Where Has All the (Manic)Time Gone?

Having completed every last one of my Galactic Season 10 goals, and having made the decision to dial things back for Season 11, I've been feeling strangely liberated over the last couple of weeks. I can actually come up with my own goals again - goals that I can start and stop at any time, instead of merely trying to figure out how to get through a massive in-game checklist efficiently enough that I can still catch a full night's sleep by the end of it.

As a result of this, I've been playing less but have been enjoying it more, which led my mind down a weird path: Have I involuntarily been reducing my own enjoyment of the game by trying to do too much? If only there was a way to track my play time... oh wait.

More than seven years ago I made a post about how I'd installed an app called ManicTime to track my gaming habits - and then promptly went on to never mention it again. I've referred to it occasionally when writing the end-of-year round-ups for my WoW blog, to figure out whether I'd spent more time playing the modern version of the game or Classic, but I never really looked at anything in great detail. However, I'm still using the same PC I had back then, and I've allowed the app to gather data all this time. Time to have a look!

It didn't take long to tickle the following graph out of ManicTime, showing my SWTOR play hours from February 2019 to June 2026, grouped by month:

So uh... it's a lot! You can see that my play time definitely increased after I started doing seasons on all servers, but there's a lot going on there in terms of ups and downs, so I decided to look more closely at what exactly happened when.

As I already mentioned, my first point of reference was February 2019, which I talked about in the post I linked a few paragraphs up, where I was slightly embarrassed about having accumulated about 130 hours of gaming time in a single month, split between SWTOR and Elder Scrolls Online. Ironically, those 66 hours played ended up being one of the lower data points for SWTOR in the chart.

Over the next few months, my monthly play time only increased, hitting a peak of about 120 hours per month played throughout May and June, which I can only chuck up to me feeling energised with excitement about the (then upcoming) Onslaught expansion at the time, which is something I did write about.

However, this excitement didn't last and my play time started to drop again soon after, hitting the chart's third lowest point in September 2019, a month in which I played less than thirty hours of SWTOR. This makes sense in so far as WoW Classic launched at the end of August, which had me super excited and hogged all my attention for a while, to the point that I was probably only logging into SWTOR for scheduled group content. In a normal week I generally attend three ops nights with my guild which last about two hours each, which in turn adds up to 24 hours of play time in a month even if I do nothing else, so that maths checks out.

My play time increased again when Onslaught actually launched, though that peak did not rise as high as the one for the pre-expansion excitement. The chart's second biggest peak comes in the first half of 2020, which makes sense as this was when the UK went into lockdown because of Covid. While I was still working more or less as normal, just from home, I did have more time to play due to no longer having to commute, and many guildies who were unable to engage in their usual in-person socialising activities were constantly online, making my SWTOR experience feel as alive as it has ever been.

Things dropped off for me in the second half of the year, because while Covid was still a thing, I'd been recruited into a guild in WoW Classic (after having hit a bit of a lull in that game before) and became super active there, once again at the expense of SWTOR. Basically that whole "slump" period from August 2020 to August 2021 was caused by my WoW Classic focus.

There was a brief activity spike in September 2021, though I'm not entirely sure what the reason for that was. There was a Total Galactic War during that month which had me binging on SWTOR for at least a week, and I did also write about being excited for Legacy of the Sith.

Again that pre-expansion excitement didn't last, however, as I got pre-occupied with WoW Classic once more (which had reached the Burning Crusade by that point), though my big investment in that would eventually peter out a few months after that for a number of different reasons.

This leads us to the lowest point on the chart in November 2021, where I apparently played fewer than 20 hours of SWTOR, meaning I likely didn't even do all my usual group activities that month. This makes sense though, as we usually take a bit of a break from ops in the weeks immediately leading up to an expansion, and at the time, Legacy of the Sith was supposed to come out in early December, until it was suddenly delayed until February.

When LotS finally launched in February, I did get active again and my activity continued to rise all the way until May, which I think I can definitely "blame" on Galactic Season 2 and my project to progress the seasonal track on all servers, as the expansion itself infamously launched with not that much content and wouldn't have kept me that busy for that long.

Once my goals were achieved, activity dropped again, with patch 7.1 only producing a tiny bump - I was not happy with the game at the time. But then Galactic Season 3 arrived and I was off to the races once again! And played even more when I decided to also do the meta objective to complete 100 weeklies on all servers.

I'm not going to keep talking about every single peak and drop after that, but I do think it's clear from the patterns on the chart that a new season always increases my time investment. The biggest peak on the entire chart was March 2024 when I launched myself into doing a Galactic Season on six servers at once for the first time, apparently spending close to 220 hours in game that month. That's seven hours per day, every day. How I pulled this off while also working and sleeping, I don't know, but that's what it says.

Anyway, I do think the chart shows that doing Galactic Seasons across multiple servers has indeed massively increased my hours spent in the game. (Compare this to the first season, which just resulted in a more or less horizontal line at the sixty hour mark for four months.) The part of the graph that shows my activity pre-Legacy of the Sith has some peaks and troughs, but most of the time my activity levels hover between 50 and 100 hours of play each month. And I have really fond memories of those times!

Yet ever since Legacy of the Sith, the average seems to have shifted closer to being between 100 and 150 hours, meaning I've spent almost twice as much time on the game, without necessarily having twice as much fun. I often wonder why I feel like I don't have as much time to blog and make videos as I used to and um... yeah, that looks like a big culprit of that to be honest! And I definitely do think that I want to reclaim some of that time to do other things.

I'm not saying I regret spending all that time on Galactic Seasons. I do think in the earlier seasons in particular, the spikiness of the graph shows some real excitement on my part, getting super hyped and binging hard, with a matching drop-off in activity and recovery period afterwards. But I think the graph for the last two years also tells a slightly different story, with the peaks getting smaller and the drops between them more shallow. I've just been playing and grinding consistently because that's what I do now I guess. I think I'd like to move away from viewing the game like that for sure.

A Good Time to Come Back to SWTOR

A couple of months ago I got a very surprising DM, from a player who had been in Twin Suns Squadron with me throughout 2012 and 2013. He'd decided to finally get back into the game and wanted to re-join the guild as well. I've got to admit that he and I hadn't been super close back then, so after more than a decade I barely remembered more than that he was English and had always seemed kinda nice, but that was still more than enough reason to welcome him back with open arms.

Our guild has pretty low churn, so it's not unusual for someone to take a prolonged break - sometimes several years long, even - and then come back and be happy to find that they are still in the guild and able to immediately pick things back up where they left off. But someone coming back after thirteen years was definitely a longer absence than anyone had ever returned from, so his level 55 trooper did need a re-invite, which I was happy to provide.

Since then, he's been online most days and is often hanging out in the social channels. I was honestly pretty delighted to see him go through all the expansions he'd missed in real time, based on which achievements were popping up in guild chat each evening. Ooh, he just finished Shadow of Revan! Ooh, he's doing chapters now! Etc.

I'm pretty sure he's fully caught up by now, but the achievements have kept on coming. The other night I congratulated him on unlocking Bessi, and he replied with something along the lines of "I just keep finding new things to do; it's great!"

While someone coming back after this long may be an unusual situation, I've also noticed an uptick in more "regular" returners, people who've just been away for months or a couple of years at most. Steamcharts also recently registered the highest player count for SWTOR since around 2023.

It just feels like a good time for that kind of thing. Knowing that there'll be a new expansion at the end of the year has people excited. If you got bored of waiting for story updates at some point during Legacy of the Sith and checked out, that storyline is now wrapped up and you can come back and play through everything you haven't seen yet in one go.

Additionally, we're also at the end of Galactic Season 10 now, with Season 11 probably starting in August, and both of these have been bringing back companions from previous seasons, giving people another chance to pick them up now if they missed them before. With only a few weeks to go it's too late to organically complete the Season 10 track in its entirety, but the companions are right at the start of the track so it's not too late to play a bit to just unlock those.

As a reminder, these are the followers you can still unlock from now until July 27th:

• Altuur Zok Adon, the companion from the very first Galactic Season that ran from April to September 2021,
• PH4-LNX, who was originally available to earn between October 2022 and March 2023.

Season 11 will then give you a chance to grab these two companions if you missed them before:

• Fen Zeil, who was previously earnable between February and July 2022.
• Amity, who was the main reward from Galactic Season 4 between March and August 2023.

 So if you haven't played in a while and happen to read this... I'm just saying!

PvP Season 10 Ponderings

I haven't talked about PvP seasons in a while, mostly because the devs haven't changed anything about them since stretching out the reward track back in season six and the objectives are always the same, so there isn't really much to talk about from my point of view.

I also still have the same concerns about the state of PvP that I elaborated on in this post from two years ago, primarily as far as the state of queues is concerned. I guess things have at least remained stable, as it's been two years and I'm still managing to get both my warzone and my arena weeklies done, though the lowbie queues still feel like they take forever. It's particularly bad when I'm approaching the top end of the lowbie bracket and have to make sure to not accidentally out-level it before I'm ready, meaning I have to twiddle my thumbs while waiting for matches to pop instead of at least doing some quests in the meantime.

It makes me wonder whether I wouldn't enjoy the PvP season more if I just stopped trying to go for the arena achievement, like I did in a few of the early PvP seasons... but I do kind of like the gameplay (in the lowbie brackets at least) and the extra rewards for completing the meta achievement are so massive it really feels like leaving money on the table to skip just this one part of it.

In general, PvP is just suffering from feeling a bit stale at this point in my opinion. Did you know that it's been close to eight years since we last got a new warzone map? The last time we got a new PvP gameplay mode was with the Proving Grounds over ten years ago. Even the introduction of PvP seasons happened three and a half years ago at this point - and yes, I still miss my MVP votes. I get that the SWTOR team is small and that they have a lot on their plate as it is, but still... I also have a lot of things to spend my time on as a player, and PvP with nothing new happening is definitely getting a bit boring. I wonder if 8.0 will include anything interesting for PvPers?

Anyway, so as not to sound all doom and gloom, jumping into PvP again for the start of the season has also been a reminder of what I do still love about it. Like pugging, it's a bit of a window into the server community, showing you which guilds are very active, who's that one guy that seems to play absolutely every single day, and so on and so forth. (Back in the day, PvP was how I found the guild that Mr Commando and I now lead together, so don't underestimate the ways in which it can bring people together.)

I particularly love seeing all the "meme" characters with ridiculous names or looks - I'm not always a fan of that kind of thing, but in the context of PvP I do tend to find it funny. Try telling anyone to focus fire the guy with the below name for example:

I was also amused to see "Agent Mako" looking exactly like the bounty hunter companion, and chuckled at "Caterina de'medic" the Commando healer. Only today I faced off against Spiderman in Huttball. Sometimes that kind of thing manages to take the sting out of even a bad loss.

And of course, there are the matches that are just super memorable. Like the one I dubbed "closest Novare Coast win ever", which we won with only 2% integrity left on our own bunker, and when the enemy's bunker hit zero they had just killed off our last defender and were already three quarters of the way into flipping one of our turrets. They were just seconds too slow!

Or the Voidstar I played on my Merc healer alt where in a highly unusual turn of events, the enemy left me almost completely alone for most of the match. That practically never happens, and I remember thinking "I wonder what kinds of healing numbers I'll end up doing when left to my own devices like this" and the answer was over fifteen million. I was pretty chuffed! (And we won.)

Galactic Season 10 Review & GS 11 Plans

We've got a little less than two months left of Galactic Season 10, but I'm once again getting close to completing all my personal goals (I've got about 20 weekly objectives left to do for the meta on Darth Malgus, and the other servers are all 5-10 levels away from completing the basic track), so I wanted to take a look back at how things went.

Sadly there's no two ways about it: this has been my least favourite season for a while. I didn't think it was going to be this bad when it was announced, but the objective structure just did not work for me at all, as I originally discussed in my first impressions post. Galactic Seasons have always encouraged me to go out of my comfort zone a bit and I was fine with that, but this season in particular was so far out I could barely spot the borders of my comfort zone in the distance.

In the past, I'd usually complete at least one or two weekly objectives early in the week without even trying, just by being active and doing other things, but this season that just hasn't worked at all. I'd log in on Saturday morning to see where I'm at and find that I'd literally be on 0/7 with not even partial progress towards anything. To be clear, this might have been a me thing and others may have found this season's objectives a breeze to complete, but for this veteran player at least it was just no good.

(I also still can't believe they made me kill all the Dark vs Light bosses a fourth time. At the end of Season 8 I wrote: "And by god, if they ask us to kill all the DvL bosses a fourth time... I actually don't know how to finish this sentence, but I still hope they come up with something different for us to do next time." Then they gave us a one-season break from them, just to bring them back again for Season 10.)

Naturally, all this has meant that my cross-server play experience also got worse. I wasn't upset enough to stop, but only because I didn't really want to abandon the progress I'd already made. I did however resolve to not do the next season on multiple servers, since we already know that it's going to be very similar in terms of structure.

In some ways, this has been kind of difficult to admit to myself, because I've been doing this whole cross-server seasons thing for over four years at this point. I like habits and routines, which is why I can find it very difficult to break them once they are fully formed. And it wasn't just a habit, it was genuinely fun... at times.

I've come to realise that I've probably been a slowly boiling frog in regards to doing seasons on multiple servers for some time now. When I first started doing it back in 2022, it was just a silly and novel way to enjoy the game. I wasn't that serious about it; I was just delighted by how easy Galactic Season 2 had been to progress compared to Season 1, so it seemed nothing but logical to follow a guildie's example and do the whole thing again on another server. I was also prevented from going too crazy by the fact that I didn't have any max-level characters on many of the other servers, so objectives to run dailies and the like were not even an option yet. I needed to use the buyout option for several levels to actually complete the track everywhere.

During Season 3 I got really into it and even pushed myself towards completing 100 weeklies on every server, but basically realised immediately afterwards that this had been a bit too much and that I probably wouldn't want to do that again (until Season 9 that is). In general, I experienced a pattern of pushes and pulls as far as Galactic Seasons go, being excited and binging on them some weeks while approaching something close to burnout in others.

For a while I thought this was all on me and needing to be able to regulate my game time better, but I've realised there's also the fact that my legacies on the other servers have matured over the years. In my early days of playing there, the whole experience was very exciting, seasons or no seasons: learning the culture of different servers, restarting a new legacy from scratch - these were all new experiences, while by now, playing an alt on any server doesn't feel that different to me than playing any alt on Darth Malgus.

I do also think that over time, the devs have - very slowly and incrementally - made seasons a little harder to complete. I don't think that's a big deal and the system is still very forgiving overall, but when you're playing on multiple servers, everything has a multiplier, meaning that a change that makes things take five minutes longer on one server results in "needing" to play for half an hour longer overall for the same result on all servers.

The first of these changes was the release of the Shae Vizla server in 2023, which meant that the game went from five servers to six and I instantly needed 20% more time to do all my daily tasks on "all" servers. Then with Galactic Season 6 in 2024, they nerfed the daily reputation Conquest objective, which had been an easy way to get your seasons daily done quickly if you were short on time. Galactic Season 7 saw a shift from "flavour" themes to gameplay-centred ones, which meant that the seasonal weekly objective(s) suddenly took significantly more time. Sure, you could argue that doing one bounty contract mission or one uprising isn't that much of a time investment, but compared to say, getting eight season points for simply visiting another player's stronghold, it was a big difference. Remember when we'd get seasons points for literally sitting AFK for a couple of minutes?! Those were the days.

And then of course we have this season, which turned the "earn 200k Conquest points" weekly objective, which used to basically be a freebie if you did anything at all, into another thing you actively have to work for via grinding. So basically, I'm a bit tired.

I'm hoping that limiting myself to Darth Malgus for Galactic Season 11, which will require literally only a small fraction of the effort I've been putting into seasons for the past few years, will allow me to reclaim some of my time and get back on track in terms of my enjoyment of both seasons and the game in general. Including on the other servers! I mentioned previously that I'd really like to finish some more class stories over there, but that's not something that's been meshing well with spending all my time doing seasons objectives over and over. I'd like to be able to work on that in my own time, whenever I feel like it, without having to worry about hitting a certain content quota every day.

The Dantooine Crash Site Five Months Later

It's been more than five months since the Jannimak crash-landed on Dantooine and I wrote about how I thought it was bold of Broadsword to experiment with a new form of endgame, though I also saw the potential for problems with the way certain mechanics worked. I wanted to take some time to look back at how things have panned out for me in practice, because not everything has gone as expected, at least for me personally. I obviously can't speak for everyone.

Firstly, I've not been as persistently engrossed by the crash site as I expected, and I think it's the first in-game reputation grind they've added that I didn't max out in close to the minimum amount of time required. At the time of me writing this, my reputation rank on Darth Malgus is still only Hero (the 4th out of 6 in total).

Usually, with a new daily area, Mr Commando and I would do the weekly mission there every week and max out our reputation in short order. He's not into SWTOR anymore to the degree that I am, but that's the kind of thing he still logs in for. However, Mr Commando didn't like the crash site on Dantooine at all. I did briefly mention our abysmal run through the area together in my original post, and he basically told me he never wanted to go back there again. Countless deaths to overtuned encounters aside, he just didn't like the whole gameplay of it one bit I think.

There was one week when there was a seasons objective to do 15 Dantooine encounters, and since I figured that this is something that should be pretty fun to do as a group, I co-opted the latter half of my guild's social night for it. Even that turned out to be a bit of a mixed bag though. It's true that having a dozen people in an ops group made every encounter pretty quick to do, but it was also like herding cats, as people's experience levels ranged from "had been grinding the rep to the max every week" to "had never stepped foot in the area before" and it was challenging to keep everyone working together. The newbies needed guidance on where to go and what to do for each step of the introductory quest chain, while the more experienced players constantly wanted to wander off somewhere else for reasons such as "oh, I see that one encounter is up over there, I still need that one for the achievement so I'll just pop over there quickly". In the end, people said it had been fun, but I felt exhausted and didn't really want to go back to do it like that again.

So I've mostly been on my own in terms of working with GSI (the other one), and I kind of found that it didn't gel very well with the way I usually play. For example, long-time readers of the blog will know that I'm very motivated/guided by Conquest. When I decide to play a character in a given week, I usually want to play them enough to earn 100k conquest points and not much more, and then I switch to an alt. And for a conquest player... Dantooine is kind of meh!

You get a small amount of points for each encounter you do, but you could complete that objective faster and more easily on pretty much any other planet. Aside from that you get a good chunk of points for advancing the reputation from each encounter completed, but that's only once per day. At the same time, the place lacks many sources of easy points that you'd find pretty much everywhere else: there's no "complete missions" objective, nothing for killing enemies, and no harvesting nodes to gather (except for a few enemies that can be bioanalysed or scavenged).

So from a Conquest point of view, the best thing to do is basically to go and do one encounter per day for the rep and leave it at that. Even that can be awkward to do because due to the limited quick travel options available, just getting to the encounter can take longer than the encounter itself sometimes, meaning I haven't always bothered.

Lest you might think that this means I haven't actually spent that much time on Dantooine, there is an aspect to this that I haven't gone into yet: As mentioned above there was a seasons objective in the first week of this season to do 15 crash site encounters, and a couple of weeks ago there was another one to do 25. And I've actually gone and done those on all servers, racking up over 250 encounters completed in those two weeks alone.

(If that makes you go "Shintar, how that does gel with you saying that you haven't been that enthused about the game and that you've been finding the current Galactic Season too grindy?", I never claimed to be an entirely logical actor. Yes, doing all those dynamic encounters was grindy as heck too, but it just happened to be something I wanted to do at the time.)

Doing this gave me a very different perspective on the zone. Firstly, it's definitely more fun and feels more "worthwhile" when you're doing more than one encounter at a time. The most entertaining thing is probably when you manage to get a "train" going with other players that just surges from one encounter to the next, dispatching each one quickly and efficiently. However, that's not something you even get a chance to experience everywhere, because which server you're on makes a huge difference.

While interest in the crash site has generally dropped off since its launch, you can still go there on Star Forge for example, and on this biggest of all servers it'll be bustling at pretty much every time of day. If you ever find yourself going to Dantooine there and it seems a tad quiet, it's usually because the game actually spun up a second PvE instance and that one doesn't have as many players in it.

Compare this to somewhere like Shae Vizla, the tiny APAC server, and it's like night and day. On Shae Vizla it was rare that I'd even run into a single other player most times. On the plus side, this taught me a lot about various encounters, because when they fly by really fast it can sometimes be hard to tell what's happening. When you're the only person doing anything on the other hand, you get to see every single stage properly and actually have to learn what to do because there's nobody else there to hold your hand or help you out. I learned to solo certain tough encounters via use of crowd control and kiting, but I'm still convinced that there are some that just aren't doable alone. There were several times I found the glacial biome stuck on the "Cryonest Matron" transition encounter for example because that one's just too overwhelming and with no groups around that area was basically dead and could no longer be played.

There was exactly one time I managed to get it down, when I think I happened to be on at around APAC prime time on a weekend and there were at least a few other people in the zone. When glacial went into transition, we all converged there and managed to take it down with the whole five of us or however many we were (not a huge number).

The other servers were all in-between. Darth Malgus and Satele Shan always felt reasonably busy. Tulak Hord had some good times and some bad times, and Leviathan was also very quiet but not quite as bad as Shae Vizla. So I don't think this area (and any similar ones Broadsword decides to create in the future) does the game any favours in terms of the perception that certain servers are dead or dying.

Another aspect of the Datooine experience that hasn't worked out quite the way I'd hoped have been the reputation rewards. It was my understanding that as you went up in levels, you'd unlock counters to the various hazards that would make all three biomes less painful to traverse on all your alts. However, this turned out to not be the case, as access to the console that gives the various immunity buffs is actually locked behind completing the intro quest chain at least up to the point where you get sent to the core on every single character.

As someone who's done encounters on Dantooine on something like twenty different alts, this meant that each and every one of them had to do at least ten encounters without any of the buffs, which in practice has meant that I've only been able to use the reputation rewards very rarely, and the vast majority of my time has been spent on foot, suffering from debuffs, regardless of my reputation rank. Needless to say, this has sucked. Fortunately this is something the devs have said they will actually rectify in the next patch, so we'll see how much that improves my experience.

Regardless of that though, the rep rewards I've actually had a chance to try have all felt kind of half-baked to be honest. Like the fact that the immunity console only lets you apply one buff at a time when the way the whole zone works encourages you to hop between different biomes every twenty to thirty minutes, meaning you have to constantly switch buffs and pay for a new one or stay in the same area way longer than makes sense.

Same thing with the weird taxi pass, only with that one the problem is the other way round: the taxi pass allows you to hop back and forth between different biomes more quickly - for half an hour. But I just said that the game encourages you to switch every twenty to thirty minutes (whenever an area transitions basically), so you buy the taxi pass to use it... once? Twice at max? All these different pieces just don't fit together in a way that makes sense to me, so I've been largely ignoring them even when I did have access. Which again, is kind of disappointing.

Finally, there's the NiM-level core boss at the end of the quest chain, for which you need to have pushed all three biomes to level three to unlock access to it for two hours at a time. People were sceptical about that setup from the beginning, but I was more sanguine about it. Truth is, it hasn't really worked out for me either, though not in exactly the way I expected.

Getting the core to be aligned isn't that much of a problem at least on Darth Malgus, as it does happen reasonably often, but the timing can be a random and that is a problem for a group of middle aged raiders with average jobs and families that usually carve out a specific time slot to do progression content with their team. Without wanting to sound judgemental, I get the impression that most of the people who have successfully tackled the core are not limited by such constraints, for example because they stream as part of their day job. This also aligns with the fact that the only time I've seen the core myself (not killed it) was when I was helping out Swtorista and friends on one of her streams.

On Darth Malgus, I've grouped up with random guildies who just happened to be online a couple of times and went inside to have a look, but we didn't even make it past any of the mini bosses. They really are super hard and you can't really expect to take them down with any old group. The buffs are supposed to help, but you'd really need the whole group to have them, and I clearly underestimated how many of the people I run ops with just don't engage with casual content like a rep grind at all. So you've got all these hurdles of needing people to be able to be online at the right time, they need to be sufficiently skilled, and they need to have had an interest in grinding the rep, and that's just too many obstacles. I'm not personally upset about this because I don't feel like I'm missing much, but it does feel a bit like a design failure to have this content that will only ever be seen by a miniscule part of the player base, not just because it's hard but because it also has these additional hurdles to access on top of the difficulty. 

A couple of months ago I filled out a dev survey about Dantooine and I did put a lot of what I said above in the answers to the questions there. One question that stood out to me was that they asked whether I thought that Broadsword should invest in making more planets/zones like the Dantooine crash site, and my answer was "not exactly like this, no" because I think it has too many issues that the devs are unlikely to want to go back and address. (I was actually very surprised when they announced on stream that they were going back to change things like the intro quest chain being mandatory on every single character.) I still think the idea of dynamic encounters as endgame has potential, and as I said, the basic gameplay of running around with a group of people to do encounters can be very fun. I just feel like on Dantooine, the puzzle has too many pieces that don't fit well together and prevent the experience from being as fun as it maybe could be.

Legacy Level 50 on All Servers

I said at the start of the year that it was going to happen this season, and it has indeed happened: I'm now legacy level 50 on all servers. The truly amazing thing is that I actually managed to capture the moment it happened on both Tulak Hord and Leviathan, when I'd previously failed to do so on my four other legacies. 

Tulak Hord was the first across the finish line, about three weeks ago. The big ding happened after I completed a round of CZ-198 dailies.

Leviathan was about one legacy level behind, so it made sense that it didn't tick over until this week. In this case it happened at the end of a random master mode flashpoint I'd queued for because it was a seasons objective. I got into a Battle of Rishi run that was very smooth and quick.

As hinted at before, I think my next goal for the other servers will be to get one of every class levelled and through the class story. Not something I expect to achieve any time soon or on any predictable timeline really, but I'm just talking about it as a vague thing to strive towards over time. As it stands, I need to create a bunch more alts first as I don't even have one of every class on every server yet. I'm not missing that many though, and I already created a few new alts this week to start making some progress towards this new goal.

We'll Be Going to Ryloth in 8.0!

Yesterday was dev stream day once again - I'm usually awaiting these with baited breath, but as alluded to in my last post, I actually feel like I'm a bit behind story-wise right now, so my reaction this time was more something along the lines of, "What, it's already that time again?"

That's not to say that I didn't still enjoy the stream. We got a bit more of a preview of 7.9's story update, which is expected to go live at the end of May. As expected, it will feature the big showdown of all the different factions that's been building up to for a long time now. We'll even get to play as some of those other characters to mix things up - they had a preview of someone running around as Lana and a short clip of someone fighting as Malgus. We'll see how that goes! The HK-55 bonus chapter came out almost ten years ago now, and then they never did anything with the idea of playing as another character ever again. I enjoyed it at the time, but on replays it got a bit tedious, though I'm not sure whether that had anything to do with the mechanics or was just due to the chapter format itself. Either way, playing as all these other characters should at the very least be novel.

They were also talking a bit about 7.9.1 already, which they justified by saying that there won't be a dedicated stream for that patch. To be fair though, we already knew that it'll be the start of Galactic Season 11 and that it'll be more or less the same as Galactic Season 10, only with Fen Zeil and Amity instead of Altuur and PH4-LNX. About the only piece of real news was that the DvL bosses won't be returning for that season... yay, I guess?

In technical news, we were once again reassured that the DirectX 12 work is still continuing and that they are hoping to have an alpha for people to test later in the year. There was also an article on the official site about a month ago that talked a bit about the nitty gritty of the work involved in this, which I thought was quite interesting. I hadn't realised that in many ways this update seemingly requires them to rebuild the game's visuals from the ground up.

However, by far the most exciting part of the stream (to me anyway) was the additional information about 8.0. We still know only broad strokes, but honestly, at this point every morsel of information is exciting to me:

• The level cap will indeed increase by five levels (to 85) like in previous expansions.
• The new planet will be Ryloth, the home world of the Twi'leks, and it will come with dynamic encounters.
• There'll be a new operation with three bosses that will launch with story and veteran mode.
• The way we gear up will change again, but they want it to be an evolution of the current system, not a complete do-over like we've had in previous expansions, and it should be more organic to figure out in game, without necessarily needing a guide.
• There'll be new abilities and changes to class balance.
• The story will take a new direction but won't be completely disconnected from what's going on right now, which is why they can't go into it until we've had a chance to play through 7.9.

Ryloth as seen in season 1 of Clone Wars. 

They expect to have an 8.0 PTS up in summer, where we'll get to test a lot of the new stuff, and there'll be more reveals to come. The list of new features above is not exhaustive - as established in the last dev stream, they just don't want to spill all the beans at once.

The Ryloth reveal personally excited me the most (as you can tell from this post's title), I guess because for once it's a planet I actually already know, from the Clone Wars TV show. I'm not sure it'll end up being the most visually interesting - it's kind of rocky, so they might be able to re-use some assets from Ruhnuk - but it's the home world of the Twi'leks and I love Twi'leks, so that's a win by itself.

I still don't know how soon I'll manage to get more characters fully caught up to where I want them to be. Being excited doesn't change the fact that I've got a lot going on right now, but the news are definitely encouraging to me personally. For more details on what else was said on the stream, feel free to peruse one of the links below:

• VOD on Twich or YouTube
• Written summary on the official website
• Swtorista
• Today in TOR
• Vulkk

Treading Water

I feel like that's what I'm currently doing in SWTOR, which is why things have been a bit quiet on this blog. I wanted to reflect a bit on why that is.

Primarily, there are two things going on: The first is simply that I'm spending less time in SWTOR in general, just because there are other things I'd rather be doing at the moment. People who also follow my WoW blog will have seen that I've still been active there for example.

I hate comparing those two MMOs because they do very different things on a very different scale and appeal to me in different ways, but it's hard to deny that WoW simply has a lot on offer right now, and if you like at least some of the new content they're currently releasing (which I do), there are plenty of reasons to log in.

Comparatively, I'm in a bit of a lull with SWTOR. Galactic Season 10 is going on of course, but as I already hinted at in a previous post, I've been less enthused by that than I expected. Every week I look at the available objectives and every week there's little that excites me (unless the master mode flashpoint objective is up). Mostly I've been running a lot of dailies, which is not one of my favourite activities and can be quite dull and time-consuming across multiple servers.

I've been really surprised by just how much this season's objective structure has been bothering me. I think it's because I'd kind of settled into a pattern of progressing the season - on the other servers in particular - in a way that wasn't necessarily optimal but allowed me to advance unrelated personal goals at the same time.

To give an example of what I'm talking about, if there were weekly objectives to do fifteen missions as a smuggler, kill one hundred mobs with a healer companion and do fifteen dynamic encounters, the "optimal" way to tackle this in the least amount of time would've been to do fifteen dynamic encounters as a smuggler with a healer companion. However, I still had the freedom to go, "nah, I don't feel like doing DEs this week" and just progress a smuggler character's class story instead. That choice was slower and I'd only get two out of the three objectives done, but it was more enjoyable to me that way.

The strict focus on Altuur and PH4-LNX this season really locks me into doing activities that work with those two (as I already bemoaned in the post linked above), and there just aren't as many options, which is simply a bit of a drain on me. I've repeatedly found myself wondering whether I really want to keep at this on multiple servers, but then I look at my progress and see that I'm already past the halfway mark everywhere and surely I can just hang in there a little longer... not wanting to break a streak can be one hell of a drug.

The sad irony is that I actually thought that Master's Enigma, the last story update, was really great and I still haven't written a post about it because I've only played through it once. I've got a draft which I meant to finish after playing through it another two or three times, but... seasons objectives need doing now! 

I thought a patch with both a story update and a new season launching at the same time would be a cool thing, but in practice it's kind of stopped me from enjoying the story as fully as I would've liked, as I have only so many hours a week I want to devote to SWTOR and the FOMO aspect of Galactic Seasons has led me to prioritise that over replaying the story, even if it's less fun, which is just a weird situation to be in.

I expect that I'll push through at my current pace until the end of the season, but whenever GS11 comes around I'll need to have a long, hard think about whether I want to continue bothering with it beyond my home server. 

A Week on Oricon

One of last week's weekly seasons objectives was "Seat of the Hutts Daily Sweeps", which requires you to either do the Oricon weekly twice or the Ossus weekly once. I've always thought this was a strange equivalence because since 7.0 the Ossus weekly takes less than ten minutes to complete (depending on your choice of dailies you don't even have to fight any mobs for it), while a single run of Oricon can require slogging through a full 100 mobs or so if you don't have stealth or someone else happened to come through just before you to clear things out already. And then you're asking me to do the one that's already longer twice?

I guess the one thing that Oricon has going for it is that it's more accessible since you unlock access to the area earlier in the story. On my secondary legacies on the other servers I didn't used to have access to Ossus, so I did some Oricon runs for seasons there in the past - though less so recently, precisely because of how tedious the whole affair tended to be. Since the release of the Bessi venture made daily access fully account-wide (meaning it applies cross-server), I could've just gone to Ossus to make my life easier, but I still feel a bit bad about "skipping ahead", even if it's just to do dailies.

This week I happened to have a few days off around Easter, so I thought why not take a few alts through Oricon since I have a bit of time? Only a couple of them had done the story before, so by the end of the week I had taken four new characters through the storyline, two on Republic side and two of my Imperials. I didn't do this all at once but staggered progress over the course of several days, and it occurred to me that I probably hadn't spent this many hours on Oricon since it first came out and I was farming reputation on all my original (then) max-level alts.

I did feel like the craziness was rubbing off on me a bit after a few days, but overall it wasn't a bad experience. Lord Hargrev's voice acting still holds up as top notch over a decade later, and I always love the bit where he goes: "Knives! They can't even resist carving one another like roasts!" Though it's distracting nowadays how much his assistant sounds exactly like Lana, not just because it's the same voice actress but also because she uses the exact same kind of voice/tone that would later become Lana's.

Being able to combine the storyline with the dailies and weekly these days is a peculiar experience that I already talked about about one and a half years ago, when I first went through Oricon that way on my Shae Vizla main. Back then I did find it a bit frustrating how all the missions tended to bug out one way or another since they had clearly never been designed to be done at the same time - this wasn't something that was impossible to overcome, but it still required me to backtrack and redo things several times.

Since I already knew what to expect this time, I was able to take some notes on the best way to circumvent the bugs tied to each mission, and I thought I might share my learnings here as well, even if it's an extremely niche topic.

[DAILY] Fallen Forces

For this one, the objectives for the story and daily quest are exactly the same and there are no issues, both progress at the same time. 

[DAILY] False Paradise

For this one, unfortunately there seems to be no way to avoid doing the phased bit twice. The story mission requires you to loot ten bioenergy enhancers while the daily requires only five. The problem is that interacting with the quest items will only progress one mission while still locking you out of progressing the other one if they were both at the same step. So the best way I found of doing this was to loot five items for the daily, use them, and then go ahead and do the phased bit for the daily mission. After exiting, any spare bioenergy enhancers you may have already collected towards the other quest will have been deleted from your inventory so you'll need to collect a full ten again, but at least you'll be able to do so straight away without resetting anything.

[DAILY] Dread Engines

Funnily enough, this quest is the exact opposite of the above. You need to destroy three/five terraforming devices, but if you enter the phased bit while one mission is done with that step and the other one isn't, both of them will bug out. Bad! Instead you have to make sure to destroy the full five terraforming devices for the story mission before entering the cave. You should then be able to progress both the daily and the story at the same time inside. 

[DAILY] The Tower’s Core

This one is probably the trickiest one to get right. The first thing to note is that when you enter the control room at the top of the tower, only the daily mission will update to the next step, so you'll want to instantly head back out of the phase and walk back in a second time, which will then cause the story mission to update as well. Inside you can disable the defences and fight Commander Zaoron for both missions at the same time with no issues. When finishing up, it's important to click the cube for the daily mission first, then interact with the panel for the story mission. If you click the panel first, you won't be able to pick up the holocron for the daily afterwards and a reset will be required.

Another thing that's worth mentioning here is that both missions require you to pick up the same unique quest item at the end, which the game doesn't allow, so what will happen once you complete the story conversation is that you'll get a pop-up saying that your inventory was full and that you got an item in the mail. Exit the phase to complete the daily (which will remove the associated item from your inventory), then pick the holocron out of the mailbox back at base before handing in the story mission. Important: You won't be able to hand in the story mission without it! In one of my earlier attempts I made the mistake of just deleting the item in the mail, thinking it was a glitch that I had been mailed a second copy. However, if you don't have this in your mission inventory, you won't be able to start the follow-up story conversation! When this happened to me, I had to reset the story mission and redo the whole tower part a second time. Don't be me. 

[HEROIC 2+] Preemptive Strike 

This is another mission that simply progresses for both story and daily mission at the same time. Phew. 

First Impressions of Galactic Season 10

I know we're already two weeks into the season, but I'm behind in terms of blog posts I want to write because with everything going on in SWTOR and the new WoW expansion (which I'm also playing), there's just way too much to do in the limited free time I have. I'm reminded of that comic where a guy looks at a pillar made of blocks representing his life, bemoaning that he doesn't have enough time for video games in his schedule, until he considers replacing the sleep slot in the last panel.

The comic in question. The "Owlturd" site no longer seems to exist, but I can still credit "Shen Comix".

Galactic Seasons are often particularly bad for this because no matter how much I tell myself that - even with my cross-server ambitions - I don't need to go quite so hard to achieve my goals and that there's plenty of time, it's still easy for me to get caught up in doing just one more objective because it was already halfway done anyway, and before I know it it's 1 a.m. and I curse myself for not being a more sensible adult.

Anyway, that is my way of saying that I jumped into the new season with gusto but almost immediately regretted it a bit and had to remind myself to step on the brakes a little. It's fun but I'm over forty now! I do need my sleep!

While I said that I didn't mind this season being a combined re-run of Seasons 1 and 3, I've got to admit it does feel a bit weird and bad to constantly claim rewards just to delete them (because I already have the Mythran armour set unlocked in collections and really don't need another copy of its belt right now).

My own crazy tendencies aside, I'm also a little worried after two weeks that this season may end up feeling somewhat grindier than previous ones. When it was said during the livestream that the "themed activities" for this season would basically be objectives to kill mobs and earn Conquest points with Altuur and PH4-LNX, I didn't think too much of it, but after two weeks of seeing these objectives in action I'm not so sure I like them.

They're not "hard" exactly - but they are a lot more demanding and restrictive than the objectives they replaced. Take the "earn 200k conquest points" weekly for example. In a regular season, I would often complete this automatically on the first or second day of the week without even really trying, just by playing the game in the way I enjoy. But earning those same Conquest points with one specific companion out is an entirely different kettle of fish.

Any group content that dismisses your companion is out: flashpoints, operations, PvP, GSF, world bosses. (Occasionally the points seem to get attributed even if your companion was forcefully dismissed, but this seems to be very inconsistent and is probably not intended.) Story content also either requires or at the very least encourages you to have a specific companion along that is not Altuur or PH4-LNX - this is also an obstacle to the "get kills with this companion out" objective.

So the only really viable things to do are to... do grindy open world solo content like heroics or dynamic encounters, probably my least favourite way of getting anything seasons-related done. Oof.

Mind you, even there you're not 100% safe. The most heart-wrenching experience I had in that regard was in week one when I was on 14 out of 15 dynamic encounters completed when I got a flashpoint pop. When I came out of the flashpoint, another dynamic encounter was active right on top of me and I was immediately in combat again. It completed and... I realised that my companion hadn't automatically been re-summoned when I came out of the flashpoint, meaning that the resulting 85k Conquest points were completely wasted as far as seasonal progress goes.

So I don't love that part. We'll see how I get on with it as the weeks progress. I did enjoy that the "do a master mode flashpoint" objective from the last season stuck around, and I had a bunch of very entertaining pugs that week. The integration of the Dantooine Crash Site into the weekly objectives was also welcome, and seeing a dozen Altuurs zerg every encounter that week was certainly amusing. I'm just wrinkling my nose a bit as I'm looking ahead at the next couple of weeks, as I fear there'll be a lot more dailies in my future.

Oh, and let's not forget that Broadsword brought the DvL bosses back yet again. Funny how they didn't mention that during the dev livestream, huh? I'm guessing they knew it wasn't going to be a popular decision and it was simply the easiest option to copy and paste that meta one more time. I've killed these buggers three times over at this point, so this will be my fourth time on Darth Malgus, not counting additional duplicate kills and the fact that I've also done some on other servers. Just ugh.

Delayed 7.8.1 Dev Livestream Reaction

Soo... there was a dev livestream over a week ago now! I did actually watch it live on my second monitor at the time, while doing an operation with my guildies, and I remember thinking "I've got to get back to this and write a post about it maybe tomorrow or on Friday" - and then things got a bit crazy.

I still wanted to jot down some thoughts on it though, even if it's belated. We know now that the patch will already drop this Tuesday, so I figured I've got to get in there before it'll be no longer relevant.

As had already been mentioned previously, the patch will be called Master's Enigma, and based on the little preview they showed without getting too spoilery, it looks like we're not yet done with Darth Nul's legacy, as she didn't just have that sanctum on Elom but apparently also a starship somewhere. We'll see how that goes!

As an aside, people always complain about there being too much time between story updates, but I've got to admit that this one time they've sped it up I'm actually sitting here thinking "wow, another story update so soon". I've only played through Galactic Threads on a few characters so far, so it feels like I've still got lots of catching up to do. Is it just me?

Anyway, the stream obviously covered a bunch of different topics related to the patch as usual, such as Spring Abundance returning with a new pet reward, the date nights with Kira and Torian, and the newest Cartel Market additions. As usual, I won't go into all of that here. There's a written summary on the official website, and Swtorista, Today in TOR and Vulkk all have their own posts as well. For me, there are just two subjects I really wanted to comment on:

Galactic Season 10 & 11

Keith informed us in his end-of-year Producer's Letter that "[the next] season will work a little differently than previous seasons" and as someone who's a bit of a connoisseur of seasons at this point, I was very curious to find out what that meant.

I'd had some conversations with friends in which we speculated about different possibilities and "bringing back old rewards" was one of those, so finding out that Season 10 will - in terms of rewards - be a mash-up of Seasons 1 and 3 with just a few new rewards added was not exactly a shock. (Season 11 will do the same thing with Season 2 and 4.)

It's not something that's personally exciting to me as someone who already completed all those seasons the first time around, but at the same time I'm actually surprisingly sanguine about it. I could easily imagine others who already have all those rewards being bitter about it ("Not only do they use seasons to recycle old content, now the seasons themselves are recycled too!" - something like that) but personally I actually really don't mind.

I know that I'm in a pretty hardcore minority, and I've seen my fair share of comments and questions from newer players who were interested in one of the companions or armour sets from earlier seasons and were disappointed that there was no way to get them anymore, so I understand that there was demand to bring them back. I'm happy those people get their chance now! Also, I didn't start doing seasons on the other servers until Season 2 (and the Shae Vizla server obviously didn't even exist until Season 5), so I'll have some fun earning some of the older rewards for a second time over there. (Technically I have all of it already unlocked in collections, but this is more fun.)

Also, there was some talk about 8.0 being in development alongside everything else that's happening, so it seemed reasonable to me to infer that putting a little less resource into the next two seasons will free up a bit of extra time for more focus on 8.0, which seems fair enough to me.

Speaking of 8.0...

We still don't know a lot more about what 8.0 will contain, but Eric and Keith dedicated a whole segment of the stream to talking about what their plans for it are in terms of releasing more information over time, which I thought was extremely interesting.

First off, they don't want to tell us too much just yet because the Legacy of the Sith story has two more patches to go and they want to give it a chance to play out in full without spoiling anything or even taking too much attention away from it, which I think is very fair and fits with the devs' commitment to treating the game's story as the most important thing, which is one of the main things I love about SWTOR.

However, they also said that they are planning to release more information in bits and pieces over time, to introduce new features and let us test them on the PTS as they reach a playable state, and I thought that was an interesting and novel approach. Usually expansion announcements are these big, attention-grabbing info dumps, so to know that an expansion is coming without much else, and that additional information will be released piecemeal over the course of a whole year is quite different. It's also a relatively long time to know about it in advance, as traditionally, SWTOR expansions have tended to be announced only two to four months before their launch date.

I'm very curious to see how this will play out in terms of expectations and hype, because on a purely theoretical level, I can think of ways in which this could go either very well or very badly. I'm hoping for the best outcome of course - just saying. Either way, I really appreciate the devs' attempt at being transparent about what's coming, when so much of Legacy of the Sith has been living from one patch to the next, without the slightest clue of what was going to be happening in six months.

One thing Keith and Eric did say about 8.0's content (it was even on the slides) was that they were planning to "create new content, gameplay, and systems that appeal to group, solo, and story players" and that they are aiming to "celebrate the breadth and depth of SWTOR to power new content and systems", which I understood to mean that they won't just be plopping a new planet and five more levels on top of what we have now, but that at least some of the new stuff will be integrated into existing planets and systems, perhaps similarly to how dynamic encounters added something new to do on classic planets. One Keith quote in particular that stood out to me was: "We're going back to old content and do something with it so it feels like new content." Could it be that they'll finally do something with flashpoints again? No, I mustn't daydream too much about specific things I'd like to see, because it's almost never what we expect. Regardless, I look forward to the journey of finding out.

Galactic Season 9 in Review

It's finally done! I completed all Galactic Season 9 meta achievements on all servers. I didn't have to wait with writing this until that was done, but I kind of wanted to, just in case anything that happened towards the end was going to change my mind in some ways - it didn't.

Galactic Season 9 was easily one of my favourite seasons so far. While most of the rewards were solid and the armour sets pretty versatile, my enjoyment was mostly down to the theme. I love flashpoints! I ran the featured flashpoint of the week up to six times per week, sometimes multiple times per night, and it never got boring because no two runs were the same.

I saw people that were in a hurry, and I saw others that were proceeding at a more slow and careful pace. I had groups that tried to skip as much trash as possible and others that killed absolutely everything in their way. Most importantly though, it was almost always good fun. There were a couple of badly behaved exceptions early in the season, but the vast majority of runs were pleasantly uneventful or filled with some amusing shenanigans. It was pretty reaffirming really, both in the way it reminded me of just how much I really enjoy flashpoints and have been missing having a good reason to run them more regularly, and how the majority of the SWTOR community is pleasantly chill and considerate of others in group content.

If I had to cite any negatives, I'd say the fact that the weekly objective was limited to veteran mode only meant that few guildies could be motivated into running flashpoints during our weekly guild event, as vet mode is so easy and quick, I can understand why many didn't see it as worth the extra effort of waiting for a dedicated time and place. I did appreciate though that there was at least an optional master mode objective during quite a few weeks, which I always did when it was available.

The special queue for the veteran mode of the week was a bit of a double-edged sword. Some nights I really would've preferred to just walk in with two guildies and a companion for example, but undermanning like that or even just going in manually with a full group to see the cut scenes was simply not an option. On the plus side though, the simplicity of this system meant that it saw plenty of use, as it was very straightforward with not much room for confusion.

As far as other objectives go, I was glad to see that the addition of all the new dynamic encounters in summer led to much more varied objectives from one week to the next, and we weren't constantly hopping back and forth between Hoth and Tatooine like in GS8. That said, I still felt a bit burnt out on these and mostly skipped those two planets, focusing mostly on the objectives for the starter planets, capital worlds and Ilum instead.

In general I reached a state this season where I spent very little time doing things I wouldn't really have felt like doing otherwise. The flashpoints were always a joy to do, and then I'd just add two or three other weekly objectives from the list depending on what I liked most.

I don't expect to go this hard (going for all the achievements on all servers) next time around, but even so I feel like I'm pretty well set to continue completing the season on all servers without too much stress in the future - more so than before, in fact, as this season was a stark reminder of how comparatively little effort it takes to just max out the reward track. That said, we now know that Galactic Season 10 will "work a little differently than previous seasons" - I'm very curious to find out what that means.

Legacy Level 50 on Satele Shan

Back in September I posted about hitting legacy level 50 on Shae Vizla, and at the end of that post I noted about the three remaining servers where I hadn't maxed out my legacy yet that "I wouldn't expect to ding 50 there this season, but I could see myself hitting that milestone on all three servers in quick succession at some point next year." What I didn't expect when I said that I would ding 50 on Satele Shan literally on New Year's Day!

It basically managed to juuust get in there at the end of the season, as I'd literally just completed my one hundredth weekly season objective and was just doing a couple more quests to hit the character's personal Conquest target when the "legacy level up" pop-up appeared. I actually paused for a moment and went "wait, what legacy level am I again on here", hovered over the bar and it said 50! I hadn't realised I'd been that close already!

Anyway, that's another one off the list. I double-checked The Leviathan and Tulak Hord now and I'm 47 and 48 there respectively, but I'm also fully done with the season, so my alts there will be getting a bit of a break over the next few weeks. Definitely something to keep an eye on next season though!

Once I'm legacy level 50 everywhere, I guess hitting legendary on all servers could be my next long-term goal. I'd definitely post about that on reddit if I ever got it, as while I surely wouldn't be the first person to ever do it, it's still gotta be something extremely rare...

Either way I'd have quite a way to go to that one on most servers, as I've only actually completed one class story on Satele Shan even at legacy level 50, just like it was on Star Forge when I maxed out there.

Patch 7.8 Ramblings

Patch 7.8 with the long-awaited story update and more landed this week, and for the first time in a while I felt like there were so many things going on in SWTOR at once, I hardly knew where to start. And I loved it!

I finished my last Galactic Seasons achievement on Darth Malgus last week (which means I should probably write my usual season review soon) but on the other servers I still need a few more weeklies for the last meta achievement, and I didn't want to abandon them completely this week, even if there was new content to explore on my main.

Mostly I just ran the featured flashpoint on each server, which was Legacy of the Rakata this week. And oh my god, the skips! Fortunately there's not too much annoying jumping going on in this one, but I was continually surprised by the number of trash pulls for which I learned that you can literally walk right through them without aggroing anything as long as you walk down a certain narrow line between two specific mobs. I always wondered who was the first person to figure that out and how it spread.

Primarily I wanted to check out the new story of course, but on launch night I saw a few people talking about bugs so I decided to hold off at first, because with the level of anticipation I was feeling, I figured I really couldn't deal with the disappointment of then running into a blocker. Fortunately the aforementioned issues were fixed quickly, and as of the time I'm writing this, I've played through the Galactic Threads story once. I can tell you that my first impression was very positive, but before I write my full review I need to see it a few more times on different classes. It seems like the kind of story that's mostly the same for everyone, but at least one part of it is gonna be different for Imperials, and there were a few other small moments where I found myself thinking "I wonder if you get a different line here if you have a different origin story". I've got to know!

One thing that was very obvious was that this update was originally meant to be part of patch 7.6, which also brought us the XR-53 lair boss on Ilum and the first batch of dynamic encounters on Tatooine and Hoth. Because the story has us going to all these places and there would've been some very obvious synergy there, discovering dynamic encounters for the first time as you're also cruising around Tatooine for the story. As it was, I was like "nope, I don't want to help promote your band right now, I'm 100% on Tatooine encounter achievements, bye". Though I did pause to help out the Weary Travellers at the taxi spot, because I can never ignore those. And on Hoth I helped rehome an ice cat, because I can rarely resist that either. I could just tell that it probably would've been an even better experience if it had come out as originally planned.

One tiny thing I'll comment on in terms of the story - and I guess this could be considered a spoiler if you're a purist, but it's only a small thing that happens literally in the first five minutes - is that I took the opportunity to flirt with Rass Ordo, and for a moment it looked like it was gonna go somewhere, but then he wasn't in the mood. It just made me realise I'm so ready for my trooper to finally kiss someone. Since her creation almost fourteen years ago, she's taken some flirt options here and there, but has never taken it all the way! I sure hope Rass is around in the next update as well.

Next to the story, the other big addition that came with the patch was of course the new dynamic encounter zone on Dantooine. Again, I'll have to make a longer post about that later on, but first impressions are once again positive, even if I had some issues with bugs on day one.

On top of all that, it was the start of a new PvP season, so I once again jumped back into warzones and some lower-level arenas. Within the same evening, I had one Voidstar match that was absolutely beautiful, with amazing, objective-focused teamwork that I see so rarely in a pug, and an Ancient Hypergate where someone yelled insults and ALL CAPS at me after I failed to defend a pylon. I put them on ignore as I've had to do with others before them, but it still always gives me an unpleasant adrenaline rush in the moment to be attacked like that, and no matter how much I tell myself that I don't need to care about the opinions of some random internet stranger, it can be really hard not to dwell on it. Always reminds me of why so many people avoid PvP.

Finally, the devs once again made some minor changes to the user interface this patch. They keep doing that and I'm sure they have their reasons, but it's honestly always a bit jarring and strange from a player perspective. Did we really have to devote development time to making the quest tracker ALL CAPS for example? However, I will say that in this particular case, all was forgiven on my part the moment I noticed that they also added a scroll bar to the quest tracker at last, which is something that filled me with delight. I always hated how that feature always just kind of "gave up" after five missions or whatever the previous limit was and simply added "X additional missions tracked" at the bottom. It's not really helping me to say I'm tracking these missions if I can't actually see any details about them, is it? Well, with the addition of the scroll bar, I finally can. Thanks, Broadsword!

GS9 Week 14: Flashpoints, Flashpoints, Flashpoints!

A little over a month ago I wrote about how much I've been enjoying the current Galactic Season, and how I'd been thinking about setting myself the stretch goal of completing the full meta achievement on all servers this time (instead of the basic 100 levels). I'm not here to tell you that I've achieved that, but at this point I can say that it's definitely happening. I've reached season level 100 and defeated my 250 enhanced enemies on all servers, with the only boxes left to tick being a couple more Flashpoint Frenzy objectives and about 20 more weekly objectives in total.

It's been really surprising to me how energised I've felt for this season. I always say that this whole "doing seasons on multiple servers" thing means walking a fine line between a fun challenge and burning myself out with too many digital chores, and usually I tend to start losing steam after around eight weeks. This time though, I've kept going all the way to level hundred, to the point that my secondary legacies were only slightly behind my main one, and even after that I've just kept going... and going... and going.

The weekly flashpoint objective has been a big part of that, and I've written about my fascination with seeing the flashpoint scene on different servers. This week was particularly amazing for that as there were a total of three weekly flashpoint objectives: Korriban Incursion and Assault on Tython were both featured veteran flashpoints for the week, and the objective to do any random master mode flashpoint was also up. I ended up doing all three of these on all servers (minus the master mode on Shae Vizla since I couldn't get that to pop), for a total of 17 flashpoint runs throughout the week, and it was thoroughly enjoyable for the most part. Sure, not every single run was amazing, but I'd say the majority were at least funny or interesting in some way.

Tython and Korriban were good flashpoints to do repeatedly because they are relatively short and have maps that are slightly more open than the average instance, meaning people can take different routes. There are a number of skips of varying difficulties, which I all saw done at some point, but I also saw every single one of those trash pulls taken down the old-fashioned way and more. Some groups pulled mob groups I didn't even know existed, even after all these years, such as when someone in Korriban Incursion accidentally hurled their sabers over a ridge and a bunch of angry tuk'atas descended upon us. I had no idea those were even there!

As far as skipping goes, on Tulak Hord, Assault on Tython popped up as my random master mode and the tank was very careful to skip as much trash as possible while we took out the artillery targeting arrays in the first part of the flashpoint, just to then randomly charge into several groups of enemies just before Major Travik while commenting that he wanted to do the bonus (which requires you to kill a certain minimum number of trash mobs). "Why did we just do all that sneaking then?!" I exclaimed, to which he replied that he wasn't sure either; it was just a habit. That cracked me up.

My favourite experience of the week - and perhaps of the season so far - was this week's master mode flashpoint on Satele Shan though. I'm still never quite sure on that server whether I'm better off queueing late in the evening or waiting until the weekend and trying early in the morning my time. This week I tried in the evening again, and even while queueing as both dps and tank the wait was long. I decided for once to spend my time doing something that was neither good for seasons nor Conquest and simply drove around Belsavis, doing the Macrobinocular mission step there, uncovering the map and picking up some datacrons. After what felt like nearly an hour's wait I was about to give up when I finally got a pop.

The group finder made me the tank in a master mode Cademimu run. When nobody gives me "bat out of hell" vibes I usually ask whether people want to do the bonus, and there was enough support to do it. The Cademimu bonus boss is called Garold the Dark One, which always makes me laugh because Garold sounds like a hybrid of Gary and Harold, neither of which are good Sith names. Anyway, we tried to fight him and promptly wiped. The healer immediately apologised, saying it was their first time and they had mistakenly rolled right into a red circle.

As I always love an opportunity to teach people when it arises naturally, I gave the tip that all ranged could just stand behind the railing by the elevator to avoid being pulled in by the boss, in order to stay safely outside of his AoE. On the next attempt we tried that, but someone fell down the lift shaft, two people died and we hit the enrage. I just thought it was entertaining and perfectly natural progression! On the third attempt we got him down and I think everyone was very pleased.

After dispatching General Ortol, one person in the group asked whether we were up for running another flashpoint for the weekly. I had only really queued for the seasons objective, didn't need the weekly mission and was tired... but that group had such great vibes, I did want to run with them again, so I did. The second flashpoint we got was Mando Raiders, and this time there were no wipes, just some minor shenanigans that got me musing about how nice it was to be the tank when you have a group that genuinely wants to be led and learn, and for whom you sometimes do have to work a bit to keep them safe if they accidentally butt-pull some extra turrets.

It was just a good vibes week all around, and I'm getting to the point where I think I can ease up on most of the other seasons objectives and just keep running the weekly flashpoints until (close to) the end of the season. 

Tulak Hord Talk

After eight seasons and almost four years of playing on multiple servers, I'm pretty well settled in everywhere, with a growing roster of alts on each server and most of my characters in stable guilds. The one server where I was still feeling a bit "unsafe" though was Tulak Hord, mainly because I hadn't really found a guild that truly covered all my needs and made me feel like it was going to stick around.

You may recall from this post last year that after more than two years of staying in a two-person guild, my attempt to find something a bit more suitable for someone interested in playing alts and doing Conquest led me to a guild that turned out to run an old-fashioned guild website that nobody actually used. I was a bit put out by that but stuck around.

Over time, things got more quiet in said guild. I never actually got to know my guildies really, but I was under the impression that there had been a core group of people that did operations together, and it looked like that had eventually fallen apart. The guild wasn't strictly dead, but going by the numbers on the weekly Conquest board, it at one point looked like I was one of a maximum of five people that were still playing.

I had almost resigned myself to potentially inheriting the guild eventually once the last of the other players stopped logging in, but after several months of this state of relative inactivity, I noticed that things started picking up again, not because the gang was back together, but because the person that the GM title had defaulted to had seemingly decided to go on a recruiting spree. Which was fine by me, but I didn't give it too much thought either.

Tonight though, something funny happened. I was just doing a few more quests on an alt (on Tulak Hord, obviously) to finish off one last weekly seasons objective when someone said "hey Shin" in guild chat. I said hi back but didn't pay it any further mind as I hadn't really had a lot of interaction with anyone in the guild.

I continued to focus on my questing, until the same person said something along the lines of "I'll just go back to DM now" and I swear for a moment my brain was short circuiting. Why was someone speaking English in guild chat on Tulak Hord? And why were they telling me about going back to Darth Malgus? What server was I on again? What the heck was even going on?

I opened the guild panel and looked at the only other person online. Their legacy name didn't sound familiar, but the character name vaguely rang a bell. It sounded kind of like one of my guildies from Darth Malgus, the one who'd inspired me to try doing Galactic Seasons on multiple servers in the first place.

"Xen?!" I typed incredulously, and with my mind still spinning. How could he be here? Had I ever gotten him invited into this guild? No, even I couldn't be that forgetful, surely? What was happening?

He proceeded to tell me that he'd been invited the other day via a random recruitment message, after his last guild on Tulak Hord had kicked him for inactivity. I mean, what are the freaking odds? I just thought that was absolutely wild. Tulak Hord isn't the biggest server, but it's still got a good number of guilds, and the one we are now both in is relatively small, so that was some crazy serendipity alright. 

On an unrelated note, another thing that bothered me about playing on Tulak Hord until recently was that this guild didn't have an Imperial counterpart, so my Imperial alts were still homeless and lost in space. I'd done a bit of research about where I could take them but hadn't come up with anything enticing enough for me to make the effort of actively applying.

Well, the other night I was just about to log off on my Sith inquisitor when someone offered me a random invite to their guild. I checked that the guild name wasn't anything offensive or utterly ridiculous and accepted. So now I'm a pirate on Imp side, and my characters have the guild rank "fish food". We'll see where that goes!