My Most Played Characters

Earlier in the year, there was a thing going around in the World of Warcraft community that had people tallying up their total /played time to see which classes they liked playing the most, which prompted me to make a post about my own most played World of Warcraft characters. I vaguely recall thinking at the time that it was a shame that I couldn't do the same in SWTOR... which makes no sense, because the /played command in SWTOR is right there! I even posted about it in the past! I don't know when and why I suddenly switched to thinking that you couldn't check your characters' /played time in SWTOR. Sometimes I do worry that it's a bit early for my brain to start deteriorating when I'm only in my forties... either way, that random misconception has been corrected now, so I thought it was about time to check back on all my alts and finally do another post on the subject on this blog too.

Shintar - 239 days

I always like to say that I enjoy playing alts, and I do, but I almost feel like this kind of shows the opposite - that in reality, I'm a maining woman who mains. How else could Shintar the trooper have more than three times the play time of the second character on this list? (Interestingly, the ratio between first and second place was similar for my WoW characters.) Though I guess it does help that she was the first character I ever created, all the way back in 2011, and has remained my main ever since. I fully anticipate a future where I'll be able to say one day that I've spent an entire year of my life playing as her.

Golu - 76 days

I'm not surprised that my Twi'lek Sage is in second place, considering that she was one of my first alts and the second character on whom I hit the level cap of 50 back in the day. She also has remained my "main alt" consistently since then, but I am a bit surprised that her play time is that far behind my main. I guess I haven't spent much time raiding on her in a while.

Fali - 40 days

My first Jedi knight coming in third place is no surprise either - again, she was one of my earliest and most played alts for a while, even if she sees a lot less play time these days. What does surprise me is how quickly the numbers fall off from third place onwards, especially when compared to my WoW top five. I've played SWTOR since launch without taking any noteworthy breaks, and I've pretty consistently stuck to the same characters, so I would've expected my alt stable here to have much higher numbers than any of my WoW characters. However, it looks like those five years of absolutely insane World of Warcraft binge-playing back in my student days still beat close to fifteen years of slightly more moderate engagement with SWTOR.

Racelle - 30 days

I'm slightly surprised to see my second smuggler this high up. She is still an old character of course (created in 2012), but as the previous sentence implies, she wasn't my first smuggler (who ended up further down the list, in ninth place). I guess the first smuggler's Gunslinger play style never really clicked with me, so it makes sense that I ended up giving this one more love almost immediately. Plus there was a time when I did a lot of PvP with her, as she currently sits at valor rank 85.

Sigex - 28 days

It should tell you how firmly I am entrenched on Republic side that the first four spots are all in Republic hands, and only in fifth place do we have our first Imperial character. The "Shinquisitor" was created at the start of 2013 and levelled as part of a duo with Mr Commando. Even though she was relatively late to the party, I do consider her my Imperial main these days (she's also the GM of our Imperial alt guild) so having the most play time out of all my Imps lines up with that.

Looking at the full list of /played across my entire stable of alts, I would say the patterns I saw were very similar to what I noticed in WoW, in the sense that older characters get pushed up the list a lot simply due to the fact that levelling used to take so much longer in the game's early years. My knight and smuggler really haven't seen that much play recently, and yet here they are, in the top five still.

Comparatively, I've got to go quite far down the list to find a character created in the current decade, simply because levelling is so fast and once I'm max level I tend to play less (with the exception of my main, who raids regularly). Fangirl, my first character on the French server and the highest-ranked among these more recent creations (she was created in 2022 for seasons), only comes in 13th place with 13 days /played.

As a bit of a side note, I found that I had an old spreadsheet for this, and since it also had a column for valor rank, I checked that too while logging through all my alts. Turns out I have very few characters nowadays who have never done any PvP, and my average valor rank across the board is 47. Plus I have two characters in the mid-80s - I should really push them all the way to 100 to have a few more Elite Warlords... 

Return of the Character Creation Hangar

One of the reasons Legacy of the Sith's launch back in 2022 was pretty rocky was that 7.0 introduced a lot of unexpected changes to the user interface, which is always a prickly subject for MMO players. Some of these changes we got used to over time, others quickly received adjustments to make them more palatable. (For example I remember people complaining that the contrast on the updated inventory was very stark at launch and gave some players headaches.)

One change that I got used to easily enough but which nonetheless never stopped feeling like a bit of a downgrade was the updated character creation screen. It made sense that it needed changing in order to accommodate the concept of "class" being split into origin story and combat style, but simultaneously changing its look to be much more minimalist always felt kind of unnecessary.

It's funny because before that I honestly had never given that much thought to the character creation screen; it just worked. But when they changed it to the new version, it made me realise just how well-integrated the old, detailed backgrounds had been into the whole flow, depicting your character on a space station when every origin story starts with a shuttle descending from an orbital station to the starter planet below. It was the kind of environmental storytelling you don't necessarily think about consciously but that still enriches the experience. Creating a new character after that just never felt the same.

With that said, I was super chuffed to be told (and later see for myself), that on the 8.0 PTS, the animated backgrounds for character creation are making a return. It's still the new creator, which makes sense, but you're no longer floating in a black void. Instead we're back to your character being put right into the environment where your story begins, which is all I really wanted. It's something that's a small detail in the grand scheme of things but still really delighted me. It makes me look forward to Masters of the Force all the more.

Adventures on the PTS, Part Whatever

I continue to log into the public test server almost every day. I've never been this engaged with testing anything in SWTOR before; it's quite strange.

First there's the new ops boss. I won't spoil anything about the theme or detailed mechanics, don't worry, but I do want to talk a bit about the experience of testing itself. Back when I tried XR-53 on the PTS, I went in with a group where at least a few people already knew what to expect, we killed it after a relatively small number of tries, and then we got an achievement at the end. It wasn't that dissimilar to trying a boss on the live servers for the first time.

This time around, things have been very different. I mentioned in a previous post that the ops entrance is right at the Odessen spawn-in point, which I assume is not going to be how it's going to work when the operation is finalised. When you go through the portal, you get teleported right into a room with the boss - no trash, nothing. Additionally, there's a droid called M4R-TN (Martin, like the ops dev - get it?) who not only offers repairs, but also has a number of consoles next to him that allow you to tweak things about the boss fight, such as in- or decreasing its health and damage output - a true test environment.

If you wanted to, you could dial down the boss's health to next to nothing and one-shot it. But what for? There's no achievement at this stage, or loot. It's up to you, the player, to decide how easy or hard you want the fight to be, purely for the sake of fun, and that's surprisingly difficult.

I'm guessing like most people, we initially tried to simply do the boss fight as presented, without tweaking anything. We also went in blind, because it's fun to discover things by ourselves. And that did work decently enough for story mode.

Veteran mode was a different matter though - so much damage! So much going on! Pure chaos. Trying to figure things out by yourself is fun for a while, but only until it isn't anymore. I've got to confess here that I've also learned over time that my ops team and I aren't actually very good at figuring out boss mechanics by ourselves. We have a tendency to completely misunderstand what's going on at times, and then coming up with ideas based on those misunderstandings that only make things worse. Myself, I just get completely overwhelmed at some point.

It made me realise that for how much I love operations in SWTOR, I'm a bit like the cliché of a WoW Classic raider - good at a 20-year-old fight that I've had opportunity to practice for literal years, but better not present me with anything new or even remotely difficult - as I'll just freeze up, even if I was actively asking for something new before. It's not entirely the same situation, but there are definitely parallels. I like the familiar, and SWTOR has given me plenty of opportunity to get used to things.

The other week I did multiple runs of Terror from Beyond, and it occurred to me that Operator IX on veteran mode is actually a pretty complex and hard to explain fight, what with everything that goes on with the colour mechanics. It doesn't seem so bad to me now after years of repetition, but the first people to figure out the encounter probably also had to spend quite a bit of time wiping, reading tooltips and experimenting in order to figure out exactly what to do at each stage and in what order. I've tried to take comfort in that thought at times when the new boss felt impossibly overwhelming to me - reminding myself that it won't seem half as bad once I've had time to properly understand and digest what's actually happening at each stage.

So after initially just dialling down the boss's damage a lot so we wouldn't die quite so quickly and had more time to actually figure out key mechanics, we did slowly get a grip on those.. but things were still messy and would quickly fall apart entirely. When I happened to come across a video from someone whose team had killed the boss on the PTS only the other day, I watched it, and it immediately taught us some things to improve.

This meant that the other night we finally realised that we'd hit a point where we understood what we were supposed to do; we just didn't have the numbers to execute it. We'd already reduced the default damage by half, but now we also had to reduce the boss's health, because we were hitting what's effectively the soft enrage with the boss still close to half health. (Mr Commando used to call that point "the 50% mechanic" - see my earlier point about us misunderstanding what's happening sometimes.)

On the next attempt we reduced the boss's health massively and he died with ease. So now the last exercise is going to be to dial the numbers up and down a bit more to see how much more we can take, but then I think we'll be done testing this particular fight for now. We've learned the mechanics and will be prepared in that regard. But if it goes live with the current default health and damage numbers, we won't kill it for a long time regardless.

The person who posted the kill video with the boss set to default values said the tuning felt good to them. In the video I could see that they were doing almost double my team's healing and about a third more damage. I mean, good for them, they are clearly good at the game - I just wish they were aware that what they are bringing to the table is not what the average group that attempts a veteran mode is going to have. I'm desperately hoping that the data we've provided by wiping over and over again is at least sending a signal in that regard, but I do still worry that it won't be enough. I suspect that not many who find the boss too hard in its current state will go through the process of wiping for hours to understand what's going on and fine-tune the numbers; most will probably just give up. And then the data set will just consist of the most elite NiM raiders killing it with ease, suggesting that everything is fine and dandy. I don't know. I can only keep trying.

The other thing that I've been spending time on is levelling lowbies with the new difficulty toggle set to veteran or master. I'll probably have another post about that in me at some point, but it's just so weirdly compelling to me. Since I'm playing so much and generating Conquest points, I've also set our PTS guild to invade a planet every week. Since there's no competition, we win every time. I know it's only temporary and doesn't mean anything, but I enjoy seeing "TSS PTS" being the conquerors of an increasing number of planets...

Testing the Open World Difficulty Toggle on the PTS

Yesterday Eric Musco did a let's play stream to talk more about the new overland difficulty toggle coming with 8.0. I wasn't able to watch it live, but I did watch the recording today. Most of it is him just doing laps on Hutta and answering questions from the chat, but it did make me keen to log into the updated PTS to see the new open world difficulty toggle for myself. (Though one interesting reveal that came up during the stream was that after almost fifteen years, they'll finally raise the legacy level cap from 50 to 60 - just after I hid the legacy experience bar from my UI since I'd maxed it out on all servers, hah.)

Anyway, since we were asked to provide feedback on how the difficulty feels on the first two planets in this round, I rolled up a new Commando and jumped straight into the master difficulty setting. To recap, the difficulty toggle increases your damage taken and decreases your experience gains and your healing received. It doesn't affect your damage output, item or credit rewards, or the health of mobs around you.

I did the first few quests and it was certainly noticeable that I remained at level one for much longer than I usually would, but mob difficulty didn't seem too bad at first. Sure, they did more damage to me than normal (which is a very low bar to clear on the starter planets) but I can't say I felt particularly in danger.

However, as I moved from quest to quest and my experience bar barely moved, I noticed the levels of the mobs around me quickly getting ahead of me, which is something that hadn't happened to me in a very long time, and their damage also became more noticeable. In Taloran Village I suffered my first death when a stray Hammer Shot pulled a second group at the same time as I accidentally body-pulled an extra silver mob on top of that. On normal story difficulty that wouldn't have been a problem, but here I died. Different, for sure.

As an aside, the way I'm questing on the PTS is the complete inverse of how I usually level in the live game. Usually, I watch all the cut scenes - even though I've seen them all before - because I want to immerse myself in the RP aspect of it all and am always hoping to encounter the occasional piece of dialogue that I either haven't heard before or at the very least haven't encountered in so long that it's as good as new to me. The combat in-between is not terrible, but relatively mindless, as everything just gets swept away with little effort.

On the PTS, I space-bar through everything because I don't want to spend time on the RP aspect, I don't want to get too invested in characters that will just get wiped anyway, and I'm paying more attention to the gameplay because that's the focus of the testing.

That said, something funny happened as I continued to work my way through all the Ord Mantell missions (both the class storyline and all the side quests): I actually got really into the gameplay. While I had virtually no buttons to press (back in the day I approached something close to a full action bar by the end of the first planet, while I basically had to blast my way through the entirety of Ord Mantell with nothing but Explosive Round this time), the increased difficulty and reduced XP really transformed the experience.

Because XP gains were so stingy that I was falling behind even while doing every single optional mission including all the bonuses, I started to feel a genuine hunger for XP like I haven't felt in this game for over a decade. I kept looking for more dynamic encounters to do just so I could go up one more level. I longed to level up and gain a new ability (even if that last one didn't really end up being fulfilled in any meaningful way during this particular adventure). I actually put med packs on my bar and got excited about gear upgrades

While the moment-to-moment button pressing was not challenging or complex at this level, everything hitting so much harder meant that I had to take care when moving around so I wouldn't accidentally over-pull, and when dealing with multi-mob groups, it was vital to quickly focus down the easy targets to reduce the amount of incoming damage. It reminded me a bit of WoW Classic to be honest.

And then I got to the Separatist volcano base. I remembered that place being quite threatening back in the day, and the trooper class mission in there was possibly the most difficult quest I ever encountered while levelling (I actually talked about it in this post from February 2012.)

Needless to say, I was very curious to see what the experience was going to be like on this new master difficulty, and it did not disappoint. Me at level 7 vs. groups of three mobs each - all level 9-10 and several of them including a strong mob as well - was an absolute disaster. The first time I would've died, the game bugged out and suddenly teleported me back to Fort Garnik, but I travelled right back into the volcano to get back into the fray. 

I managed to down a few pulls near the phase entrance by quickly nuking a single mob and then running out before his two buddies could kill me, but further in I would usually die before being able to flee, so that it became a slow zerg of kill one, die, revive, kill another, die, revive, kill the last one of the pack. I could've tried to go out and gain some more XP before trying again I suppose, but I was too stubborn for that - and I did succeed in the end. It was so satisfying! Mr Commando told me that I was weird for being so delighted by dying over and over again, but it was genuinely fun to me.

I did manage to complete the rest of the base without dying after that, though some fights were very close affairs (as in, me finishing with something like 10 HP left). Once I got my companion, I also went back to do the heroics, which were also very doable, though I had to take some care here too. However, the champion mob for the Savrip dynamic encounter just flattened me and Jorgan in a blink.

I finished the planet at only level 9, and I'm actually weirdly excited to dive back in and do the Esseles and go to Coruscant. It's funny because there's a part of me that is telling me I shouldn't get too into this because it's only the PTS and I don't want to burn myself out before it all goes live, but all I can say is that the difficulty toggle made for a really fun, nostalgic experience for me. I wouldn't want to be required to level every single character like that I suppose, but nobody has to.

The point is that outside of ventures, you can toggle the difficulty up and down at any given moment as it pleases you. I keep seeing people get confused by that and ask questions like "but doesn't that mean you can cheese the difficulty by doing x, y and z" but the point is that there is no special reward for this. The reward is that it's more fun. The ventures are somewhat different, and in those you won't be able to turn the difficulty down once you've committed to it. But outside of that, there is no cheese - there is only choosing what's fun for you.

Ranking Legacy of the Sith's Major NPCs

I said that I'd have more to say about Legacy of the Sith now that its story has finally wrapped up. One of the things I wanted to go into in more detail were the characters, because without a doubt, LotS has been the most character-driven storyline SWTOR has ever had.

I decided I'd like to rank the story's major characters from best to worse in terms of how much character development they got and how much I personally enjoyed both watching and interacting with them. Note that this will contain spoilers for various events that occurred throughout Legacy of the Sith.

1. Rass Ordo

The top spot on my list goes to young Mandalorian Rass Ordo without a doubt. I liked him when he was first introduced in Spirit of Vengeance, and he's only continued to develop from there. I may be biased here because he's the only one of the characters on this list with whom I've pursued a romance so far, but I do think his character development has been apparent even in the non-romantic scenes. He was pretty carefree and cheerful when he was introduced to us, and over time we got to witness him first becoming annoyed with the shenanigans of the Hidden Chain and then seriously disenchanted after Shae Vizla's betrayal. At the same time this only strengthened his bond to our character as someone standing for loyalty and stability, and I can't wait to see him again in 8.0.

2. Darth Nul

She may be dead and/or insane, but Darth Nul has in some ways been the unexpected star of this expansion. It's called "Legacy of the Sith" after all and nobody else seems to have left a bigger legacy for us to deal with than her. Obviously she doesn't actually do (much of) anything herself, but the arc of our characters first learning of her existence and then slowly finding out more and more about her until finally confronting her crazed spirit in the mind trap is very satisfying. It looks like we're not done discovering more of her strange projects and inventions either.

3. Shae Vizla

If we look at the Mandalorian side of this expansion's storytelling, it's largely been driven by Shae Vizla's slow descent into... not insanity, but obsession with beating Heta Kol and doing so personally (which, to be fair, is a very Mandalorian thing to do). It's very well written, from her at first very understandable desire to sort out this beef one-on-one on Ruhnuk, to her increased annoyance with the matter of Heta after the latter gets away yet again, to Shae going off like a lone wolf to confront Heta for a third time, eventually dropping out of contact and making everyone's lives worse in the process. It's a classic tragedy as we watch her make several bad (but understandable) decisions after another, which eventually cumulate in her death - even if she does manage to take Heta with her.

4. Darth Malgus 

For being this expansion's original poster boy, Darth Malgus kind of had surprisingly little to do. He gets captured right at the start, then spends several patches brooding in prison not saying much. After he's broken out by Shae, we get a few cool cut scenes of him smashing Hidden Chain soldiers during the hunt for Heta and her machine, but he doesn't really get to shine until the Legacy Reborn update. Honestly, purely based on how much he actually does in Legacy of the Sith, I probably would have to rank him lower if I'm being honest, he just manages to be so cool in everything he does that he still manages to be pretty fun to watch even when it's not that impactful.

5. Darth Jadus 

How long have people been asking for this guy to return in some fashion? And we finally got it! He's still as cunning and infuriatingly smooth-talking as ever and the interactions we've had with him so far have been great. The reason I can't rank him any higher is that he doesn't show up until pretty late in the game and is obviously being set up to clash with us again at a later point, presumably in 8.0 or after.

6. Jekiah Ordo

I never thought that this character, originally introduced to us as basically Shae's P.A., would grow on me as much as he has, but his decision to stand by the Alliance Commander after Shae goes rogue really endeared him to me (which was not a given). He always exudes a calm air of authority but doesn't hesitate to get sharp when he thinks people are stepping out of line (mostly his little brother, hah) while also displaying a softer side with those he cares about. I'm very curious to see where his journey will take him in 8.0 and after.

7. Arn Peralun

Arn already underwent quite a journey in Onslaught, from becoming Tau's new Padawan to slowly coming into his own. In Legacy of the Sith we meet him after he's officially become a knight, and throughout most of the expansion he remains a Republic player's recurring buddy, helping you out on the occasional adventure and always having your back in negotiations with Republic leadership. He remains a solid character that is only "held back" by the fact that he never really has the spotlight, even if he saves your life at the end of Master's Engima. I'd like to romance him on a character one of these days as I suspect that might reveal some more interesting details about him.

8. Major Anri

Originally introduced in Jedi Under Siege, Major Anri is another character that has already undergone a bit of a journey. She's largely the Imperial equivalent to Arn in her role in the story, but at least my impression is that she hasn't had as much of a chance to grow throughout LotS, possibly because as a soldier she's more directly limited by the chain of command, though she does still speak up for you quite boldly at times. There are also hints towards the end of Legacy of the Sith that she's growing somewhat disenchanted with Sith leadership, but it's not yet clear to me whether that's going to go anywhere. Like with Arn, I expect that romancing her might reveal some more.

9. Sa'har Kateen

Sa'har is in some ways Legacy of the Sith's biggest disappointment to me. She was in the expansion's cinematic trailer, and from the get-go we kept getting little cut scenes in game showing what she was up to even when our characters had no involvement with that at the time. I kept thinking that surely this was building up to something big, but in the end it never really did. The biggest interactions we have with her are at the end of Chains in the Dark when she turns against Tyrus, and all throughout Desperate Defiance, but then she seemingly dies, just to immediately get "revived" again one patch later, and in the end nothing much even comes of that in relation to our character as she and Ri'kan just run away on Khar Shian. She does have some character development throughout, but she never stops focusing on Ri'kan, no matter how badly he treats her, and it just gets a bit tiresome to be honest. Mostly I just don't get why she got so much focus throughout the whole expansion when her role in the major events was ultimately relatively small. I expect we'll see her again in 8.0 - maybe something more interesting will happen then.

10. Heta Kol

Heta started as an intriguing new villain in Spirit of Vengeance, but I feel like ultimately that intrigue never really paid off. She's initially shown to be forceful and charismatic, which perhaps goes some way towards explaining how she's managed to rally several otherwise very different clans to her cause. But then... it just never really goes anywhere. In Galactic Threads, Jekiah comments that Heta has morale problems, but we never see her dealing with that. The way we saw her acting towards her underlings, I honestly thought that maybe at some point, internal conflict or betrayal would become a problem for the Hidden Chain, but it never really did (not counting Sa'har, who always remained a bit of an outsider). We never really get any more detail on why Heta does anything she does, other than that she hates what Shae has done with the Mandalorians - yet at the same time, she never seems as obsessed with Shae as Shae is with her. I just feel like her portrayal never entirely came together, meaning I was always chasing after her somewhat half-heartedly myself. She was just someone who was causing trouble for me for reasons that were not personal (to my character) but also not fully known, which just wasn't very satisfying.

 

11. Ri'kan Kateen

All I'll say is, I really hope they have something planned for Ri'kan in the next expansion still, because otherwise - what a waste of time this guy was. He's even more one-note than Sa'har, but unlike Sa'har, we barely even interact with him other than the one confrontation at the end of Ruhnuk and the big fight at the end of Desperate Defiance. Why have we spent as much time as we have on watching cut scenes with him? I thought maybe something would come from the Ordo brothers having personal beef with him over the death of their sister as explained at the end of Ruhnuk, but that never came up again.

Do you agree with my ranking? Are there any characters you feel should have been on the list that I left out? I went back and forth about including Darths Krovos and Rivix for example but ultimately decided that we didn't quite see enough of them throughout the expansion as a whole for me to include them here.

Goofing Off on the PTS

Immediately after Thursday's dev stream, the 8.0 PTS went up, and I've actually been hyped to play on it. I didn't used to be someone who cared about public testing, but I've done more and more of it over the last two expansions and have become a bit of a convert to be honest. SWTOR is just not that big of an MMO anymore, and every little contribution to make it better helps. The success of XR-53 in particular has really helped to motivate me, because that fight felt so much better tuned than any other operations boss Broadsword released in almost a decade. I couldn't help but feel like the more extensive PTS testing really helped - not anything I personally did, mind you, but just having a broader selection of players trying out the fight and providing data and feedback.

In this first iteration of the PTS, there isn't much to test yet - primarily it's just the first boss of the upcoming new operation. Accordingly, the way it's set up, you're expected to just create a level one character, take the "Odessen Transport Service" just outside your starter phase* to be transported to Odessen, and then use a terminal there to get auto-levelled to 85, at which point you can grab some gear from nearby vendors, and the entrance to the operation is right there as well. (In fact, it's so close to the edge of the platform that if you run at it without being in an ops group, you have just a brief second of seeing the "you need to be in an ops group to enter" notification before falling to your death, which I thought was a hilarious troll.)

I haven't tried the new boss yet, but I'm planning to check it out this week - with a full guild group no less. This is the first time I've managed to get buy-in for going on the PTS from my whole ops team, which is another reason I'm excited.

However, until then, being an unnaturally boosted level 85 character is... a bit restrictive. You have no legacy, no ship and no companions. You don't have access to any of your unlocks from the regular servers, including species and hairdos. Not to mention that you look like a bit of a dork running around in the same not great-looking default armour set as everyone else.

Cartel Coin purchases are disabled on the PTS (for good reason), but unfortunately that includes several pop-ups that merely include a CC buyout option, such as the one to increase your inventory space or unlock additional outfit slots. Not much one can do about that, unfortunately, but at least some of the other restrictions can be worked around.

If, like me, you're someone who has earned loads of loyalty rewards and the like over the years, you might be able to grab a companion and/or a better outfit from your mailbox. I don't recommend trying to empty your mail entirely, due to the aforementioned bag space limitations, but if you can pick out just a couple of useful items, it's quite handy. 

Otherwise you can travel to the fleet and see the adaptive armour vendor in the supplies section for an alternative outfit. The selection there isn't amazing, but at least you'll be able to cheaply grab a coherent look that matches your origin story. The only way to get a companion outside your mailbox is to actually play through the class story on your starter planet. I'm not usually someone who ever space-bars through conversations, but I speed-ran my Sage through Tython for once and it was actually pretty quick.

Completing the starter planet will also unlock your legacy, and if you then make it through Coruscant on top of that, you can get your ship too. A quicker, alternative way to unlocking your legacy and ship, as well as the option for a second combat style - but no companions - is to start Knights of the Fallen Empire from the chapters menu. You don't actually have to play through it, just accept all the various prompts that ask if you're sure that you want to skip ahead and boom, there's your legacy and ship.

Why go through all this hassle for a test character? They'll probably be wiped/reset at some point anyway, right? Well, why not? Breaking out of the default constraints of the test environment is a different kind of gameplay challenge, and I bet I'll feel better testing the boss later this week when I actually get to wear an outfit I like! It also allows for additional exploration which incidentally might reveal more about features that aren't officially ready for testing yet.

For example ventures/difficulty modes are not yet ready for testing, but after completing my Tython story (on the standard difficulty, because nothing else is available), I found a surprise "challenge reward" box in my inventory which contained a "Regenerating Freeze Bombs" unlock that I was unable to use yet but which is probably an unintended preview of the kind of stuff that will be coming with the ventures. I also saw someone mention on the forums that they saw a Z axis in their stronghold options? Be still, my heart!

Oh yeah, all strongholds are free to open and expand on the PTS as well, unless they require special tokens. So go nuts and grab that free teleport as well while you're out there.

Now let's see what we can get up to next week when our PTS guild's ability to do Conquest unlocks... 

* If you're a newborn Jedi on Tython and can't find the teleport, it's right next to the first taxi droid on the raised platform where you first land. For some reason the probe droid really blends into the background there and is easy to overlook - I ran right past it at first, and talked to at least three other people that evening who had the same problem. When I made a trooper for comparison, it was much more obvious to find the droid there, as it was waiting right outside the crashed walker. 

Weekend Master Mode Flashpoint Pugs

I'm glad to not have to think about seasons anymore for a while, but that doesn't mean that I was unaware that one of this week's weekly objectives was to run a random master mode flashpoint. I decided I might as well server hop and queue for a few while there was increased interest in the activity - not for seasons, but for fun.

I started by logging into Tulak Hord quite late on Saturday evening, expecting a long wait in the queue - if anything was still going to happen at all this late in the day - but got a nearly instant pop for my Commando healer. It took me to the Esseles, which was welcomed as this was one of the flashpoints that character still needed for her Aratech Ice quest.

I was kind of amused when the tank asked whether he should rush through and drag a bunch of trash mobs along like people do on veteran mode, because in my mind, playing like that is usually a sign of someone who's in a hurry and has little consideration for the other players in their group. Someone politely asking the rest of their team whether he should be rushing felt quite bizarre to me. There was a bit of back and forth about it in chat which mostly revealed that nobody had a strong opinion on the matter, and the tank eventually just settled on taking it (relatively) slowly and going at a more relaxed pace instead, which was fine by me. (Though we still didn't really go slowly, we just killed things as we pulled them instead of going for some giant drive-by pile-up.) We also did the bonus boss and everything.

I then logged over to Satele Shan, where I queued my Shadow as both tank and dps but seemed to have no luck. Just as Mr Commando was telling me that he was going to bed and I replied that I was thinking about doing the same, I finally got a pop as dps. (It was close to midnight my time by this point.) It was for Shrine of Silence.

There was a part of me that immediately thought that this was a baaad idea, starting a difficult master mode with a low chance of success so late. Mr Commando came over and looked over my shoulder. "Oh, you're doing that one," he commented. "Which difficulty is it?" I responded in the tiny voice of someone who's very aware that she's done something naughty: "Master mode". He rolled his eyes and said that he'd see me in two hours then.

In reality, I did get a chance to say good night to him a bit earlier, when I died on the second boss and was stuck being unable to revive for several minutes, which was a good opportunity for an AFK break. However, he wasn't entirely wrong otherwise, even though the group progressed through most of the flashpoint with no major problems, including the bonus boss. On the second encounter with the two mystics both the tank and I got knocked off the platform (which was what enforced the above-mentioned AFK break) but the healer and remaining dps were able to finish the fight off without us.

I had opened up Starparse at one point to get an idea of our dps since I remembered the last boss being a brutal dps check, and both the other dps (a Guardian) and me on my Shadow were pretty close in terms of numbers - not amazing, but not terrible either. I was starting to get my hopes up that maybe we could do this, but when we actually did reach the last boss I got an immediate reality check when our first attempt resulted in a wipe with the boss still having more than 30% of his health left.

After the second wipe I honestly half expected the group to fall apart - everyone had been very nice and communicative up to this point, so I wouldn't have been upset or surprised if someone had piped up with something along the lines of "sorry, but it looks like this one's not happening" but in actuality, nobody in the group showed even the slightest doubt that we'd be able to do it if we just kept trying, so I felt like I owed it to them to do my best as well (and I could definitely tell that I had room for improvement).

At one point I realised that I'd misunderstood one of the tank's instructions about the adds, and when I correctly started to completely ignore them, the next attempt went a lot better. I did notice that the Guardian dps still seemed to be chasing adds however, so I suggested in chat that we should both just focus the boss at the end. He didn't really respond and just kept doing the same thing, but our attempts kept getting slightly better regardless, which led to us wiping at something like 5% at one point.

Suddenly the Guardian spoke up to suggest that we should just nuke the boss and I was like "that's what I've been saying, yes!" - and on the next attempt we killed it with nobody even dying. It was sooo satisfying. I looted a cool trooper armour set as well, which I put on Lieutenant Iresso. It was getting close to 2 a.m. for me by this point, so Mr Commando had been more on point than expected, but it felt so worth it.

The next morning I queued for a master mode flashpoint on Leviathan (I'd already been trying earlier on Saturday but with no success) and when I finally got a pop as healer it took me to Hammer Station - a place I'm not usually a fan of, but after Shrine of Silence it seemed like a good palate cleanser. That's what I thought at first at least, but then one of the dps typed in chat that we should just run and charged off through all the trash on their own. Unsurprisingly, they died, and then all the mobs they had aggroed turned around and killed the rest of us. I sighed and rolled my eyes, but in fairness, the person actually apologised and then we just did everything normally and it went fine.

Finally, in the early afternoon I threw myself in the queue with my trooper on Star Forge, queued as both tank and dps. I was surprised by how long my wait was, considering my flexibility and how busy Star Forge usually is. At three different times I got a pop that someone declined instantly, before anyone could've possibly had had time to even look at the proposed group make-up, which I thought was weird. Finally on the fourth go an actual group formed with me as its healer.

We got into Crisis on Umbara, another flashpoint that I tend to think of as not exactly trivial on master mode, but things seemed to be going well enough. Our pace was on the slow side and there were some deaths from people clearly not being familiar (enough) with certain mechanics, but nothing really major. We even managed to kill the Alpha Slybex.

I was just starting to think how nice it was to be in that stage of an expansion where everyone is a bit overgeared and you can carry a couple of people not really knowing what they're doing but then we got to the final boss and it wiped the floor with us. I went through every single one of my cooldowns but the adds were just absolutely swarming us and things weren't dying nearly quickly enough. After two wipes I suggested that we could pull the boss down the hill to create a funnel and make the adds a bit more manageable, and even though nobody responded, people complied. That wasn't an instant success, but I think we got the boss down on what was overall our fourth attempt or so. So that was good, I was just a bit weirded out by the way people were clearly reading and acting upon the chat but not responding to me at all. Apart from a "hi" at the beginning and a "ty" after a revive, nobody but me said anything all run, which was quite a contrast to how chatty my groups on all the other servers had been.

Either way, I quite enjoyed this round of pugs and I'll try to keep using seasonal master mode objectives as a reminder to queue up for these more often.

Legacy Reborn Full Story Review

Right, it's finally here, my full review of the Legacy Reborn story update. I don't know when these became such a big deal to me... I think that as the story updates became more nuanced in terms of character development, I just started to feel like I really also needed to talk about them in more detail to truly do the experience justice.

Anyway, if you're looking for a spoiler-free review, I'll just quickly repeat what I said on Bluesky shortly after the patch came out: "Great update. I laughed, I was sad, I went "that's so cool" many times - what more can you ask of anything Star Wars?!"

Another thing that's worth noting is that this was the first main story update since 2023 that didn't include a single KOTOR-style cut scene. As I personally haven't minded these too much, it didn't even register with me at first until I saw others talking about it afterwards and went "oh yeah, that's right", but I do believe there are players out there to whom this will be very meaningful. We'll see how the devs handle the cut scenes in 8.0 and onwards.

That's about as much as I want to say without spoilers, so below this screenshot we get into full spoiler territory. If that's not something you're looking for at this point, you have been warned.

The story starts with a long cut scene that initially shows Malgus and Shae's crew approaching Heta's fleet in a stolen Hidden Chain shuttle. Malgus makes an "I'm sensing something in the Force" face and decides to nope out of Team Shae by simply jumping straight out of the shuttle onto the planet's surface, much to Shae's chagrin.

Down on Khar Shian, we see Rivix slot Darth Nul's holocron into version three (as far as we know) of Nul's machine and Jadus explains to Heta that it needs testing. (The room that this takes place in is a great set piece by the way, with some cool visual effects when the machine gets activated.) There are a few prisoners kneeling in the background, including Sa'har and Tau (who is also here if you're an Empire player, with a side remark from Rivix explaining that she was captured during an attempt to rescue Sa'har in this timeline). Sa'har is selected as a test subject and put into the chair of the machine. As it starts up, she's clearly in pain and Ri'kan is not pleased. When she cries out in agony it's enough for him to actually make a break for it and he manages to interrupt the ritual with an angry outburst of Force power. He and Sa'har run away while Tau also breaks free and attempts to buy them time to escape.

Meanwhile our character returns to Odessen, where the Supreme Chancellor or Empress/Emperor awaits us on their flagship to talk. There's a big stand-off where they consider taking you into custody and Sal-Deron/Krovos are not happy to find out that you lost Darth Nul's holocron. Your present allies (Arn/Anri and Lana/Theron/T7, who are also there) empathically argue against this course of action when the Mandalorian fleet also arrives, with the Ordo brothers jet-packing right into the hangar. They also express their support for your side, and after some more agonising tension, Republic or Imperial leadership give in and agree to leave things be for now and tackle the threat posed by Jadus and Heta Kol first.

I thought this whole scene was brilliantly done. You can really feel the rising tension as your supposed allies from the Republic/Empire try to boss you around and you're obviously not going to take it, but at the same time both sides know that applying (lowercase) force at this point would have serious ramifications that would be hard to come back from. It was great to see your allies backing you up and talking about how great you are, with the arrival of the Mandalorians finally moving the needle enough to cause the Chancellor/Empress/Emperor to blink first.

In an interesting twist, if your character is a saboteur, they are actually exposed at this point, meaning the Chancellor/Empress/Emperor are not just mad at you about the whole Shae/Malgus/Jadus situation, but have genuine reason to want to take you down because they know that you've betrayed them. I thought this was an interesting way of framing the whole scene very differently, and in this light their reaction to actually being betrayed seems almost subdued. Your ally who just rescued you from the Enigma still speaks up for you regardless, and Republic/Imperial leadership still agree to deal with the current threat together for now.

Either way, with peace temporarily restored, the fleet jumps into Hyperspace towards Khar Shian, you catch everyone up on what happened on the Enigma and come up with an assault plan. It's agreed that you'll have to work with what you got as you are unable to call for further reinforcements. The Mandalorians, who now have some Basilisk droids thanks to Lane Vizla, agree to lead a diversionary ground assault while you and a small group of allies try to take the sneaky route to find Jadus. (There was a bit of dialogue with Lane here which sadly only seems to appear for a character that has completed the Bessi storyline, which due to the way it's set up can only happen once per account.) Meanwhile your faction will provide support from space and fight Heta's fleet there. (Side note: During the Imperial version of this bit we see that Maiya Vix from the Oricon storyline has been promoted to... captain or something? That was a nice little detail.)

As you arrive above Khar Shian, it's time to put your plan into action. You get to take part in a brief custom space combat section playing as either Daeruun and Arn or Krovos and Anri (in Krovos' ship). The devs were concerned that this could cause motion sickness for some people so it pops up a warning about that before starting and allows you to skip the whole gameplay section. The first time I ended up skipping it by accident, but I did play through it later on alts. By that point I was actually quite curious what it was like as seemingly every comment I'd read about it was pretty scathing and uh... yeah, I get the complaints about this one. It's nothing like the old space game or GSF, just a weird little section that is extremely on rails and hard to interact with.

The problem is that you're supposed to shoot targets on a large enemy ship, but your own ship's path is completely locked in and the point of view is straight ahead where most of the time you can't actually see your targets. While you can technically turn the camera to look around and see where they are, the moment you let go to actually click on a target, the camera snaps right back to the default view that barely lets you see anything. I eventually settled for just spamming tab target until it would lock onto something off screen, and then fire rockets at that whenever it would let me. While a slightly awkward process, it does eventually get you where you need to be. It's a shame because I feel I do understand what the devs were trying to do with this section; the implementation just ended up being poor.

While all this takes place, your character descends onto the surface in a stolen Hidden Chain shuttle of your own with Lana and either Theron or T7-01. The Mandalorians also try to land their ground forces but are repelled by a shield. Since you can pass through with the stolen shuttle, you have the option to suggest having a look at taking said shield out from the ground.

As you approach the area to land, you see Ri'kan and Sa'har running away, and are given the choice to fire at either them or their Hidden Chain pursuers. Then you perform another one of your by now infamous crash landings. If you didn't shoot at her, Sa'har will briefly help you fight off the Hidden Chain but then still nopes out of the situation since she promised Ri'kan to stay with him and the two of them just fly off unscathed either way. It was funny to me that Lana says at this point "I can't believe Sa'har stayed to help us fight" because all I was thinking was "I can't believe Sa'har just ran off like that".

You and your allies enter Naga Sadow's old fortress via a rocky tunnel. You feel the pressure to locate the shield generator as soon as possible as the Mandalorians are struggling and your faction's fleet is under attack by a giant ion cannon (always those ion cannons). Eventually you find a strange droid that looks like something off Iokath and which is attached to the fortress via dozens of cables. It attacks and when you kill it, the fortress' shields go down.

After this, we see a cut scene of Shae's team taking down one of Heta's lieutenants just as he's on the comm with her, and Shae tells Heta that she's coming before advising her team to split up. Heta meanwhile (still in the room with the machine) finds her eyes drawn to an ancient Sith blade (presumably Naga Sadow's) and picks it up. Nothing bad ever came from grabbing ancient Sith weapons, right?!

Jadus watches her with no more than mild interest while Rivix tells him that the machine should almost be fixed up/ready again after the test got interrupted earlier. Jadus tells Rivix that this means it's time for the latter to leave and prepare "for the next phase of the plan". Rivix is taken aback but Jadus assures him that he's the best judge of how to deal with the way events are unfolding.

With the shield down, the Mandalorians are finally landing, and we pivot to Lane, Rass and Jekiah in their new Basilisk droids - which we get to control and use to wreck the fortress' ground defenses, though the Mandalorians are eventually forced to continue their assault on foot. The attack of the Basilisk droids is another vehicle section where we get to take control of another character - this time it's Jekiah Ordo in his Basilisk, with Rass in his own as his "companion". This section was much more fun than the space bit, even if the droid handled like a drunk elephant sometimes. Listening to Rass go from complaining to being excited about his Basilisk was amusing.

In general, it was very clear by this point why the devs chose to have these sections playing as another character in this update. When it was first mentioned in the dev stream, I had no strong opinions on the idea but it seemed a bit random to me. Seeing it in action, you can tell that it was a deliberate choice to better convey the grandeur of the battle to the player. During this fight over Khar Shian, a lot of things happen at the same time that your character simply can't be there for, which would've meant either adding even more cut scenes to an already pretty cut-scene heavy update, or simply summarising things that happen elsewhere in a couple of sentences of NPC dialogue, which wouldn't really have done them justice. Having seen Broadsword's solution in action, I think it was very effective in this update and really allowed us to take part in everything that happens even when our character is not in the room for a particular event. 

While the Mandalorians assault the fortress, the fleet once again calls you for help against the ion cannon, and Lana agrees to split off to activate the fortress defenses while you continue towards where you think the machine is. So in the next segment you get to play as Lana and Theron/T7 for a bit, fighting and slicing your way towards some orbital defense controls. You/they manage to activate it for one big shot that at least is enough to disable the ion cannon.

Again, I actively loved this, in particular as it gave me flashbacks to KotET chapter eight and wondering why the heck three people can't split up to assist both Torian and Vette - but in a good way. Sometimes splitting up simply is the smart choice, and I appreciate the devs letting our characters be smart here, while at the same time reminding us that Lana and Theron are really quite capable on their own as well.

Meanwhile the Alliance Commander encounters Shae. Rass and Jekiah show up shortly after and there's a confrontation involving lots of shouting, during which Rass in particular really goes off on Shae, though Jekiah as usual pushes for calm. Then Heta joins the fray, ancient Sith weapon glowing ominously.

Within moments, her and Shae are at each other's throats like rabid dogs, and a wild brawl ensues as you and the Ordo brothers join in. At the end it segues into a cut scene during which Heta's sword makes the crystals in the room resonate somehow so that they zap everyone. You knock off Heta's helmet and we can see that she's already been physically corrupted by the Sith weapon. Shae then pushes Heta into the crystals so that they both get electrocuted (?) plus Shae also gets stabbed by Heta in the process. Heta dies surprisingly easily from the crystal zaps, while Shae stumbles back into the room one more time to expire tragically in Jekiah's arms (after uttering some appropriately dramatic last words).

While my description above is a bit flippant, I thought it was an appropriate ending for a character as important as Shae Vizla, who's been with us since the pre-launch trailers, sparred both against us and by our side in Shadow of Revan, as well as fighting Arcann's skytroopers for us on Darvannis. The way she became obsessed with hunting down Heta personally was ultimately her tragic weakness. She clearly never became fully comfortable in her leadership role and relished the opportunity too much to just run off and hunt on her own again.

I've seen some discourse here whether it wouldn't have been better if we as the player character got to stand judge over her, and as far as that one goes - I'm kinda eh. The stereotypical light side choice of all being forgiven and her coming back into the Alliance wouldn't have worked here - as she says herself, she doesn't think she has anything to be sorry for, and both the Republic and Empire were very pissed at her as well. I can see why a dark side scenario of killing her could've been appealing for vengeful characters, but I think whatever the outcome/fallout with Heta and the Ordos would've been from that would then have felt unsatisfying in a different way. Basically, I was fine with Shae having that particular spotlight for a moment (not like I personally cared about hashing it out with Heta myself for the umpteenth time anyway) and being able to respond to her dying words with either respect, affection or a variant of "I would've preferred to kill you myself, but whatever" worked well enough for me.

While the Mandalorians deal with the expiration of their Mandalore and any remaining Hidden Chain forces, you continue onwards alone. You find a trail of dead Jadus acolytes left behind by Malgus, which segues into a section where you play as him fighting his way towards the room with the machine.

When he arrives, he's confronted by a vision of the Empress or Emperor, his former master, but he successfully dispels it to identify his real opponent: Darth Jadus. A duel between the two of them ensues, during which you play as Malgus and win. (Though Malgus is panting like an old man at the end, which made me chuckle.)

He picks up the holocron and inserts it into the machine before sitting down in the chair and starting it up again, which is when our character arrives. You can approve of him using the machine or try to stop him, but something odd happens anyway - you realise that the machine hasn't really been on, but you seem to be trapped in some kind of illusion projected by the Sith meditation sphere hanging above you. Another vision appears, this one of Darth Malgus' old master (whom he killed in the Return cinematic), Darth Vindican, who warns you about Malgus' treachery, but the latter urges that you just need to get out of this together.

What follows is a very fascinating descent into Malgus' psyche. You attack the meditation sphere's anchors around the room but to no success, and instead more visions seem to spring forth from Malgus' brain, including of his former rival Lord Adraas from the Deceived novel. He gets lost in trying to fight it and even attacks you, forcing you to beat some sense back into him. However, he then immediately sees another ghost from his past: Eleena Daaru, his old Twi'lek lover (also from Deceived and the old trailer of the same name). He seems to briefly get distracted by her affections but eventually kills her again, just like he did in life.

This section is so incredibly cool if you're familiar with some of the lore involved. I read the tie-in novels years ago so it's not like everything was still fresh on my mind, but as things slowly started to come back to me, I became more and more engrossed. Oh right, it's the guy from the Return cinematic. Lord Adraas who...? Oh right, that guy! Now all that's missing is Eleena - and oh snap, there she is. 

I do wonder how well this section lands for people less familiar with the background material. Presumably more people have seen the trailers than read the tie-in novels, so I can imagine some being able to make the connections to those at least, but there are probably even more who didn't recognise any of these characters from Malgus' past. While the in-game context makes it clear enough who they are and why they matter(ed) to Malgus, I imagine it must be somewhat less impactful if you're only just meeting them all for the first time so to speak. 

Back in orbit, the fleet is noticing increasing levels of power from the fortress, and your faction's leader wants to order a strike of the location to take the machine out, though Arn/Anri and others warn them that you and other good people are still down there.

Meanwhile on the surface, you and Malgus are confronted by a vision of Jadus next, and you realise that Malgus didn't actually kill him - Jadus is sitting in the meditation sphere and causing all these visions. His projection tells you that he's modified the machine so that it won't just awaken the Force in people but will also fill them with terror of both the Jedi and Sith, with Jadus offering the only way out.

You fight and win against this projection, which results in the real Jadus leaving in the meditation sphere, while Malgus sits down in the machine again. You can (unsuccessfully) try to stop him one more time, but he does manage to call out to the galaxy. We see a number of shots from various locations with known characters reacting to the voice in their head, from Satele Shan and her students (hi, Syl) to the overseers on Korriban. (It's been pointed out that it's strange that Overseer Ragate is alive here when we seemingly killed her in the Korriban Incursion flashpoint. I guess the old lady is more robust than we gave her credit for and was only "defeated" to eventually get up again. Or the devs forgot that she was supposed to be dead. Take your pick.)

I really liked how the views of various other locations also incorporate past choices into the scene. We see Petra on Ord Mantell, alone or with her sister Mina by her side. In the Odessen Force Enclave, we see Sana-Rae and Kira, but depending on if they are alive/you invited them, you might also have Arcann and Senya, and/or Jemala and Ora in the background.

Now that everyone knows that the machine is on, your old faction's leadership orders that the fleet bombard the fortress. You and Malgus get buried under a bunch of rocks (with it being notable that even as a non-Force user, the Force seems to have been awakened in you) and credits roll. When you exit, you just appear on Odessen.

Whew, that's a bit of a cliffhanger, isn't it? I'll admit that this part was a bit disappointing to me, not so much because I'm against cliffhangers in principle, but just because of how utterly detached it is from the rest of the game. What I mean by that is that there's always a bit of a clash between the single-player story and the open world MMO elements - the story might tell you that you're in a race to save the planet, but you can opt out of following that storyline any time to do something else without any negative effects. However, it's one thing for the player to decide to break their immersion for a bit and another for the game to do it for you.

Imagine if Knights of the Fallen Empire chapter one had been released as a standalone back in the day, with chapter two coming out a week later. Imagine ending with your character being frozen in carbonite in the story, and then being spat out on the fleet just to be told to come back later to find out what's "canonically" supposed to be happening to you right now. It just feels wrong to me. Maybe it will make more sense when 8.0 comes out and future players will have a smooth transition from that being-buried-under-rocks scene to whatever aftermath comes next, but right now it feels a bit bad.

All that said, as a whole I found this update pretty damn brilliant. We'd been building towards this for such a long time, with so many different characters with different motivations pursuing their own agendas, it was bound to be epic and Broadsword delivered with what's probably the biggest cast featured in a single story update since the game's launch. Who'd have thought we'd be eating this well fifteen years into the game's life? Shae and Heta's arc finally reached a satisfying conclusion, and I think Malgus is supposed to be dead as well now, though I'm not 100% sure with him. It would be a good time for him to go in my opinion, after that nostalgia trip through his past.

The sudden cliffhanger aside, I'm okay with not everything being tied up in a neat bow. What happened to Tau? I have no doubt that we'll be dealing with Rivix again, but she just seemed to disappear without any fanfare. Do we still have reason to care about the Kateen siblings now that Ri'kan finally got fed up with Heta and they've both run away? I guess we'll see sooner or later, though I suppose the more pressing questions are how our character survives being bombarded from orbit and what impact the broadcast from Nul's machine had on the wider galaxy.

Also, even though I just wrote over 4000 words about Legacy Reborn, I do think I'll have more to say about it still, as well as about Legacy Sith as a whole, now that its story has finally come to a conclusion. Stay tuned!