SW:TOR

I got persuaded to click a link to be referred as a returning player into… SWTOR! (as I’d been planning to)

Here are a few first impressions (I’d written about Onslaught very briefly in October).

My characters are a mess, needed an hour to log in all 12 and get just a quick overview. All but one of the 70s are at exactly 60% XP into Level 71 except for 1. That one was CL 300 and I see no difference. Really weird. the 2 5x are also exactly at 60% XP into the next level. Even weirder.

Edit a few hours later: It seems to reset to 70 + 0% when ingame for a while, so probably just a weird display bug.

As I remembered correctly, my Republic and Empire mains have finished KotFE+KotET, and one alt has finished KotFE. Everyone else has finished most of the story lines up to that part, except for Ilum (half of them), Oricon (a few them), and Iokath (only the 3 I think). I still have the “Use the Group Finder”, “Try Starfighter!” and “Join a Warzone!” quests on most of them.

Half of them are completely swamped with BoE Adaptive Gear, sorted by Slot. One has all Feet+Legs items, one all Headgears, etc.pp.

2 new Astromech pets, 4 decoration items, a title, and 4 useless unlocks times 12.

I had a lot more millions of ingame currency than I’d remembered. Apparently I just collect it and don’t spend it. I also have 3 Gold Cartel packs of Decorations, unopened, must have bought them just before leaving. I also have 5757 Cartel Coins to spend. Yay.

Half of the toons have no spec, half still have one. That’s gonna be fun.

Wanted to start the Onslaught quest line, but I couldn’t find it. Fleet. Ship. Ossus. And then again all of those. I could finish the “Hearts and Minds” quest on Odessen, but then nothing. Then I went to bed.

This morning I did a complete run around Ossus, doing 11 dailies and fulfilling my weekly Conquest goal but the XP bar stopped at 99%. Researched some more.

Apparently I am a “subscriber”, but not a “subscriber”, so until I pay I will not get Onslaught.

Goddammit, Bioware, this (paying for new content) is completely fine if you message this correctly and not let me search for the breadcrumb quest for an hour and then block me from progressing at 99% of the XP. Had I not gotten any XP at 70.0% I would’ve noticed it. I had planned to pay anyway, but because I don’t know if I would waste these 7 days now I’m probably gonna wait – good job! I even got the “You’re a subscriber!” popup when I logged in and on the account management page I also have 6 days left. How poorly can you name this?

Anyway, weekly Conquest resets in 6h, so I’m gonna do something else before starting to go to 70.99 on the army of alts tonight. And maybe I’ll find out if I won’t waste these 6 days so I can subscribe sooner than next week.

While it’s been a while since I played SW:TOR I absolutely don’t have the time right now. I did login quickly to have a peek. Some observations:

• Not subscribed, so only 1 char “active” right now, my Commando
• The character window is different
• The Valor bar is still? buggy and flickering
• I only have 3 currencies left: Tech Fragments/Dark Side Tokens/Fleet Commendations
• I still have 2 Command Crate – Tier 4 in my inventory (this is in the patchnotes)
• The Renown Stash is still full 9/10 😛
• I have 350k credits + some in escrow, as expected
• My Legacy bank still shows me all my millions of credits
• The Combat Proficiencies window is still the only one that won’t close via the Esc key 😛
• There wasn’t a single pop up “new quest! new expansion! go here!” – weird. Do I have to subscribe? Should be big on the website or the patch notes or did I just miss this? Aha.
  Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ – Onslaught is coming October 2019, free to all subscribers – ok, missed it 🙂

And I basically also logged in because a friend just said he logged in for the first time in 2 years and was overcome by “OHMYGOD BAGS FULL” instantly. I was curious… and yep, it’s a thing. Makes you want to log off straight again.

No, I’ve not abandoned SWTOR completely, just put it on the backburner a little. I’m still busy in Rishi, fighting pirates.
I also haven’t started the Conquest this week, but I hope to get some time in on the weekend and finish it at least once, but it’s not one of the three I’m missing.
But I’ve also finished this finally, 5th class to Command Level 300 – gotta love that weird weekly handin. I’m mostly doing this to get better (healing) gear, but these last 14 boxes (10x T3, 4x T4) were a little meh.

I wrote about some goals a week ago and despite not being at home for a few days I managed to check a few things off the list. But tomorrow (in like 9h) work starts again and things will slow down. Also I managed to do some of the easy ones, pfff
 

• DONE Harlow Ricks’ daily on Light Side Empire chars
• Get Commando to CL 300 (at 265)
• Missing 4 3 conquest events: Emergency Operations, The Dread War, Total Galactic War, Flashpoint Havoc
• Missing 2 1 strongholds: Yavin 4 and Umbara
• Companion Achievements:
  • Recruit: M1-4X
  • Refuse: Broonmark, Ak’ghal Usar, Sgt. Rusk, Skadge, Lokin
  • 1000 kills:
    • Andronikos Revel: 815
    • Talos Drellik: 417
    • Lord Scourge: 444 0
    • Sgt. Rusk: 885 675
  • Search cantinas for Paxton Rall
• Leveling/Quests:
  • Finish Ziost on Merc
  • Finish Ziost on Sentinel
  • Get Marauder to 70 (at 57)
  • Get Guardian to 70 (at 58)
  • Finish Makeb on Marauder
  • Finish Makeb on Juggernaut (low prio)
  • Finish KotFE/KotET on Operative
  • Finish Ilum on Operative
  • Finish Ilum on Assassin
  • Finish Ilum on Shadow (low prio)
• Have a look at the Ossus dailies – normal / heroic

So that’s only one of twelve chars not having done Makeb and one of twelve not having done Ilum. But seven sitting with “Battle of Ilum” in their quest log and one with “False Emperor” – so that’s the cutoff point for my willingness to continue the Ilum story arc.
 

A goals/achievements update. Funny how I wanted to post this on Sunday but ended up playing a lot, until after midnight. So some inline updates. 😛
Missing/working on it:

• 13x 9x Harlow Ricks’ daily on Light Side Empire chars, then the 200 missions are done
• Get Commando to CL 300
• Missing 4 conquest events: Emergency Operations, The Dread War, Total Galactic War, Flashpoint Havoc
• Missing 2 strongholds: Yavin 4 and Umbara
• Companion Achievements:
  • Recruit: M1-4X
  • Refuse: Broonmark, Ak’ghal Usar, Sgt. Rusk, Skadge, Lokin
  • 1000 kills:
    • Andronikos Revel: 815
    • Talos Drellik: 539
    • Lord Scourge: 444 309
    • Sgt. Rusk: 885
  • Search cantinas for Paxton Rall
• Leveling/Quests:
  • Finish Ziost on Merc
  • Finish Ziost on Sentinel
  • Get Marauder to 70
  • Finish Makeb on Juggernaut (low prio)
  • Finish KotFE/KotET on Operative
  • Finish Ilum on Shadow (low prio)
• Have a look at the Ossus dailies
• Group Content:
  • Heal a Flashpoint
  • Heal an Operation
  • Do the 8 FPs I’ve never seen at least once
  • Try out Galactic Starfighter
  • Try out Space Missions for the first time since 2011
  • Try out an Uprising
• Do the Star Fortress quests for a second time
• Finish my Datacrons: Rishi, Fleet, Corellia, Taris

Done (what a short list):

• 10th Class to Level 70 (Mercenary), now missing Marauder (55), Guardian (20 50), Sniper (20), Sorcerer, Gunslinger, Vanguard
• 100% Life Day
• 2500 kills with C2-N2, and thus all achievements with the 2 droids

The real question is now if I want to grind out those 2500 kills on the Sentinel/Assassin that I hardly play or if I try to get my 20 Guardian up quickly to do Rusk/Scourge. Sounds a lot more interesting, with the XP event I can focus on the class story and still progress quickly. Then there’s still the weeklies, right now I’m using my Smuggler to farm healing gear for the Operative: Do weeklies, gain ~20 boxes, respec Healing, open them, reslot all 246/248 items to Bind-to-Legacy. Same can be done with the Commando once I hit 300. Not a bad use of my time I guess.
Also the Relics of the Gree Conquest (that I usually don’t like provided me with more completions than usual. Bounty Hunter, Mercenary, Juggernaut, Operative, and maybe I can even finish Guardian).

Some time ago I decided I want to try healing in SWTOR, but I had no suitable character. As I’m playing mostly Empire right now, that CL 300 Smuggler with ~240 DPS gear wasn’t any help, so I started to play my Operative a bit more, with the intention to grab some healing gear from the higher tier Command chests. He’s CL 134 now, so that’s not so much, but ok, it’s progressing.
But I also still had one of those boosts left so I went out to create a new char with the intention to boost. Then I read up on the boost and I felt this wasn’t worth it. You skip all the story, you can’t make your decisions, meh. How long can it take to level up? Wasn’t there some Double XP event planned after Christmas?

That’s how my Mercenary got started. I wanted to replay the Bounty Hunter story line anyway (thus the boost would have sucked) and I very quickly went to Level 20 (big surprise). Then I couldn’t play for a few days due to Christmas stuff, but with the +25% XP boosts from quests and the +100% server XP buff I managed to get to 70 in less than 10h, and I’m sitting at CL 26 already, having finished everything up to and including Yavin 4, as I usually do on all my chars. I just skipped Ilum again this time. And I already could transfer one 240 item from my Commando (at CL 236 now) over, via slotting the modules into a bind-to-legacy item. It’s not so cheap, but I’m not exactly lacking funds right now. 240 is a lot better than the 210 item he had equipped. So I guess this route is a lot quicker now. I respecced the Commando to Healing as well to get healing gear from the boxes, then I will transfer that over. Maybe I should’ve done this legacy-ification a lot sooner, but I felt it wasn’t really worth pre-248. This is now just an exception because I want to have some healing equip. Of course I was still too chicken to try to heal a random FP, but I hope I’ll feel confident enough soon 😛 I do think it has more to do with “running a dungeon” than “the pressure of healing” – I just don’t like small group content.
I’m pretty happy how he looks, I wrote before that I tried Male Body Type 4 once and hated it. This one now is fine – I just need to watch out which chest item I show, because in some of them he really looks to fat and unfit for combat.

I usually insert too many screenshots, because I make too few – but here’s one of one of my favorite semi-reproducible bugs: If you change your spec while being mounted you will sometimes be shown running while mounted. Depending on the type of your mount this looks wrong or really funny:

It seems I’m falling back into a lower cadence of posts, but apparently the holiday season has started, which means a lot of stuff to do. Fun things like meeting people for mulled wine but also buying presents and other stuff. Or travel for work. I did play a bit, but not much this week.
This “Continuing Comfort” weekly quest I wrote about is finally done, I managed to not forget to visit Odessen every week and hand in some (not so) expensive mats.

I did manage to get my Smuggler to Command Level 300, so that should grant me the maximum of a +100% boost to Command XP on the remaining toons at 70. Yay, more weeklies! 😛

I also managed to get my Jedi Shadow to Level 70 today (finishing everything up to Ziost and then doing the last 1-2 levels via daily quests, as usual). She’s my first toon that “duplicates” a per-faction mirror class. The moment I dinged I bought her a full set of 230 Tanking Gear with Command Tokens (1700 left now) and respecced to Kinetic Damage, we’ll see when I will try playing that.

Speaking of alts and levels, apart from this 9th Level 70 I now only have a 50 Marauder, 20 Guardian, and 17 Sniper. I still have a Level 65 boost which I think I’ll use on a Healing Mercenary, but I haven’t decided on the race yet. Then there’s still this male Rattataki Vanguard and the male Togruta Gunslinger on the table, a male Zabrak Sorcerer is created, but never logged in yet. Yeah, that should be 16 characters according to a plan of 8 male and 8 female (for the stories and voice actors), one per class each.
Doing Conquests with a guild in a coordinated manner is still fun, not having to grind daily, but being able to commit to 2h once per week and knock out 15k on one toon, still leaving the possibility to do it solo on another. Also I’ve seen some more operations, Dread Fortress, Terror From Beyond, and if you want to count them Xenoanalyst and Golden Fury.
Some more progress:

• Rishi “A Pirate’s Life”: 132/200
• Lokin to 1000/1000 kills
• C2-N2 to 1674/2500 kills

And a huge fail: I tried to do the Eternal Championship again on my Bounty Hunter, where I had not so huge problems getting to the 6th boss, but then failed (back when I hit 70). Now I tried this again – with 246 gear and a 41 Companion. Wow, I still failed at the exact same place. Of 3-4 tries I nearly managed to win the 6th round once, but that was half luck and then I gave up some time later anyway. The internet told me to let my companion get aggro on one of the 2 adds, then kill an add, then kill the main enemy, then kill the second add. Apparently my companion is not able to either hold aggro, or survive. Don’t even remember which spec worked (tank or dps) but with healing it was an even bigger disaster. Maybe I should try with a different class, that one’s certainly my nemesis. And I’m also not used to really hard content anymore, I know that 😛

Another week has gone by and I did progress a little with my SWTOR goals, yay.

• Get Sith Juggernaut to 300 Command Level DONE
• Get Scoundrel to 300 Command Level (at ~271 currently and still hopes for this week…)
• Progress with the Rishi “A Pirate’s Life” achievements (100/200 done *yawn*, at least it’s possible in afk mode :P)
• 2 more weeks of “Continuing Comfort” DONE
• 20 PvP matches on the Sage for M1-4X (8/20 done)
• Start KotFE, get to Alliance Alerts (3rd time) DONE and DONE (on Operative)
• refuse Rusk/Skadge/Broonmark/Lokin/Xalek/Ak’ghal Usar (not yet)
• Bonus: Got to Rank 20 with the 4 alliance contacts, now overflowing with Legacy gear
• Farmed some guards on some planets with the guild for achievements
• Completed Dread Fortress 8 man SM – this was really fun, but a DPS PT is not a good offtank.

Last week I only managed to contribute around 34k on 2 chars to the Guild Conquest, but I’m not good at crafting. This week we have the Gree event, also not looking forward to this…