GS9 Week 14: Flashpoints, Flashpoints, Flashpoints!

A little over a month ago I wrote about how much I've been enjoying the current Galactic Season, and how I'd been thinking about setting myself the stretch goal of completing the full meta achievement on all servers this time (instead of the basic 100 levels). I'm not here to tell you that I've achieved that, but at this point I can say that it's definitely happening. I've reached season level 100 and defeated my 250 enhanced enemies on all servers, with the only boxes left to tick being a couple more Flashpoint Frenzy objectives and about 20 more weekly objectives in total.

It's been really surprising to me how energised I've felt for this season. I always say that this whole "doing seasons on multiple servers" thing means walking a fine line between a fun challenge and burning myself out with too many digital chores, and usually I tend to start losing steam after around eight weeks. This time though, I've kept going all the way to level hundred, to the point that my secondary legacies were only slightly behind my main one, and even after that I've just kept going... and going... and going.

The weekly flashpoint objective has been a big part of that, and I've written about my fascination with seeing the flashpoint scene on different servers. This week was particularly amazing for that as there were a total of three weekly flashpoint objectives: Korriban Incursion and Assault on Tython were both featured veteran flashpoints for the week, and the objective to do any random master mode flashpoint was also up. I ended up doing all three of these on all servers (minus the master mode on Shae Vizla since I couldn't get that to pop), for a total of 17 flashpoint runs throughout the week, and it was thoroughly enjoyable for the most part. Sure, not every single run was amazing, but I'd say the majority were at least funny or interesting in some way.

Tython and Korriban were good flashpoints to do repeatedly because they are relatively short and have maps that are slightly more open than the average instance, meaning people can take different routes. There are a number of skips of varying difficulties, which I all saw done at some point, but I also saw every single one of those trash pulls taken down the old-fashioned way and more. Some groups pulled mob groups I didn't even know existed, even after all these years, such as when someone in Korriban Incursion accidentally hurled their sabers over a ridge and a bunch of angry tuk'atas descended upon us. I had no idea those were even there!

As far as skipping goes, on Tulak Hord, Assault on Tython popped up as my random master mode and the tank was very careful to skip as much trash as possible while we took out the artillery targeting arrays in the first part of the flashpoint, just to then randomly charge into several groups of enemies just before Major Travik while commenting that he wanted to do the bonus (which requires you to kill a certain minimum number of trash mobs). "Why did we just do all that sneaking then?!" I exclaimed, to which he replied that he wasn't sure either; it was just a habit. That cracked me up.

My favourite experience of the week - and perhaps of the season so far - was this week's master mode flashpoint on Satele Shan though. I'm still never quite sure on that server whether I'm better off queueing late in the evening or waiting until the weekend and trying early in the morning my time. This week I tried in the evening again, and even while queueing as both dps and tank the wait was long. I decided for once to spend my time doing something that was neither good for seasons nor Conquest and simply drove around Belsavis, doing the Macrobinocular mission step there, uncovering the map and picking up some datacrons. After what felt like nearly an hour's wait I was about to give up when I finally got a pop.

The group finder made me the tank in a master mode Cademimu run. When nobody gives me "bat out of hell" vibes I usually ask whether people want to do the bonus, and there was enough support to do it. The Cademimu bonus boss is called Garold the Dark One, which always makes me laugh because Garold sounds like a hybrid of Gary and Harold, neither of which are good Sith names. Anyway, we tried to fight him and promptly wiped. The healer immediately apologised, saying it was their first time and they had mistakenly rolled right into a red circle.

As I always love an opportunity to teach people when it arises naturally, I gave the tip that all ranged could just stand behind the railing by the elevator to avoid being pulled in by the boss, in order to stay safely outside of his AoE. On the next attempt we tried that, but someone fell down the lift shaft, two people died and we hit the enrage. I just thought it was entertaining and perfectly natural progression! On the third attempt we got him down and I think everyone was very pleased.

After dispatching General Ortol, one person in the group asked whether we were up for running another flashpoint for the weekly. I had only really queued for the seasons objective, didn't need the weekly mission and was tired... but that group had such great vibes, I did want to run with them again, so I did. The second flashpoint we got was Mando Raiders, and this time there were no wipes, just some minor shenanigans that got me musing about how nice it was to be the tank when you have a group that genuinely wants to be led and learn, and for whom you sometimes do have to work a bit to keep them safe if they accidentally butt-pull some extra turrets.

It was just a good vibes week all around, and I'm getting to the point where I think I can ease up on most of the other seasons objectives and just keep running the weekly flashpoints until (close to) the end of the season. 

Another Season of Feasting

The Feast of Prosperity has once again come and gone, and I just wanted to make a short post about how much I enjoyed it (again). I feel like the devs have really managed to hit the spot for me with these seasonal events as I pretty much love them all (except Nar Shadda Nightlife - but even that is "okay" nowadays in my opinion).

A couple of years ago I thought I'd be done with this event after getting all the achievements, but the many decorations have made it worth coming back every year to pick up a few more. The gameplay is fun, and that the event is also extremely good for Conquest points is just the cherry on top.

I simply never tire of the friendly world boss groups, and the game rarely feels more like an MMO and more alive than when you've got a full raid group thundering through the ruins of Coronet Zoo to absolutely steamroll everything in your way and collect exactly three Nexu tongues from mobs that fortunately seem to have way more tongues than you'd expect.

While waiting for those groups to fill, the food serving and cooking takes up just enough time to keep busy, ensuring that you never get bored. (I also like that all the ingredients we are sent to gather actually end up in the kitchen when we do the cooking, from ice crystals to scyk bellies.) It's all just very wholesome and well-balanced.

I'm already looking forward to next year.

 Though bringing this many pets along is probably not hygienic. Oh well.

Some Interesting News From SWTOR's 7.7.1 Dev Stream

I was somewhat disappointed by the last two dev streams, but the voice actors' strike ended a few weeks ago, so I was positive that we'd get some good news about the next story update this time, and I was also hopeful that whatever they were going to announce about Galactic Season 9 was going to be more appealing to me than Season 8's uprising focus had been. I did get both of those things, but as I always do, I have some nits to pick as well.

Story is coming... but later and perhaps less than we'd hoped

At least when talking with some of my friends, there had been a hope expressed that the next story patch would be one big "catch-up patch" giving us a bigger chunk of story than usual, kind of like how Echoes of Oblivion and Spirit of Vengeance (which were originally supposed to be separate pieces of content) were both released at the same time after delays caused by Covid.

This... is not going to be the case. 7.8, which will come out before Christmas, will have the "Galactic Threads" story that was originally meant to be included in patch 7.6 last Christmas, and then they'll speed up a little bit and add "Master's Engima", the story originally built for patch 7.7, with 7.8.1, which should then launch at some point early next year and would usually have included only the start of Galactic Season 10 and no story update.

While I'm glad to finally have something close to a date, having to wait another four months or so until the next story drop still hurts - by that point the game will have gone nearly 18 months without a story patch, which is unprecedented in this MMO's history.

The other thing that stuck out to me is that if we're getting the story that was meant to be in 7.6 in 7.8, what was meant to be in 7.8 before that? No story? Ultimately it feels like aside from the delays, we also lost one of the twice-a-year story installments due to the strike, which sucks.

Same thing with date nights by the way - they mentioned working on one back in the 7.6.1 stream, but now we won't even get one with 7.7.1, with the next expected release (Torian and Kira) coming with 7.8.1 next year. 

Galactic Season 9: Flashpoint Resurgence

As for GS9, its theme is flashpoints. Yippee! There will be Czerka buffs involved like there were for uprisings during GS8, which I don't really care about, but I'm good with running flashpoints with or without buffs. Unfortunately it sounded like the objectives will be veteran mode only, which is a bit disappointing to me personally and will not encourage my guildies to group up I reckon, but still, it's flashpoints.

The most interesting bit of the stream to me personally was the devs talking about how they were using the occasion of this seasonal focus on flashpoints to make some changes to the activity finder. A big quality of life improvement they will make is that you'll finally be able to queue as multiple roles again, change roles while queueing (so that you can e.g. do dailies in a dps spec while queueing for a flashpoint as healer) and it will take both of your combat styles into account, meaning you could queue as all three roles if you wanted and have the right combat styles for it. Now, to be clear, only the last bit of that is actually new - both the ability to queue for multiple roles and the ability to queue as a different role than you're currently playing were in the game before but got patched out at some point, I think because they were buggy or causing issues of some sort. Still, I'm very glad to see these features make a comeback at last.

They are also going to improve the loot you get in flashpoints while levelling, though it's not entirely clear what that will mean - I'm guessing more gear that is actually appropriate for your level and combat style, because getting drops that you can't even use or not use for another twenty levels was definitely a thing sometimes.

For the max levels, you'll no longer have to queue for all flashpoints to be eligible for additional daily/weekly rewards, but can exclude a few that you may want to avoid. You still won't be rewarded for just spamming Hammer Station and nothing else, but you can untick a couple you don't like, which I guess is nice. 

No more "spacebar plz"

The thing that kind of shocked me was that in connection to all these flashpoint changes, queued veteran and master mode flashpoints will no longer feature any cut scenes or group conversations; everything will just be auto-skipped and if there was some sort of decision to be made (such as whether to kill or spare the captain in the Black Talon) it will just do so automatically. If you want to see the conversations and cut scenes in the future, you'll need to do story mode (where available) or manually walk into the higher difficulty with some friends.

Now, I completely understand why they are doing this and I'm sure many people will consider this a major quality of life improvement. I made a whole compilation poking fun at people's urge to skip the cut scenes seven years ago. I've seen it all, from the guy who drops group the moment you zone into the Esseles or Black Talon, to endless arguments about who isn't hitting their space bar and why. It was a source of friction for sure.

AND YET. I myself have always loved the group conversations in flashpoints and was generally happy to watch cut scenes if other people wanted to do so too. I enjoy running flashpoints, but I never "spammed" them to the point where getting the Esseles again made me frustrated. (The only flashpoint that I've managed to get utterly sick of is Hammer Station, and that has nothing to do with cut scenes and everything to do with the community.)

I also felt that the group conversations often inspired fun little interactions, such as when a dark or light side choice got people chatting. My guildies have seen me express (not-entirely-serious) outrage at killing the engineers or leaving Asara behind in the Esseles more than a few times. And some of the cut scenes also just genuinely looked nice! I have a whole collection of screenshots of pugs in Czerka Corporate Labs, from that last cut scene that shows your group walking into the room looking heroic.

And all of that is just going to be... gone? Telling me that you can technically build a group manually and walk in to still see the cut scenes is a bit of a cold comfort because let's be real, how often do people do that? How often have you run Kuat Drive Yards since it was removed from the group finder? I just feel like this is going to be one of those things that will end up having negative ripple effects that people won't fully feel until later down the line. Or maybe I'm just a relic of ancient times for having actually enjoyed interacting with my pug mates in small ways, even if there was friction sometimes.

Be free, F2P-ers!

A big change for free-to-play players that's coming with the next patch is that the devs will be dropping a lot of the old restrictions on that type of account. You will now also get sprint at level 1, have all action bars unlocked, be able to hide your head slot  and equip random purples that you get while levelling. Honestly, with some of the things they mentioned I didn't even know there were restrictions for that: What, F2P players couldn't display legacy titles before? Or equip companion customisations? WTF?

Even as someone who's always been subscribed, I think this is great news. SWTOR has had a reputation for having extremely draconian F2P restrictions for a long time - I remember how the limited action bars were a source of ridicule across the entire MMO community when the game first went free-to-play. I think the devs did the right thing by being cautious when they first changed payment model back in the day (mostly because other MMOs that followed suit later and kept crowing about how much more generous their F2P model was in comparison, such as Rift and Wildstar, did ultimately not end up doing well).

However, all of that was over a decade ago, times have changed, and there's just no reason to be quite so brutal with all those restrictions on what's effectively the game's free trial mode. Annoying players with arbitrary feature locks before they've even left the starter planet was just never great, and I hope that these changes will give more people a chance to actually fall in love with what the game has to offer and then spend some money on it happily instead of feeling nagged from the get-go.

What about subscribers though?

So as not to leave subscribers feeling unappreciated, the game will run a new "subscriber login event" from September to December where you'll earn a special currency if you log in at least four times a week, which you can then use to buy some goodies. I kinda raised my eyebrow a bit at one of those goodies supposedly being "endgame gear" but we'll see. I really don't need more free stuff myself, but I can't blame them for trying to offer subscribers a bit more carrot while easing up on the F2P stick.

Say farewell to endless free CC

Speaking of carrots and sticks, regardless of your subscription status, you've long gained 100 free Cartel Coins per month if you've got a security key attached to your account. I often saw delighted comments from people who came back to the game after some time away to find that they'd accumulated thousands of free Cartel Coins while not playing. While that was nice, considering for how long the game has been running at this point, I can't blame the bean counters for concluding that someone coming back after years and immediately finding $40 worth of Cartel Coins in their account was maybe not so good for their bottom line. No, that free CC is not going to go away, but it will only be awarded going forward if your account was actually active in the last 30 days. 

Decos, Graphics, DirectX

Under "other topics about which I don't have that much to say", we have the Feast of Prosperity returning this autumn with some awesome new decos that I'll definitely want to grind for. (I actually broke my habit of ignoring Twitch chat to type "LOVE LAMP" when they showed the new ceiling lights.) 

The character customisation updates continue, with Rattataki getting updated textures next, and dark-side corruption getting a much-needed revamp so that it no longer turns every character into a pasty white dude regardless of their previous skin colour. (I might actually give showing it on my dark-siders a try once this goes live - I previously always disabled it precisely because it changed your skin colour so much and I didn't want to look like an albino axolotl.) Also, after they added all those skin colours for aliens in the last patch, they are expanding on this by adding more hair and montral colours with 7.7.1.

Finally, in technical news that I have to file under "I don't know enough about this to have an opinion but I guess it sounds good", they are making good progress on updating the game to DirectX 12 but there's still some work left to do. 

As usual, if you want ALL THE DEETS, including things I didn't mention here and images of various rewards, here are some other places you can look:

• VOD on YouTube (Twitch had some hiccups and split it into several parts) 
• Official recap article
• Swtorista
• Today in TOR 

Social for Seasons

Galactic Seasons are clearly designed to appeal to all kinds of players, from soloer to raider. The mix of weekly objectives isn't always perfectly balanced, but over time things should even out enough so that everyone can complete at least the main season track by only taking part in activities they enjoy. So even if you don't like doing group content for example, and there's a week where most weekly objectives require a group, you should be fine skipping that one while still being able to achieve your goals.

Personally, I'm kind of the opposite of that hypothetical example as I rather like the group objectives. We have a thing called "social night" in my guild, and during seasons we always knock out whatever items require a group on that evening.

Usually there's one or two of these per week, but last week was unusual in that no fewer than five of the eleven available objectives required a large group, plus there were a few more for which having a small group was at least beneficial. My guild group knocked out all five of the large group objectives in short order (pulling in some pugs for Nightmare Pilgrim, but that barely took five minutes) and a few of us also ran the uprising of the week afterwards. I'd initially felt a bit awkward making almost no progress towards any of my seasons objectives for most of the week, just to go and reach 7 out of 7 completed within a single evening on Saturday.

Several guildies also expressed delight at having been able to max out their progression for the week within only a couple of hours. The group objectives are really great that way, in that they require a bit of extra effort to get the group put together, but if you can be efficient about that part, actually completing the tasks themselves is super quick.

That said, I didn't expect to make much progress on the other servers during that week, as I don't have guild events to rely on for progression there, as they are either non-existent or take place at bad hours for me. However, I was really surprised that pretty much on every server, the moment I logged in, went to the fleet and took a look at general chat, someone was putting together a pug group for something, and I managed to join at least one such event on every server.

It wasn't always the same thing either. On Leviathan I got pulled into a DvL boss group for example, while I joined a Sparks of War group on Tulak Hord, and a Nightmare Pilgrim run on a different evening (which got me invited to a large German guild's TeamSpeak server).

It was all rather delightful. I know people often say that SWTOR's MMO parts were an afterthought and not well done, but my experience was always the opposite. When I first started playing back in 2011 I enjoyed the storylines for sure, but the reason I stuck around and didn't go back to WoW was the social aspect and that I was having such a blast raiding and doing group content in the open world. This week actually made me really nostalgic for that, and also made me wonder whether I don't spend too much time in my stronghold nowadays instead of on the fleet. I usually hide general chat because in the places where it's busy it tends to be filled with nonsense at best or utter toxicity at worst, but seeing all those random "looking for more" requests last week really took me back and I wanted to see more of that. 

This week has actually been similar, with another five objectives for large groups. I don't know yet how things will go for my guild on Darth Malgus tomorrow, but since I'm on holiday for a few days, I actually stayed up late on Wednesday and Thursday to join guild events on Shae Vizla and Star Forge, which might see me hitting 7/7 objectives on those servers this week, which hadn't really been my intent at all.

However, even without guild support the ease of objective completion has been amazing. The combination of Dark vs. Light world bosses and the regular world bosses on both Coruscant and Dromund Kaas both being objectives had people logging back and forth between both factions and looking for groups constantly. Leviathan may generally be a small and quiet server, but I've never seen it as packed on Coruscant as when I was killing the bosses there this week. On Star Forge I didn't even bother to look for a group, I just kind of hung around the boss spawns for a bit as a new group was coming by to kill them pretty much every five minutes or so anyway.

I don't think this is the first time I've gone on about how open world group content in this game makes me feel nostalgic, but it's simply true that nothing brings back memories of launch day crowds for me like these kinds of events do.

My SWTOR Feature Wishlist Going Into 2025

The start of a new year is traditionally a time for plans, predictions, resolutions - or wishes, as it might be. So I figured this might be a good time to finally make this post about features I really wish the SWTOR devs would get around to updating or adding. I don't really expect any of these to happen in 2025 in specific to be honest, but I just want to throw them out there because this kind of thing isn't actually something I usually spend a lot of time talking about.

I originally drafted this post several months ago under the simple title "feature wishlist" but then I saw someone comment in a video (I forget which one it was exactly) that "devs hate nothing more than feature wishlists", which gave me pause at the time. I have no idea whether it's true, but it's the kind of statement that sounds like it could be? After all, MMO developers are always working on new things that they're hoping will excite players, and the last thing you'll want to hear while you're doing that is someone going "whatever, can you please work on all this other stuff instead".

Anyway, like I said, I decided that now's the time to go ahead anyway, so without further ado, my biggest wishes for SWTOR in the next year (and beyond):

1. A solution for queues

I wrote a post in June last year in which I talked about how I'm worried about steadily increasing queue times for PvP, but to some extent this problem applies to PvE as well, depending on what content you want to do and what server you play on. If you're on Star Forge or Darth Malgus, you're mostly fine, but on any of the other four servers your odds of signing up for an automated activity queue that never pops have slowly been growing over time. Simply put, the game has too many different queues for the number of players it actually has nowadays.

You might ask why that matters, especially if you're someone who primarily plays solo, and my answer is that it's simply not healthy for any multiplayer game. It's frustrating for people who just want to play the content (and who are being led to believe that they should be able to, why else is that "queue for PvP" button even there), but it can also leave a terrible impression on new players trying to get into the game for the first time.

I find myself thinking back to SWTOR's first year, when it still had hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers, and yet people would regularly post screenshots about how it was supposedly stone dead, showing themselves standing on the fleet with not a single other person being there. You know why that was? Because when the population started dropping, the devs opened free transfers everywhere to consolidate players onto a smaller number of servers, but it took them months to actually close down the old/abandoned servers, and people were logging into them all the time with no idea what was going on, just to find that apparently "nobody" was playing the game anymore. Queues that never pop can have a similar effect, if perhaps not to the same degree.

Now, there are a number of ways to address this problem. Server merges are one, and you'll find a good number of people suggesting those, but I've got to admit I'm not the biggest fan of that particular solution myself. I like giving people the option to play in distinctly different environments that are busier or more quiet depending on their preference, and then we'd also have to deal with the issue of millions of characters all needing unique names again. However, I do think that this queue problem is bad enough that I would embrace even this radical solution.

Another option would be the introduction of cross-server queueing at last. Now, this is something that people actually asked for way back when the game first launched, and early dev communications hinted at the feature being just around the corner. However, at some point they changed their minds about this, and while I can't find the exact quote anymore (I just found a link to an old episode of the Bad Feeling Podcast that is no longer online), I seem to remember that the devs were basically saying that it turned out to be too complicated/too much effort and wasn't worth it. Please do correct me if you got an actual quote for what was said back then. Either way, this was a long time ago when the game still had a lot more servers, so I'm thinking there's a chance it might be more feasible now than it was back then?

Other options include things like simply reducing the number of available queues, for example by re-merging the warzone and arena queues, or merging the lowbie and midbie PvP brackets. And yes, I know that all of these would cause other issues in turn, which is why I'm not picking one option and claiming that this one would definitely be the best and solve everything. All I'm saying is that I think this is a serious problem and there are a number of ways the devs could go about addressing it. I'd just like them to do something.

2. A legacy- or account-wide friends list

Before the current number one on the list became top of mind for me, this used to be my number one feature request for SWTOR for over a decade. Think I'm exaggerating? Go and read me complaining about "my useless friends list" back in 2014. It's actually quite astounding to think just how many parts of the UI the devs have revamped and updated over the years, but that stupid window is still exactly the same as it was at launch.

This game is all about alts, so we need the option to (consensually!) become legacy- or account-wide friends with someone, maybe with an additional option to hide your online status even from your friends when you feel like laying low some days. As it is, we continue to make do by using external apps like Discord to stay in touch, but we shouldn't have to.

3. Support for manual group finding

This is another drum that I've been beating for at least half a decade - see here. Being able to queue up for automatically formed groups for flashpoints and PvP is fine and dandy, but sometimes you need players for something else and there are tools to support manual group formation for that in other games, but not in SWTOR. Why does forming an ops group with pugs still involve barking "LFM" in fleet general chat in 2025? Hell, we had more support for this back in 2012 when you could flag yourself as LFG in /who while providing more details in the comment field. Nowadays we don't even have that.

4. An updated companion UI

OK, so far everything I've listed has been about social features because those are near and dear to my heart, but I do have other interests as well. The "companions and contacts" window (bound to N by default) was added with Knights of the Fallen Empire and it does have some nice features, like the little text summaries that tell you more about your relationship with each companion as well as their likes and dislikes. The "travel to contact" button is also pretty neat when it works.

That said, after a decade of the devs constantly adding more companions and contacts... it's just a mess. Whenever I want to check my influence level with a companion, I always open the crew skill window instead because at least in there they are sorted from highest influence to lowest. I'm not convinced that splitting companions into different categories based on which part of the story you acquired them in was ever a good idea, but it's only gotten worse over time with inconsistent categorisation and weird duplication bugs, all of which can make it very hard to find the specific companion you're trying to summon at any given moment.

For all the sometimes seemingly random UI changes we've seen over the past couple of years, this is one window I really wish they'd get around to revamping. Mainly I think that the companions should just all be in one big list, but with the ability to sort and filter them different ways, including alphabetically and by influence level.

5. Where's that crafting update?

Remember when the devs said there'd be a crew skills update coming at some point? I think it was before Legacy of the Sith, wasn't it? Either way it's been so long since we've heard anything about that, I find it hard to remember the details.

As someone who enjoys crafting I'd love for it to finally get some love again. It's not completely useless now, and I don't think they need to fully overhaul how everything works, but some crafting skills are definitely less relevant than others and it's just been ages since they even added anything to it other than the latest set of new augments.

I'm not sure what exactly I'm wishing for with this one to be honest, other than that I hope there are no monkey paws involved, because in other MMOs I've looked forward to a crafting revamp more than once, and even thought that what the devs did in each instance looked pretty good at first... just to then still end up disappointed after a while, missing the old systems. I don't want that to happen to SWTOR... but I also feel like crew skills are definitely overdue for some love.

Do you agree with my priorities here or would yours be completely different? Feel free to share your own thoughts in the comments!

Dynamic Encounters Are Here and They Are Fun

I have to admit I wasn't immediately racing to check out dynamic encounters after the patch went live last week. Sure, I was looking forward to doing them eventually, but after completing fifty of them on the PTS, I figured I knew what I was going to be in for and didn't feel the same urgency to find out "what the new thing was like" that I sometimes feel when a patch adds new content. Plus I figured that things might be a bit overcrowded for the first couple of days and wanted to avoid that too.

When I finally set out a few days later, I was kind of surprised by how different the experience was to the PTS. Not dramatically, mind you, the basic system is still the same - but there were some changes that I absolutely didn't expect (beyond the obvious bug fixes like Republic characters no longer being prompted to kill Jedi in one dynamic encounter - that felt so wrong on the PTS).

For example, I'd noted on the PTS that encounters tagged as "encounter shared" would progress at the same pace for everyone in the area, just to then disappear once completed. This has been changed on live so the encounters loop endlessly (for the duration of the encounter anyway), which was initially kind of confusing to me. I don't think this is a bad change, mind you, just different, and it might affect how you want to prioritise different encounters when several interesting ones are up at once.

The number of events that are active on the map at the same time has also been reduced, at least on Hoth - my screenshot from the PTS showed 15 of them up at once, and I did in fact note at the time that I thought this was a bit overwhelming from a visual point of view at least. However, I didn't expect the number of active encounters to go down, as the general feedback on the forums seemed to be that the more active Hoth was preferable to the more quiet Tatooine. I would've expected the devs to up the number of events on Tatooine and not reduce the numbers on Hoth. Again though, this is not a complaint; it was just surprising to me. It does probably help with funnelling more people into doing the same encounters together, even if it means that it takes longer until certain ones come up in the "rotation".

Finally, there were some small changes - for example I quite enjoyed the ice fishing encounter on the PTS, but I was confused by the instructions to "look for the shadows" and I had the most success fishing by just plopping the fishing droid down on the cracks in the ice - I eventually figured it was meant to function similarly to certain GSI missions where you're meant to put your seeker droid over specific, static ground markers. I left feedback that I thought the instructions where unclear and expected those to be updated (if anything was going to happen at all) - but instead I found that on live, there are flitting shadows to target that never appeared for me on the PTS! And even funnier, when you catch a fish it appears to kill an actual invisible mob somewhere, as you get Conquest points and an "ugh"-style death sound plays. I just thought that was unexpectedly hilarious.

I've just been having a lot of fun doing dynamic encounters in general - I haven't been grinding them heavily, but have just been doing a few on both Hoth and Tatooine every day until I've completed both of the daily planetary "kill enemies" Conquest objectives. It's been nice to see more people out and about in the open world, with the new encounters proving quite popular at all times of day despite not offering any huge rewards.

In general it feels to me like these have the potential to fill a kind of gap in content that I didn't even realise existed, when you just want to play a bit but don't necessarily have the time or focus to dig into a piece of story or even a round of dailies. Dynamic encounters make it easy to play as little or as much as you like, and I've found them quite great as something to do while sitting in the PvP queue as well if pops take a bit of time.

I'm curious how long it will take me to complete all the related achievements, as the random nature of the events and the fact that only a limited number are up at any given point means that some encounters can prove kind of elusive. However, I'm in no rush as I'm happily just enjoying what we got and I look forward to (hopefully) seeing this system expanded to more planets in future patches.

Impressions from the 7.6 PTS

A combination of PTS incentives and curiosity about the new dynamic encounter system got me to spend some time on the public test server this past week.

My aging PC doesn't have enough disk space to support having two versions of SWTOR installed nowadays, so I had to put the PTS on my laptop, but that actually worked out quite well this time around as I was travelling last week and had the laptop with me for evening entertainment anyway.

Only two planets have dynamic encounters on the PTS right now: Hoth and Tatooine. It's currently not clear whether that's all 7.6 will launch with or whether these planets were picked for focused testing and we'll be surprised with some more content once the patch goes live. There were some indicators on the PTS galaxy map hinting at dynamic events on other planets like Alderaan and Belsavis, but with no actual content available there so far.

One thing I originally wondered after seeing the sneak peek trailer was whether dynamic encounters would be more like World of Warcraft's world quests (as in, personal to you) or dynamic events in other MMOs (shared and the same for everyone). Interestingly, the answer turned out to be "both". There are two types of events, designated as either "group shared" or "encounter shared". In the former, your progress is personal, and the encounter continues to exist for other players on the map even after you've completed it. In the latter, everyone doing stuff contributes to the event's progression, and once the encounter completes, everyone gets their reward at the same time and it disappears from the map. The shared encounters are generally rarer and can still be soloed if nobody else is around, but they tend to require killing more mobs and can therefore feel like a bit of a slog if you're the only person in the area. On the other hand it's a lot of fun (in my opinion) if there are other players around and you can see things progress really quickly as everybody does their part.

In general gameplay terms, the encounters are about what you'd expect: a lot of kill x mobs and some clicking on shiny things, though there are some standouts where the devs clearly tried to be creative and come up with more varied activities. 

I don't think dynamic events are intended to be a new "main" gameplay mode, though depending on how many planets will get them when 7.6 launches, I'd be curious to see how much levelling you could get done by just doing dynamic encounters - as an experiment if nothing else! Realistically though, I think they are meant to be similar to side missions, just without all the picking up and handing in required. At max level they currently award a tiny number of tech fragments and Conquest commendations, small enough that they wouldn't make for a great primary source of either currency.

One thing that made me wonder a little was how much focus there is on highlighting these new dynamic encounters on the map. The galaxy map highlights planets that have them active, and on the planetary map they show up as big glowy diamonds. There's nothing wrong with that in principle, but it does seem an odd choice when the devs took multiple steps in the past to hide away exploration missions and/or make them less prominent because they were apparently confusing/distracting people. Surely new levellers will get a lot more distracted by all these big glowy indicators on their maps? I dunno.

I'm still a bit torn on whether to try the new lair boss on the PTS as well or not. On the one hand I prefer not to spoil myself when it comes to content like that and would rather see things for the first time on live, but on the other hand every bit of feedback might help with making the Propagator Core a better raid.

The initial round of forum feedback certainly hasn't looked too good. Players were asked what they thought of the fight's different phases, and everyone basically replied "what phases?" because by all accounts, it was just an extremely long slog against an enemy with a lot of hitpoints while trying to manage some bad stuff dropping on the floor.

There has since been another dev post on the forums that basically admitted that almost nothing about the fight was working correctly and that it will see massive changes with the next PTS update. Which is good in the sense that it means the tedious version people experienced in the first week wasn't at all final, though it also makes you wonder why and how an operations boss ended up being put on the PTS in that state in the first place (since you'd expect the devs to be able to verify that at least the very basics are functioning before asking people to play test). I guess I'll have a few more weeks to see how things develop and whether I want to have a go myself.

Once More With Feasting

I've been having a blast with the Feast of Prosperity for the past few weeks. Looking back at my blog archives, I really enjoyed it when it was first introduced in 2020 (Has it really only been four years?!), had a good time again in 2021 (when I also used the event to get my pacifist character to the then-level cap of 75) and was pleased to finish off the last achievement associated with the Feast in 2022.

Last year I only gave it a brief mention in the context of getting my pacifist to 80 and how that hadn't actually been all that satisfying, and I think that if you'd asked me then how active I was going to be during the event in 2024, I wouldn't have given myself very high odds. After all, I'd achieved everything that there really was to achieve back in 2022, right?

However, then seasons greatly increased my interest in strongholds and the devs added a bunch of new rewards to the Feast vendor - many of which were decorations - so off I went. Housing enthusiasts have to be such great customers for Broadsword, not just because they buy deco packs from the Cartel Market, but also because decoration rewards are the motivation that keeps on giving. With things like pets, mounts or armour sets, it's mostly a one-and-done deal, but when it comes to things like chairs, potted plants and rugs, you can never have too many, right?

One item in particular that caught my eye was the Regal Wall Garden, which is a gorgeous small planter that fits onto a small wall hook. Perfect for those tricksy walls in the Copero stronghold, and it fits the aesthetic there quite well too! However, it's 1,125 tokens a pop, so I had a lot of work to do.

Actually, that's the wrong way to put it. I had fun doing the Feast dailies and weeklies, and being able to buy more and more decos after each round just made everything even better.

I did all the weeklies on three to four alts per week, and even dabbled in the event a bit on other servers. Even on the notoriously small Leviathan server I managed to get into a world boss group for Trapjaw - it wasn't big, but it was big enough to kill him. (My Operative was also only level 25 - I didn't even realise you could pick up the dailies at such a low level, and Trapjaw's AoE absolutely wrecked me... after dying once, I had to stay far away and just shoot at him ineffectively from max range.) It was a great way to earn Conquest points too, as well as to get credit for this week's "do x missions as a trooper or agent" seasons objective.

I just found it striking how incredibly well the single-player and group content flow together during this event. I'd arrive on Nar Shaddaa and immediately try to get into a world boss group, but if I just missed the last one, the amount of time it took me to do the solo missions would be just about long enough for the next group to start forming, so it was always quick and easy to get everything ticked off for the day. The world bosses themselves are extremely casual-friendly and simple, and now with shared tagging you can get in on the action even if you're absolutely allergic to actually joining a group even for five minutes.

It's just been a joy all around, and all the (new) decos should provide motivation for me to keep taking part for years to come.

Where Is the Group Content?

SWTOR has long had a reputation of being a "single-player MMO", and I've always hated that. One of the very first posts I ever wrote on this blog dealt with this topic in fact. Don't get me wrong, I have no issue whatsoever with anyone praising the personal storyline or preferring to play by themselves, but the thing that has always ground my gears is how this often dovetails into people being dismissive of the game's group content, calling it sub-par and not worth anyone's time.

Especially at lauch, that was just so not true. Coming fresh out of WoW's Cataclysm, where Blizzard had removed all group content from the levelling content in the open world, I loved that in SWTOR, heroics actively encouraged you to team up with others while levelling, plus you got bonus XP for questing in a group, instead of an XP penalty like in WoW. Social points also offered an incentive to do group content in PvE. While WoW players were moaning about being stuck with the Dragon Soul raid for nearly a year, SWTOR pumped out a new flashpoint or operation every other month. It was objectively a glorious game in terms of group content if you enjoyed that kind of thing.

Sadly, over time, SWTOR's dedication to encouraging grouping has been watered down quite a bit. Rise of the Hutt Cartel was the first and last story expansion that supported group conversations in new story content. Heroics were nerfed in difficulty and turned into just another kind of soloable daily quest in 4.0. Social points were removed with 7.0. Any plans to add new flashpoints or operations were discarded with 4.0, until they eventually made a come-back a few years later, but things have kind of petered out a bit again since then.

This has made me a bit sad, but not... devastatingly so, because while I enjoy group content, I obviously don't spend all my time in it either. I love getting new story updates! And I suspect that catering more to solo players is simply where the money is. At the very least, I'd assume that it's much more straightforward to measure the return on investment when you see a subscription up-tick after a new story update as opposed to a patch adding a new operation. I wouldn't expect many lapsed players to specifically come back for a new operation, and I'm guessing it's more of a retention mechanic for existing long-time players, giving them something to do with their friends once their interest in playing by themselves has been exhausted.

With all that said, I do think that spending some time on catering to players who like group content is still important, because they are the ones most likely to get others to try or stay in the game, to gush about it in public and promote it on social media. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single well-known SWTOR content creator that doesn't participate in group content at least some of the time.

And recently, I've been hearing a lot of discontent - from different directions, so it's not just one person and their group of friends - around the fact that we haven't heard anything about upcoming group content in a while. Now, players always want more of the stuff they like, but the reason this really drew my attention is that I've heard these kinds of complaints before... and they usually did not bode well for the months ahead, as in the past these were the times when I had to watch people I cared about leave the game and never come back. I think at this point SWTOR players who are invested in group content have mostly come to accept that their preferred mode of play is not a high priority for the devs and that they can't expect updates tailored to their interests very often - but there's still an expectation of getting something at certain intervals, and there's definitely a point where they'll lose patience and unsub.

Looking at my timeline of major content additions from last year, the longest gaps between major group content releases over time have been as follows:

• Between operations: 2 years and 10 months, between the release of Dxun and R-4.
• Between flashpoints/small group content: 1 year and 5 months, between the release of Nathema Conspiracy and Objective Meridian
• Between major PvP updates: 4 years and 2 months, between the release of Vandin Huttball and the introduction of PvP seasons (yes, really)
  

I'm writing this at the end of June, shortly after we just got a major patch, so I wouldn't expect another one until October at the earliest, by which point it will have been:

• 2 years and 2 months since the last operation (R-4)
• 1 year and 4 months since the last flashpoint/small group content (Shrine of Silence)
• 1 year and 10 months since the last major PvP update (introduction of seasons)

In other words, it's not totally unprecedented to have to wait this long for new group content, but considering that it's been this long for every type of it, I'm not surprised to see people going stir-crazy all over the place.

I really hope that the devs will have something relevant to share whenever they announce the next major patch (I'm not counting the next Galactic Season, as I know that's its own thing), because few things are as much of a downer to me in this game as seeing players I like and whose company I enjoy slowly turn away from the game because the devs just don't care about giving them anything new to hold their interest.

Shintar's Galactic Season 6 Diary, Week 5

I didn't have any particular feelings or expectations going into this week beyond what I'll note down about the individual objectives:

• Earn 200k Conquest points: Yes, naturally.
  
• Earn the seasonal currency: After last week, I was happy to see this objective return as another easy one to complete on all servers.
  
• Visit another player's Nar Shaddaa stronghold: Of course.
  
• Kill four named champion mobs on Nar Shaddaa (2 Republic, 2 Imperial): Like the Quesh objective in week one, not my first choice to complete but an easy filler to round things out if needed.
  
• Complete 8 repeatable or side missions and kill 100 mobs on the Unknown/Wild Space planets Ilum, CZ-198, Iokath and Zakuul: Easy to achieve with dailies, but one to watch out for in terms of not burning myself out with a billion CZ-198 runs.
  
• Kill 100 mobs with a healer companion: Easy to do in combination with something else.
  
• Complete 2 out of 4 selected flashpoints (Battle of Ilum, False Emperor, Legacy of the Rakata, Shrine of Silence): Now, I actually liked this one because two of the featured flashpoints were ones that are also required for the first GS6 story mission, and I'd only completed that on Darth Malgus so far, so I figured this could help with progressing it on the other servers (even if sticking to those two was going to make it particularly repetitive).
  
• Earn 25 medals in Galactic Starfighter: Same as last week, not a fave due to how many matches it takes me to get there.
  
• Play 3-6 GSF matches (wins count double): ... however, combined with this one it certainly seemed like an attractive combo to do on Darth Malgus at the very least.
  
• Kill Nightmare Pilgrim: Since you can get credit for at least the seasons objective without even being in a group nowadays, this actually seemed somewhat viable to do on multiple servers, as you just need to hang out at the boss's spawn point and wait for a group of either faction to show up (and due to the nature of the fight, the groups always take a while to sort out, so you can usually tell some time in advance that it's a work in progress, it's not a quick "blink and you'll miss it" job like on some of the other world bosses)
  
• KotET chapter 2 on veteran mode or higher: Now, I've always rejected the chapter objectives so far because I don't like repeating chapters... however, with this one, I actually had a character on Darth Malgus that was exactly on this step of the story, so I figured I might do it as a two-for-one.
  

Day 1 - Tuesday

What was supposed to be a normal office day turned out to be very sad as it was revealed to us that a (fairly young!) co-worker had surprisingly passed away over the weekend. As everyone was upset and in shock, people were allowed to go home early, and unsurprisingly, I didn't feel like doing much of anything for most of the day.

In the evening I was ready for some distraction though and logged on to do ops with my guildies, followed by a GSF weekly, which progressed me to 4/6 on one objective and to 9/25 medals earned.

On Leviathan, I put myself in the queue for False Emperor and Legacy of the Rakata and instantly got a vet mode pop for the latter. This resulted in a nice triple whammy of seasons progression, credit for the GS6 story mission and credit for the Prelude to Shadow of Revan story mission. I then meant to park myself at Nightmare Pilgrim to hopefully get a kill later, but there was already a group of Imps assembling there so I hung around (I was on a Republic character so couldn't join them). Sadly they wiped on their first attempt. The second one went better, though I myself got mowed down by the Pilgrim's Rapid Fire that time. Funnily enough, since I wasn't actually in the ops group the fight "belonged" to, I could just revive on the spot even as the fight continued.

On Tulak Hord, I did a round of CZ-198 dailies and then parked myself at Nightmare Pilgrim's spawn spot. It being past midnight in Germany, I wasn't surprised that nothing was going on anymore.

On Satele Shan, I decided to just do the Ilum heroic, including the bonus. As I also gained a legacy level while doing so, this was enough to complete the daily objective. Still, I wanted to park myself at Nightmare Pilgrim again before logging out, and once again there were some Imps already there. I waited for a bit, but when nothing seemed to move for more than ten minutes (and there weren't that many of them), I started to wonder whether this was actually a group or just some randoms doing the same thing I was, waiting for someone else to do the actual work. I actually relogged to Imp side just to check whether there were people actually LFM on the fleet but saw nothing. When I returned to my Republic character, there were suddenly a lot more people there and the battle was already in progress, but fortunately I had enough time to join in.

On Star Forge I just did a round of Iokath dailies on my boosted Sith inqusitor, before logging over to Shae Vizla to join a Nightmare Pilgrim group organised by my guild there.

Day 2 - Wednesday

After reset, I briefly logged into Leviathan to visit a Nar Shaddaa stronghold and knock out the named champion mobs for both factions. Some clickies pushed me over the required Conquest point amount for the daily objective.

Later in the evening, I logged into Tulak Hord and once again, there were some Imps at the Nightmare Pilgrim's spawn spot. Why is it always Imps? I once again waited for them to assemble and do their thing, but unfortunately this group just wiped three times and then gave up. Since I was having dinner around that time and was mostly AFK in game anyway, I hung around to wait for the next group to come by (the area had never fully emptied out). Eventually a huge Republic group came by and got me the kill. Then I just did the Ilum heroic plus bonus to complete the Unknown/Wild Space missions objective and the daily.

After that, I returned to my home turf on Darth Malgus for some PvP and GSF. One of the characters I did PvP on was a lowbie on whom I did some quests while waiting in the queue, which got me a good way towards the companion kills objective already. The GSF matches completed one of the related weeklies and brought the other one up to 16/25 medals.

When I visited Star Forge later, my inquisitor (whom I'd also left at the Nightmare Pilgrim's haunt) logged in to sounds of a battle and a group having the boss down to 20% or so already. I quickly ran in to hit him for credit before travelling to Ilum and doing the Imp side heroic there (including the bonus again) to complete the planetary missions objective.

Over on Satele Shan, I put myself in the queue for False Emperor and Legacy of the Rakata just to get an instant pop for the latter on veteran mode. The run was smooth and fast, bringing me one step closer to completing the GS6 stronghold mission on this character. I then also did a round of CZ-198, which ticked over three things at once: the planetary missions, killing things with my companion and the seasonal currency.

On Shae Vizla, I did the same thing with the group finder but without getting an instant pop, so I took care of my GTN listings and started on a round of CZ-198 in the meantime. Just as I was about to get to the final mission in the waste disposal area, I got a pop for veteran mode False Emperor. It was another smooth and fast run, and we even did the bonus boss.

Day 3 - Thursday

The first thing I did in the evening was log into Leviathan and do some quests on my bounty hunter to work towards the "kills with a healer companion" achievement until I'd hit my daily 25k Conquest points. (Reminder: My knight is a healer and doing stuff with double heals is a no-no even for me.)

On Tulak Hord, I queued for False Emperor and Legacy of the Rakata and got into a vet mode run for the latter, which I did not enjoy. We had two healers, which can make things a little slow but isn't usually a big deal... unless both of your damage dealers are really slow and erratic in their participation (one of them spent half of the first boss fight AFK from what I could tell) and the other healer absolutely refuses to press a single damage ability despite the group comp, both of which were the case here. I actually opened up Starparse purely to see whether the other healer was doing anything other than run in circles and spam AoE heals while we were all at 100% health anyway, and the answer was no. Nobody talked either, not even to respond to my greeting at the start, so I was just glad to get out of there (eventually). To cheer myself up, I went and visited a Nar Shaddaa stronghold, which got me to 4/7 weeklies completed.

I then spent the biggest chunk of the evening on Darth Malgus, first getting myself to 4/7 weekly seasons objectives there as well by completing one more GSF weekly mission, then by helping out another ops team by wiping in Dxun master mode for two hours.

After that I logged into Star Forge, where I basically did the same things as on Tulak Hord, only that the Legacy of the Rakata run on this server was smooth and pleasant. This was followed by a similarly smooth False Emperor pug on Satele Shan (bonus boss included again). Finally, I logged into Shae Vizla and just did the heroic on Ilum there, which ticked off three more weeklies there as well.

Day 4 - Friday

I had made such good progress over the first three days, I felt like a could relax and not fret about seasons too much for a day. I just logged into Darth Malgus in the evening to do a bit of PvP and that was it for my day in SWTOR.

Day 5 - Saturday

Late in the morning/shortly before lunch time, I did a round of all the other servers to get my daily done. On Leviathan, Tulak Hord and Satele Shan I did some story missions on Imp side, plus on the latter I also visited a stronghold since I hadn't done so yet. On Star Forge I queued for False Emperor and got a quick run in, which was okay, though a bit rushy and nobody responded to my saying hello.

Finally, I queued for Legacy of the Rakata on Shae Vizla and got a pop, but one person timed out so it didn't go through. It was getting close to reset time so I started work on getting Conquest points from some other sources to be on the safe side, but I did eventually get another run just in time to finish it before the reset. This one had two guys always pushing ahead while one always lagged behind, and the lagging guy actually apologised for his slowness, bless him. 

I didn't play again until the evening, when I killed Nightmare Pilgrim with my guildies on Darth Malgus and then did a couple of operations with them. After that I did some more PvP, and the questing I did between pops finished my companion kills objective. I finished the evening by doing KotET chapter two on veteran mode on the smuggler who was actually at that point in the story. I died a few times, but that wasn't entirely unexpected. With that, I was on 7/7 on Darth Malgus.

Day 6 - Sunday

On Sunday morning I decided to visit the other servers again. On Leviathan I did a False Emperor run in which someone was chattering away in French for a while until they rage-quit after the second boss. I couldn't entirely make sense of what they were saying so I opened up Google Translate on my second monitor, but it was of limited help in this instance as it didn't know what "tous au cac" meant either, a phrase that was repeated several times. Considering the context in hindsight, I can only guess it meant something like "everybody stack"? But then I'm still not sure why this was important enough to rage-quit over, especially on the second boss in False Emperor. All I did was run to the cannon to make the ship go away... I took some solace from the fact that I understood what someone else in the group said after the rage-quit: "what an angry guy".

Interestingly, I seemed to get the answer to what had upset that French guy on Tulak Hord later, when I did another False Emperor run there too, and someone complained about me using the turret on the Jindo Krey fight there as well. At least they made it clear why: they felt that the absorb shield it puts on him for a few seconds "wastes time". I appreciated being able to have a conversation about it, but to be honest my real (private) response to this was to file it away under "stupid pug strats", because I can't quite fathom why anyone would think it's a good idea to make a fight ten seconds shorter by taking 300% increased damage. Plus as a healer, I always hate the attitude of "let's ignore simple mechanics and let the healer deal with it".

On Star Forge, I just did some clickies for my daily Conquest, while on Satele Shan and Shae Vizla I played alts for a bit. On the latter I cut it so close that I only got the "influencing the galaxy" pop-up two minutes before the daily reset.

I went through all the servers again in the evening, mostly just doing a bit of questing on alts, as I was either already 7/7 everywhere or just missing a few more companion kills or Conquest points towards the 200k objective. On Darth Malgus I played a few PvP matches as well.

Day 7 - Monday 

All that was left to do was to cycle through all the servers and earn some Conquest points for the daily, which I did with a mix of questing and clickies. The only thing worth remarking on is that I finally finished my first class story on Star Forge while doing so! Oddly, it was the smuggler, not the trooper I've had since forever, but the latter is still working her way through some side missions, so the smuggler (on whom I only did the class story) ended up overtaking her on Corellia.

Week 5 Thoughts

After how much of a slog week four was, this week was a pleasant surprise in terms of how quick and easy it was to get to 7/7 everywhere. Also, I can't believe I'm already halfway through the season track on all servers! So much for not pushing myself too much... but it's still been interesting to document my progress.

Shintar's Galactic Season 6 Diary, Week 2

The second week of GS6 started with some deep thoughts for me. I know that doing this whole thing across all servers is weird. It doesn't make me unique, there are many others who do it, but compared to the player base as a whole, we're definitely a small hardcore fringe group. People may wonder whether it isn't stressful to play this way, and I guess it can be? But I do like playing in different environments and in different ways, as well as figuring out how I can get the most boxes ticked in a way that is somewhat efficient but still fun. Because it is fun for me!

That said, there's definitely a risk of hitting a point where the gameplay crosses over from fun into tedious. I remember there was a week last season when I did the same flashpoint something like three times in two days and I really didn't want to do it yet again... but it actually took a bit of effort to make myself stop and remind myself that I wasn't losing anything by not going 7/7 everywhere that week; completing the seasonal track on that server would just take one reset longer.

After I had achieved all my goals during GS5, there was also a moment when I looked at some of the objectives for the remaining weeks of the season and thought: "That would've been fun to do again on some servers... but instead I did Black Hole ten times in week one. Probably not the most fun path to take."

So with that in mind, I wanted to fight my self-imposed urge to push for 7/7 weekly objectives on all servers every week this time. My goal was to do only as many as I found fun, because I'd rather my overall season lasted a couple of weeks longer than burn myself out on grinding too hard in too short an amount of time.

With all that out of the way, the weekly objectives and my thoughts on them were as follows:

• Earn 200k Conquest points: Once again, a freebie on all servers.
  
• Visit another player's Mek-Sha stronghold: I wrote a whole post about how much I enjoyed this new objective, and it was effectively also free seasons points on all servers.
  
• Kill 25 mobs without a companion: An extremely easy and fast objective, I figured I was probably going to do this on all the secondary servers as well.
  
• Kill 100 mobs with a healer companion: Like all companion objectives, easy to do and easy to get done while also doing other things.
  
• Do the Black Hole weekly twice or the Onderon weekly once: Now this is where things got a bit tricky, because while I like the Onderon weekly, I only have access to it on Darth Malgus and Star Forge. I don't mind the Black Hole either, but having to do it twice on each of the remaining servers would be quite grindy (especially without stealth) so I wasn't planning to go that far.
  
• Complete 8 repeatable or side missions and kill 100 mobs on the Coreward planets Alderaan, Balmorra, Corellia, Mek-Sha or Onderon: Another easy choice that can be done in a variety of ways and also synergises nicely with the companion kills and the above objective to do daily areas (the Black Hole counts for Corellia).
  
• Complete 2 out of 4 selected flashpoints (Assault on Tython, Korriban Incursion, Depths of Manaan, Secrets of the Enclave): Like always, I never fancy doing twelve flashpoints across six servers, but I figured I might do this on a couple at least. Especially since three of them are part of the prelude to Shadow of Revan story chain, which I'm generally happy to start on alts before I've actually reached that point in the main storyline.
  
• Complete the Eternal Championship on Zakuul: I figured I might do this on Darth Malgus with Mr Commando, but otherwise I only had access to it on Star Forge and probably wouldn't fancy doing it again with the same character there.
  
• Hive of the Mountain Queen on any difficulty: An easy enough one-boss operation, but I couldn't count on doing this anywhere but on Darth Malgus due to the challenges involved with finding a pug group at a time that might not be the most active in the server's time zone.
  
• Explosive Conflict on veteran mode: First off, I'm very grateful that they took the feedback about the operations objectives introduced last season and reduced this to only requiring one operation. Nonetheless, the same rule applied as for the previous objective. I wouldn't say no to an opportunity to do this with a guild group, but I wasn't going to actively push for it anywhere. Even on Darth Malgus we'd just done EC VM the week before (since nobody had thought to look ahead at the objectives for the next week...) and I wasn't sure people would feel like doing it two weeks in a row.
  
• KotFE chapter 10 on veteran mode or higher: As before, not really interested in re-doing chapters.

Based on that list, I could easily see myself going 5/7 everywhere, and probably 6-7/7 on some servers, but whether I'd feel like pushing for 7/7 on all of them would kind of depend on luck and time. I didn't want to completely neglect my PvP season progression either.

Day 1 - Tuesday

It being another day in the office, I came home late again and then jumped straight into operations with my guild team. We spent most of our time wiping on Dread Master Brontes on master mode, which is actually oddly good for Conquest and completed my daily objective all on its own. I "influenced the galaxy" by running away from her zappy tentacle things. I then visited a local Mek-Sha stronghold before logging over to the other servers.

Since I didn't want to stay awake until 1 a.m. again, I just visited a Mek-Sha stronghold everywhere and mostly got the daily objective done with clickies, except for on Leviathan, where I did a bit of questing on Balmorra with my bounty hunter.

Day 2 - Wednesday

I got a bit of play time in around lunch time and used it to do a few warzones on Darth Malgus as well as a round of Onderon dailies. This completed two more weekly objectives (the one for the dailies and the 200k Conquest points one). I also used one of those buff items to increase the drop rate of the blueprint fragments and got 15 from my daily round (while killing fewer than 75 mobs) - not sure whether that's a good return on investment or not, though a guildie later posited that he got close to 60 from an hour of grinding on Oricon, so your mileage may vary.

In the late afternoon, an opportunity arose for me to join Swtorista's raid team for a run of Explosive Conflict veteran mode, which I was happy to come along to and which was good fun. This completed the associated seasons objective for me on Star Forge and also made my trooper there hit her personal Conquest target. (Also, since the operations missions terminals are often slow to update, I managed to re-pick last week's EC mission for bonus currency; go me.)

In the evening, I took part in a bit more PvP on Darth Malgus and then did some more questing on Balmorra on both the Leviathan (on my bounty hunter) and Tulak Hord (on my trooper). On Satele Shan, I did a round of the Black Hole on my stealthy consular. On Shae Vizla, I was wondering which Coreward planet to quest on, since I'd mostly levelled up through class stories there and had barely done any of the side content. I eventually settled on visiting Alderaan on my warrior for a bit. None of this took too long but I needed an early night.

Day 3 - Thursday

Another office day meant limited play time in the evening. I started with some PvP on Darth Malgus again, and then repeated most of the questing circuit I'd done the day before. My bounty hunter on Leviathan did more missions on Balmorra until he got credit for his 100 companion kills and Coreward missions. My trooper on Tulak Hord did the same for the Coreward missions, but didn't get the companion kills because she's a healer, and contrary to what a lot of people will tell you, I've always quite enjoyed levelling as a healer in this game... but questing as a healer with a healing companion is a level of masochism even I'll avoid stooping to.

My warrior on Shae Vizla did some more Alderaan missions, hit her personal Conquest target and completed her companion kills, but not her Coreward worlds objective because most of her progress had been through main planetary storyline missions and had only advanced the eligible mission tracker to 4/8.

On Satele Shan I did another stealthy round of the Black Hole, which completed the daily missions objective, but due to the stealth I hadn't killed enough mobs to complete the other two related weeklies. On Star Forge I did a round of Onderon on my inquisitor, which yielded similar results.

Day 4 - Friday

In the morning I visited Tulak Hord and logged into the knight I'd created there at the end of last season without ever playing him. I sorted out his inventory and then did the first couple of quests on Tython, because getting 25 mob kills without a companion is easy to do either way, but I particularly enjoy doing it on a character that doesn't actually have a companion yet. The same logic made me do a few more missions on Tython with my littlest consular on Star Forge.

Around lunch time, just after reset, I decided to queue for some warzones on Shae Vizla. Not only did I get quick pops, I won four matches in a row, completing my warzone weekly in the minimum amount of time possible. That is so rare that I was stunned, but I still ran around Alderaan for a bit as well to kill a few mobs without a companion so I could also feel like I'd done something for my main season progression.

In the evening I started my play time with some more PvP on Darth Malgus, followed by an operation with guildies. After that I hopped over to Leviathan and idled on the fleet for a bit while looking at something else on my second monitor, which is when I noticed that a pug group for Hive of the Mountain Queen was forming in general chat. I happily tagged along and got to tick that weekly off my list on the French server. I didn't expect to be as lucky on Tulak Hord when I logged over there, and I wasn't, but someone was forming a group for the Coruscant world boss instead, which I decided to join on a whim. It was still very good for Conquest if nothing else and pushed me over the 200k needed for the weekly objective.

Over on Star Forge, I decided to do another round of Onderon on my inquisitor - I didn't need it for the daily objective, but it was a handy way of getting my remaining Coreward worlds and companion kills, and I just like Onderon. This completed my inquisitor's personal Conquest and put me on 7/7 weekly objectives completed on Star Forge.

On Satele Shan I decided to grab my Imperial agent and continue her class story on Balmorra, first killing a few mobs without a companion and then continuing with Kaliyo by her side. I also got my Coreward mob kills but still had some left to go with a healing companion (since I'd forgotten to set Amity to heals on my first day of doing Black Hole with my consular).

It wasn't that late for a Friday but I was tired and felt quite satisfied with my in-game accomplishments so decided to call it an early night.

Day 5 - Saturday

The weekend! I was up nice and early, and since I'd achieved all my daily seasons objectives the night before, I decided to put some more work towards additional weeklies before the reset. I started by putting myself in the group finder queue on Satele Shan, for any of the four featured flashpoints on either difficulty. I ended up being put into a veteran mode Assault on Tython with a full group of 80s, and it was weird. One person ran past all the trash and then just stood there at the boss while the other two milled about uncertainly. I figured maybe the guy who had run ahead expected me to stealth the first three objectives since I was on a Shadow and I'd seen people do that before. I hadn't succeeded at it myself yet, but I decided to give it another go and pulled it off this time, go me! Meanwhile the other two players pulled some more trash though and died. I eventually put into chat "sooo, what are we doing?" since everyone seemed to have run off into a different direction, to which the guy at the boss responded that we needed to kill those three things... so they weren't expecting me to stealth but just wanted to go AFK while the rest of us did the killing?! It ultimately didn't matter, we just killed all the trash from then on, but that whole situation was a bit awkward. After that I queued again for the remaining three flashpoints and got a vet mode Depths of Manaan which was fast and uneventful.

Next I hopped over to Tulak Hord, where I did a solo mode Assault on Tython since I had the story quest for it, followed up by a round of Black Hole. Then I changed to my Sith inquisitor for a bit of story questing with a healer companion. I no longer needed anything on the Core worlds, so I was grateful to find that her class story was actually up to Nar Shaddaa already. (I'd thought she was still on Balmorra too and I'd had quite enough of that planet for the week.)

Leviathan was my next destination, where I hit up the group finder queue for the featured flashpoints again and got an instant pop for vet mode Depths of Manaan. Since we had two healers it was a bit slow, but otherwise alright. I did get a little worried on the last boss with the five minute timer when one of our two damage dealers suddenly had to go AFK, but we did still manage to beat the timer.

Finally I returned to Shae Vizla. I had to have a bit of a think about how I was going to go about the flashpoints and Black Hole runs if I was going to go for them there as well. The rewards would have been best on my level 80 warrior, but she'd already completed her Conquest for the week and I craved something slightly different, so I opted to go on my level 68 consular instead. The guild I'm in often alternates events between Republic and Imperial side, and I keep getting reminded that I don't yet have a level 80 on Pub side that can go to operations there, so it seemed prudent to milk these objectives for some XP at least.

I first queued for three of the eligible flashpoints (Secrets of the Enclave was out of reach due to level) and got into another Depths of Manaan. The irony of me running that same flashpoint three times in one morning after I wrote that whole intro about not wanting to burn myself out by repeating the same content too many times wasn't lost on me, but fortunately all the Shadow of Revan prelude flashpoints are pretty fun and not too long, so I genuinely didn't mind. Afterwards I did a round of the Black Hole and was reminded that the heroic is still somewhat challenging in levelling gear, as I actually had to run back out of the first room to save myself after starting with a bad pull. I proceeded with a bit more care after that and was fine though. The whole adventure netted me two levels, something I was quite pleased with.

After lunch and the daily reset I logged right back into Shae Vizla with the goal of repeating what I'd done earlier, one flashpoint and one round of the Black Hole. I put myself in the flashpoint queue (unticking Depths of Manaan this time, but at least Secrets of the Enclave was now available to me) and returned to Corellia, but nothing popped for the entirety of my daily run. I did have the pleasure of someone actually asking to group up for the Black Hole heroic though, something I happily accepted and which filled me with massive nostalgia.

Just as I was starting to wonder whether I should leave the flashpoint for another time, I got a pop and found myself in Secrets of the Enclave. A level 80 from my guild was in the run as well, and they instantly took off like a bat out of hell. Someone else said that they were new to the flashpoint, which prompted our bat to type out a few instructions at some point, so I can't even complain that they were being inconsiderate or anything, but they were still absolutely racing. Mr Commando went off to take a shower just when I got the flashpoint pop and he wasn't even done by the time we finished. With that, my consular completed her personal Conquest, gained another level (almost two actually), and Shae Vizla became the second server on which I hit 7/7 weekly season objectives for week two.

Later in the afternoon I went to cycle through the other servers again. On Leviathan I queued for flashpoints again, once again unticking Depths of Manaan, and ended up in yet another round of Assault on Tython. I sighed a little to myself, but it went fine. Feeling a bit flashpoint-ed out after that, I opted to just continue questing on my inquisitor on Tulak Hord to tick off the 100 companion kills objective. On Satele Shan I did the same with my Imperial agent, and finishing off her class story on Balmorra also pushed me past 200k Conquest points, bringing Satele Shan to 7/7 weeklies completed as well. Since I was already done with weeklies on Star Forge, I just spent some time on a somewhat neglected smuggler alt there to get my daily dose of Conquest done.

In the evening it was time for social night with my guild on Darth Malgus once again, where we did 16-man Hive of the Mountain Queen on story mode and Explosive Conflict on veteran mode, ticking those two objectives off for me.

I had held off on working more on my progress on Darth Malgus partially because I counted on getting those two objectives in specific done on social night and partially because I thought Mr Commando might want to do flashpoints and the Eternal Championship with me over the weekend, however it turned out that he was already on 7/7 himself after the operations. With that in mind, I logged onto my newest lowbie alt on Ord Mantell and did a bit of questing there for 25 kills without a companion.

Day 6 - Sunday

On Sunday morning I did a bit more questing to get to 7/7 weeklies done on Darth Malgus, specifically by doing some story missions on one of my inquisitors on Corellia until I'd achieved the last few kills for the Coreward Worlds objective.

I'd been so focused on completing weeklies on all servers that I hadn't even done the (admittedly quite time-consuming) first part of the new seasonal storyline yet, and neither had Mr Commando, so we made up for the missed shared play time from not doing the seasonal flashpoints by working our way through the first two chapters of the new storyline together.

After that I didn't log back into the game until evening, at which point paying a visit to each server to get caught up didn't take long at all. On Darth Malgus I just did some clickies. On Leviathan I did a bit more putzing around on Balmorra on my bounty hunter, which completed his personal Conquest target, the 25 kills without a companion objective, and the 200k Conquest points for seasons, taking me to 7/7 on that server as well.

On Tulak Hord I had one round of Black Hole and a flashpoint left to do. In an attempt to mix things up a bit, I only queued for the master mode version of the four featured flashpoints. It was European prime time and healers were even flagged as the role in need! However, I did the entirety of the Black Hole and nothing popped. Since that did earn me enough Conquest for the day though, I decided to leave the flashpoint for Monday.

Since the other three servers were all done with weeklies, I just had play a little bit on each one to earn my 25k Conquest points for the day. On Star Forge I did a few more missions on my smuggler, and on Shae Vizla the same on my trooper. On Satele Shan, I was just getting ready to make a start on Nar Shaddaa on my Imperial agent when I got a warzone pop! I've historically had bad luck with getting into PvP in the non-max level brackets on that server, presumably due to time zone conflicts above anything else, so this was exciting. In fact, the whole reason I was queued for warzones was that I still had the "introduction to PvP" quest in my log at level 39 - I'd originally picked it up at level 10 and had got the arena part done pretty quickly, but just never managed to get into a warzone. Apparently I got lucky that night and the game actually found enough people for a 4v4 lowbie Huttball. I did more damage than anyone else (Snipers are so brutal in the lowbie bracket, it's kind of amazing) and we dominated the other team 6-0. Sorry guys, but I did wait a long time for this.

I actually still felt like playing some more after all that and found myself at bit of a loss for what to do outside of seasons content that evening, so I ended up doing a bit of midbie PvP on Star Forge.

Day 7 - Monday

I decided to start my play session in the late afternoon by logging into Tulak Hord to get that last weekly seasons objective done. I thought I'd try the master mode queue for the featured flashpoints again while taking care of some errands like crew skills and GTN listings (since I'd done nothing but solo and veteran modes all week), and I could always switch to queueing for vet mode if nothing materialised within a reasonable amount of time. However, this time I got a pop almost immediately, which was for Depths of Manaan. What followed was a super smooth run that even included the bonus boss; I was very pleased. Since I was also on the story step for Depths of Manaan, my Shadow of Revan prelude progressed as well. And with that I was once again 7/7 on all servers.

Since I now only had to earn some Conquest points on the other servers, I just did that by cycling through various alts and playing them a little bit at a time.

Week 2 Thoughts

Okay, so... I was wrong again! I was quite sure that I wouldn't be able to do 7/7 weekly objectives on every server this week without feeling stressed, but not only did I do it again, I was almost fully done by Sunday. That was really surprising to me as this week featured a lot more repetition than week one, with me doing the same four objectives across all servers (while in week one the two "automatic" ones were the only ones I did everywhere). I think those lucky ops runs on Star Forge and Leviathan (which I definitely wasn't counting on) really helped me out, because I don't think I would've been able to stand any more flashpoints and dailies than I already did.

Now, next week - things really will be different I think, because in a classic case of "be careful what you wish for", after I bemoaned the lack of a Total Galactic War during the between-seasons break, the devs decided to give us one next week, right in the middle of the Galactic and the PvP season! It's simultaneously exciting and a completionist's nightmare, as I'll probably find myself wanting to focus on helping my guild on Darth Malgus win at Conquest, which would then leave little time to do anything on the other servers. We'll see how it goes I guess.