Wednesday, December 01, 2021

Another interruption in your Mother of All SWTOR Reviews

Well, I feel kind of sheepish and stupid. I had believed that I had locked out my story on my first character, a powertech named Graggory. It turns out that I had not. I had believed that I'd locked out my romance with Mako because it wasn't working the way it did in the KOTOR games. But I hadn't locked it out after all; although I had gone to some planets that were above the main story, like Ossus and Onderon and Ilum. However, I hadn't done any of the story missions above the main story mission, so I actually still had it open all along. And because I had believed that I'd locked it out, back when I still was kinda new to the game and didn't know how all of the mechanics worked, I just never really looked back at Graggory, and I did a different bounty hunter named Galat'ion. I'd deliberately made him to look a lot like Graggory, and I'd had the same advanced class, same discipline, and everything. But now I feel kind of stupid. I can finish the second half of the story with Graggory after all, and because I've been max level for a long time now, I don't have any reason to do anything at all other than the class stories, so I can also do it fairly quickly (in fact, I blazed through Taris and Quesh earlier today, before doing a bunch of stuff on the Gree event with all my other guys.)

So now what? I don't have any need for two nearly identical powertechs, but there are some other reasons why I don't want to get rid of Galat'ion either. So, I spent just a small handful of cartel coins to update Galat'ions appearance just a little; changed his hair and eye color, really is all. Just enough to make him look a little bit different than Graggory. And, I also went to the disciple retrainer on the fleet, and since I'm a subscriber, I can change that for free too. I changed pyrotech to prototype, so I've updated some passives and just a few of my attacks on Galat'ion. I don't think I'll be using him for anything but reputation dailies and events and stuff now that I'm done with his story, so it'll be nice to have them both just a tad different from each other. In fact, I'll probably work on some dailies the next few days with Galat'ion in particular to get used to his new abilities on his new discipline.

Swtorista, who's one of the most popular YouTubers in the SWTOR community, actually said not too long ago that she has a character for every single discipline. That's a lot; there are 16 classes when you split each class story into its two advanced classes, and each of those 16 classes has three disciplines. Does she really have 48 characters? That's how many you'd need to have one of each discipline. Yeah, she probably does. Her full-time gig, as near as I can tell, is as a SWTOR content creator, and she's been subscribed since pretty much the inception of the game. I'm not quite that serious, to say the least, so there's no way that I'll ever have that many different characters. But I can have a few alternative versions, and since the bounty hunter is my favorite class anyway, it makes sense to explore the options there a bit more than normal.

UPDATE: I still, of course, have the "opening crawl" text say that I'm on my way to Makeb and the Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion. I feel less stupid about believing that I'd screwed up my game. Everything about it seems to be telling me that I'd screwed it up with the exception of one small marker that I had another story mission to go do. Because I also had story missions on Ilum and Makeb, that can perhaps be excused for getting lost in the shuffle, and it is more explainable why I thought I'd messed up my game and started all over again, this time actually tracking my progress.

That said, it's been pretty fun going through stuff again so soon. Belsavis is not very fun for the bounty hunter; it's poorly designed in terms of having to sit around waiting for those bounties to respawn (and those are poorly implemented anyway; not very interesting) and of course you have to deal with Skadge the entire time. This time, I'm not even having the companion conversations with him. I'm going to stuff him in the corner of my ship and pretend he's not there as much as is possible. Ugh, I hate that guy. But so does everyone else, apparently. Even if I do have the companion conversations with him, because he was the last pick-up, exposure to him is pretty small anyway. If they hadn't made him so important to the story of Belsavis, I'd probably like playing that planet as a bounty hunter a bit better.

Anyway, I'm on to Corellia, so I'm almost done now. I've also done a ton of Gree stuff during the Gree event this week. I'd never really spent any time on that, but I maxed out my reputation, and I've got a ton of reputation trophies to spend as soon as the week resets. (I may even have enough that I'll max out next week too and have to spend some the week after.) Earning the Gree currency is pretty hard. I've done the Gree Relay quest with all of my characters, which earned my a fair bit of gray helix currency, but you can only do that once ever per character, so it's pretty much done. The only way to really get more is to do the heroic, which is difficult to do alone, but you can do impromptu quick groups with the people standing around the pylon, which tends to work fairly well, and the weekly stuff. 

What I really want is more bounty hunter contracts. I don't know when the bounty week will be back on, but I'm afraid it could well be while I'm out of town (although if the rotation actually works like a normal rotation, it should probably be Dantooine pirates while I'm off for Christmas break—too bad; I'd like to get some more reputation for that event too and buy the blue Dantooine pirate outfit.) There's a bunch of stuff I'd like to buy with bounty hunter contracts, but I've only got 12 of them on stock, which is barely enough to buy most of it. A lot of that bounty contract gear is bind on pickup rather than bound to legacy or even bind on equip, which means you can only buy it with the character who's going to use it, and then he's the one stuck with it forever. Not sure how I feel about that, but what can you do? That's where I got Galat'ion's totally awesome gun, by the way. I've got some other pistols that I'm eyeing for my mercenary playthough in the future on the other platform opposite the BBA platform; the grek pistols that you can buy there with cartel certificates. You get a decent little stack of those every month if you log in every day, and I'm already legend status on the rep track, so I can buy it all if I can afford it. I need to keep that going too so I can keep getting the currency to spend.

Other than that; well, I'm starting to think about how I'm going to make my next set of characters for the next playthroughs. Although the 7.0 release will be out in just a couple of weeks, and will have the new combat style stuff, I actually think that I probably prefer (at least for now) to play the class mechanics that are meant to go with the class. What I mean is, when I play my mercenary and my Jedi Sentinel, for instance, I'll play them as bounty hunter and Jedi Knight, the way that they would have been prior to 7.0. The same will probably be true for all of the other playthroughs that I intend to do.

Anyway, my work day is wrapping up soon, and I'd like to get an hour or so of playing in before I have to start my evening stuff. Maybe I'll finish the story with Graggory today yet. If not, for sure I will tomorrow.

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