Dark Fantasy X: SWTOR end game

Wednesday, March 06, 2024

SWTOR end game

Well, I had mentioned that the lag seemed to be improved. I still had a lot of it playing Taul Kajak on Voss yesterday. I did finish Voss, including the bonus series. There were two major problems: 1) if playing Jedi Knight, then you actually defeat Sel-Makor as part of your class story before you face his minion in the faction story and have a lot of dialogue that doesn’t make any sense anymore, and 2) the bonus series is super long and tedious. I did it specifically because I hadn’t in a while and wanted to see it again, but I doubt I’ll do it with any of my next wave of characters (I guess I’ll do one Imperial character too, just to see how its different.) I also switched to my second combat style to sneak past a bunch of tedious trash mobs, and it completely screwed up my buttons when I switched back. Overall, my Voss experience was pretty frustrating. Too bad, as I think that it’s a pretty planet, at least, but that’s not sufficient to account for all of the other frustrating or dumb things that Voss offers. It hasn’t been one of my favorite planets to actually play. Of course, if I can get rid of the lag by getting a new graphics card and/or motherboard, that’ll be a major improvement, at least.

I’ve been waffling a bit on whether or not I want to do the faction story on Corellia with this character, or wait for the next one to come around, but I’m thinking I’ll do it with Taul after all. For all subsequent Republic characters, I’ll just completely drop all exploration, heroic, extraneous flashpoints or faction story missions as soon as I hit max level. I mean, like a hot potato. I’ll abandon the missions in my mission log and ignore all of them from that point forward.

Unfortunately, I’ve never much liked the end game planets as much as I wish that I did. Hoth is the last planet that I really like. Belsavis and Voss and even Corellia have elements to them that are cool, but others that are not. I kind of like planets like Ilum and Rishi or even Yavin IV that come later more than I like these three. Part of my dislike of Voss is the “anthropology lesson” that the writers want to subject you to. They are proud of their setting development on Voss, and spend way too much time going over it with you as opposed to just letting you go adventure out on the planet. You’re constantly having to navigate the supposed tricky diplomatic situation because of the Voss and their weird culture, and the impact of the Mystics, etc. The writers indulged in that way too often with many of the companions in the game, but Voss is where they really let it hang out there for the whole planetary experience.

In any case, with Taul Kajak now ready to go to Corellia, which is the last normal planet, I’ll almost certainly make that my priority, and just do Corellia and have done with it. Then I can check one more character off as “finished”, or moved into semi-retirement is perhaps more accurate, and decide what to do next. I’d kind of like to finish the two Ilum flashpoints with Hutran Thanatos, actually, and then have him do The Black Hole and Section X, etc. And I’d like to grind reputation on Ruhnuk with Maark. And, I’ve got Anstal Tane and Vant Galaide to move forward with, not to mention Mirabeau Tane. Plenty to work on; I mostly just have to decide what of all of those options I’m more in the mood for. And as I get Taul into semi-retirement, I’d like to make some outfit videos with him and Hutran, my two green guys, at which point I’ll feel like their semi-retirement is more legit. I somehow feel like there’s something still to do with them, and I think that that’s really it.

And then last night, I deferred some of my real life responsibilities to "veg". I listened to some music. I watched YouTube videos about the philosophy and text of the Dune books (the more I learn of them, the less I like them. I'm glad that I only read the first one, didn't even finish it, and instead just watched the sci-fi channel miniseries and now the new movies. They were better than the books, in most respects.) And, of course, I played around in SWTOR. I went to Corellia, although not with Taul Kajak; rather I took my old bounty hunter Graggory, my old agents Johhn and Hutran Thanatos, my old commando Philippion and my old gunslinger Luukke to the Spike and spent some time in the rakghoul tunnels. I had earlier reported that I might delete Philippion, but I'm now thinking that I probably won't; he's my only commando, and I won't be able to showcase any outfit videos or anything else using a cannon if I don't have any commandos. Since I don't really need or want a second commando, I might as well just keep him. Too bad he has a dumb name, but the same is true for Mat Thew, Maark Luukke and Johhn in most respects, and yet I'm not getting rid of any of them. Oh, well

I took some video in the rakghoul tunnels and on the surface of Corellia with another low cost outfit on Thanatos, but I haven't edited the video file or otherwise done anything with it, so here's some other screenshots taken earlier of the outfit that I had Graggory running around in. I'll get some rakghoul stuff later. Because there are two daily challenges that give you rakghoul cannisters, and you can do them pretty quickly, I did them both with all five of the characters mentioned, netting me ten new rakghoul cannisters. If I do that a couple more times this week, I'll be sitting pretty with regards to rakghoul cannisters. I'm a little short on bounty contracts, though—next time that event comes around, I'll need to grind a good twenty new contracts or so.

As noted, this Graggory outfit is very "smuggler-like" rather than hunter-like, but I tend to like my hunters to dress in normal gunfighter clothes quite often. Here he is showing off his stuff on Dantooine, Korriban, Balmorra and Nar Shaddaa respectively.

UPDATE: Actually, maybe I'll go back and do the Voss planetary and bonus series Imperial side with Hutran Thanatos, as well as Corellia planetary. And for Republic, I can do the Corellia stuff with Anstal. Because they belong to Operative and Scoundrel. I can sneak past the trash mobs easily. There's no point anymore in worrying about XP or bonus missions, etc (well, there won't be by the time Anstal is on those planets) so the whole thing will be faster and less tedious than with anyone else. And once I've said that I've done it again relatively recently, I won't feel obligated in any sense whatsoever to try it again for quite a long time.

This is part of what I mean by "semi-retirement." Hutran Thanatos finished the main story, he's max level—but there's still plenty that I can do with him, I find, so there's no reason to delete him, and plenty of reasons to still keep him around for certain things and do things with him. I'd actually like to play the next part of the expansions, probably up through Ziost at least with him too... but I feel no urgency to get that done.

UPDATE II: Good and bad news on the rakghoul tunnels. I didn't realize this before, but if you fast travel straight from the tunnels to your spaceship, it still shows your location as in the tunnels, which are treated as a separate world from the world that you're actually on. This means that if you exit your ship, you go straight to the tunnels too. Nice shortcut! Also, and I think this seems to have been changed, it seems almost impossible to draw aggro now in the tunnels unless you literally attack one of the monsters. You can literally walk through them and not draw aggro. This is very convenient too. The bad news: I forgot that you can only do the Jeelvic mission once per character per week. If my goal was to get 30 rakghoul cannisters, I'll now need to do it at least two more days than I thought, or with more characters than I thought. Or, I can settle and get less. We'll see how it goes. Taking five characters just to ride around and binocular the ceiling in a few places each isn't the most exciting thing, but it's pretty quick and harmless and gives me the currency I need. Sadly, all of the other missions just give reputation, and I'm all done with reputation.

I guess I could do the Heroic 4 and group up with somebody or other, maybe... Might be nice to try something different, and maybe I'll even get grouping credit for it on the social achievements.