A Nemesis Defeated

This wasn't the post I was planning on publishing today, but I'm just too giddy not to share it immediately.

Dread Master Brontes is the operations boss about whom I've probably written the most on this blog. Back in 2019 I detailed my history with her in this post, explaining how my group mates and I had been defeated by her nightmare mode incarnation over and over again.

A little over two years ago, I finally ended up beating her on 16-person master mode of all things, and noted at the time: "I just hope I don't need to wait another ten years to tick the box for the 8-man achievement."

Aaand... *insert drumroll here* tonight it finally happened!

Unfortunately there won't be a kill video this time, as my video recording software did not cooperate.

We generally seemed to be a bit cursed all evening. First Mr Commando randomly wrenched his back (he does have chronic back problems that rear their head every so often, but usually not randomly while he's just sitting at his desk), which required a time-out so he could stretch a bit and take some painkillers. Then the friendly guildie who'd offered to fill in for one of our regulars who was absent started having internet connection problems, which led to a couple of wipes and warranted various restarts on his end.

I was in this weird head space where I simultaneously really, really wanted the kill and felt that it was absolutely within our reach (I finally understood how every single part of the fight worked and had the impression that everyone else did too) and at the same time felt weirdly zen about not getting it, almost certain that we'd continue to fail somehow and finish another year without having bested this boss (after all, it had happened several times before, and all the random mishaps described above did not fill me with confidence).

However, in the end, we persisted and were victorious! I'm still a bit bummed that I didn't get a recording (there was some excited shouting for sure) but as I said to my guildies, I'd rather get the kill without recording it than have my recording work all evening and then have nothing to show for it but more wipes. I'm not sure yet what we'll attempt to tackle next, but I don't need to worry about making a decision on that yet anyway, as this was our last progression night of the year and we won't be back at it until January.

Truth Sought and Found

There's a dynamic encounter on Hoth called "Trial By Fire", which I ranked among my top ten favourite encounters on that planet. As mentioned in that post, the encounter has you testing an experimental heat resistance suit inside one of the small lava fissures in the area, which requires you to press some buttons both to stay alive and to gather data.

Back in January I wrote: "I also feel like there's definitely more to how the suit works that we just haven't quite figured out yet, which intrigues me." At the time, I even spent some time trying to do more research on that myself, which included recording myself doing the encounter and noting down the sequence of available ability buttons in a spreadsheet. Unfortunately it quickly became clear that there wasn't a straightforward solution or "correct" button-pressing order. I was intrigued that on one of my attempts my charge button changed to "hyper-charge" but at the time, I couldn't figure out what that meant.

In the end I got bored of the whole thing again pretty quickly. In March however, the devs added new achievements to the dynamic encounters on Hoth with patch 7.6.1, and the real depth of Trial By Fire was revealed, including several new achievements and other rewards, which of course got the real super-sleuths on the case pretty quickly. That hyper-charge I had previously achieved by accident turned out to be only one of those achievements.

Going somewhat counter to what you'd expect considering my initial interest, I didn't immediately jump on working on all the new achievements myself. The main reason for this was that when I initially read about them, it sounded like you'd need a second person to help unlock most of them. You see, they required you to stay in the lava fissure for longer and focus on the data-gathering abilities at the expense of the self-preservation abilities, so initially the advice given was to bring another person to heal you through the damage (your own companion gets dismissed whenever you don the lava suit).

However, as new information was uncovered and the guides were updated, I learned that it was possible to survive by yourself, by falling back on tried and tested methods used for other purposes: buying a health regenerating meal on the fleet (yes, this is a thing) and getting the "refreshed" buff from the moisture vaporators on Tatooine, the same buff that's required to hatch an Orobird pet out of its egg (and serves to protect you from extreme heat in that context as well). It just really tickled me that they'd actually re-used an old mechanic like that in a way that made sense and I wanted to see for myself how it worked. So I got myself all refreshed, ate my dewback steak sandwich and started diving into the lava.

And what do you know, I had fun! I quickly got into the habit of just parking my character with the buffs next to where the encounter usually appears and then relogging her whenever it was up. (Both buffs last half an hour, so if you don't do anything other than spend five minutes on the dynamic encounter every time it's up, you can do several runs in a row without having to go back to Tatooine to refresh the buff from there.) It didn't even require a huge amount of effort, just a bit of patience. (I did make myself a little crazy at times checking the galaxy map every half hour to see whether the encounter was back up yet, but that part's not mandatory.)

A few weeks ago, I finally dug up the last item I needed for the last achievement, which earns you a special armour set and the title "Truth Seeker". The armour set kind of looks like the hazmat suit you wear during the encounter itself and therefore isn't exactly the most stylish of outfits, but I've been wearing both it and the title on my main for several weeks now because I'm just so proud of having achieved it. It's not proof of great skill or anything, just of patience, but it's such a niche thing that I don't think many people are even aware of it. Which, to be honest, is also why I wrote this post, to spread awareness of this bit of hidden content. I think it's a very fun little puzzle and I appreciate whichever dev came up with it.

Another One for the Books: Scum Speed Run

Back in June I wrote about successfully completing the Dread Palace timed run achievement with my guildies. Our next destination after that ended up being Scum and Villainy, which also has a timed run achievement... but I initially hardly dared to hope that we might be capable of accomplishing that, mostly because of the last boss. I still remembered from when we worked on the Styrak fight during Onslaught, how we literally spent months wiping on him, and how even the final kill - satisfying as it was - took us over 20 minutes, something I found difficult to mentally reconcile with the idea of a speed run.

However, things went better than I'd expected as we started working our way through the ops without the timer. I didn't actually keep track, but I think I would've been able to count the number of attempts it took us to kill Styrak on my fingers if I'd wanted to. Clearly what had held us back those years ago had truly just been the bad group composition above all else, and going in with the knowledge that we needed certain combat styles and preparing accordingly turned that into a complete non-issue.

A guildie who's a much better player than me encouraged me: "You've done the DP timed run, and that's much harder! This should be very doable." And indeed, where in Dread Palace you only have one hour to beat five encounters, in Scum you have two hours to defeat seven of them. Everyone agreed that it was both a realistic and a worthy goal to pursue.

Nonetheless, progression still wasn't all as smooth as that. Most fights in Scum master mode are much easier than in Dread Palace, and I'd say at least four of the fights became more or less guaranteed one-shots pretty quickly. Thrasher, the third boss, could sometimes be a random road block if something was even slightly off with the group, as there's a lot of damage thrown at random targets, requiring strong burst healing, people to use their cooldowns correctly, and dps to be very responsive to the add spawns.

The worst fight by far though were the Cartel Warlords, primarily because Sunder, the boss that needs kiting, has been suffering from terrible desync for years, meaning that he'd often appear on the other side of the room from where he actually was, which is not a good thing when you have to stay away from him or else risk being one-shot. It could be very hit and miss whether our tank could kite him long enough without anything going horribly wrong. And that's without even mentioning that it can be very easy to already wipe in the first phase, when the pressure on the healers is the highest and there are once again a lot of randomly targeted damage abilities going around that could cause someone to fall over if they just so happened to be hit by a lot of things in a row.

Styrak himself turned out to be a comparatively mild obstacle, with the biggest problem being just how long the fight still was. With better dps we could now take him down in less than twenty minutes, but that's still pretty long for a boss fight, and a single wipe at a late stage of the encounter could be massively costly in terms of time.

Once again progression was very much not linear, with us getting hard stuck on Thrasher one week, then breezing through all bosses until Styrak the next, just to keep wiping to silly mistakes; followed by us getting stuck on Cartel Warlords again on the next run.

That said, this Wednesday the stars finally aligned: we one-shot Thrasher, and got Cartel Warlords down on the third attempt. It was a pretty epic victory too, with only one person still alive to deliver the final killing blow to the last warlord. And Styrak was once again super-smooth, with us finishing the speed run achievement with plenty of time left on the clock.

Even better: the next evening we did it again, for the one member of the team who still needed the achievement and hadn't been there the previous night. This time we one-shot both Thrasher and Cartel Warlords and only had a silly wipe in Oasis City that was completely my fault. However, we did lose some time to real life interruptions, and then wiped on Styrak four times. Fortunately, fifth time was the charm and we got him down mere minutes before the timer was about to run out.

I'm happy that I got the achievement (as well as the character title on both my main and main healing alt) but above all, I just feel extremely proud of how well the team got together to make this happen. I hardly want to think about how long this streak of good luck can possibly last because good times like these never last forever.

Fun fact: Even though this operation is over ten years old at this point, I was surprised to find that there are still certain mechanics for which it's hard to find hard data about how they work. The specific example that made us scratch our heads was the knockback add on Styrak. There seemed to be agreement that the healers needed to stand out and it would jump to them, but even though we made sure to do that, it would still leap into the melee group sometimes. Someone suggested having a third person stand out, a ranged dps - still no difference. The best we could work out eventually was that a Watchman Sentinel's group healing could cause the add to mistake them for a healer and leap to them, because the moment our own Sentinel changed to a different spec for this fight, the random leaps into melee stopped happening.

Dread Master Shintar

I have a somewhat strange relationship with operations in SWTOR at this point. I think most raiders would posit that for them, raiding is about some sort of progression: seeing the content, beating the challenge, getting the gear... and once you've hit your goal, you move on.

SWTOR doesn't really support that kind of attitude towards raiding anymore, or at least not if you're a long-term player. If you're coming to the game completely fresh, there's plenty to do and many encounters to work your way through, thanks to scaling keeping all the old content relevant, but new operations come out way too infrequently to keep existing players busy for very long.

I sometimes find myself wondering why I'm still so focused on that part of the game after more than a decade to be honest. I've seen all there is to see, many times, and while my skill at the game has improved over the years from sheer repetition, if I haven't been able to beat a higher-difficulty encounter that's been in the game for over a decade at this point, I'm not holding my breath that it's still going to happen.

I guess it's just a habit, a way of hanging out a few times a week, and the fact that Mr Commando and I do it together has led to a sort of feedback loop where we keep each other going even if one person's interest flags at some point.

That said, there's been turnover in the people we raid with over the years, and every now and then we'll get some fresh faces who haven't yet seen it all and who'll be excited to tackle this or that operation for the first time, and I'll be like "sure", because what else am I going to suggest?

In line with that we cleared Dread Palace master mode again a couple of months ago, and it actually went so quickly and smoothly (considering that some people had never done it before), that I found myself daring to hope for some personal progression for the first time in a while, because I'd never gotten the achievement for the timed run, which requires you to clear the instance within an hour.

Everyone was game for working on it, so we kept going back every week, just to get better at the fights and progress that little bit more quickly, with fewer wipes along the way. Progression was far from smooth, as some nights would see us one-shot the first four bosses in a timely manner just to keep failing on the final Council fight, while on others, we would mess up repeatedly at the very beginning and then never even finish the instance.

However, improvement did happen, and this Wednesday we finally got there. We were actually off to a very bad start at first and wiped twice on the very first encounter. We'd learned early on that whenever this happened, it was possible and indeed recommended to just reset the entire instance and try again from the beginning, but it still didn't seem to bode well for the rest of the evening. However, it turned out that the third try was the charm, and we then proceeded to one-shot every boss after that, including the Dread Council themselves.

Embarrassingly for me, I died a few seconds before the end because I got into healer tunnel-vision mode, focusing so hard on keeping someone else alive that I missed my own health getting dangerously low - oops. Fortunately we'd basically won at this point so it wasn't a big deal; it just made my "victory" screenshot look a bit awkward.

A guildie also recorded the whole run and uploaded it to YouTube if you're curious, though he failed to record his own voice so some bits of conversation may sound like non-sequiturs without the inclusion of his comments.

Anyway, it was just nice to have one of those little success stories to share, as they've become more and more rare for me at this point.

Achievements I Would Add to Old Content

I'm actually not the biggest fan of achievements and prefer it when MMOs don't have them, as the big UI pop-ups tend to take me out of the world too much, but seeing how they seem to be considered pretty much a standard feature of most games nowadays, I've learned to live with them. Sometimes they'll even motivate me to do something! I won't necessarily go out of my way to hunt for achievements, but if I'm already doing something, and there's an achievement to do just a little bit more for example, that can definitely work as an incentive.

For those who don't know, SWTOR originally launched without an achievement system, but added one with the Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion in 2013, which included a lot of retrofitted achievements for older content. However, there were always some things that made me go "huh" - every time I found myself a bit surprised that there wasn't an achievement for a particular thing. Here's my top five list of achievements that I would still add to old content:

1. Being sneaky in the Black Hole

In first place, we have the mission that inspired this whole post: [Daily] Eyes and Ears on Republic side or [Daily] Hypermatter Directive on Imp side. These are mirrored dailies that require you to click on five spots in a warehouse while navigating a bunch of sensors that will spawn a guard droid each if you trip them. There's no particular punishment for this other than having to kill the droid so you don't have to do it perfectly, but I at least try to be perfectly sneaky every time, and on the rare occasion when I succeed, I always feel extremely proud. Alas, the game doesn't agree that this is a special feat and there's no achievement for it. If any daily mission ever deserved an achievement, I think it's this one.

2. Kill Esh-ka

One type of common achievement that was added with Rise of the Hutt Cartel was to kill a bunch of mobs on every planet, often sorted into different categories. On Voss for example, there's one to kill hostile droids, members of the opposite faction, and several different kinds of beasts. I didn't inspect all the newly added achievements in advance, so as I quested my way across the different planets for the first time after the expansion, it was always interesting to see what would pop up.

I have this distinct memory of doing this on Belsavis, and at one point wondering why nothing had popped up yet for the dozens of Esh-ka I'd killed. And then I checked and found that there wasn't even an achievement for these mobs... which make up what feels like half the enemies on the planet. I always thought that was a bit odd.

After thinking about it a bit more, I can only guess that the devs were worried that something like "kill 100 Esh-ka" might sound kind of... genocidal? Generally the kill achievements for humanoids ask you to take out a faction, not a species. But that strikes me as something that could be addressed with proper wording - "defeat 100 Esh-ka escapees" or something. I want my wading through tunnels and tunnels full of these to be acknowledged!

3. Harmonised flashpoint achievements

When a new flashpoint comes out nowadays, it generally has a pretty standard set of achievements: do it x times on story/veteran mode, do it x times on master mode, kill each boss at least once, and then maybe a couple of extra achievements for bonus bosses or special mechanics. This wasn't always the case though, and if you look back at the achievements archive, there are quite a few flashpoints that only have an achievement for running them once on story or vet mode, such as the Esseles, Black Talon, Athiss, Mandalorian Raiders and more. I think this is because at the time, they were low-level content that didn't scale, and it didn't really make sense to ask people to re-run a level 20 flashpoint twenty times after they'd out-levelled it (though there are always alts I guess...) Nowadays though, with everything being scaled, I don't see why these achievements shouldn't be the same across the board. Same with flashpoints that are lacking achievements for their bonus bosses, such as Assault on Tython and Korriban Incursion.

I know some old-timers would hate me for this - "I've already run the Esseles a hundred times and now you want me to run it another twenty times for a new achievement in 2024?!" Well... yeah. I'd still do it.

4. Planetary storylines

This one is fairly simple: I think it's a bit of a missed opportunity that there are achievements for completing all the class stories, but none for doing all the planetary storylines at least once. I'm not saying they're all narrative masterpieces, but I think they add a lot of context for each planet and achievements could make for a good incentive to encourage people to give them a try. I still occasionally see comments from players who try to do literally nothing but their class story and then wonder why they end up under-levelled at some point.

5. Exploration missions

I've always felt a bit sour about the fact that exploration missions get hidden by default nowadays, until I heard Swtorista say in a stream that they apparently confused people? I don't know, that was before we had the purple markers for main story missions... either way, I think at the very least they deserve an achievement of their own as well, to give people an incentive to check them out, similar to the planetary storylines. For these, I guess I wouldn't make a separate one for each planet, but simply something like "complete 50 exploration missions across the galaxy" (or however many there are - I wouldn't require you to do them all, but probably something like two thirds of them).

Have you ever come across something in game that made you go "huh, I'm surprised there isn't an achievement for that"? Feel free to share in the comments!

PvP Season Six Finished

The other day I finished my goals for PvP Season 6... including all the achievements. I was rather surprised to be hitting that point with almost two months left in the season.

When the devs originally announced their plans for Season 6, I wasn't too on board with some of the changes and noted that I was hoping they'd reconsider some of their plans based on people's feedback. Unfortunately that didn't happen, and I definitely grumbled when I claimed my adrenal and medpack "rewards", which didn't stack with the thousands I already have and vendored for a two-digit number of credits.

But the five levels added to the reward track had an... interesting effect. Usually the way my season progression would go was: finish the warzone weekly achievement first (since I really enjoy warzones and they are responsible for most of my progress in PvP), followed by finishing the main track a few weeks later. Then I'd need a couple more weeks to finish my arena weeklies (since I don't like them as much and pops in the lowbie and midbie brackets can be slow, I rarely complete more than one a week) and finally I'd hit the 2000 medals.

A screenshot from an arena I rather enjoyed. Four bounty hunters vs. the world! RIP, enemy team who got obliterated by three Powertechs with a pet healer both rounds.

This time around, the achievement for twelve weekly warzone missions was still the first thing I completed, but I also had quite a few levels of the reward track left to go so nothing else happened for a while... and then I completed the main track, the arena weekly achievement and the medal achievement all within hours of each other. I think the main track was actually the last thing I finished as well.

That was... odd. I honestly hadn't expected to finish everything seemingly at once and to then just be done, with so much time left in the season. On the one hand it was kind of nice, but on the other I'm not sure that's really the best way to balance these things either. I always figured that completing the reward track was meant to be the main goal, with the additional achievements being "stretch goals" that you can work towards if you're particularly hardcore. When it works that way, this also means that gameplay-wise, there's a kind of curve to your activity, where you first play a lot, working on everything at once, and then it gently slopes downwards as you complete things and have to invest less and less time to just finish off those last few remaining goals.

The regular Galactic Season works like that too (or at least it did in the past, the silly fragments achievement in the last one kind of screwed things up). I'm not sure how much of a point there is to things like the medal achievement if you complete it automatically before even completing the track, just because that's how many matches you need to play to get to the end anyway.

That aside, I don't have much to add about the season that I didn't already express in this post from June.

Galactic Season 6 in Review

We've got less than a month left of Galactic Season 6, and usually I would've been done with and written about the whole thing weeks ago. The reason I'm still at it this time is the Fragments Found achievement, which is grindy and horrible and which, at my current rate, will keep me busy until the very last week of the season. Still, that last stretch seems pretty predictable at this point, so I thought I might as well share my thoughts on the season as a whole.

GS5 was a slam dunk for me last year, so it pains me to say that GS6 was a bit more of a mixed bag. Let's get into the whys and hows.

Theme & Rewards

I expressed at the end of Season 5 that all the free decorations handed out as part of the seasons reward track had rekindled my interest in housing in an unexpected way, so I loved that the main reward for Season 6 was a stronghold. The Copero Villa is beautiful, and with its smaller rooms it fills a niche that wasn't previously catered to, offering a housing option for those who aren't so fond of the giant vaulted ceilings that are present pretty much everywhere else in the game.

The matching decorations on the reward track were also absolutely beautiful, and I can say with confidence that I finally stopped fretting about what to do with my season tokens whenever I get close to the cap again - I can always use a few more of those beautiful decos from the vendor. There were some other solid pieces on the reward track as well.

Objectives

The objectives were... okay. I definitely appreciated that the devs took the feedback about the ops objective from last season on board and changed it so it only required completion of a single story or veteran mode operation instead of two to four within a single week. Otherwise it was mostly the same old, except that they seemed to want to mix things up a bit by doubling up on certain objectives, like in that one week when all three "kill 100 mobs with your companion" objectives were active at the same time, which was kind of strange in a way that I can't really rate as good or bad.

I did think the seasonal objective to visit another person's stronghold was genius in its simplicity and I had a lot of fun looking at other people's strongholds across all servers. The posts I wrote about this were also quite popular with at least a certain subset of my readers, somewhat to my surprise.

Story

The story is where the disappointment starts to set in, because after how much I enjoyed Galactic Season 5's story, I had high hopes for this one. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Season 5 was a narrative masterpiece, but it was an actual piece of story content where I didn't expect it, with a fun little mystery and three missions that actually offered you choices that changed the experience a little. I really liked that.

Unfortunately Season 6's story was nothing like it. It still came with three missions that you unlocked as you progressed along the reward track, but they didn't feel like part of a coherent whole, offered no choices and didn't come to any kind of real conclusion.

There was a little Easter Egg for those who brought Amity along again though, solidifying his position as best boy in my mind.

I actually thought the first mission was quite interesting at first, and the idea of "run this flashpoint" being framed as an act of studying history struck me as very clever. Unfortunately the three flashpoints you were required to run are all on the long side if you don't have stealth, and it made the mission a bit of a drag to do more than once. Most annoyingly though, you kind of go into it with the expectation of learning more about your mysterious Chiss benefactors at the end, but you don't get to meet any of them, and Vagol Oss' information about House Inrokini's goals remains vague all the way to the end.

In the second mission you meet a Jedi researcher called Cay Teenu who has also come to help you out with your studies. She's interested in biology and has a strained relationship with a former padawan who was expelled from the Jedi order. I thought this was actually the most coherent of the three missions, because at least it comes to somewhat of a conclusion with the Jedi thanking you for your help at the end.

The final part introduces yet another character who wants you to run errands for her, a disgraced Sith named Juna Helos. However, once you complete her mission, nothing happens. I initially thought I'd missed something - both her and Vagol offer some more conversation options after their missions, but they didn't yield any more information. I even went all conspiracy theorist for a little while, wondering whether there was some deeper meaning to each NPC making recommendations about what kind of decorations you could put into the house, whether you needed to decorate the villa in a certain way to unlock the last part of the story. But no, doing additional research on this just yielded other people being confused by the sudden cut-off as well. Season 6's story consists of nothing but running some errands in the name of mysterious benefactors that you don't get to meet and that's... it. No pay-off. With Juna Helos also appearing in the Spring Abundance storyline, another option I considered was whether there could be a continuation next season, but I think that would be a bit odd and seems unlikely to me.

Blueprint Fragments

I wrote about how the removal of the seasonal reputation track caused some confusion at the start of the season, and the way the devs kept the seasonal currency in as nothing but vendor trash. This definitely seemed like a strange setup, but once I understood what was happening, I didn't mind it too much.

The problems started once I realised how stupidly grindy the final achievement was that replaced the old reputation track. With the seasonal reputations, I'd never had any issues with maxing them out well before the end of the season. Acquiring the reputation tokens took no special effort beyond doing my weekly objectives every week, I just had to remember to actually pop them in order to max out my weekly reputation allocation in a timely manner. In fact, last season I commented on how I didn't see the point of the "Brrazz's Gift" booster items since I never needed to boost the item drop rate for the reputation currency anyway.

In hindsight it feels like that comment of mine made the monkey paw curl... I was hoping for a nicer and more useful type of reward when I wrote that, but the devs apparently took it to mean that they needed to make the boosters more useful by turning the seasonal currency into a horrible grind that will make you yearn for anything to alleviate the pain.

Don't get me wrong, I get that this is the "top tier" achievement that requires extra effort, but the degree of extra effort required this season was ridiculous. I don't know anyone who aimed for that achievement and wasn't fretting about it pretty much throughout the whole season. The thing that got me was that I spend so much time in this game and yet still only just scraped by because of how incredibly grindy it is.

It doesn't sound so bad on paper; after all you earn fragments for completing pretty much any kind of PvE group content, plus while simply fighting things with your companion. In practice though, you can (and I have) spend hours playing the game without making any progress towards this achievement whatsoever. Doing PvP? Nada. GSF? Nope. Killing some ops bosses with your guild but you don't fully clear because you're still progressing? Nothing. Killing things with your companion in areas that don't count for some reason? This has to be the worst one because you just can't tell what kind of area will or won't count and why. I killed hundreds of mobs in the Minboosa District while playing through the 7.5 story repeatedly, and those didn't drop a single fragment. Other areas do seem to be eligible but still offer only a crap drop rate. I did Kessan's Landing dailies (as a non-stealther) with the Brrazz buff on, just to end up with two fragments in my inventory at the end. Out of 1500 needed. It just felt ridiculous.

When someone who plays as many hours as I do a week still struggles, something seems wrong to me. I've heard people say that you can earn a decent amount of fragments by applying the buff and then just slaughtering flesh raiders on Tython for an hour or two... which may be true but also sounds like absolutely awful gameplay. It shouldn't be like that!

And that's without even starting on the fact that the buff items, for what little good they did, were bind on pickup instead of bind to legacy, and the buff didn't stop running once you logged off, so if you couldn't play for the full hour of the buff duration in a single play session - tough luck, the rest was wasted.

I hope that whatever they end up doing for the next season doesn't include anything like this. If they don't want to do a reputation track anymore, that's fine, but collecting 1500 pieces of vendor trash that only drops under certain (unclear) circumstances, and with a low drop rate at that, was just a horrible replacement all around.

The Abundance Festival in Review

I wrote about the Festival of Spring Abundance at the start of the month when it first came out, but now that it's about to wrap up I wanted to write another post about it to reflect on how it's gone.

For me personally at least, this new event has been a massive success. I took part in some of the activities pretty much every day, completed the little event storyline on nine different characters, and ground out enough currency to buy most of the rewards I really wanted on Darth Malgus, which included the Nightshift Tech armour set for one of my agents as well as at least one of each decoration. I can definitely see myself coming back for more of the potted plants though, as they tend to be one of my favourite types of stronghold decoration. The only slight regret I share with Intisar is that the armour set is character- instead of legacy-bound.

I also got all the achievements except the one that is still bugged (so nobody could get it) and the one for the rare fish that is completely RNG-dependent. All in all, I enjoyed this event enough that I can see it competing with Life Day for the position of being my favourite seasonal event in SWTOR - except they're both such chill events, they'd probably be happy to just share first place.

The daily missions were easily my favourite part, because they were both fast and easy while still awarding a lot of Conquest points. Okay, so the dancing one was pretty much a matter of getting paid for taking an AFK break... but I'm not someone who minds a freebie every now and then.

The pie baking and eating was probably the most fascinating to me, though I was a little disappointed that there wasn't as much complexity to it as I originally assumed. When I first learned that there were achievements for eating a perfect and a bad pie for example, my mind instantly went spinning with all kinds of theories about how to make my pie qualify as perfect ("bad" seemed obvious since you can select the wrong ingredients while putting your pastry together), but I then found out that your skill in preparing the pie actually has zero impact on its perceived quality when someone else eats it by clicking on it on the table; it just seems to be completely random.

What still remained fascinating to me though was that people seemed to bring real life food preferences into the baking process. What I mean is that most days, when it came to choosing which pie to bake, I took a look at the tables to see which of the four types had the least representation or was maybe even missing entirely, so I could fill the gap for anyone else who was still on the weekly pie-eating mission. And the vast majority of the time, it was either the Deepwater Dac Pie (tentacles, gross!) or the Pitted Ka-Olive Pie, but mostly the former. Bestine Threeberry Pie and Sweet Spore Tarts were almost always represented, I can only guess because they looked and sounded like something one might actually want to eat in real life. I just thought that was kind of amusing.

The weeklies were a bit of a mixed bag for me. The creature rescue was extremely adorable the first time I did it, but once I realised that it was the exact same set of creatures every week, it became my least favourite just because it required so much running around. I'm pretty sure the sheer amount of planetary travel involved also cancelled out most of the reward money.

The cultivation daily was similarly time-consuming, and once again I was slightly disappointed to see us planting the exact same crops every week, especially considering that the prerequisite seed procurement mission sent us to a different planet each week. You'd think they'd actually make us pick up different seeds while doing that. I did enjoy making Mr Commando do the mission with me though to get the achievements tied to completing it as a group.

The egg hunt I generally enjoyed, though the experience could vary a lot depending on which server I was on as well as the time of day (I did some of the event stuff on Star Forge and Shae Vizla as well). Yavin IV was very easy for example, since the area is large and offers good visibility, with the roaming Massassi not really posing much of an obstacle. In general, the eggs were not as hard to spot as the livestream in which the event was first announced had led me to expect, but the fact that players were competing for spawns could be a real pain in the neck. The Rishii Village location was the worst in my opinion since it was both small and featured a lot of verticality, which made it hard to do a good "circuit" of the area and competition could be extremely fierce. While trying to poke my nose into every nook and cranny, I also managed to get stuck between buildings more than once, to the point where using /stuck actually killed me instead of moving me. Death by egg hunt, what a way to go.

The one-time story quest was much shorter than I expected. I thought that it was going to be a mirror to the Feast of Prosperity, giving us a new story step for every week of the event, for a total of four missions, but in reality it turned out to only have two parts, both of which were quite short. I can't say I really minded though, as this meant that it actually felt very doable as something to complete on alts. For comparison, I haven't actually done the Feast of Prosperity storyline on many characters due to its length. My only gripe with the Abundance storyline was that even though the cut scenes were KOTOR style and all the talking was alien gibberish (so there was no voice acting cost tied to giving additional choices), there was no dialogue option to account for your character not actually knowing Juna Helos from the Copero stronghold story. It felt kind of wrong that all my alts were just supposed to know her automatically.

Still, all of these were ultimately very minor complaints, and overall I've had a grand old time. I already look forward to revisiting this event next year to earn some more plant decos and work on those last two remaining achievements.

PvP Season 4, Arenas & PvP on Shae Vizla

PvP Season 4 ends in five days, and I managed to do something this season that I've never done before: for once, I didn't just complete the main reward track, but I also completed all the seasonal achievements. And I didn't stop there either! Not only did I do all this on Darth Malgus, but I did so on Shae Vizla as well, which is a huge jump from never even getting all the achievements in the first place.

There was no tangible reward for doing this, I just kind of happened to get about 80% of the way there (on both servers) without really trying, and then I figured I might as well put in the extra effort to push myself over the finish line.

Loyal readers may recall that the reason I never bothered with completing all the seasonal PvP achievements before was that I didn't like queuing for arenas. I don't mind them from a gameplay perspective, and I was quite content with having them pop up every now and then when unranked arenas and warzones shared the same queue, but when they were split out with the launch of PvP Season 1, I found the dedicated arena queue to be way too toxic for my taste. The repeated personal insults were just too upsetting, and I certainly wasn't having enough fun to make up for that, so I decided to simply nope out of that part of the game.

What happened to make me change my mind? Well, the Shae Vizla server happened, and as I mentioned in my first impressions post, doing PvP over there was an absolute blast during launch week. I actually dared to queue for both modes again for the first time in ages because I figured, we're all level ten with a hundred credits to our name, how could anyone possibly find a reason to take things too seriously and be toxic in that environment? And people were indeed pretty good-natured for the most part. I encountered exactly one guy being toxic in an arena during those days, and that was after he lost a drawn-out one-on-one against an opponent. The way he yelled insults at that person was still unnecessary and stupid, but it was also such an obvious case of someone just being a sore loser that even I couldn't take it too seriously.

I was having so much fun in that environment that I earned the maximum number of PvP season points during the first two weeks of the server's life without even paying attention. Once I noticed, I thought to myself: Hey, if it's going to be that easy and fun, I might as well complete the PvP seasons track here too. It didn't remain that easy once queue pops started to slow down, but for a while they were still consistent enough that I could complete multiple weekly missions for both game modes across my stable of alts.

Meanwhile, I was working on completing the PvP season track on Darth Malgus as well, by following my usual modus operandi of doing nothing but warzones. However, the experience on Shae Vizla made me reconsider my stance on arenas. I'd also heard some other players who weren't exactly PvP gods mention that they were doing arenas for the season on their home server and that things weren't so bad in the lowbie and midbie brackets since you were less likely to run into toxic try-hards there. So I decided to start queuing for arenas in the lower brackets on Darth Malgus as well and... it was actually decent fun. I didn't encounter any toxicity, and mixing things up with the occasional arena weekly made my seasonal progress easier as well (since sticking to only one mode makes it harder to max out your points every week).

After I completed the main reward track on both servers and thought about writing a post about that, I had a quick look at my achievement progress and was surprised to find that on Shae Vizla, I had in fact completed everything bar the 2000 medals achievement, and even for that one I was already most of the way there. It seemed like a no-brainer that I should continue playing until the end of the season to get that ticked off as well.

Then I checked my progress on Darth Malgus for comparison and found that I was even closer to completing the medals achievement there, though I was only on six out of twelve arena weeklies completed. After a bit of deliberation, I decided that it might be worth trying to push that to completion as well.

At first, things seemed to go well enough, but then I got into an arena with my midbie Scoundrel where someone went off on me big time after we lost the first round, spamming "shit healer" in chat over and over, to the point that another person on our team actually told him to chill the hell out. In that moment I felt that familiar surge of adrenaline caused by a mix of embarrassment and anger and immediately thought to myself: Here we go again, this is why I stay out of fucking arenas. I thought that was going to be the end of that particular experiment.

But for some reason, I pressed on anyway. I think it was due a mix of factors. While I was initially very flustered by the guy's insults (I knew I hadn't done great in the first round and was already feeling bad about that, which is when I'm particularly susceptible to insults making me feel even worse), I thought I actually played quite well in the second round, and while we still lost, I thought it was very obvious that it wasn't due to me being a "shit healer" but due to the fact that our dps was doing way, way less damage than the enemy team and I could only compensate for that for so long. The fact that another member of our team spoke up to... well, not exactly defend me, but to agree that the mean guy was way out of line, also helped a little.

Around that time I also happened to come across this old blog post of mine, in which I told the story of being intimidated by a PvP bully and then encountering him in a different context. In that story, we actually ended up getting along in the end and he apologised for having been an ass before. I don't expect the guy from my most recent encounter to ever get to that point (though it was a character name I recognised from previous matches), but I did find an odd kind of comfort in the idea that like my old nemesis back then, he might actually feel kind of embarrassed if he realised that people will remember him for this kind of behaviour and that it may well give him a bad reputation.

Either way, I pressed on and fortunately didn't have any more encounters like that, though I'll say that ticking the boxes for six more arena weeklies still wasn't the most fun thing I've ever done. Arenas may technically be shorter than warzones in terms of match duration, but their queues aren't necessarily any faster, so I spent a lot of time waiting for pops. The resulting matches were often only partially filled and hideously imbalanced, and losing a 3v4 game while getting zero medals for your efforts feels worse than losing normally. I was very glad when I was finally done, and grinding out the remaining medals in warzones was much more pleasant, not just because I prefer warzones, but because medal acquisition is much smoother there. Unlike when you're getting stomped in an arena and finish with zero medals, you pretty much always earn some medals in a warzone even if it's a loss.

Meanwhile I encountered a different problem on Shae Vizla: that of the lowbie and midbie queues suddenly dying. I'd previously enjoyed mixing things up by playing different characters, but I was at a point where I had only ten days left to earn a little less than 300 medals, and spending hours in queues that might never pop just seemed like a waste of time in that situation. (Never mind that if I did actually get into an arena, it might end up being another one of those zero-medal matches, basically making them worthless for my purposes.)

So I had to ditch my alts and focus entirely on playing my level 80 Juggernaut. Even on Shae Vizla I still preferred to give the max-level arena queue a wide berth, so I focused on warzones only. They were still popping reasonably often, but considering that there are only a few specific hours in the day when my play time overlaps with APAC activity, I was starting to worry that I might fail due to a lack of pops just short of crossing the finish line. The maths told me that with an average of about eight medals per warzone, I only needed to play four per day until the end of the season, which is quite reasonable, but again, considering that some days I might not get to play at all... to be on the safe side, I decided to pour all my efforts into binging PvP on the weekend and ground out 150+ medals over the course of those two days (much to the amusement of Mr Commando), ensuring that I only had a few matches left to do afterwards.

Doing max-level warzones on Shae Vizla was very fun in a different way and strangely nostalgic by the way. Because the population is relatively small, you see a lot of the same names over and over again, and you soon learn who the PvP guilds are, who the healers are, and what general weirdness to expect. (For example there was this one guy who liked yelling in all caps in a foreign language(?) in general chat during warzone matches. No idea why.) It kind of reminded me of the game's early days and the kind of community-building I got to witness in the days before mega servers.

Is there a moral to all this rambling? I'd say the main takeaway for me was that I was reminded that I do actually enjoy arenas in moderation. There's a particular kind of fun to the mayhem that is picking who you should go for first, trying to focus an opponent down quickly, switching targets, kiting enemies and all that jazz. Doing them while levelling probably also teaches you how to use your class toolkit better than anything else in the game, because you'll be actively eager for every new button that helps you deal with various problems you'll encounter, such as using defensive cooldowns to not die, interrupting healers, or gaining counters to knockbacks and roots. Almost more importantly, you then get to practice using these skills over and over again, making sure that you'll actually remember that they're there. In solo PvE you just don't need those things nowadays and it's easy to forget parts of your toolkit if you don't use them often enough.

I also started to be a bit more liberal with the ignore feature this season than I've been in the past if people are being horrible, and I wonder just how much chatter this is actually blocking out now. There's been more than one occasion where I saw interactions in warzone chat that made it clear that I was missing something due to having someone on ignore. It's something I do remain conflicted about, because while not having to listen to certain types of people definitely improves one's gameplay experience, it also seems like a bit of a shame to remove any chance of reconciliation, especially if the infraction wasn't that egregious.

Finally, it's worth noting that I spent a significant percentage - if not the majority - of my time PvPing this season not as a healer, but as a dps, most frequently as a Juggernaut, and I've got to admit that for the first time ever, I'm kind of finding myself doubting my commitment to healing. I still love it in general, but in PvP it's often just so... unsatisfying. You can heal for millions and yet feel like you've achieved nothing, all while being more likely to get crap from team mates and enemies alike regardless of what you do. Yet playing as a Jugg, seemingly nobody cares how good or bad you are, and even if I die ten times during a match, I rarely feel too bad about it because I hit hard and still feel powerful in defeat when it takes multiple enemies half a minute to take me down. Just something to think about.

Either way, it's been a ride, and while it's been fun, I also think this is one experience I'm unlikely to repeat (100%-ing the PvP season on two servers that is). I don't think I'll ever be able to complain about the 2000 medal achievement being too much again though, considering I effectively earned more than double that number this season.

Take That, Brontes!

Dread Master Brontes and I have a long history. I'm not going to talk too much about that right now, because I already wrote a whole post about it back in 2019 and for the most part, what I said back then still applies - if you want to know the details, just go back and read it. The tl;dr version for our purposes today is that in the almost ten years since the release of Dread Fortress, I've never been able to kill the last boss in it on nightmare/master mode, despite spending a fair amount of time trying.

Not much changed since 2019... though I think we never even attempted the fight during the Onslaught patch cycle, as word on the street was that the boss's tuning was so out of whack that she was basically the hardest boss in the game at that point. Legacy of the Sith's operations tuning has had plenty of issues of its own, but Brontes' difficulty sounded like it had been dialled back down to more "normal" levels again, so we've been visiting her occasionally.

Specifically, my guild does 16-man progression one week a month, and last week we actually managed to clear Dread Fortress for the first time! One of Brontes' remaining orbs exploded just after she died and took out the remainders of our raid group, so you could technically call it a draw, but it still counted. Here's the kill video, consisting of footage from both myself and another officer who was playing a dps Vanguard:

It certainly felt like quite a milestone to finally get her down after all this time, though at the same time it feels a bit weird to think that the 8-man kill still eludes me. 16-man might be ever so slightly easier in terms of gameplay, especially as a healer, but then getting a 16-man progression group together in this game is much harder than finding an 8-man team, so it's kind of a wash in terms of overall effort I suppose.

At least the additional time spent on progressing the fight has taught me that it wasn't my healing that was at fault in the past, as I now understand a lot better what happens in the last phase (in the 2019 post I admitted that I found it hard to tell what was going wrong in our attempts). Basically it's almost always the tanks' fault - no shade intended, as they do have the hardest job in that part of the fight if not in the whole fight in general. It's just that everyone else is so busy with their own priorities towards the end, there isn't much time to keep an eye on everything the tanks are doing. And then one mess-up pretty much just results in the whole group getting obliterated without anyone being able to tell in the moment what exactly just happened.

I just hope I don't need to wait another ten years to tick the box for the 8-man achievement.

The Interpreter's Retreat

I've written in great detail about 7.3's new story as well as the new flashpoint, but I also wanted to take a moment to talk about the new area on Voss more generally. As I said after the 7.3 livestream, I think that adding new areas to existing planets is a marvellous idea, even if Voss isn't a particular favourite of mine. From a production point of view it's presumably very efficient, since existing planetary assets can be re-used, while still giving players something new to play around with.

My initial expectation of the Interpreter's Retreat was that it was going to be roughly Black Hole-sized (since that was the first "secondary planetary area" that was ever added to the game) and it... kind of is? I do have the feeling that it's probably a bit smaller, but it's not like I counted myself doing laps around the two zones to compare.

Compared to the rest of Voss, it's a lot less open, with a lot of relatively narrow paths and much denser mob placement, but after spending the last few months on Ruhnuk, it still felt almost liberating to quest there. You can't really dodge most mob groups very well, but at least they are easy to kill (unlike many opponents on Ruhnuk) and the area is at least open enough that you can keep running and shake some of them off before running into a dead end.

One thing that wasn't quite clear to me after the initial livestream was whether the Interpreter's Retreat was going to be a daily area or not. They didn't call it that, and if it was they probably would've said so, but it still sounded like there were things to do there other than the main story. Based on the PTR, commenter Iris informed me that the structure of the repeatable quests was a bit like Mek-Sha, and after having seen how it works for myself, I think that's a fair comparison, though I think the Interpreter's Retreat does things somewhat better.

With Mek-Sha, my general feeling was that the repeatable/side content was just not very interesting or rewarding. Why do things like the heroics or the trade house missions more than once just to see what they're about? There's the one heroic with the gangs that has an achievement attached to it if you repeat it forty times, but all in all, the experience always felt very "meh" to me.

The Interpreter's Retreat is better at luring you in with a plethora of decoration and pet rewards, and I found all of it to be pretty "discoverable". For example I never looked up a guide for the picnic achievement, I just found the leftover food naturally while doing the daily in the Gormak kitchen, and then spotted the spare drink while walking around town on another character. Then the description of the combined item makes it clear what you need to do with it. Considering the area isn't huge, it didn't take too long for me to find the right spot to use it as well. My discoveries of the contemplation achievement and the pet played out similarly. There were some things I looked up eventually, but in general I was positively surprised by how many items of interest I managed to encounter organically and how they drew me into spending more time in the area without having to look anything up.

I also thought it was interesting how a couple of achievements unlocked decorations on the vendor in town when completed, which isn't something SWTOR's ever done before I think. A guildie commented that he's seen something similar in Elder Scrolls Online though. No matter its origins, I think it's a neat idea, as it provides a bit of extra incentive to work on those achievements even if you're perhaps not much of an achievement hunter normally, though it's not very clearly communicated. The achievement description does point out that there are decos involved, but surely I'm not the only one who doesn't usually read achievement descriptions... I just think it could've been made a bit clearer, perhaps with the vendor having a quick chat option where they tell you that they'll show you some special goods if you help out enough or something like that.

All in all, I think the Interpreter's Retreat is a nice little addition to the game. I don't think it will have a lot of staying power for people, as even going after the achievements is not something that's going to keep you grinding for months and months, but I think that's okay. The mobs are supposed to drop decos randomly (though it's been acknowledged that the drop rates are currently bugged), which could be something to keep people interested in grinding them once fixed. Now if only the devs also added a Conquest objective or two for the area and we'd be golden.

Three Not So Little Grophets

The datacron on Rishi is definitely one of the more memorable ones for me. Back in the day before datacrons gave legacy-wide credit, I got it on quite a few alts... usually by someone else offering to summon people there whenever it was uncovered. I also got trapped under the rock that usually hides it at least once:

However, beyond the whole vanishing rock thing, I had no idea what was involved in revealing it, other than that I had overheard some talk about farming grophets, and that the special drops from them were easy to mistake for vendor trash (might be that they were even grey items originally, but I'm not sure about that one).

Then during a guild datacron hunt in 2021, we did the whole sequence to unlock the datacron in Raider's Cove, and I was the lucky one who won the roll to reveal the datacron and get the achievement using data packets that someone else had farmed.

I didn't really think about it again until a day in September when I was questing in Rishi's PvP instance on one of my alts. I don't generally use the PvP instance most of the time, but sometimes I switch my focus to PvP when I'm dealing with some sort of quest objective that's overfarmed, and then I often forget to switch back until I actually run into an enemy player. Anyway, on this occasion I didn't run into an enemy player... but while making my way to the pirate ship west of Raider's Cove, I came across a ginormous grophet with a name.

I instantly twigged that I must have run into one of the rare grophets related to the Rishi datacron, and like any good MMO player who discovers a rare and strange creature, I immediately went to kill it. I was surprised to actually see an achievement pop up too because I didn't know that there were any related to this.

Now I was intrigued. I'd always heard that getting the rare grophets to spawn was a horrible grind, but apparently you could just... randomly come across them in the world now? So I consulted the old Dulfy guide on the matter to learn where they spawn, just so I could, you know... check in on them if I happened to be in the area. I quickly decided that even if I didn't find them in their dedicated spots, I was at least going to kill the "placeholder grophets" from now on whenever I passed them, just to at least give the rares a chance to spawn, even if it was ultimately for someone else.

And what do you know, the other week I came across both Wudd and Breck on different characters. There was a bit of a hiccup with Breck as on re-checking the guide I realised that I'd actually read the map wrong and had been killing the wrong group of grophets the entire time (d'oh), but I got lucky after relocating to the correct place and got Breck to spawn after only a couple of visits. I was on my Sorc when I once again killed the placeholders, got a warzone pop and took it, and when I reappeared on Rishi after the match, there was Breck.

So now, more than eight years after it was added, I've finally seen every part of the Rishi datacron journey (not to mention that I earned a bunch of new achievements and the "Wolf of Rishi" legacy title). I really like it when old content still reveals new secrets to me. And I'm going to hold on to those data packets so that I can pay it forward and let someone else get the achievement for handing them in whenever a guild datacron hunt visits Rishi again.

8 Weeks Left

 ... until the end of Galactic Season 3. I reached level 100 on Darth Malgus a little while ago, and last week I also hit it on Leviathan, Tulak Hord and Satele Shan. Star Forge is trailing behind a little with eight levels left to go, which is a bit odd considering that last season it was the first of the "secondary" servers where I finished the season. I think I got a bit overconfident, thinking that I had such an easy time on that server last time that it was fine to leave it as my last place to visit most days... but of course that also meant that if it was late in the evening or I was short on time for other reasons on any given day, it also became the place where I played the least.

Still, less than ten levels is not far behind, and I should be able to be proud! Last season I started late on the other servers and had to use credit buyouts for a few levels, so being done (nearly) everywhere without having to use any buyouts, and two months before season end at that, is some great progress! I should be able to lean back and relax now, right?

Of course not, because with so much time left I'm now thinking about stretch goals. The achievements for doing 100 weekly objectives and maxing out the reputation track will come more or less on their own on Darth Malgus, but on the other servers... last time I started so late that they hadn't even been a consideration, but this time around they are actually within reach. Maxing out the reputation should be easy enough as long as I keep playing and using my rep tokens, as you could do that in six weeks even if you were starting from zero.

For the weeklies, I did the maths and to reach 100 on the secondary servers, I'd have to do 4-5 weeklies every week until the end of the season on most of them, and 5-6 weeklies on Star Forge. Not a trivial time investment, but not impossible either. I think I'm going to give it a shot, especially after seeing the weekly objectives for the next month that were posted on the official website yesterday and how many of them are really quite easy to complete. Just two more months of this and then I can take a break.

Wish me luck!

Master of the Feast

I've been doing pretty well for myself during the seasonal events this year. While I missed out on the coveted High Roller Shades last year, I finally managed to acquire them this year, two days before the Nightlife event was about to end again. I probably should have made a blog post about that, but for some reason I only felt like posting a brief comment on Twitter at the time, something I kind of regret now... here's what it said:

And this week I finally managed to complete the last achievement I was missing from the Feast of Prosperity. I had completed all the basic activity- and story-related ones ages ago, but there's one achievement in particular called "What did you put in this?!" which is hidden until you actually complete it, but at the same time features requirements that you might not hit automatically without tracking and specifically going for them.

Now, there's a very roundabout way in which you can check your progress even while the achievement is hidden, but I'd forgotten what it was. Fortunately Swtorista provided the answer (as usual) - you basically need to find someone who already completed the achievement, inspect them and shift-click their achievement into chat. Then you can click on that yourself and it will show your own progress.

It sounded like the kind of thing I can imagine being extremely awkward (how do you randomly find someone who's got that achievement?), but I guess I got lucky in that it didn't take me long at all to do so while chain-inspecting people around the Feast event area. Finally seeing my own progress was a major revelation as it clarified why I still hadn't got the achievement myself - I'd been barking up the wrong tree all along.

See, it has three requirements: to do 25 of the hardmode cooking missions, 25 hardmode cantina rushes, and to use pepper 75 times while preparing meals. I was convinced that it was only the pepper that was holding me back, since I seemed to remember only using it rather sparingly before I'd become aware of the achievement's existence. However, it turned out that I was actually done with peppers and all I was missing was nine more cantina rushes. I'd been thrown off by the fact that I already had the 25 completions achievement for that mission, however that achievement counts both difficulties, so I had clearly overestimated my willingness to take on the harder version. (To be honest, it's not really harder - it just takes twice as long for little extra reward, which I guess is why I hadn't done it more often.)

So I've dutifully been doing Feast dailies all week (not just the cantina rushes, but also the other types since I do still like the world boss hunts in particular), until I finally managed to tick the achievement counter over on Monday. Sadly I didn't manage to capture the moment of the achievement actually popping up, but it sure felt good to finally hit that 100% score for the Feast category. I've often said that I'm not much of an achievement hunter, but sometimes it just feels good to get that last thing done.

The question is now: Am I "done" with the event? I'm not usually someone to farm a world event endlessly for all the rewards, so once I've achieved everything I personally wanted to get out of it, I don't tend to go back very often. Then again, the Feast only comes around once a year, so maybe I'll feel ready for some more cooking, serving and killing delicious world bosses by this time next year anyway.

Day 8: Memorable Moments

IntPiPoMo may be over for this year, but my 10 days of SWTOR screenshots aren't finished, and I'm still planning to do that. The theme for day eight was "memorable moments".

First off we have a shot of guildies grouping up to kill the R8-X8 world boss on Ossus. I chose this one not because that particular kill was memorable, but to represent that whole era of Ossus being endgame. I loved it so much and I repeated all the related activities a stupid amount of times... I've often joked that had there been an achievement for killing each world boss a hundred times, I'd probably have gotten it.

I do miss those days somewhat. I really did like the importance of the world bosses, and that they were epic fights for maximum-size ops groups, but unfortunately they haven't aged well for that same reason, because now that the player base's focus is elsewhere, you can't easily go back and knock them out with just a few friends.

This shot was from Jedi Under Siege launch night. It may not be particularly immersive, but I do always enjoy seeing the masses pour in to enjoy the new story.

I wrote a whole post about it at the time, but I thought it was worth calling out again that spending my 37th birthday turning into a robotic deity and rampaging across Iokath with my guildies was an incredibly unique and fun experience.

This is a screenshot of me getting the achievement for completing the Trial and Error uprising on master mode in February 2020. I don't actually remember that evening in specific being that memorable, but basically that uprising seemed to be incredibly overtuned on its release and we spent a lot of time wiping in there the first couple of years. When we finally gave it another try during Onslaught and were able to beat it at last, it felt like quite an achievement. I think they definitely changed the tuning as well though, because it wasn't nearly the same level of crazy anymore.

This shot is from one of our datacron hunts from earlier in the year and was memorable to me in two ways: First off, I finally got to see how the Rishi datacron is done "properly", because back in the day I'd just been summoned to it after the whole process had already been completed and therefore I stayed completely oblivious to what was actually involved in unlocking it. (This is the reason I no longer accept well-intended summons to new datacrons, by the way. I want to actually see and understand how they work.) The second reason it was memorable to me was that someone else had pre-farmed the required materials so that we could quickly get it done on the night... but we rolled for who'd be the one to actually activate it, and since I won I got to do it and got an extra achievement to boot. That was nice.