters as their mains and poking fun at Republic wimps etc. at every corner. I actually got some comments from readers who said that they were impressed to meet someone that was so open about being a staunch, light-sided Republic player because it seemed quite unusual to them.

Recently I don't get as much of these same vibes anymore though. The current biggest SWTOR content creator, Swtorista, is a trooper main like me, and Vulkk mains a Sentinel from as far as I remember. The dark vs. light event four years ago surprised me by concluding with a pretty firm light side victory, even if the final result was still pretty close to a half and half split. Three years ago a SWTOR Facebook post revealed that 76% of players going through KotFE/KoTET had decided to save/redeem Arcann instead of kill him - admittedly that was only one specific choice, but I was still impressed by how strongly that skewed towards one end of the spectrum. More recently, I can also say that anecdotally at least, the dark vs. light "state of the galaxy" on Darth Malgus seems to see the light side winning about three times for every dark side victory. That's quite a contrast to the dark side winning within an hour of the feature's initial introduction.

A few months ago, a former Cinematic Designer from Bioware also commented on Twitter that in Mass Effect, something like 92% of players chose the "nice" options - which is a different game, mind you, but I still think a lot of people were surprised that with so much effort put into letting players choose their path, the vast majority went for the exact same goodie-two-shoes options anyway.

It has given me some comfort to know that there are more people like me who just enjoy playing the good guy most of the time - though it does make me wonder why SWTOR got such a reputation for everyone wanting to play an edgy dark-sider to begin with...

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.

Reading Crew Skill Mission Text

Bhagpuss has been writing about being fascinated by EQ2's new Overseer system. As far as I can tell from his descriptions of how it works, it's very similar to the "waiting" mini-games that many MMOs have added to their optional gameplay over the last decade or so, and which often involve directing minions or hirelings of some sort. When I asked Bhag in a comment what he found the most interesting about it, he responded that he was surprised by how well the whole system was narratively integrated into the rest of the game.

SWTOR has of course had its own version of this sort of thing since launch, in the form of crew skill missions, even if they are very much on the simple end of the scale: You're always dealing with the same small number of missions, they don't tend to take a lot of time, and the only real way to influence the outcome has been to raise your companions' affection/influence level. I guess nowadays we also have guild perks and amplifiers to improve success rates and crit chance, but those are universal, passive buffs that don't really change the way you look at any given mission.

Bhag's comments about story integration made me pause and think though, mainly because they made me realise just how long it's been since I actually read any of my crew skill missions. These days I only really look at what they're supposed to reward, and maybe the duration/cost - but the actual "story" is something I skim right over.

So of course the next thing I did was to sit down and actually read the text for some of the missions that I've been spamming day in, day out - which just ended up reminding me of something that annoyed me whenever I had read them in the past:

You see, my main has diplomacy as her mission skill, the one mission skill that can award both light and dark side points. What has annoyed me in the past is that in recent years the text has rarely matched the alignment gain (as far as I'm concerned anyway)!

An Alderaanian noble who shares lineage with a renowned smuggler would like to see this particular relation quietly escorted into exile and "forgotten". - So you're basically asking me to abduct/potentially murder someone... and it awards light side points!?

Yet here's the counterpart of the same level: An allied smuggler was recently arrested for customs violations. Send a companion to ensure the smuggler is free to continue assisting the cause. Surely helping an ally is not a bad thing? But no, this one gives dark side points. And so on and so forth.

But okay, that's just diplomacy - let's look at some other profession that isn't tied to the alignment system in the same way. How about some slicing missions?

Taerab Starship Manufacturing is rumored to have a hyperdrive prototype that will cut fuel costs in half. If your companion slices into their files, you could reap the benefits of their research.

Ruthless financier Herron Morvis VII claims to have "confidential personal information" on dozens of corporate heads across the galaxy. Have your companion slice into his secure servers to find out what he knows.

Okay, none of these may be officially tied to the alignment system, but they do all sound a bit dodgy to be honest! Maybe that's another thing that's subconsciously been discouraging me: that I don't much like the thought of my character being tied up in these situations, so I just want to get the rewards without considering potential in-world consequences.

More seriously though, I think in practice it's just down to how basic, repetitive and inconsequential crew skill missions are. Most of the time their duration can be counted in minutes instead of hours, and you might well end up running some of them hundreds of times without anything coming of it other than you slowly growing your stash of crafting mats. How invested can you really get in that on a narrative level?

Then again, you never know when something will suddenly turn into an Easter Egg. For example there is an old diplomacy mission that has been in the game since launch and goes like this: The Sith Lords Anathel and Xarion are battling in the Stygian Caldera, disrupting Imperial trade. Your companion could persuade them to take their feud elsewhere. For years and years, these were just two random names... but then Onslaught came around and suddenly Anathel and Xarion were part of the story and on the Dark Council. So you never know!

More DvL World Boss Hunting

Has it really been one and a half years since I last posted about hunting DvL world bosses? Apparently it has.

At the time, I mentioned that I was hoping to persuade my guildies to do more of them, but we never really ended up doing that. The CXP payout wasn't actually that good for the effort, especially after other activities got buffed, and the bugged achievement gave everyone the feeling that it was better to wait for it to be fixed before trying to kill any more of these bosses - until we just kind of... forgot.

With the recent ennui however, fringe activities to break our weekly operations routine are suddenly in demand again, so we've been going back to hunting. We've had some decent successes actually, and with the achievement long since fixed, we've been making progress towards that as well. Here's a video of one of our more recent kills, Overseer Qezzed:



I actually have two more recordings like that lying around that I still need to trim and upload. Why? I'm not sure; these are hardly tough kills. I guess I like to document my guild's achievements, but it also feels vaguely helpful to add these because there is still so little information about these bosses out there, especially with how apathetic Dulfy seems to have become about SWTOR (though she still posts updates about the Cartel Market and stuff like that). Even with beloved community members like Vulkk and Swtorista trying to fill in the gaps, Dulfy's guide to the DvL bosses remains the only one out there that I'm aware of, and it hasn't been updated in a long while, though some commenters have left useful tips in the comments. Those are easy to miss though if you habitually avoid the cesspit that's Dulfy's comment section.

Things that my guild and I have learned by doing so far:

The bosses don't seem to be tied to specific planets. I guess I have no evidence that there aren't rules of some sort that prevent boss X from spawning on planet Y, but we've seen a bunch of different bosses spawn in the same spot as well as the same boss appear on different planets, so it's quite possible that anything goes.

The bosses have at least two different sets of Force abilities, one that includes dropping lightning pillars on players and a Force execution like Raptus's from Dread Palace, and another consisting of a Trail of Agony type ability (like you get on the Revan fight in Temple of Sacrifice) and AoE damage over time. Getting stunned in a puddle of bad stuff is a real risk in either case and you've got to be ready to use your stun breaker quickly when needed or else you'll go down. It seems to me that this is less likely to occur if you bring more people to the fight, as it gives the harmful abilities the option to spread out more instead of one person getting targeted by several effects at once, but I'm not entirely sure about that. We've done several bosses with as few as eight people but they pretty much always involve someone dying and having to run back or needing revival.

I probably shouldn't tell you this to avoid competition, but so far the Dune Sea on Tatooine has seemed like the best place to hunt, as it has at least five spawn spots in pretty close proximity, and people are less likely to engage and despawn the bosses by accident. I've actually done the latter on Hoth myself, when I mistook a world boss spawn for a random champion and didn't realise my mistake until my Sentinel had already leapt in and was Force-choked to death in short order.

It also seems to me that the bosses are actually easier to kill on lower level planets. Sure, you get level synced, but we all know that being levelled down by a lot still leaves you pretty powerful compared to the average same-level mob, and on a lower-level planet this effect is more pronounced. In other words, I've noticed that we seem to do a lot less dying on Tatooine than on Hoth.

All that said, we haven't actually engaged a single light side boss yet! I'm very much looking forward to seeing how those are different (if at all). Initially we were only going after the dark side bosses because most of us main light side characters and we were basically roleplaying our alignment, but lately the dark side has also been winning a lot, leaving us with no real choice.

Activity Bonuses

One of the things I've enjoyed about the introduction of Galactic Command are the changing activity and alignment bonuses that have come with it. The basic idea behind them is that while Galactic Command allows you to gain Command XP from almost anything, the game wants to gently nudge players towards doing more than just grind a single activity until they burn themselves out.

Of course, not everyone has the same ideas about gentle nudges. I was honestly shocked when during an episode of a podcast I was listening to, one of the hosts complained about the dark vs. light system, claiming that because the light side was victorious more often than the dark side on his server, he felt that playing his dark-side main was never worthwhile. This surprised me because he made it sound as if doing anything without benefitting from maximum bonuses was unacceptable, which is the sort of hardcore min-max attitude that you don't see in SWTOR players very often.

I've certainly never let the bonuses prevent me from doing something I really wanted to do, nor have I ever felt compelled to do something that I don't really like doing. I do however love them for everything in-between, to the point where checking which activity is eligible for the daily bonus on any given day has pretty much become the first thing I do upon logging in.

If flashpoints or warzones are the activity of the day, it's very likely that said activity will take up most of my evening, because I really enjoy both of them anyway, and the bonus just makes them feel extra rewarding.

My Galactic Starfighter play has probably benefitted the most from the introduction of Galactic Command, because starfighting is something that I'm not massively fond of but that I do enjoy in small doses. The problem is that I've always struggled with finding reasons to choose GSF over other activities that I enjoy more regularly on any given day. (For a while I played on various alts for Conquest points, but as my interest in that waned, so did my enthusiasm for GSF.) Galactic Command has provided me with an easy solution: Just play whenever it's GSF bonus day! I won't necessarily go for it every time, nor do I usually spend all evening in a starfighter, but the recurring bonus has certainly managed to make it a more regular part of my gaming diet.

Operations is a bonus I usually ignore, because while I enjoy them, we have our guild runs scheduled on particular weekdays whether there is a bonus on or not, and I rarely feel the urge to join additional runs on top of that.

Chapters and planetary missions also don't particularly enthuse me, and either of them being the featured activity of the day will usually be my cue to go play a low-level alt instead. However if I do have an interest in doing either of those things for whatever reason (e.g. I made a plan to finally get an alt through KotET), I often wait until they are the featured activity of the day, so that I'll at least get the biggest benefit out of doing them.

Uprisings are a funny one. For a while I did do them occasionally - not too long after they first came out - but I just haven't found them nearly as compelling as flashpoints, lacking the latter's replay value, so I actually haven't done one in quite a while.

As far as the dark vs. light bonuses go, I actually pay very little attention to them unless I'm planning to pop a bunch of accumulated CXP packs (then I will save them until the "correct" alignment dominates). However, the state of the galaxy can be helpful when it comes to deciding which alt to play. If I'm torn between two characters of opposite alignments, it's an easy choice to go for the one that currently benefits from a bonus.

Fun fact: I was originally planning to write this post yesterday, but then I saw that it was flashpoint bonus day and I spent all evening running flashpoints with guildies. Just goes to show.

Do dark vs. light and the daily Command bonus influence the way you play at all?

Good Changes

Gosh, has it really already been two weeks since the release of patch 5.5? I've been meaning to write about it but have kept putting it off in order to first be able to gather some more first-hand experience with the changes it introduced.

5.5 has been one of those updates that aren't very glamorous, with no new content on offer and a lot of work being done in the background to prepare for the upcoming server merges, but for long-time players there was still some good stuff in there, as Bioware continues to work on all kinds of quality of life improvements.

One thing that wasn't even in the patch notes is that all the daily missions on Iokath are finally available. In my Iokath Daily Tips post back in May I noted that several quests that were listed in the achievement panel had yet to appear in the rotation, and they actually continued to be no-shows for another five months. Something clearly didn't quite go as planned there. However, after this patch the list of missions that are available each day suddenly grew quite a bit longer, and all the ones that had been missing so far were finally in there as well. I was quite pleased to finally be able to complete the achievement for having done them all.

Something that's neither here nor there but which amused me was the update to the conquest board. Even though conquests were introduced in late summer 2014, long after the last round of server merges, the way guilds displayed on the conquest board still made reference to servers that no longer existed for some reason. So on Red Eclipse for example it would list guilds "@ Jolee's Hut" as competing with others "@ Nightmare Lands", presumably some leftover from the way the servers were originally folded together. Nobody really minded, but I guess it could potentially be confusing to newbies.

Exhibit A.

Well, what do you know: Three years later and mere weeks before all the current servers will cease to exist, they finally updated the information on the conquest board so that all guilds on my server were correctly tagged as "@ The Red Eclipse". Now the big question is: When the server merges actually happen, will it show guilds "@ The Progenitor" etc. with the old server names, or will it be updated yet again to actually show the new and correct server names for everyone? You may not be dying to know, but I sure am.

The Cartel Market also received its first real interface update since its introduction. I don't even use it much, but I still found the change to be a pleasant surprise because every now and then I would see someone with a store item and go "hey, that's nice, I would like to buy that too", but the old UI was not very conducive to friendly browsing. Now it finally has an actual search box (imagine any online store trying to sell you things without a search box these days) and everything is much better categorised. When I opened the right category for it, I was surprised to find that there was actually a hairstyle that I didn't own yet. Guess I simply hadn't been able to find it before!

Strongholds have received some nice tweaks as well. First off, the cap was raised to ten, which meant that I finally had reason to go out and buy the Umbara train. I was honestly a bit disappointed when I first found out that I wouldn't be able to buy it without disabling one of my existing strongholds, so I decided to hold off on farming the currency for it originally. It's kind of funny because I don't even use my strongholds very much, other than my Coruscant home's first room, which is where I tend to load in and log out on most of my characters. However, I still like owning them all.

More importantly, they finally fixed the issue with the intro cinematics! It used to be that you could only see the intro cinematic for each stronghold when you first entered it on any given character. This worked okay for that "inspecting the new place you just bought and which is totally empty right now" feel of your first purchase, but once you started decorating you soon realised that on any alts, the cut scene would look so much cooler because you could actually see all the decorations you had placed in the meantime. Yet the only way to see this cut scene again was to roll another alt. (Manaan then turned this on its head by instead playing the full cut scene every time you entered the stronghold on any character. That was annoying too.) Now it's been fixed so that after the initial visit on a new character, you can replay the little cinematic at any time by clicking a new terminal by the door. This was honestly one of those things I figured they were never going to implement because while it probably wasn't hard to do, not enough people would care. Thanks for caring, Keith!

Nice outside view of the one stronghold I've actually bothered to decorate, courtesy of the new terminal that lets you re-watch the intro cut scene.

I still haven't managed to convince my guildies to go hunting for Dark vs. Light bosses, but the new 18-hour-long victory states are definitely handy. Previously it could be quite challenging to catch that one hour when your alignment would line up with the correct victory state to get the most out of your accumulated CXP packs, but with a full 18 hours to go each time, it's become a lot easier.

Finally, last but not least: so many GSF changes! While I talked only recently about how I'm really quite sick of hearing about class changes, I did appreciate these because Bioware changed so much, and more than anything this is exciting because they haven't really touched GSF in several years. Even without having paid attention to all the details of which ship was updated in what way, it's clear that the mini-game has been reinvigorated and people are trying new things. I've continued to stick to my gunship and bomber staples simply due to lack of skill at dogfighting, but I've certainly died in a lot of new and interesting ways lately... mostly to strike fighters, which are suddenly en vogue now and have some sort of ability that disables all my systems for a really long time, so that I can do nothing but helplessly drift through space while they shoot me up until I'm dead. (I've previously talked about how I consider it one of GSF's biggest issues that it doesn't give you good feedback about what is happening to your ship.)

Have any of the recent small changes made your day?

Faction Attitudes

I've been playing some of my Imperial max-level alts lately. As my fourth Republic character slowly makes her way towards Command Rank 300, I figured it was about time to give the other faction some love. (And not just because yesterday's patch introduced an achievement to get all eight classes to 300. Only mostly.)

However, I've also found that for some reason pugging on Imp side is a bit more likely to frustrate me. I keep running into attitudes that annoy me, and I wonder whether there is some truth to my perception or whether I'm just biased.

Actually, I think there can be no doubt about character distribution in terms of light and dark side at least. Go pug the Esseles five times and tell me how many times you got to sell out Ambassador Asara. Zero, right? Now pug the Black Talon five times and tell me how many times Captain Orzik survived. Maybe once - if you got lucky.

It's understandable though. While the game allows you to play a kind Sith or an evil Jedi, it's more natural for people to choose the Republic if they want to play a good guy and the Empire if they want to be evil.

However, people don't just roleplay differently. I've also found that Republic players are more likely to at least try to be team players. Now, I'm not claiming that all Republic players are one way and all Imperials another. I'm not even saying the majority on each side is one way or another. But at least to me it seems that attempts at team play are a bit more common on Republic side.

While doing warzones as an Imp, I repeatedly found myself abandoned guarding a node or door, my cries for help as I was trying to stay alive in the face of two or three attackers soundly ignored. Whenever I died and watched the enemy cap, I couldn't help but think: "Typical Imps". On Pub side I almost always get support. People may be slow or run around like headless chickens in other areas of the map, but usually someone will at least try to help.

Imps are also perfectionists. In a Lost Island hardmode run the other night I was healing on my Sorc, when the tank suddenly started berating me for my healing, even though we had a great run with no deaths whatsoever. Earlier he had also moaned about how slow everyone was when I hung back to help a party member who didn't know how to skip the trash at the beginning and pulled something by accident. (Note that the tank himself didn't lift a finger to actually help kill things or guide the person through!) I couldn't help but think about how a Rep pug would most likely just have high-fived each other for having had such an awesome run. Here it was nothing but moaning about how we didn't quite meet the tank's standards for perfection. Again, I see similar things in PvP. People get angry in chat on both sides when they are losing, but it seems to be mostly Imps who start shouting at people for playing sub-optimally even while their team is in the lead.

The one thing I will hand to the Imps is that they seem to have more of the really good players. When I see truly outstanding play in PvP, it's almost always from an Imp - as long as we're talking pure duelling skills, that is. When it comes to objectives, their disinterest in team play (see above) sometimes gets the better of them and they do things like run away from objectives just to get one more killing blow, resulting in a loss despite of their superior ability to kill the enemy. Again, I'm not saying that I've never seen a Pub player do this - it just seem to observe it on the other faction much more often.

Still, in the end I have no numbers to back up my observations either way, so it might just all be bias. Do your experiences with the two factions match my own perceptions? I would expect Imp players to disagree that they have more unpleasant individuals among their ranks, though I'm sure they'll be happy to accept the compliment of supposedly having the better players...

More Road Map Thoughts

As mentioned in my last post, the announcement of the impending server merges kind of overshadowed everything else that was said in the road map update this week, but there certainly was more. The team at Bioware did a pretty good job at banging the PR drum for once actually, as the post was almost immediately followed-up by a Q&A on Twitch, and this weekend more information about upcoming content has been pouring in via the New York Cantina event.

First I'd like to look at something else though: namely the previous road map released in May. How accurate was it in hindsight? Did everything that was promised in it actually come to pass? The answer is no, but nonetheless the final verdict is positive - nothing that was mentioned in the previous road map has been outright cancelled; a few features that were said to come in the future without any specific time frame just haven't arrived yet but are clearly still being worked on (such as Unassembled Components becoming a legacy currency, the new warzone map, or more returning companions).

The new road map reiterates those points and gives the impression that Keith continues to be devoted to delivering a strong and varied line-up of new content. The next story update will bring back a former Imperial agent companion and has been co-written by famous Star Wars author Timothy Zahn, which gives it quite a pedigree. In terms of multiplayer PvE, there'll be another flashpoint and the next encounter in the Gods from the Machine operation. PvPers will get a new Civil War-type map set on Yavin 4. (I have to confess I'm a little disappointed by that in so far as the previous references to "a new warzone" had made me expect a new rule set, not just a new map, but we will see how interesting it is. Quesh Huttball was sufficiently different from The Pit to make it a fun addition anyway.) And Galactic Starfighter will see its first proper rebalancing in years as well as a new map. (Again, not as good as a new game mode, but a big step up from nothing!)

At the same time, an impressive amount of effort seems about to be invested in quality of life changes and polishing existing parts of the game, such as continued CXP changes and the addition of a special vendor for companion customisations that were previously unavailable to one faction. What intrigued me the most personally was the mention of plans to update Dark vs. Light, conquest and the group finder. Maybe the longer dark/light states will improve my chances of convincing my guildies to hunt down some of those special bosses. (Understandably people didn't want to jump out to go looking for them for an hour in the middle of an ops.) My interest in conquest has been waning for a while, and the incoming server merges will likely make it impossible for my small guild to ever compete again under the current rule set. But if they make changes to the system afterwards, who knows? I don't know what to think of the idea of a group finder revamp, because I do think the current one works fine, but I'm open to possibilities.

All in all, the current direction continues to be encouraging for long-time fans of the game. Sure, I've seen the occasional grumble from dedicated KotFE/KotET players who want to see nothing but new solo story content, but overall public perception seems to have improved a lot compared to say, a year ago. Even in places like the SWTOR Facebook page, where I'm used to the top comments usually being whines about how much the game sucks now, people are positively excited and discussing the new developments with interest. Not bad for a nearly six-year-old MMO, not bad at all.

Questing Surprises

After I finished my knight's class story, I was wondering what levelling goal to tackle next. Eventually I decided to go back to working on my Commando on the Ebon Hawk. She's been max level for a while now, but more than merely levelling her up, I had made it my mission a while ago to replay all the quests on Republic side on her, since it's so easy to skip them these days and it's been quite a while since I actually saw all of them. When I last left her, she had just finished the Balmorran bonus series.

Aside from the vastly accelerated XP gains, the levelling game also underwent a lot of more subtle changes in 4.0. I did write a first impressions piece about that shortly after 4.0's launch, but my focus back then was on a couple of Imperial alts. On Republic side, I continue to be surprised by changes that I haven't seen yet, such as when I mentioned a broken cut scene in a mission on Coruscant in this post.

One thing I already noticed back in February but about which I didn't write a full blog post at the time was the removal of what I considered an important story choice in the planetary storyline on Balmorra. At one point, after taking control of the planetary satellites, you have to choose between using them to help the Republic military (which was your original goal) or to save a bunch of slicers from being executed - with the latter option having the additional complication that said slicers are best buds with the guy who helped you gain control of the satellites in the first place. Except... when I played through this on my Commando, no dialogue wheel came up, and she just made the light side choice by default. Wait, what? I mean, I was playing light side anyway so I guess it wasn't a big deal, but it was still kind of jarring and I can only imagine how awkward it must feel if you were gunning for the other option.

As not many knowledgeable old-timers replay this content at any given point, the issue hasn't received much publicity, though I found at least one angry forum thread about it. Myself, I simply submitted a bug report about it, because I couldn't fathom why a choice like that would have been removed intentionally. Shortening bonus missions is one thing, but this? Just makes no sense.

As I finally continued to Quesh the other night, I was in for a positive surprise however. For as long as I can remember, there has been this mission on Quesh which is part of the main planetary chain and has you raiding a factory. During the mission dialogue, Broga the Hutt tells you about how he'd really like you to pick up some adrenals while you're over there (wink wink, nudge nudge), which seemed like pretty common "bonus mission talk". The problem was that there never was a bonus mission. Nothing appeared on the quest tracker, and I never found anything to click on inside the factory either. It was a mystery.

Now, as far as I can reconstruct things in hindsight, the bonus mission appears to have always been in the game files, but I guess some bug was preventing it from triggering properly. On the official forums, I found complaints from as recently as 2015 decrying the fact that the quest wasn't working. Well, imagine my surprise when I picked up the main mission this time around, and suddenly the bonus "Broga's Adrenals" appeared on my quest tracker. And lo and behold... when I arrived in the factory, there were crates on the floor that I could click on to pick up the long-lost adrenals! The best part was that on handing in, I was also given the choice whether I wanted to actually hand the adrenals over to Broga or claim them for the Republic. I was a bit surprised that the latter was considered the light side option - even if he's a Hutt, it doesn't seem very kind to agree to fetch something for him and then go: "Nyah nyah, I'm keeping that for my own people."

Still, it was amazing to me that they finally got around to fixing that bonus mission after who knows how many years and that as a result, I got to see something new in old content. I wonder if more such surprises await on the remaining planets that I haven't fully replayed since 4.0? If yes, will they be positive or negative?

A Knight's Tale

Another milestone achieved: I've finally completed the Jedi knight story for a second time. Only took me five years...

I get excited about these things because while I do love SWTOR's class stories, they are not my first go-to when I'm looking for an evening of easy fun and they require a bit of conscious effort to work on. In addition, I get quite annoyed with myself when I have a character stuck somewhere in the middle of their story, because it makes me feel like I "can't"/shouldn't create another alt of the same class until I've finished the previous one's story. You can guess how peeved I was with myself by this point for taking three years to level up this second knight...

With how long it had been, I do have to admit that there were quite a few details to the story that I'd forgotten about, and it was nice to be reminded of them. I also took so many screenshots. When I levelled my first knight, I hadn't yet succumbed to using third party software to take screenshots to circumvent SWTOR's issues with the Print Screen button, so I had virtually no pictures from my first playthrough. As anyone who's played a Jedi knight knows, there are plenty of pretty epic and screenshot-worthy moments in that story.

All in all though, I still agree with my initial thoughts about the Jedi knight story. Sometimes it feels epic, other times it's so clichéd it hurts. So it remains one of the poorer class stories to me, even though I know many rate it highly or even as the best. One thing I have to say however, after replaying it after all this time and after having seen all the other class stories: It does a better job at dealing with side characters than most. There's a whole bunch of people whom you can kill or get killed relatively early on, who actually make a comeback on Corellia if they are still alive. They don't do anything that affects the outcome of the story, but it's still cool to see them again and hear what effect your actions have had on them. The cast of Jedi that you work with throughout the story is also pretty varied and interesting.

The biggest highlight of the playthrough was actually seeing Lord Scourge again. How could I forget all about him? I once listed him as the one Jedi knight companion that I wouldn't want to lose, but then I took my Guardian into KotFE shortly after it came out and well... obviously I haven't heard from him since, and since I had no other knight at a high enough level to own him as a companion, he just kind of vanished from sight for me. (I had no screenshots of him either.) "Getting him back" on this character made me really happy!

As a bonus, his voice was just as I remembered - shortly after 4.0, I remember grousing about how his new voice lines for when he is set to dps or heal (as opposed to his old default role, tanking) sounded all wrong and as if Bioware had hired a new voice actor for him who sounded nothing like the old one at all. Looking back at it now, the only references I could find about this talk about it being a bug, and that the sound files for several companions had gotten mixed up at the time? Either way, this time around he sounded completely like his old self again, even while healing me, which pleased me to no end.

He also got along a bit better with this Sentinel than with my old Guardian, since I at least attempted to make some dark side decisions on this one. I've said before that I can't really play dark side characters since I dislike being evil just that much, but at least towards the end I got a few dark side decisions in by being all: "My mission is too important for me to hang around and waste time with your petty problems right now!" (Ooh, so edgy!) I even refused to do the side mission near the end where you're supposed to rescue your companion from peril, which was made even easier by the fact that it was Rusk of all people who had gotten in trouble - I thought it was always Doc or Kira! Not that it makes a difference either way, as the situation is resolved quickly afterwards with a comment that one of your other companions filled in to do the rescuing.

One funny side effect of the new dark vs. light system is that you can effectively "cheat" your way towards being a certain alignment regardless of your story choices. (You could do that before if you had diplomacy as one of your crew skills, but it was quite an amount of work in comparison.) So even though I failed at being truly evil, with my supported alignment set to dark the entire time, Satele Shan told me at the end that she could sense the dark side in me. I kind of chuckled when my character responded with: "What have I done?" - because she really hadn't done much that would have been considered dark side.

Not sure what's up next for me in terms of story - I do have a Sage that has been sitting at the start of chapter two for nearly five years as well, but I'm not as fussed about her. But maybe I should go for it, since I seem to be on a bit of a roll?

A Tale of Tier Four

I mentioned before the patch that I had saved up a lot of CXP packs in anticipation of Command tier four. One more reason to be antsy about the patch's release was that I was running out of space to store the things if I didn't want to start redistributing them on alts, so I was really keen on finally being able to clean out my cargo hold, inventory and mail box.

Of course, nothing is ever that easy. To get the most out of all those packs, I wanted to wait with claiming them until my alignment (light side) had had a victory. Unfortunately, this doesn't happen very often on TRE right now, and I'd say there are about two dark side victories for every light side victory. I won't be so melodramatic as to say that light side never wins, but it's certainly proven elusive over the last couple of days. I tried staying up late in the evening, but even though my side was gaining, it was so slow that I eventually had to give up as I was falling asleep at the keyboard and had work the next day. Other times I always seemed to just miss it, with the victory popping just after I had to leave the house for an appointment or just before I came home from work. It was growing kind of aggravating!

Then, yesterday at around 6 in the morning, I logged on to finally find the light side at stage four already, and claiming victory shortly afterwards. Hurrah! What followed were several hours worth of inventory management, which is one of those things that you either enjoy or you don't, and I definitely did enjoy it in this case. I'm happy to report that all those CXP packs translated to a respectable 86 Command crates. And let me tell you, opening so many of the things at once is pretty fun!

I actually purchased all the Command stash extensions, a UI feature that I had always considered pretty pointless before then, but if you open that many crates at once it's actually pretty nice to be able to let the loot pile up for a bit without having to worry about claiming or disintegrating things every other crate. Plus it allowed me to be strategic and for example leave the blue gear pieces in the stash at first without claiming them, in hopes of getting a purple or even gold for the same slot out of one of the later crates.

I'm happy to say that it worked out pretty well for me, and I received an upgrade for every single gear slot. Sure, most of them were blues, and while they feel less prestigious than the purples we're used to and I'm still not convinced whether it's a good idea to even have all these tiers within tiers, everything was at least an upgrade. It seems that Bioware has finally found a sort of balance with tier four, making me reconsider Command rank 300 as a worthwhile goal for some of my alts.

Fiery Grophet seeking to camouflage itself on a carpet.

The thing that came as a surprise for me were the pets. I'm not a pet collector, so I have to admit I have a pretty short attention span when it comes to caring about them. Sure, I'll usually go "that's cute", but by the next day I'll already have forgotten that I even got a new pet the day before. But this tier had a grophet as one of the rewards from the crates. I've written before about really liking those. And the other pet was a cute green froggie with spots! D'aww.

But then the duplicates started rolling in. I hit disintegrate on a grophet and immediately felt a terrible jolt of guilt. It doesn't really make sense. I don't worry about what an uncomfortable life these creatures must lead, being stashed away between armour pieces and companion gifts inside of crates that mysteriously appear out of thin air. But when you ask me to take action myself, to actively destroy them... I suddenly feel bad. It's one thing to "disintegrate" a piece of armour, but a cute little animal? I'd always felt a little bad about it before, but the grophets were more appealing to me than the usual offerings, and due to opening all of those crates at once I had quickly accumulated a whole stack of them. Seven little grophets... sounds like the name of a fairy tale!

Eventually I went "to hell with it", claimed them all and sent them round to my alts. Who wouldn't want a cute little potato creature with spindly legs by their side? My Marauder's also seems to have an interest in slicing, who knew? It's a shame that you can't have more than one copy of a pet in your stronghold, or I could open Shintar's Home for Fiery Grophets in one of them. It's strange in what sort of directions playing a game like this can take your thoughts sometimes.

KotET Chapter by Chapter - Chapter 6: The Dragon's Maw

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

Click here to go back to Chapter 5.

We've reached what's probably my favourite KotET chapter... but more on that later.

The Story

With the fight on Iokath wrapped up one way or another, things seem to have calmed down a bit, except that Vaylin having retaken control of the Gemini droids also means more attacks on Alliance patrols and outposts. Since she's in a celebratory mood, she wants to throw a grand party, with its main event being the execution of some Zakuulan rebels. What she doesn't know is that her "party organiser", a guy called Indo Zal, is a traitor too and has gotten in touch with the Alliance to disrupt the festivities and free his compatriots before they can be killed.

The plan is for Lana and T7 to slice the security grid while you and Theron infiltrate the party dressed as Knights of Zakuul and plant ion charges around the building that will allow you to break all the prisoners' shock collars in one fell swoop. This serves as a fantastic advert for the Zakuul Knight armour set by the way; I thought my characters looked really snazzy in their disguises! Wonder if that increased Bioware's sales of that particular item set... I was kind of tempted myself, but still couldn't think of a way that wearing this set would make sense for any of my characters outside of this particular scenario.

Anyway, you and Theron successfully infiltrate the party and pick up the ion charges from Indo, and then comes the part that I love but which I could also see people hating: a puzzle section during which you spend your time running around the building, trying to get access to all the locations where you need to plant the charges. This involves the solving of some simple problems, such as pretending to be the food delivery person for the guards to gain access to their barracks. If you get stuck, there is an in-game hint button you can click. I'm not going to describe all the steps in detail here; if you need a walkthrough I can recommend Fibrojedi's for the main mission and this post by Calphaya for the super secret bonus mission that isn't even displayed. 

While you plant the charges, we're treated to a scene of Vaylin talking to an Anomid via holo, who assures her that they are close to freeing her of her "weakness" (aka the conditioning). Indo walks in on this conversation and manages to immediately look highly conspicious... one has to wonder how he managed to fool Vaylin for as long as he did if merely walking in on her in the middle of a conversation is enough to cause him to blow his disguise. Unsurprisingly, he gets added to the shock collar squad.

You finish planting the charges just in time for Vaylin's speech, which is when you decide to ditch the armour and crash the party. Vaylin just has enough time to throw the rebels into her beast pit before you activate the ion charges and say the magic words to trigger her conditioning. Right on cue, an unknown shuttle also attacks the building, and out comes... Arcann, accompanied by some soldiers. In the ensuing panic, with people running all over the place and various blast doors getting shut, you manage to jump into the beast pit where Indo and the rest of the rebels are unarmed and exposed to various beasties (though if you did the secret bonus, all but the rancor will be friendly to you). You defend and free them and then have the option to order them to serve as your cannon fodder or encourage them to get to safety.

Vaylin has fled the scene to the sky deck, where she is confronted by her brother and they fight. As soon as you arrive, Vaylin uses a speeder to make her escape, leaving you to confront Arcann alone. Interestingly, he's very different depending on whether you chose to help or kill Senya in chapter one. If you made the kind choice, Arcann himself has turned to the light side while he was away. As a gesture of how much he's changed, he's even got rid of his face mask. (I kind of thought he needed that thing to survive but I guess he just wore it to look edgy and hide his scars? Unless the ritual on Voss also healed him physically so that he doesn't need the mask anymore.) If you killed Senya, Arcann is more or less his old self only even madder and angrier.

Redeemed Arcann vs. "Darkann"

Light side Arcann will pledge his allegiance to you and helps you fight off some Horizon guards. Dark side Arcann wants to fight to the death as usual, but this time you finally get to kill him. (This is what, your fifth attempt to do so?) Since there are lots of holo cameras watching, you also get to frame the event in a light or dark context regardless of which version of Arcann you're dealing with. Either you're a benevolent rescuer, backed by the former ruler / ridding the planet of the previous tyrant, or you're showing off your power, having the former ruler kneel to you / killing him on camera to demonstrate your might. Also, Valkorion chimes in to make some douchey comments to his son either way. The bastard.

Vaylin has escaped to her flagship and orders the fleet to bombard the site to kill everyone, but Lana and T7 help you escape. You return to Odessen victorious, either with a former emperor in tow to support you from now on, or having absorbed his strength while killing him (as commented on by Lana and Valkorion). Either Arcann or Valkorion also comment that Vaylin remains a challenge and won't remain chained by her conditioning forever. And indeed, the chapter ends with the player watching her ship arrive above a dead world where she plans to break her chains.

My Thoughts

I absolutely loved the puzzle section of this chapter. Adventure games were the first PC gaming genre I ever fell in love with as a teenager, and the tasks you have to take care of in this chapter certainly harken back to that kind of gameplay. Now, since this is quite different from what we usually do in SWTOR, I could also see people hating it, but I would hope that only few would have quite such a strong negative reaction. Even on the forums I only found this post by a guy proclaiming that this chapter had "chased him off", but most of the replies seemed vaguely bemused by this rather than in agreement. Bioware actually does have a long history of inserting random puzzles into their content, yet they remain infrequent enough that it's still a surprise every time it happens. I think this chapter does a good job in terms of setting expectations though, as it's explained from the start that your goal is to succeed via subterfuge instead of fighting, so you avoid the pitfall of suddenly running into a "puzzle wall" in the middle of a combat mission.

I also love the hidden bonus mission. It's cute, rewards people for paying attention beyond what it says on the objective tracker, and especially on the harder difficulties it's actually quite handy to complete as well - while your "pets" aren't particularly strong, effectively having four extra "companions" following you around and helping you fight things is definitely useful in terms of dps.

Arcann coming back in two different ways depending on your choices in chapter one is also really well done and undoubtedly one of the better ways in which Bioware managed to live up to their "choices matter" mantra. Initially I wasn't sure whether I liked light side Arcann because in my opinion he comes across as a bit odd - even if you helped Senya, he was confused and hostile the last time you met and his change of mind isn't really explained. However, he grew on me over time and I found his portrayal actually kind of realistic in the sense that he clearly went through a life-changing experience and is now totally focused on it - like someone who converted to a new religion or otherwise changed their lifestyle, found that their life changed for the better afterwards, and is now trying to prove his devotion to his new way of life at every opportunity. Incidentally, the SWTOR Facebook page revealed the other day that 76% of players so far have chosen to redeem Arcann.

Finally, I thought that Indo Zal was a pretty good character in the sense that they managed to give him a fair bit of characterisation for someone who was only just introduced and remains a minor character throughout.

The only negative thing I have to say about this chapter is that the layout of the building feels like it's designed to artificially prolong the chapter, especially towards the end when certain doors suddenly close without explanation, forcing you to run all around the houses to get to where you need to be. I did love the overall atmosphere though.

Onwards to Chapter 7!