Just a quick update, without even an image file to pretty it up (unless I edit the post and add one later, which I may do.) By grinding for a few hours last night, I finished Hutran Thanatos' story, and I'll let him fall to the back of the list of characters through non-use, I think. I may yet return to him, and do Ilum, or some of the other post story story, if that phrase makes sense. Maybe Makeb, and Rishi, and all that, although I tend to peter out with all of my characters after Yavin IV at the very latest, and honestly, even getting past Ilum is sometimes tricky. Makeb is big and kind of intimidating to start when I feel like the payoff isn't as big. What I really miss are the class specific stories, and without them, I just don't care nearly as much. The big story expansions; KotET and KotFE aren't class specific, and really only make sense for a Jedi character anyway. I know, I know... you can play them with anyone. But it only "feels" right with a Jedi, or maybe a reformist Sith, if you played a relatively light-sider Sith.
Hutran Thanatos would also be a great candidate for grinding through potential reputation or seasons (when another one starts), if I still have any interest in getting reputation. It's not a sure thing that I do. But now that I'm back in the game, I'm still interesting in the drip, as the kids say, because it's one of the few things that you can do that at least gives you that dopamine hit of being fresh for a moment. Otherwise, I've got loads of story still to play with loads of characters, and then I need to decide what I'm really going to do with them. Honestly, I don't really know what to do with all of these characters. I'd like to play them to completion, but after that? I have no idea. I don't really want to get rid of them. Maybe I'll use my slow drip of cartel coins to buy a few extra character slots so I can keep these and not feel like my character slot situation is quite as full as I feel like it is now. I do still have two slots, but that's not a lot. I'd like to have a buffer of a few more, especially if I do let my son play through. He'll obviously take one. Realistically, I probably can't and don't have much need to keep all of these "junior" characters. If I decide that I want to keep them instead of the originals, then I'd need to max out the crafting on the newer characters, and try and get them a load of schematics that my current characters have. I doubt that I'd have any interest in doing that, although at least it'd give me something to do with them. The only reason that I'd otherwise keep these newer guys is because I have some reason to come back and play them again. I doubt that that's will be true, but in the meantime, I'm having a hard time making that decision and letting go. To be fair, I literally just finished the story with him last night...
As a quick aside, the ending for the agent was a bit underwhelming, although appropriate. For the Jedi Knight, for example, and most of the other classes if I remember correctly, there's a whole big deal obviously modeled after the medal ceremony in the first Star Wars film. For the agent, you just have a quiet moment with your crew. Your crew that I mostly can't stand, if you'll remember. (The companions are clearly the worst aspect of the Agent storyline.) I was kind of waiting for something else before I realized that I was actually done and that the next thing I was supposed to do was go ahead and go to Ilum.
Or, maybe I can do a few non-solo flashpoints with him still. I'm starting to lag behind even with my top characters in gear rating for group stuff, and these newer characters are farther behind still. I guess I can go pick up stuff on the Fleet to get him more up to speed than he currently is, but I just don't want to grind for a few points of gear rating; or even a few tens of points. It simply doesn't matter enough for any of the material that I prefer to play. I'll make another plug for I wish BioWare, or Broadsword, or whomever it is these days, would allocate someone for a few weeks on making all of the Flashpoints soloable. Half of them were upgraded, because they're important to the story, and you can't really do solo story play without them, but why not do the rest of them? And figure out some way to have solo flashpoint versions of the Operations and Heroic 4s too. Here's a flowchart of a lot of this stuff. It doesn't have the newest stuff on it, but the newest stuff is more obvious anyway.
I kind of like Ilum well enough. It feels like a nice coda to the original faction/planetary stories, as well as many details from many of the class stories. I might yet go back to Thanatos and do Ilum. And maybe the Black Hole and Section X, etc. By the time I get all the way to Makeb, however, I'm much more likely to feel "done" with the character, and if not, I really am usually by the time I'm done with Rishi or Ziost at the absolute latest. Although in light of above; I should double check and make sure that I've maxed out my Makeb reputation. Right now, like I said, the only one that I'm super interested in that I haven't finished (or even started) is Ruhnuk. And I may only have one character who can play that. I'm not sure. I think I have to do the Ruhnuk story before I can do the Ruhnuk dailies for reputation.
Meanwhile, Johhn, my OG agent and one of the more important of my crafters (because he makes by far the most bank on the GTN, and looks poised to continue to do so even with the GTN changes) is still crafting Advanced V-9 Seismic grenades, which I can sell for about 125,000 credits a pop. In an evening, even in the background, I can usually have him craft 30-40 of them, and my net profit is ~four million credits per batch. If I keep him pretty anxiously engaged, I can actually afford to keep shopping on the GTN on occasion, although even the cheaper of things that I really want tend to be tens of millions of credits, so... a of work to get, say, an adept pilot dye module for ~60 million.
I had thought that I'd turn to Taul Kajak, my Mirialan Jedi who I already finished Alderaan with earlier this week, but I didn't really feel like picking him up again, and I ended up going to Taris where my more junior zabrak Jedi was in the middle of some missions instead. I like this guy, because he looks more like Darth Maul (with a bit of red hair) and has blood-red black core dual lightsabers, but I'm playing him straight as a "chaotic good" Jedi. By "chaotic good" in this sense, I mean that I'm not caring what the game itself thinks is light or dark side, because as I've said many times before, the moral compass of the game itself is ridiculous, and the moral dilemmas that they try to set up are hoaky and stupid.
I also have a swamp camo outfit for him, which I'm enjoying on Taris. Probably the only place where it would be appropriate to wear it anyway. Except maybe Rishi, Rakata Prime, or possibly Onderon. I also created a "stillsuit" outfit from Dune that he can wear on Tatooine later, or any other hot planet, I guess. All of my characters also have at least one cold weather outfit, since Alderaan, Hoth and Ilum are all cold worlds.
Honestly, that's what I should have done all along; had outfits specific to each planet, and named them after them. Maybe I can still do that with my newest ones; see below...
Anyway, after I finish Taris with Elemer Kell, including (probably) the Taris bonus series, it'll be time to bounce back to an Imperial character. Probably Vant Galaide, the bounty hunter who's due to start Balmorra. He's at about the same stage in the story as Kell which works well. In fact, if I could (in theory) keep almost all of my characters at more or less within a two-three planet band of each other as they progress, that would be ideal. But I have... had... Hutran Thanatos all the way about to start Voss until recently, and Haul Kajak just finishing Alderaan, they're kind of the outliers. And the several characters that I have who effectively haven't started yet and are still on their home planets with their introduction done and their first real mission still waiting for them, can probably be part of another wave. There's four of those characters, Saxon Hettar (agent story), Beorn Hengest (bounty hunter story), Gael Heckett (smuggler story), and Gändalf Greyhame (jedi consular story).
That still gives me almost certainly too many characters to try and keep in the same place; Mirabeau Tane (trooper story), Anstal Tane (no relation) (smuggler story), Codon Veile (trooper story), Phovos Maledict (sith warrior story), Revecca Arden (sith inquisitor story), Vant and Vash Galaide (maybe a relation—brothers or cousins or something) (bounty hunter and agent story, respectively), Embric Stane (bounty hunter story), Elemer Kell (jedi knight story), and of course Haul Kajak (jedi knight story), who's kind of out in front. Ten characters to juggle still, not to mention the stuff I'm still doing off and on with my "finished" characters, and four more waiting in the wings to launch after that?
Not for the first time, I'm wondering if I didn't bite off more than I should have attempted to chew.
And that's sometimes what drives me to the more mindless tasks, like grinding for reputation, or taking screenshots of outfits.
UPDATE: The "minor" update ended up being a longer post than my major update (post title changed.) In any case, I didn't realize it, but that version of the flowchart doesn't have the bonus series. There is a bonus series on almost every major planet after the capital worlds. Haul Kajak should go back and do the Alderaan bonus series, and Elemer Kell should count on doing the Taris bonus series while he's still on-world. Honestly, I'm thinking maybe something to do with Hutran Thanatos, now that he's done, is go back to Belsavis,, Voss and Corellia and do the planetary series as well as the bonus series for the first two of those (Corellia doesn't have one, although you could consider The Black Hole to be a de facto Corellia bonus series.) Or maybe I can do all kinds of missions on bonus series, since they're repeatable, and get footage or screenshots of various of his outfits while I'm at it. That would be a nice epilogue to the character, and a way to send him off in style. Once I've done that, I'll still keep him on the backburner, because I may want to do Ilum, the Black Hole, Section X, and maybe all of the rest of the stuff that was added to the game in Rise of the Hutt Cartel and Shadows of Revan. Not that I'm super pumped to do that; I still haven't done it with most of my original run of characters, after all. But we'll see.
A quick quote from an old Kairos post by Brian Neimeier:
1997 began with a film event that would portend an even more ominous trend than the aforementioned Batman and Robin. The Star Wars Trilogy Special Editions were released starting in January and continuing monthly through March. Thus began the cynical strip-mining of a 70s space opera that until recently was the only remaining cultural touchstone that bound the atomized American populace.
Everybody likes to point out how the warning signs of what awaited us in the prequels were all there in the Special Editions. But now another, more distant, red flag pops into focus: the fact that George Lucas doesn’t particularly care about the iconic saga whose artistic success he personally had little to do with. If he was willing to shoehorn in Special Jabba the Hutt and a CG Muppet dance number, we should’ve known he’d eventually sell out to the highest bidder.
In short, the bastardization of Star Wars that plagues us to this day began in 1997.
The post is about the decline of arts and entertainment in general in Western civilization, and makes a pretty convincing case that 1997 is the day that all of it dies, fed only by inertia in the years since, which has mostly completely run out. Any actual good art doesn't come out of the industries that specifically are supposed to produce and distribute it anymore, but rather from indie or even individual artists doing what they love for love of the art alone. But I think he's right; the release of the Special Editions was supremely disappointing, and I say that as a guy who waited in line for hours when the first one came out. It was clear even then that George Lucas either didn't really understand why his own creation was so successful (which may well be true, because he never expected it to be, and back in the day farmed out the stuff that he couldn't do well to help; he had help with the script, with the dialogue, with the pacing, with the editing; the only thing that he actually was good at was 1) restating what made older space opera so beloved into a slightly revised format, and 2) spectacular visuals the likes of which hadn't at that point been seen. And frankly, almost anyone could have done 1) if they'd simply been bold enough to do so. Arguably, Gene Roddenberry did it too more than a decade before Lucas did.
Star Wars' inertia was considerable for people like me, who grew up on it, who were naturally inclined to be science fiction fans anyway, and who also enjoyed the post-Star Wars sci-fi boom, that's still going strong, although not being led by Star Wars anymore. Like I said, the Special Editions were excruciatingly disappointing. They showed us exactly what to expect from the prequels, which were also excruciatingly disappointing. Star Wars was at a nadir until a few things, including the Clone Wars animated show, and a series of video games (especially Knights of the Old Republic) reinvigorated it for me. The Old Republic itself bears some credit for having made Star Wars cool again, although they had a very rough out the gate approach, due to supremely shortsighted and foolish business decisions to try and cash in on WoW money. Once they finally fixed that and made SWTOR a good single player experience, it remained one of the last good Star Wars products that has a lot of replayability/rewatchability potential.
And, of course, we all know about how Disney has completely destroyed most of the goodwill fans have left. SWTOR's newer material suffers from most of the same problems, but at least you can still go through the older stuff. But almost everything that was good in the Old Republic is over a decade old now.
UPDATE: As promised above, here's a few images of Thanatos, one in his classic "work outfit" and two in his "retired attire".
Sadly, the "retired attire" outfit doesn't show properly on the character select screen. There's an issue where sometimes your dye modules, especially if you have separate ones on some components, land pants seem to be the worst offenders, won't color right. He still looks good, but his pants are black with a gray stripe rather than khaki in that view.
I really love the rifle he has in that look too. Of course, I also really love the laser tommy gun look he has going on his "work clothes."
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