Shintar's Galactic Seasons Diary, Week 11

The final week!

Day 1

My weekly objectives - the last weeklies I was going to do this Season - came up as warzones and operations, which was fine by me. My daily objectives were to play a warzone and generic mob killing on core worlds.

For the former I played a Hypergates match on my healing Sage that was pretty fun and we won. For the latter I returned to my little squid Sorc and did some more questing on Balmorra, like I'd done in week 6.

Day 2

The same daily objectives as the day before! This time my Sage got into a Voidstar, which was another nice win. During the attacker round I felt like I just spent all my time being killed over and over again by a veritable mob of enemies, but every time I caught myself noticing this, someone else on the team managed to plant a bomb on the other side of where I was - so I guess I did my job by being distracting?

My little Sorc continued questing on Balmorra. I can recommend the Okara droid factory as a place where you can get some side quests done while also killing lots of mobs.

Day 3

Heroics and Black Hole dailies made for a welcome change of pace, even if there wasn't any synergy between them. It was late in the evening and I didn't feel like risking a re-roll. For the heroics I went to Alderaan on my Assassin, since I figured Imperial heroics on Alderaan was one particular combo I hadn't done yet since the Season started. My picks for things that were quick to do and where stealth would be useful were mostly good, except for this one heroic where you're supposed to kill some enemies while friendly droids help, and for some reason it was just super buggy and everything kept evading. Fortunately blowing up a nearby barrel managed to un-bug at least a few mobs enough that I could kill them and then the rest followed suit.

For the Black Hole dailies I went back to Republic side after my previous observations about how I just have issues with these on Imp side. My Guardian made quick work of them.

Day 4

First I got my operations weekly out of the way by running Nature of Progress with my guildies, then I tackled more Black Hole dailies on my Nautolan Shadow and played a GSF match on my Assassin tank. In the latter both teams were neck-on-neck throughout the whole thing, though my team eventually eked out a win. In this one I was actually the worst player on my team, which made me oddly happy (because I know that I'm pretty bad at GSF, and every time I see how many people still manage to be even worse than me it depresses me a little).

I also kept looking at my Seasons points to figure out just how many more objectives I'd have to do in order to finish and was temporarily overcome by paranoia that I'd miscalculated and would actually have to do another week. I'm apparently not good at doing maths on the fly.

Day 5

I saw heroics and insectoids and immediately re-rolled the latter, just to then slap myself on the forehead for doing that because I'd forgotten that during "core week", the insectoid killing actually has good synergy with doing heroics and I could have got both of them done at the same time by doing selected heroics on Alderaan or Balmorra. As it was, I'd instead saddled myself with yet another round of the Black Hole instead. I went on another stealth character, my DvL Shadow, to at least make things there as quick as possible.

For the heroics I also went stealth on Imp side on my Operative, and opted for picking three heroics on Balmorra. My choices were pretty good: one didn't require me to kill a single mob; in another I killed two but probably could have avoided doing so if I'd cloaked when they aggroed. Only the third one actually required a bit of killing, but it still wasn't too bad.

Day 6

As if the game wanted to give me a second chance, I got heroics and insectoids again, and managed to resist the urge to re-roll this time. I completed both by doing a round of the Killik heroics on Alderaan on my Vanguard tank.

That just left me to complete the PvP weekly for the final few points! I queued for a warzone on my lowbie Merc and got into an arena where I initially was completely by myself on my team while the opposition had a full four. I pondered whether it was worth taking the deserter penalty if I was still alone by the time the gates opened, but fortunately two more people got added before the match started - though that still meant that we were one man down, but then, the other team didn't have a healer! Amazingly, we managed to win within two rounds despite the numbers disadvantage, and no, I don't think it was because of my healing actually... it's just that both damage dealers on my team did really high damage, and the Sage found the time to throw some off-heals on me on top of that.

After doing a couple of quests to finish my Merc's Conquest, I relogged on my main to claim my final Seasons prizes. There doesn't seem to be an achievement for completing the Season, but I did get one for Altuur's last custom gift pushing him to influence fifty.

Week 11 thoughts:

I'll go into more detail about my final thoughts on the first Galactic Season in a separate post, but I will say that it feels really good to be done. I don't regret committing to completing it as soon as possible and without using any of the buyout options, but some days I definitely did feel a bit pressured (by my own resolution I mean) to log in just to keep up even though I didn't really feel like playing or didn't have much time. So I'm looking forward to not having to worry about POs anymore for the next few months until they release Season two with the expansion.

LotS PTS Day 1 - WTF Is Going On?

So here I was, making a post full of happy musings about what combat styles will mean for me... and a few hours later the PTS went up. Great, I thought, maybe that can answer some of the questions we have! Me and some of my guildies were on there in a flash to check out what exactly Bioware had meant when they said that this first phase was going to be about Guardian combat styles only. Does that mean that all the Force classes will be able to play as Guardians only or...?

I was not prepared for what I found. Nothing on the PTS right now has anything to do with the whole "switching advanced classes" thing... instead it seems that Bioware is actually also planning to revamp all the classes, by pruning a lot of abilities and re-introducing something similar to the old skill trees, yet different. I was just like... WTF? Why wasn't there a peep about this on the livestream?

On the forums we're being urged not to panic, that this is all early stages and likely not final. Which is fine, but I'm still somewhat alarmed that they were planning to change up the class system that much and didn't even care to mention that when announcing the expansion.

I'm kind of glad now that they started the PTS with Guardian since that's not my main, so it's a bit easier not to freak out entirely. But it's still very bewildering. I went to see the special PTS trainer and the abilities it gave me at level 75 weren't even enough to fill out two action bars. I queued for a warzone and got into an all-Guardian arena where I flailed around very ineffectively, struggling to find buttons that I could push that weren't on cooldown. Later I found out that there was a known issue with the PTS training droid and it only gave out half of your intended abilities.

As a bit of a contrast, I then did a veteran mode Mandalorian Raiders with my guildies and we absolutely destroyed everything, even with half of our abilities missing. The final boss only had about twice the health of a normal player. Then we read that content scaling's apparently broken on the PTS as well. How do we know what's a bug and what's a feature?

Speaking to the training droid multiple times afterwards did fill up my bars a little more, but not a lot. A lot of basic abilities were still missing, such as our interrupt, stun breaker, or Saber Throw (a Guardian's only ranged ability). Others were present but suddenly limited to a single spec when they used to be available to all Guardians. There was a very long post explaining the specs on the forums but to be honest with you I still found that very confusing. This kind of skill tree really needs some sort of visual to be easily understandable. Swtorista made a valiant attempt at creating a graphic for the Focus path and posting it on reddit, but honestly I was still confused because when actually playing I found that not everything was actually working as laid out by Bioware either. Again, what's a bug and what's a feature?

My initial thoughts on ability pruning are this: I don't like it much, but I can see the logic behind it. There are probably a few abilities that they could remove and we'd all be fine. I was a bit sad when my Commando lost Pulse Cannon and Stockstrike back in the day, but I got over it. And if I'm being honest, part of the appeal of doing things like playing in the lowbie PvP bracket is that things are simpler there, without classes having 27 different cooldowns. But the current iteration of the PTS feels like it's taking it too far.

As for returning to some sort of skill tree... mweurgh. I liked the game's original skill trees and was a bit sad when they turned into a mere line with Shadow of Revan. But the reason Bioware did that was to make things more straightforward for new players, and this feels... more complicated than what we started out with? The whole "taking away abilities and making you choose between them" thing reminds me of modern World of Warcraft and I don't like it there either. Suddenly there'll be right and wrong ways to spec again, and we'll likely lose access to some abilities that add a lot of flavour to each advanced class. A Guardian without Saber Reflect sounds pretty sad to me to be honest! Plus do we really need advanced classes and specialisations and these combat styles on top of each other? It feels like they're taking away some of the complexity of "choosing the right buttons on your action bar while playing" and simply shifting it towards "choosing the right abilities while speccing your character" - is that really more fun?

I'm not sure Bioware will be doing themselves a favour with this added complexity either. They just added all these set bonuses in Onslaught... how confident are they really in being able to adjust everything so that nothing clashes or becomes unbalanced or outright weird? As an extremely simple example (which I'm sure will be fixed in time, but there'll be lots of these), I started my session on the PTS by buying the gear set from the vendor that my Guardian also uses on live... and then realised that it buffs an ability that doesn't actually exist on the PTS right now. I'm also thinking of how my guild's current master mode progression relies on characters being able to chain every single cooldown they have - so that means all those fights will need re-turning. You're creating a lot of work for yourselves by having to straighten that all out, Bioware.

I really want to have faith in them here, but at the same time I'm struggling to get on board with this particular vision. I'm really curious about what Commando and Sage testing will be like now, since those are the classes I know best and where I'll feel any changes most sharply. I'm just kind of taken aback by how unnecessary all this feels. The ability to swap between advanced classes as announced on the stream was going to be enough to change things up and people's reactions to that seemed to be largely positive. This... not so much.

What Will Combat Styles Mean for Me?

As mentioned in my post about the expansion announcement, there's still a lot about the new combat styles feature that we don't know, especially relating to how changing between different styles will work and whether there'll be any sort of limitations on when and how often you can do it, but it does seem pretty clear that you'll be able to swap between the existing advanced classes with everything that entails - including both their weapons and abilities - and I see no reason to assume that e.g. older characters will be excluded from this feature (though I did see that line of thought floating around on Twitter as well).

With that said, what is this going to mean for my stable of alts?

The thought of Shintar the Commando being anything other than, well, a Commando seems kind of absurd. I mean, it's in the blog name! And I've always had a giant assault cannon on my banner! That said... no, I don't think I'll change her play style, though depending on the ease of swapping, I might experiment with using Mercenary style some time. Same basic gameplay, but two blasters. Plus I mean, all tech-using classes have canonically always had at least one blaster anyway, considering the ever-present oddity of wielders of big guns and rifles suddenly holstering their weapons in cut scenes to threaten their enemies with a small blaster instead.

Looking at my alts, I honestly can't see myself making a lot of changes to them either, because I've never been fussed about weapon choice and if I made them one specific advanced class over another, there was usually a reason for that. Still, I could imagine some use cases for swapping combat styles:

One is for Force users whose alignment doesn't match their faction. I have thought occasionally that it's a bit weird that my Sith Sorcerer is still shooting lightning all the time, considering how much of a goodie-two-shoes she is. So I could see myself changing her to Sage for the more appropriate visuals. I think on a low-level character it would feel a bit strange to use opposite-faction Force powers, because you'd think that would be very alarming to your fellow Sith or Jedi, but if you're already the Commander of your own Alliance, I reckon you don't have to worry about hiding your true nature anymore if you don't want to. The same would apply to my light-sided Juggernaut tank.

I've said before that I'm terrible at playing dark-sided characters, so there aren't many contenders for a transition the opposite way among my Republic alts. The closest is probably my somewhat ruthless Sentinel, but I'm not sure she's evil enough.

Speaking of my Sentinel though, that does bring up another interesting line of thought. I've made alts of every single advanced class over the years because I simply wanted to know what they played like, but I can't say I actually enjoyed them all. Sentinels and Marauders look cool with their two lightsabers, but the play style has never appealed to me at all. My second least favourite is probably Sniper/Gunslinger.

So the question here is: Would it be worth speccing out of the advanced classes that I don't like very much? It has sometimes struck me as a bit of a shame that I find myself avoiding playing these characters purely because I don't enjoy the way they play very much, even if their story choices would make for some interesting content to experience. But at the same time, I specifically created them because I wanted to have a Sentinel, a Sniper and so on. Is that still going to be that meaningful when we can all swap combat styles though? Something to think about at least.

And of course there is always the option of new alts. As if I need even more of those! But then, there could be synergies with other things I want to do. For example I've talked about how I like to play healers in lowbie PvP, but just how many times do I really want to start over as a consular or inquisitor? Now I could level up through the knight and warrior stories to add more alts to the stable while having a bit more variety in my story content.

Do you see yourself making use of the new combat styles feature?

Shintar's Galactic Seasons Diary, Week 10

Day 1

On logging in, I found myself saddled with the flashpoint and operations weeklies, and decided to re-roll the former into warzones. One of my dailies was also to play a warzone, and the other to defeat 75 enemies in unknown or Wild Space. Since I'd just killed 150 mobs for my daily objectives the day before, I re-rolled that one as well and it turned into CZ-198 dailies.

Through the SWTOR community Discord I found out that there was some new bug with Seasons objectives not progressing, so I logged off again. They did fix that one within a couple of hours though.

When I logged back in I completed both of my daily objectives without problems, and the warzone also counted towards my weekly. I played an Ancient Hypergates on my Sage healer and somewhat to my surprise, we won pretty decisively. For the CZ dailies I got out my Operative healer again. She quested in the PvP instance, and apart from two people idling in the landing zone I didn't encounter another player of either faction during my entire round.

Day 2

On Wednesday I found that I had to jump into my ops group's progression run unexpectedly as one of the usual Wednesday healers couldn't make it, so I didn't get around to my Seasons objectives until later. They were warzones and galaxy-wide insecticide respectively, though the latter luckily re-rolled into GSF.

The GSF match was a domination that started out well but ended up being a pretty decisive loss. Looking at the scoreboard at the end, we had been hopelessly outgunned, but I didn't mind too much because I'd still had fun flying around and shooting things.

The PvP match landed my healing Sage in Quesh Huttball, and the moment we went to pick up the ball I spotted long-time PvP streamer Snave on the opposing team, presumably with one of his pre-mades. Unsurprisingly, someone called for us to just let them win and get it over with, but I got some satisfaction out of the rest of the team continuing to fight until the bitter 1-7 end. I did have some sympathy for the guy's frustration in this case though. Going up against a pre-made is rarely fun, but knowing that your loss will be broadcast to the public while someone on the other team trash-talks you makes it even more annoying.

Day 3

This was the day of the expansion livestream, which I missed due to being preoccupied with something else at the time, but I did go to watch the recording as soon as I was done and then continued to watch it on the side while knocking out my daily objectives, which were GSF and CZ-198 dailies again.

The GSF match was a domination game that was both an easy win and great fun - early on I ended up at a satellite with an enemy player who seemed to be as incompetent as me, so that we just ended up circling each other and shooting into space for what felt like several minutes. I got lucky in that my team was the first one to actually send some reinforcements, who then shot my opponent to pieces. Tough luck, bud!

For the dailies I went stealth on Imperial side again, this time on my Assassin tank. It felt like I was done in no time, seeing how I was merely going through the motions while actually focusing on the stream recording.

Day 4

I was relieved on login to find that my dailies were a straightforward warzone and galactic insecticide, which was at least an obvious re-roll and handily turned into GSF. I played the GSF match first, on my Powertech tank, and it was an oddly enjoyable deathmatch where we didn't just win but I only died once, when we were already sitting on thirty points! Mostly I was sitting safely in my gunship at the back and it felt like people were always trying to make a beeline for me but got shot down by my team mates before they could reach me, which was nice.

For PvP I queued on my squid Sorc and got an insta-pop into an arena in progress. My team was already one point behind, but for some reason we were a full team of four while the opposition was one person short. Unsurprisingly we spanked them on the next round and evened the score. They still didn't get reinforcements during round three, but changed their strategy and ended up doing a lot of damage. I was actually a bit worried when they managed to kill one of my team mates, but we still ended up winning in the end. This completed both my daily and my weekly objective.

Day 5

My dailies were GSF and mob killing in unknown or Wild Space. I decided to risk a re-roll on the latter but it just turned into insectoid killing, which I then got done by having my Sniper go on a quick rampage among the Killiks just outside Rhu Caenus spaceport on Alderaan.

The GSF match I played on my Juggernaut tank for a change and while it was a good match and a win, it was also a reminder of why I try not to spread my GSF activity around too many alts... it's just way too much of a hassle to set up ships, components and so on for every new character.

Day 6

The day before, I'd seen a guildie complete the Iokath dailies PO and thought, "Hey, I'd quite like to get that one some time this week!" so I tried making sure to log into a level 75 character first, but I got warzones and CZ-198 daily missions as my objectives. I risked a re-roll on the dailies and it turned into insectoid killing again. Sigh. That meant another round of Killik killing for the Sniper.

For the warzone objective I queued up with my lowbie Merc and she got into a Mandalorian Battle Ring arena. Since the last patch, the sub-75 queue has been been split into lowbie and midbie again - initially we weren't sure whether this was intentional or an accident, but it was later confirmed on the forums that it was intended and they just forgot to include it in the patch notes. Since then I've been getting a lot more arenas again... anyway, this one was a solid win as I had two dpsers on my team that did absolute monster damage. I then played a second match, which also popped as an arena, just to complete the character's Conquest, though that one was a loss. Funnily enough, everybody on my team gave me their MVP votes regardless, which surprised me.

Day 7

I once again completed my second weekly objective on the last day of the SWTOR week, by doing a Gods from the Machine story mode run with my guildies. As if the game had read my mind about the previous day, my daily POs were Iokath dailies (yay) and CZ-198 again. I hadn't realised that you only need to do three (!) Iokath dailies for that objective, which is less than a third of the weekly mission, as opposed to four or five missions for most other daily quest-based objectives. They really want to sweeten people on Iokath I guess.

CZ I visited on my Sniper, not too fussed about skipping unnecessary trash kills, but it was so busy that I actually struggled to find anything to kill - I was barely halfway done with the mob killing daily by the time I'd finished all the other missions in the area.

Week 10 thoughts:

With the second full five-week cycle complete, I'm sitting on 734 Seasons points, which means that I just need 66 more to reach 800 next week, and then it'll be retrospective time! I'm currently thinking that I could get up to three different analysis posts out of this: one about how I played this Season (which objectives I did how often etc.), one with feedback about what I think could be improved in Season two, and one featuring tips and tricks I've learned from chatting about Seasons with other players. Stay tuned for that!

Legacy of the Sith Expansion Announcement

I didn't watch last night's livestream while it was happening (though I do want to say to Bioware's credit that they've got much better at scheduling their streams at times when it's actually reasonable for Europeans to tune in too), but I did watch the recording as soon as I was able to. And once again I have to say that I found it very engaging and enjoyable to watch. I feel they've really found their groove with these streams recently - they may not be very high budget, but Charles and Eric have a great dynamic and are fantastic ambassadors for the game with their unending and infectious enthusiasm.

The intro with various devs talking about what ten years of SWTOR meant to them and how much they love their jobs could be considered a bit cheesy I guess, but it all sounded very genuine and to be honest it's nice to see some of the same faces making repeat appearances (proving that they're still around). Plus who doesn't like the idea of a game's devs actually enjoying their jobs?

And then we jumped right in: new expansion at the end of the year, called Legacy of the Sith (cue lots of "LOTS" puns, and Musco promised many more) to celebrate ten years of SWTOR! You can find the official run-down here, but here are my own thoughts on each item:

Five new levels, new story and locations

Not that much to say about this one, because while it's nice to see, it's also par for the course for a new expansion. All we know about the story is that it'll continue to focus on Republic vs. Empire, which I'm happy about, and they wouldn't say any more in order not to spoil us and I think that's how we as players like it.

In terms of new locations it sounds a bit less ambitious than Onslaught was, as instead of two new open world planets and a flashpoint, we'll only get one new place to hang out plus a flashpoint. The latter will also take place on a new planet called Elom though instead of being set on an existing one like Objective Meridian was.

The main "new" planet will be a battle-ravaged Manaan. I have to say while the concept art looks cool, I'm not sure I like it being all messed up! Seeing beautiful and serene locations torn up by war is always a bit sad. And it's one thing if it's only in a flashpoint like it happened for Tython and Korriban, but to have the "permanent" open world version of the planet be a mess is less appealing I think. Who wants to hang out on a rainy battlefield all day?

New operation

I like to call this one out separately because while you could argue that a new operation should also simply be an "expected" part of a new expansion, SWTOR's fraught history with this type of content has taught me to be careful with my expectations - so I'm happy to see that they are planning to deliver another operation soon!

Story-wise it sounds like the new ops might have a tie-in with Nature of Progress - it's teased at the end of the Dxun story mission (if you can resist the subtle pressure to kill Trey) that something dangerous has gone missing from another Czerka facility. Though again based on the concept art for the new operation, the overall flavour of this one seems very different, with more of a horror vibe similar to what we saw from the Dread Masters. I'm looking forward to it either way!

Combat styles

This was the main expansion feature aside from new content and to be honest it fried my brain a bit. Basically, after re-doing gearing in Onslaught, it seems that Bioware has targeted basic class gameplay as the thing that needs an update next. I have to admit I froze for a second when they started talking about that, as I wondered whether they were going to do something silly like pivot the game more towards action combat, but fortunately Bioware knows their player base better than that. What they did announce sounded a bit confusing though, and depending on the exact details has the potential to be a huge game changer or to make no difference to many players at all.

In a nutshell, based on the slides they showed, they want to disconnect base class (what defines your story content) from advanced class (what defines your gameplay), except for the divide between Force and tech users, which remains intact. What this means is that you could for example create a trooper but instead of playing her as a Commando with a big assault cannon or a Vanguard with a blaster rifle, you could choose to use a Sniper rifle and have access to all the abilities that a Sniper would usually have... I think?!

On a surface level this seems fine, logic-wise, because why wouldn't a trooper be able to use a different weapon? And many of the abilities are generic enough that seeing them used by a different base class wouldn't feel "wrong" - e.g. my Commando heals with different medical probes, and I see no reason why a bounty hunter, agent or smuggler couldn't also use medical probes. But some abilities are a bit more... flavourful, and there I struggle to wrap my head around the idea of all of them simply being available to every class. Would an agent tanking things with a flamethrower like a Powertech really feel "right"? Or how about a trooper running around kicking people in the nuts Scoundrel-style? Assuming that this is indeed how it's supposed to work, I'd hope that they're at least planning to tweak the animations/flavour of some of the abilities for different base classes.

That said, even if I understood all of that correctly, there are lots of question marks in the air about other details and how this is going to affect players in group content. Considering how big of a deal they made about it, it seems safe to assume that this "choosing a different play style" thing won't just be for new characters, but then how easy will it be to switch? If you could do it on the fly it could lead to weird gameplay expectations ("Everybody switch to a stealth style so we can skip the trash!") but then what would the restrictions be? Based on the fact that they said they'd also be introducing loadouts to go along with this (an easy way to save different specs/styles/gear sets and switch between them) it sounded to me like they do want players to be able to swap with relative ease.

And what will all of this mean for alts? If you want to see all the different gameplay options on both factions, you currently have an incentive to have sixteen alts, eight for each advanced class on both factions (though I'm sure most long-time players have more, haha). With this announcement, it sounds like you'd only really need two going forward: one Force and one tech user, who would then potentially have access to the full toolkit of all advanced classes on both factions. Does this mean there's less of a reason to have alts? I don't think so, though it does make things easier for people who want to avoid them for some reason. If you like having lots of alts though, there'll be even more class story/gameplay permutations for you to try though, as you could have e.g. eight different troopers that all level with a different play style.

Anyway, based on how many unanswered questions there still are about this new feature, a lot of this is really speculation more than anything else. We'll all have to hear more details first before deciding what it means for the way we play going forward.

Any other business

The expansion's launch, which is supposed to happen around the end-of-year holiday season (though we don't have a fixed date) will also mark the start of the second Galactic Season - so from the sounds of it there'll be a couple of months break between the end of the first and the beginning of the second Season, which is something I'd welcome. Season two will be centred around a new Duros companion.

There was also talk about improving a lot of the user interface, and I have to admit that was the part of the livestream that filled me with the least happiness... not that I'm against the idea in principle, but to be honest a lot of their UI "improvements" of the last couple of years haven't really felt like such (new windows that can't be modified in the UI editor etc.) - so you'll excuse me if I feel some trepidation around this.

On a general level, I liked how much optimism was expressed about SWTOR's future, considering how much doomsaying SWTOR players have had to put up with over the years. Apparently it's the longest-running Star Wars game at this point (I wouldn't expect them to count Star Wars Galaxies rogue servers for obvious reasons), and they have plans for more content for years to come. Eric even went as far as to say that this is just the start of the game's next ten years. I mean, obviously you never know when the corporate overlords might end up having different ideas - but still, seeing the team be so happy and confident does bode well.

If you made it to the end of this post and haven't heard about this yet, they also gave out a code that you can redeem in your account for a free stronghold deco poster of rebellious Mandalorian Heta Kol. The code LOTSofSWTOR (easy to remember!) is valid until July 15th.

What are your thoughts about everything that's been announced?

Shintar's Galactic Seasons Diary, Week 9

Day 1

This was the closest I've actually come to missing a day, and to explain why, I need to share a bit of personal information. Basically what happened was that I came down with a horrendous toothache out of nowhere in the late afternoon, so that I spent all evening desperately trying to get some sort of emergency dental treatment, though I did not succeed at this. In the end I could only take a lot of painkillers and go to sleep, meaning that I was in no state to play at any point.

The next morning I felt a bit better and managed to get a dentist appointment, at which point I finally remembered to log into SWTOR to check on my Seasons objectives. My weeklies were GSF and flashpoints, but I re-rolled the latter and happily, it turned into warzones. My daily objectives were Oricon and Yavin dailies - both activities I didn't mind, and in fact Yavin had never come up for me as an objective before so I appreciated the novelty, but I was a bit disappointed by the complete lack of synergy. Looking at the time, I had about an hour left until I had to leave for the dentist, and I knew I wouldn't be back before the daily reset. Could I try to squeeze both sets of dailies in before then? Should I even try? Wasn't the very fact that I was having an urgent dental issue reminding me that there are more important things in life than video games? I decided to give it a go anyway just to see if I could... and I did manage to complete both sets of dailies just in the nick of time.

(Just in case you're wondering, the dentist identified the issue and I'm receiving medication now, plus further treatment has been arranged. I'm still in some pain but at least it's being worked on.)

Day 2

I logged on late in the evening to find that my daily objectives were to kill insectoids across the galaxy and 75 opponents across "Seat of the Empire" planets. I paused for a moment to think whether these could overlap somehow, but I don't think there are any kind of bugs on Oricon, Taris, Yavin or Dantooine, so I ended up re-rolling the insectoids once again and the associated daily turned into the warzone objective.

For the latter I played a late-night Huttball on my Sage, which was one of the rare matches that really frustrated me, not because it was a 1-5 loss but because it felt like it was due to a single player on the enemy team: This one Shadow scored most of their goals and repeatedly pushed or pulled our ball carrier into fire traps when we were close to scoring. (He finished the match with more than twice the objective score of the next person down the list.) I mean, on the one hand... respect! But on the other... damn it, a single guy shouldn't be able to run circles around an entire team like that.

For the mob killing I consulted my quest spreadsheet and decided to continue my DvL Commando's class story on Taris. Only when I logged in, I realised that the step in the story she was on was literally the last bit of talking on Taris before leaving the planet. I mean, I did do that while I was there, but it didn't help me with my mob kill counter. I moved on to my Scoundrel that I once created for lowbie PvP. To be honest, what she had left of her class story on Taris didn't require that much mob killing either, even more so with a stealther, but I just made sure to aggro and kill every single pack of rakghouls and scavengers I encountered on the way, so that completing my objective and finishing the planetary class story ended up aligning quite nicely.

Day 3

Like on day one, I ended up with two non-overlapping PvE objectives, Yavin dailies and heroics on Taris. For Yavin I ended up completing the weekly on my Marauder, who had done her first four quests there for Tuesday's daily objective (and I also found out - very much to my surprise - that based on the codex entries she received while doing them, I'd apparently never done the Yavin weekly on her before), and for the Taris heroics I returned to my DvL Shadow, whom I recalled having a pretty chill time stealthing through them last time. It worked out well.

Day 4

More Yavin dailies and insectoids across the galaxy. I re-rolled the latter and it turned into Ziost. I gritted my teeth a bit, as three out of four days up to that point being dailies was not exactly my favourite combo, but it was alright. I did half the Yavin weekly on my Sniper, fully expecting to have to do the other half later in the week, and a round of Ziost on my Operative healer - after all, it's not like there's anything that requires killing on there.

Day 5

Finally a GSF daily, which brought my weekly counter to one out of four, even if it was another somewhat depressing domination loss. (You know it's bad when you're fighting at satellite B, and when you get the message that the enemy has captured A and C, your team is only on a single point... then someone on the enemy team self-destructed and we went to two.)

The other objective was Taris heroics again... I decided to risk a re-roll to insectoids since I really needed more warzones for my weekly, but it landed on Oricon dailies again. Sigh, more dailies. I decided to start the Oricon storyline on my dps Juggernaut since I knew that the one-time story quests also counted as "dailies" for Conquest - but apparently Seasons are programmed differently, since I soon noticed that my objective tracker was not moving as I was progressing through the story. So I abandoned that angle and logged onto my dps Powertech to do the dailies the "normal" way instead.

Day 6

Since my daily objectives were to do more Yavin dailies (as expected... sigh) and to play a warzone, I started off by playing two rounds of GSF. No, really, that made sense! With my weekly still sitting at one out of four and the week being on its sixth day, the opportunities for synergetic dailies had mostly passed. I played both matches on my Powertech tank: The first one was a loss during which I still had a good time since I had the highest score on my team (not that this was any sign of me actually being good at GSF, mind you), and the second one was a solid win in domination mode for once.

For the dailies I first took to Vandin Huttball on my Sorc healer, and it was one of those frustrating matches that started out feeling relatively even but then quickly devolved into a 0-6 beatdown. Also, my mind boggled when I saw at the end of the match that I had the lowest objective score on my team despite of constantly chasing the ball and feeling very much alone in that. I guess you don't get points for healing nearby team mates and vainly trying to stop the enemy ball carrier without succeeding.

Completing the Yavin weekly on my Sniper ticked off the other daily objective. She too, got codex entries that indicated that she'd apparently never done it before.

Day 7

On the last day of the week, the game presented me with generic mob killing and Ziost dailies as my daily objectives. I was fine with the mob killing as I had an Oricon weekly to finish off anyway, but I eyed the Ziost dailies thoughtfully. Checking back with the official post about Season one, I figured I'd have a one in three chance of re-rolling to something more synergetic with what remained of my weeklies, and a one in six chance of making things worse by getting the insectoids - everything else would be a wash. Those odds seemed good to me, so I decided to risk it... and got the bloody insects of course, prompting Mr Commando to ask why I was swearing so loudly (something that's not usually my wont).

I decided to start off with finishing the weeklies. The GSF match I got into on my Assassin tank was an easy ride for once, as I spent most of the game squatting on the middle satellite (owned by us) while the rest of the team laid waste to the opposition for a quick and easy win. When I played my regular PvP match on my healing Sage a bit later, things looked a lot less promising as I loaded into an arena with horrible lag (I've been having recurring connection issues in the evening lately). I figured it was bound to be a loss but somehow the rest of the team carried us to victory regardless of me only getting a heal off every three seconds or so.

This just left the two rounds of daily slaughter. For the generic mob killing on a Seat of the Empire planet I finished off my Oricon weekly on my main (she'd still had the heroic mission left after doing the regular dailies on day one), and for the insectoids I decided to go slaughter Geonosians in Jundland on Tatooine on my DvL Shadow. While running around the area I noticed that I'd never done the local side mission to kill Geonosians (the one that used to be an [Area] mission), so I picked that up too while I was there.

Week 9 thoughts:

What a week, with personal emergencies, connection issues and other mishaps! I can't say that was as fun as it could have been. And yet I persisted, bringing my Seasons level up to 83 (or in other words, 660 out of 800 points earned). I'm in the final stretch now, with only one full week and a bit left to go to max out.

I'm definitely feeling somewhat ambivalent about the whole system at this point. I can't deny that it's worked to somewhat revitalise my interest in the game and made me play more - I'm a sucker for a good fill-the-bar routine. On the other hand though, it's also been somewhat exhausting and with both raiding and completing Seasons objectives, I feel like I haven't really had any time left to just log on and do something random for fun, if you get what I mean. So I'm very much looking forward to being able to say that I'm done with this Season thing, at least for a while.

Shintar's Galactic Seasons Diary, Week 8

Day 1:

Got GSF and flashpoints as my weeklies and re-rolled flashpoints into ops. My dailies were generic killing in Hutt Space, and killing 75 insectoids on Voss. I re-rolled the latter, naturally, but it just transformed into insectoids on Ossus instead. I mean: yes, that's better, but still not great. At least the two dailies went well together. I went to Ossus on my Guardian and picked up five daily missions in bug-infested areas, did those, and then ran around killing some extra Geonosians since the quests only got the counter to about halfway. Both objectives completed at the same time.

Day 2:

I did a bit of a double take when I saw that my dailies were generic mob killing in Hutt Space and to do three GSI dailies on Makeb. Looking back at my Seasons diary, I've only had the latter objective once before, back in week three, which was also focused on Hutt Space. I don't know why they don't have these as options during other weeks; after all, GSI dailies exist on a number of planets. Or maybe the objectives also exist and I've just not seen them outside this one week? I assume they only have a chance to show up if your first daily login is on a character that actually has a seeker droid and macrobinculars, hmm...

Anyway, I quite appreciated this change of pace and took my Vanguard tank to Makeb to do some GSI dailies there, expecting the associated mob killing to come naturally. I tried to pick the "opposing set" to the missions I took last time to keep things varied. It was a chill enough time, though I have to say the macrobinocular quests pretty much always work out to be the better deal. The seeker droid ones always sound really appealing on paper, technically requiring zero combat and all, but then the things to dig up are so hard to find that you have to do three rounds of the map and things end up taking forever anyway.

Day 3:

Insectoids on Ossus and Voss for both my dailies, are you freaking kidding me? Naturally I re-rolled the Voss one and got GSF instead. In the match I played, a guildie of mine on the enemy team killed me over and over and we lost. I feel like I'm just losing these all the time, but I don't know if that's just in my head. I'll have to do a tally at the end of the Season to figure out the actual numbers.

For Ossus I did another round of five dailies on my Guardian. Since I knew from day one that I'd have to kill extras, I tried to do so, but probably because it was earlier in the evening it was actually quite busy, I struggled to find any mobs at all in places. So I then did another round of five dailies on my Sage, and both together did get me my mob tally quite comfortably.

Day 4:

Generic mob killing and Voss insectoids again. I re-rolled the latter and it turned into Ossus insectoids instead, so it was off to Ossus for another combo deal of doing five dailies each on two characters. For the second round I chose an Imp this time. It's a good thing I love Ossus as much as I do or I probably would've got a bit annoyed by all this repetition.

Day 5:

For the third day in a row, the game tried to send me to Voss to kill insectoids, and for the third day in a row I re-rolled it, this time into Ossus dailies. This was nice as I could just do the second half of the weekly on my Marauder without worrying about mob kills.

My other daily was Galactic Starfighter, which ended up being a domination match that was a decisive win for my team. Looking at the scoreboard at the end, it appeared to have been really unbalanced in our favour, with a lot of proper aces on my side.

Day 6:

This time my dailies were GSF and Ossus insectoids. The latter made me think hard since I didn't really want to go to Ossus for the fourth day in a row, but re-rolling could potentially result in Voss insectoids instead... in the end I decided to risk it and fortunately the die landed on "play a warzone" instead.

The GSF match was another disastrous loss during which I suffered my first death before my team had scored even a single point, but it was still decent fun. I played the regular PvP match on my Shadow in the levelling bracket and got into an Ancient Hypergates, which ended up being a very close loss. It was a good game though - we seemed to be hopelessly outmatched in the actual fights but me and another Shadow did the brunt of the point scoring for our team - sadly it just wasn't quite enough.

Day 7:

My last two dailies for the week were GSF and the killing of generic mobs in Hutt Space, both of which I was fine with. The GSF match also completed the associated weekly - just in time. It was another match where I got shot down by a guildie and we lost horribly. More annoyingly though, I had really bad lag again. There was one point where I hit the speed boost on my way to a satellite, then let go because I wanted to stop, but the ship just kept going on and on and on, shooting right past the satellite and into space because I couldn't make it stop. I just about managed to turn around but got killed right afterwards anyway (unsurprisingly).

This was also the day when I got my second weekly done, by running Scum and Villainy story mode with my guild. I don't think I've ever left both weekly objectives until so late in the week. Finally I completed the mob killing daily by doing a couple of quests on Quesh on my evil Juggernaut.

Week 8 thoughts:

I don't think I've explicitly said it before, but I don't actually care that much about any of the rewards from Seasons, I just enjoy filling the bars. I won't say no to another free companion, but truth be told I have more than enough of them already. Likewise, all the old rewards now available on the vendor are irrelevant to me since I was already playing when they were given out the first time. About the most interesting thing I thought were the two new fleet apartments - while I have more empty strongholds than decorated ones, they at least have some novelty value.

I realised this week that I had earned my eighth token, meaning that I had enough to buy one of the two strongholds. (The way it's designed you can only buy one per Season.) I meant to buy the Republic one but was tired when I talked to the vendor and so ended up buying the Imperial one by accident instead. D'oh! Oh well, I guess I was planning to eventually get them both anyway. Now it's just the Republic one that will have to wait until the next Season.

Shintar's Galactic Seasons Diary, Week 7

I apologise for Seasons being all I'm talking about at the moment, but similarly to the Dark vs. Light event back in the day, I'm honestly kind of fascinated by my own interest in it despite of my initial reaction that the concept wasn't all that great. I'm currently planning to keep writing these diaries until I reach level 100 (which, at my current progress, should be in three to four weeks) and then maybe post a summary of lessons learned.

Anyway, without further ado: The seventh week of the Season was Total Galactic War, which meant that I was more focused on Conquest than Seasons for the first few days at least, though there is overlap between the two of course. This shift in focus meant that I kind of completed some Seasons objectives almost accidentally and without paying too much attention to them.

Day 1:

Seeing how I'd got the flashpoint weekly again and considering what I said last week, I re-rolled it so that I ended up with both warzones and GSF as my weekly objectives. My dailies were also to play a warzone and to do some outer rim heroics.

For the latter I enlisted my DvL Shadow and for once I was actually pretty good at getting in and out of various heroics on Belsavis stealthily, meaning that I finished in good time. In the evening I did a fair amount of PvP for Conquest, which completed both my daily and my weekly. I remember that the first match was a Voidstar on my healing Sage, in which we managed to defend the first set of doors for the full duration, and during the second round I was the one who succeeded at planting the bomb, which is the sort of thing that always makes me happy. The matches after that I don't recall that well, I just know that they didn't all go that swimmingly for me.

Day 2:

My dailies were once again to play a warzone and to kill 75 enemies on outer rim planets. My first PvP match of the day was a Huttball on my Vanguard tank where I rocked pretty hard, pulling enemy ball carriers into the fire repeatedly, and we ended up winning 6-0. After that I descended into a major losing streak though, until I got annoyed enough to stop for the day.

For the outer rim rampage I decided to return to my DvL Assassin and continued questing with her on Belsavis. I felt slightly naughty playing on Imperial side since we needed more points on Republic side to win first place on Onderon, but we already had a healthy lead after only one day, so I wasn't too worried about taking a little bit of time away from that.

Day 3:

On the Thursday, my dailies were a convenient GSF/warzone combo. (I think one of them may originally have been something else, which I decided to re-roll, but I don't remember the details.) The GSF match was one in which my team was abysmal. The warzone, played on my Vanguard tank, was a Voidstar where we once again mounted a flawless defense during round one and then broke through the doors almost immediately in round two.

Day 4:

More GSF for my daily objective, which also brought my weekly count up to three. This one was one of those games in which both sides were bad and struggling to kill each other, which is usually something I find amusing, but less so on that day since I was lagging pretty badly for some reason, constantly getting "on cooldown" messages when trying to fire my railgun, and it annoyed me. Alas, even though it was quite close, it was still a loss.

My other daily was originally 75 mob kills, but I re-rolled it into heroics. I considered repeating the Belsavis combo that I'd found so efficient on day 1, but decided to try Hoth instead for a change of pace. I did aim for a stealthy run again, taking my Shadow tank this time, and actually succeeded again! I even picked up two heroics that were in the exact same area without realising. I found myself thinking that it would be handy to have a guide for which heroics are quick and stealthy to do, but of course these already exist; I just hadn't been looking. This spreadsheet is a good example, if not entirely comprehensive (though I'm not sure about all the random profanity).

Day 5:

My dailies were GSF and heroics again, but I felt daring, so I re-rolled the heroics and got mob killing instead... but the objective counter was already sitting at 74/75, so I literally only had to kill a single mob to get completion. Best bug ever.

For GSF I queued on my Assassin tank again while some of my guildies were queueing on Republic side, and we got into the same match on opposing sides. I was a bit uneasy since at least two of them are pretty good at GSF while I'm not, but the match actually ended up being quite balanced and extremely close. My team won though, which also completed my second weekly objective for the Season.

Day 6:

This time I got PvP and heroics, and re-rolled the heroics into mob killing again, though this time it was sadly at the (expected) progress of 0/75. For the warzone I queued with a group of three guildies this time since several of them had the same objective, and we got into a Novare Coast. Since I was on my Nautolan Shadow, I volunteered to guard our side base. It was pretty quiet for most of the match, except for one time when two people came to try and cap it and I pretty much deleted one of them before they even got close to killing me... I forget how ridiculously OP burst spec Shadows and Assassins are in PvP. The match as a whole was a decisive win too.

For the mob killing I decided to change scenery to Rishi, where my dps Sorc was just starting up the Shadow of Revan storyline. I simply quested until I had enough kills, though considering how many of the early missions are simply about running around and talking, that took me quite a while. Also, I learned that Rishi has a weekly mission now? I do vaguely recall hearing something about that being added at some point, but I'd kind of dismissed it because I didn't think Rishi had enough daily missions anyway. I was wrong!

Day 7:

Finally, I closed out the week with a combo of heroics and mob killing, neither of which I re-rolled this time because they were quite synergetic. One planet I hadn't visited yet this week was Tatooine, plus our Imperial guild still needed some Conquest points too, so I picked three Tatooine heroics off the fleet terminal on my dps Juggernaut and off I went. I was initally worried whether I'd judged their length badly when I wasn't even halfway towards completing the kill objective after two heroics, but "fortunately" (in this case) the third one included a lot of running around and mob killing, so that I actually ended up completing both objectives nearly simultaneously.

Week 7 thoughts:

I think I've developed a clear preference in terms of the daily Seasons objectives now: I'll always be happy to do a warzone or GSF match. Heroics and mob killing I'm generally OK with, but I might try to re-roll them anyway if I get the same type of objective too many times in a row or just don't fancy it that much on a particular day. Insectoids I still avoid like the plague.

That said, two months in, things are definitely getting a bit repetitive. I do try to to mix things up by doing things like heroics on different planets every day, but there's only so much you can do to spice things up on that front. I'm looking forward to being properly "done" with this Season and having a bit of a break from caring about these daily and weekly objectives before Bioware intends to start the second Season (in September I think?).

Shintar's Galactic Seasons Diary, Week 6

Day 1:

We were back to week one objectives, and I got flashpoints and GSF for my weeklies. I decided to keep the flashpoints this time, since three of them are part of the Shadow of Revan prelude and I have a lot of alts that are somewhere on that step of the story (I don't like doing these on solo mode very much). So I figured this could be a good opportunity to progress their personal stories a bit.

My dailies were heroics and conveniently, more GSF. I returned to playing the latter on my Assassin tank, and I felt that I actually did incredibly well for once... I ended up being at the top of scoreboard in that match somehow, with most kills and the highest hit percentage. Sadly, we still lost by quite a margin, but at least I had fun. This also completed the character's first ever GSF weekly, which finished her Conquest three times over, so I knew that I'd want to do the remaining GSF matches for the week on another alt.

For the heroics I decided to return to Corellia, but this time on my Shadow tank to avoid having to kill too many mobs. However, this did not work as well as expected, as I'd forgotten that two of the three heroics I chose were full of mobs with super stealth detection, meaning that going into stealth didn't just not make me inconspicuous, but rather the opposite, sometimes causing mobs to come running from the other side of the room. This was quite amusing but fortunately didn't cause me to lose too much time (to some degree I could still get away with stealthing if I was fast enough running past the mobs with the detection skill).

Day 2:

This was kind of the ultimate test for my interest in Seasons as it was the day after the release of WoW's Burning Crusade Classic, which I was very excited about and therefore distracted by. I actually logged on extremely late at night to check out my objectives, re-rolled insectoid killing once again, but then decided that I couldn't be bothered anyway. However, in the end the FOMO won out and I logged back in the next morning to quickly get my objectives in before the reset after all.

One was to play a warzone, which I did on my lowbie Merc, and once again got into an arena. Now, this one definitely felt depressingly unbalanced in terms of levels - my team all in the thirties and the opposition between 65 and 74 except for one guy. I didn't expect us to stand a chance and we didn't, though I was surprised that I did manage to stay alive at least for a little while.

The re-rolled objective was to kill 75 mobs on a core world and I was unhappy to see from my spreadsheet that only a single one of my characters had any story quests there, and it was my little squid Sorc whom I'd specifically made to PvP and on whom I didn't care about doing the story anyway. Still, I logged into her anyway and flew to Balmorra. For a change of pace I also picked up all the other quests in Sobrik and then just went on a rampage in the nearby area. It was actually interesting to see those side quests again as it had been so long that I'd done some of them that they actually felt vaguely fresh again. I also "found" a datacron containing a green matrix shard and that required two people to unlock, again something I'd completely forgotten about... there was another person there clearly interested in getting it so I helped them out.

Day 3:

Once again I logged on extremely late at night and was therefore glad to see that neither of my daily objectives were group content, as PvP or GSF pops would likely have been non-existent at that time of night. Instead I was asked to do three core world heroics and kill insectoids on Balmorra... which I decided not to to re-roll for once, as the previous day's adventures had reminded me that this was actually quite a viable combo in more than one way, even if I was sick and tired of the Republic heroics featuring Colicoids.

So I logged my Sniper instead and picked up three heroics on Balmorra, two of which I was sure contained Colicoids, the third one I wasn't sure about (and it didn't). Still, after doing those three, I was most of the way towards being finished with the insectoid objective as well, so I just went to Bug Town and AoE-d down a couple of pulls of weak mobs there to finish off.

Day 4:

This time I logged in earlier in the evening and was presented with more generic core world killing and being asked to do a warzone. I played the latter on my Merc again and got into a Quesh Huttball. It was another loss, but I couldn't blame that one on levels; my team was sadly just a lot less co-ordinated than the enemy. Also, in a classic display, the one guy on my team who I could tell was really trying and of whom I thought positively early on in the match, then went on to be abusive in chat and AFK-ed out at the end. Because of course.

For the mob killing I returned to my little Sorc to do some more questing on Balmorra, even though she was long done with her Conquest, but I had no other characters that had anything useful to do on any of the highlighted planets. So I guess a lesson I learned about myself there was that while I generally like to spread out my activity to reach my Conquest target on as many characters as possible, when it comes to Seasons I'll prioritise making actual character progress over spreading out those Conquest points at all costs.

Day 5:

After three days of counting mob kills I was relieved to be presented with Black Hole dailies and a GSF match as my objectives for a change. The GSF match was one of those in which I played pretty abysmally, but everyone else somehow managed to be even worse, so it was no surprise that we lost.

For the Black Hole I decided to go on my Gunslinger, after having done the dailies on Imperial side every time they came up as an objective so far. I generally prefer to go Imp side for these things since our Imperial alt guild sometimes needs a bit of a push to reach the large Conquest yield, but for some reason I find the Imperial side of the Black Hole a bit irritating. I can't quite put my finger on it as I don't think it takes longer exactly, but it just doesn't seem to flow very well. Maybe it's just because I got so much more practice on Republic side back in the day when this zone first came out. On Imp side it always feels like I spend entirely too much time running back and forth to find a few more droids to kill.

Day 6:

My favourite combo of GSF and a warzone at last, woohoo! This GSF match went quite a bit better, and at the start it even looked like it might end up being an easy win, but somehow the enemy managed to turn things around and we ended up losing after all. It was pretty close though, and a good match overall.

The warzone I did on my healing Sage ended up being an Ancient Hypergates. That was another good match, despite of us losing - we were only four points behind, which is an absolutely minuscule difference in that game mode.

As it was Sunday and I had yet to even start on my flashpoint weekly objective, I also decided to run two flashpoints. First I did Depths of Manaan on my Powertech tank. The queue pop showed another tank and I hesitated for a moment as I tend to avoid double tank or double healer team-ups in veteran mode, but I decided to risk it. In the end it went fine, though the other tank was a bit odd. They were unusually chatty by flashpoint standards and seemed friendly enough, but they also bragged about their dps, seemed to pay little attention to any of our damage dealers lagging behind, and felt the need to quiz one of them about why their gear was so bad (not that this person responded).

On my second run I queued for Assault on Tython on my Shadow tank, again because she was on that step in the Shadow of Revan prelude (that had been my reason for choosing the Powertech as well). Funnily enough I ended up in a group with a guildie who was also trying to get his weekly done. I stealthily positioned myself to pull the first group but was instantly reminded that Tython is another one of those flashpoints where people will run all around the houses to skip as much trash as possible. I rolled my eyes a little but decided to let the "lead skipper" take point from then on and it all went very quickly and smoothly.

Day 7:

My last daily objectives for the week were to kill 75 mobs again and to play a warzone. I tried to re-roll the mob killing in hopes of getting a GSF match to synergise with my weekly but got bug killing on Alderaan instead.

I decided to finish my weeklies first and played one last GSF match, which we actually won decisively! First victory I had all week. Then I did Depths of Manaan with my Juggernaut tank and it was quite smooth. I liked that we had this one dps who pulled a couple of times but then actually apologised for it.

With just the dailies left, I joined a warzone on my Shadow, but it was a Hypergate that was less than a minute from ending, and my team was behind. Unsurprisingly, I didn't manage to pull off some miracle move to make us win after all, but at least it was quick completion credit. For the bugs, I couldn't be bothered to try and figure out some interesting activity that would maybe coincide with bug killing anymore, so I just grabbed my dps Sorc and did a round randomly AoE-ing down Killiks just outside the Imperial spaceport.

Week 6 thoughts:

Well, I kind of surprised myself with my persistence in this one, since this would have been the perfect time to end my perfect streak of doing all the objectives, but even in the throes of Burning Crusade hype I found the time to log on at least briefly every day and knock out my dailies. I'm just too much of a sucker for a routine I guess.

Having done the flashpoint weekly two weeks in a row now, I think I'll likely avoid it going forward as it just takes too long compared to anything else and has no synergy with any of the dailies. Like I said last week, it would be nice if there was a daily objective for flashpoints of some sort, but since there isn't it sadly doesn't line up with anything else.

Otherwise this week was kind of dominated by mob killing dailies, giving me a chance to grow tired of those. I'm generally somewhat ambivalent about this sort of objective, because on the one hand it gives you options and you can tie it into some other activity, such as doing story missions or heroics on that planet, but on the other hand it can be seen as a cue to just mindlessly AoE everything in sight for quick completion, which is not the sort of thing I'm fond of.

Shintar's Galactic Seasons Diary, Week 5

Day 1:

For the first time since the start of the Season, neither of my weeklies involved PvP, as they were for flashpoints and operations. Ops were good again as I was planning to run Gods from the Machine with the guild on Friday, and as for the flashpoints... well, looking at the flashpoint list for the week I decided that I was going to do it this time, also because it was the fifth time in a row that I got the flashpoint weekly and I'd never actually done it. Yes, re-rolling it to GSF or warzones would have been more convenient for sure as I was bound to do those things for dailiy POs anyway, but I was craving some variety.

However, dailies first. One of them was to kill 75 enemies in unknown or wild space, meaning Ilum, CZ-198 or Iokath. I decided to go for kills on Ilum via a character that was on the Ilum storyline anyway, and was surprised to find that I only had one, my dps Sage. I seem to remember that there was a time when loads of my alts had yet to do Ilum... I guess I burned through them all back when Conquest actually required some work and questing on Ilum was a frequently reoccurring objective.

The other daily was a warzone again, which I played on my lowbie Merc. I was glad to see some map variety once again, as I got put into Yavin Ruins for the first time in ages. My team won - somewhat to my surprise, considering that they were not very responsive to my calls for help and multiple people were off to skirmish at the third turret when we already owned two, but I guess we just overpowered the enemy so much that it didn't matter.

For the flashpoints I decided to pick characters that had story missions tied to one of the flashpoints from the selection, so I started by queueing my original Sorc for Legacy of the Rakata. I got into a group with two stealthers, which allowed us to skip a few extra pulls, but nobody was obnoxious if we did end up pulling something after all. The other non-stealther, a bounty hunter, got stuck in the terrain at one point and I had to rescue him, but other than that it was a pretty nice and smooth run. I ended up involuntarily tanking the last boss and rotating through the kolto stations to keep myself alive, as we were a full dps team.

I then decided to go on another run, this time to Directive 7 on my DvL Commando. I did have slight regrets when I was reminded of all the annoying skips that many pugs insist on in this flashpoint as I got myself stuck inside a wall while running along one of the pipes. After I'd untangled myself with /stuck, I went and just killed the lone weak mob that we had so painstakingly avoided.

On Bulwark I ended up tanking once again, and actually died - much to my embarrassment - as I was surprised by how much damage I took and didn't click on a kolto station quickly enough. I felt a little sheepish for about a minute, but then the rest of the group actually wiped (!). After that, the rest of the run went okay, and the only other noteworthy thing that happened was that we tried to skip the boss with the two turrets near the end but someone aggroed him anyway, which made our main skipper quite annoyed, based on their "wtf" and "omg" comments in party chat.

After that I decided to leave the third flashpoint for another day. It felt strange to realise that I hadn't actually done a veteran mode flashpoint in many months and how everything felt slightly unfamiliar.

Day 2:

I logged on quite late in the evening, hoping for something quick, so when I saw the insectoid killing objective, I immediately re-rolled it and got CZ-198 dailies instead. The other PO was a warzone, which was fine.

I played another PvP match on my lowbie Merc and got into a Huttball, which my team won 6-0. Our opponents were dead set on killing, with me being a favoured target due to my low-ish level, but I can't say I'm upset about being killed if it leaves my team unimpeded to win more easily!

For the dailies I picked up my DvL Assassin, wanting to minimise mob killing since that wasn't part of the objective. Despite the late hour, there was a veritable crowd in the CZ-198 landing zone when I arrived, so I immediately switched to the PvP instance. I was surprised to see two people by the shuttle there as well, but once I went into the actual quest area I didn't see another soul during my entire round, which was pretty much what I had hoped for.

Day 3:

Another late night, I logged on to find more CZ-198 dailies and insectoid killing. I re-rolled the insects again and got generic mob killing instead... perfect combo, yes!

This time I took my Sniper to do the dailies and stayed in the PvE instance, since I suck at PvPing as Sniper. It was busy despite the late hour, but there were still enough mobs to go around. Only the champion droid for the heroic took some time to secure a tag on. Finishing the quests and my kills ended up lining up quite nicely.

Day 4:

This time I logged on earlier in the evening to get my daily objectives done before ops time. I had to do a GSF match, which popped almost instantly, and the match ended up being pretty close but ultimately a loss, sadly. The most interesting thing about it was the guy on my team who kept trying to give pretty detailed instructions, like "They have three slicer ships, get the slicers!" and I was just kind of baffled that he apparently expected the rest of us to actually know and understand what he was asking of us.

I also got CZ-198 dailies for the third day in row and briefly considered re-rolling them but then was like "nah". They are after all really fast and easy. This time I went on my Operative on Imp side and again switched to the PvP instance the moment I arrived and saw how busy it was. Unfortunately there were other Imps in the PvP instance as well... but I had the sense to not try to fight them over the droid crates (where I encountered them) but instead move on to the next area and complete the quests there first, including the heroic. That worked out well as the other floor was pretty quiet and by the time the others arrived, I was ready to go back and quickly finish off the crate quest.

Story mode Gods from the Machine with the guild was smooth and fairly unremarkable. In conversation I came up with the idea of maybe creating a YouTube video called "The Gods from the Machine story explained", which would then just be me saying: "Don't worry, it's not just you; it simply doesn't make any sense."

Finally I decided to finish off the evening by doing my last flashpoint for the other weekly. I decided to go for Czerka Corporate Labs on my DvL Juggernaut. I was actually kind of slow to notice that the Czerka flashpoints were on the list too; to be honest if I'd seen that earlier I probably would have done Core Meltdown instead of D7, but oh well. You live and learn. This run was super fast and smooth, with people who clearly all knew what they were doing. On our way to the second boss someone even said "remember not to pull the second boss until everyone's in the room" - that right there is a sign of someone who's pugged that place a lot. At the end someone commented that we had been so fast, it had probably been even more efficient than a Hammer Station run. Damning praise, but I'll take it!

Day 5:

Got generic mob killing and insecticide as my objectives again. Re-rolled the insects and ended up with CZ-198 dailies for the fourth day in a row. Could be worse I guess... (I said that last bit out loud, to which Mr Commando replied from across the table: "Yes, you could be doing this instead!" He was doing an archaeology quest in WoW.)

I hopped onto CZ and into the PvP instance on my dps Powertech, and actually encountered an enemy player for the first time! They were fighting the champion droid when I saw them and I briefly thought about attacking but then decided not to and disappeared around a corner instead. A couple minutes later I went for the droid myself, and as soon as I was done, what I suspect was the same person suddenly attacked me instead and killed me (I was in combat, not expecting it, and am not that great at death match PvP anyway). I suppose it was a small mercy that they at least waited until I was done with the droid too or just didn't see me any earlier. As it was, that death was barely a bump in the road and I quickly resumed my questing, to finish both the weekly mission and my two objectives a few minutes later.

Day 6:

Generic mob killing and insectoids AGAIN. I re-rolled the latter and got CZ-198 AGAIN. My guildies were complaining about GSF and Iokath dailies - how I wished I could have gotten some of those instead! Still, not the worst thing on the world, so I went to that little moon yet again, this time on the Sorc on which I had done Legacy of the Rakata on day one, since she still needed some Conquest points.

Once again I opted for the PvP instance, though it was surprisingly busy, at least with other Imps. I didn't see another Republic character until I spotted a guildie on one of their Republic alts, so I jumped him and killed him (admittedly with another random Imp joining in). We were both on voice chat so I also teased him about it there. However, he managed to revive quickly and then killed me in return, so fair play. We had a good laugh about it.

Day 7:

Generic mob killing again, but at least this time it was paired with doing a warzone. I decided to return to Ilum with my dps Sage and continued the storyline some more. As much fun as it is to give Lord Loyat a dressing-down, it did occur to me that I might have done that particular storyline a bit too many times (especially compared to other planetary arcs).

The warzone was once again done by my lowbie Merc - can I still say lowbie now that she's level 40? - and I got into an arena. I got a little excited to see that I wasn't the lowest level in the match when I noticed that there was also a level 18 Vanguard on my team. However, when I tried to seize up the opposition, I noticed that the only person whose level I could see was a level 60+ Sage... the other three were all stealth dps. I'm sure I don't need to elaborate on how that went, but at least it got the objective done quickly.

Week 5 thoughts:

We've now completed the last of the five weeks that were posted on Bioware's blog about Seasons - which means that after the reset we'll be back to week one and its focus on core worlds. Hopefully the worst bugs will be fixed by now, and if you ever found yourself annoyed in previous weeks by having made bad re-roll decisions based on that week's objectives, you'll get another chance at those.

I've definitely fallen into a routine of doing the warzone and PvP objectives every day, ops for the weekly if I get it, and always re-rolling insectoid killing. Dailies, heroics and generic mob killing are usually fine for me too but get tiresome if they repeat too many days in a row - then again, I've had to learn from experience that re-rolling them risks making things even worse.

I really wish there was a daily objective for flashpoints of some kind - it could be any difficulty to satisfy both soloers and socialisers - just to mix things up a bit I guess.