When Will We Get 8.0? Will We Ever?

This was a topic that I discussed with Ivano on the podcast, but I still wanted to write a blog post about it as well, since it's something that's been on my mind for a while. With it having been more than two and a half years since the launch of Legacy of the Sith, it's also a question I'm seeing people ask more and more.

The short answer is: We don't really know. If it's happening, it's unlikely to be soon. As of me writing this in September 2024, we have no official information on the subject. No, that post on Today in TOR was an April Fools joke.

Now for the long answer.

The problem with talking about future expansions for SWTOR is that it has never had what I would call a regular expansion cycle akin to other long-running MMOs, where you can count on a new expansion pack being announced once a year or every other year.

If we look back at the game's early years, we did get expansions at something close to a yearly pace for a while: Rise of the Hutt Cartel came out in early 2013, Shadow of Revan at the end of 2014, Knights of the Fallen Empire in late 2015, and Knights of the Eternal Throne at the end of 2016. That may actually seem kind of regular at a glance, but it wasn't really. RotHC was originally meant to be free content for subscribers but was later repackaged as an expansion. Then we got Galactic Starfighter towards the end of 2013 and Galactic Strongholds in mid-2014, and while people tend to not think of those additions as expansions nowadays, they were marketed as such at the time, meaning that for a while we were getting a major content drop almost every six months. Shadow of Revan actually felt kind of cut short, seeing how it was only current content for less than a year.

Then Knights of the Fallen Empire came around, promising to completely change the game from the ground up, and it did indeed introduce many changes that impact our gameplay to this day, such as level scaling and companions being way more powerful than they were in the game's first three years. The flow from Fallen Empire chapters into Eternal Throne on the other hand was so gradual it made the two feel almost like a single expansion... and then it just stopped.

I think it was around this time that I remember a dev saying that they weren't even sure they were going to do expansions anymore because they might just keep adding regular content patches without all that hullabaloo instead. They did eventually change their minds about that, but Onslaught didn't come out until the end of 2019 almost three years later.

When Legacy of the Sith was announced for late 2021, it felt like the team was really getting back into the groove, but then 7.0 turned into a big flop. (To be clear, I think they've released a lot of good content since then, but 7.0 at launch was just underwhelming in a lot of ways.)

And that's really the crux of the matter as I see it. People (both players and developers) like MMO expansions because they generate hype, promise exciting new things and give lapsed players a reason to check back in. From a developer's point of view, they can also be used to charge extra for a big bundle of content all at once.

However, SWTOR hasn't benefitted from that last one since 2014, seeing how they've never wavered from their "all content unlocks with the subscription" model that was introduced with KotFE in 2015. And well... Legacy of the Sith was great for hype before it launched, but then not so much. Those Twitch numbers I looked at the other day showed engagement with the game dropping to a two-year-low shortly after the expansion's launch, kind of the opposite of what you want out of a big release like that!

A really terrible expansion can harm your game just as much as a good one can lift it up; it's not an automatic win. I never played Rift myself for example, but from everything I've heard, interest in that game absolutely tanked with the first expansion because the new content went into completely the wrong direction for the player base it had built. And of course there's always Star Wars Galaxies' infamous New Game Experience. Legacy of the Sith was fortunately not on that level and interest in SWTOR seemingly recovered around the time 7.1 came out, but I still think it was a close call and reminded everyone that a bad expansion can actually be worse than no expansion at all.

The point of all this waffling is that SWTOR has never had a regular expansion cycle due to the many changes in direction it's had over time, and with the current business model it doesn't actually benefit from an expansion nearly as much as many other MMOs. While the team at Broadsword seems happy with their new home and has been doing a solid job continuing to pump out content, they are still small and I'm honestly not sure whether it would be the best use of their resources to reduce work on the regular patches in favour of building up to a bigger release again.

It's not that I wouldn't love to see another good expansion, but after the dud that was LotS' launch, I really don't want to see them mess up like that again either. I had a decent enough time in 7.0, but seeing how unhappy it made many players and listening to the game get panned left and right was no fun at all. If they are going to give us another expansion, I feel it needs to at least match Onslaught in terms of scope, which launched with a new playable species, two planets, distinct storylines for Republic and Empire, a new flashpoint and a new operation. If they can't honestly commit to that, I'd rather they stuck to focusing on giving us the best possible new content from one patch to the next, even if that doesn't get them as much press as an expansion launch would. Just raising the level cap by five again and revamping the way gearing works for the umpteenth time in order to call it an expansion would do the game more harm than good in my eyes.

My 7 Favourite Post-Launch Story Updates

Over the years, a lot has been said and written about the merits of each of the different class stories, but there's been comparatively little discourse about the expansion stories from what I've seen - which I think is a shame, because in my opinion there's some pretty good stuff in there. Obviously, no single storyline can live up to the eight original class stories in terms of sheer breadth of unique content, but that aside, I disagree with the general sentiment I often see expressed that those stories were the peak of the game's storytelling and that it's all just been downhill from there. The more cinematic cut scenes post Knights of the Fallen Empire have been so much more exciting to watch than anything in the original class stories, and many of the non-player characters that were introduced in later years are much more interesting than the vast majority of NPCs we interacted with in the base game.

With all that said, I wanted to write a bit of a love letter to some of my favourite expansion stories. Back in 2019 I wrote a post called "Good Quest, Bad Quest" in which I laid out what I think makes an MMO quest good or bad, and those are the main items that influenced my ranking of these stories as well: presentation, writing, plot, characters, gameplay and world building.

Honestly, the most difficult thing was to decide what actually counts as a separate story. In the past it was pretty clear-cut for the most part, but ever since Ossus the game's ongoing storyline has been a bit of a never-ending soap opera in which different plot beats get picked up and dropped again without necessarily coming to a proper conclusion. You could argue that it's basically all been "the Malgus saga" since then, but I don't entirely agree with that as everything around Onslaught (and somewhat randomly, the Manaan part of Legacy of the Sith) has felt more like a classic and mostly self-contained Republic vs. Empire story to me, while I tend to think of Echoes of Oblivion as a stand-alone adventure that referenced a lot of older content. Spirit of Vengeance involved the Mandalorians for the first time, but then the focus kept ping-ponging between them and Malgus again.

Anyway, I obviously decided to make some choices in regards to the above; this is just to add some context.

1. Jedi Under Siege (2018)

Also known as Ossus or the prelude to Onslaught, released with patch 5.10. There was never going to be any doubt in my mind that this was going to take the top spot on my list, because I loved this update so frikkin' much. Seriously, if you go back to the blog archives from December 2018, every other post is just me gushing about some aspect of this update or another that I loved.

I'd yearned for a return to Republic vs. Empire after Knights of the Eternal Throne, and while Iokath had paid lip-service to this, it had also been done in an extremely lacklustre way, just to then immediately steer away from the subject again to pivot into what would later become known as "the traitor arc". Comparatively, Jedi Under Siege felt like a return to form, the likes of which we hadn't seen since the base game. Ossus was a beautiful planet that made it a joy to explore again, something that hadn't really been the case with the very limited environments of the "Knights of" expansions and Iokath's confusing architecture.

We were introduced to several new and interesting characters in the form of Tau Idair, General Daeruun and Major Anri, and several companion returns that people had been anticipating for many years were skilfully worked into the story in an organic way (Doc, Nadia, Khem Val). On top of that other minor characters made surprise re-appearances, such as Jonas Balkar from the trooper story, NR-02 from the Black Talon, or Darth Malora from Korriban.

Not to mention that Malgus came back! You may be tired of him now after watching him sit around and mope for the last two years, but back then I thought this was a genius move and a fun surprise. And of course, the storylines for Republic and Empire side were different and well-written. I just had a blast all around with this content and am always happy to revisit it on alts. The fact that it takes place on an open world planet instead of constantly shunting you through instanced corridors feels very liberating, and I enjoy seeing the little variations in dialogue depending on what class you play and whether you had any pre-existing relationship with any of the returning NPCs.

2. Onslaught (2019)

In this context I'm talking about the story content that came with the immediate 6.0 expansion launch, meaning the story on Onderon and Mek-Sha plus the finale in the Objective Meridian flashpoint.

Onslaught honestly repeated a lot of what Jedi Under Siege did, only with some minor flaws. We quested our way through two new planets again, met some interesting new and returning characters (Arn, Darth Savik, Jakarro and D4, to name but a few) and once again saw things from different perspectives depending on our faction and to some degree our class (getting the option to reclaim your Dark Council seat as a Sith inquisitor was fire). It just wasn't... quite as good. For example the Republic story on Onderon suffers a bit from your senator liaison being a bit boring, and on Mek-Sha too much of the content for both factions overlaps, but it's still a storyline that I love to replay.

3. Makeb (2013)

This the storyline from which the Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion got its name, except the Hutts don't really get to rise very much at all before you slap them down again. They came in 2.0 and went within the same patch. This is a piece of content on which my opinion has changed a lot over time. Initially I liked it well enough, but the mobs on Makeb were quite numerous and tough at launch, and replays quickly started to feel like a slog. Not to mention that it was being sold to us as chapter four of our class stories for a while when it very obviously wasn't that.

However, considering how much smaller expansions got in the years afterwards, I've really grown fond of our adventures on Makeb in retrospect. We get to explore a large, picturesque planet over the course of a pretty meaty storyline, and it's totally different for Republic and Empire side as well. The Imperial storyline is admittedly a lot stronger, since the Republic one feels a bit odd with the whole "the planet is about to blow up" threat never seeming entirely convincing, but it's not terrible either. It's where we first meet Doctor Oggurobb after all.

4. Shadow of Revan (2014)

I'm mainly thinking of the actual 3.0 expansion launch story here, though I wouldn't blame anyone for wanting to include the Forged Alliances story arc that formed the prelude to the expansion; I'd just personally treat that as its own thing. I'm also not really including the Rise of the Emperor patch here, since that had nothing to do with Revan anymore really. 

Many people cite this as their favourite expansion, but as I've stated many times before, I think it's somewhat overrated. That doesn't mean that I think it's bad however, not at all! Again, we got to quest our way through two beautiful new planets, Rishi and Yavin IV, and the tale of battling the Revanites and their new-old leader was compelling enough. There were some bits that fell a little flat for me, but I did enjoy the story overall.

It's also the expansion that had us start our adventures with Theron and Lana in earnest (including the option for some romance), which I guess is a big plus for some, though it's been more of a mixed blessing to me personally. I know many people love Lana, but if you think Malgus is worn out as a character, imagine how those of us feel who aren't crazy about Lana and yet have had to listen to her tell us what to do for over a decade now...

5. Echoes of Oblivion (2020)

I hesitated a bit to put this one here because I actually don't necessarily think that this is a great piece of content to replay on multiple characters, which is something that is quite important to me. The final boss fight is (in my opinion) one of the worst in the game and the whole thing is pretty linear without any meaningful variations based on your faction or class. However! In terms of world building, this storyline did so much to tie up several years worth of annoying loose ends that I can't not list it here as a piece of content that was very meaningful to me when it came out. It just felt like a love letter to the game's lore in a big way, trying hard to improve on all kinds of tidbits that had felt a bit unsatisfying in the past. Plus hanging out with Kira and Scourge was fun. I wrote a longer review about it back then, which you can find here.

6. Legacy of the Sith or Whatever It Is We're Doing Right Now (2020-?)

As mentioned in the intro, it's very hard to pin down a clear start and end point for this one, but personally I see what I'm talking about here as starting with the introduction of the Mando plot in Spirit of Vengeance in patch 6.2 and then pretty much everything that comes afterwards, except maybe the storyline on Manaan since that doesn't really tie into anything to do with the Mandalorians or Malgus. I'm also treating this placement as tentative since I'm not sure whether 7.5 will turn out to be a real cut-off - I suspect not, so future updates might change my opinion on this storyline. It's honestly been a bit of a ride, and I know many players have understandably been put off by the sheer amount of real time that has passed while all of this has been going on. But I still like the storyline because it has given us both new flashpoints and multiple new planetary areas in terms of gameplay, plus it's had a lot of what I think is great character writing. I'm really interested in seeing where things go with 7.6!

7. Oricon (2013)

Technically part of the Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion and only a short side story, I liked patch 2.4's "The Dread War" for giving us a cool daily area and bringing the story of the Dread Masters to a satisfying conclusion. The plot and writing are pretty basic - here are some really scary bad guys, we need to beat them - but it showed us how something that isn't technically part of the main storyline about our character could still result in a really interesting and enjoyable story update.

I'm going to stop here because after this point, I think I'd start to be a bit more grouchy about the storylines that remain, and this is meant to be a positive post! You might be surprised by some of the things I haven't listed - I know the "Knights of" expansions have their fans for example, but I'm not one of them to be honest. You can read more about why here if you want.

If you've played through all the expansion content to date, how much do you agree/disagree with my rankings? Is there a post-launch storyline that I didn't mention here and that you feel is really underrated perhaps? Feel free to chime in in the comments.

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.

The State of Operations in 7.0

I think I've mentioned before that considering the amount of time I spend raiding in SWTOR, I spend relatively little time talking about it on the blog. You might also think that there shouldn't be that much to say about operations at the moment, what with us still not having a release date for the new op, R4-Anomaly.

However, like it or not, with the way SWTOR works, every time the level cap is raised, things get shaken up in the existing operations as well, as everything gets re-tuned and we get to enjoy the process of re-progressing through the content once again. (I'm not being sarcastic here. It's the kind of thing you either like or not.)

For as much as I thought that Onslaught was a very good expansion overall, the state of ops throughout most of it was not great in my opinion. Sure, the new operation on Dxun was sweet, but the older raids suffered from awkward, extremely unforgiving downscaling with no avenues for progress other than to repeat the dance over and over until you were absolutely perfect at it.

My guild did continue to raid in that environment, but it was rough at times - the fact that it took my team something like nine months (with some interruptions) to get Dread Master Styrak down on master mode was a good example of this. That's also why I for one was perfectly happy to start our pre-expansion raid break early once the original launch date for Legacy of the Sith was announced... we didn't seem to have anywhere left to go where it wasn't going to take us many, many months to kill anything anyway.

That said, I'm happy to report that while Bioware showed no signs of relenting on their stance on master mode operations throughout the 6.x patch cycle, they did decide to approach things differently for Legacy of the Sith and actually had someone go through all the group content to level it up to the new cap correctly and to avoid any more forced downscaling shenanigans. As a bonus, whoever did the work on that also took a close look at various minor mechanics in ops that had become somewhat screwy over time and fixed a lot of those too. No more cheesing Writhing Horror's babies with double Shadow tanks, no more hiding behind the pipe on Operations Chief... and the pylons on the way down on Soa now actually have enough health to allow you to do their mechanic properly instead of them just kinda being killed by accident by the first person who Force-leaps down to the next platform.

I can't emphasise enough how enjoyable it's been to actually be able to feel a difference in performance from gearing up again. During 7.0 launch week, we actually wiped to the first boss in 16-man Eternity Vault enraging on us... which I thought was absolutely hilarious.

One thing I always love about a new #SWTOR expansion: wiping on the first boss in EV again. 😆 And I'm not being sarcastic here, that run really was the most fun I've had in EV in a while... actually having to do mechanics and everything! pic.twitter.com/qfyJl1j8lF

— Shintar (@ShintarCommando) February 16, 2022

Now, we had been messing around and several people had gone down early, so were easily able to overcome that on the next try by playing "properly", but it showed that dps checks and following mechanics actually mattered again, and as we all started to improve our item rating under the new gearing system, it was very noticeable that our performance improved too, and that felt good. That's what I like to see in an MMO!

I won't say that it's been an entirely smooth ride, as a lot of what should be relatively straightforward hardmode bosses feel pretty unforgiving right now, especially in terms of dps required, which has been somewhat intimidating to some of our damage dealers in particular I think. There's a general sentiment of "If veteran mode is already this hard, just how hard is master mode going to be?!", coupled with a fear that we won't be able to progress as far this expansion as we did in the last one.

Personally I've tried to assuage people's fears by telling them that I don't expect things to be that bad. My general impression has been that Bioware's trying to play the long game here, and they have explicitly stated that we'll get to upgrade our gear by several more item levels with the release of the new operation. Considering how much of a difference we've already seen from the upgrades from 320 to 330, I expect that the old master modes will become significantly more accessible as we continue to gear up - which again, is how I feel it should work.

Other notable differences to the ops running experience revolve around gear and schedules. I've already talked about how I find the new gearing system quite convoluted, but aside from that, one thing that it unfortunately has in common with Galactic Command is that everything is personal loot - meaning that if you have anyone on your ops team who doesn't have as much time to play or is being held back for other reasons, you're limited in terms of how much you can help them gear up. You can offer to e.g. run flashpoints with them, but ultimately they have to be willing to put in the time themselves so to speak. You can't just craft upgrades for them or let them have your drops. Based on the same dev blog I linked above, this should at least improve with the release of the new operation, assuming that Bioware are still planning to go ahead with their plan to have tradeable gear tokens drop in there at least.

The thing about schedules is that in the past, we've largely been free to decide which content to run in which week at our own leisure, aside from the weekly highlighted hardmode system that was in effect during KotFE. We've also had a bit of a rule of thumb in our guild that we try to avoid having different ops teams work on the same content at the same time, both in order to ward off unhealthy feelings of competition, and to keep people's lockouts free so that teams could help each other out more easily if any group came up short a member one night.

The new featured ops rotation has kind of thrown us for a loop in that regard, because while we can technically still go wherever we want, it's most rewarding for all teams to try and complete whatever the featured weeklies are. Meaning that we can't help but compare performances to a certain degree, and extra care has to be taken whenever you're helping out a team other than your own so you don't get yourself locked out of a raid you're meant to do with your own group later in the week.

So far it's worked out okay, as we have a lot of players with a lot of alts (and free lockouts) at this point. All the officers who lead teams have also known each other for a really long time by now and are therefore doing their best to compare notes to help each other out and keep everyone progressing at a good pace. But it's certainly a change compared to how we used to operate.

Still, the bottom line is that my early impressions of what Bioware have done with operations this expansion are extremely positive, which is a nice thing to be able to say considering a lot of the negativity that has surrounded the expansion launch. I've been having more fun with them than I've had in a long time and I'm looking forward to seeing what R-4 Anomaly has in store for us whenever it comes out.

First Impressions of Legacy of the Sith

I can't lie, my first impressions of Legacy of the Sith are not as positive as those I had of Onslaught, though it was hard for me at first to articulate what exactly is wrong, because I am having a good time. Trying to sort out my thoughts for the purposes of writing this post has certainly helped with putting things into perspective though.

If I had to sum my issues up in a nutshell, I would say that one is that there are a lot of mechanical and visual changes that I'm not sure how I feel about yet, and the other is that the content feels incomplete.

Point one is about both the UI updates made with 7.0 and the class changes that included some ability pruning. The UI updates have generated a lot of public complaints that I've got to say feel very out of proportion, buuut... I do have at least a little bit of sympathy because I can't say that I really love them myself. I'd like to think that there were probably good reasons for all of the changes the designers decided to make, which may not be evident to me, such as needing to increase scalability for larger monitors, improving accessibility or whatever, but the main thing I see as a long-time player and layperson when it comes to UI design is that a lot of things that used to be very colourful, detailed and representative of a style that strongly set SWTOR apart from other MMORPGs... are now more flat, less detailed and minimalist in a way that makes things look a lot more generic. It doesn't really actively bother me, but I can't claim that it feels like an improvement to me personally either.

Old class/origin story icons vs. new

As far as the ability pruning goes, the situation is actually kind of similar, though here it's more a case of "I'm not sure how I feel about this yet". What changes I experienced on the PTS for myself didn't seem too bad. Playing my Commando after the update has been fine too! In fact, I did kind of like having fewer combat abilities that don't fit onto my main two action bars, because that does feel neater somehow.

On the other hand though, I've already been in numerous situations where I found myself missing almost every single ability that I now had to cut out of my arsenal due to the new system forcing you to choose between different options. I can't tell though whether that's just a temporary thing while I get used to the new normal or something that will bother me in the long run. Either way, it's once again a change that I can't simply gush about as a cool new feature.

As far as the content feeling incomplete goes... I was perfectly fine with Bioware delaying the release of the new operation, because other MMOs also stagger the release of new raids and that seemed completely reasonable to me. I was fine with them leaving crafting updates for some time after 7.0, because I'd rather they had a good think about them than rush out something that feels bad. When they said they'd have to push weapons in the outfit designer back to 7.1 as well, I was like: "Whatever, it's just a small cosmetic feature!" But when I wanted to do the new daily zone on Manaan and was told that this, too, had been cut out of the initial launch, that didn't feel good at all. Apparently Bioware had announced this somewhere previously, but I'd completely missed the memo somehow. It does mean that once you've completed the story, there's nothing to do other than work on getting new gear through existing content and re-running the new flashpoint perhaps. That's a pretty thin offering.

Speaking of the story... I won't go into any spoilers in this post, but I can't deny that even I thought it was kinda short. Now, people have complained about SWTOR's expansion stories being too short pretty much since Rise of the Hutt Cartel (aka the very first expansion), and I've always found that ridiculous because a lot of these complaints tend to be rooted in comparisons to certain other MMOs that are made by much bigger teams, and which also charge a lot more money for their expansion content.

But in this case, you can very easily compare to what we got only one expansion ago in this very same game, with Onslaught, which launched with a story that spanned two planets and a flashpoint, while this time around it's only one planet and a flashpoint. I had some hope that Bioware would compensate for this by making Manaan bigger and longer, but that simply hasn't been the case, so we got about thirty percent less story than last time. That's very noticeable.

As for the content of the story... again, I won't go into spoilers until a later post, but again the comparison to Onslaught is quite striking. Onslaught had three acts that were logically tied together and finished with a solid climax, followed by a little epilogue that teased the next update. It also made great use of the large existing cast of characters, showing lots of love for little details. In contrast, the story that LotS launched with consists of two parts that are completely disconnected and which focus on a much smaller cast, leaving you with a certain sense of: "Where is everyone?" It's not awful, but compared to most of what Bioware has served up over the last couple of years, it falls rather flat.

All that said, I'm still managing to have fun. There is something fascinating to re-discovering your class with the combat changes in place, and gearing up through group content with my guildies is as fun to me as it has always been. The new season has also been enjoyable so far. It's just that... I should really have better things to say about a freshly launched expansion than merely that? I'll continue to focus on the bits I enjoy for now and here's to hoping that 7.1 fleshes things out a bit, considering how much content they held back for it.

LotS (of) Gear

It seems that Bioware decided to open the floodgates in regards to information about what else is coming with 7.0, which makes me glad that I'm not a news site and therefore not compelled to repost everything they say asap, but there's been a lot of food for thought and I'd definitely like to talk about at least some of it.

Today I'd like to discuss the news post called "Itemization in 7.0", which basically revealed that set bonuses being replaced by legendary items is only the beginning... and um, wow. My overall impression of that blog is best summed up as this new system being a sidegrade from Onslaught's, getting rid of some issues while introducing others, and I'm not sure whether I'll like it.

As I said in my review of Onslaught, I honestly thought the gearing this expansion has generally been great. I won't deny that it's had some issues, but at least to me, they were so minor that they barely affected my enjoyment, if at all. I guess I can't blame Bioware for aiming to address them anyway and trying for perfection, but I do worry a little that they'll just end up causing other issues that'll ultimately bother me more. I guess we'll see.

Less randomness, less gear needed

The way things worked in Onslaught, there was a lot of randomness (and bad drop rates for certain sets and Tacticals was definitely one of the criticisms I had), but this was somewhat compensated for by the game absolutely showering you with loot at every opportunity, so odds were good that you were going to get at least something interesting reasonably often. In terms of sheer quantity of drops, this system was very over the top, and having to pause after every other flashpoint or ops boss to deconstruct all the random gear filling up your inventory wasn't great, but I didn't consider it a massive bother either.

In the linked blog post, Bioware basically states that players hate RNG so they want to do away with most of it. In LotS, every time you complete (a weekly mission for) a certain type of content, you'll either get a piece of gear that's guaranteed to be useful to you, or some sort of currency to improve it. Very utilitarian and deterministic.

Some people will love that I'm sure. However, I've always liked a bit of RNG to be honest, that feeling of being surprised by what drops. To me, it's only bad if there's an expectation that you'll get a certain item within a decent amount of time but bad drop rates keep holding you back, or if it takes a lot of effort to even spin the metaphorical wheel and the results tend to feel unrewarding for the effort required. Overly deterministic loot systems can feel somewhat work-like in comparison, which I'm not a huge fan of, but I guess we'll see how this one ends up feeling.

Not all things are equal anymore

The second big ticket item in the news post is the announcement that they want to bring back tying item level rewards to specific pieces of content (read: you can only get the best gear by doing the hardest raids). More than anything, this is just one of those cans of worms I'm kind of tired of dealing with because I honestly don't care either way at this point in my life.

I do think it's fine to incentivise certain bits of content with more powerful rewards, especially if this content depends on a minimum number of participants to function or has high skill requirements. I'm perfectly fine with not having the best gear in the game myself, as long as what I've got serves me for doing the content I want to do. In a casual theme park game like SWTOR it really doesn't matter and I think people who get up into a huff because someone gets to do their dailies with a few more item levels than they have are drama queens.

But at the same time, I also don't care if it's not that way. Onslaught's gearing system made SWTOR the most egalitarian it has ever been, as everyone could work their way up to item level 306 by doing any activity they wanted. I continued to do operations anyway because I enjoy them, and it didn't hurt me that someone else could grind their way to the same gear by doing things that would be boring to me. Live and let live, I say.

So I don't really mind either way, though I do sort of wonder what prompted this change on Bioware's end. Not enough people doing the latest operation this expansion, I guess? I will say that Nature of Progress was terribly incentivised initially, but that didn't have anything to do with item levels, but rather with the fact that it initially dropped less loot than the old operations while also having worse drop rates for its coveted special gear sets somehow, even though the new ops was "supposed" to be the best way to farm them.

Different gearing paths

A catchphrase that Bioware has been using to describe their design philosophy for several years now is to "play your own way", yet somehow this can apparently be used to justify totally opposing design decisions, which I find fascinating. In Onslaught the "play your own way" concept was supposed to be supported by the fact that you could get your gear drops - with the exception of a select few sets - from any source. The implementation was just a bit wonky because in practice rewards from PvP were absolutely anaemic while flashpoints were the way to go, but I guess I was willing to forgive that because I really like running flashpoints with my friends anyway.

In LotS on the other hand, playing your own way will apparently mean largely separate gearing paths for every activity, though the details of just how separate they are going to be are still a bit fuzzy to me. The basic idea is that veteran flashpoints will drop different items from master mode flashpoints, which will drop different items from PvP and so on, with each one having its own upgrade currency as well, though my understanding is that their stats should be comparable except for the different item level caps for some activities as per the previous point.

At the same time they're apparently not totally separate, as the example they cite is that you'll be able to upgrade flashpoint gear with "flashpoint upgrade currency, daily/heroic currency, conquest currency" - but not PvP currency? Which does bring me to my main gripe with this announcement, which is that as someone who likes to regularly take part in different types of content, it sounds confusing as hell and as if gathering pieces of gear from different sources might end up being a proper nightmare. Maybe they just didn't explain it very well and it won't be as bad as it sounds, but I really don't miss having umpteen different vendors to trade in different tiers of stuff like we had at the end of Knights of the Eternal Throne.

Some simplifications 

While the above sounds like potentially unnecessary complication to me, there are some things they are planning to simplify. Amplifiers will be gone, and nobody will miss them except for the handful of crafters who actually bothered to optimise them for a special crew skill crit set, and these players do have my sympathy.

Augments are still somewhat in the air and it sounds like Bioware don't plan to add a new tier of them, but the old ones will keep being useful.

Most importantly though, the default way of gearing at level 80 will simply be unmoddable items, with purchasable modifications becoming something that still becomes accessible at max level if you do want to change things around for some reason. As someone who's never enjoyed the number-crunching associated with min-maxing, I'm happy with this, especially as it sounds like this should e.g. result in damage dealers being automatically accuracy capped with a few pieces of "default" gear without having to maths out the perfect way to mix and match their mods. Leaving in the option to do this if you're hardcore while making things more straightforward for the more casually inclined strikes me as a good compromise.

All in all, it sounds like a lot of change to address what were mostly non-issues to me anyway, so I can't say I'm hugely excited about anything I've read here. I'm not massively worried either... just a little disappointed that they feel the need to mess with gearing this much when Onslaught already had it mostly right in my opinion.

Onslaught in Review

As I said previously, we still don't have a launch date for Legacy of the Sith, but it can't be far off now, and I don't expect us to get another major content update before then, so I thought it would be interesting to look back on how Onslaught has gone as a whole. I wasn't sure what conclusion I'd come to when I first started writing this, but honestly, now that I've added it all up, this has been a pretty ace expansion.

Features

After Bioware tried (and failed) to reinvent the wheel for the last two expansions (with the single player focus in KotFE and Galactic Command in KotET), it was nice to see them refocus on simply adding features that players had actually been asking for in one form or another.

• Nautolans as a new playable species: They ended up looking a bit more... weird than most people expected I suppose, but I still think they were a good addition. Based on forum polls and the like, Nautolans were easily the most requested species that wasn't available yet - so much so that after this, I'm not actually sure what playable species they could add next. Sure, there are lots to choose from and you can find people suggesting pretty much all of them on the forums somewhere, but I haven't seen anything else have the same kind of consistent demand as Togruta and Nautolan had before they were added.
  

• Spoils of War: Gearing was a mess towards the end of KotET and needed a revamp desperately. I think the new Spoils of War system worked out well overall! It's not perfect, but what ever is? I'd say its biggest flaws are that a lot of set bonuses and Tacticals they introduced were pretty useless so that there ultimately weren't that many viable choices to make about what to get, and that drop rates for both types of items were pretty poop, meaning that most of the time, you were better off just saving fragments to buy from a vendor, even when all you were doing was gambling at Kai's. Still, overall the ease of gearing up in terms of item levels was amazing, and everything being bound to legacy so that you could gear all your alts in one fell sweep has been super neat.

• Material storage: I liked how they never even advertised this as a feature; it was just suddenly there and amazing, freeing up tons of space in cargo and legacy bays across the land. This is the kind of quality of life improvement we all love to see. Separate but related, they also added all those event currencies to the legacy currency tab.
  

Story

I didn't love the Onslaught base story quite as much as Jedi Under Siege, but it was still excellent overall, making use of the game's large pre-established cast and adding all kinds of great little touches to remind players of their class identity. Over the course of the expansion, we then got three more story installments:

• Echoes of Oblivion: This was a pure love letter to the game and its community, taking all kinds of loose ends that had been left dangling in an unsatisfying manner and tying them into a neat little bow.
  

• Spirit of Vengeance: Probably the least interesting of Onslaught's updates, it still introduced Rass Ordo as a likeable new character and laid the seeds for what's hopefully going to be an interesting arc about the Mandalorians facing off against an intriguing new villain.
  

• Secrets of the Enclave: The expansion's second piece of story that was actually different for both factions (after the Onslaught base story), this again featured a plethora of interesting character moments, even if it didn't advance the plot very much.

If I were to criticise anything, I guess you could point out that there is no clear theme to all of these to tie Onslaught together: a bit of Darth Malgus here, some Mandalorian stuff here. Then again, this is pretty in line with how things used to be in SWTOR's "good old days": After all, Rise of the Hutt Cartel was only really about Hutts for a very short time; all the content added after its launch centred on organisations like Czerka or the Dread Masters.

"MMO Stuff"

It seems to me that after the early years of most content additions being standard MMO content and the wild swing in the opposite direction with KotFE & KotET's story chapters at the expense of all else, Bioware has finally settled into a nice balance between continuously adding engaging story installments while also consistently churning out repeatable content to keep dedicated players busy in the gaps in-between.

• Two new planets: Onderon and Mek-Sha were both smaller than I would have hoped, but they were fully fleshed-out planets with datacrons and everything. The Onderon daily circuit is decent fun. Unfortunately Mek-Sha felt a bit half-baked with its somewhat random selection of side missions in different places, some content being quite buggy initially and none of it ever really becoming very rewarding.

• One new operation: Nature of Progress (or Dxun as most people call it) is a brilliant op in terms of story and undoubtedly the funniest piece of group content Bioware ever released. The fights are mostly good fun as well, except for the last boss, whom I find kind of tedious mechanically to be honest.

• Three new flashpoints: Objective Meridian, Spirit of Vengeance and Secrets of the Enclave. I stand by what I said about Objective Meridian seeming a bit dull at first blush but being interesting to replay. The last boss(es) can be infuriating but in a good way (to me anyway). Spirit of Vengeance was a bit meh - some neat little Easter egg achievements couldn't make up for the fact that it consists of too much boring trash and the environment isn't exactly thrilling to look at either. Secrets of the Enclave is probably my favourite of the three, meaning it's fairly fast-paced, features decent boss fights and includes some beautiful environments to feast your eyes on.
  

• Two new world events and more: We got the Ultimate Swoop Rally on Dantooine and the Feast of Prosperity as a seasonal event in autumn. I liked both of these as creative non-combat additions. I found that swooping gets quite boring quickly if you do it for too long but it is something different. I also enjoyed the little mini-games coming with the Feast and the way it livened up the world boss pugging scene - I'm quite looking forward to doing that again this year actually. Finally, we also got the Alderaan stronghold and Galactic Seasons for what it's worth.
  

Summary

I know people always complain about wanting more from Bioware - and it's not like I'd object to being given more! - but honestly, looking back at all this, it strikes me as a pretty decent tally for a two-year long expansion that came free with the subscription. Especially considering that for a lot of that time, Covid was interfering with the devs' working patterns as well.

I like that there's a clear effort to balance single player story content with MMO features and additions now, and most of it was really good quality as well, with just a couple of not-so-great items on the list but nothing completely awful or boring. If Legacy of the Sith can deliver in a similar way, I'll be one happy camper.

Datacron Hunt on Mek-Sha and Onderon

Ah, datacrons - I have such an interesting history with them. Originally I was pretty oblivious to them while levelling, to the point that I'm not sure I came across even a single one organically (the one simply lying on the ground on Coruscant perhaps...), but then other players started showing them to me and datacron hunting became both a fun social activity and something I liked doing on my alts. Then they were made account-wide with KotFE and that whole avenue of play kind of fell off a cliff... especially as Bioware didn't add any new ones either - until Ossus that is, and I wrote about my experience with those datacrons in this post.

Onderon and Mek-Sha were similar to Ossus in that guildies were offering summons to the new datacrons within days, but like on Ossus I refused because simply accepting a summon to an unknown location, clicking a cube and leaving again kind of seemed to defeat the purpose of the whole thing to me. I told myself that I'd go back to get them later, but to be completely honest I mostly forgot about them again after that. So I was delighted when my guild decided to host a guild datacron hunt for the first time in literal years and that Onderon and Mek-Sha were supposed to be the first destinations. 

We started with the endurance datacron on Mek-Sha, which follows in the footsteps of similar datacrons from the base game such as the mastery ones on Imperial Nar Shaddaa and Corellia, which both require you to jump on a small kiosk/carrier as it floats past and ride it (close) to the datacron location. I would rate the Mek-Sha one as slightly less fun than either of those though, as part of the path you ride along is a bit buggy, which is disorienting (the environment around you goes all crazy, the platform appears to disappear under your feet etc.), and after successfully jumping both on and off the floating "sign" you then still have to make another couple of (admittedly not very difficult) jumps before reaching the datacron.

My guildies and I spent some time chatting while repeatedly falling to our deaths here, but our guide for the evening made it to the finish line very quickly and was able to offer limited assistance for some classes with a Sage pull (we also found that with some skill and/or luck a Scoundrel could jump to them with Trick Move.). After a given time limit we simply used a guild flagship summon for anyone who was still struggling... but I refused to accept it, as - despite of my repeated failures - the whole thing felt very doable and I figured that I'd be able to do it the "proper" way if I just gave myself a bit more time.

Still, for the time being we moved on to the endurance datacron, which was a more straightforward jumping puzzle in a fairly small area. I actually did pretty okay with this one except for one really far jump near the end. Here we sort of moved along as a group, initially falling down and re-trying all the jumps on our own, but I wasn't the only one struggling with that one particular jump, so we eventually started to "pool" around that one and once a couple of people got across they helped others with pulls and such. I was not too ashamed to accept a little help there myself, as getting a bit of a leg up with one jump in a row of about a dozen jumps isn't on the same scale to me as simply getting a summon to the final destination. In the end we all managed to get this datacron without having to use the guild flagship summon at all.

After that we were off to Onderon, first to deal with the endurance datacron there. This was another jumping puzzle but with a deadly edge, as missing one of the first three jumps meant falling to your death. Fortunately a medical droid wasn't far away, but it was still quite silly how many times I fell to my death here. Otherwise it was a similar affair to Mek-Sha in that I eventually managed all the jumps by myself except the very last one, for which I accepted a pull since I was the only person who hadn't made it yet and people wanted to move on. We took a little group photo next to the datacron since the backdrop was quite nice up there.

Finally, there was the mastery datacron, which was introduced as "the Indiana Jones datacron" to the group and it sure lived up to its name. This one lives in a personal phase and requires you to leap across a bridge with invisible holes by following a certain pattern (in what is undoubtedly meant to be an Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade reference), followed by dodging a bunch of floor spikes in the dark that insta-kill you if you step on them. This is already tricky enough one way, but then you finally get to the datacron, a little cut scene plays and some sort of electric/force field gets unleashed, forcing you to make it back the same way with the additional pressure of a timer or you die. I must have died a hundred times to that thing and was once again one of the last people to get it (cheaty Sages and their Phase Walks...) but it didn't really feel impossible at any time... it was just a matter of mastering the sequence to the point that I was able to execute it both flawlessly and quickly enough.

At this point some of my guildies moved on to Ossus, but since I already had those 'crons, I instead opted to return to Mek-Sha and went back to practising riding the sign. It took me another half-dozen attempts or so and then I made it to that datacron as well.

I'm glad that I originally decided to save getting these datacrons for a more opportune time, as getting them with my guildies was much more fun than it would have been to simply get a summon or even to follow a guide on my own.

The Indiana Jones datacron was probably my favourite, despite of being sequestered in a personal phase and causing me to die a hundred times. It was just a very fun idea, and restarting after a death was extremely fast so the failures didn't feel too punishing. Though I guess the time pressure at the end could be considered a bit harsh for the rather casual player base that the game has cultivated over the years. Sure, casual players don't "need" the stats from it either, but I just think it's a pretty fun experience to have regardless, for all kinds of players.

The endurance datacron on Mek-Sha was the sort of mini adventure that I usually like with datacrons, but I was a bit let down by the bugginess of its implementation. Also, considering that there are follow-up jumps after the sign ride that you can fail, having to wait about two minutes for the sign to come around again after each try was a bit annoying.

The two jumping 'crons were both alright - they both featured at least one pretty fiendish jump, which always strikes me as a bit frustrating when it's part of a whole series of jumps that you have to restart if you fail, but at least the run back wasn't long in either case. The Onderon one also had what you could call "save points" in the sense that if you fell off at a later point, you only had to redo the last couple of jumps and didn't have to start over from the very beginning. That was good.

I wonder if there'll be datacrons on Manaan?

PS: It's the first of August, which once again heralds the return of Blaugust! Whether you enjoy discovering new blogs, would like to promote your own writing or are maybe only just thinking about starting your own blog, I can definitely recommend checking out this community event.

Reviewing Renown Ranks

When Galactic Command turned into Renown with Onslaught, that never-ending, not-quite-XP bar became a lot less important as a source of gear, and since your Renown rank didn't actually affect the level of gear you got our of your reward boxes anymore, there's been a lot less incentive to care about levelling it up ever since. Mind you, I still like making numbers go up, and there were multiple achievements to be had for getting every class to 100, and one character to the max of 999.

With how intensely I played at the start of Onslaught, the first 100 Renown ranks on my Commando flew by in no time, and I even missed it when I got the achievement for hitting rank 100 because I was too busy actually playing. (Or maybe it was a technical issue at the time? All I remember for sure is that I was somewhat disappointed when I realised that I'd failed to capture the big ding.)

The first couple of alts followed reasonably quickly as well, but after that my efforts became increasingly... scattered. For example it took me nearly a year to get an inquisitor to renown 100 because the class is not among my most frequently played, but also because I have several at max level and kept swapping between them. I was happy for my guildies when they hit their own milestones and earned the "Everybody Knows My Name" legacy title for hitting 100 on all classes, but even though I kind of wanted that achievement as well I just didn't want it quite enough, always preferring to hop on different alts all the time to work on their Conquest scores.

It was therefore only last month that I logged on one night and finally hit renown rank 100 on one of my multiple bounty hunters, the last class I was still missing for the achievement. Alas, not even one guildie was online to witness it, but it was still something.

Up next is the one to hit rank 999 on my main. Again, based on how quickly I burned through the levels at the start of the expansion, I should've already achieved it, but in practice my Commando main is still somewhere in the mid-500s. If I added up all the Renown ranks across my legacy though, I'd already be at more than 2000, so it's not as if I haven't been playing... also, unlike with the class-related achievement, I haven't seen many lay claim to having reached the 999th Renown rank, so I feel somewhat less behind the curve on that one.

Of course, this is all in the context of being surrounded by my guildies, most of whom are pretty hardcore in terms of how much time they spend in the game. I posted a poll on Twitter the other day to ask other players about their highest Renown rank at this point, and somewhat to my surprise, even more than a year after the system's launch almost 30% of respondents still said that they had yet to progress beyond rank 50 on any character.

Before Onslaught's launch, there was talk of having "seasons" for Renown ranks and the suggestion that they would reset every so often, which was one of those things at the back of my mind putting a bit of FOMO pressure on me to get that rank 999 achievement done sooner rather than later. We haven't heard anything about that since the system was actually implemented though, and based on those poll numbers I guess Bioware isn't feeling a particular rush to reset the numbers. Hopefully that means that I can continue to take my time (relatively speaking) and still get there in the end.

We Failed to Kill Some Bosses

Last week was 16-man week in my guild again, and we decided to do something different this time by revisiting the Dreadful and Hateful entity (the latter of which I hadn't seen since that afternoon back in 2014), as well as a world boss on Yavin IV called the Ancient Threat, which I didn't really know anything about other than that it was kind of secret and existed.

It was... interesting.

The Dreadful Entity went down easily enough, probably in part due to the Veteran's Edge stacks you get on hardmode these days. The other two bosses... didn't.

With the Hateful Entity, there was some confusion at first about how to summon it as people kept saying that a certain pack of womp rats needed to be killed in a specific way. Mr Commando and I were raising our eyebrows at this as we remembered no such thing from back in 2014 - it sounded a lot like some sort of superstition to me and I said as much. In this case it turned out that I was wrong though, and you really do need to get all the womp rats equally low to get the "Hateful Presence" to spawn that in turn can be used to summon the Hateful Entity. I'm still baffled by how I have absolutely zero memory of doing anything like this back in 2014 and I even went on a bit of a googling spree afterwards to find out if Bioware maybe changed the mechanic at some point, but no: I found guides from before then that referenced the womp rat thing too. I can only guess that the allied guild that we ran with back in 2014 were already familiar with the whole concept and made sure to do it right without talking about it? I have no idea.

Anyway, we eventually managed to summon the Entity, but killing it was unfortunately another matter. I don't think we even got it to 80 percent on our best attempt. Some of that failure was undoubtedly down to bad play on our part (especially early on we lost quite a few people to death mark dispel failures), but the damage also seemed quite insane. For example a Gunslinger reported being hit by two unavoidable abilities in quick succession that hit for more than his entire health bar even when at full health. How do you deal with that in a downscaled operation with fixed health values?

A quick search yielded only a single kill video uploaded since 6.0, but I guess that proves that it's technically possible. Unfortunately it's a bit hard to tell what's going on in it, but it looks like they brought a lot of Powertechs in order to have the Sonic Rebounder buff on the group 24/7, which would then presumably prevent the sort of deadly two-shot combos that kept befalling some of our raid members.

Speaking of it being hard to tell what's going on, I remember being told back in the day to make sure to turn all my graphics settings to low for this fight as it would otherwise be too hard to see what's happening... this is probably still true, but I decided to leave mine on high anyway this time as a sort of experiment. My PC could actually deal with it fine, but the sheer amount of lightning and particle effects did indeed make it hard to tell what was happening a lot of the time. Still, I have no regrets - at least I got some cool screenshots out of the whole ordeal whenever I died and hid my UI to watch from floor level as the rest of the group slowly followed my example.

Another thing that was funny and which I definitely don't remember happening back in 2014 was that after wiping, people wouldn't necessarily respawn at the start but instead appeared in a random location inside the operation. I ended up on the other side of Thrasher's gate a couple of times, and in the middle of trash pulls the rest of the time. The latter made for a sort of cruel but hilarious Russian roulette as the whole ops group would revive but certain people (often including me) would immediately die again as they were teleported alone into the middle of various trash packs and mugged to death. Hey, if you're gonna die anyway, you might as well do it in an entertaining way!

We didn't have much luck with the Ancient Threat world boss either, though at least it was an interesting experience to get all the buffs required to summon it, as this requires you to find a number of small "secret" clickies dotted around Yavin IV that also grant several achievements.

The boss itself is the same "glowing ball" model as the two Entity bosses and has similarly simplistic mechanics, though the mask from Dreadtooth isn't required anymore. A lot of guides we found said that this fight was quite easy, but this didn't really match our experience. For example the red circles that were supposed to come down only every 15 seconds or so according to some sources were dropping almost non-stop, forcing the whole raid to run around like headless chickens. More importantly though, the ongoing AoE damage that was supposed to be insignificant and easy to heal through actually ticked for about seven percent of everyone's health every two seconds and felt pretty impossible to heal through with a normal role setup of "only" about a quarter of the group being healers.

For this one we couldn't find a kill video from this year at all, just one that was uploaded this year but clearly recorded before Onslaught, so it may well be that the scaling went a bit awry for this boss. We heard from some acquaintances that they have successfully killed it since 6.0, but apparently only by going in with a group of five (two of which were healers) and drawing out the fight to nearly an hour.

Interestingly we did get quite close to killing it once, by going complete zerg and spamming guild flagship summons every time someone died, revived and ran back. The only problem was that as Republic, the run back without a summon is really long (way too long for a significant number of people to survive). At some point, one of the summons got borked up and red circles were dropped right under the summoning spot so that people got put in combat or died instantly the moment they accepted the transport, and then we couldn't get another person into a position to summon in time, leading us to wipe at around ten percent. As guild ship summons have a long cooldown, it wasn't really feasible to keep trying that method for several attempts in a row, unfortunately.

We are however of half a mind to try this same zerg method again some other time, but this time on Imperial alts, who respawn much closer to the Ancients Threat's "home", meaning that people should be able to keep running back to some degree even without a summon. If we do get it down that way it wouldn't exactly be something to be proud of, but hey... sometimes you just gotta do what works.

The Best Classes to Take into Onslaught

With the recent Steam launch having brought many new and returning players (back) to SWTOR, there's been a resurgence of curiosity about many basic aspects of the game. One question that returning players with a stable of multiple characters might have is which class they should pick up first to get the most out of the new story additions since they last played.

My post about the best classes to take into the "Knights of..." expansions is one of the most popular posts on this blog, but we've had a fair amount of new story since then, with the arc about Valkorion and his family more or less wrapped up and abandoned. I think it's fair to wonder whether the storylines that have come after are better suited for a different set of classes, or if there is one class that's just best for everything, meaning KotFE/KotET and everything that comes after. My answer to the latter is "yes, and it's the Sith inquisitor", but I'd really like to go into a bit more detail than that. So get ready for some minor content spoilers and mention of companion returns post-KotET, but I'm not giving away any major plot points or anything.

First off I think that on the whole, the post-KotET content has been much more neutral in terms of which classes it's suitable for. Your character is now the commander of the Eternal Alliance (whatever you may think of how they ended up there) and they are back to dealing with the two big factions, which is easily justifiable in my opinion, whether you originally started out as a Sith or a Republic trooper.

When Bioware first eased their way back into this style of writing they seemed to struggle a bit, and the Iokath storyline that followed KotET was pretty bland and awkward as a result. This was followed by what has been dubbed the "traitor arc" since then, which again started poorly but got better as it went along. It's also probably the single most class-neutral storyline we've had since KotET, simply because it focuses very much on your personal relationship with the traitor, which depends more on how you feel about that particular character than your class choice. That said, the last flashpoint in the series, The Nathema Conspiracy, features a nice callback to your class story with a lot of different permutations based on your choices there.

From there it's off to Jedi Under Siege, which takes place on the planet Ossus, and where the current ongoing storyline kicks off. While this is still fairly class-neutral content as a whole, Bioware started to include a lot more references to the original class stories from this point onwards, which is what I will use to justify most of my rankings. Also noteworthy is that from Iokath onwards you're given the option to start sabotaging your old faction, which is something that might be greatly suited for characters that were played as never having been that attached to their original faction to begin with.

With all that out of the way, I would recommend prioritising the classes as follows if you're uncertain:

1. Sith Inquisitor

The Sith inquisitor is in the lucky position that they were a great fit for KotET/KotFE but the new content fits them like a glove as well. They basically enjoy ruling their own little faction, and whether you decide to go back and help the old Sith Empire or would rather scheme against them because it's the Sithy thing to do, opportunities for intrigue abound.

Jedi Under Siege starts with a call from your old friend Moff Pyron (who remembers you of course), and if you sided with Khem Val over Darth Zash at the end of his companion arc in the base game, you'll get to reunite with Khem on Ossus. Even better, you get to romance him too if you're into that kind of thing!

In Onslaught you're also given the opportunity to reclaim your old seat on the Dark Council if you wish (and in an appropriately Sithy manner as well).

Oh, and Andronikos and Ashara also come back in post-KotET Alliance alerts but that's really just the icing on the cake.

2. Jedi Knight

The Jedi Knight is another character that gets along well with the KotFE/KotET storyline and manages to continue into the new content quite seamlessly. You'll get recognised both as an important Jedi and a military commander, and no fewer than three of the original knight companions make their return as part of the storyline from Ossus onwards: Doc, Kira and Scourge. The latter two haven't had that much to do yet (that'll be in the content drop we're anticipating towards the end of the year), but all three are fully integrated into the storyline and reuniting with them is quite interesting. Kira can now also be romanced by female knights and Scourge is open to either gender. I haven't been able to find confirmation whether Doc swings both ways as well now...

3. Imperial Agent

The reason I rank the Imperial agent highly is mostly because of the saboteur option. You don't have to take it if you don't want to, but of all classes the agent was the one for whom it could (potentially) make the most sense to want to betray the Empire by the end of their class story. This was the sort of story thread that I think most of us didn't expect to ever get picked up again once Bioware said that there weren't going to be any more class stories, but the saboteur option has effectively revived it and even made it more "mainstream" so to speak.

Vector returns in a post-KotET Alliance alert, which is nice enough if you like him or even romanced him, and agents also get an exclusive little chat with him after the Task at Hand interlude that serves to remind you that he's still there and involved in the agent's life and decisions.

4. Jedi Consular

Similar to the knight, the consular is recognised for previous achievements on Ossus, and there are opportunities to both fight and be diplomatic.

In terms of companion returns, the consular was a bit of a black sheep during the KotFE/KotET era as no consular companions were involved in the main storyline and Qyzen was the only one that could be re-acquired via an Alliance alert. Post-KotET however, Lieutenant Iresso returns in an alert, you reunite with Nadia as part of the Ossus storyline, and Tharan comes back during Onslaught. Good times!

5. Sith Warrior

I ranked the Sith warrior as fairly high in terms of its suitability for KotFE/KotET, but to be honest I never pictured the warrior as someone who wants to sit on a throne and rule - better to leave that to someone with an interest in politics while they go out and smash faces. Ossus and Onslaught offer some nice opportunities here as you get back onto the front lines of the war and get the option to leave all that pesky planning to other people if that's more up your alley.

Quinn returns on Iokath and you get the option to finally get closure in regards to "that thing" he did during your class story. Jaesa returns in an Alliance alert after Ossus too, both her light and dark side versions. The former can now also be romanced, and the latter can also be killed if, like me, you always found her pretty annoying.

6. Bounty Hunter

You finally get Mako back in post-KotET Alliance alert, but it's a bit lacklustre to be honest. There is an interesting moment in Onslaught where bounty hunters get a slightly different reaction from an NPC than other classes, but other than that it doesn't offer anything particularly exciting for the class. The main reason I still rank it above trooper and smuggler is that bounty hunter is another class for whom the option of wanting to change sides in the war makes more sense than for most others.

7. Smuggler

Corso, Risha and Akaavi come back in two post-KotET Alliance alerts but they are short and not that great in my opinion. And while part of Onslaught takes place on a planetoid where a smuggler could feel right at home, nothing much is made of how this might make for a different experience for this class.

8. Trooper

Elara Dorne makes her comeback during Iokath but it's not very exciting. In the aftermath of Onslaught you get another little scene with her though (like the agent does with Vector), which is nice. Other than that there isn't anything going on that feels particularly tailored towards troopers.

Looking back at the final ranking, I'm kind of surprised by how similar it is to my KotFE/KotET ranking, with knight and inquisitor coming out on top once again, and smuggler trailing behind yet again. That said, I think it's important to repeat that overall, the newer content doesn't feel nearly as badly suited for some classes as KotFE/KotET did, and that there's much less of a difference between how much you'll enjoy playing through it as an inquisitor vs. a smuggler.

Got a different take on how different classes experience the current expansion and the content leading up to it? Feel free to leave it in the comments!