SWTOR update 3.0

I don't know why I'm keeping a running journal of my Old Republic progress here lately, but cut me some slack; I'm enoying it immensely again after—while still playing it—having kind of run against a wall of tedium. It all boiled down to deciding that I didn't have to do it all. I crashed early last night, very sleepy after a bad night the night before, but that had a good effect. I didn't do everything that I thought I would, but I did all but one of my characters grind in the rakghoul tunnels. I woke up early enough to do that last one again before the day reset (I'm in Eastern time zone, so it resets at 7:00 AM my time.) That took me a little longer than I thought, and only a few minutes after I finished, 7:00 AM hit and it reset. I've since done two of my three characters again; the smuggler (who's otherwise retired from active duty, and I keep around for grinding purposes) and agent. After doing the smuggler, I had enough money to try and buy the armor set on the GTN I was saving for, but all of the cheaper copies had sold, and not only could I not afford it, but I wasn't even close anymore. I bought another similar set for even less, however—the helmet wasn't quite as good, but the chest piece was better. (I have a level 10+ legacy bound helmet that was very much like the one I couldn't buy.) There's one more armor set that I really want, the Mandalorian tracker. It sells for 25-30 million on the GTN, and 1440 on the Cartel Market. But I have no interest in using real money to buy this; I will either need to wait until I get my subscriber + security key cartel coins and have enough to buy it, or keep grinding with the smuggler until I get enough credits to buy it. That's not as unreasonable as it sounds, but it does mean spending at least an hour a day grinding—which might get tedious.

After I did the agent, I went back and did Quesh with him. The class story on the planet is shockingly short. I had to start the planetary story just to take the stupid shuttle from the orbital station to the surface, but then I could abandon that quest and move on. So freeing! I did it in about 20-30 minutes, because it's so short, and then moved on to Hoth. I'll finally get my agent's love interest (the one that I can stand to romance, anyway—my character already met her, but I can't change her race and image until I get her as a companion, of course.) For what it's worth, while the character model is a black woman (and prettier than most real life black women I've ever seen) the voice actress is a white Australian. She's blonde, but her hair color probably isn't natural. In fact, the customization 9 that I'm going to use as soon as I get her as a companion, probably looks a lot like the voice actress herself does. Or did, a good 10-15 years ago, anyway, with her natural hair color and natural brown eyes. Anyway, I've said before that I don't really like the agent's companions much, but Dr. Lokin is kind of interesting as a mad scientistic Dr. Jekyll of sorts, and Raina Temple is extremely cute, charismatic and likable.

Tonight, I want to: 

1. Finish the Hoth class story with my agent.
2. Grind the rakghoul tunnels with my Jedi Knight and Sith Warrior. 
3. Do the Esseles Flashpoint with my Jedi Consular
4. If I still have time, do the Coruscant Heroics with my Consular
5. If I still have time, grind a few more heroics with my smuggler for money and for the chance to get the Remnant Underworld Trooper body armor piece, the only part of the remnant armors that I still really want to make sure I can find. I actually got quite a few crates that I need to open with all my smuggler grinding yesterday, but I haven't opened them.

But I don't know how much time I'll have tonight; I need to get out for a couple of hours in the evening. This weekend, I'm going out of town for my niece's baptism, so I won't play much. But when I come back, I'll only have a little bit of the rakghoul event to do before the timer runs out on it, so that'll be done. I'll keep grinding a bit more credits and see if it's feasible to actually buy the Mandalorian tracker armor with credits, or if I'll find the whole thing too tedious to keep working on. It's more money than I've ever spent on anything before; I don't think I've spent more than 5 million credits on anything before. But, of course, I'll be getting money just from my day to day progress through the story with my characters too.

I don't expect to be able to afford it, but the only other cosmetic right now that I really crave is the executioner's lightning weapon tuning, which I'd probably put on literally every weapon for every character for a while. But those are super expensive, and I'm not spending real money on that either.

Even with this accelerated schedule, I don't expect to finish the agent storyline completely next week, although I'll probably be close. And I'm going to play the consular with just world stories and maybe Tython and Coruscant repeated daily heroics to keep my level up, if I feel I need to, just to see how well that works in terms of leveling. I'll probably also do the story flashpoints with him; I'll hopefully do Esseles tonight, but also the two Maelstrom Prison/Revan ones later on, and maybe the Directive 7 one again too.

I'd also really like to do the War for Iokath story stuff on my Jedi Knight next week so I can start grinding those dailies. There's two reputation tracks to level up, one for Empire and one for Republic, but since you're the Alliance Commander, one character can do both of them (although you can only do the story track as one, and you get a headstart on the reputation that way.) Both of them have armor sets that I want, one of them I intend to use the majority of as the basis for my recorded Sith Warrior play through.