Big Changes Coming with Galactic Season 2

When I wrote my feedback post for Galactic Season 1, I assumed that Bioware wasn't planning to make any major changes to the overall structure of the system, with two randomised daily and weekly objectives a week. As it turns out though, they're planning to change a whole lot!

David Staats took to the forums on Thursday to explain what updates they are looking to make for Season 2, and the list is quite extensive.

First off, the UI is going to change a bit - this is something I didn't mention before, but yes, having the Seasons objectives just mixed in with the regular Conquest ones was not great and slightly confusing. I kept having to re-order my list to find my Seasons POs, so giving them their own tab makes sense and will be a welcome improvement.

More importantly though, the number and nature of the priority objectives is going to change big time. The forum post lays out how during this first Season, most of the available points came from the daily objectives, and that the devs want to move away from that a bit to shift the focus more towards weeklies, as these give people more freedom to organise their play time and should ease the pressure on players like me who wanted to earn every available point as soon as possible. Can't say I disagree with that!

Going forward, there is only going to be a single, unchanging daily objective: to earn Conquest points. Datamining shows the amount of points required for this currently set to 50k (which is the same as an individual character's personal Conquest objective for the week), but since it hasn't officially been confirmed to be that number, I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up being a bit lower in the final iteration (higher would surprise me). This is a step towards homogenising Seasons and Conquest (already!), which I'm not too fond of, but it's somewhat balanced out by...

... people no longer getting two randomised weekly objectives but instead a list of ten that is the same for everyone, and the first seven you complete will award you points before the whole thing locks down (meaning you can skip whichever three you like the least). The forum post doesn't specify the nature of these and they are probably still up in the air, but again, if datamining is at least an indication of the general direction, quite a few of these will be more specific than the Season 1 weeklies were, e.g. to kill some mobs without a companion, to complete a specific KotFE chapter, or to kill a certain boss in a specific flashpoint.

Everyone drawing from the same list of objectives will make it easier for friends and guildies to co-ordinate, though it also makes me hope that Bioware isn't planning to add any competitive open world objectives to that list, because e.g. the whole server trying to complete a certain Taris outdoor heroic at the same time would probably not be that fun.

In general, this change in structure will definitely also change how I approach the Season. During Season 1 my priority was always to get my daily objectives done, and the weeklies were something I fit in whenever, or even something that completed itself while I was doing dailies (e.g. the warzone weekly getting ticked off if I got the daily objective for warzones several days in a row).

With the shift to a focus on weeklies and the daily being super generic, the question will instead be "What weeklies can I work on today?" and it will be the daily that completes itself while you work on other objectives. At the same time it will be easier to deal with busy days that don't allow for as much play time without missing a beat, because you could then just log in, do some quick and easy Conquest objectives that award a lot of points (such as raising a companion's influence level) and call it a day without falling behind on Season progress.

I have to say I really like the sound of that, and after a bit of time "off" from Season 1, I'm now actually looking forward to Season 2 and how it will work with that new system.

Bad Batch Season 1

As the last episode of Bad Batch season one aired on Disney+ a few days ago, I wanted to talk about this show for a bit! It was the first Star Wars show of which I've watched every episode as it came out, which was a novel experience for me. I was hoping that I'd be able to have some exchanges about it with my Twitter friends about it, since I remembered some of them talking about Rebels all the time back when that aired, but for some reason Bad Batch didn't seem to inspire the same amount of enthusiasm among the people I follow at least. Fortunately my guild's Discord had a Star Wars spoilers channel where people were happily chatting away about every new episode as it was released, so that was good fun.

For me, Bad Batch has been quite the pleasant surprise. I haven't been too hyped about Disney announcing that they are working on god knows how many more Star Wars shows, simply because let's be honest: both Star Wars and Disney have always been about fifty percent brilliance and fifty percent cheap crap, and you can't necessarily know in advance which one it's going to be. Bad Batch in specific also didn't excite me at all because I didn't feel particularly enamoured with the characters when they first appeared in Clone Wars. And anyway, how interesting can a show about a bunch of clone troopers simply fighting different enemies every week be anyway?

However, I was pleasantly surprised from the very first few minutes of the pilot. Despite the Batch being the titular characters, the show isn't all about them but also about the transformation of the Republic into the Empire after Revenge of the Sith, and I'm always a sucker for that kind of world building. Also, the Batch find themselves as outcasts almost right from the start, meaning that instead of being sent into battle every week by their superiors, they instead have to struggle with the question of what it means to be a soldier without a cause. They quickly settle into working as mercenaries (which is, after all, very close to being a soldier, it's just that your employers change) but come to realise over time that there could be more to life for them than simply being someone else's hired muscle.

A big part of that is inspired by their association with Omega, the show's child character, who I'm sure made every adult fan freeze in terror or groan at least a little the moment she was introduced in the pilot... but you know, ultimately I think she's been handled well. There are a few episodes where she's a bit much, but in general she serves her purpose of being a more "natural" foil to the single-mindedness of the clones, who're used to going where they're told and not having to ponder philosophical questions about what they'd actually like to do with their lives.

If I had to criticise anything, it would be that despite of everything that happens in season one, most of the Batch doesn't really see a lot of character development. Most of the personal growth I described above happens through the lens of Hunter, the leader of the squad, while his followers mostly remain true to the stereotypes as which they were introduced. I still think that works okay though, and with everything else that's going on I didn't personally perceive that lack of focus on the other squad members as annoying or detracting. Plus it's kind of part of the package with clones that they don't really have unique backstories to explore... it's more about the choices they decide to make going forward.

With that said, I'd like to add that I was surprised by how much the show's overarching themes of finding your place in the world and being forced to leave the past behind resonated with me on a personal level. I was a very "good kid" as a child, so unproblematic that my mother used to say that I appeared to have skipped puberty... I was just happy to trust the adult authority figures in my life and do whatever they asked of me (which mostly just meant staying out of trouble and getting good grades), but this also meant that when I hit my early to mid-twenties I had major difficulties adjusting to life as a grown-up and being expected to make decisions for myself. Let's just say that was a rough couple of years in some ways. So I could definitely relate to this bunch of clones feeling a bit lost without their Republic commanders to tell them what to do, even as they knew that the Empire wasn't right for them. Or maybe it's just that I main a trooper, so it's natural that I like a show about troopers? You decide.

Either way, I'm looking forward to season two.

All about the Codebreaker Title and Shortcut!

I'm not usually someone to write guides, but sometimes I'll come upon a fairly obscure piece of information that seemingly nobody else has posted on the internet yet, and that can be kind of fun to lay out for others. This is one of those occasions, somewhat randomly inspired by my ops group being back in Dxun and me suddenly finding myself wondering whether the Codebreaker shortcut is widely known, as I never saw anyone really talk about it... it's just something that we discovered organically.

A quick Google search for "swtor codebreaker shortcut" just got me the message "It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search", and trying "swtor codebreaker title" resulted in links to a few pages that replicated the codex entry for the title but nothing else. Hopefully this blog post will soon answer anyone's questions on the subject!

The first step to getting the Codebreaker title is to complete the Dxun Cipher achievement. I'm not going to go into detail about how to get this one, because there are already some good guides out there how to get that. Here is one of them. As you can see it requires you to have beaten the first three encounters in the Nature of Progress operation.

After killing the Mutant Trandoshans (boss number four, but it doesn't have to be in the same run as getting the achievement!), on your way to the Huntmaster, you have to pass through this room on the second floor of the main facility where you get ambushed by a trash pull. As you enter, on the left is the door leading to the stairs (yellow arrow), while on the right is the door to the tram/elevator leading to the spaceport and executive lounge (green arrow).

If you don't have the Cipher achievement, trying to use the lift before you've cleared the trash to Huntmaster won't work, as you'll be locked out. If you do have the achievement however, you can go up to the spaceport right away! And this is what grants you the title. Just be aware that if you do this on your own and you don't have stealth, you'll also die, as the tram spits you out right in the middle of a big trash pull.

However, if enough other people in your group have the achievement, you can all click the button simultaneously and go up together. (Timing is important here though, because the ride becomes unusable the moment the first person gets into combat.) Once the trash group at the top exit is dead, the lift becomes usable for everyone as normal. This is a nice way of skipping the stairs, which - while absolutely hilarious the first time - can get a bit old after a while I suppose.

Nightlife Disappointment

The Nar Shaddaa nightlife event and I don't have the best of histories. My initial impression of it when it was first introduced back in 2014 was a resounding "meh", and since then I've mostly alternated between not really caring or being mildly annoyed by some aspect of it. Last year my annoyance reached a new peak when I realised that the newly added Emperor's Grace slot machine resulted in more free Kingpin chips than any sane person could ever use, effectively turning use of the Kingpin slots into nothing but a grind where prizes were guaranteed if you just kept clicking for long enough. I honestly felt pretty burnt out after simply trying to get rid of all my free chips for a few days, even as new ones kept rolling in faster than I could spend them.

With that knowledge in mind, I knew I had to approach things more carefully this time and not let myself get lured into some sort of self-inflicted sense of having to use all the chips. Occasionally clicking away on one monitor while watching a video on the second was fine, but only in moderation.

However, Bioware managed to throw a spanner in the works for me by adding a new prize that I actually really liked - a shiny visor.

Promotional image from the website article about Soovada. Not my own screenshot, obviously.

This one came from the Emperor's Grace machine, and since acquisition of those chips was much more limited, I figured that simply using whatever chips I earned in pursuit of some new shades shouldn't be an issue. And it wasn't, not in that way anyway.

Within days of the event going live, my Twitter feed was full of people proudly showing off their new visors and I figured that I should be able to join their ranks soon enough. Since Emperor's Grace chips can't be bought - unlike the other two types - this wasn't like prizes from previous years where you could assume that someone who showed off having won the jackpot within days of the event going live had likely poured several millions of credits into buying chips. Emperor's Grace chips had to come "naturally", so if people saw success so quickly, it couldn't be that bad, right?

Wrong.

I just kept playing normally, only going to use up my Emperor's Grace chips on whichever character had earned them as I went, but luck was simply not with me. I won a mount and the new droid pet, sure - but neither of those were items I was after.

With less than two weeks to go on the event I started to get a bit nervous. What else could I do to earn more chips? I knew that you could get them as prizes from playing the Kingpin machines, and I did have thousands of chips for those... so I started another round of click spam, to little avail. It felt like I could go through hundreds of Kingpin chips while barely getting a return of two or three Emperor's Grace chips. That's not a great return on investment for so many hours of clicking.

Eventually I decided to take to Twitter for advice - after all it was full of winners - and this was interesting in so far as it resulted in what's been my most replied-to tweet in a long time:

Those of you who got some of the new prizes from this year's casino event - how long did it take you and do you have any tips for farming Emperor's chips? It seems I can burn 100s of Kingpins to maybe get 3 Emps, which then don't win me anything except more Kingpins... 😅 #SWTOR

— Shintar (@ShintarCommando) August 4, 2021

As it turns out, trying to get chips from the Kingpin machines is apparently the worst thing to do, and the generally agreed upon recommendation was to do content instead, especially anything that involved killing lots of mobs. I was more than happy to be told to get out of the casino, though the most emphatic advice I'd been given, to simply AoE down mobs by the dozen on the starter planets, didn't sit quite right with me either.

So I spent the last week of the event playing the game "normally" again. Ops nights were pretty good for earning chips, but other content honestly didn't feel that much better than playing the slots, with me often finishing the evening with only one or two chips gained. Still, at least it was more fun than clicking slot machines all night.

Still, today the event concluded without me having won my desired prize. I didn't actually count how many Emperor's Grace chips I went through in the end, but it must have been several dozen. I guess such is the nature of anything RNG though. 

Fortunately I'm a patient person - the event will likely come around again next year, and if Bioware follows their previous track record, the shades might end up being added to the Kingpin prize pool or to one of the vendors at that point, which would make them much easier to get. I can only hope - but so far my streak of not getting along with Nar Shaddaa Nightlife seems to be doomed to continue.

Let's Talk About... Secrets of the Enclave

This post has been sitting in my drafts for literal months, mostly thanks to Galactic Seasons sucking all the air out of the room when it came to my writing energy, but I knew that I'd come back to it eventually. SWTOR's story updates are just way too much fun not to write about them!

I had to think a bit about how to structure this post, because technically the 6.3 story update is extremely easy to sum up (spoilers incoming by the way, if you don't want to read any of those, get out while you can): Your faction finds out that Darth Malgus is doing something in the old Jedi enclave on Dantooine, so you follow him there with two companions, but as it turns out he's already gone. The end.

However, while reducing it to that single sentence is truthful, it's also kind of unfair. It's truthful because, well... it's strictly true, and you could argue that this update's biggest major weakness is that it doesn't really move the plot along very much, if at all. But it's also unfair because not every piece of story needs to advance the plot in leaps and bounds - it's okay to focus on other things sometimes - and what Secrets of the Enclave does do is provide major insight into at least four secondary characters, feature lots of KOTOR fan service, the return of two known (if minor) SWTOR characters that we hadn't seen in ages, more information about Malgus' current status, and a bit of an update on how our faction and the Alliance's relationship with it is coming along. So I guess these can be my sub-headers for this post or something.

First I'd like to note though that Secrets of the Enclave sits in a funny place in terms of faction split, in the sense that it's kind of the same story but at the same time it isn't. Strictly speaking you hit all the same notes along the way both as a Republic and as an Imperial player, but since you're coming at things from a different background and with completely different companions, it actually feels quite different as well. The closest existing piece of content that I can compare it to is probably Korriban Incursion/Assault on Tython, where the gameplay is identical for both factions but it obviously evokes quite a different feeling depending on whether you're attacking or defending. Secrets of the Enclave has a lot more dialogue that either of those did though.

Your guides along the way

Let's start with the friendly faces that assist you throughout your journey to and inside the Dantooine enclave. There's an interesting behind the scenes interview with writer Caitlin Sullivan Kelly on the official SWTOR website in which she explains why she chose the characters she did to accompany the player in this flashpoint, but in short each side needed someone with a connection to Darth Malgus and someone who could provide a bit of exposition/history about the enclave.

On Republic side, the former position is held by Aryn Leneer, who actually kicks off the mission to the enclave for both factions (Imperials are inspired by having captured some footage of her testimony to the Republic). Her connection to Malgus is that he killed her master during the sacking of Coruscant (he's the poor chap that Malgus offs at the end of the "Deceived" trailer). Back then she tracked him down to get revenge and they duelled - a fight that she lost, though she was spared for reasons. Not gonna say any more; if you want all the details, go read Deceived, the book! In SWTOR we first encountered her in The Task at Hand last year, where we saw her sensing Malgus coming to Dantooine (where she'd settled with her family) and freaking out about it. Apparently this cumulated in her finding him at the enclave and alerting the Jedi about his presence, which is why you're being approached to hunt him down. Aryn comes along as your guide and struggles with her emotional connection to Malgus along the way.

Your other companion on Republic side is Arn Peralun, who was introduced at the start of Onslaught as Tau's new padawan. He has previous experience fighting Malgus by your side in the Objective Meridian flashpoint and he also seems to enjoy reading up on things as demonstrated by his intro on Onderon. Here he shows that he's also read up on Jedi enclave on Dantooine and provides historical context for what happened there. Honestly, I quite liked him in that role. I felt kind of "meh" about him on Onderon and Mek-sha as he seemed a bit too defined by his trauma and insecurities, but it's fun to see him come into his own, clearly emboldened by his time with Tau.

On Imperial side, his role is filled by Darth Rivix (also first introduced in The Task at Hand), for whom I guess it makes sense to gather a lot of knowledge considering his ambassadorial role, though your other companion keeps expressing a mix of bemusement and suspicion about just how knowledgeable he appears to be about Jedi business. As I mentioned in my first post about Secrets of the Enclave, the animators also did a great job with his facial expressions, from subtle eyebrow raises to slight smirks. He's not all smooth talking though... if you make the light side choice after defeating the second boss, asking Rivix to let him go, he goes ahead and kills the guy anyway, something that will make my Sorc very suspicious of him going forward!

Your connection to Darth Malgus on Imperial side comes in the unexpected form of Darth Krovos, whom we first met during the intro to Kuat Drive Yards more than seven years ago (gosh, I hadn't realised she's been around such a long time) and who's been making small reoccurring reappearances since then but hasn't exactly been fleshed out a lot. In this story update we learn that she's known and respected Malgus for a long time, and she does in fact plead his case with you, expressing the belief that regardless of what it may look like, Malgus is sure to still have the Empire's best interests at heart and to keep that in mind when it comes to dealing with him.

I really enjoyed what Bioware did with all four of these characters. The studio's always been good at writing believable and amusing party banter, and I found it particularly fun to listen to the exchanges between Rivix and Krovos - you don't get to hear Sith interact in what you could call an amicable manner very often! On Republic side, I already mentioned that I liked seeing a different side of Arn.

Aryn's dialogue had the heaviest lifting to do since this was the first time we interacted with her in game, and you can't expect people to instantly care about her just because she was in a novel, but I felt that it was done well. The grizzled veteran coming out of retirement to protect their loved ones is a common stereotype for male heroes, but seeing a female fighter in that role is more unusual, plus here it was also coupled with a certain vulnerability as Aryn admits at the start that she realised while following Malgus that she's in no shape to stand up to him on her own the way she did when she was younger.

KOTOR fan service

The flashpoint takes place in the abandoned Jedi enclave on Dantooine, a location that features in both KOTOR games... need I say more? I can't actually comment on the KOTOR II stuff too much as I haven't played it but would still like to at some point, so I didn't want to dig through spoilers too much if that makes sense. The dialogue makes reference to the events of the first KOTOR as well though, which I did get!

This is all pretty cool but has limited relevance to the story we're being told in the flashpoint. I'm kind of hoping it's not just gratuitous fan service and it will turn out that Malgus's plan has at least a vague connection to something that was brought up in this context.

Surprise cameos

There's not just fan service for KOTOR fans, but also for long-time SWTOR players in the form of cameos from two minor characters that we haven't seen in a long time. Personally I always enjoy these, because if you don't remember them it's not a big deal and the story still works, but if you do it just adds that little bit of extra flavour.

On Republic side the final boss fight is against none other than Captain Colonel Golah of the Imperial Reclamation Service, whom Imperial players will remember as one of the quest givers for The Thing Czerka Found on Tatooine. There's a nice callback to his cordial relationship with the late Darth Silthar as he basically complains about how the Sith nowadays aren't what they used to be. In general he sounds a lot more bitter than he was back then, and you get the impression that he's definitely seen a lot of nasty things in the meantime (even beyond the events of that mission on Tatooine I mean).

Meanwhile Imperials face off against none other than Leeha Naarezz from the Jedi knight class story, and here too it's obvious that the events of the past have left a mark on her, though she still employs her personal pet droids.

What's Malgus up to?

As mentioned in the introduction, Malgus is actually already gone when you arrive, though you learn that he managed to steal some kind of artefact. He also claims during a sort of echo/vision to have broken his chains unlike any Sith before him, and... he makes it very clear that he wants you dead, as he apparently counted on you (as in, the Alliance Commander) to come looking for him and laid a trap for you. You escape of course, but the intention is quite clear.

As a Republic player this isn't exactly surprising, though I was a little disappointed to find out that he feels no differently about you if you're a (former) Imperial. Why do you hate an Imperial-aligned Alliance Commander so much, Malgus? I get that you'd hate the Emperor or Empress, but don't you care about the Empire itself? And we got along so well on Ossus... I feel that my dreams of a renewed Malgus team-up for Imperial players are pretty much dashed at this point. And it's also a shame in-character, because it feels like age hasn't made Malgus any wiser and he's pretty much repeating the mistakes he made on Ilum by discarding even the possibility of certain people (aka the player character) coming around to his side and actively forcing them into opposition against him, which will likely end up becoming his undoing this time around as well.

Still, Krovos sends you a letter afterwards in which she basically says that she still has faith in Malgus, even after he tried to kill you all, so make of that what you will. She may just be wrong, but it would be cool if that turned out to be an angle that players could pursue further.

The thing is, we still don't know what exactly Malgus is up to beyond freeing himself from Vowrawn/Acina's control. Being a lone wolf with no help (as we learn during the flashpoint, he even ditched the medical droid), what can he really hope to achieve? And how does he feel about the Empire and its citizens at this point? I look forward to finding out.

The Alliance and the Republic/Empire

The mission debrief for Republic characters involves a holocall with important people in the newly rebuilt Jedi order, one of whom is Tau and another Master Sal-Deron, someone who Imperial defectors would already be familiar with. A new Nautolan called Master Vinyor Tesh is also introduced and shown to be very suspicious of outsiders. The Jedi are definitely presented as being more cautious in their rebuilding efforts, and quite a far cry from the proud and public role they took during the game's base storylines.

Imperials catch Rivix chatting with Acina and revealing some more details about Malgus stealing a book on Ossus. I actually thought it was pretty hilarious how scared Rivix looks when you walk in on him. I hadn't even thought he was doing anything suspicious talking to the Empress without me in the room, but he looks like you just caught him doing something really naughty. He reassures you that there'll be no more secrets between the Empire and the Alliance, but if he also disobeyed your order during the flashpoint there's definitely a bit of suspicion there, just in case previous chats with Rivix left you feeling a bit too trusting of him.

In summary

I think all of that should give you a pretty good idea of why I loved this story update even if it didn't advance the plot very much. It's packed full of character development and lore, and that's just something that SWTOR does really well. I'm looking forward to seeing where this story goes next, though we might not find out yet in the next update, considering that there's also the plot thread with the Mandalorians still going on. Then again, the expansion has Sith in the name, so who knows? Either way it's good times for SWTOR story fans.

Datacron Hunt on Mek-Sha and Onderon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wonder if there'll be datacrons on Manaan?

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

The Return of Zenith

All this talk about Galactic Seasons has really set me back in terms of writing about other things happening in the game that I wanted to cover on the blog. Time to get back on track on that front!

First off, let's talk about the return of Zenith, which was added as a small story update with patch 6.3.1 a month ago. It's sort of halfway between the two options I speculated about when the previous mini mission was released: It is indeed just a short chat on Odessen, but instead of being an Alliance alert, it is part of the main storyline. (The following post contains spoilers.)

Imperials misled Zenith with false intel to get him to destroy a Republic weapons shipment - a plan that does succeed, though Zenith himself gets away from the trap that the Alliance set for him (not sure why they bothered if he was unwittingly working for you anyway) and sends the Alliance Commander an angry letter afterwards.

For Republic characters, he successfully completes the mission he was given and then comes to Odessen to have a chat with you and you can try to recruit him into the Alliance. For non-consulars, this is doomed to fail as he's too put off by all the former Imperials under your command. I have to admit my mind was set racing, thinking about the possibility of whether it was feasible to have a character that he'd agree to join if you rejected every single former Imperial companion that you come across on your journeys... but of course you don't get the option for rejection for every single companion, and the Alliance is just generally portrayed as containing refugees from both the Republic and Empire lore-wise, regardless of your choices.

Now, the interesting part happens if you're a consular, because for your sake Zenith will agree to join the Alliance, as long as you keep the former Imps out of his hair (metaphorically that is). Or, and this is the part that excited me... you can flirt with him! Unlike many long-time players I'm not a romance fanatic, but this was something that was meaningful to me since Zenith was the first companion of whom I remember that I really wanted to flirt with him back in the day, just to be disappointed when I found out that it wasn't possible, and that there wasn't really any reason for it other than Bioware prioritising female love interests over male ones at the time. (The base game gave you eleven female companions to romance vs. only eight male ones.)

Since then I've kind of maintained it as my head canon that my Sage had deeper feelings for Zenith that she couldn't quite express at the time due to her strict observance of the Jedi code. Therefore I was filled with quite the mix of excitement and trepidation when I finally got to hit that [Flirt] option nine years later. (The trepidation comes from a feeling that I can never be entirely sure whether hitting [Flirt] won't make something wildly inappropriate for the situation come out of my character's mouth. To be fair, this hasn't actually happened in a long time, but the "trauma" from some early experiences with this in the base game has never quite left me.)

It led to what I thought was a very understated and cute little moment. Basically your consular says something like "I want you to stay" and "work with me" while taking a little step towards him and looking straight into his eyes, and you get the feeling that he's a little flushed and taken aback, yet very much swayed by this avenue of argument. It doesn't go any further than that, but it delivers an amazing amount of feels with little dialogue and a bunch of small touches, which I really loved. It would be great if we could get more at a later point, but I understand that content only applicable to a limited pool of players of a single class will probably be hard to fit in.

Anyway, even if you personally didn't care to romance Zenith or even about getting him back, this update still marked the end of an era, as it finally put a bookend to the "era of lost companions" that began with KotFE taking away all of the original class companions back in October 2015. (And yes, I know some people will point out that we haven't got Tanno Vik or Khem Zash back, but we also know that we won't at this point because we know why they aren't with us. With Zenith's return, everyone's accounted for.)

It's kind of mind-boggling that it took almost six years to reintroduce the last of the forty base game companions after they were taken away from us with a parting shot of them fighting in their undies in KotFE chapter two. I wonder if the devs ever regretted that decision... it did open up a lot of characters to interact with different classes, but I'm not sure Bioware was quite prepared for the vehemence with which players continued to campaign for their favourite companion to come back now, for months and years after they'd been separated from their base class. Never mind the newest story chapter about Zakuul, where's Mako?! However, I've got to give them credit for sticking with the overarching plan to bring them all back, even if it took forever. I reckon it would've been easy to say "who cares about that guy anyway" for some of the less popular companions and just move on, but the current dev team clearly values players of all classes and preferences - which is something I'm definitely grateful for.

Galactic Seasons Optimisation Tips & Tricks

I may be done with Galactic Seasons for the time being, but technically Season 1 still lasts for another two months, so there's plenty of time for people to work on completing it if they aren't done yet and for any advice on how to do so more efficiently to come in handy. Alternatively, you might find these tips useful once Season 2 starts with the release of the new expansion.

1. Seasons are legacy-, not account-wide

If gaining 100 Seasons levels already felt like a bit of a grind once, you probably won't want to do it several more times in parallel... but if you have a lot of free time and love the free Cartel Coins on the subscriber track, it's worth noting that Seasons progress is legacy-, not account-wide, so you can technically complete the Seasons track separately on each of SWTOR's five mega-servers. I'd call you slightly insane, but it would net you 20,000 free Cartel Coins (plus a lot of other goodies, obviously). If that sounds appealing but you're not sure you can take that much of Seasons, you might want to consider going for at least partial completion on secondary servers by simply claiming your free points from login rewards every week, which is a lot less effort.

2. You can influence what objectives you get

This was something I only really figured out after talking to commenters on the blog and chatting with some guildies, but it seems that the Season system can't "see" your legacy and therefore bases your objectives purely on what the first character you log after reset has access to. The objectives to kill mobs on the starter planets in specific seem to be locked to only appear for sufficiently low-level characters, which is why I never encountered them even once, as I never logged a really low-level character first after the reset. If AoEing grey mobs on Coruscant is your jam however, make sure to log that lowbie first thing every day and it'll make things significantly easier for you.

You'll also be able to avoid other, more high-level objectives this way. For example a low-level character will always get GSF and PvP as their weeklies as they're probably not high enough to queue for all the highlighted flashpoints and the operation of the week via the group finder. Hate Iokath dailies? Make sure to start your day on a character that hasn't unlocked them yet during an unknown/wild space week. And so on and so forth.

Just keep in mind that limiting your options also affects re-rolls. So if you're on a lowbie with the GSF and PvP weeklies, re-rolling will just give you the same weekly again since there are no other options available to you this Season! Don't end up wasting them like that.

3. Do your research!

I mentioned an unknown/wild space week earlier... are you perhaps confused by what and when that is? Then do your research! For Season 1, Bioware posted an extremely detailed article on the official website that clearly lays out what to expect in terms of objectives each week, even if it's not a 100% accurate reflection of what you might end up seeing in the game (e.g. the GSI objectives I got a couple of times were not on that list at all). However, it does give you an idea of what sort of objectives are lurking in the wings and what you might risk getting when using the re-roll option.

I'd also recommend checking out the bug report forum at the start of each new week to see if players have reported any objectives as broken or otherwise bugged. I wish this wasn't necessary, but realistically you might save yourself a lot of headaches that way.

4. Don't be hasty!

Related to the above, if you want to avoid frustration it's better to not rush into anything with Seasons but to pause and consider your options. If your weekly objective is an activity you wouldn't usually do and requires some effort, don't try to complete it on day one if you have any choice at all - if it turns out that there was a bug, you'll just be annoyed.

Likewise, avoid making impulse decisions when it comes to re-rolling objectives. You only have one re-roll per day (or per week for the weeklies) so make sure to make it count. Check the official Seasons post for all the potential options that could come up when you hit that re-roll button and consider whether it's really worth the risk first. I personally found that it was best to not use it unless I really, really didn't want to do that particular objective, because taking a gamble on "maybe" getting something better even if my current objective was okay rarely worked out.

5. Be efficient with your time

If there are any objectives that you're maybe not super keen on and you just want to get them done without too much faff, consider all the ways in which you can be efficient with your time. For example if you have the daily objective to do heroics on a certain planet but don't need mob kills, use an alt that has stealth and pick missions that require minimal killing (a quick Google search will lead you to various lists with recommendations) for a quick in-and-out job.

If you've got the weekly to play a certain amount of GSF matches or warzones, don't rush to get them all done in one go - odds are good that one of these will also come up as a daily objective at some point during the week, so you can earn both daily points and make progress towards your weekly at the same time.

Some dailies also go really well together - for example if you get one to do daily missions on a planet and another one to kill mobs on that same planet. Don't re-roll these even if you usually wouldn't be too keen on one of them on its own.

Got any tips of your own? Feel free to leave them in the comments!

My Feedback After Galactic Season 1

I was not particularly fond of the idea of Seasons when they were first announced. More login rewards and incentives to repeat content that we've done a hundred times before? Puh-leeease. And yet... I still love filling up bars, I'm a sucker for limited time events, and the things I had to do to earn Seasons points ranged from activities I enjoyed anyway to those that I at least didn't mind doing for a while. So I went all in and completed the Season in the minimum amount of time possible without using any of the buyout options to skip ahead.

That said, I'm glad to be done with the whole thing for a while. The novelty wore off quickly, and with only so many hours of free time in a week, having to spend half an hour to an hour on Seasons every day for three months while also continuing my normal ops-running two to three nights a week meant that I didn't really have time for much else that wasn't directly Seasons-related.

It's kind of interesting actually, because I was in a bit of a slump before 6.3 in terms of my in-game activity and didn't feel like playing too much. The Galactic Seasons incentives increased my engagement with the game... but also reminded me of parts of it that I hadn't played in a while and that I suddenly didn't have enough time for, such as progressing more of my alts through their personal stories. Previously I had just been slack with doing those things, but naturally, the moment I didn't have time for it anymore, I suddenly wanted to do nothing more than to play story content on my alts! I'm looking forward to giving them some love now that I have the time to do so again. Funny how that goes.

Anyway, while I'm sure that a lot of how Galactic Season 2 is going to work is already predetermined, I still wanted to write down some feedback for Bioware if they happen to read this, about what I'd like to see more of and what I hope they'll change next time.

Things I Liked

Effort vs. reward

While dedicating half an hour to an hour to Seasons objectives every day seemed like a lot when compressed into less than three months, ultimately the time commitment required to complete the Season isn't that high... but there are a lot of rewards on offer on the subscriber track in particular. A companion, four thousand Cartel Coins, plus piles of decos, gear and mounts... I didn't really need a lot of those things myself, but most players enjoy getting free stuff and I don't think anybody can say that there hasn't been a lot of that in this first Season.

I also liked how they put a lot of old subscriber/event rewards on the Seasons vendor. Again, as a steady subscriber from launch I didn't actually need any of them myself, but I know that there's been demand for the companions to return in particular, and I think it's nice that players who are keen on them have now been given a way to earn them in game.

Objective variety

When the concept of Seasons was first announced I wondered how they were going to distinguish it from Conquest, which is after all a similar system that rewards completing objectives on a daily to weekly basis. I did like that they limited things to just two daily objectives a day and two weeklies a week, which meant that unlike for Conquest in its modern state, you did actually have to target specific activities instead of simply doing whatever and watching your bar auto-fill. The re-roll option seemed sufficient to me to allow people to avoid that one thing they really dislike (though you did have to be smart about it, and generally speaking, the fewer different types of content you like, the harder a time you'll have being a completionist - but then, that's just MMOs for you).

I also liked the themes they introduced, both focused on the Season's companion Altuur and on different planets grouped by proximity. Because Altuur is a Kubaz and they like eating insects, there were objectives centred around insectoids, and I think that's a neat concept! Likewise, the weekly rotation focusing on a different part of the galaxy each time was a nice idea. It's just a different way of slicing these things that hadn't been done before, and I was happy with that.

Timings and catch-up

I was actually quite surprised when I realised after reaching Seasons level 100 that we were barely halfway through the Season at that point, because for some reason it had felt more urgent than that to complete it. But no, people have plenty of opportunity to still get there at their own pace, or to use one of the two catch-up options with Cartel Coins or credits. I think Bioware really did well there in terms of giving people options to make the whole thing appealing to different play styles.

Things I Didn't Like So Much

Bugs!

I'm talking about the technical variety here first. I've long accepted that SWTOR is not a highly polished game... you'll encounter a lot of little glitches and such while levelling up, though in Bioware's defense the vast majority of them are just visual and shouldn't ruin anyone's gameplay. (I've encountered more game-breaking bugs during my casual return to retail WoW over the last few months than I've seen in SWTOR over the last five years.)

But in a time-limited event like that... I just can't help but feel that they should have been able to do better. They tried hard to fix any truly serious issues (such as the missing weekly objectives in week 3) as soon as possible, but anything that didn't totally break the system has largely remained unresolved. During week 2 with its outer rim theme, I remember seeing a certain daily objective being unsure whether it was asking me to go to Rishi or Section X, and when the same week rolled around again five weeks later, that bug was still unfixed. Likewise, the fact that Dread Palace didn't count for the ops weekly in week 4 was never addressed and still persisted in week 9 more than a month later. Just because it's technically still possible to complete the objective by doing another operation that doesn't make it a great experience for players who bothered to put a group together for Dread Fortress just for this, you know?

I quickly learned that it was best to hold off on making any plans to complete my weekly objectives, in order to give other players time to find the bugs and report them on the forums first without me ending up wasting any of my own time (selfish, I know...) but it shouldn't have to be like that.

Insectoids

So I said earlier that I liked the idea of the insects theme in principle... unfortunately in practice, it sucked, mainly because insectoids are simply not a hugely common mob type, which meant that any objectives related to killing them were either awkwardly time-consuming or very repetitive. I mean, you can tell it was bad because they actually felt the need to add more Shaclaws to Voss in the last patch purely to make that objective a little less painful! (I don't know if that helped by the way, I avoided that objective like the plague after the first time.)

So I'm happy for them to give the next Season a theme like that too, but I hope that if it involves mob killing again they pick a type that's more common, such as droids or beasts.

Mob killing in general

Honestly, I wasn't keen on the mob killing objectives in general. I never liked the rampage achievements for Conquest much either. Which is funny because I'll happily grind mobs by the hundreds in other MMOs, but those games usually make the process more interesting by having those mobs drop interesting loot or something, or having them exist in high densities that are intentionally designed to be fun to AoE down. Mob pulls in SWTOR's open world are generally pretty spaced out, meaning that you spend a lot of time just running around the map to round them all up, and they rarely drop anything of value. It's just not that kind of game.

That said, I'm sure there are people for whom these are their absolute favourite type of objectives, so I guess I shouldn't call for their removal... I guess I just wanted to get this rant off my chest. Maybe we could at least reduce the mob counter a bit though? 75 kills is a lot. On some planets I could complete a whole round of dailies without coming across that many mobs.

Need more objective variety

I'm happy with Seasons objectives being somewhat limited... as I said in a previous post, it reminds me a bit of Conquest in the earlier days. So I'm certainly not campaigning to have Seasons objectives for everything the way we have for Conquest now, so that they basically auto-complete themselves if you play at all that week. However... looking at the general theme of the Season, I did think there were some obvious gaps that I'd personally like to see closed next Season:

• Some sort of more solo-friendly weekly objective. I'm generally fine with the idea of the dailies being more targeted towards soloers and the weeklies towards people who like to group, but it seemed a bit odd to me that there wasn't a single option among the weeklies that could be done completely solo. Maybe something like "complete 15 quests" on the planets of the week? Or take away the veteran mode and group finder requirements for the flashpoint weekly.
• A flashpoint daily objective! I thought it was really striking that this was the one type of staple repeatable content that wasn't represented at all among the daily objectives. This really needs to be added next Season I think. Any difficulty, no group finder requirement. Just do it, Bioware.
• Something related to KotFE/KotET content. This may sound surprising coming from someone who's largely been happy to leave that whole era of storytelling behind, but I found it a bit odd that over the course of a five week cycle, we visited pretty much every known planet in the galaxy, including secluded daily areas and the dead Ziost - except for Zakuul. I'm not saying I'd want that content to pop up among my daily objectives all the time, but during something like an unknown/wild space week, why not have "complete a chapter" as a potential daily objective for that one week only?
• More GSI! I'm not nuts about GSI missions in general and again, I'm not saying I necessarily want them to pop up all the time... but seeing them come up only twice this Season left me wanting more. There are GSI missions available on a number of planets, so I don't see why this couldn't be a (rare?) objective during more than one week.
  

Season 2

Regardless of how much is changed or stays the same for Season 2, I'd like to think that I might adjust my personal approach a bit next time around. Seeing just how much time I had left after reaching level 100 this time, I could see myself taking things a little easier next time around and not fretting too much about missing a day here or there, or skipping some objectives that I just don't fancy on a particular day. Then again, I'm also a sucker for routines, so maybe I'll burn just as hard regardless, simply because I feel compelled to fill up that bar as soon as I can.

The Stranger from Kubindi - Some Fun Personal Stats

As mentioned previously, I'm planning to write a three-part post-mortem about my experience with SWTOR's first Galactic Season. Let's start with some fun stats! Well, I thought they were fun anyway.

One of the nice things about keeping a diary of all the Seasons objectives I completed literally every day for three months is that it provided me with data that I could enter into a spreadsheet to find out how much some of my perceptions were backed up by reality. Did I really lose most of my GSF matches? How often did I use the re-roll function in the end? Let's find out!

First off... poor flashpoints. I got assigned the flashpoint weekly ten times out of eleven, but I only completed it twice! The other eight times I re-rolled it, while never re-rolling any of my other weeklies. You'd think I disliked flashpoints or something... I don't, but in the context of Seasons objectives I did find that weekly pretty time-consuming and inefficient.

The re-roll statistics for daily objectives are a little more varied, though they still paint a very clear picture of my preferences: The daily objective I re-rolled the most was insectoid killing, which I re-rolled 20 times throughout the Season! And yet I still ended up "having" to do it 14 times anyway. Heroics I re-rolled seven times, generic mob killing four, and dailies three. These weren't caused by any sort of strong dislike, but more based on general mood and often related to me having got a streak of the same objective several days in a row and craving some variety. GSF I only tried to re-roll once and the warzone daily never.

In general the number of re-rolls I attempted for daily objectives went up over the course of the Season; I'm guessing because my patience with repetition grew shorter. During the first two weeks I only used the re-roll function on dailies twice each, but in weeks eight and ten for example I used it no less than five times. I often regretted those later re-rolls though - the early ones were reserved for things I really didn't fancy doing, while the later ones were sometimes attempts at simply having a shot at something better... but usually it only made things worse. This is why gambling is bad, kids.

In terms of objectives I actually completed, there was a pretty good spread: Looking at my weeklies, I did GSF and warzones seven times each, and operations six times - flashpoints, as already mentioned, only twice. My most commonly completed daily objective was planetary mob killing with 31 times (note that this was always for the planets of the week - I did not see the ones for the starter planets even once). With 75 mob kills required each time (minus some bugginess), that resulted in a rampage of over 2,000 mobs cut or shot down purely for Seasons objectives!

My second most frequently completed daily objective was warzones, which I did 30 times, followed by 29 rounds of planetary dailies and 28 GSF matches completed. Thanks to the re-rolls I "only" had to do heroics 18 times and hunted down insectoids 14 times. The real outlier was the PO to complete GSI missions, which I only saw twice. I guess I could have lumped it in with the other dailies, but since it's mechanically so different that didn't seem right. I really wish that this one had come up more often, just for the sake of variety.

Anyway, what makes these numbers interesting to me was that they didn't feel this even while I was playing, probably because of how much some of them forced me out of my comfort zone. For example I do PvP all the time... not a lot of it, but quite regularly, often for Conquest, so also having a daily PO to do a warzone barely registered with me. GSF I hadn't done much in a while, but it's also something I'm quite comfortable doing at least occasionally for Conquest and such, so playing a few GSF matches a week didn't feel like a huge change either. But things like dailies and heroics are so rarely part of the way I play the game that being "forced" to do up to seven rounds of planetary dailies a week (I'm looking at you, week nine) felt pretty chore-like at times, even though realistically I didn't spend much more time on them than on the other activities.

Besides the objectives, the other two things I looked at were my PvP win-loss ratio and how much I travelled around the galaxy. Playing GSF over eleven weeks, it felt like I lost more matches than I won, and this was an accurate impression, though I guess the difference wasn't as drastic as it could have been: 14 wins vs. 19 losses. Warzones felt much better, and they were! In that mode I recorded 23 wins vs. 15 losses.

In terms of gallivanting around the galaxy, with each week being limited to objectives on a certain number of planets, I was curious whether I managed to mix it up or kept coming back to the same locations over and over. The answer is that I succeeded... kinda, I guess? The planet/area I visited the most often was CZ-198, on eight different days, due to the many "do dailies" objectives that sent me there. It's tied for first place with Balmorra, but that can be explained by the fact that the core world themed week is the only one I did three times (I only cycled through all the other weeks twice). The same reasoning applies to Alderaan, which I visited on seven different days.

Most planets I visited on around three to six different days, which seems quite reasonable. The biggest outliers were Iokath which I only visited once (though I would have liked to get an objective to go there more often), as well as Rishi and Voss. The latter I only visited that one time when I got the objective to kill Shaclaws and then decided "never again". Interestingly, Dantooine, Mek-Sha and Onderon were all eligible as locations to kill mobs at one point or another but I didn't visit either of them even once. Maybe something to consider for variety next time.

And that's it! Wasn't that interesting? Up next, we'll be looking at how this whole experience made me feel and what feedback I would give Bioware about what to change for the next Season.