Another One for the Books: Scum Speed Run

Back in June I wrote about successfully completing the Dread Palace timed run achievement with my guildies. Our next destination after that ended up being Scum and Villainy, which also has a timed run achievement... but I initially hardly dared to hope that we might be capable of accomplishing that, mostly because of the last boss. I still remembered from when we worked on the Styrak fight during Onslaught, how we literally spent months wiping on him, and how even the final kill - satisfying as it was - took us over 20 minutes, something I found difficult to mentally reconcile with the idea of a speed run.

However, things went better than I'd expected as we started working our way through the ops without the timer. I didn't actually keep track, but I think I would've been able to count the number of attempts it took us to kill Styrak on my fingers if I'd wanted to. Clearly what had held us back those years ago had truly just been the bad group composition above all else, and going in with the knowledge that we needed certain combat styles and preparing accordingly turned that into a complete non-issue.

A guildie who's a much better player than me encouraged me: "You've done the DP timed run, and that's much harder! This should be very doable." And indeed, where in Dread Palace you only have one hour to beat five encounters, in Scum you have two hours to defeat seven of them. Everyone agreed that it was both a realistic and a worthy goal to pursue.

Nonetheless, progression still wasn't all as smooth as that. Most fights in Scum master mode are much easier than in Dread Palace, and I'd say at least four of the fights became more or less guaranteed one-shots pretty quickly. Thrasher, the third boss, could sometimes be a random road block if something was even slightly off with the group, as there's a lot of damage thrown at random targets, requiring strong burst healing, people to use their cooldowns correctly, and dps to be very responsive to the add spawns.

The worst fight by far though were the Cartel Warlords, primarily because Sunder, the boss that needs kiting, has been suffering from terrible desync for years, meaning that he'd often appear on the other side of the room from where he actually was, which is not a good thing when you have to stay away from him or else risk being one-shot. It could be very hit and miss whether our tank could kite him long enough without anything going horribly wrong. And that's without even mentioning that it can be very easy to already wipe in the first phase, when the pressure on the healers is the highest and there are once again a lot of randomly targeted damage abilities going around that could cause someone to fall over if they just so happened to be hit by a lot of things in a row.

Styrak himself turned out to be a comparatively mild obstacle, with the biggest problem being just how long the fight still was. With better dps we could now take him down in less than twenty minutes, but that's still pretty long for a boss fight, and a single wipe at a late stage of the encounter could be massively costly in terms of time.

Once again progression was very much not linear, with us getting hard stuck on Thrasher one week, then breezing through all bosses until Styrak the next, just to keep wiping to silly mistakes; followed by us getting stuck on Cartel Warlords again on the next run.

That said, this Wednesday the stars finally aligned: we one-shot Thrasher, and got Cartel Warlords down on the third attempt. It was a pretty epic victory too, with only one person still alive to deliver the final killing blow to the last warlord. And Styrak was once again super-smooth, with us finishing the speed run achievement with plenty of time left on the clock.

Even better: the next evening we did it again, for the one member of the team who still needed the achievement and hadn't been there the previous night. This time we one-shot both Thrasher and Cartel Warlords and only had a silly wipe in Oasis City that was completely my fault. However, we did lose some time to real life interruptions, and then wiped on Styrak four times. Fortunately, fifth time was the charm and we got him down mere minutes before the timer was about to run out.

I'm happy that I got the achievement (as well as the character title on both my main and main healing alt) but above all, I just feel extremely proud of how well the team got together to make this happen. I hardly want to think about how long this streak of good luck can possibly last because good times like these never last forever.

Fun fact: Even though this operation is over ten years old at this point, I was surprised to find that there are still certain mechanics for which it's hard to find hard data about how they work. The specific example that made us scratch our heads was the knockback add on Styrak. There seemed to be agreement that the healers needed to stand out and it would jump to them, but even though we made sure to do that, it would still leap into the melee group sometimes. Someone suggested having a third person stand out, a ranged dps - still no difference. The best we could work out eventually was that a Watchman Sentinel's group healing could cause the add to mistake them for a healer and leap to them, because the moment our own Sentinel changed to a different spec for this fight, the random leaps into melee stopped happening.

Dread Master Shintar

I have a somewhat strange relationship with operations in SWTOR at this point. I think most raiders would posit that for them, raiding is about some sort of progression: seeing the content, beating the challenge, getting the gear... and once you've hit your goal, you move on.

SWTOR doesn't really support that kind of attitude towards raiding anymore, or at least not if you're a long-term player. If you're coming to the game completely fresh, there's plenty to do and many encounters to work your way through, thanks to scaling keeping all the old content relevant, but new operations come out way too infrequently to keep existing players busy for very long.

I sometimes find myself wondering why I'm still so focused on that part of the game after more than a decade to be honest. I've seen all there is to see, many times, and while my skill at the game has improved over the years from sheer repetition, if I haven't been able to beat a higher-difficulty encounter that's been in the game for over a decade at this point, I'm not holding my breath that it's still going to happen.

I guess it's just a habit, a way of hanging out a few times a week, and the fact that Mr Commando and I do it together has led to a sort of feedback loop where we keep each other going even if one person's interest flags at some point.

That said, there's been turnover in the people we raid with over the years, and every now and then we'll get some fresh faces who haven't yet seen it all and who'll be excited to tackle this or that operation for the first time, and I'll be like "sure", because what else am I going to suggest?

In line with that we cleared Dread Palace master mode again a couple of months ago, and it actually went so quickly and smoothly (considering that some people had never done it before), that I found myself daring to hope for some personal progression for the first time in a while, because I'd never gotten the achievement for the timed run, which requires you to clear the instance within an hour.

Everyone was game for working on it, so we kept going back every week, just to get better at the fights and progress that little bit more quickly, with fewer wipes along the way. Progression was far from smooth, as some nights would see us one-shot the first four bosses in a timely manner just to keep failing on the final Council fight, while on others, we would mess up repeatedly at the very beginning and then never even finish the instance.

However, improvement did happen, and this Wednesday we finally got there. We were actually off to a very bad start at first and wiped twice on the very first encounter. We'd learned early on that whenever this happened, it was possible and indeed recommended to just reset the entire instance and try again from the beginning, but it still didn't seem to bode well for the rest of the evening. However, it turned out that the third try was the charm, and we then proceeded to one-shot every boss after that, including the Dread Council themselves.

Embarrassingly for me, I died a few seconds before the end because I got into healer tunnel-vision mode, focusing so hard on keeping someone else alive that I missed my own health getting dangerously low - oops. Fortunately we'd basically won at this point so it wasn't a big deal; it just made my "victory" screenshot look a bit awkward.

A guildie also recorded the whole run and uploaded it to YouTube if you're curious, though he failed to record his own voice so some bits of conversation may sound like non-sequiturs without the inclusion of his comments.

Anyway, it was just nice to have one of those little success stories to share, as they've become more and more rare for me at this point.

7.7 Dev Stream: More Alien Colours Are Nice, but Still No Story

Yesterday it was time for another dev stream, this time focused on the upcoming patch 7.7. There was some competition for my attention as the new pope had gone live mere moments earlier, but I loaded up Twitch on my laptop and dived right in.

There was a new Twitch drop to be earned (a purple-framed Dromund Kaas poster), for watching one hour of live SWTOR content, but apparently Twitch measures time a bit differently from the rest of the world as it took almost the full one and a half hours of the stream for it to show as earned. Yes, the stream lasted one and a half hours! I wish I could say this was a sign of it being chock-full of exciting updates, but to be honest I get the feeling that they've just got better at fluffing up what they have to make it look bigger. For example there was a whole section about fixing a bug with the sprinter guild perk, which... don't get me wrong, fixing bugs is a good thing, no arguments there! But is a single bug fix of that nature really important enough to warrant a segment with the game producer on your livestream to get players hyped up? Personally I don't think so.

The thing that we of course all wanted to know above all else was whether there was any update on the story content and sadly, the answer was not really. Basically, they've built 7.7, but the voice actors' strike is still going on, so we're still not getting anything. The only thing I noted down here was that they showed the little trailer from Star Wars Celebration again (the one that included [Spoiler?]) and the accompanying slide said it featured "a mysterious figure that has been pulling the strings behind the scenes", which does seem to confirm that this person's role is going to be more than a throwaway cameo.

Anyway, having the second major patch in a row release without story content will be a bummer, but I guess I can't really complain as we know the voice actors' strike is still a thing. I'd just gotten my hopes up a little as a "datamining-adjacent" friend had told me that something had happened and somehow the 7.6 story looked ready for release now. (You know who you are; consider yourself given the side eye!) But that's not the devs' fault, and just goes to illustrate once again why you shouldn't put too much stock in things that are datamined.

Anyway, they still managed to fill a one and a half hour stream, and it wasn't all bug fixes, so there obviously were some other things announced.

Among a number of UI updates to the mission log and map, the one that stood out the most was the addition of the so-called "eras window", a new tab on your mission log. All this does is basically show you the storyline split into "eras" (which mostly align with expansions, but not 100%), to show you where you are and what's coming up. This seems like it could be a major boon to returning players who don't remember where they left off in terms of story. It was also noted that it doesn't "currently" include notes on any decisions you've made, though I guess this is something they could expand on in the future. Either way, it's a good feature but won't do much for me as a "power user". I wrote about how I had to create a spreadsheet to keep track of all my alts' progress almost seven years ago, which is much more detailed and most importantly, let's me see where each character is at without having to log into them in game to check. I still rely on that to this day, but for less hardcore Swtorites this new window will be useful.

In terms of group content, we got the official announcement for master mode XR-53, which is cool for the relevant target audience but I suspect it will be too hard for me and my guildies so I can't muster too much enthusiasm for it right now. I was also a bit disappointed by the clarification that the new augment schematics it will drop will be brand-new gold augments that will outclass the purple ones that people spent the last few months researching and crafting. We don't even know whether you'll be able to reverse-engineer the gold ones by deconstructing the purple ones (it was asked in chat multiple times but not answered). So eh. As a side note to this, they said that PvP weeklies will start rewarding small amounts of corrupted bioprocessors, the (until now) unique crafting material dropped by XR-53, which is nice I guess, though for me personally the bottleneck has actually turned out to be other mats.

Speaking of PvP, PvP Season 8 will launch with 7.7 and in order to align it more with how Galactic Seasons work, it will now also include an option to just buy out levels with Cartel coins. I've got to admit there was a small part of me that bristled at this because isn't PvP about skill? You shouldn't be able to buy that, right? But then, these new PvP seasons have always been just about participation with no particular requirement to succeed, so I guess it's not that big a deal.

They talked about Nar Shaddaa Nightlife returning in July, which just felt weird to think about this early in May, but I guess summer isn't that far away. The main thing that irked me here was that there was no comment about making the various slot machine chips a legacy-wide currency. They talked about this last year and said it was complex and would take time - but then they managed to change the DvL tokens from character- to legacy-bound within a couple of weeks, so I was really hoping we'd be able to start this year's Nightlife with something similar. But nope, nothing. I guess I can still hope that it will be addressed later, but for now I'm just disappointed that the main thing I was curious about in regards to this event was not mentioned at all.

The biggest and most universally accessible bit of gameplay to be added with the patch will be new dynamic encounters on seven planets, which will include all the starter planets, the two faction capitals and Ilum. The starter planets won't have that many encounters due to how small they are, but still. I thought going for these early planets next was an interesting choice when I first heard chatter about it during the previous PTS. I thought Tatooine and Hoth made great sense as first locations for this new feature, and in my mind the best place to use it going forward were going to be other large planets with a lot of empty space, such as Quesh, Belsavis or Voss. Cramming them into the tiny starter planets is kind of the opposite of that, but I can understand the devs wanting to introduce the feature to new players early on in order to get people interested and familiar from the get-go. I'm still a little concerned that it might end up being a bit of a pain to have god knows how many players compete for the same six k'lor'slugs on Korriban (which would not improve the new player experience I reckon), but we'll see how it goes. In general I've really enjoyed dynamic encounters and am looking forward to getting more of them.

One interesting thing they announced closer to the end was "combat updates", which is to say they are going to make some changes to combat styles, such as which discipline is selected for new players by default and what order you get some abilities in. The example they gave was that Guardians/Juggernauts don't really have any AoE other than Force Sweep/Smash for a long time, so they want to pull Cyclone/Sweeping Slash forward and grant it automatically at level 7 instead of making it a level 27 optional choice like it is right now. This sounds like a good idea in principle, though I could have thought of better examples to choose. From what I recall there are currently some utilities that actually give you buffs to certain abilities several levels before you actually get that ability, which is just weird, and I'm hoping that this kind of thing will also be included in this overhaul. (I quickly logged in to find an example and e.g. Deception Shadows have a talent option at level 27 to add functionality to Force Cloak when they don't actually get Force Cloak until level 31.)

I do wonder a little though, as another example they gave about something they want to change was to make the default spec for Shadows Serenity (the dot spec) instead of Deception (the direct damage one). I just wrote down "why?" in my notes here as the latter is much easier to play, so why change to the more difficult one as default? So I have some reservations as well, not fully understanding what they are going for here.

The big surprise at the end of the stream (including one here seems to be a pattern they are settling into) was that they'll be adding lots more skin colours for aliens in the patch, and I do mean lots. Like, Nautolans will go from having 10 colours to 95 different shades. Now, only some of those will be completely new colours, like the (inexplicably, to me) popular purple Twi'leks, but just getting a lot more different shades of say, green, will be cool too. I think this was the most exciting announcement of the stream for many players, and I liked it too. It's just no replacement for actual story content, you know? I continue to wait.

Meanwhile, further info about the patch and stream, should you want it:

• VOD on Twitch
• VOD on YouTube
• Article on the official website
  
• Swtorista summary
• Today in TOR summary
• Vulkk summary

Social for Seasons

Galactic Seasons are clearly designed to appeal to all kinds of players, from soloer to raider. The mix of weekly objectives isn't always perfectly balanced, but over time things should even out enough so that everyone can complete at least the main season track by only taking part in activities they enjoy. So even if you don't like doing group content for example, and there's a week where most weekly objectives require a group, you should be fine skipping that one while still being able to achieve your goals.

Personally, I'm kind of the opposite of that hypothetical example as I rather like the group objectives. We have a thing called "social night" in my guild, and during seasons we always knock out whatever items require a group on that evening.

Usually there's one or two of these per week, but last week was unusual in that no fewer than five of the eleven available objectives required a large group, plus there were a few more for which having a small group was at least beneficial. My guild group knocked out all five of the large group objectives in short order (pulling in some pugs for Nightmare Pilgrim, but that barely took five minutes) and a few of us also ran the uprising of the week afterwards. I'd initially felt a bit awkward making almost no progress towards any of my seasons objectives for most of the week, just to go and reach 7 out of 7 completed within a single evening on Saturday.

Several guildies also expressed delight at having been able to max out their progression for the week within only a couple of hours. The group objectives are really great that way, in that they require a bit of extra effort to get the group put together, but if you can be efficient about that part, actually completing the tasks themselves is super quick.

That said, I didn't expect to make much progress on the other servers during that week, as I don't have guild events to rely on for progression there, as they are either non-existent or take place at bad hours for me. However, I was really surprised that pretty much on every server, the moment I logged in, went to the fleet and took a look at general chat, someone was putting together a pug group for something, and I managed to join at least one such event on every server.

It wasn't always the same thing either. On Leviathan I got pulled into a DvL boss group for example, while I joined a Sparks of War group on Tulak Hord, and a Nightmare Pilgrim run on a different evening (which got me invited to a large German guild's TeamSpeak server).

It was all rather delightful. I know people often say that SWTOR's MMO parts were an afterthought and not well done, but my experience was always the opposite. When I first started playing back in 2011 I enjoyed the storylines for sure, but the reason I stuck around and didn't go back to WoW was the social aspect and that I was having such a blast raiding and doing group content in the open world. This week actually made me really nostalgic for that, and also made me wonder whether I don't spend too much time in my stronghold nowadays instead of on the fleet. I usually hide general chat because in the places where it's busy it tends to be filled with nonsense at best or utter toxicity at worst, but seeing all those random "looking for more" requests last week really took me back and I wanted to see more of that. 

This week has actually been similar, with another five objectives for large groups. I don't know yet how things will go for my guild on Darth Malgus tomorrow, but since I'm on holiday for a few days, I actually stayed up late on Wednesday and Thursday to join guild events on Shae Vizla and Star Forge, which might see me hitting 7/7 objectives on those servers this week, which hadn't really been my intent at all.

However, even without guild support the ease of objective completion has been amazing. The combination of Dark vs. Light world bosses and the regular world bosses on both Coruscant and Dromund Kaas both being objectives had people logging back and forth between both factions and looking for groups constantly. Leviathan may generally be a small and quiet server, but I've never seen it as packed on Coruscant as when I was killing the bosses there this week. On Star Forge I didn't even bother to look for a group, I just kind of hung around the boss spawns for a bit as a new group was coming by to kill them pretty much every five minutes or so anyway.

I don't think this is the first time I've gone on about how open world group content in this game makes me feel nostalgic, but it's simply true that nothing brings back memories of launch day crowds for me like these kinds of events do.

Lair Bosses Ranked!

I was wondering how to write about the new lair boss added with patch 7.6 without being too repetitive, seeing how I already put down some thoughts on the fight (at least about its difficulty tuning) after killing it on the PTS. I finally settled on this idea, to write about all the lair bosses currently in the game and rank them, seeing how there aren't that many of them and I haven't talked about the others all that much in the past either.

1. Xenoanalyst II

My favourite lair boss is still the very first one they ever added to the game: Xenoanalyst II from the Gree event. The concept of a fight that is openly just a test of your strength rather than hostility towards you has always tickled me (I liked that about Colicoid War Game too), and it always cracks me up how the boss is openly jubilant at the end after you beat him because you've done so well.

The mechanics require everyone to do their part on veteran mode but are fairly straightforward and easy to understand, while story mode is easy to pug with pretty much any group. The random chance to get Jawas during the species comparison is a fun little Easter egg, and reward-wise, it's always worth getting a bit more of the Gree-specific event currency. People like farming the boss for his rare mount drop as well.

The fact that he's only available for a few weeks each year also makes it impossible to ever overdose on the guy, so there's that.

2. Propagator Core XR-53

Yes, I honestly think that the new lair boss is the best boss we've had of this type that isn't tied to a Conquest event. Story mode is tuned in such a way that you can kill it with a pug without needing to give long explanations of anything, yet it also isn't impossible to die if you mess up enough. Veteran mode is a challenge, with several interesting mechanics that can be dealt with in more than one way and most of which have a decent margin for error, meaning that consistent mistakes do make things considerably harder, but there are very few things that will turn your attempt into an instant wipe. The dps check is tight for a standard ops group setup but not insurmountable, and you can also play with the group setup to squeeze more dps out of your raid.

Other things that make it good are the fact that it's very easily accessible, with the entrance being located right inside your faction's main base on Ilum. I don't think this is something that really matters a lot for ops in general, but when you're getting a group together to kill only one boss, you don't want to spend too much time faffing around just to get there.

In the same vein I like that there's a little bit of trash for flavour, but it's extremely quick to get past and doesn't really slow you down.

Finally, I know not everyone's excited about a new tier of augments, but I like that there's a reason to actually visit this boss in specific. Chasing better gear isn't as much of a motivation in SWTOR as it is in other MMOs, but I do think us raiders do appreciate a bit of a carrot to lure us in and make it worthwhile to do new content every now and then. I do suspect that whenever these augments become obsolete, the boss's appeal will also be somewhat diminished.

3. The Eyeless

The second lair boss that's tied to a recurring event is another one of my favourites. His mechanics are very simple on both story and hard mode, but he always feels like a fun romp. Someone always feels the need to comment on his perfectly sculpted butt cheeks, and on hard mode, at least one of the melee always dies to the very obvious and very easy to avoid AoE smash, but it won't cause you to wipe.

Like with Xeno, limited availability and drops that always retain their usefulness are other points in this guy's favour. The reason I rank him slightly below Propagator is that his mechanics are a bit basic.

4. Hive of the Mountain Queen

While we're now getting to the bottom half of the list, 4th place overall still isn't all bad, as it's effectively second place for bosses that aren't tied to Conquest events. Hive of the Mountain Queen's strongest point is that it's a very flavourful operation, with moody environments, interesting trash, and a fight that uses the theme of "insect queen using her minions to fight you" to great effect.

The reasons I rank it slightly lower is that I think the veteran mode is a bit overtuned, and while the trash is very interesting the first time you do it, it does feel like a tad much for frequent repeat visits. Also, the Queen basically offers no interesting loot (which was even a problem when the fight first came out!) - there's technically a rare companion from what I hear, but it's apparently so rare that few people have ever even seen it.

5. Toborro's Courtyard

I wasn't a fan of Toborro's Courtyard when it first came out, and I still struggle to find a lot of nice things to say about it today. I guess story mode is easy enough to pug, and veteran mode feels like it has an appropriate difficulty level as well. The mechanic of having to blow up barrels during the fight, as well as having to flit in and out of the boss's range (because he's completely static but does that laser beam of death every so often) are mildly interesting.

The problem is that you have to repeat the same couple of moves in the exact same way for far too long, which turns the hard mode version of the fight into a tedious exercise in struggling not to lose focus out of sheer boredom. There also isn't any interesting loot to be had, and the fact that prepping the barrels gets you stuck in combat, making it impossible to do a proper ready check before the pull, is a bit of a nuisance (even if "jump if you're ready" is always good for a bit of nostalgia).

Finally, the location is also a bit annoying to get to. I like Makeb as a planet, but navigating all the different mesas is not easy, and getting to the courtyard requires riding through a pretty trash-filled area that is likely to force you to dismount and fight for a bit.

6. Colossal Monolith

I can imagine that some people might question my choice to put this fight at the very bottom of the list, making an argument that it should be above Golden Fury at the very least, if not higher up. I will give you that the Mololith has more interesting mechanics, but I still dislike him all the same. Both story and hard mode feel overtuned for what they're supposed to be (I've actually never killed this guy on 8-man VM to this day), and while you could argue that his mechanics may be interesting, several of them are what I refer to as "circles for circles' sake", meaning it makes no sense whatsoever in universe that you stop this guy from hurting you by having people jump into coloured floor tiles around his head on cue (I always disliked that about Underlurker as well). Like, what's even supposed to be happening there diagetically? Maybe I'm a sucker for caring about this stuff, but I actually find it more enjoyable when boss fight mechanics align with abilities that actually make sense in universe, and Golden Fury at least has that going for it.

Additionally, the Monolith is yet another boss that drops nothing of interest and is kind of a pain to get to. There's pretty much always someone who needs a summon because they haven't unlocked Ziost yet, and if you're unlucky, it will then turn out that someone else can't even accept the summon because they don't have their ship yet. Just being able to get to a boss that isn't even that much fun to fight shouldn't be this much of a hassle.

Have you had a chance to defeat the XR-Propagator Core on Ilum yet? If so, what did you think of the fight? And do you agree or disagree with my rankings?

My Experience with the New Lair Boss on the PTS

I wrote at the start of this month that I wasn't sure whether I wanted to try the new lair boss on the PTS or not. Wanting to earn the associated special titles was a point in favour, but my general preference for "going in blind" and being surprised once the content hits the live servers was also a strong argument against it.

In the end an opportunity arose for me to join Swtorista's Team Disco today to have a go at the boss and I decided to take it. (I guess I have Galaxiya to thank for being unable to make it, meaning I could take her spot. Thanks, Galaxiya!) I was glad I did, too, for three reasons:

1. We did get the boss down on both difficulties, earning me the associated titles on the live game.
2. I now know what to expect and have a better idea how to tackle the fight with my guildies once it goes live.
3. It was honestly just good fun, too! The fight had clearly come a long way from that first iteration of the PTS where people couldn't even tell what was supposed to be going on most of the time.
   

Primarily, I was relieved to find that story mode seemed to be at an appropriate difficulty for a story mode, which is to say: easy enough that an inexperienced pick-up group should be able to do it. Several members of our group (including me) had never done the fight before and nobody gave any explanations pre-pull either, but it worked out fine anyway. All the mechanics do fairly low damage, so you can learn as you go and it takes quite a bit of messing up for anyone to take enough damage to die.

If I had to pick anything to criticise here it's that the fight still felt like it took pretty long for a story mode with a group that had quite solid dps output, but that may just have been subjective, and I didn't actually time it. Plus we went in with the standard group setup of two tanks, two healers and four dps - on story mode you could easily swap out a tank and a healer for two more damage dealers to speed things up a bit.

Veteran mode was another pleasant surprise after all the unpleasantness that was my experience with R-4 Anomaly, in the sense that it actually felt like what I'd call a "proper" vet mode, not something bordering on NiM, just trying to please the top 1%. As a healer, there was enough damage going out to give me something to do, but it wasn't so high that I couldn't also throw a few damage abilities into the mix at various points. There was stuff on the floor to dodge, adds and different boss mechanics to watch out for, but at no point did the number of things going on feel overwhelming.

We got the encounter down on what I think was only our third try, though I wouldn't read too much into that as a sign of it being too easy, as several people had worked on it before and could tell the rest of us what to do. The biggest challenge was actually the hard enrage, which kicks in at around the ten minute mark, and was what killed us on our penultimate attempt. We hit it again on the actual kill but managed to get the boss down just before it had the chance to kill us.

I checked to see what feedback others had given on the official forum thread, and winced at several comments along the lines of "I went in with my NiM team, using only one tank and healer, and we thought it was too easy". I just hope the devs don't use that as an excuse to do any last-minute upward-tuning before releasing the patch, because I don't agree that the fight was too easy at all. A vet mode ops boss isn't supposed to be something that's hard for NiM raiders! I did think that some of the suggestions that were given for how to make things harder might actually make for a good master mode version of the encounter later on, if Broadsword ever decides to add that.

However, vet mode struck me as fine as it is. If anything, the fight still seemed quite long and the dps check pretty tight for a group of raiders that aren't at the extreme cutting edge, but I'll assume for now that with more experience and better understanding of the mechanics, groups will be able to improve their damage output and general performance over time, to the point where the enrage timer won't feel quite so challenging anymore.

In general I was pretty happy with everything I saw, and assuming what we experienced is going to be close enough to what will go live in a couple of weeks, I'm actually looking forward to tackling the new boss on the live servers. It will be nice to work on farming materials and schematics for the new augments in a story mode that should be accessible enough to actually do on my guild's social nights, and a vet mode that will pose a bit of a challenge for my regular ops team without making it feel like we're just bashing our heads against a wall.

Impressions from the 7.6 PTS

A combination of PTS incentives and curiosity about the new dynamic encounter system got me to spend some time on the public test server this past week.

My aging PC doesn't have enough disk space to support having two versions of SWTOR installed nowadays, so I had to put the PTS on my laptop, but that actually worked out quite well this time around as I was travelling last week and had the laptop with me for evening entertainment anyway.

Only two planets have dynamic encounters on the PTS right now: Hoth and Tatooine. It's currently not clear whether that's all 7.6 will launch with or whether these planets were picked for focused testing and we'll be surprised with some more content once the patch goes live. There were some indicators on the PTS galaxy map hinting at dynamic events on other planets like Alderaan and Belsavis, but with no actual content available there so far.

One thing I originally wondered after seeing the sneak peek trailer was whether dynamic encounters would be more like World of Warcraft's world quests (as in, personal to you) or dynamic events in other MMOs (shared and the same for everyone). Interestingly, the answer turned out to be "both". There are two types of events, designated as either "group shared" or "encounter shared". In the former, your progress is personal, and the encounter continues to exist for other players on the map even after you've completed it. In the latter, everyone doing stuff contributes to the event's progression, and once the encounter completes, everyone gets their reward at the same time and it disappears from the map. The shared encounters are generally rarer and can still be soloed if nobody else is around, but they tend to require killing more mobs and can therefore feel like a bit of a slog if you're the only person in the area. On the other hand it's a lot of fun (in my opinion) if there are other players around and you can see things progress really quickly as everybody does their part.

In general gameplay terms, the encounters are about what you'd expect: a lot of kill x mobs and some clicking on shiny things, though there are some standouts where the devs clearly tried to be creative and come up with more varied activities. 

I don't think dynamic events are intended to be a new "main" gameplay mode, though depending on how many planets will get them when 7.6 launches, I'd be curious to see how much levelling you could get done by just doing dynamic encounters - as an experiment if nothing else! Realistically though, I think they are meant to be similar to side missions, just without all the picking up and handing in required. At max level they currently award a tiny number of tech fragments and Conquest commendations, small enough that they wouldn't make for a great primary source of either currency.

One thing that made me wonder a little was how much focus there is on highlighting these new dynamic encounters on the map. The galaxy map highlights planets that have them active, and on the planetary map they show up as big glowy diamonds. There's nothing wrong with that in principle, but it does seem an odd choice when the devs took multiple steps in the past to hide away exploration missions and/or make them less prominent because they were apparently confusing/distracting people. Surely new levellers will get a lot more distracted by all these big glowy indicators on their maps? I dunno.

I'm still a bit torn on whether to try the new lair boss on the PTS as well or not. On the one hand I prefer not to spoil myself when it comes to content like that and would rather see things for the first time on live, but on the other hand every bit of feedback might help with making the Propagator Core a better raid.

The initial round of forum feedback certainly hasn't looked too good. Players were asked what they thought of the fight's different phases, and everyone basically replied "what phases?" because by all accounts, it was just an extremely long slog against an enemy with a lot of hitpoints while trying to manage some bad stuff dropping on the floor.

There has since been another dev post on the forums that basically admitted that almost nothing about the fight was working correctly and that it will see massive changes with the next PTS update. Which is good in the sense that it means the tedious version people experienced in the first week wasn't at all final, though it also makes you wonder why and how an operations boss ended up being put on the PTS in that state in the first place (since you'd expect the devs to be able to verify that at least the very basics are functioning before asking people to play test). I guess I'll have a few more weeks to see how things develop and whether I want to have a go myself.

7.6 Sneak Peek!

I was planning to write about something else today, but then as I was browsing YouTube last night, a new video from SWTOR's official account suddenly popped up in my recommendations. Whaaa...?!

Here we've all been sitting around, waiting for them to announce the next livestream, and they surprise us with an actual teaser like that. I like it! While I've enjoyed the livestreams over the last few years, they do kind of seem targeted at fans who are already highly invested, while a four-minute video talking about upcoming patch features should be much more accessible to a more mainstream audience.

The three major points of interest from the video are: the new type of gameplay that's coming in 7.6, the new lair boss, and the upcoming PTS.

The new type of gameplay that will take us back to existing planets is called "dynamic encounters" and is basically... world quests? Dynamic events? Something like that. We don't know enough details (such as how often they'll occur, and how much credit will be shared vs. personal) to say which of the comparable features in other MMOs they will resemble the most, but we get the basic idea: They'll be a bit like quests, but instead of picking them up in town, you'll just find them popping up on your map.

This seems like a smart direction for the dev team to take, as it'll allow them to add more things for players to do at all levels without needing more voice acting or fancy cinematics, plus it's likely to make the open world feel a bit more alive as you should encounter more players running around on old planets.

I'm tentatively excited, though it remains to be seen how engaging this stuff turns out to be in the long term, and of course there's always the question of rewards. I thought it was kind of funny that the example in the video showed the player getting literally nothing for completion (obviously since it's still a work in progress) but it does make you wonder. XP and credits seem like a given, but the game already throws plenty of those at you everywhere else too. Is another source of Conquest commendations at max level going to excite anyone? But then, SWTOR has never been as highly reward-driven as other MMOs, so I really wouldn't expect these to suddenly start handing out higher-level currency or anything like that. We'll see.

In fact, we should find out more soon enough as this stuff will be going on the Public Test Server! And there'll even be a new reward for going on there and helping with the testing: a special mini pet. I just thought this was funny since I have a guildie who asks every time the PTS goes up whether there's a new reward, and usually there isn't... so I outright told him at one point that there doesn't seem to be much point in asking that question every time. I of course had to ping him immediately once I saw the video, hah!

The other thing we'll get to try on the PTS will be the new lair boss, a droid called Propagator Core XR-53, found on Ilum among the remnants of the Emperor's old space station. Unsurprisingly, like R-4 Anomaly, the fight won't have a 16-person mode, which I know most people don't care about but I'll keep moaning about it anyway because as a guild who has done and continues to do 16-mans, I miss that option. (When R-4 was a seasons objective the other week and we had 13 people on, that was quite challenging to sort out.)

Aside from that though, XR-53 will have both a story and a veteran mode, and I'm curious to find out what it'll be like. I crave more group content, but R-4 was such an awful experience for me at launch that I'm also still a bit wary of their current design philosophy in that area, so I'm hesitant to get too excited just yet.

What are you most interested in learning more about in regards to patch 7.6?

First Impressions of GS7

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Where Is the Group Content?

SWTOR has long had a reputation of being a "single-player MMO", and I've always hated that. One of the very first posts I ever wrote on this blog dealt with this topic in fact. Don't get me wrong, I have no issue whatsoever with anyone praising the personal storyline or preferring to play by themselves, but the thing that has always ground my gears is how this often dovetails into people being dismissive of the game's group content, calling it sub-par and not worth anyone's time.

Especially at lauch, that was just so not true. Coming fresh out of WoW's Cataclysm, where Blizzard had removed all group content from the levelling content in the open world, I loved that in SWTOR, heroics actively encouraged you to team up with others while levelling, plus you got bonus XP for questing in a group, instead of an XP penalty like in WoW. Social points also offered an incentive to do group content in PvE. While WoW players were moaning about being stuck with the Dragon Soul raid for nearly a year, SWTOR pumped out a new flashpoint or operation every other month. It was objectively a glorious game in terms of group content if you enjoyed that kind of thing.

Sadly, over time, SWTOR's dedication to encouraging grouping has been watered down quite a bit. Rise of the Hutt Cartel was the first and last story expansion that supported group conversations in new story content. Heroics were nerfed in difficulty and turned into just another kind of soloable daily quest in 4.0. Social points were removed with 7.0. Any plans to add new flashpoints or operations were discarded with 4.0, until they eventually made a come-back a few years later, but things have kind of petered out a bit again since then.

This has made me a bit sad, but not... devastatingly so, because while I enjoy group content, I obviously don't spend all my time in it either. I love getting new story updates! And I suspect that catering more to solo players is simply where the money is. At the very least, I'd assume that it's much more straightforward to measure the return on investment when you see a subscription up-tick after a new story update as opposed to a patch adding a new operation. I wouldn't expect many lapsed players to specifically come back for a new operation, and I'm guessing it's more of a retention mechanic for existing long-time players, giving them something to do with their friends once their interest in playing by themselves has been exhausted.

With all that said, I do think that spending some time on catering to players who like group content is still important, because they are the ones most likely to get others to try or stay in the game, to gush about it in public and promote it on social media. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single well-known SWTOR content creator that doesn't participate in group content at least some of the time.

And recently, I've been hearing a lot of discontent - from different directions, so it's not just one person and their group of friends - around the fact that we haven't heard anything about upcoming group content in a while. Now, players always want more of the stuff they like, but the reason this really drew my attention is that I've heard these kinds of complaints before... and they usually did not bode well for the months ahead, as in the past these were the times when I had to watch people I cared about leave the game and never come back. I think at this point SWTOR players who are invested in group content have mostly come to accept that their preferred mode of play is not a high priority for the devs and that they can't expect updates tailored to their interests very often - but there's still an expectation of getting something at certain intervals, and there's definitely a point where they'll lose patience and unsub.

Looking at my timeline of major content additions from last year, the longest gaps between major group content releases over time have been as follows:

• Between operations: 2 years and 10 months, between the release of Dxun and R-4.
• Between flashpoints/small group content: 1 year and 5 months, between the release of Nathema Conspiracy and Objective Meridian
• Between major PvP updates: 4 years and 2 months, between the release of Vandin Huttball and the introduction of PvP seasons (yes, really)
  

I'm writing this at the end of June, shortly after we just got a major patch, so I wouldn't expect another one until October at the earliest, by which point it will have been:

• 2 years and 2 months since the last operation (R-4)
• 1 year and 4 months since the last flashpoint/small group content (Shrine of Silence)
• 1 year and 10 months since the last major PvP update (introduction of seasons)

In other words, it's not totally unprecedented to have to wait this long for new group content, but considering that it's been this long for every type of it, I'm not surprised to see people going stir-crazy all over the place.

I really hope that the devs will have something relevant to share whenever they announce the next major patch (I'm not counting the next Galactic Season, as I know that's its own thing), because few things are as much of a downer to me in this game as seeing players I like and whose company I enjoy slowly turn away from the game because the devs just don't care about giving them anything new to hold their interest.

Shintar's Galactic Season 6 Diary, Week 8

Week eight was a surprise in terms of Galactic Seasons weeklies as the devs took their recent experiments with doubling up on certain objectives to a new level, with all three of the companion kill achievements being active in the same week. Here's the full list of everything that was on offer and my thoughts on each objective:

• Earn 200k Conquest points: Naturally.
• Earn the seasonal currency: Would also get done automatically.
  
• Visit another player's Tatooine stronghold: Another one for my "drop-in" series of posts, so sure!
  
• Kill 100 mobs with a healer companion: I mean, as previously established, this is really easy to do, so I was probably going to do it on all servers.
  
• Kill 100 mobs with a dps companion: ... even if I needed to kill 200 mobs.
  
• Kill 100 mobs with a tank companion: ... or 300, for that matter.
  
• Kill the Quesh and Nar Shaddaa world bosses: I'd had decent luck getting these done on several servers in week one, so I was up for doing that again.
  
• Earn 40 medals in warzones: I'd actually finished my last PvP season achievment on Darth Malgus the previous week, but this was going to be easy enough to do. I just wasn't sure whether I would feel like investing the time on other servers or whether I would even be able to get pops.
  
• Heroic space missions:  As mentioned previously, I'm not good enough to do these as I never even finished all the normal space missions.
  
• Play 5-10 arenas (wins count double): Since I no longer needed any PvP season objectives, I thought it was unlikely that I was going to bother with arenas.
  
• KotFE chapter 13 on veteran mode or higher: Once again, a chapter I wasn't going to bother to repeat.
  

Day 1 - Tuesday

After a day in the office I had limited play time in the evening, though ops was cancelled so that awarded me a couple of hours extra. I did the world boss objective on Leviathan, Tulak Hord, Star Forge and Satele Shan. On Tulak Hord I also did the Coruscant world boss since I initially replied to the wrong group request in general chat (lol). On Star Forge I also got lured into healing a master mode Dash'roode/Nefra pug while waiting for more people to show interest in the world bosses. On Shae Vizla and Darth Malgus I just focused on getting my daily objective done with a bit of questing/clicking.

Day 2 - Wednesday

In the morning I logged into Shae Vizla to check for world boss groups and tried to queue for some warzones, but had no luck on either front. 

I then didn't log in again until relatively late in the evening, when I did the daily Conquest round on all servers, mostly by continuing my class story on different characters. This always made at least a little bit of progress towards one of the companion kill achievements as well.

Day 3 - Thursday

Thursday was another office day, and when I came home I didn't feel like doing much more than what I'd done the night before. It was kind of funny to me that I ended up working on my class story on Alderaan on no fewer than three different characters/servers. I'm not trying to keep them in sync - rather the opposite to be honest, to avoid repetition - but for some reason I have a lot of characters on the secondary servers that are more or less at exactly the same stage in the story. Might be related to me always playing them for seasons at the same time...

Day 4 - Friday

Another similar day seasons-wise, as I did ops with my guildies in the evening and then did the rounds on the other servers doing various quests. The "kill things with your companion" achievements were slowly starting to get ticked off as well, though it was interesting to me how few mobs you actually have to kill on some of the earlier planets and how much it ratchets up later on. Taking a more progressed character for a spin for this definitely worked better than doing it on a lower level if you were just following the class story.

Day 5 - Saturday

In the morning I logged into Darth Malgus to do a few warzones and a bit more questing. I also did a quick check on Shae Vizla to see whether any world boss groups were forming or level 80 warzones were popping, but there was no sign of either.

I played again in the evening, first killing the two world bosses with my guild on Darth Malgus, followed by some PvP which got me the warzone medals objective. On the other servers I did another round of questing once again, with most of them ticking off one or more of the companion objectives by this point. Again I had some weird parallels as my trooper on Tulak Hord and my knight on Leviathan were on literally the exact same planetary story quest on Balmorra.

Day 6 - Sunday

I didn't play until the evening, when I did some PvP and questing on Darth Malgus, getting me to 5/7 there, with just some more mob killing left to go. On Leviathan, Tulak Hord and Star Forge, I visited a Tatooine stronghold and also did some more questing. As it was late by that point, I decided to save the daily objectives on Satele Shan and Shae Vizla for the next day.

Day 7 - Monday

It was a holiday in the UK, so I had all day to devote to non-work activities. I logged into Satele Shan and Shae Vizla in the morning, visiting a Tatooine stronghold on each and knocking out the daily objective with a bit of questing.

In the evening I returned to do the rounds on all servers again, once again completing story missions on characters everywhere to get the last few companion kill objectives and finish various personal Conquest targets. This left me with 7/7 weeklies completed everywhere except on Shae Vizla, where I'd failed to get a world boss group or any warzone pops for the PvP objective.

Week 8 Thoughts

The triple companion objective resulted in a pretty wild week as you could basically get to 5/7 without doing anything truly season-specific - as long as you did any kind of non-instanced content that involved your companion and rotated through all the different roles. I used this mostly to advance my class story on different characters on all servers (and didn't feel the need to go into a lot more detail about which character was on exactly which step). With the stronghold visit and the world bosses I could then get to an easy 7/7 everywhere except Shae Vizla, where I ended on 6/7 as I couldn't find a world boss group this time around (though I'll confess that I didn't try all that hard either).

I'm not really sure how I feel about this particular experiment in having all the companion objectives active at once. On the one hand, easy season progress, yay! On the other hand though... it almost felt like it wasn't really a season since I could get points for just questing, which is usually not the way this works.

There won't be a Week 9 Diary by the way as I'm travelling, and while I have my laptop with me, I don't really feel like spending much time on gaming. I'm not too worried about missing a week as I'm seasons level 90 on Darth Malgus and around 80 everywhere else at this point, so I'll be able to ease up on the other servers soon anyway.

Shintar's Galactic Season 6 Diary, Week 7

This is being published a bit late since I wanted to get my April round-up and the dev stream highlights out on time, but I didn't forget! To clarify, this is about the period from 23rd to 30th of April.

I'd been pretty excited about doing Galactic Seasons objectives for the first six weeks, but week 7 was the first one where I looked at the weekly objectives and kind of thought "meh". I think this was mainly due to the fact that repetition was starting to become noticeable to me for the first time. Here's what I thought about each weekly objective:

• Earn 200k Conquest points: Yes, I'd do that one.
  
• Complete the GSI weekly mission: Somewhat time-consuming so I definitely wasn't going to do this everywhere, but I do like me a bit of GSI action every now and then, so I figured I was going to do this on some servers as least.
  
• Earn the seasonal currency: Will get done automatically, so yes.
  
• Blow up enemies with destructible barrels and the like: I was probably going to do this one one way or another because of how easy it is to complete.
  
• Do the Black Hole weekly twice or the Onderon weekly once: This was the first objective that made me sigh a little. Didn't we just have this one? Oh, apparently that was five weeks ago. Didn't feel that long ago, somehow.
  
• Complete 8 repeatable or side missions and kill 100 mobs on the Hutt Space planets Nar Shaddaa, Quesh, Voss, Makeb, Darvannis or Ossus: This one also felt like I'd done it before, but I triple-checked and it hadn't been featured yet this season. I can only guess it felt that way since I'd done a fair bit of questing on Nar Shaddaa while working on other objectives in previous weeks. Still, this wasn't too bad and I was definitely going to do it.
  
• Craft invasion forces and dark projects: As usual, yay for crafting on Darth Malgus but nowhere else.
  
• Complete four uprisings on veteran or master mode: Still not a huge fan of uprisings and I could still feel the after-effects of spamming them for Total Galactic War. I figured maybe I'd do this on Darth Malgus, but surely nowhere else.
  
• Complete 2 out of 4 selected flashpoints (Battle of Ilum, False Emperor, Legacy of the Rakata, Shrine of Silence): Now this one was definitely repetitive because these exact same flashpoints were featured only two weeks ago. I appreciated them then, but going through the exact same routine only two weeks later was definitely going to be a no from me.
  
• Earn 25 medals in Galactic Starfighter: And the more annoying one of the two GSF objectives again... I figured I probably wasn't going to bother with this one, except maybe on Darth Malgus.
  
• Karagga's Palace on story mode: Now this was one objective that made me happy, as I was pleased to see that like the vet mode ops objective in week two, it had been reduced to requiring only one run - instead of previously four! I was hopeful that I'd be able to get this done on multiple servers since I figured it shouldn't be too hard to find pugs for it.
  

Day 1 - Tuesday

I got home very late that day as I attended a memorial for the recently deceased co-worker after my shift at the office. I didn't really feel like playing games after getting home, so I just logged into each server briefly to collect my daily login reward and achieve my daily allotment of Conquest point via various clicky objectives.

Day 2 - Wednesday

I had a lot more free time that day but still didn't really feel much like playing SWTOR for most of the day. I did eventually log in late in the evening to do the rounds again. On Darth Malgus I just did some crafting, followed by some GSI dailies on Leviathan.

I've settled into a routine when it comes to doing the GSI weekly, which involves doing Buried in Time on Tatooine, followed by two of the missions on Alderaan, digging up ancient weapons near House Teral and toxic waste barrels near Outpost Luurdes just a short ride over. This is very quick and easy, and I just do it several days in a row. This time, I also did the heroic on Tatooine (since you need to do one for the weekly) and blew up the womp rats near the barrel in Anchorhead a couple of times while I was there.

I then logged over to Star Forge to see whether any ops pugs were advertising for KP story mode in general chat. It took a little while, but eventually I saw a group form on Imp side. It was a nice and smooth run that also got me some achievements, as I'd never done KP SM on Star Forge before.

On Shae Vizla, I did a bit of questing on Nar Shaddaa until I'd earned enough Conquest for the daily objective. By that point it was late though and I was tired, so I decided to leave the remaining two servers for the next day.

Day 3 - Thursday

In the morning, I logged into Satele Shan and did a round of GSI dailies mirroring what I'd done on Leviathan the night before.

After that, I logged into Tulak Hord and did the Nar Shaddaa bonus series, since I couldn't remember whether I'd completed it on that server before, just that I had all these issues with false starts and bugs. It's a shame that you pretty much have to do them in a single day now to make sure they don't bug out, and with that in mind I've found it best to be laser-focused on only the missions actually part of the chain, while making a note to come back for any heroics or unrelated exploration missions in the area another time. Either way, this completed my Hutt Space missions weekly.

In the evening, I spent some time on Darth Malgus doing stuff not strictly related to seasons, such as PvP, ops with my guild and a bit of questing (though this did also get my daily objective done).

When I visited the other servers afterwards, I did another "round" of GSI dailies (meaning the eggs on Tatooine and the two dailies on Alderaan) on both Leviathan and Tulak Hord, followed by a round of the Black Hole on Satele Shan (since that's the only server where my main's a stealther) and a round of Ossus on Star Forge (the only secondary server where I have access to that planet). Finally, I continued doing non-class missions on Nar Shaddaa on Shae Vizla until my daily was done there as well.

Day 4 - Friday

I didn't log in until the evening again. Starting on Darth Malgus, I did a variety of activities there, including a GSF weekly. I'd originally planned to skip that particular objective, but our Imperial alt guild was a bit low on Conquest points, so doing the GSF weekly a couple of times seemed like a good way to boost our score. Winning two matches only got me to 7/25 medals however.

On Leviathan, I went out to Nar Shaddaa - I knew that I'd completed the bonus series before, but I could've sworn I had some other side missions left to do in the area. This turned out to be wrong as I couldn't find a single one - clearly my spreadsheets to track progression across different alts aren't detailed enough for this. I instead started questing on Quesh until I hit my daily Conquest.

On Tulak Hord, I did some more GSI dailies, after which I logged over to Shae Vizla since I thought a KP guild run might be about to start. However, when I double-checked the time it turned out that I was wrong and the actual start time was something like 2.30 am my time, so I went and did some more quests on Nar Shaddaa instead. (I was clearly not having the best day in terms of knowing WTF was going on.) It didn't take long for me to complete my Hutt Space objective, so I went and started another GSI weekly mission. The Imperial version of the heroic on Tatooine has a bugged spot so you always need to check there first to make sure RNG hasn't assigned it to you, else you need to come back the next day (some say resetting the mission can also work but I've had no success with that personally). Fortunately I was lucky that day and the bugged spawn was not included in my objectives. On Alderaan, I realised I'd forgotten how much more of a pain the Killik weapons are to dig up on Imp side, as the nearest location for Imperials requires going up a long and winding mountain path with lots of bugs in your way. I eventually got there, but I vaguely seemed to remember actually preferring a more distant location with less of a hassle to get there...

On Satele Shan I did another round of Black Hole, and on Star Forge a round of Onderon for the daily area objective.

Day 5 - Saturday

I only played for a couple of hours in the evening, and only on Darth Malgus. Not everything I did was about seasons either, though I did do Karagga's Palace on story mode with my guild, and another GSF weekly. I got it in two wins again, though this time they yielded ten medals, getting me to 17/25.

Day 6 - Sunday

I got up late but with enough time left before the reset to do the rounds on the other servers. On Leviathan and Tulak Hord, I completed my GSI weeklies, and on Star Forge I figured I had it in me to do one more of these this week, so I started it on my trooper (including the heroic on Tatooine and blowing up some womp rats). On Satele Shan, I did some side questing on Nar Shaddaa.

When it came to Shae Vizla, I only had twenty minutes left before reset, but I figured that should be enough for a quick round of the Black Hole, right? Even on a character that is a healer (my level 75 consular)? Even if their highest-level companion is only influence level 12? (I hope you can tell where this is going...) I started but quickly realised that things weren't going fast enough. I decided to skip ahead to the heroic, since I figured I could at least finish that, but it was going so. Slow. Just as I was starting to wonder what would happen to someone inside a mission phase if the reset happened while you were doing the quest, I actually managed to die on a pull and just gave up. I quickly relogged my warrior to get my last few Conquest points for the daily objective before reset, but even that took too long and reset arrived with me being only 150 Conquest points off the daily objective. I was so annoyed I just logged off.

I logged back in later in the evening, completed the partially done Black Hole weekly on my consular and then did some GSI dailies on my warrior again (opting to take a taxi to the more distant but less awkward location for Killik weapons this time), followed by some more of those on my trooper on Star Forge.

By then it was time for ops with my guild, which took up a good chunk of the evening. Afterwards I did another GSF weekly, which was done within two wins again, and yet I was still only on 23/25 medals after that. This is what makes this weekly so frustrating. It doesn't even matter if you play well/win, whether you get any medal credit feels like a complete roll of the dice. Like, how many weekly missions should a single seasons objective require? It's ridiculous. After that, it took two more matches to get those last two medals. Yes, two matches for just two more medals.

After a couple more warzones, I switched to the remaining servers where I hadn't done the daily yet and got my daily Conquest allocation done with some questing on all three.

Day 7 - Monday

In the morning I logged in on Darth Malgus and quickly knocked out two more weekly objectives by doing a round of Onderon dailies and blowing up some womp rats. I'd held off on my last two objectives until close to the end in case Mr Commando felt like doing flashpoints or uprisings over the weekend, but that didn't happen, so I had to get to 7/7 by myself.

I then logged in again in the evening to finish off my personal Conquest on a couple of alts and get my daily objective done that way. On Leviathan, I completed my bounty hunter's personal Conquest on Quesh (a good Hutt Space planet to jump ahead to, and I was kind Nar Shaddaa-ed out).

On Star Forge I did two heroics on Makeb to get some more Hutt Space kills - the Ossus dailies on Thursday had taken care of the mission part of that objective but I had barely killed any mobs. Makeb was good for achieving the opposite.

On Satele Shan, I'd left things off with several Conquest objectives partially completed so that I only had to do a single mission hand-in on my agent to be done for the day.

Finally, I finished my SWTOR week on Shae Vizla by doing one more round of Black Hole and completing my GSI weekly.

Week 7 Thoughts 

I started this season with a promise to myself that I wasn't going to burn myself out doing objectives I didn't enjoy, but then I was so excited that I did 7/7 weeklies on all servers for several weeks anyway. This week though, I could definitely feel my enthusiasm wane for the first time, with several days where I just didn't feel like playing much at all. I was still going to get 7/7 on Darth Malgus, but I quickly resigned myself to probably only getting three or four weeklies done on the other servers. In the end I still did a bit better than that, achieving 6/7 on Star Forge and Shae Vizla, and 5/7 on all the others.

I didn't even think that the objectives were particularly bad, but there was definitely little to no synergy, and the feeling of repetition got me more than anything else. This was the first time this season where I really felt the conflict between "wanting to do the thing because I want to have the thing completed" and just not feeling the actual gameplay in that moment. It's a pretty normal thing to feel, but also something I personally like to keep an eye on, as I'm quite capable of making things un-fun for myself by being too determined to get things done no matter what. With that in mind, I was glad that I was able to recognise that I was not really feeling it this week and say "oh well, not gonna go all out this week then" pretty easily and early on.