It's Mirialan Monday! Fitting, then, to focus on the exploits of our green gals in their moments of triumph.
It took longer than I thought it would, but on a lazy Sunday afternoon yesterday, Scooter and I finished up the original stories for Lulara and Heliantha, her Sage Jedi and my Gunslinging Smuggler, respectively. Ironically, thanks to the streamlined leveling process (though, near the finale, by way of a conscious effort on our part), both characters reached level 65—the current maximum—before finishing the third chapter. We have six more chapters to go till the end of KotFE, with a seventh in the offing early next month.
But for now, Heelee and Lulu are going on a well-earned hiatus while Scooter and I work on the rest of our "Legendary" status. After a short break while we watched Mad Max: Fury Road (perhaps more on that later) we started new characters, a Consular for me and a Knight for her (more on them later, too).
All in all, I did enjoy the end of the Smuggler story, though I will reserve my discussion of it (and ranking with the rest) for when I have finished all the stories. There was plenty of action, but coming off the amazing KotFE chapters, it's easy to see how the storytellers at BioWare have really stepped up their game recently. Interestingly, finishing the third chapter (and all the companion stories), while conferring the same Legacy "perks," did not have the climactic feel (by way of music queues and on-screen notices) that it had prior to the release of KotFE. Also, somewhere along the line, I must have rejected Corso without realizing it, because he just offered to take care of my (unborn) kids as if he were a protective uncle (much like Bowdaar did) rather than as their father.
While Scooter went all Light with Lulara (as did I, mostly), I plan to make my new Consular much darker in order to see how the story changes. I am a good chunk of the way through my own Knight's story, and it was interesting to see how the Consular story meshed with it, in a way the Warrior and Inquisitor stories do not. It was also interesting to have a Force user and a non-Force user paired up, though I think we'll not do that again until we revisit the Empire for Scooter's completion of the Warrior story (during which, I plan to re-run the Agent story).
As Scooter said last night, it's kind of sad to leave these two characters behind. We spent the past two and a half months playing them exclusively (unlike past run-throughs that overlapped a bit). We've gotten to know them: their quirks and personalities that, while being a minor reflection of us, are still quite different. But this is not goodbye, and it will be fun to revisit them once our Legends are complete.
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In my opinion, the Consular story is the one story that does not work well as a Dark Side story. It really feels like it should be played as Light Side.
ReplyDeleteYou're probably right. I guess I'll find out for myself. :P
DeleteHow long is a play through taking you in actual game hours played? I'm wondering just how much they sped things up. My agent (from before all the changes) has probably 120 hours on him and is sitting at level 53.
ReplyDeleteThat's hard for me to gauge. I'll see if SWTOR has a /played function when I get home this evening. Raptr tells me I regularly play over 20 hours per week, but not all of that is actual questing (GTN shopping, house decorating, etc.), or even on the same toon (I have soloists for when Scooter isn't available). Since I tend to play together with Scooter, we're doing two stories at once, which would be slower than someone soloing their way through (offset somewhat by shorter battles and downtime). Clearly, though, not every planetary mission is absolutely necessary.
DeleteI think what was missing from BioWare calculus was that kills and quests reward XP at your true level, not at your down level (which is fixed at the maximum possible to get any XP on a given planet). In the past, even with 12x, if you'd out-leveled an area or a quest, you were getting minimal XP. On the new system, we were earning XP at more than ten levels above the actual planet in some cases. To finish Ch. 3 at max level, we made sure to finish Corellia's planet stuff first, then mine (I was ahead by about 50%) then slaughtering everything between us and Scooter's last instance.
It does have a /played function. I double checked mine last night and I was way off, I actually just cross the 220 hour mark with my Agent. But that was, like you, in a party, thought mine was a party of three so everything took us even longer! But with these changes and soloing a character, I'm hoping they got the number way down.
ReplyDeleteIts not quite a true level calculation but a relative one. For example on DK you are set to level 18. Kill level 13's and you will get XP for killing a creature five levels lower than you, which is basically nothing. So you still have to find "level-appropriate" challenges in some sense.
I'm not knocking the process though, its what has made it possible for my family to game together again. That and the companion changes are such no brainers I wonder why they are not standard MMO features by now!
You're right, the kill XP would go down, and stay down. But I think the mission XP stays at true level, meaning you'll continue to progress. Even under 12x, We would reach a point where we were not really leveling until the story caught up to our level. I'm actually interested to see what my played time is.
DeleteOK: 4 Days, 19 hours, 57 minutes ~ 116 hours /played on Heliantha.
DeleteAnd that's with at least a few hours of shopping, housekeeping, and otherwise not really playing.
DeleteA pretty significant speed up then, at least double what it was before. That is encouraging!
ReplyDelete