Vant Galaide

The servers are down for deployment of the 7.0 update, so I'm taking some time to edit some videos together. I'm on a personal day for work, so I can take a nap later (my wife and I both slept terrible) and because I have a furnace repairman coming over later today too. Sigh. Cold day for our furnace to not be working, although this same guy just installed it a few weeks ago. Probably a simple thing like frozen condensation blocking the air intake pipe, or something.

Anyway, last night I finished Ord Mantell with Anstal Tane, my scoundrel. I find that I'm a couple of levels short on the Scoundrel and Operative compared to the other classes; I'm leaving the starting planet at level 17 instead of level 20. Technically, you only have to be level 10 to go to the fleet, or you're only "expected" to be. I presume that I'm missing a little bit of XP because instead of killing all of the tedious trash mobs, I'm turning on my stealth generator and sneaking past a lot of them. Because otherwise, I'm doing all of the missions. I didn't think XP from kills was really as big a deal as all that; I thought the missions were by far the bigger deal. They probably still are, but y'know. Plus, if I don't start killing a few enemies, I'm not getting the bonus missions, which are just a modest amount of credits and XP. But at these lower levels, even a modest amount of XP is something.

To be honest, any new character I ever do from now on will probably have a stealth generator option as my second combat style; Scoundrel or Operative for all tech classes and Shadow or Assassin for all force classes. Because sometimes those tedious trash mobs are just sooooo tedious. Actually, most of the time they are. So I was actually thinking that hitting the fleet is a good opportunity to shut down for the evening, and then since the week resets today when it comes back on after the update, I can use the Heroic Transport to do the Ord Mantell heroics again, and probably get another level or two out of the deal before I go do the Esseles Flashpoint and get—hopefully—yet another level and then end up at level 19-20 on Coruscant after all. 

I'm reminded that the writing on the starting planet isn't just bad for the Jedi Knight; the smuggler and trooper have to deal with all kinds of whiny, entitled virtue signaling too. Ugh. But I'm also reminded that the gunfighters in space ideas tend to be more compelling to me than the Jedi and Sith; the "space wizards" and their ideological wars, if you will. I just in the last few weeks did the starting planets for the Smuggler, Agent, Jedi Knight and now about half of the bounty hunter too. The Jedi Knight stands out of that group as being the least engaging... and he's the most engaging of the force class stories (although the Sith Warrior is a close second.) The trooper never did much for me, but those other three really have the best potential. 

I decided to make my Mercenary a pretty typical gunfighter in space in terms of how he dresses and whatnot. The dialogue occasionally refers to his heavy armor and all that, but I doubt I'll actually ever really wear any that's very over the top; I'll focus on making him look more like a cowboy in space. I've also equipped him with Provenance, one of the Cartel Market pistols that I bought. (And of course being a Mercenary, he uses two of them.) Many of the pistols are pretty big and chunky, but I especially go in for the even more exaggeratedly big and chunky pistols, and Provenance certainly is a big boy. It's also got a very unique clackity-clack sound like its throwing expended shells out of a side vent or something; the animation even looks a bit like that too.

UPDATE: I was having real trouble with names in the game until I started borrowing names from my existing settings. Anstal Tane is actually a minor NPC from my DARK FANTASY X game, shown here in this campaign proposal. And Vant Galaide is actually just the last name of existing Star Wars character Cobb Vanth slightly respelled, and Galaide is from my own SPACE OPERA X setting, where the Galaide Worlds are a subset of the Dhangetan Cartel; formerly Altairan worlds that were "sold" by corrupt oligarchs to the Dhangetans, a kinda sorta stand-in for the Hutts.