Hustlin' through The Old Republic - Server merges and bein' Evil

You know I never intended for these to be annual updates, but I guess they are, as I’m always updating once around the same time of year, so I guess it’s that time again. As far as the playerbase is looking the game things are pretty bleak, as of July last year there was another big server culling with the game going from 17 servers down to just 5, pretty scary for a game that once had 200. But it matters not, until they shut down the servers completely I will keep on going, as I’m not finished yet, not by any means, despite a couple of requests from friends to start playing Elder Scrolls Online.

Doin some heroics on Balmorra, was glad I got the chance to do em with someone

So we begin with my Trooper and the conclusion of his storyline which occurs on Corellia which in case you didn’t know I the planet where all class storylines conclude. But actually before that Havoc Squad was off to Voss for the conclusion of Aric Jorgen’s mission to rescue his old Deadeye squad companions on Hoth, and when we found that two of his squadmates were dead due to a careless Republic officer so I decided to let Aric shoot the bastard.

Senior Agent Zane gets what's coming to him.

 I’ve been doing Dark side options a lot more now while playing, maybe it’s because quite a few companions I have prefer the naughty things. From the start of the game I’ve had many characters who were very light-side orientated, on my Jedi Knight T7-O1 and Kira Carsen were good examples of this, on my Sith Inquisitor it was more difficult being a Light-side with Khem Val but as soon as I got Ashara Zavros things got easier. Playing my Trooper was a mixed bag, Elara Dorne was very light orientated, Aric Jorgan and M1-4X were mostly fine but their fanatical devotion to the Republic favoured some Dark side choices and towards the end of the storyline I just started choosing them for a change of pace, I didn’t use Tanno Vik or Yuun much at all but Tanno is definitely Dark side orientated. I guess after playing purely Light side characters for so long I wanted to have some fun with dark side options, and you can have some pretty messed up fun indeed. Also I am actually seriously considering creating a female character as either the a Sith Marauder or a Smuggler Scoundrel it’ll be a bit weird romancing guys but then again it’s the same thing you’re just on the other side.

Companion's play a large part in your class story, but you don't always have to do things that get their approval.

 I actually regret not promoting Aric to Lieutenant now as when I decided to promote Elara that was for the selfish reason of trying to curry favour to get into bed with her, but that was the time previously where you needed to build influence with your Companions in order to continue their story but now this happens progressively as you complete each story chapter. So anyway after that it was on to Corellia, another city planet with a confusing layout like Coruscant. The story was mostly about the Empire vs Republic and the showdown with General Rakton which I and the forces of the Republic collectively kick his ass, I’m not sure whether I killed him or sent him to jail but I think it was the latter. At some point I had decided to replace my green striped armor with orange striped armor and a new helmet in an attempt to standardize the squad colours in preparation for the coming grandiose congratulatory ceremony and meeting with the Supreme Chancellor.I decked my squadmates out pretty well all except for Yuun who had appropriate armor on but I forgot to change the colour, oh well, they still looked good.

Havoc squad in full force

I’m finding the new adaptive/customisable gear vendors on the fleet are a great source of custom gear as an alternative to the Cartel Market especially when you hit level 60 where you start receiving only Knight of the Fallen Empire gear which all looks the damn same. I’m basically building collection a set of ‘Outlander’ and upgrading it as I obtain more gear from the Command crates though I’ll have to work out how to get the gear to the character as the Fallen Empire chapters are basically just go-go-go and I have no idea when the first mailbox is though I suspect it’s at the Gravestone but even then that’s a couple of chapters in. I have decided to do Knights of the Fallen Empire on my Trooper as I want to see what it’s like when you do it with a non-force user though I feel like doing it with my Imperial Agent as I reckon he’s my favourite character at the moment.


Doin my part for the battle of Coreillia

So that was that, end of the storyline for my Trooper, three class stories down, 5 to go, hopefully I get through em. It was then on to my Consular Sage who was sporting some pretty cool looking white and bronze gear. With the start of the Consular Chapter 2, I was tasked with finding a group of leaders of various planets trying to break away from the Republic called the“Rift Alliance” and to do this I was to be a Jedi Master! so I graciously accepted of course then went to their ship which was being attacked by the Empire so I saved them and met them all, one of which was a future companion Nadia Grell which was odd as she is the last companion you get so it was strange to see her so early. Then they end up being passengers on my ship, geez I don’t even think the Defender had enough bunks. I enjoyed the process though as in this chapter I’m really doing a lot of mediation work and keeping all these ambassadors happy, which is fun because some don’t trust me and it involves a few arguments. So we first went to Balmorra to assist Tai Cordan and met the future companion Zenith who is a Balmorran resistance fighter. So I go to war with Darth Lachris (again) and reluctantly slash through her fit body with my lightsaber (though all female bodies of that size are the same really) and pick up Zenith along the way who I now use as a ranged tank. At one point I decided to use the ever popular adaptive gear vendor to make myself a new more-consular style armor set which looked pretty good with the orange highlights.

I like this shot, even if my armor is a bit glitchy

So then I’m off to Quesh and finished it off pretty fast and I also find out Nadia has force aptitude, then we go to Hoth after yet another costume change from the adaptive gear vendor. This time I added this really strange headpiece which seems to be some sort of weird leather visor around my head but It’s cool and as it’s highly unusual think it looks ok on the consular. On Hoth I defeat some more Rift Alliance enemies and another companion, Lieutenant Felix Iresso, I save the King and Queen of Sarkhai and also find out that one of the Rift Alliance ambassadors on my ship Blaesus is a special Sith called a “Child of the Emperor” and I kill him and another random Sith called Lord Kyrus. And that was that for the chapter, next up I’m back to the Academy again to check on the Noetikons.

Lookin good, me of course not that guy's arse

Bounty Hunter time again and from what I can remember I was still on the perpetual-night-time-though-only-for-the-Sith-Empire-instance planet of Taris. Here is where I had met Torian Cadera and we were hunting his dad cause his dad was on the bounty hunter blacklist so after a pretty cool scavenger hunt over Taris to find Jincoln Caldera, Torian and I found him and turned him over to the Mandalorians. Not much else happened though I managed to do the heroics on this planet and soon it was on to Quesh for a very short amount for a very short amount of class story where I am invited to endorse some battle stims then find out it’s a republic trap, I also did the planet storyline which didn’t take too long. It was then on to Hoth and I defeat a Trandoshan Warrior with the help of Blizz the Jawa who then joins the crew. I didn’t finish off the story but I did re-mod the old orange and maroon insect themed outfit I had on before it got outdated rather quickly as now I am level 70 I won’t be getting any new armor.

Heroics again, I like this shot

Now it was time for Knights of the Eternal Throne except this time on my Sith Inquisitor, not that it’s much different from a Jedi really it’s just down to the choices you make, and I did make some different choices this time. Firsty I decided to kill Supreme Chancellor Suresh instead of sending her to jail, I also decided to leave Vette to die instead of Torian and possibly most important of all, I decided to rule the galaxy as an emperor instead of heal it as a peace keeper. Surprisingly this didn’t give my allies too much ire of me, Theron and Lana and everyone else just seemed to accept it with no private conversation expressing anything, and now they say “May the Force serve you” wow. So after that I went to do the brief Iokath storyline where this time I sided with the Empire of course, and this time Jace Malcolm got the old hot seat messin’ with the Iokath chairs. But after that was finished I had had enough and moved on.

A lot goin on in this shot

Before I have been thinking a bit about what I’m going to do with the future of my characters and SWTOR in general, specifically with my Jedi Guardian and Sith Inquisitor, I can’t call them ‘max level’ characters as because of the ridiculous speed in which you level up almost all of my characters are max level now . Anyway they have now both done their individual class stories, Ilum/False Emperor story,  Rise of the Hutt Cartel/Makeb Expansion, Rhakgoul Outbreak, The Dread War, Shadow of Revan, Knights of the Fallen Empire/Eternal Throne and the Iokath war. There’s always something to play when I come back to them but once I’ve finished that do I stay and look for more things to do, operations? flashpoints? other high level content? Etc I guess it depends what’s currently going on in the server, whenever I’m on the fleet on whatever character I’m always checking the chat to see which ops (aka raids) are going on but with less and less people it’s getting harder.. And that’s what did, While playing my Imperial Agent Sniper I saw a call out for the last boss of The Ravagers Raid, Coratanni. So I moved to my Assassin and did the raid, I was a bit disappointed that it was only the last boss, but I still managed to get to Rishi first and get the main quest in order to complete it and boy did I also get a lot of command xp and items.

The Ravagers Raid final boss, Coratanni

Now back to what could possibly be my favourite character at the moment, my Imperial Agent Sniper, you may have seen in my previous post that I had finished Balmorra and you may also know that because I did this on a two week special event of triple xp while levelling I was level 61 when I finished the planet. I decided that I had levelled too fast and acquired all of my abilities too quickly. I also wasn’t happy with a lot of choices I had made on the way and decided this time to go full badass. My reasoning for this was if I was going Dark side on my Sage then I have to go Dark on at least one Empire character and technically my character is supposed to be a cyborg but I was roleplaying that I’m actually a droid so I got no feelings, which definitely makes things easier. The other thing that makes things easier is that Kaliyo as annoying as she is prefers the Dark side options so this was good at least. So I decided to cut my losses and transfer any items I wanted and sell off any I didn’t or were bound to me. Unfortunately I had already put on my Series 212 Cybernetic set binding it to me so I had to buy the damn things again but I had all the credits that I needed so I bought it again and thankfully it wasn’t too expensive. I also might have to end up wearing the a helm similar to the Citidel Duelist’s set which I wore on my Sith Assassin as it’s a perfect helm both with voice modulation and even moving droid eyeballs though it’s a shame I already used it with my Assassin, the only other ones that could come close would be the helm from this set and that helm which looks like General Grievous which I’ve forgotten the name of.

Kaliyo and me, a entertaining relationship

And so I started again going through Hutta, Dromund Kass and then Balmorra making different choices along the way and boy was I bad, I can’t think of any light side choices I made. Speaking of Light and Dark side choices, I may have mentioned this before but on my Sage I am going Dark Side, but I forgot to set myself as “Fighting for the Dark side” on my “Force Alignment” feature thingy so I ended up just gaining more light side points which I didn’t want. So now I don’t know what I’m going to do I wanted to see my Jedi Sage all evil with the Dark side effects on his face but I’ve wasted all this time going Light side and I don’t think I’ll ever get be able to get to full Dark unless of course I want to go through every expansion like I have with my Guardian and Assassin. I am going full Dark with my agent though there are a couple of problems, as you might have seen I got the “White pupil” cartel market item for my Agent who is supposed to be secretly a droid, and one of the first effects of dark side corruption is yellow eyes, so there goes that side of the corruption as I’m not getting rid of my white eyes, and then of course I’m going full on droid so I won’t see anything anyway which sucks, so If I don’t get my Sage onto the Dark face (heh) I’ll have to do it with either a Marauder or Smuggler. Anyway so I conquered Balmorra and killed Grand Marshall Cheketta this time and boinked Darth Lachris for the third time and it looks like I’ve still got the Balmorra bonus series to do but then my subscription ran out.

You makin fun of me boy? These eyes will be the last thing you ever see.

After some deliberation I have decided to get HK-51 on my Agent as he uses a Sniper Rifle and with us both as Droids we’d go well together though I’m not looking forward to the questline as it seems pretty involved, I hope I can get someone to help me. But anyway that will be in the next time I get on my Agent, for now it’s on to my Guardian and the mysterious ‘Crisis on Umbara’ flashpoint of Game update 5.4.

JD

Pew! pew! pew!

This universe needs more sexy times