SW:TOR

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…

Due to having a few days off I actually got some stuff done, which was really nice – I love goals and milestones 🙂
Both my Sage and Juggernaut finally got to Archaeology 600 – apparently the easiest way is to harvest on Iokath until 580 and then just do 5-6 missions. All the guides I found online said you’d be able to harvest until 600, but at least I didn’t manage to do that. Anyway, 6 Level 10 missions isn’t too much money – so I got all Crew Skills at 600 now – that’s a big goal ticked off the list.
I also managed to finally hit 100% “companion completion” on Smuggler and Consular, after dragging Guss Tuno and Felix Iresso through some content for 1000 kills. Iresso was especially hard as I had already started KotFE on my Sage, so I had to actually use my Shadow for that. So she’s 60 now and is in the Manaan story arc.
The Rakghoul Conquest is kinda nice, especially if you’re not strictly soloing anymore, so I have finished the Conquest goal three times and I guess in total I am at like 65k.
As I joined a guild I’m now focusing a bit more on my Empire toons, that means I’ve diverted all Bonus CXP packs to my Juggernaut (who is at 194) and making that my #1 active character right now, and demoted the Scoundrel (who is 195). Juggernaut is more fun to play anyway. The aforementioned third conquest character is my Operative, who I don’t really enjoy playing (but also not less than the Scoundrel) is my only Empire character at 70 capable of healing – so I’m gonna invest a little time now and respec healing to try that out.
I also motivated myself to work on Datacron completion, finishing Imperial Balmorra, Makeb, Quest, and Ord Mantell. That leaves me missing Corellia, Fleet, Rishi, and all but one on Taris (both sides) – so 60 found and 18 missing. I remember trying Corellia already and giving up. Some of those jumping puzzles are really horrible (like that one on Makeb, where I think I needed 1h for one).
I wasn’t as happy with the Rishi Stronghold as I had originally thought, so I ripped everything (well, wasn’t so much yet to be fair) out and migrated my army of alts to my Nar Shaddaa stronghold and started remodeling parts of it.
And I cleaned out some bank space, selling off all those duplicate identically looking pieces of armor and weapons…
Finally I started on the Macrobinoculars quest chain, but only got Dromund Kaas done so far.

First of all: yes, I did it. While I had finished most weekly quests on Thursday already I somehow managed to get Iokath and a few other things done and got my 2nd Command 300 on Saturday. Taking advantage of that sweet +25% XP boost I could finally start the weekly quest run on my Juggernaut and Scoundrel, they’re at 158/164 now.
I’m also mostly done with my weekly Conquest, though I do have to finish it tomorrow. Part of that was Kuat Drive Yards, which I did solo. Wasn’t too hard but I was kinda glad Mako is Level 36 and not 20 anymore, like a few weeks ago. My DPS is high enough to get rid of everything but the last boss kinda quickly, that one took quite a while…
I kinda ran out of podcasts right now, so I’ve used Netflix in the first time in months. Not sure it was a good idea, I caught up on quite some “I wanted to see them, but I wasn’t really excited in the first place” movies.

Although I was kinda busy and afk this weekend I somehow still managed to play a lot this week. Maybe too much, as I’m a bit bummed out and done with it right now – but maybe it’s something different. It’s double XP week and so I spent every minute of my available gaming time pushing for Command XP – I think I did the Ziost weekly 5x, Black Hole 5x, Yavin 4 4x, Section X and Oricon once… and CZ-198 dailies for like 8-9 times (because of the Conquest), including 5 weeklies. As I’m trying to get my Sage to 300 I also did several Planet Daily Heroic quests several times – usually Coruscant, Corellia, and Nar Shaddaa (because I’m already a bit sick of Voss :P). But the problem is… I kind of ran out of “easy XP” things to do already. No more weeklies, not many fun dailies. I know, it’s kinda normal to have some daily/weekly cap and I’m pretty glad I managed to get to 237 from last week’s ~173 – but I would have played the other alts a lot less and this toon more if the game had let me (while still keeping the sense of progressing). So yeah, first world problems, running with a Command boost in double XP week, gaining 70 Command levels in a week and still complaining. Just that I also managed 30ish levels on the Scoundrel, 20 each on Juggernaut and Commando and still had enough time to get roughly 10 chests on my 300 Bounty Hunter and also finish the traitor story line. And I don’t think I really played a lot this week…
I’m glad I finally finished the traitor story arc, so now the only stuff I haven’t ever seen ingame are some of the flash points in solo mode. I can live with that, but I might still try to catch up on a few of them. Mad props for Bioware how they managed to completely not spoil any of the story in Nathema when you run it as a group. Been in there twice already and had ZERO clue what would happen in story mode, I was properly surprised. Well done. On the other hand the Nathema FP was kinda “wtf is this” before. Get in, kill stuff, done 😛
I still haven’t tried to contact any guild this week because a) none of them stood out in any way and b) I think I made up my mind about WoW now. I’ll definitely get it, I’m just not sure when. Last week I postponed it because of uncertainty. This week I postponed it because of Double XP. Let’s see next week.

As I had to buy some mats on the GTN anyway, I also made the push for 600 Artificer with those Arch mats. This frees up a HUGE chunk of inventory space, although again I failed to properly inventorize and had 2 dupes. This is the Juggernaut.

Then I went ahead and pushed Armstech on my Sith Assassin to 550 (not pictured) and then went on to complete everything on my Smuggler. That’s 3 more Crew Skills at 600, but not so much bank space reclaimed this time via Command Crate Cybertech schematics (no dupes this time, yay):

So that’s nice, a 2nd character with 3x 600 – the Sage needs 20 points in Archaeology which I should be able to gather while leveling in KotET.

Which means there’s only 3 left: Armormech, Armstech (both 550), and Archaeology (580). Phew.
Nothing else exciting happened, except that I’m also trying to get this week’s Conquest done on the Smuggler (at 9k after 2 days) and get some Conquest levels on Sage (now at 200) and Smuggler (now 140). Having concrete goals helps me a great ton.
Oh and this ingame mail was hilarious: