Shintar's Galactic Season 6 Diary, Week 7

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

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

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

Day 1 - Tuesday

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

Day 2 - Wednesday

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

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

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

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

Day 3 - Thursday

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

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

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

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

Day 4 - Friday

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

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

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

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

Day 5 - Saturday

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

Day 6 - Sunday

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

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

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

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

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

Day 7 - Monday

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

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

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

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

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

Week 7 Thoughts 

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

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

Kessan's Landing

I've settled into a kind of routine when it comes to writing about SWTOR's major patches: write a first impressions post, put together a detailed review of the new story content, sum up how I feel about the new planet/flashpoint/operation/whatever the main new gameplay feature of the patch is, followed by a couple of additional posts for any other business, such as UI updates or other minor changes.

As far as 7.4 goes, I covered most of that, but the one thing I was still missing was a rundown of the new planetary map on Ord Mantell, Kessan's Landing. To be honest, I think the main reason I've been putting off writing about it is that it's been... fine. Good, even! I have no major complaints. At the same time I didn't exactly feel blown away by its awesomeness, so... I've just kind of struggled to find a lot to say about it.

I suppose the one thing I'm not too fond of is that it's night time there. I guess the devs opted for that to strengthen the slightly oppressive mood that hangs over the town, plus to create additional visual distinction between Kessan's Landing and "old" Ord Mantell, as the two areas use a lot of the same general "building blocks" otherwise, such as sandy beaches, rocky cliffs and glowing lava flows. Night time is never great for taking screenshots of your character though.

Doesn't mean there aren't any nice vistas to look at.

I also thought it was interesting how much bigger Kessan's Landing is compared to many older in-game towns. All the villages on the starter planets tend to consist of like, five buildings, which is quite video-gamey and not very realistic. I liked that Kessan's Landing felt more like a real place where people could actually live.

The dailies were decent fun. As I've said many times before, I'm not a huge fan of dailies, but I do like doing them sometimes, and they are one of the better types of content for me and Mr Commando to do together nowadays, considering that the story is a purely solo affair. After the troubles we had with Ruhnuk, it was nice to return to a mode of running dailies that felt more relaxed and less punishing. The map is reasonably open for the most part, meaning you don't have to fight every single mob you encounter, except for the narrow tunnels leading up to and inside of Fort Ronning, but that's okay because it adds flavour by making that particular area feel more dangerous.

Mr Commando soon figured out a path that took us through a full round of both normal and heroic dailies in good time, and we faithfully did that every week until we maxed out the reputation track. I thought it was interesting that while most of the dailies come from the terminal in town, there are a couple that have to be "found" and picked up from NPCs around the area, something that reminded me of Yavin IV and Ziost. I was just a bit disappointed that the missions seemed to be exactly the same for Republic and Imperial players - with exactly one exception, oddly, in that Republic players have to save grazers while Imperials capture an asharl panther.

The heroics were decent fun to duo as well, and the [Heroic 4] is proper hard without feeling like a slog, as you basically just have to fight one mob with a lot of health that also has some hard-hitting mechanics. Ironically, the open world boss FR3-D0M felt relatively easy in comparison, though at least it has some bad stuff you actually need to step out of - as opposed to Kithrawl on Ruhnuk who's basically a big sack of potatoes that you just need to wear down.

Kessan's Landing also has a new datacron, which... honestly, maybe I should just make a whole post about the evolution of datacrons at some point. However, for this post it's enough to say that the most recent trend with them has been to force players to do the work themselves, ensuring that people can't just get summoned to the datacron location on day one and get their stat buff without even knowing what was involved in unlocking it.

The Ruhnuk datacron also required you to do a lengthy relic hunt quest chain first, which I didn't mind - my issue with that was more that it also felt like it was meant to benefit your daily-running, and completing it for that purpose on every alt felt tedious to me. In that regard I have to give the devs props for making the relic hunt equivalent for Kessan's Landing irrelevant to the dailies and only required for the datacron, so you only really need to do it once. As it was, I thought it was a fun little quest chain that sent you traipsing around the galaxy (and that featured another cute gonk droid). Fun fact: during the part on Quesh I got the codex entry for "lobel" on my main... only took me thirteen years. I might even repeat the quest chain on an alt at some point, but I'm happy knowing that I don't have to in order to be able to do the dailies efficiently on alts.

Completing the chain unlocks access to a secret cave where you then have to go through some puzzles to get to the datacron. I initially got a bit frustrated by the part inside the cave because it felt quite lengthy, yet any failure would send you back to the very start and force you start over from scratch. On my first visit I eventually gave up after dying to the hidden droids in the lava one too many times, but funnily enough, when I came back a couple weeks later I simply changed one utility to boost my speed and easily made it through that same lava bit on my first try. Gotta use that brain!

After that I was extremely paranoid though as I didn't want to get sent back to the start yet again, so I only progressed very slowly and with a guide on hand. I was in fact so slow that the door you're meant to unshield and blow up had re-shielded itself by the time I reached it. Fortunately I only had to backtrack a little bit to unshield it again. Ultimately it was far from the hardest datacron I've ever done, though I definitely would have appreciated a couple of check points along the way.

Most of all though, I'm really happy with the way the dev team has managed to deliver a new planetary zone three major patches in a row now, and with any luck we'll get another one in 7.5. This is something I love and definitely don't take for granted. And as I said previously, I'm more than happy to revisit existing planets, so I don't mind at all if it's not entirely new environments.

Seeing How the Other Side Lives

I know that the way I play SWTOR puts me into a small minority relative to the overall player base. Doing PvP, doing operations, doing Galactic Seasons on all servers... most players don't do those things. Still, I tend to think that having at least dabbled in pretty much every part of the game, I should be able to "get" what drives most players. While the story is not necessarily my main focus nowadays for example, I've played and enjoyed it, so I can completely understand why someone else's play experience may be centred around it.

Spending time in more casual guilds on other servers during seasons has been rather eye-opening in that regard, which is to say that I've been quite surprised by some of the things people talk and seemingly care about. Here are three of the biggest items that caught me off-guard:

1. Companion power

I feel a little confused every time I see someone talk about what the "best" companion is. Most of them are identical in terms of their abilities, and the few who have a bit of an edge in one area or another still aren't massively different. Since every companion can play every role nowadays, the thing that matters the most is whether you like their look and voice lines, not how well they can "parse".

But people care a lot about min-maxing their companion performance. I always thought the Commander's Companion, a consumable that you can buy on the Cartel Market and that instantly raises your influence with one companion to fifty, was kind of a dumb item. Who would spend real money on that when there are multiple ways to raise your companion influence organically? Apparently the answer is: a lot of people.

And not just that, but apparently those same players consider it pretty much mandatory to have all of their companions maxed out, which honestly kind of blew my mind. I've been playing this game since launch and not one of my characters has all their companions at maximum influence (though my main is the closest simply from years of running crew skill missions). Some don't have a level fifty companion at all. Because from my point of view... it's just not needed?

There are a few use cases for maxing out companion influence, such as if you're heavily into crafting and want to maximise those crits, or if you're working on one of the game's extremely tough solo challenges. There's a reason my Sage, on whom I did KotFE on master mode back in the day, has exactly two level fifty companions: Lana and Senya (because I felt the need to max out their influence while working on tough chapter bosses).

However, in PvP and group content (where I spend a lot of my time), companions are irrelevant, and most other solo PvE content is so easy that your companion's exact influence level makes no noticeable difference (at least to me). Seriously, if I quest with a companion that's under level ten, I may notice that they "feel a bit weak" so to speak, but above twenty or so they are more than powerful enough for pretty much anything, meaning I don't really notice further increases in power level.

Maybe this is a remnant of my experience playing at launch, when companions were much weaker than they are now and gear affected their output, so it made sense to try and squeeze every little bit of extra performance out of them. Compared to that, they still feel OP to me in their current form regardless of influence level, but others will have a different perspective.

2. Running heroics

I used to love heroics when the game first came out and they were genuinely challenging open world group content. When they were turned into just another type of daily in Fallen Empire, I was not impressed. I'm not much of a daily runner at the best of times, and now there were even more of them, just with mobs that took longer to kill. I got pushback for this opinion even back then, so I knew that others felt differently.

Even so, I've been kind of flabbergasted by the number of people I see for whom running heroics is a regular part of their routine every day. I don't know whether it's just been particularly pronounced on Shae Vizla because people see them as a good way of making credits, but I could absolutely not play that way and it's kind of weirdly fascinating to me that so many players seem to actually enjoy this kind of grind.

3. World bosses

I've always quite liked world bosses, but my general experience has been that they're fun to do once for the achievement, and then maybe another couple of times for one-time missions. After that they just become kind of unrewarding to revisit repeatedly in my opinion (unless one is an objective for Galactic Seasons of the Feast of Prosperity of course). If you're already bothering to put a group together to do some sort of group content, why not do something that pays more than a few credits and a couple of Conquest commendations?

So I was quite surprised by the amount of world boss hunting I've seen going on and the sheer enthusiasm some people have for it. When Heroes of the Republic did Nightmare Pilgrim for example, people were pretty much counting down the minutes to the event for at least half an hour before it was actually meant to start. Now, I did learn that while you're levelling, killing world bosses gives pretty good XP, so some people use it as a form of power levelling - can't really argue with that. Likewise, if you're a new guild, world boss events are a way of being inclusive of characters at lower levels.

However, at max level I'm honestly still not entirely sure why people seem to do them as much as they do. My best theory is that players who mostly like to play by themselves see them as a low-pressure way of socialising, where you don't need a specific group composition, there's rarely more than one boss mechanic to worry about and you don't necessarily have to talk. Heck, with guild ship summons the whole thing can pretty much be reduced to "accept summon when it comes, whack whatever's in front of you until it's dead, leave". But maybe that's just what some people are looking for to feel connected to their guild and if they're too shy or time-constrained to invest time in activities like flashpoints or operations? I'd never really considered world bosses filling that specific niche before.

Have you ever come across an activity or way of playing the game that utterly surprised you with how popular it was with other players?

Mysteries of Mek-Sha

I've been thinking about Mek-Sha recently. I had a good amount of fun at the Interpreter's Retreat, and people pointing out similarities to Mek-Sha made me want to reconsider my stance on that planet. I liked the story there back when it came out, but as I noted after three months of Onslaught, the repeatable content seemed half-baked and disappointing.

The other week Mek-Sha was one of the planets featured on the weekly seasons objective to do repeatable or side missions, and I thought I would use that as an opportunity to give it another look. I did so on my Shadow on Star Forge, and sadly I ended up being disappointed all over again, as most of the missions I completed didn't even count towards the objective. After I repeated one of the heroics for the third time without my mission counter advancing, I eventually gave up and finished the objective on another planet.

The "We're Wanted Men" heroic isn't even marked as one (which is why I guess it didn't count for the seasons objective) - though it did advance my "do heroics on Mek-Sha" achievement. It's also a bit "plain" compared to its predecessor "Turf War", as it just has you fight off waves and waves of mobs. I hadn't fully processed this previously, but they completely replaced the Turf War heroic with this "new" one back in 2020. Xam Xam still has the guide for the old version up, and I remember it being quite tough and having a sort of puzzle aspect to it. You'd get one of four different opponents that had a unique buff, and you'd have to interact with the environment to counter it (so for example you'd splash the guy with the "drunken rage" buff with a glass of water). I mean, there was a reason Mr Commando and I stopped bothering with it after a few tries, but that had more to do with bugged credit than the mission itself.

The two regular heroics are also quite a bit longer than most regular heroics, requiring you to move between phases in different areas, which makes them feel like a lot of effort for little reward.

Finally, I was reminded of how Mek-Sha has all these hidden achievements, but I couldn't be bothered to look them up online. I think the Interpreter's Retreat was much better at luring you in and getting you interested in what else there was to discover. Achievements that stay hidden until you complete them are not very intriguing, because unless you look up a guide in advance, you won't even know that you're already working towards something. I much prefer the approach of letting you discover the achievement as soon as you do something that progresses it.

I'm glad that the devs seem to have learned from those issues, considering how much better the Interpreter's Retreat worked, but part of me still kind of wishes that they'd go back and clean up Mek-Sha a bit too. Make sure heroics are labelled and counted as such, make sure exploration missions are labelled and counted as such, and allow hidden achievements to be found once you do something that triggers them, so you know you're actually making progress and have an incentive to keep going. Just one of those little things.

The Dynamic Pacifist Duo

I mentioned in my last post about reactivating my pacifist Jedi Pacis and acquiring Amity as a companion that I wanted to take them both to Dantooine so they could pat the Kath Hounds and dig up relics together. But then I thought: Why wait until next week to start levelling? Dantooine is a mess this week because of the pirates, but that doesn't mean I can't traipse around the galaxy a bit and have Pacis show Amity what she's explored so far.

So I took them to the heroic terminal on the fleet and grabbed one mission each on every planet where I'd previously identified pacifism-compatible heroics.

The first thing I discovered was that Amity did not like to stay passive, as he reactivated himself every time I travelled to a new planet. I don't know if that's a bug, some intentional setting meant to prevent newbies from accidentally neutering their companion, or just another facet of the way the game resets your character's status in certain ways whenever you travel (such as non-combat pets disappearing).

Speaking of non-combat pets, I had a funny experience in the very first heroic on Coruscant, Trouble in Deed. At one point when I wanted to put a mob to sleep I accidentally hit the wrong ability and summoned a non-combat pet instead (I forgot that as a pacifist, Pacis has a very different quickbar layout from my other Shadows). This broke my stealth and aggroed the mobs I'd been standing next to, though it was no problem as I could just stealth out. However, even after I'd exited combat, the mobs did not (as I was told they were still in combat when I attempted to apply my CC again) - they kept their weapons drawn and remained transfixed by the little droid I had summoned. They couldn't attack it of course, but they clearly wanted to. I ran around the area a bit and was very amused to watch them chase the droid in circles.

On Nar Shaddaa, I struggled a bit with my Two Cloaks Tactical seemingly not working reliably... or maybe it was just a visual bug with the cooldown clock not displaying, but it looked like it wouldn't start adding the second charge sometimes until I un- and re-equipped it. It's weird because I don't recall running into this issue before, but I guess my other Shadows also don't usually spend much of their time standing around waiting for Force Cloak to come off cooldown, so maybe I haven't been looking hard enough until now.

On Alderaan, I experienced the fun of the game being unable to decide whether companions are separate from the player character or not. Basically, while Pacis and Amity were stealthing around, a bunch of Killiks aggroed on him. I wanted to vanish out, but the game told me that I couldn't because I was already in stealth. Which one is it, game, are we still stealthed or not? I had to watch Amity get beaten to a pulp while in stealth (at least he took it like a proper pacifist, bless him) and was only able to cloak and exit combat once the mobs started hitting Pacis. I do vaguely recall experiencing this on other stealth characters before, but I can see this becoming a bit of a nuisance for this duo in particular.

On Balmorra, I did the heroic where you collect intel from the crashed probe droids - an occasion where I decided that Amity could make himself useful by healing Pacis through the damage from the toxic sludge. Of course this was when I noticed that he wasn't doing anything even while set to active. A quick look at his action bar revealed why: like player characters, he needs to have a weapon equipped for many of his abilities, and the one heal he was able to do without his staff was turned off by default. D'oh! I turned it on of course.

Fortunately the remaining heroics didn't reveal any more issues, but I guess this went to show that having a companion definitely introduces new complications to Pacis' life. I was also a bit dismayed to find that after doing all those heroics, I was only sitting on 40k Conquest points. Last time Pacis participated in Conquest, it only required 50k points to complete, and I think it still may have awarded credits and XP as well? I actually approved of all of those things being changed, but when you're a pacifist, every little helps, and on the other hand even small changes can make your life a lot more difficult. Fortunately the Pirate Incursion conquest featured an objective for doing ten heroics, which allowed Pacis to complete her Conquest the next day. During other weeks it might be harder (comparatively), but it should also still be doable as long as I actually remember to log in and play her every day.

Daily Tour: Black Hole (Republic)

Is it me or does the Black Hole come up as a seasons objective more often than other daily areas? Maybe it's because it's the most accessible of these zones, having been the first of its kind. Looking back at what I had to say about the Black Hole at its release, I was quite charmed by its design, even if the whole concept of SWTOR having "proper" dailies (instead of story missions that just happened to be repeatable) still felt kind of weird and novel at the time.

Nowadays though, I have to admit I'm not nearly as fond of it anymore. The whole concept of having a [Heroic 4] at the end that you needed to group up for worked well enough when it came out, when there was less to do at endgame and grouping up for a round of dailies seemed like a natural thing to make time for in your weekly routine. Nowadays there are so many more daily areas, and players are more spread out, so Bioware made the heroics soloable - but to be honest that just makes them a slog. I'm not crazy about spending ten minutes on the "regular" dailies in the zone and then another fifteen on just doing the heroic.

If you're a stealther, mind you, it's super easy because you can just sneak straight to the end and be done just as quickly as with any other quest. It's just that I so rarely play a stealthy combat style that I tend to not think of that experience by default...

Anyway, here's a visualisation of my usual route through the Black Hole on Republic side (I never did it much on Imperial side for some reason):

I start by clearing out the mobs in the north-east corner of the map and then turn back to rack up more kills along the northern zone border, eventually looping down to Quick-Hands Quarl when I need him. If someone just killed him, I can always go do the "Eyes and Ears" mission first, else that comes after. Then I cross over diagonally to free the dralls (I used to always turn left at the entrance, but someone converted me to turning right at some point by pointing out that there was one less mob group to deal with on that side).

When I exit that building, I go in a straight line and drop down to a group of mobs that will usually drop one of the anti-radiation thingies for that quest. I make sure to use it right away so I can loot a second one and have that ready to use as soon as the first one expires. Once I've fixed the leaks, I continue to the heroic, and after completing that I used to quick travel back to base for hand-ins, though that part is no longer needed.

Now that I think about it, I still have a pretty good time whenever I go to the Black Hole, it's just that whenever I think about going there in the first place, the idea just doesn't seem that appealing in my head anymore for some reason.

Day 7: Team #IntPiPoMo

I'm taking part in IntPiPoMo, and this is the seventh of ten screenshot posts I'm making as part of a series for this, each one themed around a certain topic. Today's topic is "team", which is about the people I play with.

A lot of my enjoyment of the game revolves around operations with my guild. I don't think I would do them much if I wasn't in a guild, but as it is they just provide this social activity for us to do multiple times a week, and it doesn't matter if the content stays basically the same, the people always make it a little different. Pictured here is my Scoundrel dancing up close with one of the other officers during a break on one of our "social" (read: easy mode) nights in TfB.

When it comes to harder content we have to be a bit more selective in terms of who to bring and when, but that only forges closer bonds. Here's my ops team sitting in front of Izax before we were getting ready to pull.

Operations aren't the only thing that my guild makes more fun though, running flashpoints with guildies is great too. This shows me healing Kaon Under Siege on my Operative on Imp side, standing on a bunch of pipes where a guildie had shown me that you could get away with not getting pounced on by the mobs as much.

There's also a small but dedicated group of us that really loves doing the Shroud and Dread Seed heroics at the end of their respective quest chains. We've all done them on so many alts by now but are always happy to do them again! Here's a shot of one such run (I'm the second one from the right, the Zabrak Sorceror in the red and black robe).

Finally, we also do casual PvP together sometimes, though I personally partake in that less often than the other activities. To be honest I sometimes prefer to fully pug my PvP because I don't want to feel angry at my guildies if they mess up. Here my lowbie Merc was teamed up with a guildie's Powertech though, waiting for a Corellia Square arena to start.

Finally, here I am with the same guildie on different characters, and my poor Squid Sorc ended up being the only non-stealther on her team. As if I needed even more of a target painted on my head... (I thought it was amusing though.)

IntPiPoMo count: 51

It's obvious at this point that I won't finish my "ten days" series by the end of November - I could have pushed harder but I had other things on my mind throughout the month and didn't want to force it. After all, the whole "ten days" theme is something of my own making, so there's no need to fret about completing it within a certain timeframe. I still managed to squeeze enough posts in to hit my IntPiPo count, and I'll simply post the remaining days throughout early December.

Peaceful Adventures on Hoth & Belsavis

I took last week's Pirate Incursion event as an opportunity to take a break from having Pacis look after the Kath hounds and dig for relics, and instead had her resume her mission to explore the galaxy and find out what else there is to do that doesn't require you to fight anything.

As I mentioned previously, Hoth is where I lost interest in this part of the project at one point, but nonetheless I felt compelled to go back and at least finish it up. I tried to do the main story quest where you're supposed to trigger an ambush and then have Imperials come to your aid, figuring that maybe I wouldn't actually have to get involved in the fighting myself to get credit, but as it turns out the traitorous bastards don't even show up if you don't attack the ambushers yourself first.

Besides that, I re-did the one heroic that's doable without any combat and finished exploring the rest of the map. In the Starship Graveyard I ran into these two troopers that appear to be brothers or something and looked like they were sparring with each other. I don't recall ever seeing them before.

When I moved on to Belsavis, I was pleasantly surprised to find that this snowy prison planet perpetually stuck in a state of rioting is an unexpectedly great place to get things done without fighting! There is of course the perennial favourite of heroic runners everywhere, looting Agent Mynock's corpse, but I also found three other heroics that I could do.

Open Communications just requires you to loot an item and as a stealther you can vanish out when this act spawns a group of attackers, and of course doing the Stasis Generator without fighting anyone reawakened fond memories of the game's early days when these missions were part of the daily circuit that many people did in a group and it wasn't unusual for us to chill by the door while the stealther in the party took care of things. Doing it on my own was a bit more boring though since I didn't have anyone to talk to while waiting for Force Cloak to come off cooldown four times.

The biggest and most amusing surprise however was the heroic to save captured scientists from rioting Gand. Most of these "rescue" type missions require you to kill the mobs around the captives, but I couldn't remember that being the case with this one for sure, so decided to give it a quick go anyway. And what do you know, not only can you rescue the scientists without fighting anything, it doesn't even break stealth! So I just had to walk up to them, nudge them in stealth, and they'd just get up and walk away. Never mind the armed prisoners with guns pointed at their heads, clearly it was just their own negative attitude that was keeping them imprisoned. Life lessons!

After that I was planning to explore the map and look for some more one-time missions to do, but then the Feast of Prosperity came around and I realised that this was too good an opportunity to engage with some temporary non-combat content to pass up. The event missions also happen to give tons of experience, which is only enhanced by it overlapping with three weeks of double XP this year, so the level cap is now so close that I can smell it!

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.

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.

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 4

Day 1:

The first thing I did upon logging in was check whether I had two weeklies this week. Check! Flashpoints and warzones, represent! However, the flashpoint weekly showed as completed for some reason, even though the counter was (naturally) on 0/3. I checked and I hadn't accidentally been awarded points for it either. I had a look at the forums to see whether there was a bug report about this by somebody else, but there was nothing. Just as I was contemplating taking a screenshot and submitting it myself... it reverted back to (correctly) showing as incomplete. I really wish I had taken that screenshot earlier now, just to prove to you all that I'm not going insane.

Anyway, I dithered a bit about whether to keep the flashpoints, as I do like flashpoints in principle and the bug with not receiving credit for them was supposed to be fixed by now, but eventually I decided that I just don't like how limited this objective is. I'm fine with only certain flashpoints counting, but only on veteran mode and only through the group finder? Meh... I re-rolled and it turned into operations, which was just as well as I was signed up to do the two Oricon operations with some guildies later in the week. Mind you, some of them tried to do Dread Palace that evening already, and hey, it turns out it was bugged and didn't give credit for the objective even though it said it should! What a shocker!

My dailies were once again the welcome combo of GSF and playing a warzone. I returned to doing GSF on my Assassin tank and she got into a domination match that started really well, but then we somehow ended up losing all three satellites and it turned into a loss. My warzone of the day on my Sage healer wasn't much better - I guess it was a nice change to not get into Huttball yet again, but instead it was Hypergates, which is probably my least favourite warzone. The match was an annoyingly close loss, an experience that was not improved by one guy constantly whining in chat.

Day 2:

My daily POs were doing a warzone and heroics on Taris. The latter would have been alright I guess, but I didn't really fancy heroics that evening so I dared a re-roll anyway and got Ziost dailies instead. At least something different!

I did the warzone on my lowbie Merc and got into an Alderaan Civil War which ended with a close win for my team. What was surprising to me was that everyone was very communicative and friendly, rather unlike your average PvP match. I took my Gunslinger to do the rounds on Ziost and that was very nice and chill as well.

Day 3:

Same dailies as the day before, but this time I decided not to re-roll the heroics.

I once again did the warzone on my lowbie Merc and got into an arena, in which I was the lowest level by quite a margin (the next lowest level character was 19 levels above me). It felt like the system had made some sort of attempt at balance, as my team had the higher level characters aside from me, but I still got slaughtered within seconds and we lost. It felt vaguely bad, but once again I'm not quite sure I can really blame the level disparity as I've been in similarly lop-sided matches before this whole merging of brackets thing. At least this completed both the daily and weekly objective for me.

Fortunately the heroics on Taris went well for a change, as I did remember for once which ones to pick for quick completion with my DvL Shadow. I think it helped that Republic Taris was more freshly on my mind from when my pacifist character came through there and I was checking whether any of the heroics were doable with her specific limitations in mind.

Day 4:

As mentioned previously, a story mode run of the two Oricon operations was scheduled by the guild, and Dread Fortress completed my second weekly.

My dailies were completely PvP-free for once, asking me to do another round of Ziost and to kill 75 mobs of any kind on a "Seat of the Empire" planet (Taris, Oricon, Yavin or Dantooine). I was OK with this and did the Ziost weekly on my Guardian and started the Oricon story on my dps Sage, while only going as far as I needed to in order to get all my mob kills.

Day 5:

The 75 generic mob kills made a return, this time accompanied by 75 kills worth of insecticide. While bugs from all over the galaxy were eligible for the latter, making it less annoying than the objectives from previous weeks, I still re-rolled it and got the warzone one again.

My PvP match of the day was a Voidstar I played on my Sage healer, which was a really good match that we won. For the kills I returned to my dps Sage and continued her Oricon story until she'd achieved another 75 kills.

Day 6:

My favourite combo of warzone and GSF returned, so there was no need to re-roll anything. I got exceptionally lucky with both as well: The PvP match took my Assassin tank into Odessen Proving Grounds, a long-time favourite of mine which I hadn't actually got into in ages. It was a tight match that we ended up winning, not least because of yours truly topping the team's scoreboard for objective points.

When I queued my Powertech tank for GSF, I got into a death match in progress with my team already up by 40 points. I conveyed this to a couple of guildies on voice chat and one of them commented: "So basically, some poor bastard disconnected and you're reaping the benefits!" Indeed I did. I still managed to shoot a couple of things, but the whole thing must have been over within less than two minutes.

Day 7:

The last day of the SWTOR week presented me with Oricon dailies and Taris heroics as my objectives again. I didn't really mind either of those, but seeing how it was the last day of the week, I tried re-rolling the heroics anyway just to see if could get something more synergetic or that I hadn't done before and got warzones again.

For this PvP match I selected my Nautolan Shadow and she got into a Voidstar which was a close loss. Considering how close it was, I can't really complain, and my team did fight hard until the end, but at the same time it was one of those losses that felt like it would have been entirely avoidable if the two people guarding the left door hadn't decided to chase some random to the other side of the map...

For the dailies I returned to my dps Sage, who had handily just reached the point in the Oricon story when you unlock the dailies, so I did a round of the area to complete the weekly and to unlock the one-time story quest for the two Dread operations.

Week 4 thoughts:

Once again I was reasonably happy with my objectives for the week, though I also have to admit that four weeks into this Season, things are starting to feel a bit same-y. In Bioware's detailed article about Seasons on the website, there seemed to be more generic objectives every week than I've personally encountered - has anyone actually got the ones for the low-level planets? Or are those limited to players with only low-level characters on their account?

After doing every single objective for four consecutive weeks now, I've also completed 37 out of the 100 Seasons levels, meaning that if I can keep up this cadence, I've got less than two months to go. Alternatively, I guess I could afford to slack off and slow down a bit without missing out on any rewards. We'll see how I feel about it in two weeks time.