The Subscriber Login Event in the Rear View Mirror

Lots of exciting things are happening in my favourite MMOs, but sadly real life has been kicking my arse lately so I haven't had as much time to play games as I would've liked, never mind writing about them. Still, tomorrow SWTOR gets its first story update in one and a half years, so I thought I had to sit down and post at least briefly - not about what's to come, but about the subscriber login event that's also coming to an end tomorrow.

Back in September I was kind of "whatever" about it, looking at it from the perspective of someone who's never had a reason not to continue subscribing to SWTOR, but now that it's coming to an end I wanted to take a moment to say that I actually ended up quite liking it. It was nice to get something marginally more useful from the weekly login reward for several months.

It was particularly nice for my alts on the other servers, where I spent all my currency on buying Rakata gear for my level 80s, and if I had tokens left over at the end of that I spent those on some extra OP-1s for further gear upgrades. Do I need this gear for anything? Of course not, but it's still a nice thing to have.

On my main on Darth Malgus, I ended up buying the two ship droid customisations and after that, all the different pets. I think at the end I had purchased every single one of them except for one. Did I think they were all amazing? Not really, but on Darth Malgus I have more gear and currencies than I know what to do with at this point, I already had all the emotes that were on offer, and I'm not huge on regeneration toys, so the pets were the next best thing. Especially since they were all originally from the Cartel Market, so now they're in my collections for future unlocking if I should fancy it.

Can I just say that it's kind of funny in hindsight that a single pet from the vendor cost as much as three Rakata gear pieces? Interesting value assignment there...

If you were a subscriber, what did you end up doing with your tokens?

Some of my guildies - who are usually not necessarily representative of the wider player base - were almost aggressively uninterested; it was actually kind of funny. Like, you're already subscribed and the devs are giving you free stuff, don't you want it?

The funniest to me was one particular guildie who's been a subscriber since launch and seems to have remained subscribed out of inertia more than anything, as he doesn't even really seem to play anymore - he just logs on once every two months or so to join us for a social night or something and then disappears again. He also hated the gearing system that was introduced with Legacy of the Sith and was always moaning about the fact that the the gear he got from being carried through an operation wasn't the best yet but required further upgrading.

So naturally, when this event came around, we were all like "oh man, this is going to be great for Nev; finally he can get the 340 Rakata gear he always wanted for simply logging in" - and then he didn't log in until literally the penultimate week of the event. We told him that he still had time to get three pieces if he just logged in four times during the last week, but he didn't do that either. Too busy, he told us afterwards, before stating wistfully that he wished he could just buy gear with Cartel Coins. (I know, I know. But hey, pay to win wouldn't be a thing in any game if there weren't people who liked it.) 

Armour Sale Time!

Like last year, SWTOR is running a number of themed sales this summer. I like these themed sales because they make it much easier to know in advance whether something relevant to you might be included or not, but I didn't mention the whole thing this time, because to be honest it wasn't as exciting the second time around, at least at first.

When they put a whole bunch of mounts on sale at the end of July, I basically ended up buying exactly one mount that I had regretted not grabbing last year, and that was kind of it - pretty much everything else I either already had or wasn't really interested in. They don't add a lot of new mounts to the Cartel Market nowadays, do they? It's mostly weapons and armour sets.

Then the next two sales were about weapons and modifications and I was very eh about those too. However, this week we got armour sets, and that's one area where they keep adding a lot of interesting stuff, so I found this one much more intriguing to revisit. As it happened, I had just created two new alts as well, for whom I hadn't decided on outfits yet, so going shopping for those quickly became my primary objective.

I ended up making a very shiny Twi'lek. She's wearing the Secret Agent's Armor Set with that shiny dye from Galactic Season 6.

Anyway, why am I posting this? Because I think that this is a cool sale and wanted to make a PSA to my readers to not miss out in case anything interests them. If you want to browse the goods without being logged into the game, Swtorista has a handy page that lets you see all the different sets while also allowing you to sort them alphabetically, by base price or by discount, to make it easy to find the best deals or specific sets you might be looking for. Just remember my advice on how to shop responsibly (that post was about mounts but really, the principle's the same regardless of what items you're looking at)!

Also worth noting: From the 16th of September, the theme is supposed to switch to decorations, another one where I personally expect to spend some coins. They really don't let me hoard that free CC like they used to!

7.6 Dev Stream Reactions

After watching the big Warcraft Direct stream yesterday, it was quite a contrast to spend time on SWTOR's 7.6 dev stream tonight. Smaller studio, fewer viewers, but also a much more relaxed atmosphere and lots of laughs. I was immediately overcome with an urge to make a bunch of gifs of the interactions between Eric Musco and Papa Keith, intending to post them on Bluesky, but it couldn't cope with me uploading any images at the time (I later learned it wasn't just me), so I'll be inserting them into this blog post instead, even if that may seem a bit random!

As usual, if you want the full rundown of every little detail, I recommend watching the recording of the stream yourself or reading a detailed summary elsewhere - Kal already has one up here for example. Over here I'm more choosy with what I talk about and won't mention everything, but I'll add some commentary to make it more interesting. Let's get on with it!

Topical and time-sensitive things first: There's a new Twitch drop for the next 14 days, an Ilum poster deco with a purple border. Handily livestream viewers were able to earn it right away simply by watching the stream as it only requires one hour of watch time. There'll also be another Twitch drop, a purple Vulptilla mount, once 7.6 launches. We weren't given an exact date for that, but from what they did say on the stream it sounds like it will be early December.

Also, effective immediately, there's a big 50% off sale on dyes going on! The interesting thing related to this was that they mentioned that they're planning to make changes to how dyes work soon... I'm sure I'm not the only one whose mind immediately jumped to the notion of making them unlockable in Collections, something I've seen people request more than once. I don't think that will happen though - dye sales have got to be too much of a money-maker for that - but I'm still curious to hear what they've got in mind once the time comes.

We got some info about the 7.6 story, and I tend to not go into too much detail about story previews in these posts, but I did want to note that Imperials will finally get to see Major Anri again, almost three years after Manaan, and that the story is supposedly going to be structured a bit differently, consisting of four threads you can advance in any order, about Shae Vizla, Darth Malgus, the Hidden Chain and Darth Nul's holocron respectively. I'm curious to see how that'll pan out - it could mean more content, but I've got to admit that personally I'm a little worried that "you can do them in any order" means that each "thread" will contain a lot of exposition/cut-scene watching and fewer interesting choices - but we'll see.

Unfortunately after all that talk about how interesting the new story is going to be, we won't actually get to see it at 7.6's release, because while the patch itself will still land as planned, they had to delay the story update part of it because they "currently don't have all the elements [they] need to complete this story", which I've seen people interpret as having to do with the voice actors' strike, though I don't know whether that's just speculation or backed by anything that was said elsewhere.

There was some talk about dynamic encounters and the new lair boss, but I won't go into that here as I already covered those topics in my post about the PTS from last week. They just confirmed that dynamic encounters will only exist on Hoth and Tatooine at launch, with the possible exception of Hidden Chain invasions, which might also happen on other planets from the sounds of it.

The new lair boss is also going to drop crafting materials for new augments, something that people had already caught on to some time ago but that hadn't been officially announced. These new augments will be better than the current gold augments. I guess this will offer a sort of gear progression without further raising overall item rating, though it does make me wonder whether the next gear reset perhaps isn't as far away as I thought.

There was some talk about new Cartel Market items, which I usually don't go into here either, but there was one thing that piqued my interest: there'll be a new decoration bundle called the Remote Outpost Bundle, and it'll come with a small amount of story/gameplay attached from the sounds of it. I was immediately reminded of the encrypted datacubes from back in the day and how people were not happy with those, though I guess a big part of that was that they came from inside Cartel packs, while this will be a direct purchase. I'll make sure to get it when it comes out and will let you know whether it's worth the money or not.

In terms of gameplay, there'll be a new UI feature called comlink to interact with terminals and characters in a more organic way without having to always resort to KOTOR-style cut scenes. They emphasised that this isn't meant to replace cinematics and proper conversations but should simply serve as another option for interactions where appropriate. The example they showed was of someone using a terminal and being given a prompt to enter a password, where in the current system that would bring up the KOTOR-style black bars and mute dialogue options like "enter code" or "walk away". They explained that they could also see this working for characters "texting" you.

PvP Season 7 will still start with the launch of 7.6 and bring an end to 8-man premades, as they'll once again be limited to four people max, and the devs are also disabling the old level 75 set bonuses in PvP to reduce the power of twinks. Not what I personally consider PvP's biggest problems right now, but better than nothing. What did stand out to me was that one of the new season rewards is actually going to be a proper emote instead of the previous "text-only" one, which might actually be something to look forward to for me.

As the stream was getting close to wrapping up, Eric and Keith dropped a few more surprises on us at the end. First off, we'll get a new mount as a free subscriber reward that introduces something new: the ability to have your (humanoid) companion ride in a sidecar beside you and a non-combat pet in the luggage rack. The preview looked hilarious and made me laugh out loud. I'm not sure how much I'll use it but it'll be fun for a little while if nothing else. Plus I appreciate that they decided to make it a sub reward instead of a Cartel Market item. There'll also be two new mounts from dynamic encounter-related achievements that won't show your companion but will include your active mini pet.

Next they announced that they'll do a character name purge for the first time in a long time. If you're a subscriber, all your characters are safe, but if not, you'll want to log into any toons that haven't been logged into since January 1st of this year, else they will be flagged for a rename. I wonder if that'll give me a chance to claim Shintar without the funny i on Tulak Hord, the one server where I don't currently own the name... they also mentioned that they'll try to remember to do this a bit more often in the future to not have all these names taken up by inactive characters.

Finally, a big surprise at the very end: they're working on more art modernisation for planetary environments, but also for player characters. Musco immediately assured everyone that their number one priority was to not change the overall feel of the characters. The examples they showed looked really good, with just more detail on the facial textures and more gloss on the eyes. (When I tried to explain this to Mr Commando afterwards, he said that talking about shiny hair and eyes made me sound like I was trying to sell him a dog!)

All in all, a fun stream with lots of news and some interesting things to look forward to, though the story update being delayed with no clear ETA was a bit of a bummer. What was your favourite part of this stream?

Could Flashpoints Become Endgame Again?

I've been thinking a lot about flashpoints recently. Over the past year and a half, I've been dabbling in Mythic Plus dungeons in World of Warcraft with some friends, and while I have my issues with that system, it has served as a reminder of how much I still enjoy small group content with friends... and how little reason I've had to do any of that in SWTOR for a while now, even as I continue to run operations with my guild.

When 7.0 first came out, we ran master mode flashpoints as part of our gearing up process, trying to get items from every possible source available, but after that it soon became clear that of the three different PvE gearing paths available since Legacy of the Sith, flashpoints have come out as the most lacklustre. The Noble Decurion gear you get from solo activities is by far the easiest to grind out and upgrade, while the Rakata purples from operations offer the best overall itemisation, not to mention the highest possible item level, which makes them a worthwhile goal to pursue even if it takes some effort. Flashpoint gear occupies an uncomfortable position in the middle, meaning it's not the best, but also ridiculously pricey in terms of currency upgrade costs, meaning you're almost always better off choosing one of the other paths.

(I note that many guides recommend acquiring and upgrading a single Supreme Decurion item from flashpoints and dissembling it to unlock the mod vendor - but that's it, after that you're basically not supposed to set foot into a flashpoint ever again.)

Seasons used to offer an incentive to group up for flashpoints with guildies, as the way the old flashpoint objective worked meant that it was faster to run a master mode including the bonus boss with guildies than to do multiple, easier but more haphazard runs with pugs. However, since this was changed to require exactly two runs no matter what, it's not as attractive anymore to put the effort in to assemble a group of friends. Sure, I'll still run with guildies for fun sometimes, but the temptation to just "get it done" with a quick solo mode stealth run or pug when that is also an option at any time is definitely much stronger than it used to be.

It strikes me that there is really some missed potential there, considering the sheer number of flashpoints the game contains, most of which do have a master mode as well. There just isn't much incentive to run them beyond some achievements and rare decoration drops nowadays - and to be clear, I don't want to over-incentivise flashpoints either, so that people feel like they have to run them all the time, but I really think we could get a lot more mileage out of them than we currently do.

Whenever I do queue for a master mode flashpoint for example, I almost always get the same ones, because people want to just do the easiest ones for rewards and not have to deal with any of the harder or newer ones. Which I think is a crying shame!

I remember when Lost Island first came out, it was put into a second "tier" of flashpoints with a separate queue and rewards because it was considered to be so much harder than the others. That ultimately didn't go anywhere, I guess because having a tier with only a single flashpoint in it isn't particularly enticing. In this day and age however, when we have dozens of flashpoints available that are all scaled to the current level cap, many of which are of wildly varying difficulty, wouldn't this be a perfect time to revisit that idea? It doesn't make sense that the game treats master mode Hammer Station and master mode Ruins of Nul as if they were exactly the same.

Flashpoints I would personally put in tier two would be:

• Assault on Tython 
• Battle of Rishi
  
• Blood Hunt
• Crisis on Umbara
• Lost Island
• Nathema Conspiracy
• Objective Meridian
• Ruins of Nul
• Secrets of the Enclave
• Shrine of Silence
• Spirit of Vengeance
• Traitor Among The Chiss

That's 12 of the current 29 master mode flashpoints - maybe you could add or remove a couple. I'm not married to the idea of a specific list, and obviously any selection would still include some (comparatively) easier and some harder ones... but not "Hammer Station easy", you know.

And what would be the point of having a separate tier, you might ask? Well, it could give separate rewards, and again I look back at something that I liked about the early days of the game - that the last boss in a master mode flashpoint used to drop a Rakata piece. Why not do something like that again? You can't tell me that it takes less effort to complete any of these than to do a master mode Nefra.

Both of these suggestions wouldn't require the introduction of anything dramatically new, as they both refer back to systems that were in the game before, and gear rewards that are in the game right now, but I'm open to other ideas as well of course. I'd just like to see some incentives to make flashpoints more attractive again as something to run with both guildies and pugs, especially on master mode.

7.5.1 Dev Livestream Notes

So there was a dev livestream today - you'll be excused if you're surprised to hear this, as for some reason the SWTOR team decided not to announce it anywhere... except on Twitter. I thought I was being bitterly hyperbolic in my last post with the whole "why do you think only Twitter users are worthy of knowing about what's happening with the game" line, figuring that they were still going to announce it somewhere else eventually, but they really didn't. What a bizarre marketing decision, especially seeing how they apparently want us to spend more time on Twitch...

Which is me segueing into the fact that the first item announced during the livestream was that they now have Twitch integration, and that once you've connected your account and patch 7.5.1 launches, you'll have 30 days to earn a purple speeder by watching four hours of SWTOR streams.

I hope this appeals... to the kids... or something? Sorry, I'm that old fogey that doesn't really "get" streaming and mostly finds it boring. To me, watching four hours of SWTOR livestreaming in a single month will be quite a big ask, but I guess I know Swtorista's schedule so I might be able to get there with some effort. I went ahead and linked my accounts, which seemed to be successful, but when I go into my SWTOR account now it still says that there's no linked Twitch account. There's already a post on the forum noting that there are issues. I guess that's why they announced the feature before it actually matters, so they have time to iron out any kinks before the actual eligibility period starts.

The stream's main focus was the next Galactic Season, which will be called "The Greatest Bounty" and whose theme will be bounty hunting. Interestingly, the Bounty Hunting event that is currently tied to the Death Mark conquest and only live about once a month will be active throughout the entire season. Even more interestingly, they'll bring back the Dark vs. Light bosses as targets to hunt for seasons objectives.

Amusingly, all the devs on the stream got the bosses' origins confused, as they talked about how these were supposedly part of the original DvL event from eight years ago. This is not true though - the DvL world bosses used to spawn based on the dark vs. light "world state" that was added in Knights of the Eternal Throne and removed with Legacy of the Sith. I hunted them all down back in 2020, and while it made for a fun guild activity for a while, it was also kind of a pain in some ways. It sounds like the issues with how easily they were to accidentally despawn will no longer be a thing, but we'll see what the difficulty tuning will be like - back then it was pretty brutal to be honest and not really pug friendly. (In the linked post I quoted a guildie as saying that he'd rather be kicked in the nuts for half an hour than ever fight any of these bosses again.) Still, I generally approve of these encounters being repurposed like this.

There was no mention of a central season reward like the past companions or the stronghold from the current season, so I'm not sure if it'll just be a more general reward track like in GS5? We will get a recoloured version of the Loth kitty apparently. We also weren't given a launch date, though Musco said that they're targeting "late August", so it sounds like we'll have about a month's break between seasons this time around. I just hope they don't repeat the whole blueprint gathering thing...

As promised previously, there'll also be two new date night missions, this time for Aric Jorgan and for Vette. As these are class companions, it was clarified that you won't be able to do these while just playing through the class story - you'll need to actually have reunited with your love interest in KotFE and locked in the romance before the date nights become available. I currently don't have access to either of these, so I can't get excited about them just yet, but I guess two more of these are another reason to work on getting those alts through the expansions.

There were some previews of new decoration rewards from the Feast of Prosperity and some new Cartel Market items. We'll finally get an Imperial trooper armour, which is something people have been wanting for a long time apparently, and there'll be two new weapon tunings which make either embers or flower petals float around you, which I've got to admit looked kind of amusing.

In terms of gear, there isn't going to be a new tier of gear or anything, but they are making some changes to make it even easier to get upgrades in the existing system. For example the various weekly missions will give you a choice between a gear box or just a flat amount of currency that will be much higher than just taking the gear and dissembling it (which is the only thing we can do right now if we don't need the actual item). All the ops weeklies will be back on the terminals every week instead of being on a four week rotation - I should be happy about that but I'll also kind of miss the way this made it easy to rotate different operations on social night without having to really think about it. You'll also be able to trade in gear boxes for higher-quality gear boxes, all the way up to Rakata... which does sound good in theory but also like it could be kind of clunky, depending on how many boxes you need to save up in your cargo hold before you can trade them for anything. We'll see.

Finally, there were some very brief teaser comments about 7.6, which we can expect closer towards the end of the year. Apparently this time the story will take us back to existing planets, where "an entirely new type of content" will await. *insert curiously raised eyebrow here* Even more importantly for those of us interested in group content though, there'll be a new lair boss a.k.a. a single boss operation. Again, I just want to be happy but unfortunately I don't have the best track record with lair bosses. I like the event-based ones like the Xenoanalyst and the Eyeless, but I've always hated the Colossal Monolith, and Golden Fury and the Hive Queen are at best kinda boring. I want it to be good though, honest!

Anyway... with that I've actually touched at least briefly on everything that was said in the stream I think! Still, as usual I recommend other places like Today in TOR for a more comprehensive and detailed round-up.

Patch 7.4.1 Is Here!

It is here, patch 7.4.1, and with it several new features:

• Galactic Season 6
• The first four Date Night missions
• Server transfers to Shae Vizla

I'm sure I'll have plenty to say about all of these in a couple of days, but for today, I'd just like to highlight a few other patch notes that I enjoyed:

A new Character Convenience unlock has been added to Legacy Perks! Once unlocked, players will be able to reach the GTN at any time without needing to travel to the Fleet, their personal ship, various planets or Strongholds!

I can't say that I recall ever wishing for a portable GTN myself, but I think this is a good addition. More legacy perks are always welcome! I could see this being useful to raiders who realise that they don't have a stim on them just as they're about to pull a boss in an operation for example.

Ancient Armaments Added To Daily Login Rewards: Ancient Armaments contain various armor appearances including ones that could not previously be acquired or traded. These armor pieces do not contain stats or mod slots and are intended solely for Outfitter. These armor pieces do have dye slots and can be traded and bought / sold on the GTN. The armor pieces that are available inside of Ancient Armaments are now also available as random world drops.

Now this is probably the biggest patch feature that came as a complete surprise. Joe Stragmalia expanded on the subject on the forums to clarify that this includes hundreds of weapons and over 2000 armor pieces. I'm very curious to see how this addition will shape up in practice.

More outfit choices that you can acquire through gameplay are always a good thing, and I know that there was demand for at least some of these world drops (the reason they were rare was that they would only drop while your character was in a specific level range, and with how fast levelling is nowadays, it was very easy to outlevel even the chance of having them drop). On the other hand though, I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of these old pieces will actually be considered quite ugly by most players, and since they have no stats and can't be vendored, I wouldn't be surprised if the GTN ended up being a bit flooded with them in short order. Again though, more cheap cosmetic options available for credits is not a bad thing.

What I'm curious to see is whether these are all based on world drops or whether other looks that are no longer available otherwise are included as well. I'm thinking of things like old flashpoint armours that I still own on some of my oldest characters, such as the Black Talon Hunter's Body Armor or the Cademimu Sharpshooter set.

Outfits will now be included when characters are transferred between servers.

This is great news but amused me since I just pointed out in February's community round-up post that outfits not transferring was an important thing to consider before transferring to Shae Vizla. As someone who's not planning to do any transfers any time soon, I'm still pleased that next time I'll make a character copy to the PTS, the first thing to do upon logging in won't be staring in horror at my outfit-less character displaying whatever hodgepodge of armour they were actually wearing underneath.

Fixed the Unread Mail UI icon so that it once again properly updates when new Mail is received.

Oh yes please, that only snuck in recently and was quite annoying.

The Mantellian Flutterplume’s name is now spelled correctly.

But... how was it spelled before then? 🤔

Removed a random floating bottle on Dantooine.

Glad to see we're focusing on the important things!

Several Nova Blade pirates on Rishi who were hostile in previously-neutral areas have been asked to calm down a bit.

I think I know which mobs this refers to... I think they were originally added for the Feast of Prosperity story chain? They lurk on the west side of Raider's Cove and I've unintentionally aggroed them (always feeling a bit surprised to be attacked in town) quite a few times.

Added the following to the appropriate mission terminals: [DAILY] Grateful Grazers (Republic), [DAILY] Panther Training (Imperial), [DAILY] Turn the Lights On (Both), [DAILY] Unstable Readings (Both) 

This one surprised me because as I mentioned in my post about Kessan's Landing, I figured placing these missions outside of town was an intentional design choice reminiscent of Yavin IV and Ziost. Did people find these too hard to find?

The Galaxy Map icon will no longer be highlighted for newly created characters that can't access it.

Not that this isn't a good thing... but wasn't this supposed to have been fixed in 7.3.1?

Regeneration Toys will correctly regenerate resources for all origin story and combat style combinations.

Once again, I just wonder which toy/origin story/combat style combination was bugged here. Let me know in the comments if you know!

Anyway, lots of other stuff to look at in game, so I'll get to that for now!

Struggling with Credits on Shae Vizla

I hit level 80 with my first character on Shae Vizla shortly before the new year. It's still kind of funny to me that I'm effectively a "warrior main" over there right now, strictly because "complete missions as a Jedi knight or Sith warrior" was a seasons objective during the server's launch week.

Story-wise, she's only just finished chapter two of her class story, but that's still better than I usually do with story progress before getting distracted by other activities.

Since I'm currently aiming to do more on this server than just seasons objectives, I thought I'd jump onto the gear treadmill. It was a strange experience to actually run out of Conquest commendations while picking up gear, and I was kind of taken aback when seeing that even buying what I tend to think of the "cheap starter gear set" costs about ~250k credits, with prices increasing for item level upgrades. On any other server, I'd consider that chump change, but on Shae Vizla, credits remain precious. I briefly felt inspired to do a round of Dromund Kaas heroics solely for the purpose of making money but was quickly reminded of why that kind of gameplay bores me.

The economic situation in general is really interesting to me though. SWTOR has had issues with inflation for a while (even if I personally didn't think it was as much of a problem as some people made it out to be), but the devs have taken measures to combat it in the past year that have actually been really effective. My personal measuring stick for this have been the blue flagship encryptions, which I remember selling for about 200-300k credits a pop once upon a time when Conquest was still relatively new. At the peak of inflation, they were going for more than ten million a piece, but now they are down to about one million again - on my home server Darth Malgus, that is. On Shae Vizla they sell for 15-30k each right now (not that I've been selling mine; they've been going towards the guild bank).

While levelling, I generally felt that I was in a good place in terms of credits. There were some small expenses like quick travel or locking in an outfit in the outfit designer, but none of this was too bad (outfit designer costs scale with level and are cheap when you're a lowbie). However, now that I've hit max level, I feel like there are credit sinks left and right that make it challenging to save up for anything.

This is an interesting contrast to when the game launched. I found that in this post from March 2012, I noted that credits had been a bit of a struggle while levelling up, as paying for new skill ranks at the trainer was expensive, but once I hit max level, there wasn't really a lot to spend money on, even as a round of Belsavis dailies netted me 100k credits each time. (Though it's interesting to see how that number felt like a lot to me back then. Even on Shae Vizla, a million credits doesn't feel like a lot to have right now, at least not to me.)

Nowadays you only have small expenses while levelling, but then you hit max level and:

• Building outfits becomes expensive, costing 100k+ credits for a full outfit at level 80. Not to mention the cost of purchasing dyes for example.
• As mentioned above, the gear vendors charge considerable fees for every piece of gear you buy or upgrade.
• Unlocking legacy perks is another credit sink running in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. While the legacy system was added very early in the game, it wasn't there yet at launch when I started.
• Death can also get expensive. On my fully-kitted out Commando on Darth Malgus, one death costs 30k+ credits, which doesn't even register with me over there, but on Shae Vizla you may find that kind of cost noticeable. In fact, I found it interesting that there are posts on the forums complaining that progression raiding on SV isn't really viable right now because wiping repeatedly incurs a high cost that requires way too much grinding to compensate for. I'm not really in a position to comment on the validity of that complaint, but it's noteworthy to me that this is even a talking point.

I was somewhat reminded of something that happened in my guild on Darth Malgus not too long ago, when someone returned to the game after a long absence, made their way to the level cap, and then fizzled out with a bit of a rant about how they found the endgame to be grindy and boring. I responded to them at the time that the game could indeed be like that if you were hell-bent on playing only a single character, but that it's designed around the idea of making you play alts, which immediately alleviates a lot of those issues.

I think I basically need to heed my own advice from back then and consider that even if I do want to gear up a bit on Shae Vizla, there's no need to rush it, and that I should keep working on my alts to strengthen my legacy as a whole. My wealth should automatically increase over time that way, without the need to start grinding for cash.

Either way, it's another interesting aspect of the "fresh start experience". When I started playing on Leviathan and Tulak Hord in Galactic Season 2 and ran into issues with needing credits to finance buying out a few levels on the seasons track, I could "cheat" by buying a dye from the Cartel Market and selling it on the GTN for a billion credits, which meant that I was immediately set for life in terms of any normal gameplay expenses. On Shae Vizla there are no shortcuts like that (at least as of now).

7.4 First Impressions

I was surprised how nice it felt to be able to upgrade my gear again. I had enough tech fragments saved up across alts that I could raise both of my implants to item level 340 right away, merely requiring a few relogs to claim more fragments on different characters. Getting back into full max-level Rakata gear is going to be my next goal, and any spare tech fragments can go towards upgrading the implants of alts. SWTOR demands so little of players in terms of grind that it's actually nice to have something like this to work on again every now and then.

I was excited when they announced the new shiny dyes, so I immediately bought some to try out. I also really liked the new Suppression Trooper armour, so I bought that too. It's funny to me how I'm earning more free Cartel Coins than ever from doing Galactic Seasons on multiple servers, but the devs are also getting better at luring me into buying things, so my huge stash of free CC is actually starting to diminish for the first time in ages. Of course, simply making all the new items expensive also helps.

I remember when Treek came out back in the day, a dev commented on Twitter that this made them huge amounts of money... Note that the Chrome White/Metallic Gold dye bundle costs as much as two and a half Treeks, and it's a one-time consumable. Well, I hope it makes them good money and that Broadsword will invest it back into the game.

Pictured below, from left to right: my trooper's Rakata gear dyed Chrome White and Metallic Gold, the Battlefield Commander set dyed the reverse way (Metallic Gold and Chrome White) and the new Suppression Trooper armour with a secondary light orange dye applied.

There were some bugs. It's kind of funny to me at this point that as a long-time player, I should really know that there are always going to be some bugs on patch day. The devs certainly do, which is why they're always on standby to implement hotfixes after pushing a major patch out. And yet... it's still always a little disappointing to run into an issue that stops you dead in your tracks. Then again, if they fix it quickly enough, hardly anyone even remembers a month later - though I do immortalise some bugs by posting about them I guess. It's a funny cycle.

It didn't help that one of the issues this time around has been game performance, which by its very nature affects a lot of people. It wasn't too bad for me, though I did suffer from abnormal lag and stuttering the first evening, which eventually resulted in a full game crash. The rest of the time I was fine though. Others have had it worse, struggling to even get the game running. The devs are still investigating.

A more harmless bug manifested itself in the new storyline on Republic side, where you're supposed to click on an object in the open world that's somewhat slow to respawn. I say "somewhat" because it must've been one, two minutes tops, which isn't that long in the grand scheme of things, but of course it's a nightmare when there are fifteen players stacked on top of each other, all wanting to click first. Musco was actually spurred on to make another one of his rare forum appearances to clarify that this happened because the tool they use to build these kinds of quests sets this long-ish default timer and they forgot to manually fix it in this instance. They'll look at adjusting the default as well to avoid the problem recurring in the future. Interesting to know!

At the time of writing this, I've played through the main storyline once on both factions; I haven't looked into the Lane Vizla story yet. Still, I've got lots of thoughts already, which I'll save for a long story review post as usual. The only thing I'll say for now is that I appreciated the faction flavour. 7.2 and 7.3 have been exactly the same regardless of what faction you play, so it's nice to be reminded that the Republic and Empire exist. While the overall storyline is the same in 7.4 too, it's similar to Secrets of the Enclave in the sense that you work with different people on both sides and that makes all the difference to the experience.

A Livestream About 7.4 and Beyond

Yesterday was livestream day for SWTOR, a day that's quickly becoming a major event to look forward to for me, as we finally find out what's to come in the next big patch while getting to connect with the devs and deriving some entertainment from the process at the same time.

The stream lasted for more than an hour and yet time seemed to be flying by! A lot was said and done, and as usual you can watch a recording on Twitch or find a full written summary of absolutely everything that was revealed on the sites of the usual suspects:

• Swtorista
• Today in TOR
• Vulkk

I have no desire to go into that much detail myself, but will instead comment on the main things that excited me, of which there were still a lot! So let's get into it.

First off, it was interesting that they started the stream with Papa Keith saying hi and showing new studio pride by wearing a branded Broadsword jumper. (By contrast, I noticed that Musco was still wearing a SWTOR shirt with the Bioware logo on it; naughty!) What was really interesting about Keith's intro though was that he immediately started things off by telling us that beyond 7.4, they just reviewed their road map up to 7.6 with Broadsword, content that is meant to come out over the next year.

This was reassuring in the sense that it showed that there are no signs of things slowing down after the studio transition, and it was interesting to note that this planned patch cadence basically confirmed that there isn't another expansion coming soon. I personally didn't think there was, but I'd certainly seen some people speculate that the next patch after 7.4 would be 8.0, so I'm kind of glad to have that misconception dispelled. Obviously I'm not saying I never want another expansion again, but Legacy of the Sith definitely feels like it needs more time to cook at this point so I'm okay with adding more patches to its runtime.

The main announcement was the reveal about 7.4's story content, which will take us to... a new town on Ord Mantell? Can't say I expected us to return to another existing planet immediately after the return to Voss in 7.3, and Ord Mantell wasn't on my personal list favoured destinations, but I can't say I'm unhappy with it either. Actually, it's an interesting callback to the ten-year-anniversary news post from two years ago, when it was teased that as part of this expansion, we might "gain an opportunity to return to where your character’s journey first began so long ago…" My only disappointment was that when there was some talk about how it can be safe for Imperial characters to go to Ord Mantell, nobody thought to mention Lost Island. Come on!

I won't go into any detail about what they said about the story there to keep things as spoiler-free as possible, but unlike the Interpreter's Retreat, the new town Kessan's Landing is going to be a proper daily area and yes, we'll chase after Heta Kol and the Hidden Chain again. No, I don't know whether we'll actually achieve anything this time around. But! We'll interact with both new and returning characters, and I was particularly pleased to hear of the return of Sergeant Captain Blyes and Gizmel Gam. If those names don't mean anything to you, Sergeant Blyes is literally the first NPC troopers and smugglers talk to outside their class story phase, the guy who gives you your very first side mission to blow shit up in the village. And Gizmel Gam is the shady heroic quest giver who wants you to fetch his illegal drugs from Savrip Island (without telling you that it's illegal drugs). I love it when minor characters like that get to reprise their roles.

A story-related announcement that surprised me was the continuation of the Lane Vizla story from Ruhnuk. Now, again, trying to keep it as spoiler-free as possible... the way that story ends on Ruhnuk does sort of imply that there'll be a follow-up, but I honestly figured it would just be a mail or maybe a short conversation. But no, it looks like it's actually turning into a proper side storyline that has you seeking out new characters and places, and I'm here for it.

Next they announced a technical update that probably had me way more excited than it should have: "cinematic lighting". What does that mean? It means older in-game cut scenes will have better lighting, making better use of "natural" light sources and shadows instead of artificial spotlights. They showed a few clips from starter quests for different origins and I just kept thinking how gorgeous the new versions looked.

What can I say: this is a game with a heavy focus on watching your character look cool in cut scenes and it heavily encourages you to play alts. I'm not sure there's any other game where an announcement about improved lighting would make me feel like it's one more reason to make a new alt, but it really does in this instance.

Also, my favourite side story related to this was that when I checked the forums afterwards, I found this thread by someone going by the forum name Jazulfi, posted about a month ago and complaining about how bad the lighting in some of the old story cut scenes was. Needless to say, they were over the moon about this announcement. Just imagine being in that position, making an incredibly niche complaint about something and a few weeks later the devs announce that they are about to release a major technical upgrade addressing your specific issue. The timing just cracked me up. Good for you, Jazulfi!

Also interesting was the demo of the GTN update that had been teased before. At a glance I thought it looked kind of similar to the way things are set up in the modern World of Warcraft auction house - which is not a bad thing, as it's mostly quite convenient. Even better, the new GTN will have a "claim" button so you can grab your stuff directly from the GTN terminal instead of going to your mailbox, which I really appreciate because in WoW I always buy stuff from the auction house and then run off without remembering to actually take it out of my mailbox, so this is a very real problem for me. The only slight concern I have was that there was a brief mention of the deposit now being classified as a fee, which makes me worried that it might no longer be refunded if your item doesn't sell. That would be a shame as this particular bit of generosity of SWTOR's GTN was a really nice feature and meant that I was never shy about re-listing stuff as I didn't have to worry about actively losing money if nobody purchased right away. We'll see I guess. (Edit: This has now been confirmed in a forum post.)

In terms of gear, we were told that 7.4 will bring another gear rating increase. Implants and mods will become upgradeable to 340, and Rakata gear's max rating will increase to 344. There was also a cryptic mention of Rakata gear for everyone, not just ops players. The main takeaway I got from this is that after about a year of R-4 Anomaly on veteran mode being the only source of max-item-rating gear, they're basically dumping that entire idea and nobody will ever go there again. Can't say I'm sad, though the thought of updating gear across my entire stable of alts again is a little tedious, even if it won't be hard to do.

Now, the Cartel Market section of these streams never really interests me that much, but this time they had something that caught my attention... because it was SHINY! Basically, they're adding a new type of dye that doesn't just colour your gear but also gives it a shiny or matte effect, and the example they showed looked amazing.

To be fair, this is a brand-new gear set that has likely been optimised to work well with this new effect, and it might not look as great on older armours, but still... I could definitely see myself picking a couple of these up to see if I can give an old outfit a new shine. This gets a thumbs-up from me.

Finally, they finished the stream with an interesting twist on the Best View in SWTOR contest - they haven't chosen the winners yet, but Jackie wanted to share the five finalists for each planet... and I can see why, as they were all gorgeous. I kept an eye out for any of my own submissions, but while one of the Nar Shaddaa finalists looked kind of like one of mine, it had someone else's name on it so was presumably submitted earlier. However, apparently no fewer than three people I know found themselves featured among the finalists. Yay them! Either way, I loved seeing all those screenshots and they looked like worthy winners regardless of which ones actually end up being the final choices.

Oh, and if you read this before November 1st - they gave out a free deco code again, so you can redeem "LotsVizla" until then for another in-game poster of your (perhaps not) favourite Mandalorian(s).

Either way, the stream clearly did its job for me as it got me properly excited for 7.4. We don't have a release date yet, but based on how they've been handling these recently, it's probably going to be late November or early December.

Galactic Season 4 in Review

I achieved my last Galactic Season 4 goal today (the 100 weekly objectives), so I thought I'd write down some final thoughts on the season. I mean, technically it still lasts another one and a half months, but I'm happy to be done. Regardless of how soon the SWTOR devs decide to launch Season 5, I should be able to have a proper break between seasons this time.

All in all, my experience of GS4 was very similar to that of GS3, just with me deciding to moderate my time investment a bit. There were no major changes to the concept or reward structure, so I liked and disliked pretty much the same things as before. The one new thing I liked was that the way the chapter completion objectives were structured helped me get my old smuggler through KotFE, though I'm still not sure whether that was intentional or not. It seemed too consistent to be mere coincidence, but then the objective preview for the last few remaining weeks of the season has KotET chapter eight coming up two weeks before chapter four, which wouldn't make sense in that context, so who knows.

At the end of the last season I really wished for a companion that didn't speak alien gibberish, and I didn't get that, but at the same time I just couldn't dislike Amity. I enjoyed his story, and the whole concept of a human raised by Selonians who also happens to have been disfigured to such an extent that he permanently needs to wear full body armour was just such a bizarre way to justify keeping costs down, I honestly kind of had to admire it. At this point I'm willing to accept that this is just the way it's going to be and I'm simply curious what weird combo the dev team is going to come up with next. A Wookiee that's secretly two Jawas in a costume? A Kel Dor whose consciousness has been transferred into an astromech droid? I'm sure they'll surprise me.

In terms of rewards, I was quite pleased to be able to spend my accumulated tokens on all servers on the new Mek-Sha stronghold at the start of the season, just to then do absolutely nothing with it. That's just the way I am with strongholds and that's fine. I am however back to being close to the token cap everywhere, meaning that I now dread the start of next season and once again having to wonder what the hell I should do with all that currency. (I'll be very surprised if they release another stronghold or other major reward soon enough to help me out with that problem.)

While I was glad to see that they made the reward dyes stackable, my inventory problems still hit a new high this season due to all the weapons the reward track gives out each time. I'd already unlocked the armours in collections last season, but this time I went nuclear and deleted everything on all servers once I was done (and after unlocking it in collections first of course). I remember when I was sceptical about the devs adding a mass-delete window. Thank you, devs - you clearly knew what was to come better than I did.

All in all, this season was a bit of a turning point for me in that it really hit me that Galactic Seasons are just another routine event now. That doesn't mean they're not fun anymore, just... that I at least can't approach them with quite the same zeal as before. I also still wonder about scaleability in the sense that I think that the team won't be able to keep these going in exactly the same way forever - our ship will eventually run out of room for new companions if nothing else! I have visions of companions being stuffed into every nook and cranny as if the Alliance Commander developed a serious hoarding problem.

On Discord, I saw someone suggest that the "main reward" of a future season could be something like a playable race instead - which I think would probably be a lot more effort than a companion actually, so it's unlikely to happen, but I thought it was a neat idea anyway. It would just be nice to see things get mixed up at least a little to avoid long-time players getting tired of the same old, same old.

No More Daily Comms

Hot on the heels of the 7.3 reveals, Bioware made a post on the PTS forum in which they announced another change that's going to come with the next patch: the removal of Daily Resource Matrices, sometimes also referred to as daily commendations.

I was honestly kind of surprised by how much that bit of news excited me. I'm long past the point where I have to worry about upgrading my main's gear, and while I still get the occasional earpiece, implant or relic for an alt, that's just something I do for fun when I'm getting close to hitting a currency cap.

However, the requirement to farm dailies to upgrade any kind of gear never sat right with me, and I mentioned it as one of my major annoyances with Legacy of the Sith's gearing system shortly after the expansion's launch. Due to this, I've probably done more daily rounds in the last year than I did in the three previous years before that.

Some of my guildies hated this part of the system even more than I did - usually they were healer mains like me, for whom it seemed particularly awkward and annoying to go grind dailies (the new loadouts feature notwithstanding), when all they really wanted to do was heal people in operations or PvP.

I also had a couple of guildies who were totally fine with it though, and who were in fact constantly capped on daily commendations since they seemed to "naturally" acquire more than they could spend in a week anyway.

Ultimately, I had no idea how my own dislike of this part of the system compared to the rest of the player base. Being raiders, we're often far from representative of the "average" player. Maybe more casual players spend all their time at max level farming daily areas, and that's why this change was made? I kept trying to tell myself that it probably made sense from Bioware's point of view.

Needless to say, I'm taking the fact that they are removing daily commendations entirely in 7.3 as a sign that I was in fact not a lone weirdo for feeling like the daily grinding required to keep your gear upgraded was in fact not that great. Now that I think about it, daily commendations are also the reason my alts on the other servers don't have a higher item level than they do - I've had to exchange both Conquest and PvP currency for tech fragments at some point or another due to getting close to the cap, but I couldn't use them to upgrade my gear due to always being starved for daily commendations (and outright refusing to grind dailies on the other servers just to gear up).

I figure maybe it was a sort of experiment on Bioware's part to get people to engage with the old daily zones more... in which case my response to that would be: Okay, you tried; let's not to that again. Dailies already have their use as sources of reputation, credits and Conquest points as well as for the occasional seasons objective. I think that's enough to keep them relevant. Having to do them dozens of times to upgrade your gear as well was just overkill.

GS3 Review: Satele Shan

I've given my general thoughts on Galactic Season 3, but I also wanted to write more specifically about my experiences completing it on all servers again. Part of what has made this project so appealing to me is being able to observe different server communities; another has been re-experiencing a bit of that newbie life, in the sense of not having a max-level legacy with all the perks maxed out and actually being able to benefit from things like picking up datacrons.

I thought I'd start with Satele Shan, which is the first server on which I finished the 100 weekly objectives achievement (outside of my home on Darth Malgus that is), even if the other servers were only days behind.

My main on Satele Shan is my Shadow consular Zilek, who was level 66 by the time I finished Season 2, and on Balmorra in terms of his class story. He hit max-level during Season 3 and progressed up to Hoth story-wise. He also accumulated what I felt was a decent amount of gear, considering that gearing up wasn't really a goal I was actively pursuing - I just went to buy upgrades and trade in currency whenever I got close to hitting some kind of cap. At the time of writing this he's got an average item rating of 328, which is also the level of both of his legendary implants.

I made no effort to make any progress in the PvP season on servers other than Darth Malgus, but it kind of happened automatically as I did some warzones for weekly objectives for the regular season sometimes, which got me up to PvP season level four on Satele Shan. In general I wasn't too excited about PvPing on Zilek though - while he was still levelling, being an Infiltration Shadow felt pretty OP sometimes, but the closer I got to the level cap the weaker I started to feel compared to other specialisations. It was actually much more fun to do a bit of PvP on my lowbie Guardian knight as Focus, a spec I'd never really played before and which made me feel like an absolute monster even as I had no clue what I was doing. However, she recently levelled up into the midbie bracket, and it doesn't feel great to play anything at the low end of that bracket either.

Aside from that bit of PvP I didn't do much on the Guardian except for a few missions when there was a weekly objective that demanded I play a knight and I think she only gained a couple of levels. While they are still small, it felt like I made more progress dusting off my ancient agent and trooper, with the former getting to level ten and the latter to fifteen. My overall legacy level is also up to 22 and I was kind of surprised that I found myself even caring about that, but there are actually perks that you can't unlock with credits until you've hit a certain minimum legacy level, something I don't recall ever running up against on Darth Malgus back in the day, probably because I levelled more quickly than Bioware actually added new perks.

Finally, I noted in my Season 2 in review post that I had joined a guild that had invited me randomly and that felt quite organised. I had a hunch that they wouldn't keep me around for long once the season ended and I became inactive for a while, and this assumption was proved correct as I logged in at the start of Season 3 to find my characters unguilded again.

Ironically, I received a generic recruitment whisper from the exact same guild within days of starting to play again, but this time I didn't respond to it. I could've benefited from the guild perks again, which certainly would've made Conquest easier as well as earning me extra rewards, but I'm just not a fan of such a purely utilitarian approach when it comes to guilds. They would've just kicked me again as soon as I stopped logging in and somehow that didn't sit right with me on an emotional level, even though I completely understand it from a purely practical point of view.

The FULL List of 7.0 Augment Crafting Materials

A somewhat random, short and to-the-point post today. I've had several conversations with guildies about crafting purple and gold augments lately (item rating 286 and 300 respectively), and when it comes to exchanging mats, they always seem to expect to just hand over the rarest parts required, with the crafter taking care of the rest. To be honest, in the past that's how crafting often worked, because basic materials were available aplenty and you didn't need that many of them for special crafts.

However, ever since the 6.0 crafting update, the requirements to craft some of the more high-end items have been pretty ridiculous in terms of materials required. This is due to the tier system that Bioware introduced at the time, which makes you start by crafting green quality components, then craft several of those into blue quality components, then craft several of those into purple quality components, all while introducing a multiplier at every step that can bring the total number of materials required to produce a single high-level item up into the hundreds.

And yet, if you look at all the current guides about augment crafting, they basically say "get these five rare mats... and then there's also some crew skill specific items, don't worry about those". I'm guessing the people who wrote those guides don't actually craft themselves, because I don't know how else you can be so dismissive of such a huge chunk of the process.

Anyway, I decided to do a full write-up of what's required for each augment in terms of base materials (which then need to be "crafted upwards" multiple times towards higher level components). Note that the materials for purple and gold augments are almost identical except that where the purple versions require 5 Legendary Embers, the gold requires a CM-1337 instead, which is the special mat that Cybertechs make out of 5 OEM-37 and 5 RPM-13 plus 5 Legendary Embers.

Mats for one Synthweaving augment (crit or redoubt/defense):

• 60x Artifact Data Spike
  
• 60x Artifact Lustrous Artifact Fragment
  
• 60x Artifact Lustrous Bondar Crystal 
• 60x Artifact Woven Syntex 
• 5x Legendary Ember (OR 1x CM-1337 for gold instead of purple)
  
• 108x Premium Data Spike
  
• 180x Premium Lustrous Artifact Fragment
  
• 180x Premium Lustrous Bondar Crystal
  
• 192x Premium Veda Cloth
• 108x Premium Woven Syntex
  
• 5x Processed Isotope Stabilizer
• 54x Prototype Data Spike
  
• 90x Prototype Lustrous Artifact Fragment 
• 90x Prototype Lustrous Bondar Crystal
  
• 120x Prototype Veda Cloth
• 54x Prototype Woven Syntex
  
• 5x Solid Resource Matrix 
• 384x Standard Veda Cloth
  

Mats for one Armormech augment (absorb or alacrity):

• 36x Artifact Data Spike 
• 36x Artifact Fibrolite
  
• 60x Artifact Duranium Plating 
• 60x Artifact Tempersteel
• 5x Legendary Ember (OR 1x CM-1337 for gold instead of purple) 
  
• 108x Premium Data Spike
  
• 108x Premium Fibrolite
  
• 192x Premium Flerovium Flux 
• 180x Premium Duranium Plating
• 180x Premium Tempersteel
  
• 5x Processed Isotope Stabilizer 
• 54x Prototype Data Spike
  
• 90x Prototype Duranium Plating 
• 54x Prototype Fibrolite
  
• 96x Prototype Flerovium Flux 
• 90x Prototype Tempersteel
  
• 5x Solid Resource Matrix
• 384x Standard Flerovium Flux
  

Mats for one Armstech augment (accuracy, shield or versatile; versatile only exists in gold):

• 36x Artifact Dallorian
  
• 36x Artifact Data Spike
  
• 60x Artifact Tempersteel 
• 60x Artifact Duranium Plating
• 5x Legendary Ember (OR 1x CM-1337 for gold instead of purple) 
  
• 108x Premium Dallorian Scraps 
• 108x Premium Data Spike
  
• 180x Premium Duranium Plating
  
• 192x Premium Flerovium Flux
• 180x Premium Tempersteel
  
• 5x Processed Isotope Stabilizer
• 54x Prototype Data Spike 
• 54x Prototype Dallorian Scraps
  
• 90x Prototype Duranium Plating
  
• 96x Prototype Flerovium Flux
• 90x Prototype Tempersteel
• 5x Solid Resource Matrix
• 384x Standard Flerovium Flux

As you can see, it adds up to a lot. I crafted an augment for a guildie today after he'd handed me the mats for a CM-1337, the Isotope Stabilizers and the Resource Matrices, and when I did the maths for the "rest" that I had contributed, it added up to 60 million credits in value. Now, that's not worth as much as it used to be, but it's still a lot to spend on essentially doing someone else a favour. So crafters, don't let yourselves be ripped off! And if you're looking to get someone else to craft augments for you, be mindful of all the materials required - their amount and cost is not as trivial as many people seem to think.

Season 3 Halftime Thoughts

We're slowly approaching Galactic Season 3's halfway point, and I've been doing very well for myself! On Darth Malgus I'm up to season level 88, and on all the other servers I'm somewhere between the mid-sixties to low seventies.

That's basically me confessing that I haven't really been able to ease up on my slightly obsessive play on the other servers, even though it can be a bit overwhelming sometimes. It's not that I don't enjoy playing there, but my brain doesn't quite seem to be able to comprehend that you can't just multiply the effort for something like the PvP weekly by five without feeling a dramatic increase in play time required to achieve that goal. And by the time it starts to drag I've usually progressed enough that I kind of don't want to give up on the weekly so close to the finish line... c'est la vie. At least being close to finishing the season on Darth Malgus means that there'll soon be one server less to consider when it comes to weekly objectives.

Aside from chasing objectives, I've kind of enjoyed rounding out my legacies on the other servers a bit. At the start of the season I was able to buy both of the fleet strongholds on every server, which gave my Conquest point bonus a crazy boost compared to what it used to be.

The clone of my main that I made on Tulak Hord hit 80 the other day, as did my Shadow on Satele Shan, which leaves Leviathan as the only server where I don't have a max-level character, though my knight there only has three more levels to go as well.

I've also enjoyed adding to my legacies on the other servers with the creation of some Imperial alts. Occasionally there are some easy season objectives that require you to have characters of both factions, such as the one this week that asks you to kill a few named mobs on Quesh on both Republic and Imperial side, and it annoyed me a bit that I couldn't do those. So I've been using the weekly objectives to do x number of quests on a character with a specific origin story to create alts on servers where I didn't yet have anything that matched the requirements. Specifically that has resulted in a new Sith inquisitor on Tulak Hord and my ancient lowbie agent on Satele Shan finally getting to level ten. Fun fact: while Conquest and Galactic Seasons officially don't unlock until level ten, you already get credit towards seasons objectives before that, which meant that my Sniper got the one to complete fifteen quests as an agent at a mere level nine.

Another thing to note is that I've been loving the change to the prize tracks that replaced some Cartel Coins with Cartel packs instead. I know there was some moaning about this at the start of the season from people who primarily do them for the free CC, but I've got to admit as someone who's never short on CC I've unexpectedly been loving this change! It means I get to open some boxes without having to spend money of either kind, and I've liked some of the prizes enough to just keep them. For example I got a set called "Berserker" out of one of my free Cartel packs on Satele Shan, which is apparently a fairly common set from a really old pack, but I didn't recall ever seeing it before. I really dig the "cybernetic suit" look it sports though and decided that it was a great fit for my new agent.

And the stuff that doesn't appeal to me personally? Gets claimed and thrown onto the GTN once the bind timer runs out, which means that this is also a great time for people who prefer to buy their Cartel items with credits, as the free crates from seasons provide an additional supply of items that wouldn't otherwise be there.

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.