My Total Galactic War Routine

Last week was Total Galactic War again - my first after successfully conquering the galaxy with my guild last June. I was kind of wondering at the time what that would mean for my interest in future Conquest events, and last week I got my answer: I wasn't any less engaged and it was still as much fun; I was just a little less tense now that the stakes were no longer as high for me personally. We re-conquered Ruhnuk and it took some effort, which made it more enjoyable, but it wasn't as manic and crazy as the last few TGWs have been.

It also occurred to me that maybe the time has finally come to share some more of my accumulated knowledge about Conquest. It may sound a bit paranoid, but I've actually held back a bit on that subject in the past because I didn't want to accidentally help any of our opponents in case they came across this blog. At this point I'm not really that worried about that anymore though, plus as a guildie pointed out, any guild coming across this place in search of more information about how to take on Twin Suns at Conquest should mainly come away with the conclusion that we are all maniacs and they are better off not messing with us.

As a start, I thought I'd share my Conquest routine for Total Galactic War, which always has me generating between five and fifteen million Conquest points across my legacy, depending on how much time I have and just how much effort I'm willing to put in for that particular week.

To begin with, I tend to mentally think of the objectives I decide to tackle as split into roughly three "tiers". Tier one includes the ones with the best payout for the time invested, and the ones I try to do every day, even if I don't have a lot of time after a long day of work. Tier two is how I generate additional points if I have extra time, and tier three is what I do when it's the weekend, we desperately need more points and I'm trying to find just a few more activities to squeeze points out of. 

All number values cited in this post are rounded up or down using a full stronghold bonus as the baseline. Yours might be smaller if you don't have that maxed out, or bigger if your guild also has a Conquest guild perk slotted. The point here isn't to provide exact number values to do maths with, but just to give a general idea of how rewarding an activity is - it obviously makes a difference whether something awards 5k, 30k or 100k Conquest points.

Tier 1:

- My first priority of the day is to do the Galactic Starfighter weekly objective, "Starfighter: Achiever". It requires you to play only two to four matches (depending on whether you win or lose) and grants over 100k points. Make sure to fly all four different types of ships whenever you get the chance and over the course of the week you'll also earn an additional 120k or so for completing the "Starfighter: Bomber/Gunship/Scout/Striker Pilot (Eternal)" objectives (after flying each type in six matches). The only downside to this objective is that GSF queues don't pop at all times of the day even on busy servers, so you've got to make sure to get this done during prime time. Also, you can only repeat it up to three times on the same character. If you want to get credit for more than three days you need to use alts.

- My next priority is to do the weekly warzone objective, "Warzones: Achiever". If you win every single match it will be done after only four games. Now this one carries more risk than the GSF weekly, as the worst case - if you were to lose every single match - would require you to play twelve of them, but realistically you'll get something closer to a 50/50 win rate while queueing solo, which would then complete the quest for you after six matches. You'll also earn additional points from "Warzones: Medalist", "Warzones: Victorious" (which comes in three tiers) and "Activity Finder: Socialite" (which also comes in two tiers). If you win a lot, there's also the infinitely repeatable "Warzones: Infinite Domination" which grants an additional 80k for every tenth win. Like with GSF, you'll need alts after three completions.

- While sitting in queues for the above activities, I do the Iokath weekly. Many people seem to hate Iokath, but it really doesn't take that long once you know what you're doing and awards an insane 50k points for "Iokath: Patrol" plus some extra from "Iokath: Mission Complete" and "Iokath: Defeat Enemies". Last I checked, this can be done twice per week per character, so again, alts are needed to get the most out of it.

- Alternatively, you can also do heroics. I prefer to use a stealther to do a really quick one on each planet, since you get bonus points for one planetary heroic per day, but you can also go for one that requires more mob killing and try to knock out the "Defeat Enemies" objective for that planet at the same time. 

- Alongside all of this, I also do various easy clicky objectives if I have the resources for them, such as "Advancement: Reputation", "Companion: Influencer", "Crafting Invasion Force", "Crafting: Dark Project", "Crafting: Inventor", "Crew Skills: Missions" etc. None of them give huge numbers anymore, but they can add up to an easy 50k or so points that you just earn almost passively/in the background. If you haven't fully expanded all available strongholds yet, opening a new room also earns 30k per day.

Tier 2:

- If I have time to get into tier two territory, the first thing I like to do is to play a low-level alt (below level 70). You gain about 4k points each time you level up, plus 30k every fifth level once per day, plus 25k for completing ten quests of any type once per day. If you do your personal story, that also gives 6k for each quest completed.

- Next it's doing three uprisings for "Uprisings: Veteran Weekly", which is worth over 100k points by itself. You should also get credit for "Uprisings: Tour of Duty" along the way, though that one's buggy and not all uprisings count for some reason. If you do Landing Party, you'll also get credit for the one-time "Chapters: Defeat Skytroopers" for about 20k plus the less profitable daily repeatable version of the same objective. In terms of raw points earned per time investment, this is really a tier one, but to do it efficiently you kind of need to create a pre-made group that knows what it's doing, which takes extra effort. Personally I also find uprisings a bit tedious, so I don't actually want to do this one every single day.

- I have a similar attitude to the arena weekly for "Arenas: Achiever". Everything I've said about the warzone weekly actually applies to this one as well, I'm just personally not as fond of arenas. You objectively also need to do more arenas to complete the quest, even if you win all the time, and pops tend to be less frequent than for warzones, meaning it takes longer. Still, if you enjoy warzones and arenas equally, you can almost double your daily points by doing both of these. I limit myself to doing this one maybe twice over the course of the week.

- Another thing you can do while waiting in queues - if they take long and you've already done Iokath and a heroic on every planet - is work on dynamic encounters (outside the starter planets, since those don't count) for about 4k points per encounter and an extra 80k+ for completing fifteen (up to once per day). This isn't huge but can add up, especially if you choose encounters that don't take too long. You'll also get points for killing mobs for "Defeat Enemies" on that planet, so it might be worth moving around the galaxy a bit. The only risk to doing these while queued is that you might get a pop before you're able to complete the event you're currently working on.

- Finally, there are daily areas other than Iokath that award points for completing their weekly mission (usually once per day): In descending points order: Makeb ~50k, Ossus ~30k, Kessan's Landing, Manaan, Ruhnuk, Yavin 4 ~25k each, Rishi, Onderon, Oricon, Section X ~20k each, Black Hole, CZ-198, Ziost ~10k each. I'd actively avoid Makeb since its missions are way too spread out and take forever to complete, and I very much recommend Ossus as something that gives a lot of points for how quick and easy it is to complete, but beyond that, your mileage may vary. Personally I can't do too many of these without starting to feel burnt out.

Tier 3:

- Star Fortresses were my bread and butter during Total Galactic War at one point, when they awarded about 100k per completion, but the devs realised that this was perhaps too good and nerfed them heavily. Nonetheless, the weekly mission still gives over 60k points, plus 10k+ per heroic or 5k for a normal run. There are also additional objectives for completing specific Star Fortresses. It's not the best way to earn points, but if you've exhausted most of your other avenues or are just looking for a change of pace, there are some valid points to be gained here. Though they do require your character to be past KotFE chapter nine to start doing them. While they are technically soloable, this is another piece of content that greatly benefits from bringing a competent friend along.

- Finally, there's what we tend to call "Rampaging" after the "Galactic Rampage" objective, though that one is no longer part of Total Galactic War and limited to other Conquest events. Its goal is to simply kill mobs of any type. While that particular objective is no longer relevant during TGW, there are still all the other "Kill enemies" objectives on most planets, which net about ~15k points per planet for killing 75 mobs. Now, I mentioned above that these can feel like a nice bonus to get while you're already doing dailies, dynamic encounters or heroics, but just running around killing mobs is pretty dull. Still, if you're out of other things to do, it's an option. It's also worth noting that as an organised guild activity, this can be extremely efficient, because having a whole ops group scouring the landscape makes 75 mob kills go past in a breeze. Still, this post is primarily about what choices to make as an individual player, and from that perspective simply killing mobs is a lot less exciting and profitable. 

The Hunt for the Best View Returns... Again!

Last year, I mentioned that the "Best View in SWTOR" contest, first held in 2021 for the game's tenth anniversary, made an unexpected return. I was even more surprised when I saw the announcement yesterday that it was coming back for a third round this year. If the SWTOR team wants to make a habit out of this, they'll have to give us a lot of new planets this year or else start repeating some of them on the featured planet list next year.

Anyway, I immediately felt inspired and spent some time traipsing around the galaxy and taking screenshots - none of which I'm going to show here yet of course. Instead, I'll share my submissions from last year. Back in 2021, I only submitted shots for three out of ten possible planets, but last year I actually entered nine out of ten possible screenshots, with Odessen being the one planet I left out since I just couldn't find an angle I was happy with there. Anyway, these were my submissions - you can compare them to the actual winners here.

Coruscant will always have a special place in my heart, and the quintessential experience of the Republic home world is stepping out of the spaceport into that perpetual dusk while the music swells and sky cars roar past overhead. There was no question that this was going to be the focus of my screenshot, and it was for the winner as well, but they basically faced the other way. It's a worthy shot, but I'll admit I still prefer my own submission in this case.

The winning shot of Quesh shows grass, water, trees and part of a Hutt Palace, and it's interesting to me that I took some similarly-themed shots during my own exploration of Quesh, but ultimately I opted for submitting the refineries blowing smoke into the sky, since to me, the toxic air is what defines Quesh more than anything else.

I had a hunch that this one wasn't going to be winning shot material, since I noticed that while NPCs are technically allowed to be featured in your submission, no winner has ever included one in the foreground. However, to me it was perfect since swamp and rakghouls are what defines Taris above all else. The winning shot was of the wreck of the Endar Spire instead (I think?) which is of course a KOTOR reference but never meant much to me personally.

There's something to be said for the stark beauty of driven snow, but while taking shots of Hoth I struggled with how empty it always looked, which is why I opted to include these tauntauns in my submission. Same problem as with the rakghoul I guess... though I also notice now that perhaps I've been using the full width of the screen too much, seeing how the winning submissions get cropped down to 4:3 for the in-game decorations. Half of that tauntaun wouldn't even be in the shot then.

Alderaan is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful planets in the game, but I find that this beauty can be a bit challenging to capture accurately in screenshots, so I was quite pleased with myself for managing to take this wide shot of the Glarus Valley. The winning shot ended up being one of Castle Panteer however, which I guess was kind of the more obvious choice. I had taken pictures of it myself as well, but opted against submitting them.

Dromund Kaas is an interesting mix of rain-swept jungles contrasted against the stark, futuristic spires of Kaas City, and I simply decided to submit this rather old screenshot I took of the city since I really liked it. The winner shows both the jungle and parts of the city in the background, which I really can't fault.

With Manaan there was the question of whether to screenshot the new invasion zone or the serenity of the old entrance area. For me it was an obvious choice since I really don't like the visuals of the invasion zone all that much. This particular shot was actually taken inside the Depths of Manaan flashpoint. The contest winner was from the new area though.

Iokath was a challenging place to frame, since it's incredibly cluttered visually, in a way that I honestly find kind of ugly. I eventually found this view at the edge of the expanse, which looked much cleaner and more serene, with just the Eternal Fleet ships taking to the sky in the background. I will admit that this isn't very "typically" Iokath though. The winner managed to take a much better shot of just outside the Republic (?) base that manages to be visually busy but still look good.

Rishi was a tough one because I couldn't decide whether the Rishi Maze or Raider's Cove were more iconic for the planet. I eventually opted for the former, with a grophet in the foreground because I love grophets, OK? I was quite surprised that the chosen winner actually included neither.

Anyway, I'm off to take more pictures of this year's featured planets! If you want to take part, you can find all the details here, and you have until the 29th of September to make your submission(s).

Republic Saboteur, Part 1

When Bioware first added the option to the game to sabotage your old faction after KotET, I was not ready for it. All my most progressed characters were simply way too loyal to their faction!

It took me until last year to finally get my Imperial double agent up to the point where I could start making saboteur choices on Ossus and beyond. I wrote about the experience in a series of posts here, here and here.

Of course, after that, the next step was going to be to be repeat the exercise on Republic side, which required me to get yet another character caught up to the relevant point in the story. The choice fell on my somewhat dark-sided smuggler Racelle, since I always pictured her as quite chaotic and enjoying personal power. I figured she would view it as liberating to break free from her old ties to the Republic, and to be fair, Acina and the Empire did help her during KotET...

Getting her up to Iokath was very slow though, and by the time I finally got there I was baffled when a piece of dialogue reminded me that she had romanced Theron. He must be my most-romanced companion at this point; I just can't resist flirting with him on the blaster-wielding ladies... on re-evaluation, I figured that the two of them probably weren't going to be a good match, but then, even a somewhat dark-sided, chaotic smuggler can have a soft spot, right?

Interestingly, when my bounty hunter who had also romanced Theron reached Iokath, that felt like a reason to side with the Republic there for the sake of his dad, but on my smuggler I had no such compulsion, even though she was also dark side and in a romance with Theron. Instead, she seemed to take the obvious cue that Theron didn't actually seem to like his dad very much, and saw it as just one more justification to turn her back on the Republic. Though that then led to her having to watch her beloved Theron get upset when his dad died, which was not a combo of events I had really anticipated seeing.

Up next was the traitor arc, which I'll admit was really tricky to decide on in this instance. My bounty hunter had turned her back on Theron on this occasion, but I felt that despite her chaotic nature, my smuggler wasn't quite that cold. When he asks you whether he can stay with the Alliance at the end, I actually selected "no" at first but then escaped out and changed my mind. Turns out this smuggler just had to forgive him... even I didn't see that coming.

In the Nathema Conspiracy, I was kind of disappointed by the way that this smuggler also got the dialogue with Master Sumalee at the end, just like my light-side smuggler did. Based on a quick Google search, there seems to be some disagreement on how exactly you trigger the alternate variant.

Anyway, Ossus was next and I got to start sabotaging in earnest. First you damage the water pumps in the Jedi base, then you plant an extra bomb in the cave with the Geonosians to make sure it collapses completely and no artefacts can be preserved (I think that's what the sabotage is about anyway, considering the loyalist version is to save some relics) and you steal the Jedi's farming data in a somewhat blatant way as it's handed to you directly and then when someone asks about it later you go "oh, but it was corrupted". Just a little suspicious I think...

Interestingly, unlike on Imperial side I didn't really get any vibes that the ending monologue sounded noticeably more pessimistic than for non-saboteurs. I went back to compare the loyalist and saboteur ending cinematics on YouTube just to make certain, and the overall sentiment really wasn't that different. There is some disappointment about the lost farming data and some of the escaping shuttles being snatched up by Imperials, but the overall vibe is still one of "yay, we got the Jedi back and we'll totally show the Empire".

During Hearts and Minds I confessed about the sabotage to Theron and he took it surprisingly well! I mean, he was taken aback and didn't like it, but also assured my smuggler that it didn't affect his love for her, plus he seemed to be more worried about how taxing the whole double agent business can be than anything else (based on everything that happened during Fractured Alliances).

The saboteur version of the interview with Alec Ranin was a hoot as expected - I especially loved the bit where the camera pans to your character and they just break into a big goofy grin, and how when Alec asks whether you have any last words, my smuggler said: "I really like your boots!" A true TV natural.

Onderon starts the same way for Republic characters as for Imperials, with a space battle where as a saboteur you let the enemy get away instead of shooting them down.

Interestingly, I found the first act of sabotage on Onderon much more convincing on Republic side than on Imperial, where you just mysteriously fail to press the right button at a crucial moment. After all, Republic side has you reacting to Darth Savik's attack on Iziz, and when you get to the point where you would usually stop the cannons from firing at the fleet, you just pretend that you were simply too late. Much more believable!

This means that all but a few of the Republic ships above Onderon are destroyed, and surprisingly little fanfare is made about it compared to what happens on Imperial side regardless of outcome. After that, there isn't really much sabotaging left to do, as you hunt down Darth Savik just like a loyalist would and there are no options to try to be nice to her (not that it would matter as she has a personal grudge against you).

All in all, my first impressions of the Republic saboteur path so far are that it feels surprisingly more subtle than the Imperial version, but also less impactful somehow. On Ossus, stealing the farming data for the Empire is a decent win I guess, but ultimately the Republic still wins the day no matter what you do. And on Onderon your sabotage is simultaneously much more believable, but also kind of downplayed in the story as you quickly shrug and move on to chasing down Darth Savik. I'm curious to see whether these vibes will stay the same or start to change as my sabotage continues. Read more in part 2.

Imperial Saboteur, Part 1

Ever since Jedi Under Siege introduced the concept of loyalist vs. saboteur (the faction switch on Iokath was treated as more of a one-off before that), I've been curious to see the saboteur story options for myself - problem was, all my most advanced characters in terms of story were pretty loyal to their faction and I couldn't see any of them going down that path.

So I've slowly been chipping away at progressing more suitable saboteur characters through the story as a sort of side project... and the other week I finally reached the crucial point on my Imperial agent Corfette, the Sniper who became a double agent for the Republic during her class story - is there a more natural fit for the role of Imperial double agent?

What follows are my impressions of this path up to the end of Onderon, so consider this your spoiler warning for that content.

First off, I gotta say that it felt a bit odd to return to the Empire as a saboteur after openly siding with the Republic on Iokath. Paradoxically it actually felt better to return to being an Imperial loyalist after betraying them on Iokath on my bounty hunter, whose loyalties were always a bit questionable and for whom Iokath had been a somewhat impulsive decision based on a dislike for Acina's scheming and being in a relationship with Theron at the time.

On my agent however, who had previously been assisting the Republic undercover, Iokath was almost a sort of "coming out", and to then go back into the Imperial closet so to speak felt weird and like my old faction would obviously be suspicious of me now.

Incidentally, on Nathema I was confronted by the former Watcher Two, who did not look kindly upon my involvement with the Republic, despite of everything I'd done for her on Rishi.

Anyway, so the start of Ossus felt a bit awkward, but it seemed easy enough to slide back into the old agent patterns, what with Darth Malora expressing distaste for my character and the option to commiserate with Major Anri about the moods of Sith superiors.

I'd previously been told that Ossus wasn't that different for a saboteur vs. a loyalist and I would say that's broadly true. The bonus mission at the start is to sabotage the Imperial fighters instead of giving them a boost, and when it comes to the Jedi farming data, you tell Major Anri that it's not really your focus while secretly passing it on to the Republic. The main events stay the same however.

Interestingly, the wrap-up at the end sounds very pessimistic compared to the optimism a loyalist gets presented with, with the implied justification being that your small acts of sabotage made the whole mission way too costly. However, it doesn't really feel different, because the base still gets shot up by a Republic attack either way and the damage doesn't look any different as far as I could tell, even if it gets talked about in very different ways.

During Hearts and Minds, I told Theron about my saboteur status and he actually commented: "So it's true what Shara said on Nathema", which made me squee except that I thought it was it a bit odd that Theron would be on a first-name basis with my former Imperial colleague whom he saw exactly once.

I was also happy to choose the saboteur option for the speech at the end of the mission, which was pretty hilarious in that you're not saying anything that's obviously meant to be detrimental towards morale, you just come across as being absolutely abysmal at giving speeches. After the repeated air punching while yelling "Empire!" over and over again, you're basically quietly escorted away, and Doctor Oggurobb sends you a message in the mail later to suggest having you checked for Geonosian brain worms. (Nice reference!)

Onslaught starts with your character being involved in this little space battle, and I was pleased to see that as a saboteur, you don't end up killing the Republic fighter you're engaged with but let them get away.

The mission on Onderon initially goes exactly the same as on a loyalist, what with ingratiating yourself with King Petryph and enlisting the aid of the Untamed. But then! When you're at the point where you'd usually use the cannons in Iziz to shoot down the Republic fleet, you can pretend that they're not working. (Your character gets a very over-the-top smirk on their face as they do this - you won't survive long as a saboteur if you make faces like that every time you successfully perform some sort of sabotage! I just thought it was funny.)

Savik frets but doesn't panic quite as much as I would have expected and tells you to at least get to the throne room to help King Petryph. And here I got the opportunity to just shoot him and leave Senator Nebet be, which is exactly what I did! To be honest this is an option I've kind of wanted to have even on my loyalists sometimes, simply because it seemed like it could be useful to capture a Republic leadership figure that isn't a complete idiot.

Then I got back to base and Malgus absolutely lost it with Savik for failing, going instantly into remote Force choke mode, at which point you get the option to suggest whether you think she should be allowed to live or die. I really liked this choice as you could argue that either one can make sense for a saboteur: You can position yourself as a voice for moderation and potentially earn Savik's favour for the future, or you can simply let her be offed and be happy that there's one less Sith in the galaxy. I chose the former option here.

I gotta say the saboteur options on Imperial Onderon felt extremely satisfying and I was quite surprised that they actually allow you to blow the whole mission this time. You'd think that might make the Empire suspicious... but I guess from the point of view of the NPCs you aren't "the player character who never fails at anything" but simply another person who's fallible to some degree... plus you were just following Savik's plan, right?

I'm looking forward to what more there is to see. Continued in part 2!

Daily Tour: Iokath

I've been meaning to write about Iokath. Intisar wrote an excellent blog post called "Iokath is Good, Actually" back in November, which I meant to comment on at the time but didn't for some reason, and then it was too late because the comment section for that particular post had closed.

So I'll let you in on a secret here: Somehow, Iokath has become one of my favourite daily areas. No, really! I think a large chunk of it is the ridiculously high amount of conquest points it awards compared to the relatively low time and effort required to complete the weekly quest, but also, I just kind of like how different it is. So it's about time I continued my kinda-sorta series of posts about my daily routines and wrote about Iokath. Especially since I'm not sure whether it will continue to be viable once Legacy of the Sith hits, what with the planned changes to daily and weekly resets. If you're someone who investigated this on the PTS, please let me know in the comments.

Anyway, one of Iokath's biggest drawbacks as a daily zone is that you can't just go there, pick up all the available quests and get your weekly done in a single day. However, there's a simple big brain workaround around this: Go to the mission board - just the board, don't do any quests - two to three days in a row and keep adding to your log. Once you've got at least ten dailies that you're happy with, you can get your weekly done in one go. This still has the disadvantage that your quest log is pretty clogged up for a couple of days, but since I'm not much of a daily runner in general, this isn't usually a problem for me.

You may have taken note of my choice of words in the previous paragraph: "ten dailies that you're happy with", because god knows I don't like all of them myself. The colossal droid requires a group for example, which is not ideal in most circumstances. Both the scouting mission and the one to disable enemy defenses require too much running around for my liking. And unlike Intisar, I don't like the one to kill forty droids as a walker either.

I remember at the start you couldn't loot while in "vehicle form" and I'm someone who's very obsessive about making all the loot beams disappear, so being unable to deal with that quickly made this one a no-go. I do think they might have fixed this issue later on, but by that point it was too late for me. Plus being a walker prevents you from doing certain activities required for other missions, and you'll already have to kill dozens of droids just to get all those other things done, so adding another forty unrelated kills on top of that just doesn't appeal to me.

I do like the vehicle quests with the mouse droid and Iokath monitor, the one to defend the base, as well as everything in the docking ring and weapons factory plus the more generic kill quests. So this is how it goes then:

Starting in my faction's base, I first do everything that can be done right there, which covers the base defense and the aforementioned vehicle quests. For the kills with the monitor, I go just outside the base and up the ramp, where weak mobs come in singles and pairs, which are easy to kill even for the fragile monitor, and while I'm there I can also enable some laser defenses (because that's something you can apparently do in vehicle form).

Next I go back to the landing zone and enter the docking ring, which can contain up to four daily missions, though I'll also go if I've only got two or three. I disable the two lasers in the first room and do the little event there, and then proceed to the easternmost room, which contains one of the AA batteries (assuming I have that quest). Then I make my way north for the second one. If I don't have that particular mission, my circle will be condensed to just get a few more lasers and droid control stations.

Once done in here, I use my quick travel to quickly get back out, and then run out onto Iokath proper, just to make a quick beeline towards the tram that takes you to the weapons factory (pictured here is the Republic version of that). In there I first go to the southern room to play the weird ball game there (my inner SEO optimiser is screaming at me for not calling anything by its proper name, but I can't be bothered to look up the names of each mission - plus I wouldn't want people to find this while searching for a guide and then leave me angry comments about what a useless guide this is). I click on the panels along the walls if I have that particular quest, and then go north if I need to vent heat. At some point during this, I should usually be finishing my weekly, and once done, I can once again quick travel out.

I think the fact that the description of the actual daily "round" only took me three paragraphs should tell you how quick and easy the Iokath weekly actually is if you stack enough quests, as there are several places where you can get three to four of them done almost all at once - which is more than you can say for most daily zones to be honest!

Day 8: Memorable Moments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Stranger from Kubindi - Some Fun Personal Stats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shintar's Galactic Seasons Diary, Week 10

Day 1

On logging in, I found myself saddled with the flashpoint and operations weeklies, and decided to re-roll the former into warzones. One of my dailies was also to play a warzone, and the other to defeat 75 enemies in unknown or Wild Space. Since I'd just killed 150 mobs for my daily objectives the day before, I re-rolled that one as well and it turned into CZ-198 dailies.

Through the SWTOR community Discord I found out that there was some new bug with Seasons objectives not progressing, so I logged off again. They did fix that one within a couple of hours though.

When I logged back in I completed both of my daily objectives without problems, and the warzone also counted towards my weekly. I played an Ancient Hypergates on my Sage healer and somewhat to my surprise, we won pretty decisively. For the CZ dailies I got out my Operative healer again. She quested in the PvP instance, and apart from two people idling in the landing zone I didn't encounter another player of either faction during my entire round.

Day 2

On Wednesday I found that I had to jump into my ops group's progression run unexpectedly as one of the usual Wednesday healers couldn't make it, so I didn't get around to my Seasons objectives until later. They were warzones and galaxy-wide insecticide respectively, though the latter luckily re-rolled into GSF.

The GSF match was a domination that started out well but ended up being a pretty decisive loss. Looking at the scoreboard at the end, we had been hopelessly outgunned, but I didn't mind too much because I'd still had fun flying around and shooting things.

The PvP match landed my healing Sage in Quesh Huttball, and the moment we went to pick up the ball I spotted long-time PvP streamer Snave on the opposing team, presumably with one of his pre-mades. Unsurprisingly, someone called for us to just let them win and get it over with, but I got some satisfaction out of the rest of the team continuing to fight until the bitter 1-7 end. I did have some sympathy for the guy's frustration in this case though. Going up against a pre-made is rarely fun, but knowing that your loss will be broadcast to the public while someone on the other team trash-talks you makes it even more annoying.

Day 3

This was the day of the expansion livestream, which I missed due to being preoccupied with something else at the time, but I did go to watch the recording as soon as I was done and then continued to watch it on the side while knocking out my daily objectives, which were GSF and CZ-198 dailies again.

The GSF match was a domination game that was both an easy win and great fun - early on I ended up at a satellite with an enemy player who seemed to be as incompetent as me, so that we just ended up circling each other and shooting into space for what felt like several minutes. I got lucky in that my team was the first one to actually send some reinforcements, who then shot my opponent to pieces. Tough luck, bud!

For the dailies I went stealth on Imperial side again, this time on my Assassin tank. It felt like I was done in no time, seeing how I was merely going through the motions while actually focusing on the stream recording.

Day 4

I was relieved on login to find that my dailies were a straightforward warzone and galactic insecticide, which was at least an obvious re-roll and handily turned into GSF. I played the GSF match first, on my Powertech tank, and it was an oddly enjoyable deathmatch where we didn't just win but I only died once, when we were already sitting on thirty points! Mostly I was sitting safely in my gunship at the back and it felt like people were always trying to make a beeline for me but got shot down by my team mates before they could reach me, which was nice.

For PvP I queued on my squid Sorc and got an insta-pop into an arena in progress. My team was already one point behind, but for some reason we were a full team of four while the opposition was one person short. Unsurprisingly we spanked them on the next round and evened the score. They still didn't get reinforcements during round three, but changed their strategy and ended up doing a lot of damage. I was actually a bit worried when they managed to kill one of my team mates, but we still ended up winning in the end. This completed both my daily and my weekly objective.

Day 5

My dailies were GSF and mob killing in unknown or Wild Space. I decided to risk a re-roll on the latter but it just turned into insectoid killing, which I then got done by having my Sniper go on a quick rampage among the Killiks just outside Rhu Caenus spaceport on Alderaan.

The GSF match I played on my Juggernaut tank for a change and while it was a good match and a win, it was also a reminder of why I try not to spread my GSF activity around too many alts... it's just way too much of a hassle to set up ships, components and so on for every new character.

Day 6

The day before, I'd seen a guildie complete the Iokath dailies PO and thought, "Hey, I'd quite like to get that one some time this week!" so I tried making sure to log into a level 75 character first, but I got warzones and CZ-198 daily missions as my objectives. I risked a re-roll on the dailies and it turned into insectoid killing again. Sigh. That meant another round of Killik killing for the Sniper.

For the warzone objective I queued up with my lowbie Merc and she got into a Mandalorian Battle Ring arena. Since the last patch, the sub-75 queue has been been split into lowbie and midbie again - initially we weren't sure whether this was intentional or an accident, but it was later confirmed on the forums that it was intended and they just forgot to include it in the patch notes. Since then I've been getting a lot more arenas again... anyway, this one was a solid win as I had two dpsers on my team that did absolute monster damage. I then played a second match, which also popped as an arena, just to complete the character's Conquest, though that one was a loss. Funnily enough, everybody on my team gave me their MVP votes regardless, which surprised me.

Day 7

I once again completed my second weekly objective on the last day of the SWTOR week, by doing a Gods from the Machine story mode run with my guildies. As if the game had read my mind about the previous day, my daily POs were Iokath dailies (yay) and CZ-198 again. I hadn't realised that you only need to do three (!) Iokath dailies for that objective, which is less than a third of the weekly mission, as opposed to four or five missions for most other daily quest-based objectives. They really want to sweeten people on Iokath I guess.

CZ I visited on my Sniper, not too fussed about skipping unnecessary trash kills, but it was so busy that I actually struggled to find anything to kill - I was barely halfway done with the mob killing daily by the time I'd finished all the other missions in the area.

Week 10 thoughts:

With the second full five-week cycle complete, I'm sitting on 734 Seasons points, which means that I just need 66 more to reach 800 next week, and then it'll be retrospective time! I'm currently thinking that I could get up to three different analysis posts out of this: one about how I played this Season (which objectives I did how often etc.), one with feedback about what I think could be improved in Season two, and one featuring tips and tricks I've learned from chatting about Seasons with other players. Stay tuned for that!

The Best Classes to Take into Onslaught

With the recent Steam launch having brought many new and returning players (back) to SWTOR, there's been a resurgence of curiosity about many basic aspects of the game. One question that returning players with a stable of multiple characters might have is which class they should pick up first to get the most out of the new story additions since they last played.

My post about the best classes to take into the "Knights of..." expansions is one of the most popular posts on this blog, but we've had a fair amount of new story since then, with the arc about Valkorion and his family more or less wrapped up and abandoned. I think it's fair to wonder whether the storylines that have come after are better suited for a different set of classes, or if there is one class that's just best for everything, meaning KotFE/KotET and everything that comes after. My answer to the latter is "yes, and it's the Sith inquisitor", but I'd really like to go into a bit more detail than that. So get ready for some minor content spoilers and mention of companion returns post-KotET, but I'm not giving away any major plot points or anything.

First off I think that on the whole, the post-KotET content has been much more neutral in terms of which classes it's suitable for. Your character is now the commander of the Eternal Alliance (whatever you may think of how they ended up there) and they are back to dealing with the two big factions, which is easily justifiable in my opinion, whether you originally started out as a Sith or a Republic trooper.

When Bioware first eased their way back into this style of writing they seemed to struggle a bit, and the Iokath storyline that followed KotET was pretty bland and awkward as a result. This was followed by what has been dubbed the "traitor arc" since then, which again started poorly but got better as it went along. It's also probably the single most class-neutral storyline we've had since KotET, simply because it focuses very much on your personal relationship with the traitor, which depends more on how you feel about that particular character than your class choice. That said, the last flashpoint in the series, The Nathema Conspiracy, features a nice callback to your class story with a lot of different permutations based on your choices there.

From there it's off to Jedi Under Siege, which takes place on the planet Ossus, and where the current ongoing storyline kicks off. While this is still fairly class-neutral content as a whole, Bioware started to include a lot more references to the original class stories from this point onwards, which is what I will use to justify most of my rankings. Also noteworthy is that from Iokath onwards you're given the option to start sabotaging your old faction, which is something that might be greatly suited for characters that were played as never having been that attached to their original faction to begin with.

With all that out of the way, I would recommend prioritising the classes as follows if you're uncertain:

1. Sith Inquisitor

The Sith inquisitor is in the lucky position that they were a great fit for KotET/KotFE but the new content fits them like a glove as well. They basically enjoy ruling their own little faction, and whether you decide to go back and help the old Sith Empire or would rather scheme against them because it's the Sithy thing to do, opportunities for intrigue abound.

Jedi Under Siege starts with a call from your old friend Moff Pyron (who remembers you of course), and if you sided with Khem Val over Darth Zash at the end of his companion arc in the base game, you'll get to reunite with Khem on Ossus. Even better, you get to romance him too if you're into that kind of thing!

In Onslaught you're also given the opportunity to reclaim your old seat on the Dark Council if you wish (and in an appropriately Sithy manner as well).

Oh, and Andronikos and Ashara also come back in post-KotET Alliance alerts but that's really just the icing on the cake.

2. Jedi Knight

The Jedi Knight is another character that gets along well with the KotFE/KotET storyline and manages to continue into the new content quite seamlessly. You'll get recognised both as an important Jedi and a military commander, and no fewer than three of the original knight companions make their return as part of the storyline from Ossus onwards: Doc, Kira and Scourge. The latter two haven't had that much to do yet (that'll be in the content drop we're anticipating towards the end of the year), but all three are fully integrated into the storyline and reuniting with them is quite interesting. Kira can now also be romanced by female knights and Scourge is open to either gender. I haven't been able to find confirmation whether Doc swings both ways as well now...

3. Imperial Agent

The reason I rank the Imperial agent highly is mostly because of the saboteur option. You don't have to take it if you don't want to, but of all classes the agent was the one for whom it could (potentially) make the most sense to want to betray the Empire by the end of their class story. This was the sort of story thread that I think most of us didn't expect to ever get picked up again once Bioware said that there weren't going to be any more class stories, but the saboteur option has effectively revived it and even made it more "mainstream" so to speak.

Vector returns in a post-KotET Alliance alert, which is nice enough if you like him or even romanced him, and agents also get an exclusive little chat with him after the Task at Hand interlude that serves to remind you that he's still there and involved in the agent's life and decisions.

4. Jedi Consular

Similar to the knight, the consular is recognised for previous achievements on Ossus, and there are opportunities to both fight and be diplomatic.

In terms of companion returns, the consular was a bit of a black sheep during the KotFE/KotET era as no consular companions were involved in the main storyline and Qyzen was the only one that could be re-acquired via an Alliance alert. Post-KotET however, Lieutenant Iresso returns in an alert, you reunite with Nadia as part of the Ossus storyline, and Tharan comes back during Onslaught. Good times!

5. Sith Warrior

I ranked the Sith warrior as fairly high in terms of its suitability for KotFE/KotET, but to be honest I never pictured the warrior as someone who wants to sit on a throne and rule - better to leave that to someone with an interest in politics while they go out and smash faces. Ossus and Onslaught offer some nice opportunities here as you get back onto the front lines of the war and get the option to leave all that pesky planning to other people if that's more up your alley.

Quinn returns on Iokath and you get the option to finally get closure in regards to "that thing" he did during your class story. Jaesa returns in an Alliance alert after Ossus too, both her light and dark side versions. The former can now also be romanced, and the latter can also be killed if, like me, you always found her pretty annoying.

6. Bounty Hunter

You finally get Mako back in post-KotET Alliance alert, but it's a bit lacklustre to be honest. There is an interesting moment in Onslaught where bounty hunters get a slightly different reaction from an NPC than other classes, but other than that it doesn't offer anything particularly exciting for the class. The main reason I still rank it above trooper and smuggler is that bounty hunter is another class for whom the option of wanting to change sides in the war makes more sense than for most others.

7. Smuggler

Corso, Risha and Akaavi come back in two post-KotET Alliance alerts but they are short and not that great in my opinion. And while part of Onslaught takes place on a planetoid where a smuggler could feel right at home, nothing much is made of how this might make for a different experience for this class.

8. Trooper

Elara Dorne makes her comeback during Iokath but it's not very exciting. In the aftermath of Onslaught you get another little scene with her though (like the agent does with Vector), which is nice. Other than that there isn't anything going on that feels particularly tailored towards troopers.

Looking back at the final ranking, I'm kind of surprised by how similar it is to my KotFE/KotET ranking, with knight and inquisitor coming out on top once again, and smuggler trailing behind yet again. That said, I think it's important to repeat that overall, the newer content doesn't feel nearly as badly suited for some classes as KotFE/KotET did, and that there's much less of a difference between how much you'll enjoy playing through it as an inquisitor vs. a smuggler.

Got a different take on how different classes experience the current expansion and the content leading up to it? Feel free to leave it in the comments!

Gods Unleashed

The first four bosses in Gods from the Machine each drop an item called "[boss name] control module". First-timers to the operation inevitably ask what it is, and the answer is usually something along the lines of: "It allows you to temporarily turn into the boss on Iokath; nothing special."

Now that I think about it, it's actually pretty weird how utterly unexcited we've always been about these drops. Being able to turn into a boss (and one that's considered a god, no less) should be freaking cool! I guess the problem is that it only works on Iokath, and people don't like Iokath. I mean, personally the dailies have grown on me over time, but then I've also been told that I have some masochistic tendencies. What good is a cool transformation if the only time you can use it is to do content you don't particularly enjoy, in a place you don't like? Yeah.

And yet... I've kept all five of my control modules in my bag ever since I won each of them, and every now and then I've looked at them longingly, telling myself that I'll get to use them one day.

Well, the other day I decided that it was time to make this happen. Sure, just turning into one of the gods and then doing dailies on Iokath would probably be pretty boring, but anything can be fun if you turn it into a guild event! So that's what I did, especially since I was sure that other people had unused control modules sitting in their bags and banks as well.

Unfortunately we ran into practical limitations very quickly. I had envisioned us marching across Iokath as a whole army of gods from the machine, but as it turns out the game will only allow one copy of each god to be active at any given time, meaning that a lot of people only got to scurry along as our "adds" at the gods' feet as it were. Even worse, our plan to at least let people take turns was foiled as well, as the consoles in the control room kept indicating that the gods were still "on cooldown" even after the original lot had expired, without providing any details about just how long said cooldown was. We just had to call it at that point as there seemed to be zero documentation about this online either and we didn't fancy waiting around indefinitely.

That said, we managed to have a pretty good time while it lasted. I got to pick Scyva because it was my birthday, and others were quick to claim the other gods. There was a certain humour in the fact that the most mellow of our officers, who wouldn't hurt a fly in real life (no really, he's a strict vegan), turned into Tyth, the god of rage. And one of our tanks had way too much fun slipping into the skin of Nahut and using the tank-killing move to which he'd fallen victim way too many times on other people instead.

Vehicle mechanics in SWTOR tend to be kind of clunky and these were too, but the sheer fact that the gods lived up to their names, with massive health pools and the same overpowered abilities that they also use in the boss fights, was enough to make playing them fun.

We started off by paying a visit to the Colossal droid, who was still taller than we were even in our transformed states, but he died easily enough. Then we had the idea of invading the Imperial base, where absolute carnage ensued. I hadn't gone into this with PvP in mind but we just so happened to be in the PvP instance when we started, and a few guildies decided out of their own volition to change sides and put up a bit of resistance.

Mind you, they mostly ended up being ganked a lot, but they didn't seem to mind too much and had fun getting the occasional kill among our non-transformed followers. We as gods may have been pretty unassailable by a small handful of players, but with base defenses going off all around us non-stop, the place was still dangerous for those who had followed us on their regular characters. No non-guildies were harmed in the process by the way, as the PvP instance was pretty empty, and the one Imp who briefly showed up (very sensibly) did a straight 180 the moment he saw the mayhem happening in his base.

I uploaded a video recording of the event here if you want to get a better idea of what it was like; it's about half an hour long. It was definitely fun and I'd happily do something like this again - though maybe next time we should aim for a slightly fairer fight and have a few more people (and maybe even some of the gods) on the defending side.

A Series of Unexpected Events

When I wrote about skipping story content last year and why I'm conflicted about it, one of the arguments I gave against it was that at least for me, there can be quite a difference between imagining how a character would react to certain story beats in the abstract, purely based on their personality and alignment, and actually playing through that same content, because small details such as certain pieces of dialogue can end up making quite a difference to the way things feel in the moment.

I've had a great example of this recently in the form of my bounty hunter - or should I say "one of my bounty hunters"? I'm up to three of them at max level for some reason and have been splitting my play time between them in the most awkward of ways. Anyway, this story is about my dps Powertech T'ir (don't ask me how to pronounce that, I just added the apostrophe somewhat randomly when she lost her original name during the first round of server merges), who is the bounty hunter with the most story progression and on whom I've been making a concerted effort to get caught up with current events. In case it's not obvious, this means that this post will contain spoilers about story content from KotET onwards.

T'ir's a Chiss and tends to lean towards dark side decisions, so I thought everything would be pretty cut and dry for her. She's not exactly an Imperial loyalist, but she's been getting along with the Empire well enough, so I couldn't really picture any set of circumstances in which she would defect to the Republic when given the choice.

So the other week I finally finished the last chapter of KotET on her. Declaring herself an Empress at the end seemed like quite a high point for a bounty hunter fond of personal power. I don't think she has any real desire to rule nor interest in politics, mind you... she just likes being the strongest and punching people. Calling herself an Empress must have felt like a bit of a joke to her, to be honest.

Then it was time to go to Iokath, to find the Republic and Empire squabbling there. T'ir didn't really want to support either of them - they both seemed kind of beneath her at that moment. Acina had previously been an ally, but here she was trying to snatch some superweapon for herself behind everyone else's back - typical Sith scheming, bah!

And who was representing the Republic? Jace Malcom, a hardened war veteran with whom a bounty hunter could actually see eye to eye, and who also happened to be her boyfriend's dad. (In hindsight I honestly I have no idea how or why I ended up in a relationship with Theron on this character... they are/were a terrible match. However, the point is they were a couple at the time, so the familial relationships were a consideration.) With all that in mind: Why not side with the Republic on this occasion and bash some Imperial heads in? To a bounty hunter like her it's all the same anyway. (Fun fact: If you pause this story arc after "defecting" and then click the launch button to resume, it will put you in the wrong base and you'll get murdered by guards as soon as you arrive. Huzzah!)

Anyway, if you're all caught up with the story, you know what comes after that - the traitor story arc. Oddly, the bit I enjoyed most about that was the interaction with Aristocra Saganu. In particular, there was one line of dialogue where you get to say something along the lines of: "Really, you'd sell out one of your own just like that?" and his response is: "You're one of our own too." I actually had to pause and blink there for a moment to realise that he was talking about the fact that T'ir is a Chiss just like him. I hadn't even considered that! At the end he also sent her a letter about how she was a role model for all young Chiss, which I thought was great.

The issue of the traitor himself largely played out as I expected. While there were a couple of heart-wrenching lines about love, T'ir wouldn't have become a bounty hunter if her heart was that easily wrenched. I'm not sure she would have been able to pull the trigger herself, but simply turning her back on him when he had already been injured by someone else's hand was surprisingly easy.

Where do you go from there though? Surely not back to working with the father of the man you just left to die? Handily though, Emperor Vowrawn also wrote her a letter asking to let bygones be bygones and saying that he'd quite appreciate her working with the Empire again. He might not be so bad; he reminds her a bit of Darth Tormen... I also think she'll get along just swell with Malgus, though I don't know how well he will like someone who already switched sides twice. I guess the best way to find out is to play! I'm very curious to see how things will play out for her from here, as I never expected to have an Imperial loyalist that would be dealing with Vowrawn instead of Acina...

Looking Back on Three Years of KotET

Seeing how we only have six days left until the release of Onslaught, it's about time I wrote the post looking back on the current expansion that I've been meaning to write for a while. It's not exactly a tradition, but nothing about Knights of the Eternal Throne has been traditional!

In fact, it probably featured the biggest period of upheaval for the game since its launch year and the free-to-play transition, at least from a player perspective. Business-wise, I'm sure the first year was a much bigger deal, what with the many unmet expectations and resulting lay-offs. But from a player point of view, it wasn't actually such a bad time, considering the sheer amount of content that was being released.

Knights of the Eternal Throne on the other hand was a bit of a mess from the beginning. The story was solid, but it was originally meant to go on for much longer and was quickly cut short (for whatever reasons).

After the heavy single-player focus of KotFE, there seemed to be some renewed interest in releasing group content, but initially only in the form of uprisings, which were a bit awkward. I really wanted to like them, but ultimately I was not at all inspired to repeat them unless I was going for an achievement or something. I couldn't quite put my finger on why they just didn't grab me for the longest time, until a commenter described them as flashpoints with the interesting bosses taken out and more of the sort of trash pulls put in that everyone always wants to skip.

And of course there was Galactic Command. Not going to re-hash that story yet again! Let's just say that it was quite a disaster at launch; it was probably the period of time in which I was the most unsatisfied with SWTOR gameplay-wise that I've ever been, and it made several good people I knew leave the game for good. Boo!

The first couple of months after launch mostly seemed to be dedicated to damage control. We will be getting back to Republic vs. Empire, honest! And you'll get a new operation too, even if it's only one boss at a time!

The release of Iokath in April 2017 was true to this change in direction, but felt somewhat clumsily done. Yes, we were getting back to Republic vs. Empire, but the plot felt like it had been written with a single destination in mind and little concern for whether it made sense how we got there. Iokath also featured our first new daily area in years, yet it was awkward to navigate and initially released with several dailies actually costing you money instead of awarding it (yes, really).

In May, Keith Kanneg becoming the game's new Producer gave many of us new hope for improvements. And ultimately, I think he has been good for the game, but it's been a very slow process. I'm a bit hesitant to speculate ever since I read John Staats' WoW Diary - in which he proclaims that player speculation about what's going on inside video game development is pretty much always wrong, no matter how well thought-out - but what it felt like from the outside above all else was like Keith had to completely clean house and revamp a lot of things, which took up a lot of dev time that could otherwise have been used to create new content.

After he took charge, we basically got a slow trickle of new content alternating with systems updates: the second Gods from the Machine encounter was released a full three months after the first, then a month later we got a new flashpoint with some story, then another three months passed until a big round of server merges, and so on.

It took almost a full year for all five bosses in Gods from the Machine to be put live, and the traitor story arc, consisting of three bits of story tied to an equal number of new flashpoints, took a full nine months from start to finish. It wasn't bad content, it was just coming out so, so... slowly.

The traitor story arc did also mark an interesting turning point from my point of view though. While the first chapter, Crisis on Umbara, continued in a similarly awkward vein to Iokath, part two was a marked improvement, and part three was all-around enjoyable again. It was also an interesting time to be playing and engaging with the community, as there was a lot of discussion about what to make of the traitor's actions, which was the kind of thing you only get to experience right at the release of such new story content.

After that we had to deal with another relative drought of content for several months, until Bioware revealed that a new, bigger piece of content was coming in December, which would eventually be followed by a whole expansion. It's kind of weird to think that this was a year ago now and said expansion is only launching now.

Three years is a long time for any MMO to go without an expansion, but it has been even more so in SWTOR's case, which was pumping them out mere months apart before that (even if they were smaller in scope than what many other MMOs call expansions). It kind of felt like Bioware just completely lost the plot for a little while after KotET's launch, with everything a bit of a mess and no clear plan in terms of how to proceed.

I don't have a citation at hand, but I even remember Keith saying at one point that he wasn't that keen on expansions and preferred smaller content updates himself, which may have contributed to no moves being made towards working on another big content drop for a long time. I'm glad that the cries for a new expansion eventually won out though, even if it took a while. I'm looking forward to playing it in a few days!

As for what comes after... who knows? I remain eternally optimistic that things are maybe back on track now and the next big update won't take three years, but I honestly don't know. It's a persistent rumour that the team working on SWTOR is much smaller than those working on comparable MMOs, which would obviously limit their resources if true. But I take heart from how passionate they seem to be and that - raw quantity of output aside - I've felt that they've been taking steps in the right direction for the past two years, both in terms of story and in terms of how they interact with the community. For me, Jedi Under Siege has easily been the most enjoyable addition to the game in years. Ultimately, those are things that matter more to me than the sheer frequency of new patches.