Skilling Those Crews

We're in that quiet time between Galactic Seasons - technically PvP Season 8 is still going on, but I got my last achievement for that the other week and didn't really have anything to say about the experience that I haven't already said after the last couple of PvP seasons (about how lowbie and midbie queues are increasingly anaemic even on Darth Malgus and it's something that worries me a lot in regards to the health of the game... but that's not the subject of this post).

Usually I'd stop playing on the other servers during this time, but this time around I've kept logging in... to work on crew skills. As a general rule, I like the crew skills system, but it hasn't had a meaningful update in forever at this point, and the devs giving us ever more powerful augments to craft recently is something I feel a bit meh about.

That said, I've done minimal work on my crew skills on the other servers, because I primarily play there for Galactic Seasons and Conquest, and raising a crew skill by one point gives a nice number of Conquest points for the mere seconds of interaction it requires. So I've always had it in my head that I'm better off not raising my crew skills on these characters, because capping them would mean losing this source of Conquest points.

There was just one problem with this: I kept getting "mission discovery" items from login rewards (consumables that grant you a one-time crew skill mission with a wealthy yield) and most of my characters weren't actually high enough to use them. Watching my legacy cargo bay slowly drown in these things started to give me flashbacks to when I first created my characters on Leviathan and Tulak Hord and just collected login rewards for a few weeks, until their inventories became so full that I felt I had to start actually levelling them, in order to get access to a cargo hold and legacy storage if nothing else. Like I said back then, other people feel motivated to play in order to earn free items; I feel driven to play in order to deal with all the free items that are being thrust upon me!

I also realised that with each character having three crew skills that cap out at 700 points each, raising them at a rate of one skill-up per day to maximise Conquest points would take almost six years per character. There really was no need for me to artificially try and slow things down.

So I've been logging into at least one character per server per day over the past few weeks to level up their crew skills. You can actually get most of the way towards your personal Conquest target by doing that every day, assuming that you'll also have a companion go up an influence level at least once or twice in the process.

It's felt kind of satisfying, but also made me realise just how slow of a process it is if you're just sitting there waiting for your companions to run missions or craft things, especially if your character isn't that progressed and therefore doesn't have that many companions yet and they aren't of particularly high influence. I haven't really felt the weight of that in a long time, considering how long most of my characters on Darth Malgus have been maxed out in everything.

Sadly my efforts haven't made much of a dent in the pile of mission discoveries yet since a lot of them require pretty high skills to use, but at least I'm making some progress. I think my main takeaway from the whole exercise is that next season I'll need to remember to run at least a couple of crew skills on the side during each "proper" play session to make sure I can get them levelled up more consistently.

My SWTOR Feature Wishlist Going Into 2025

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

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

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

1. A solution for queues

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. A legacy- or account-wide friends list

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

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

3. Support for manual group finding

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

4. An updated companion UI

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

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

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

5. Where's that crafting update?

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

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

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

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

7.6 Dev Stream Reactions

After watching the big Warcraft Direct stream yesterday, it was quite a contrast to spend time on SWTOR's 7.6 dev stream tonight. Smaller studio, fewer viewers, but also a much more relaxed atmosphere and lots of laughs. I was immediately overcome with an urge to make a bunch of gifs of the interactions between Eric Musco and Papa Keith, intending to post them on Bluesky, but it couldn't cope with me uploading any images at the time (I later learned it wasn't just me), so I'll be inserting them into this blog post instead, even if that may seem a bit random!

As usual, if you want the full rundown of every little detail, I recommend watching the recording of the stream yourself or reading a detailed summary elsewhere - Kal already has one up here for example. Over here I'm more choosy with what I talk about and won't mention everything, but I'll add some commentary to make it more interesting. Let's get on with it!

Topical and time-sensitive things first: There's a new Twitch drop for the next 14 days, an Ilum poster deco with a purple border. Handily livestream viewers were able to earn it right away simply by watching the stream as it only requires one hour of watch time. There'll also be another Twitch drop, a purple Vulptilla mount, once 7.6 launches. We weren't given an exact date for that, but from what they did say on the stream it sounds like it will be early December.

Also, effective immediately, there's a big 50% off sale on dyes going on! The interesting thing related to this was that they mentioned that they're planning to make changes to how dyes work soon... I'm sure I'm not the only one whose mind immediately jumped to the notion of making them unlockable in Collections, something I've seen people request more than once. I don't think that will happen though - dye sales have got to be too much of a money-maker for that - but I'm still curious to hear what they've got in mind once the time comes.

We got some info about the 7.6 story, and I tend to not go into too much detail about story previews in these posts, but I did want to note that Imperials will finally get to see Major Anri again, almost three years after Manaan, and that the story is supposedly going to be structured a bit differently, consisting of four threads you can advance in any order, about Shae Vizla, Darth Malgus, the Hidden Chain and Darth Nul's holocron respectively. I'm curious to see how that'll pan out - it could mean more content, but I've got to admit that personally I'm a little worried that "you can do them in any order" means that each "thread" will contain a lot of exposition/cut-scene watching and fewer interesting choices - but we'll see.

Unfortunately after all that talk about how interesting the new story is going to be, we won't actually get to see it at 7.6's release, because while the patch itself will still land as planned, they had to delay the story update part of it because they "currently don't have all the elements [they] need to complete this story", which I've seen people interpret as having to do with the voice actors' strike, though I don't know whether that's just speculation or backed by anything that was said elsewhere.

There was some talk about dynamic encounters and the new lair boss, but I won't go into that here as I already covered those topics in my post about the PTS from last week. They just confirmed that dynamic encounters will only exist on Hoth and Tatooine at launch, with the possible exception of Hidden Chain invasions, which might also happen on other planets from the sounds of it.

The new lair boss is also going to drop crafting materials for new augments, something that people had already caught on to some time ago but that hadn't been officially announced. These new augments will be better than the current gold augments. I guess this will offer a sort of gear progression without further raising overall item rating, though it does make me wonder whether the next gear reset perhaps isn't as far away as I thought.

There was some talk about new Cartel Market items, which I usually don't go into here either, but there was one thing that piqued my interest: there'll be a new decoration bundle called the Remote Outpost Bundle, and it'll come with a small amount of story/gameplay attached from the sounds of it. I was immediately reminded of the encrypted datacubes from back in the day and how people were not happy with those, though I guess a big part of that was that they came from inside Cartel packs, while this will be a direct purchase. I'll make sure to get it when it comes out and will let you know whether it's worth the money or not.

In terms of gameplay, there'll be a new UI feature called comlink to interact with terminals and characters in a more organic way without having to always resort to KOTOR-style cut scenes. They emphasised that this isn't meant to replace cinematics and proper conversations but should simply serve as another option for interactions where appropriate. The example they showed was of someone using a terminal and being given a prompt to enter a password, where in the current system that would bring up the KOTOR-style black bars and mute dialogue options like "enter code" or "walk away". They explained that they could also see this working for characters "texting" you.

PvP Season 7 will still start with the launch of 7.6 and bring an end to 8-man premades, as they'll once again be limited to four people max, and the devs are also disabling the old level 75 set bonuses in PvP to reduce the power of twinks. Not what I personally consider PvP's biggest problems right now, but better than nothing. What did stand out to me was that one of the new season rewards is actually going to be a proper emote instead of the previous "text-only" one, which might actually be something to look forward to for me.

As the stream was getting close to wrapping up, Eric and Keith dropped a few more surprises on us at the end. First off, we'll get a new mount as a free subscriber reward that introduces something new: the ability to have your (humanoid) companion ride in a sidecar beside you and a non-combat pet in the luggage rack. The preview looked hilarious and made me laugh out loud. I'm not sure how much I'll use it but it'll be fun for a little while if nothing else. Plus I appreciate that they decided to make it a sub reward instead of a Cartel Market item. There'll also be two new mounts from dynamic encounter-related achievements that won't show your companion but will include your active mini pet.

Next they announced that they'll do a character name purge for the first time in a long time. If you're a subscriber, all your characters are safe, but if not, you'll want to log into any toons that haven't been logged into since January 1st of this year, else they will be flagged for a rename. I wonder if that'll give me a chance to claim Shintar without the funny i on Tulak Hord, the one server where I don't currently own the name... they also mentioned that they'll try to remember to do this a bit more often in the future to not have all these names taken up by inactive characters.

Finally, a big surprise at the very end: they're working on more art modernisation for planetary environments, but also for player characters. Musco immediately assured everyone that their number one priority was to not change the overall feel of the characters. The examples they showed looked really good, with just more detail on the facial textures and more gloss on the eyes. (When I tried to explain this to Mr Commando afterwards, he said that talking about shiny hair and eyes made me sound like I was trying to sell him a dog!)

All in all, a fun stream with lots of news and some interesting things to look forward to, though the story update being delayed with no clear ETA was a bit of a bummer. What was your favourite part of this stream?

Peace Out, Again

My pacifist character Pacis hit the level cap taking part in the Feast of Prosperity. Again!

I last wrote about her back in April, when the introduction of Amity inspired me to pick her up again as she could finally go on adventures with a (supposedly) fellow pacifist friend for the first time. I was really hoping that this would rejuvenate my interest in the character and the project, but it didn't really work out.

Having the two of them hang out on Dantooine and doing the peace time dailies did initially give me a bunch of new things to think about. For example I was baffled when I found Pacis drawing a lightsaber one day, considering that unequipping her weapon was one of the first things she ever did. 

Eventually I realised that the following had happened: I had completed a Conquest on her, which rewarded me with a gear create. I haven't found crates from solo activities to be very reliable when it comes to detecting which piece of your gear needs an upgrade the most, but it clearly noticed that I was missing a weapon and therefore rewarded me one. And of course another change that came with 7.0 meant that if one of your gear slots if empty and you receive an appropriate piece of gear for it, it now gets auto-equipped, so I hadn't even noticed that saber sneaking in there. What can I say, this game really wants you to be ready to inflict violence!

The other thing that happened was that while gathering on Dantooine, a slicing node gave me my first rare crew skill mission. Considering how long Pacis had been doing this without ever getting one before, I kind of wonder whether there's something preventing you from getting these if you don't actually have a companion that could run missions... or maybe it was just bad luck.

Either way, she had Amity now, so I was of course happy to send him out. As I awaited his return, a vision of a whole new future for Pacis briefly unfolded in front of me. Crew skills as a pacifist activity! I'd actually have to read the mission text again to make sure it was compatible with her ideas though. And she could drop one or more of her gathering skills to start crafting instead! A true pacifist's career!

However, I don't think I even contemplated this for five minutes before the idea lost its lustre. Crafting is a peaceful activity, sure... but Pacis wouldn't be the one actually doing it, and it would be no different from any of my other characters sending their companions out to do stuff for them; she would just be worse at it than those with larger, more developed companion stables. Plus the materials would come out of my legacy-wide material stash, fuelled by all my regular characters who'd done who knows what to acquire them. It just didn't seem very... satisfying.

So that idea went nowhere and I just continued running the Dantooine peace time missions for a little while - until I got a bit annoyed with Conquest. As I already alluded to in my last pacifism post, Conquest as a pacifist post-7.0 is annoyingly hard. Doing one round of dailies on Dantooine, she now just gets "Dantooine: Mission Complete", "Missions: Bonus Missions" (for petting the Kath Hounds), the one for getting a crew skill skill-up and the one to harvest ten gathering nodes. That's not a lot, and meant that I had to be diligent in doing those tasks every single day of the week or she wouldn't be able to hit her personal Conquest target.

Maybe you're wondering why it matters, but I really like Conquest as a pacing tool and like to hit my personal target on all characters I decide to play in a given week. Inevitably, a week came when I forgot to log in and do my Dantooine round one day, which caused me to barely miss my personal target for the week and made me quite annoyed. After that I kind of stopped playing her again, except for doing a bit of swooping at some point (I think?) - though I still haven't looked further into those one-time swoop story missions I meant to attempt two years ago.

Until the Feast of Prosperity came around again that is, and I decided to leave Dantooine to do charity for the Hutts again, which is such a nice and peaceful pastime, while also being great for both Conquest and XP, and resulted in Pacis eventually hitting level 80.

I'm a little disappointed that I didn't feel inspired to do more with her on the way to the new level cap, but I'm also reminded of this post I wrote back in 2021 about how my pacifism experiment had essentially become a solved problem. That's still the case, plus 7.0 also took some of Pacis' more fun tools away, such as the ability to CC multiple targets or to keep missions with quick travel items in her log to get around the galaxy at any time. So it's just generally not as fun as it used to be. Which is fine I guess, as this was only an experiment and I have allll my other characters to play with. But it's still a little bit of a shame as well.

The FULL List of 7.0 Augment Crafting Materials

A somewhat random, short and to-the-point post today. I've had several conversations with guildies about crafting purple and gold augments lately (item rating 286 and 300 respectively), and when it comes to exchanging mats, they always seem to expect to just hand over the rarest parts required, with the crafter taking care of the rest. To be honest, in the past that's how crafting often worked, because basic materials were available aplenty and you didn't need that many of them for special crafts.

However, ever since the 6.0 crafting update, the requirements to craft some of the more high-end items have been pretty ridiculous in terms of materials required. This is due to the tier system that Bioware introduced at the time, which makes you start by crafting green quality components, then craft several of those into blue quality components, then craft several of those into purple quality components, all while introducing a multiplier at every step that can bring the total number of materials required to produce a single high-level item up into the hundreds.

And yet, if you look at all the current guides about augment crafting, they basically say "get these five rare mats... and then there's also some crew skill specific items, don't worry about those". I'm guessing the people who wrote those guides don't actually craft themselves, because I don't know how else you can be so dismissive of such a huge chunk of the process.

Anyway, I decided to do a full write-up of what's required for each augment in terms of base materials (which then need to be "crafted upwards" multiple times towards higher level components). Note that the materials for purple and gold augments are almost identical except that where the purple versions require 5 Legendary Embers, the gold requires a CM-1337 instead, which is the special mat that Cybertechs make out of 5 OEM-37 and 5 RPM-13 plus 5 Legendary Embers.

Mats for one Synthweaving augment (crit or redoubt/defense):

• 60x Artifact Data Spike
  
• 60x Artifact Lustrous Artifact Fragment
  
• 60x Artifact Lustrous Bondar Crystal 
• 60x Artifact Woven Syntex 
• 5x Legendary Ember (OR 1x CM-1337 for gold instead of purple)
  
• 108x Premium Data Spike
  
• 180x Premium Lustrous Artifact Fragment
  
• 180x Premium Lustrous Bondar Crystal
  
• 192x Premium Veda Cloth
• 108x Premium Woven Syntex
  
• 5x Processed Isotope Stabilizer
• 54x Prototype Data Spike
  
• 90x Prototype Lustrous Artifact Fragment 
• 90x Prototype Lustrous Bondar Crystal
  
• 120x Prototype Veda Cloth
• 54x Prototype Woven Syntex
  
• 5x Solid Resource Matrix 
• 384x Standard Veda Cloth
  

Mats for one Armormech augment (absorb or alacrity):

• 36x Artifact Data Spike 
• 36x Artifact Fibrolite
  
• 60x Artifact Duranium Plating 
• 60x Artifact Tempersteel
• 5x Legendary Ember (OR 1x CM-1337 for gold instead of purple) 
  
• 108x Premium Data Spike
  
• 108x Premium Fibrolite
  
• 192x Premium Flerovium Flux 
• 180x Premium Duranium Plating
• 180x Premium Tempersteel
  
• 5x Processed Isotope Stabilizer 
• 54x Prototype Data Spike
  
• 90x Prototype Duranium Plating 
• 54x Prototype Fibrolite
  
• 96x Prototype Flerovium Flux 
• 90x Prototype Tempersteel
  
• 5x Solid Resource Matrix
• 384x Standard Flerovium Flux
  

Mats for one Armstech augment (accuracy, shield or versatile; versatile only exists in gold):

• 36x Artifact Dallorian
  
• 36x Artifact Data Spike
  
• 60x Artifact Tempersteel 
• 60x Artifact Duranium Plating
• 5x Legendary Ember (OR 1x CM-1337 for gold instead of purple) 
  
• 108x Premium Dallorian Scraps 
• 108x Premium Data Spike
  
• 180x Premium Duranium Plating
  
• 192x Premium Flerovium Flux
• 180x Premium Tempersteel
  
• 5x Processed Isotope Stabilizer
• 54x Prototype Data Spike 
• 54x Prototype Dallorian Scraps
  
• 90x Prototype Duranium Plating
  
• 96x Prototype Flerovium Flux
• 90x Prototype Tempersteel
• 5x Solid Resource Matrix
• 384x Standard Flerovium Flux

As you can see, it adds up to a lot. I crafted an augment for a guildie today after he'd handed me the mats for a CM-1337, the Isotope Stabilizers and the Resource Matrices, and when I did the maths for the "rest" that I had contributed, it added up to 60 million credits in value. Now, that's not worth as much as it used to be, but it's still a lot to spend on essentially doing someone else a favour. So crafters, don't let yourselves be ripped off! And if you're looking to get someone else to craft augments for you, be mindful of all the materials required - their amount and cost is not as trivial as many people seem to think.

Gold Augments and a Brush with Pay-to-win

Last year I wrote a post about how I'd been making a lot of money in SWTOR by simply selling stuff on the GTN that I'd earned through normal gameplay. I also concluded that people's concerns about inflation were a bit overblown in my opinion, because there are ridiculously few situations in game that require you to spend an amount of credits that you'll even notice.

In recent weeks, a couple of things happened. Roger from Contains Moderate Peril wrote a few posts about being back in SWTOR, and one of them expressed annoyance about how he'd lost some money from going over the hardcoded credit cap (which is over four billion) without noticing. I was utterly baffled that this was an issue for him (and said as much in a comment) because as far as I can tell, Roger's relationship with the game is very casual (as in: he spends some time playing solo through the story once and that's it) and yet I, as an extremely invested player of more than a decade, have never run into the issue of having more money than the game is technically capable of letting you hold even once, never mind accidentally! He confirmed in a response to my comment that he'd merely purchased a few things from the Cartel Market and then sold them on the GTN.

On a similar note, Mr Commando was moaning recently that he was soon going to run out of money to pay for his repairs. Being a good wife, I told him that this was ridiculous because repairs are not expensive at all, and that he could solve the problem in mere minutes by simply selling some of the items he's been hoarding in his cargo bay and material storage for years. However, he considered that "work" and scoffed at the idea.

One of the other tanks in our ops progression team had different advice for him though. "Just do what I do," he said, "I buy a Hypercrate from the Cartel Market every so often and then just sell the contents. Covers everything easily." Mr Commando liked this idea since he had plenty of complementary coins to spare anyway, so he followed this advice and it pretty much worked as advertised. In fact, when he was done, he had about the same amount of credits as I'd slowly worked my way up to over the course of several years of GTN trading.

Now, I hesitate to call that "pay to win" because paying for repairs is actually not at all expensive, and most of those extra credits seemed pretty superfluous for both of us either way. But my pride was certainly a little stung, considering just how stark the contrast was between the amount of time I'd put in vs. his single Cartel Market purchase leading to more or less the same results.

I really don't like talking about pay-to-win in MMOs though, because it's one of those areas where people can never agree on a definition and will happily contradict even themselves. Not to mention that I've seen many a self-righteous commentator preach about the evils of pay-to-win just to be perfectly fine with partaking in such systems when it suits them.

Fortunately SWTOR has only really had light brushes with the subject in the past, such as when some of the earliest Cartel Market items had stats on them (even if they weren't particularly good), or when Galactic Command boosters were purchasable for real money back in 2016. However, none of these things lasted long in their original iterations, probably because Bioware saw that they were generating a lot of bad vibes for little profit.

Nowadays the devs are quite happy to focus on getting people to subscribe and buying cosmetics, and I'm fine with that myself. Speaking of cosmetics though, these also tend to be among the most expensive things to buy on the GTN, because the resale prices can be through the roof, which is something that critics of the game's economy often like to point to as evidence of inflation being a problem. For me this has always been kind of "meh" because there are plenty of good-looking and affordable outfits in the game, so who cares if there are some that are expensive? I don't really feel like I'm losing anything by not wearing the most expensive set of robes. Now, things that actually affect your stats are a different matter...

Which brings us to the subject of gold augments. I mentioned them very briefly in the post I linked at the start of this one, but brushed them off as pretty irrelevant at the time. With the way almost all max-level content was scaled and the stats on your gear were capped during Onslaught, trying to invest billions into tiny stat increases seemed like something for bored min-maxers with too much money on their hands and with nothing else to do.

Since 7.0, operations don't scale you down anymore though, yay! This means that you can actually see the effects of improving your gear, including augments, which means that gold augments - despite of being a relic from the last expansion since crafting hasn't received an update with 7.0 - are suddenly of a lot more interest now than they ever were when they were first introduced. Seriously, back then I didn't even look into what was required to get them. Everyone just said they were both ridiculously expensive to make and nearly useless, and that was enough for me to feel that I didn't need to know any more.

So imagine my shock when I actually looked into what's required to make a single one of these augments the other day: seven of a material that drops once per nightmare mode ops boss, and 14 of another material that comes from ranked PvP. Disregarding the chance of a lucky crit which can allow you to get multiple results from one craft, you need a set of these for every single augment, and a single player has fourteen item slots to augment. At the moment my guild's also not really killing any NiM bosses other than Nefra and sometimes Dash'roode, and I don't know anyone who regularly does ranked PvP. In short: It's hella expensive, and while augment prices on the GTN aren't the highest they've ever been, I still wouldn't be able to buy more than a couple of these even if I spent all of my hard-earned wealth at once.

Meaning of course that I thought of the whole "just sell Cartel items on the GTN" thing and how that would allow me to kit myself out in gold augments within days, which immediately made me uncomfortable. I didn't do it because I rather dislike this kind of thing, but if I'm being honest also because I don't think me as a healer not having full gold augments is what's holding our progression back at the moment. But it sure reminded me of SWTOR's previous brushes with pay-to-win and how this may very well be the closest yet, seeing how better augments don't make you "win" but provide a more tangible benefit than anything else ever did.

Of course, the funny thing is that where e.g. Galactic Command boosts were a clear attempt to make players spend money on the Cartel Market, this... doesn't seem like it was ever meant to be. After all, there is nothing about gold augments that can be acquired from the Cartel Market - each and every part of them needs to be earned by players actually playing the game. It's just that the primary sources of these materials are quite inaccessible to the average player, so people value them highly - and there's nothing else you can earn through gameplay that would make you rich enough to actually be able to pay that price, because the only other thing that players rate as similarly valuable is Cartel Market fashion. It's really a pretty bizarre situation if you think about it.

With that said, I'm glad that Bioware is planning to make changes to this system in the next patch, both by reducing the material requirements for gold augment crafting and by moving the rare materials from master mode operations and ranked PvP onto a vendor where they can be bought with tech fragments. (Note that the vendor is actually already an option right now, but much more expensive than it will be.) With that, these augments will still require a lot of effort to get, but I do expect the prices to go down with the increased accessibility, considering that tech fragments are something that anyone can earn over time, whether it's from Conquest or even dailies.

Should SWTOR Innovate More?

Something I've long appreciated about SWTOR is that for most of its ten-year run so far, the devs have been sticking to what's known to work. They know that most of the players are mainly here for a story in which we get to make decisions that flesh out our characters and in which we can build relationships with NPCs, with some group PvE and PvP in a shared world on the side to keep us busy between story releases.

On the rare occasions when they've tried to deviate too much from that formula, such as during the "Knights of" expansions, I was not a happy bunny, but looking at the bigger picture, fortunately there hasn't been too much of that sort of thing, especially when you compare it with the (former?) market leader World of Warcraft and the way that's been trying to make every single expansion about some exciting and totally new feature for many years now.

That said, after several years of playing it very safe with new content additions, Bioware is finally looking to make some more daring changes with Legacy of the Sith, and I can't help but wonder whether they haven't already missed a trick or two.

Actually, the very first time that thought occurred to me was after the launch of Final Fantasy XIV's Shadowbringers expansion two years ago. I've never played FFXIV myself, but something that intrigued me about the reports of people who did was the addition of a new feature called the Trust system. From what I understand, this allows you to run certain story instances that are designed for group gameplay with NPCs instead of actual players, and the NPCs are all characters that you know from the story. When I first read about that, one of the first thoughts that came to my mind was something like: SWTOR really should have thought of that first!

This isn't to say that I feel SWTOR desperately needs a feature like that right now. I strongly disliked the introduction of the GSI helper droid for solo modes back in the day, but I've been quite content with the way Bioware has handled more recent flashpoint releases by simply scaling the content so that story/solo mode is easily doable with your one or two companions.

My point is more that companions have been one of SWTOR's distinguishing features since launch, and back in 2011 just having them was one of the game's genuine innovations. Sure, other games had combat pets or mercenary NPCs à la Everquest, but no other MMO had them be fully fleshed-out, permanent companions with their own stories. It was a trend that other games felt the need to catch up with by adding their own spin on combat companions over the years, but in that same time frame, SWTOR itself hasn't really done much with the feature at all. The last major changes came with KotFE, when companion abilities were homogenised, affection was replaced with influence, all companions became capable of playing any trinity role, and more. However, since then, all that's happened is that we got more new companions and... that's it.

And that really seems a shame considering SWTOR's focus. To get back to the idea of being able to bring multiple companions into combat at once like in FFXIV's Trusts, one of the original trooper missions has you storming an enemy ship with your whole squad going in guns blazing, and everyone I ever talked to about that mission said that it was really cool and that they'd love to see the game provide more of that, yet Bioware never did. Again, I'm not saying that being able to run group content with a group of companions is exactly what we need... but considering the large stable of them that we have nowadays and how core they are to SWTOR's gameplay, you'd really think that Bioware would have come up with something new for them to do or contribute to by now.

You could say something similar about crew skills. I mean, crafting in SWTOR was hardly revolutionary even at launch, but the idea that your companions were doing all the work for you was kind of novel. This was around the time when a number of MMOs came out with companion apps on the phone, and players opined that it would be neat if they could manage crew skill missions from their phones as well - but that never happened. And neither did anything else, other than that new crew skill levels were added over time and some details about crafting progression were tweaked. It used to be that different companions had bonuses to different crew skills (remember when Elara Dorne had a bonus to both bioanalysis and biochemistry for example), but that was also taken out.

Looking at the way Bioware is overhauling a lot of UI elements with Legacy of the Sith, and considering that the crew skill window is one of the oldest, almost completely untouched UI elements in the game, I wouldn't be surprised if doing something with that was somewhere on their to-do list as well. I'm both excited for and scared of the day that will happen, as I'm not a fan of the companion window they introduced in KotFE, and crew skills is the only place where I can currently see my companions sorted by influence, so I'd hate to lose that.

But at the same time, I can't help but think that Bioware could do so much more with the crew skill system. Having played a bit of retail WoW on the side over the past year, I finally had a chance to have a look at the frequently derided "mission table" there and its various permutations throughout the last few expansions, and while you can say that they're all essentially phone mini games, I actually found myself quite engrossed by at least a couple of them. I also couldn't help but think how much more interesting it was that my in-game "companions" for these systems had different strengths, weaknesses and abilities, as opposed to SWTOR's companions - for all the depth they have as characters - being all the same when it comes to crew skills aside from potentially differing influence levels.

Again, I'm not saying that SWTOR needs to copy WoW and that crew skills should become an auto battler - in fact, that sounds like a pretty terrible idea when I put it like that. But my point is that the idea of having companions do your crafting/work for you was something that was originally unique to SWTOR, yet nothing has been done with that over the last ten years, while other games actually ran with the idea and even experimented with various ways of making it more interesting.

So I'm not saying that I think the Bioware team needs to come up with drastically new ways to play the game - I think Galactic Starfighter showed well enough that e.g. adding a first-person space shooter to an old-school tab target MMO with an RP focus is not a recipe for success. However, just looking at the areas in which SWTOR excelled at launch and which have remained a focus throughout the years, it feels like things have become a bit stagnant, with no real attempts to improve or expand on many existing core systems since around Knights of the Fallen Empire.

I think the combat changes coming with Legacy of the Sith are their most daring step in that direction that we've seen in a long time. So I do hope that these work out well, and that in the years to come we can perhaps see a similar amount of thought be put into other parts of the game that could do with a bit of freshening up, such as companions and crew skills.

Dancing the Conquest Dance

I'm not nearly as invested in Conquest as I was about a year ago, but as mentioned earlier this month it's still a major driving force in the way I play. I guess I like the feeling of being rewarded for being organised - some people get their kicks out of killing people in PvP; I get excited when by handing in the PvP daily mission on Coruscant instead of the fleet I also complete the Conquest objective for Coruscant missions and juuust manage to push a character over the finish line for her weekly personal target that way.

That said, ever since the addition of those silly new objectives earlier in the year, I have to confess that some of my habits have become slightly bizarre. For example there are those objectives that give three or four times the number of points you need to hit your personal target. Those always feel so weird and wasteful to me, because it's not as if you get anything for the excess... but I always figure the numbers probably make more sense for players who don't also have the maxed-out stronghold bonus.

Still, the point remains that completing that one objective and doing literally nothing else is already enough to hit your Conquest target, making it feel like a bit of a waste to get it on a character that is already partially done anyway. So if I notice that I'm approaching completion of such an objective, I may find myself frantically relogging to a lesser-played alt just to have them do the one thing to get credit, achieve their personal target and log off again.

What's particularly funny is that because gaining points is so easy nowadays, there can be unexpected pitfalls even in that simple act. For example the other day I noticed that I was on four out of five for "gain five levels", which promised an instant 35k points towards the personal target of 50k. So I logged a lowbie with the intent to just quickly level her up once, but the things I did to gain XP pretty much got her to her personal target before she even had a chance to level up, which made me switch characters yet again to find a new "victim".

However, the oddest/most awkward things are undoubtedly the objectives to complete five crew skill missions and the one to gain an influence level with a companion - the latter more so than the former, since it gives 16k+ points, while the former only causes a small bump. As I wrote earlier in the year, ever since Onslaught introduced the materials inventory, I run crew skill missions a lot of the time purely to raise my companions' influence level, and I habitually queue up a full set before logging off. However, this now also means that I have to be careful which character I log first on any given day, as they could end up completing one or both objectives the moment I log in (if I sent companions on crew skill missions the last time I played them) - and of course I want those Conquest points to go to a character that will actually benefit from them too.

So I not only have to keep track of my different alts' progress towards their personal Conquest targets (the guild list is helpful for that, but not so much when it comes to making decisions before even logging in), but also which alts have missions running and companions close to gaining a level. I'd really need a spreadsheet to track the latter accurately, but while I love me a good spreadsheet I ultimately don't care that much about optimising this particular habit to the nth degree... just enough to be slightly bothered when I mess it up (and to write about it here obviously).

I wonder if that's just me...

Life on the Guild Ship

I think everyone has their own preferred spots to log in and out in any MMO. In the game's early days I used to "live" on the fleet, but ever since they added housing, my Coruscant stronghold has been my home on all my Republic characters. It's just too convenient to be able to have all my utilities right next to each other, plus I also take the opportunity to harvest some free crafting materials from the utility decorations every day.

Ever since I started my project to sell most of my jawa junk, I've had to relocate to our guild ship however, as we have all three of the jawa vendors located right next to a GTN terminal and multiple cargo holds there. Technically I could have acquired the vendor decorations for myself and placed them in one of my personal strongholds, but that would have required an amount of effort that I didn't feel like making.

It's been interesting to see just how many other people seem to have made the guild ship their virtual home - I suppose I shouldn't really be surprised by this, but I expected more players to be like me and prefer hanging out in their private abodes. Whenever I'm logged in on the guild ship, bouncing back and forth between the vendors and the GTN, I'm continually amazed by all the people I see logging in and running to and fro. Considering how much it costs to acquire and fully unlock a guild ship, I guess I should be glad that people are actually using it!

As for my jawa junk selling, it's been going moderately well. I think I've made about 75 million credits from it so far, but it feels like I've barely made a dent in my junk stash and of course more scraps keep coming in all the time. I guess it's nice to be making all that money from seemingly nothing but in terms of freeing up more bank space it would be preferable if I could get rid of more materials faster. I'm just not a fan of flooding the market with any single item; it just never works out well for me.

I did get a bit bored with maintaining my spreadsheet of prices. I like me a good spreadsheet, but let's just say that manually price-checking 261 items every few days got old really fast. Instead I've settled into a routine where I will only do the full check every so often, but I do log in several times a day to check what has sold, and anything that sells quickly and is still going for a good price at that point, I just buy more of and re-list immediately.

There are some green and purple low and mid-level materials that sell very consistently for a decent profit and of which I have a stack on the GTN almost at all times at this point. I do try to avoid grade one materials and anything above grade five, because while there is good profit to be made with some of them too, I've found them annoyingly volatile. Technically you don't lose any money if the price suddenly drops and your listing expires, and you can just keep re-listing it at a higher price until it sells I guess, but as stated previously my goal with this has been to shift jawa junk both at a good conversion rate but also at a decent speed, so I try to avoid too much speculation and uncertainty.

Interestingly, blue junk/materials are probably the hardest to get rid of and actually bring in less value than the greens at times. Naturally, blue junk is also what I've got the most of, so it looks like I'm gonna be at this for a while at least...

Turning Jawa Junk into Credits

When jawa junk suddenly started to proliferate with Onslaught, I was kind of pleased. Valuable tokens that you can trade for crafting materials and more! Yes! However, as the expansion has gone on, I've found that I've got more and more stacks of the things piling up in my bank and it's starting to bother me. I kind of want to get rid of at least some of them - just to free up some space if nothing else - but at the same time I don't want to just waste them, you know?

Initially I just bought some grade 11 crafting materials (which is the current crafting tier). This turned out to be a big mistake. While you do need stupendous amounts of these to craft pretty much anything, they are horribly overpriced on the junk vendors. I initially thought that maybe this was justified due to the materials' rarity or something, but it really isn't. People easily gather the exact same materials out in the world or from missions by the thousands and sell them on the GTN for much less. I did some maths and at least based on the prices on Darth Malgus, if you buy grade 11 crafting materials for jawa junk, you're basically parting with your junk for as little as half a credit (!) per piece. Just... don't do it.

I did a bit of research to see if others had any recommendations and found several people saying that the companion gifts and exotic crafting materials were reliable sellers. They weren't wrong, and I did sell a few stacks of those, but my gut feeling was that I still wasn't getting good value for my money/junk.

Yearning for a definitive answer, I did what any player with a bit of an obsessive streak would do in such a situation: I made a spreadsheet. Specifically, I wrote down every single item sold on the jawa vendors and how much it cost in junk, price-checked it on the GTN, and then let it calculate how many credits per junk piece I was going to make if I sold the same item at the current lowest price.

Let's get the bad news out of the way first: There is no single, clear "winner". I repeated my price-check just a couple of days apart and there was considerable variance in what came out on top. But there are some patterns, which I guess make sense if you think about them.

For example, the "obvious" sellers like companion gifts and exotic crafting materials are - at best - lower to mid-tier in terms of value for money. I guess this makes sense because it's right there in the previous sentence: they are the "obvious" choices. Every player knows what a companion gift is and knows that they're useful. Therefore it's safe to assume that they have some value and other people will buy them. Similarly, anyone who's ever done any group content has likely rolled off for some exotic crafting drop, and even if you're not sure what exactly they're for, there's some vague sense that they're rare and valuable.

Regular crafting materials are very different though, because they're fairly obscure. (Just writing down the list made me realise how many item names I didn't even recognise.) Even if you're a seasoned veteran of the game, I'm pretty sure that most of you would give me a wide-eyed look if I asked you to sense-check whether Lanthanide Modulators are worth buying and trading (that's a grade 5 slicing component by the way). Or how about Neuro-Stimulators (a type of grade 3 medical supplies)? Can you think of something craftable that uses these items as reagents?

The good news is that you don't actually need to know all those details. It's enough to know that certain crafting materials are where the money's at, and that they let you cash out hundreds (for the green ones) or thousands (for blue or purple) of credits for each piece of jawa junk converted and sold.

Which ones exactly sell for the most can vary from day to day, even on the same server, and I haven't been gathering data for long enough to spot any real trends, but the most basic common factor seems to be that it's usually selected lower-grade (1-6) materials that give you the best conversion rate so I would at least price-check those if you can't be bothered to go through the whole list. My best guess as to why that is the case is that people don't spend much time gathering in the lower levels but still need the mats to level up their crafting crew skills. The recent influx of new players from the Steam launch may have contributed to that too.

My only other advice is that due to the volatility of the market, I wouldn't recommend buying too much of anything in one go. Throw up a stack of 10-100 of a highly valued crafting mat and see how quickly it sells. Fortunately the generosity of the GTN means that you always get your deposit back even if things don't sell the first time around.

I may update this post later or write a follow-up to let you know if I notice anything else that's interesting or just to let you know how well my own plan to turn my junk into riches has been going.

Building Up My Companion Roster

I have a long history of struggling with companion affection in SWTOR. Back when companion story progression was tied to affection I made a post about how I still hadn't finished a lot of companion quests long after I'd completed all the respective class stories because I just couldn't be bothered to gain certain people's affection. Companion story progression getting tied to class story progress was a godsend for me.

Fast forward a few years to 2017, and I wrote about the tedium of levelling companion influence with nothing but gifts. As it happens, Bioware made crew skill missions also award companion influence only two months later, much to my delight.

For a while after that, I ran crew skill missions constantly, just to raise various companions' influence levels. It was really just another way of burning credits on influence - probably not the most efficient one at that - but I really loved that feeling of killing two birds with one stone, raising my companions' influence levels while also gathering crafting materials.

Unfortunately I soon ran into a significant limitation: bag space. Having my inventory fill up at unexpected times because crafting mats were constantly pouring into it on top of whatever else I was picking up was not fun, causing me to eventually abandon the whole thing again.

Now the introduction of the materials inventory in Onslaught has unexpectedly served to revive my interest in this particular pastime, as the spoils of each mission can go directly in there without clogging up my regular inventory. Even better, because crafting materials are actually needed in great numbers and somewhat hard to come by, running missions 24/7 is also worthwhile!

With that in mind, the most pressing question on my mind has now become which companions to level on each character. Thanks to Knights of the Fallen Empire and what followed, all of my characters who've gone through that content have more companions than you can shake a stick at, but you can't send more than eight of them out at once anyway, meaning that you have to make choices about whose influence to level first.

Back in 2017 I just tended to pick the lowest level ones first since I didn't like having anyone sit at level one, but these days there's actually some benefit to having max-influence companions for crafting, so that's become a goal for me. (Technically it was a benefit back then too, but with the exorbitant costs associated with crafting in Onslaught, you really want as many of those crits as possible now.)

It's actually been an interesting thought exercise to pick each character's "favourite" companions. Former class-specific companions are usually a no-brainer if they are still around and I didn't utterly loathe them. And as tired as I got of KotFE over time, one or two of the companions acquired during the Fallen Empire/Eternal Throne story usually make sense as well, depending on the character's preferences.

Then it's simply a matter of who else seems suitable. On my trooper I added Sergeant Rusk to her favourites for example, since he's a Republic soldier too and they should get along swimmingly. I also added HK-51 and Treek, simply because those are companions I haven't bothered to acquire on my other characters so they feel unique to her.

My Sage is trying to get to know Kira because a liberated former child of the Emperor is interesting from a consular's perspective. My Marauder is investing in Scourge because she's intrigued by the fact that he was once her predecessor. My smuggler is levelling up Gault because how could she not want to keep someone with this many underworld contacts close? And so on and so forth.

It's very slow going compared to gift-giving, but I do like watching my selected companions slowly climb in levels, and it tickles my inner roleplayer to imagine my characters' relationships with various companions that don't feature much in the official story. It's like a mini game of my own making.

Reading Crew Skill Mission Text

Bhagpuss has been writing about being fascinated by EQ2's new Overseer system. As far as I can tell from his descriptions of how it works, it's very similar to the "waiting" mini-games that many MMOs have added to their optional gameplay over the last decade or so, and which often involve directing minions or hirelings of some sort. When I asked Bhag in a comment what he found the most interesting about it, he responded that he was surprised by how well the whole system was narratively integrated into the rest of the game.

SWTOR has of course had its own version of this sort of thing since launch, in the form of crew skill missions, even if they are very much on the simple end of the scale: You're always dealing with the same small number of missions, they don't tend to take a lot of time, and the only real way to influence the outcome has been to raise your companions' affection/influence level. I guess nowadays we also have guild perks and amplifiers to improve success rates and crit chance, but those are universal, passive buffs that don't really change the way you look at any given mission.

Bhag's comments about story integration made me pause and think though, mainly because they made me realise just how long it's been since I actually read any of my crew skill missions. These days I only really look at what they're supposed to reward, and maybe the duration/cost - but the actual "story" is something I skim right over.

So of course the next thing I did was to sit down and actually read the text for some of the missions that I've been spamming day in, day out - which just ended up reminding me of something that annoyed me whenever I had read them in the past:

You see, my main has diplomacy as her mission skill, the one mission skill that can award both light and dark side points. What has annoyed me in the past is that in recent years the text has rarely matched the alignment gain (as far as I'm concerned anyway)!

An Alderaanian noble who shares lineage with a renowned smuggler would like to see this particular relation quietly escorted into exile and "forgotten". - So you're basically asking me to abduct/potentially murder someone... and it awards light side points!?

Yet here's the counterpart of the same level: An allied smuggler was recently arrested for customs violations. Send a companion to ensure the smuggler is free to continue assisting the cause. Surely helping an ally is not a bad thing? But no, this one gives dark side points. And so on and so forth.

But okay, that's just diplomacy - let's look at some other profession that isn't tied to the alignment system in the same way. How about some slicing missions?

Taerab Starship Manufacturing is rumored to have a hyperdrive prototype that will cut fuel costs in half. If your companion slices into their files, you could reap the benefits of their research.

Ruthless financier Herron Morvis VII claims to have "confidential personal information" on dozens of corporate heads across the galaxy. Have your companion slice into his secure servers to find out what he knows.

Okay, none of these may be officially tied to the alignment system, but they do all sound a bit dodgy to be honest! Maybe that's another thing that's subconsciously been discouraging me: that I don't much like the thought of my character being tied up in these situations, so I just want to get the rewards without considering potential in-world consequences.

More seriously though, I think in practice it's just down to how basic, repetitive and inconsequential crew skill missions are. Most of the time their duration can be counted in minutes instead of hours, and you might well end up running some of them hundreds of times without anything coming of it other than you slowly growing your stash of crafting mats. How invested can you really get in that on a narrative level?

Then again, you never know when something will suddenly turn into an Easter Egg. For example there is an old diplomacy mission that has been in the game since launch and goes like this: The Sith Lords Anathel and Xarion are battling in the Stygian Caldera, disrupting Imperial trade. Your companion could persuade them to take their feud elsewhere. For years and years, these were just two random names... but then Onslaught came around and suddenly Anathel and Xarion were part of the story and on the Dark Council. So you never know!

Three Months of Onslaught

I realised today that as of yesterday, a full three months have passed since Onslaught's launch. Time flies when you're having fun!

My initial excitement has of course tapered off a bit, but I'm still happily chugging along, as the game feels like it's in a pretty good place right now.

First off, the expansion has really managed to reinvigorate my interest in endgame of all kinds. Working on the new operation has been a blast, and my guild has been able to run two full progression teams to focus on it. The other team actually managed to kill the Apex Vanguard (the last boss) on veteran mode last week, but my own team isn't far off either - just yesterday we had a zero percent wipe (/cries).

While there'll still be things left to do after he falls, I really like the thought of soon being able to say that we cleared the new operation in both difficulties. It's not something I've ever been able to say so shortly after the release of a new raid.

The Conquest rebalancing also revived my interest in that part of the game, and my guild managed to conquer both Mek-Sha and Taris in the last month, which was fun and exciting.

My excitement about gear has tapered off a lot since I earned full 306, simply because the set bonus I want seems ridiculously hard to acquire - it's not available from the regular vendors and I don't think I've seen a single piece drop in the operation it's supposed to be dropping from after three months of running it nearly every week. So I just keep spending tech fragments on sets for alts whenever I get close to the cap and that works alright for me.

Despite of my initial criticisms I did the Onderon dailies for quite a while, even after I'd maxed out the reputation, mostly because running them was something that Mr Commando was happy to do too, so it gave us another in-game activity to do together. Once he lost interest I mostly did as well, though I've been back a couple of times mainly to combine doing them with a round of gathering. The way Bioware has balanced gathering skills this time around, hours of running missions don't yield nearly as much profit as simply picking flowers while doing a round of dailies on Onderon.

The repeatable content on Mek-Sha has been oddly disappointing though. I only found one of the heroics really fun to repeat, as the other one required an odd amount of running around that made the heroic quick travel option feel almost pointless. Then later they added a third one which seemed like it was supposed to give you some fun options to support different factions and unlock achievements, but it was buggy as all hell on launch and gave no real reward, which caused Mr Commando to dismiss it after one run and we haven't been back since then.

Bioware also added a terminal with supposedly rotating dailies in patch 6.0.2, but I also only visited that one once. It gave me a mission to pick some fruit on Dantooine but sent Mr Commando off to Nar Shaddaa. The fruit-picking was cute enough, but being sent off to different planets at random obviously didn't make it a good choice for something to do as a team. I should probably revisit it anyway though...

To get back to gathering for a second, crew skills in general launched in a pretty messed-up state (which is honestly why I didn't bother to look into them too much initially), mostly with even the simplest crafts being ridiculously expensive in terms of materials. A patch has improved the situation somewhat since then, but it's still incredibly slow. I only got the achievement for getting all crew skills to level 700 the other day, and am slowly chipping away at trying to research this or that schematic, without too much commitment.

All of that aside, there is of course always more story content to go through. I've "only" completed Onslaught on six characters and I have so many more alts parked at various points, from their class story to KotET. And I do enjoy logging into different ones to play a bit here and there, but as much as I want to see different outcomes on a cerebral level, when it comes to deciding how I'm going to spend my one hour of playtime in the evening - or however much I happen to have - I all too often end up doing something else instead. But it's okay, fortunately that content isn't going anywhere, so I'll just keep chilling and chipping away at it as time allows and depending on my mood.

Early Onslaught Impressions (No Spoilers)

Whew, the first couple of days of the new expansion have been a bit of a whirlwind! So far I've played through the story once on Republic side (on my Commando) and once on Imperial side (on my Marauder), did the new Republic dailies once, killed the first few bosses of the new operation on story mode, and spent a couple of hours sifting through several hundred screenshots that I took during my story playthroughs.

To quickly sum up my first impressions of the story in a spoiler-free manner: It didn't grab me quite as much as Jedi Under Siege did, but I freaking loved Ossus, so that was an incredibly high bar to clear. That said, if you asked me to rate Onslaught in comparison to all the previous story expansions so far, I'd say it's the best one we've had to date.

I honestly felt a little lukewarm about the start on Onderon - the planet is smaller than I had hoped (definitely no Yavin or Ossus) and the story beats didn't quite resonate with me - but by Mek-Sha I was warming up to it. The hollowed-out asteroid was kind of the opposite of Onderon in terms of my expectations, as I thought it was going to be small and I've traditionally not been super fond of what you could call underworld environments. But then it ended up feeling much bigger than I anticipated (I can't tell you how it compares in terms of actual square mileage, but all the traversing between platforms and in three dimensions certainly made it feel bigger) and the story developments made me go: "Yeah! That's what I'm here for!"

The thing with having played a game like this for several years is that you can't quite appreciate some things the way a new player can, as you just can't feel the same sense of awe and wonder at the sight of new things (as everything new is usually at least similar to something you've seen before). However, being a veteran of many years does give you an eye for certain details and nuances that the uninitiated won't notice and that you can only recognise with years of experience.

With that said, I could tell that a lot of love has gone into the Onslaught story. (If anyone from Bioware is reading this: thanks, guys and gals!) There are so many little moments that make you smile, chuckle, or just go "o-ho!" as they reference past events, and the cast of characters - both new and returning - is huge.

I've always felt that SWTOR's two biggest strengths in terms of story are the personalised class story that makes the player feel invested in the game, and the huge cast of supporting characters - all with their own backgrounds, interests and influences - that can push the story into fascinating new directions at any moment. That is also what made KotFE and KotET fall flat for so many people: that our characters seemingly forgot about everything that had come before, including loved ones and spouses, and that we were supposed to care about nothing but Valkorion's family and the Eternal Empire now, just us vs. them. (Now that I think about it, the Alliance vs. Zakuul story was actually a more simplistic black and white version of the galaxy than Republic vs. Empire has ever been in SWTOR.)

Onslaught is chock-full of callbacks to our characters' pasts (where appropriate) and the amount of old non-player characters that have been pulled back into service (again, absolutely appropriately) is staggering. As a long-time player, that just feels so good. As a non-spoilery example, at one point my Marauder was asked to see the Dark Council and quipped in response (I'm paraphrasing from memory): "Are you sure they really want to see me? Last time I did that, I ended up killing one of them." That's no line for an Outlander or generic Commander, that's pure Sith warrior right there.

A couple of months ago I wrote a post about how MMOs are actually kind of similar to long-running book series: the audiences for both love to immerse themselves in a huge world that seems to go on forever, happily memorising countless numbers of different events, protagonists and their motivations. The Onslaught story fully caters to that invested long-term audience that will welcome every reference and in-joke enthusiastically. I don't think that necessarily makes it unenjoyable for more casual players, but let's just say that if you only play a single character for example you'll be missing a lot of Onslaught's more subtle context.

Anyway, my "quick" story summary turned into seven paragraphs - what else is there to say so far? Unfortunately in terms of questing as a group, Onslaught has been a bit of a step back from Ossus again, and I'm not sure why. On Ossus they had this weird system going that allowed you to go into the same phase, have the conversation parts be personal to you and then do any fighting as a team while progressing the story simultaneously. This time we're back to regular old personal phases everywhere, and for me and Mr Commando they even bugged out a couple of times, with one of us finding themselves forced into spectator mode in the other one's phase and being unable to create their own phase without first leaving the group. At this point I feel a bit like I'm the last person left on earth who cares about levelling and questing in SWTOR as a group, but I'll just keep banging that drum anyway.

In general there are a fair number of bugs again. No show-stoppers so far - as far as I'm aware - but what I'd call the usual array of minor annoyances, such as crafting nodes spawning in the ground, creatures and droids whose bodies should be salvageable not being flagged as such, the Mek-Sha world boss giving neither achievement credit nor any loot, and one of the daily quests on Republic side that requires you to pick up items from the ground being almost impossible to complete. There's a definitive pattern to these bugs, and from the way Bioware designs their weeklies and such it's almost as if they expect at least one quest to be broken at this point (since they never ask you to complete absolutely everything to get the main reward). I do wish it didn't have to be like that, but I also understand that bug fixes for anything that isn't a major feature get treated as low priority from a business point of view all too easily.

My dislike for the new item tooltips and item modification UI from the PTS has made it to live too. I also noticed that you don't need to hit "apply" when swapping mods around anymore as it commits them automatically! I'll have to be extra careful now, because I'm totally the kind of person who used to accidentally overwrite better mods with worse ones until I noticed just in time to avoid hitting apply...

I'm also hopelessly confused by the new colour codings for armour. Maybe one of my readers can enlighten me? Basically "orange" as a colour for moddable items seems to be gone, so now items of any colour can exist in moddable and unmoddable versions. I'm totally lost what decides the colour of the shell though, as my old oranges have sometimes turned blue and sometimes gold. Why? Who knows! Makes it much harder to not accidentally vendor stuff you want to keep in my opinion, as you now have to double-check even every bloody green...

The one thing I really like is the new legacy-wide materials tab, which freed up something like three of my legacy cargo bays (though I'm sure I'll find something else to fill them up with soon enough). Again, there are just some minor issues with it that I wish they'd fix, such as it not remembering whether you closed any of the sub-categories and simply defaulting to having all of them fully expanded whenever it refreshes.

I also really dislike not getting any feedback when I gather now: The way it used to be (and still is when you gather a slicing node for example) is that you'd get a small notification on screen and in your event log of what you just picked up. Stuff going straight into the materials tab doesn't make a peep though, so I had no idea what I was harvesting on Onderon all day until I sat down at the end of the evening and checked which of the biochem mats in my materials storage I only had in small numbers (and which were therefore bound to be the new ones).

Finally, let me finish with a couple of random, non-spoilery screenshots:

I suffered my first death of the expansion from sheer stupidity: coming to the edge of a waterfall on Onderon I went "whee" and leapt right off the edge... to my death of course. (The screenshot shows Mr Commando reviving me after the fact.) That's what I get for having got excited about diving underwater in WoW Classic in the past month - letting my subconscious forget that in SWTOR every body of water is but a knee-deep puddle.

One previously unannounced feature of Onslaught: exciting new ladder-climbing gameplay! Unfortunately the reception hasn't been too great so far: mostly I see confused Republic players complain about being unable to reach that one spot in their story mission where they're supposed to climb a ladder because they don't seem to realise that this is what they're supposed to be doing. On Imp side I found a ladder to climb a roof in the open world but I tried to use it three times and every time my character got to the top and the getting-off-the-ladder animation played, she fell straight down to the ground. Baby steps...

One of the more amusing bugs to me was that in my Marauder's version of the story, Theron Shan is dead, but this didn't prevent him from making an appearance as an invisible ghost to talk about... partying?