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. 

Flashpointing on Different Servers

One of the major reasons I've really been enjoying the current Galactic Season is that it's gotten me back into pugging. I've enjoyed doing group content in SWTOR with strangers for as long as I can remember, but over the last few years I've kind of fallen out of the habit on my home server Darth Malgus. I think it's mainly because I spend so much time on organising and running things with my guild that my "weekly group content quota" feels more than filled by the time that's all done.

On the other servers though, it's a different story. While most of my characters are guilded at this point, due to time zones I rarely find myself with an opportunity to join my guildies there for group content, so most of the time I'm at the mercy of random strangers who happen to be online at the same time as me. And it's been surprisingly fun!

What's been really interesting about the whole experience though is that doing at least one flashpoint per week on every server, one can really feel the different vibes. I briefly toyed with the idea of taking detailed notes and trying to come up with some sort of objective ranking but quickly discarded that notion, both because it would've been a lot of work but also because things like whether you had a nice group or why you may have liked one pug more than another are really hard to objectively quantify. I decided it was fine to limit myself to subjective observations and let people make their own judgements about that.

To begin with, I'll say that the differences between the servers are actually not dramatic in my opinion. It's not like you'll always have good runs on one server and bad ones on another. So far this season, every single flashpoint I got into was completed successfully, with the exception of a master mode Ruins of Nul where we called it quits on Regnant. However, that particular boss is very tough, we'd given it several decent tries, and it just didn't look like we were getting even close to succeeding. Everyone was very polite about collectively admitting defeat at that point.

I also haven't seen a single hostile vote-kick initiated anywhere, which was interesting to me compared to World of Warcraft, where people will boot you for the most frivolous of reasons. In my SWTOR flashpoints this season, I once initiated a kick for someone who'd been disconnected for a while when we couldn't proceed any further at a checkpoint that required everyone in the group to be present and click, and in another run an individual who'd been kind of toxic themselves actively begged to be kicked to get away from the rest of the group. But that was entirely it.

That's not to say that all players in my flashpoints have been perfect angels, but if there's conflict, people would seemingly rather have a verbal fight about it than simply try to give their opponent the boot, which I find interesting. I could imagine that some might prefer being quietly removed over being insulted in what's supposed to be just a game, but personally I kind of appreciate that this shows that even when things get heated, SWTOR players have an unspoken attitude of "we're in this together, so let's all just get to the end, OK?" where they don't want to deprive someone else of their flashpoint credit even if they find the other person annoying.

Generally, most of my runs have been what I'd call pleasant and quiet: not much conversation and we just get on with things without too much friction. Usually at least one person will aim for every possible shortcut there is, but at the same time nobody bats an eyelid if someone fails to be sneaky and pulls an extra group - you just help to clean up and get on with it.

So that's what's been the same on all servers. Now let's talk about those subtle differences I mentioned:

I feel like on Leviathan and Tulak Hord, you can really tell that these are smaller communities as everything's just a little bit more friendly and relaxed. People are a bit more chatty than average, with everyone always saying hi and bye at the start and end of a run and actually pausing to discuss tactics if there are any questions or hiccups. I wouldn't say these chats are necessarily "nicer" than on other servers (the chattiness can also include rudeness or complaints) but there is a clear acknowledgement of the other players being there and attempts at communication.

You'll run into people with a range of skills, from the one who's never done the instance before to the experienced raider, with most probably sitting somewhere in-between. These servers are small but still healthy communities, where you'll learn to recognise the names of some of the bigger guilds after a while.

This is somewhat of a contrast to Star Forge, whose mega server status has only been increasing over the past couple of years, as people from smaller servers with an interest in high-end or queued content are increasingly transferring off the smaller servers in order to have a larger pool of players to work with and shorter queues. As a result of that, I feel like Star Forge is the server where you have the highest chance of having one or more super efficiency-obsessed players in your group who set a stiff pace because they're already planning their next activity afterwards and don't want to spend a second more inside this flashpoint than they have to. If there's some new degenerate trash skip, you'll probably learn it here. (Me in D7: What's this guy doing, running right through so many groups at once? Wait what, if we just stand here and wait, everything evades? WTF.)

I think this creates an interesting conundrum because in general we'd like to guide new players towards a server that's busy and where queues are popping, but I can't help but get the impression that at least as far as flashpoints are concerned, almost any other server is probably a more welcoming environment for someone's first run, as people are going at least marginally more slowly, so that chances of the newbie just being left behind and panicking over where everyone went are at least somewhat reduced.

To clarify though, I'm not claiming that Star Forge players are unfriendly or anything. I haven't seen that particular situation arise myself, but I imagine most would probably be perfectly fine with slowing down a bit if someone said that they're new and need a bit of help. It's just that the default assumption in group content seems to be that if you're on Star Forge, you're here because you're a veteran player who wants to maximise your efficiency in terms of play time, more so than anywhere else at least.

This is particularly striking when compared to Satele Shan, the other and now smaller US server. Am I saying that everything there is super slow? Not at all, SS players can also be in a hurry, but what has stood out to me there is how much personality players display in my runs there. Both my best and worst runs of the season (so far) have been on Satele Shan.

The worst was a run where one guy was always rushing ahead and ignoring that the rest of the group was still fighting things, while another player who was queued as tank was pulling things willy-nilly without actually tanking them. These two people could hardly have been more at odds with each other, they fought about it, and me and the remaining dps were awkwardly caught in the middle.

The good runs on the other hand were ones where people were chatting happily, asking to do the bonus boss and just generally goofing off in a way that's just such a contrast to the more business-like, in-and-out approach that I usually encounter on Star Forge (and many other servers). It's like everyone who wants a fast and easy ride has transferred off and what's left of the population has a much higher density of absolute maniacs (both good and bad).

Finally, we have Shae Vizla, the Oceanic server where queued content mostly died about three months after its release. The current and previous Galactic Season have been good at creating groups for the featured content at least, but I've got to admit the experience always feels a bit sad to me, because my impression is that you basically get only two kinds of people in these runs: complete newbies who decided to queue up for something for the first time, and seasoned veterans who are only here for Galactic Seasons (and are usually in one of three guilds). 

I'm being a bit hyperbolic of course, but it does feel markedly different from the vibes on Leviathan and Tulak Hord, where you still have this healthy mix of different player types. On Shae Vizla, the newbies presumably don't talk because they're unsure of what's going on, and the veterans don't talk because they're like Star Forge rushers on crack - gotta quickly finish this flashpoint here so I can do it five more times on the other servers!

I'm curious whether others who've done group content on more than one server have had similar experiences or see the situation completely differently. Even if you play on only one server, do you think my characterisation of the flashpoint-playing population matches up with your own experiences there?

Let's Talk About Czerka Combat Enhancers

During the last Galactic Season, we were introduced to the concept of experimental Czerka combat stims, which were supposed to bring a breath of fresh air to an old type of content that turned out to be the season's theme: uprisings. The reality of that didn't really match my expectations, and I discussed in this post how and why I thought that the effects of the stims were mostly boring and useless. I suggested that at least two of the three needed buffing, but nothing of that sort ever happened.

When new stim effects were announced for this season, I didn't get my hopes up too much but figured that they could hardly be worse than the ones from Season 8. Again I ended up slightly disappointed... this time not by the new effects themselves, but by the fact that all the old ones were still present as well, so every time you use a stim, you only have a two in five chance of actually seeing one of the new powers. I think it took me three or four weeks until I finally got sufficiently "lucky" with the random numbers. (Later I would always click the buff off if I didn't like it and reapply the stim until I got a result I liked, but early on I didn't have that many stims from drops yet and I didn't care enough to buy extras from the vendor.)

The two new effects are both decent actually: One gives you two floating probes over your shoulders that add dps by pew pew-ing everything you're in combat with, and the other one gives you a temporary action button that allows you to pick up a mob up to silver strength and throw it at another enemy. That can be kind of fun, especially when it leads to somewhat unexpected results (such as being able to pick up and throw a stationary turret), but it does kind of lose its lustre after a while - in my opinion at least - mainly because I think the cooldown is too long, and the fact that the throw causes everything in the vicinity to fly off in ten different directions is actually kind of inconvenient in AoE situations.

Anyway, talking about the different enhancer effects wasn't actually going to be the main point of this post. Instead, it's that this season has kind of made me wonder about the concept of these stims as a whole because I've noticed some friction for the first time that I never encountered last season. Back then, the main thing that stood out to me was that in any given uprising, I was often the only one to pop a stim, which gave me the impression that people didn't really know or care about the feature. If people were ever confused by some mobs growing big and red, or my character leaving pink puddles of poop on the floor, nobody ever said anything.

This season though, I've noticed an increase in friction around the stims. I still see few other people using them in pugs most of the time, but I actually had two runs of the featured veteran flashpoint of the week (both on the Leviathan server) where someone asked for the stim buffs to be removed. I didn't want to, and since I'm not fluent enough in French to have a discussion about it, I unfortunately turned into one of those pugs that just follow along silently and don't respond to anything, but it was still awkward.

On the other end of the spectrum, I've experienced (and heard of other people's unpleasant experiences with) people popping combat enhancers in master mode flashpoints. Now, best case that just turns the whole run into a big of a slog, but in some instances it can actually seriously kneecap you - for example on a boss fight where you're supposed to kill adds quickly, having those adds suddenly quadruple in health when they spawn in can pose a serious obstacle. The solution is obvious - get rid of the combat enhancer - but having to be the party pooper that asks someone else to please click off their stim buff isn't really any fun either.

What I'm getting from both of these scenarios is that the trade-off the stims ask of you (gain an extra ability in exchange for some mobs gaining more health and hitting harder) doesn't feel worth it a lot of the time. I'll be honest myself and admit that I'm 100% only doing it for the achievement that requires you to kill 250 enhanced mobs in flashpoints. This has turned out to be much easier to achieve than last season's equivalent for some reason - maybe because flashpoints are generally longer than uprisings?

On Darth Malgus, where I always do my weekly flashpoint with guildies and we all agreed to pop a stim at the start, we were all done with the achievement after only four or five weeks (though the fact that we're the kind of people who will do the bonus boss in every flashpoint certainly helped with that). On the other servers it's still a work in progress for me, but the reason I even considered this one achievable on all servers is the fact that even in a run where only one person is using an enhancer and we skip a lot of mobs, I'll still be able to make a decent chunk of progress on my tally.

However, once done I'm not really interested in continuing to use the enhancers after that, because I'm honestly inclined to agree that they just make everything take longer without a sufficiently fun pay-off and I don't want to get into arguments about it with the rest of my pug group. I don't know what kind of systems the devs are planning for the next Galactic Season, but I don't really feel like this whole Czerka stims thing has been a huge success, at least not the way it's currently implemented.

Still, I'd love to hear other opinions on this. What have your experiences been with the Czerka combat enhancers this season? Do you find them fun or tedious, and have you experienced any disagreement about this in your flashpoint pugs? Let me know in the comments. 

GS9, Week 4 Thoughts

This week was probably the least fun week of Galactic Season 9 for me so far, though I can't tell for sure whether the objectives were just less fun by themselves or whether my "new season enthusiasm" was slowly starting to wear off. That isn't to say that it was a bad week, just one that felt like it required more effort.

The dynamic encounter planet of the week was Dromund Kaas, which was weirdly enough quite a mixed bag. First off, it required 25 instead of 15 encounter completions again, which I found off-putting, though that didn't prevent me from doing the objective anyway, at least not this early in the season.

More strikingly though, Dromund Kaas was a weird inverse of Ilum last week - as mentioned then, I think the dynamic encounters on the latter are usually somewhat less fun due to the high mob density, so having more people around who were constantly clearing things out actually made everything more pleasant. Dromund Kaas on the other hand has a lot of encounters that are usually quite fun in my opinion... but they just don't scale with large crowds at all. Watching a dozen people all try to be the first to click that one terminal in "Rogue Droid Uprising" would have been funny if it hadn't also been very frustrating. The cherry on top was that this particular encounter has an achievement for clicking the terminal really quickly after getting to that stage of progression - not this week, bucko!

The veteran flashpoint of the week was the first part of the Jedi Prisoner storyline on each faction, which meant running either Taral V or Boarding Party and was another objective I wasn't too thrilled about. The Jedi Prisoner is an interesting storyline, but all the flashpoints involved in it are definitely in the bottom half of my list if I had to rank all flashpoints from best to worst. Gameplay-wise, they're all kind of long and boring, and while there are a lot of mobs that can be skipped, that just makes the whole experience feel a bit unsatisfying in a different way (to me anyway). Also, what's the point of doing Boarding Party if you don't get to confront Captain Yelto at the end?!

Unsurprisingly, my favourite run of this objective was the one I did with Mr Commando, who - despite not having run any flashpoints in what felt like forever - still remembered his exact pulling routine to unlock the Taral V bonus boss in what he felt was the most efficient way possible, which I thought was quite beautiful to behold. As it happened, we also had to pug one dps in that run, and I was a bit worried that we might get someone who'd be annoyed at us not skipping everything to finish the run as quickly as possible. However, we got lucky and got a level 15 who actually seemed quite delighted by the experience, gained six levels throughout the flashpoint and asked us at the end whether we wanted to do another one, which I thought was cute.

Running a master mode flashpoint was also an objective once again, and I was happy to do so on five servers (Shae Vizla is only being left out because I can't get the queue to pop there, even while queueing as tank or healer). My random pops this week were Blood Hunt, Cademimu, Mandalorian Raiders and Assault on Tython times two, which took me up to four runs of the latter this season already.

I'm curious whether that was just pure RNG or whether this is a side effect of the new exclusion rules. I have this theory that people primarily choose to exclude flashpoints from their random queue for three reasons:

1. They're perceived as too hard (e.g. Ruins of Nul, Shrine of Silence).
2. They're perceived as too long (e.g. The Esseles, Directive 7).
3. They're perceived as easy and overfarmed to an annoying degree (e.g. Hammer Station, Athiss).

If all four people that are up next in the queue have excluded five flashpoints for different reasons, that narrows the selection down by quite a lot - and I reckon Assault on Tython may simply be one of those that slips through the net either way, as it's neither faceroll easy nor particularly hard, and not terribly long either (especially if you skip some of the early trash). Has anyone else been seeing more of this one than usual? My hypothesis will need further testing for sure.

As for the other flashpoints, Blood Hunt was largely unremarkable, and Cademimu was the one I did with Mr Commando, which once again meant doing the bonus and just dragging a pug along whether they liked it or not, though they didn't complain about it. It was funny though when the guildie who was our fourth accidentally took the elevator downstairs in the middle of the bonus boss fight. 

That said, the weirdest/most amusing run was probably the Mandalorian Raiders I did on Satele Shan. I noted last week that I'm not a fan of dps running ahead and pulling when I'm the tank, right? Well, in this one there was a Guardian dps who took off like a bat out of hell the moment we zoned in and then kept pulling non-stop. I considered saying something like "you know this is master mode, right" but decided that this would've been too passive-aggressive - but also, I was honestly kind of confused more than anything because of how he kept getting away with it, in the sense that none of the trash seemed to hurt him too badly even when he got all the aggro. I was even starting to wonder whether I'd accidentally queued for veteran mode by mistake.

It wasn't until we killed Braxx the Bloodhound with the healer dead and everyone else on about ten percent health that the Guardian paused and said something along the lines of "I only just realised this is master mode since there were no kolto stations". So that was kind of humorous. He did stop pulling after that, we had a few more mishaps anyway, but ultimately it was all good.

GS9 Flashpointing, Week 3

I wasn't planning to keep a diary of my weekly activities this season - and I guess I'm still not really keeping one, at least not one that involves the level of detail with which I kept Galactic Season diaries in Season 1 and Season 6 - but I do find the weekly flashpoint objectives interesting enough that I keep wanting to take some notes on them.

In general, the third week of Galactic Season 9 was another really pleasant one with multiple easy objectives, to the point that I ended up going 7 out of 7 on all servers. You know it's an easy one when you set yourself a goal to reach a certain objective by the end of the week and end up ticking off several others by accident before you even get there! That's the kind of week it was.

The dynamic encounter planet of the week was Ilum. It's the planet I've ranked as the least fun in terms of dynamic encounters so far, but the reason I did so was that I think many encounters have a high mob density that tends to get in the way of whatever the actual objective is. In a week like this one, where there were plenty of people on Ilum every day, this wasn't nearly as bad as mobs were constantly getting cleared out left and right. Turns out even the rather tedious Fall of Fort Tonvarr can be fun with a sufficiently large crowd of people around.

The featured veteran mode flashpoint of the week was Mandalorian Raiders, which is another relatively easy one. I wonder if all the featured flashpoints will be softballs or whether the devs will make us "graduate" to some of the trickier ones as the season progresses.

Anyway, nothing too noteworthy happened in any of my runs of this particular flashpoint this week, except that in one run where we had particularly high dps (it was a group with multiple level 80s if I recall correctly) the last boss was burned down so quickly that he completely forgot to do any mechanics, just stood there and didn't move until he died. The only downside of this was that this also seemed to bug out his on-screen position, as none of us were able to loot him, always getting the "you can't reach that" error message.

I still remember when at least parts of this flashpoint could be quite deadly, such as if you pushed the last boss himself too quickly and got too many turret adds, but in the one group where this happened it was no problem to survive the turret fire anyway.

Also, the dog trash used to hit so hard, I remember on master mode we'd have to rotate stuns to make sure the tank would survive. I will say though that in runs with lower-level characters, I did notice that ahead of some pulls with multiple dogs, people often suddenly step on the brakes, clearly waiting for someone else to go first and get pounced on (I tended to volunteer).

The more exciting thing were once again the master mode flashpoints though, even if I got a pretty tame selection this week.

On Leviathan I got Hammer Station at last! I'm happy that it took until week three for it to show up in my randoms. Also, we actually killed all the trash to the first boss properly instead of trying to run like headless chickens, which is something I appreciated.

On Tulak Hord I got into a Maelstrom Prison and nearly died on the first pull when I got all the healer aggro just as a guildie was asking me something, but other than that it was smooth. And yes, a guildie was actually online in the largely inactive guild I joined! They asked me to invite an alt of theirs into the guild, so I had them invite two of mine in return after the flashpoint, so I can at last reap a few more Conquest rewards on this server. (Now, if only I knew what to do with my Imps...)

On Star Forge, I did several flashpoints on Swtorista's stream, and we got Nathema Conspiracy and Legacy of the Rakata. In the former, we actually did no skips, and we all agreed that the last boss used to be way harder somehow. In the latter, we wiped once on the bonus boss, oops! But it was all good fun.

On Satele Shan, I once again used my magic tank powers to get an instant pop for a pug. The power is addictive! This time I got into Red Reaper, a flashpoint I hadn't done in ages. A dps Powertech was constantly running ahead, which annoyed me a bit because if you're on a class that can tank and you want to always be the first to charge in, just queue as tank, damn it! These sorts of damage dealers are my least favourite to tank for. Though this one did stop just short of actually trying to pull for me. Fortunately I did still end up remembering all the pulls and skips so I managed to keep up reasonably well. I was really just having tank ego problems here: I got an instant pop and had a smooth run where nobody died, but one of the dps was playing in a manner that was slightly annoying to me, woe is me.

On Darth Malgus, we managed to field two groups for master mode flashpoints after our social ops run on Saturday, which was something I was very happy to see as I've always felt that flashpoints are a great social activity. My group got the Esseles, which I didn't have any particularly strong feelings about at this point, but Mr Commando groaned as it was the third time he'd had to run the Esseles in three weeks. I will note that I think for master modes the cut scene skip is fine by the way, because these were always meant to be a gear grind above anything else.

I'm curious to see what exciting places the group finder will take me next week!

A Good Start to the Season

You may find it hard to believe after my outrage at how gutted the Esseles and the Black Talon feel without cut scenes, but I've actually had a pretty good start to Galactic Season 9 in spite of that. Patch day was a bit rough, with my game crashing to desktop something like seven times, but once I learned that this was caused by hovering over one specific UI element, I was once again too amazed by just how weird MMO bugs can be sometimes to really be mad about that. (Plus, once I knew what was causing it, it was easy to avoid. They then patched the issue a couple days later.)

The flashpoint theme has actually felt surprisingly invigorating. I've long said that I'm a big fan of flashpoints, but I'm not immune to incentives, and the fact that there's literally been nothing to earn for me in flashpoints for a couple of years now has admittedly discouraged me from running them. I would rarely go for the seasons objectives that required you to run two specific flashpoints because they were just too time-consuming and felt inefficient. The dedicated weekly objective for this season only requiring a single quick veteran mode run makes a world of a difference, and I was genuinely surprised that I actually had fun blitzing through Athiss six times this past week.

My favourite run was the one with my husband on our home server, where he actually bothered to go into one of the side alcoves to use his scavenging to repair the broken combat droid there, something I hadn't done in so long that I'd genuinely forgotten that it was even a thing. One of the guildies in our group then kept casting a heal over time on it to keep it alive, to the point that the temporary pet was actually still alive when we got to the last boss. This is where we learned that the living fire debuff can go on non-player characters! The poor droid didn't manage to survive that one, but it was good for a laugh. 

The other weekly objectives for the first two weeks were pretty good too, with some nice softballs that didn't take too much time to complete on multiple servers while also earning me new achievements.

My personal biggest delight last week though was that there was also an objective to run any random master mode flashpoint, which I did on five out of six servers. (Sadly I couldn't get the queue to pop on Shae Vizla even while queueing as a tank.)

Even better, not a single one of them was Hammer Station, even though I had queued for the full selection. I had the expectation that most people would use the new feature that allows you to exclude a few flashpoints without losing your random bonus to primarily veto long or difficult ones, but maybe there are more fellow Spammer Station haters out there than expected who are actually excluding that one instead.

Either way, the random master mode flashpoints I got put into were Assault on Tython (twice), Battle of Rishi, Lost Island and Crisis on Umbara. The latter must have been nerfed a lot since I last did it, as my group completed it successfully without wiping despite feeling pretty mid in terms of skill. I know there's been some gear inflation since 7.0, but the first two bosses barely even seemed to do any damage, and we pulled the bonus boss by accident with a bunch of trash and still killed that successfully too. Not that I'm complaining!

Battle of Rishi had me busting out my Shadow's tank spec on Satele Shan, which I had actually set up some time ago but then never ended up using. I was very pleased with myself for how I guided the rest of the group through the run after someone expressed that it had been a while and they weren't sure they remembered what to do. Trying to model good tank behaviour!

Lost Island was the most memorable one though, as that was what I got on the Leviathan server while queueing on my Sage as a healer. It quickly became obvious that the tank and one of the damage dealers knew basically nothing about the flashpoint, while the other damage dealer gave the vibes of someone who had done it before and generally knew how to play but couldn't fully remember all the tactics properly. It was pretty funny to read the chat and try to make sense of it, as my knowledge of French is very limited. I think I could generally get the vibe/general topic, but not necessarily what exactly people were trying to say.

Unsurprisingly we wiped something like five times on the second boss as everyone but me kept getting knocked off the platform. I tried to use Google Translate to explain where people needed to stand, but either the translation made no sense or they intentionally decided to ignore me because I sounded too weird, as they didn't appear to listen to my advice. Fortunately they eventually seemingly managed to figure it out on their own and we were victorious. The remaining two bosses after that were comparatively easy, but I still felt like I was carrying pretty hard, healing people through some significant amounts of "standing in bad".

I felt properly giddy after we finished, both excited and relieved that we'd succeeded despite our difficulties, but also a bit amused by how ridiculous the whole experience had felt. The dps who'd given me vibes of having some idea of what to do whispered me afterwards to... I don't know, I'm guessing it was something like "we're queueing again" though it might have meant something completely different; I genuinely had no clue. I just logged off because I'd definitely had enough for that evening.

I'm hoping to see that objective pop up more often though.

Flashpoints: Why Are We Here?

I've been having fun with the new season so far and will probably talk about that at some point, but the removal of cut scenes and group conversations from the group finder continues to weigh heavily on my mind. While my initial reaction was skewing towards slightly negative, I was telling myself that this is probably one of those cases where I'm just a weird outlier for liking something (group conversations in pug flashpoints) that many people don't like, and that I'll see the benefits of this change soon enough. I still remember when the Czerka flashpoints first came out back in 2013, I was actually somewhat disappointed at first that they were so streamlined without any interactive cut scenes, but I got over that pretty quickly.

One of the seasons objectives this week was to run either the Black Talon or the Esseles on veteran mode via the group finder, and with me doing Galactic Seasons on all servers I had plenty of opportunity to see the new change in action. For the most part, the experience was... fine. I'm not going to pretend that I would have had so much more fun if I'd gotten the full cut scene experience six times instead of the new fade to black thing. Primarily, it was all just kind of weird, with a lot of running back and forth with no discernible purpose when you don't actually have the story cut scenes to tell you what is happening.

There was one run that really annoyed me though. I got into an Esseles on a level 80 healer, and the other three members of the group were a level 80 dps, a level 10 and a level 14. I don't know if the two lowbies were new players or just alts, but either way they were subject to certain limitations at their low level, such as slower speed and lacking strong AoE abilities or defensives. Yet the level 80 was constantly mounting up and driving ahead, aggroing absolutely everything to pull it into a corner at the end, while the rest of us slowly jogged after them on foot. (I would've been able to keep up more but I felt it was my duty to protect the lowbies, who would've died several times if I hadn't healed them.)

The 80 repeatedly told them off for fighting things and said they should just mount up as well. I got the impression that at least one of them got a bit flustered by that and tried to overcompensate by mounting up and rushing ahead even of the level 80 at one point, just to then be told off because not everyone had made it up the elevator yet when we were put into combat as a result of that (which was technically correct but also must've been confusing in terms of mixed messages).

I got really annoyed with that level 80's attitude but didn't say anything because frankly I was quite busy just keeping up with their constant running myself, as well as just keeping everyone else alive. I simply did what I could to support the lowbies, such as when one of them veered off towards the bonus boss while the 80 was just trying to go straight to the end. I just kept hoping that neither of the little guys were genuinely new players because if I had been a newbie in that situation, I would have been so put off from running flashpoints ever again.

Now, to be clear, all of this technically has nothing to do with the cut scene change, because people could act like that while the group conversations were still a thing. However, at least the cut scenes would put the brakes on things a little bit. They were a reminder that this flashpoint wasn't designed to be rushed like that. And I feel that the removal of the cut scenes does the opposite now, vindicating people like that level 80 in the sense that yes, the devs agree with you that flashpoints are something to get over and done with as quickly as possible. I feel like my opinion was validated by a thread on the SWTOR subreddit posted this week about how this kind of behaviour seemed to be worse than ever since the patch. In a comment thread there, someone who commented that "games are meant to be fun" also received the reply: "It's a season objective. Literally not meant to be fun. Just a way to progress."

I just kept thinking to myself: What are we doing here? Why are we optimising content for people who don't like it? And I realised that I'm worried about SWTOR flashpoints going down the way of World of Warcraft dungeons.

WoW was my first MMO as well as my introduction to doing group content with random players, and I loved it. The first time I did the Deadmines? Amazing. I got yelled at for ninja-looting a chest because I didn't know any better, but I apologised, learned from it and we moved on. For about three or four years, dungeons were easily one of my favourite things to do in the game. However, somewhere along the line, things changed. Blizzard wanted players to run dungeons in greater numbers and more often, so they became increasingly incentivised for endless replay, and people's attitudes changed accordingly.

I still play WoW almost twenty years later, but I rarely do dungeons in its modern incarnation now. Every now and then some reward will lure me into queueing up for a pug dungeon again, just for me to instantly be reminded of why I no longer find them fun. Everything is just an insane rush to the end to pick up the reward and it's a casual or new player's absolute nightmare.

When I started playing SWTOR, I instantly fell in love with the game's flashpoints too. The Esseles and Black Talon are absolutely amazing experiences that have no real equivalent in other games when you play through them in a group for the first time and as intended (which is to say, actually paying attention to the story and listening to the group conversations). They are also clearly not intended to be re-run on a daily basis. Sure, they can be fun to re-play every now and then, to see what different conversation choices do and so on, but it's clearly not something you're supposed to do all the time. The game won't stop you from running it multiple times a day if you want to, but I think it's fair to say that you were effectively "doing it wrong" in that case and couldn't really complain if it wasn't super fun. The idea with SWTOR flashpoints was that they were still meant to be a bit of an adventure every time you entered one, something you can only really consume in moderation.

With this change... I don't really know anymore. I can even defend the removal of cut scenes as a temporary measure for the Galactic Season, mostly because it benefits me personally, but people like me, who do Galactic Seasons on every server, can hardly make up a significant chunk of the player base. Clearly the intent is to get more players into flashpoints that haven't done them before, but I'm not sure this whole exercise is going to show them anything appealing enough to want to come back. Endless running along corridors with no rhyme or reason about what is going on? What's appealing about that?

I also saw someone comment somewhere that Final Fantasy XIV used to have a similar problem with new players having a bad experience in the group finder due to issues with cut scene skipping, and Square Enix's solution to that was to make the cut scenes unskippable for everyone and increase the reward payout to make sure veterans were being suitably compensated for the fact that the run was taking longer to accommodate the newbies. Now, I don't play FFXIV myself, so I can't tell you how well that worked out for everyone, but I think it shows that "whelp, we've got to cater to the people who are in a hurry" is not an inevitability. SWTOR and FF have a lot in common in terms of their focus on story, so it's actually kind of odd to me now to see the SWTOR devs choose speed-running over story in this instance.

At this point, after thinking about it some more, I feel like instead of removing cut scenes all over the place they should've gone back and reconsidered what flashpoints are all about and why people are funnelled into them the way they are. Why do people ask to skip cut scenes? Because they're in a flashpoint they don't really want to be in. Why are they in this flashpoint? Because we give extra rewards for queueing for a random flashpoint. Why do we give rewards for that? So people who want to run specific flashpoints can get groups for them. But why would people run the Esseles in a group these days when there is a solo mode available anyway? Maybe the devs should've just taken it out of the group finder like they did Kuat and Colicoid War Games. Leaving it in but taking out everything that actually made it unique and insteresting just feels like extremely muddled game design to me. It just doesn't make sense in my head.

A Farewell to Pug Cut Scenes

I said in my post about the dev live stream last month that the most impactful announcement to me was that patch 7.1.1 was going to remove all cut scenes and group conversations from group finder flashpoints. While this was widely welcomed, I'm personally not convinced that it's the right decision for the devs to give in to the worst impulses of people who are always in a hurry, but we'll see how things play out. The patch went live this week, and either way it's done for now.

I just wanted to pay my own little tribute to all these cut scenes that I will no longer get to see, because I used to love taking screenshots of those group moments in pugs, so I dug through my screenshot folder archive and compiled some for this post. 

I was kind of surprised that the oldest screenshot of this kind I could find was the above scene from Battle of Ilum from 2016, but then I remembered that I was mostly unable to take screenshots during cut scenes for the game's first two years (not sure they ever fixed that bug) and yeah, I guess that checks out. You can tell that it's an older screenshot because everyone's outfits are relatively old school, with the Jedi in Thexan's robes being the most "modern" looking.

This shot on the other hand was from 2020, when I documented levelling a character purely through flashpoints for the second time and found that Battle of Ilum was a surprisingly common one to get randomly (if you excluded Hammer Station like I did). Gotta love the Twi'lek barely covering her privates on the ice planet. (No, I don't. I mostly dislike those kinds of outfits and in the cut scenes I found them quite immersion-breaking to be honest.)

The flashpoint I loved the most for group cut scenes was, ironically, one that only had a single one: Czerka Corporate Labs. However, it does have this brief moment at the end where your group enters the final boss room in this really cinematic looking way and I always loved capturing that one. I'm not kidding, I have so many shots of this scene. Here, have some more:

If you want to play a little game, you can try to pick out which character is mine in each shot! Or just generally let me know which character out of all the ones pictured you think looks the best. Or which group looks the most cohesive as a team. There are just so many things to ogle.

I almost forgot that Czerka Core Meltdown has a similar cut scene because it just doesn't work nearly as well. The above screenshot is cropped to focus more on the characters, because the camera is quite zoomed out if you look at the whole screen.

After Corporate Labs, I remember I kind of waited for Bioware to recreate that group cut scene magic in any of the flashpoints that followed but they never quite got there. The above shot from the end of Battle of Rishi is about as close as it got, and that, too required some cropping/zooming in.

A shot from Korriban Incursion. "Everyone with their weapons drawn" is another classic in terms of moments that looked great in screenshots.

Ah, Directive 7, one of the most interesting side stories from the base game that was never ever mentioned again anywhere. And another flashpoint with lots of little cut scenes (and even more trash mobs) that many hated for taking too long. But again, I quite enjoyed seeing my pug groups look cool and kick ass while facing off against Mentor.

Let's finish up with another screenshot from Battle of Ilum that stands for something else I'll miss: the dark side/light side choices. The image doesn't actually show the choice, but I saved it under the name "light side pug" - so the fact that I had ended up in a group of all light side characters on Imperial side stood out to me. I loved it when I found my people! And when someone disagreed about what the "right" choice was in a certain scenario, there was usually some friendly banter to be had. No more.

(Just as a disclaimer so nobody gets the wrong idea: I didn't "force" any of these pugs to wait for me while I was watching cut scenes. My attitude was always to skip if people wanted to skip, and watch if people wanted to watch, but you could easily get some great shots of certain moments even while space-barring through most of the conversation.)

Pugging Trench Runner

I've previously talked about how the current Galactic Season's focus on uprisings was off to a rough start, though things improved once Broadsword applied some difficulty nerfs and replaced veteran mode in the group finder with story mode.

Since then, I've pugged the uprising of the week on at least some servers pretty much every week with no issues. Until last week that is, when it was Trench Runner time. It had been a little while since I'd last run that particular uprising before that week, but from what I'd heard from people who'd given it a go more recently, it was both very good for progressing the seasonal meta achievement to kill empowered mobs and one of the more challenging uprisings.

I got to experience that for myself when I got into a run on my level 63 Sniper on Satele Shan. Everyone else in the group was also still levelling, with the highest level being a level 79 Juggernaut. The other two members of the group were another Juggernaut in their 40s and a low-level... something, I forget what their combat style even was, but they were only level 18 and by their own admission fresh off of Hutta and new to uprisings as a whole.

Things did not start off too well as we suffered several deaths right at the start, and the low-level quickly became very apologetic, clearly assuming that it was their fault somehow. I assured them that it was alright and that this was simply one of the tougher uprisings.

However, things continued to be messy. I kind of expected one of the Juggernauts to pull by virtue of being melee, but everyone kept standing around awkwardly, waiting for someone else to pull. Eventually I got impatient and did so myself, just to die on every pull where I did so. At one point I realised that I was high enough level now to spec into the Sniper's OP self-heal in cover and did that in hopes of increasing my survivability, but it still wasn't quite enough. I tried kiting, but if I wasn't shooting things, they just weren't dying.

It just felt like nobody but me was really doing much damage to anything at all (not least because whenever I pulled, I'd keep aggro on absolutely everything until I died). I even fired up Starparse to understand what was going on and it showed people doing about 3k dps each, which seemed crazy with everyone being scaled up to 80. I figured that simply couldn't be correct and had to be distorted by the long periods in combat when you were just waiting for things to spawn. (After the run, I had a closer look at the log and at least one of the Juggernauts was spending most of their time just hitting their basic attack.)

Regardless, we slowly bumbled onwards despite the dying and sometimes full wiping, until we got to the third bunker, where we just ran into a hard wall, always wiping within a minute at best. "Alright, tactics time," I said and started to explain how the turret worked and how we needed it to kill most of the adds at the top. I explained how we needed to kill at least some of the adds on the ground as well and couldn't just nuke the boss because we were taking too much damage. And to their credit, people tried! But we just couldn't do it.

I think on our best attempt, the low-level handled the turret while we killed the first few rounds of unavoidable adds, but things were dying so slowly and we were taking so much damage in the process that we used up both kolto buffs in the vicinity and they took ages to respawn. At some point the lowbie would get kicked out of the turret controls and I would take over, but while I was shooting the walkers and droids at the top, the rest of the group in the trench would wipe quickly, at best having gotten the boss to about fifty percent health.

I don't recall how many times we tried this, but eventually I just didn't know what else to suggest. The lowbie was a bit helpless by nature and neither of the Juggernauts seemed to be using any survival cooldowns from what I could see, but trying to teach people how exactly to use their class toolkit seemed to go a bit beyond what's appropriate in a piece of group content that's meant to take about ten to fifteen minutes.

Eventually I just thanked everyone for trying and left (after sending the lowbie one more reassuring whisper that it wasn't their fault and that the combination of people not using their abilities and being put into one of the tougher uprisings was just unfortunate.) A few minutes later I re-queued and got another pop quite quickly - this time with a group of three eighties with whom we blitzed through the whole thing without any real issues. However, I still felt bad about the group I had abandoned, especially for that lowbie who'd tried an uprising for the first time ever and had been keen to follow instructions but we just couldn't make it happen. I can only hope they weren't completely discouraged by the experience, and that the devs maybe revisit this uprising in particular in terms of tuning before the season is over.

This was just one of those situations where I'm never quite sure what the right solution should be. Does story mode content really need to be tuned down to the point where it can be completed with a group of people just hitting their basic attack? Part of me wants to yell no and argue that it's okay to push people a little bit to learn how to play the game. But then, how are people supposed to learn how to play while being put into group content with strangers where there's an expectation that it's supposed to be super accessible and that you can be in and out in ten minutes?

(As a side note, the swarms of mobs gave crazy XP. Just from that one aborted run followed by the full run that I completed shortly afterwards, my Sniper gained three levels. So there's that, I guess.)

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.

First Impressions of GS7

I haven't had as much of a chance to immediately dive into Galactic Season 7 as I maybe would've liked, but I did check in on all servers this week and at least made a start. I said I wasn't going to keep a detailed diary of my seasonal progress this time, but that doesn't mean that I have nothing at all to say about my experiences.

The first thing I noticed was that there doesn't seem to be a seasonal story this time. You still get a mission item at level one, but all that unlocks is a quick intro on Hutta where you briefly talk to someone from the Bounty Brokers Association about hunting down some Force-sensitive types - to provide an in-character explanation for killing the Dark vs. Light bosses I guess - and that's it.

I can't say I was particularly surprised or dismayed by that. While I loved GS5's story, last season was a bit of a damp squib in comparison, and I can only guess that the devs decided somewhere along the way that this "seasonal story" thing wasn't working out the way they'd hoped, so they just ditched it. And I'm fine with that. Yes, GS5 showed that there was potential to do more with the idea, but if it's not working, I'm happy for them to focus on other things, considering that seasons were never meant to be about story anyway. I just hope they put those cut scene and dialogue tree building resources to good use somewhere else.

In my last post I wondered which way GS7 was going to pivot after seemingly everybody hated last season's insane vendor trash grind. The answer to that is: they just got rid of the whole currency concept and the "big" seasonal achievement this time just requires you to do a lot of bounty contracts and kill a bunch of DvL bosses. That seems... reasonable to me. It's still going to take effort, but it's much more predictable and easier to space out based on your own preferences.

If you wanted to and have done a lot of bounty hunting in the past to generate unlocks, you could even complete the meta achievement in the first week! One of my guildies got all 40 of the required DvL boss kills within the space of a few days just by idling on Dromund Kaas and tapping the DvL boss for the week whenever a group came by. Shared tagging for the win! I do imagine this achievement is going to be a lot harder to get on the less popular servers though. (Not that I was planning to do that, but I mean for the people who have their mains there.)

With the currency (real or fake) gone and one of the easy weekly objectives having been focused on currency acquisition in the past, the devs decided to have two season-specific weeklies this time: one to kill two DvL bosses and one to do a bounty contract. I think that's nice as it adds more flavour to the season, and should satisfy both those looking for something easy to do solo every week (the bounty contract) and those who like the group objectives to have something to do with their guilds.

My experience with the DvL bosses themselves has been a bit of a... mixed bag. As mentioned before, I defeated them all back in the day, so I roughly knew what to expect, but I knew the devs were going to have to fix the awkward spawning/despawning mechanics and I figured maybe they were going to apply some nerfs in the process as well. The spawning issues have indeed been fixed, as just two bosses are up each week in a fixed spot, and they respawn after something like five minutes of being killed, so there's no fear of missing out if you're in the process of assembling a group and someone else gets there first.

However, in terms of difficulty, they don't feel nerfed at all. This first week, the two active spawn points were on Dromund Kaas and Tatooine - both low-level planets, which always used to make the fights easier - though even here you could already notice a marked difference between the damage output on DK vs. Tat. My guild group had no real problems of course, though even that wasn't without deaths, as it's easy to get caught out by a circle-drop-and-stun combo even as a seasoned raider.

On Star Forge I joined an Imperial pug group as healer, and it felt like insane level whack-a-mole trying to keep everybody alive, though we did successfully kill the boss on Dromund Kaas. I immediately moved on to Tatooine but some people said they wanted to kill the same boss again to progress towards the meta achievement. It then turned out that I must've either been the only healer or maybe just one of two, as it looked like the group wiped when they pulled the same boss again without me (I couldn't tell with 100% certainty, but everybody died and people in ops group chat sounded disappointed). I then summoned them to Tatooine, where we succeeded again, though with more deaths than last time.

On the other servers I was less successful. On Satele Shan I joined a pug but people kept dropping out as fast as new ones joined, and someone insisted that we shouldn't even try the boss until we had at least 16 players, so after about half an hour of that I dropped out too to go to bed. At other times, I just went to the jungle to see whether I was lucky enough to find someone else already fighting the boss, but was unlucky enough to not encounter any groups. I just got myself killed more than once when what looked like random levellers decided to try and solo the boss, and apparently the range at which you get pulled into combat is really big, meaning that if a single person decides to pull and you're an innocent bystander some yards away, you'll pretty much immediately find yourself dotted and stunned to death.

I suspect I could've gotten kills on more servers if I'd just had the time and dedication to simply loiter near a boss or on the fleet for longer, but I didn't want to do that this time. I'm trying to stick to my plan of aiming for fewer objectives per week on the secondary servers, and there were a lot of other objectives this first week that required a lot less time and effort. I still ended up achieving more than four weeklies on most servers, but it definitely felt much more relaxed to have a goal of four and then maybe go "oh, I can knock out one more out today" rather than trying to work towards six or seven from the start of the week and then feeling stressed out as the weekly reset draws close.

One thing I'd forgotten about and which I saw people complain about is that the dark and light tokens dropped by the bosses are per character, and that many of the rewards you can buy with them have alignment requirements. I'd honestly forgotten about all of that. I found that a lot of my characters still had loads of tokens from back in the day anyway, because there wasn't anything of interest to me left on the vendors. Plus the tokens were actually really easy to get back then, as you'd get one every time your character gained a Galactic Command (and later Renown) level while the side of the Force that matched your alignment was in the lead in the galaxy-wide Dark vs. Light war, which was easy enough to achieve. I agree that like the Nightlife chips, this is another currency that really should be legacy-wide, but considering what the devs said about the former, I wouldn't hold my breath for these tokens getting fixed before the end of the season either.

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.