Yesterday, I finished Knights of the Eternal Throne, the fourth major story expansion to Old Republic with my Jedi Knight character. It's the same for all characters, mostly, so I have little incentive to be too much in a hurry to run someone else through it. I do want to eventually run at least my Sith Warrior through it though, because some of the Onslaught content differs by faction again. There's still a fair bit of content to do for this character, including Iokath, three story mode flashpoints, Ossus, and then all of the Onslaught drip feed stuff, which is not insignificant too. One thing that I've heard which is notable is that some of the later Onslaught material, especially the Echoes of Oblivion stuff offers major spoilers for the Jedi Knight, Jedi Consular and Sith Warrior classes. I've played the main story for Knight and Warrior, but not yet Consular. I'll want to do that first. Luckily, it's the next one that I'm scheduled to start.
My Sith Warrior lags a bit behind the Jedi Knight, but I just finished all of the Rishi content, so I'm hip deep in the Shadow of Revan expansion. I'm also using him specifically to be my reputation grinder. I have two factions at legendary now, two I believe at Champion (the next to last, below Legendary) and four or five at Hero. The ones that tend to lag are the ones that are based on the events, since I can't just do them whenever. Those, if I'm interested in unlocking something on the track, I throw more characters at anyway. But I'm a little leery of starting Knights of the Fallen Empire with him too soon, because I'm using him for stuff right now anyway. And, there's no hurry; I literally just did Knights of the Fallen Empire and Knights of the Eternal Throne with my Jedi Knight, and the story is the same with any class.
My smuggler is approaching the end of his story, kinda. I just arrived on Voss, so I just have that planet, plus the Directive 7 flashpoint, and then Corelia to be done. I don't know that I'll go any further than the end of the main story with any of the subsequent characters of this batch. Probably not, actually.
My agent is on Alderaan. I just finished the class story and the world story and after doing the bonus story missions, I'll leave that one behind (although I think next week is the rakghoul event on Alderaan. So I'll probably have plenty of characters on that planet again next week. I liked it better on Tatooine, honestly. It somehow seemed to fit that planet better.) After finishing the Alderaan bonus missions, he's got the chapter 1 capper events and he moves into Chapter 2. We're gettting there!
After I finish the smuggler, I'll start the Jedi Consular, and I'll want to finish that story before I get to the end of the more recent Onslaught updates like Echoes of Oblivion, at least. Mark (or M'aar'k, more accurately, or however I had to spell it to get the stupid game to take the name), my Jedi Knight, will therefore go a bit into hibernation, and I'll only use him for the two upcoming events; the rakghoul and the bounty hunting event, both of which I want to max out my weekly reputation for my legacy on, and I'd like to earn plenty of the currency that both give for buying some special items.
After I finish the agent, which will be sometime after finishing the smuggler but before finishing the consular, I'll add the sith inquisitor to the rotation to replace him. And sometime soon, my bounty hunter and trooper rotations will go into effect too, and then I'll be a Legendary Player who's finished all eight class stories. Then I'll mop up the expansions and be done.
But wait! After I'm done, I'm actually going to do it all again! See, each class has two variants. Back in the day, you started a class and then at some point picked an "advanced" class that changed some of your combat mechanics. Now, you pick that right at the very beginning and character generation. The story between the two variants for each class is identical—there's a cosmetic change (what type of weapon you use) and many of the combat mechanics will differ somewhat. So why do it? Just for the combat mechanics? No, actually I'm going to record and then edit movies of this second playthrough, to archive for the day when inevitably the game goes offline and you can never play it again anymore. Sure, I could probably watch someone else's youtube playthrough. There's plenty of good options. But I want to "cast my own protagonist" so to speak, and play through with a character whos' appearance I've designed and make the dialogue choices, insignificant as most of them are, that I want to pick. Plus, I'm having fun figuring out how to do the video recording and editing; it's not something that I've done much with before, so it's a new hobby of sorts within the greater hobby of playing SWTOR.
Along those lines, although the world stories, the bonus stories, the exploration missions and the heroic missions are all fine, I do find that they interrupt and disrupt the pacing and flow of the class stories. As I play this, I'll end up editing it in such a way that it'll focus on the class stories, and the world stories, exploration missions and whatnot will be "supplemental content". I'll upload all this stuff to Youtube, I presume, once I've finished editing them, but the main playlists will be the class stories only. Also, because the world stories, exploration missions, bonus series and heroic missions are all the exact same across the entire faction, I probably will not bother editing and uploading the material for every class; probably one per faction only.
I will also be only doing solo content, at least at this point. Anything that requires grouping will not be played. This means that the operations that end the Oricon planet won't be showing, and several of the non-essential flashpoints. I also won't be doing the macrobinoculars and seeker droid missions, because they end on group content that can't be completed without a group. It's a real shame, because you can do a lot of stuff solo, but you can't quite finish it. It was clear that during the Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion era the devs were really trying to push group content on the player base, but the reality is that most people don't play group content (I think this is likely common to most online games, actually—the old World of Warcraft MMO model is one that's pretty much gone now in most respects, and the lack of solo player modes for games like Destiny, Overwatch, Star Wars Battlefront, etc. have been points against the game for much of the player base. Regardless of what other games are doing, the devs for SWTOR have confirmed that this is the case for SWTOR, and after that expansion era ended, the subsequent expansions focused heavily on solo play. I'd love to see the last flashpoints and the Oricon operation, a least (since it's a story one) as well as the Heroic 4s for the end of the macrobinocular and seeker droid missions retooled as soloable content. Leaving the rest of operations as group stuff (plus uprisings and other group content) should keep the groupers happy with at least the same level of content that they have now, and hopefully more as more content continues to be added, but the solo players are missing out on a few items here and there that are actually necessary to get the entire story. Honestly, we could leave the rest of the non-essential flashpoints as grouper only, but I wish that they wouldn't. Most of them should be fine with a combat droid and some extremely minor tweaks to the enemies.
Anyway, that's neither here nor there, since I can't control what the devs add or don't add to the game. For purposes of my recording of the game, I'm only doing the solo content.
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