I’ll tell you when I get there #SWTOR

I see lots of discussion online about the latest Star Wars the Old Republic expansion. The buzz around its launch was enough to tempt me to come back to the game for some story-mission fun on my Jedi Shadow main. I almost resubbed last week but realised I wouldn’t have time to play much for days so delayed until the new cinematic trailer arrived, that was enough to get me to click on the old sub button. Star Wars is a mood for me, it’s a deeply ingrained cultural memory from my childhood (of seeing Empire as the first thing in the cinema) plus a lot of happy hours of play with figures, and much later, computer games.

It’s not without its controversies I had already read based on testing coverage; last night I saw one major aspect of that for myself – the UI changes are “in your face” as the character sheet panes now look more akin to an action RPG (I would say). In my usual style I leapt straight into the mission for Onslaught, the previous expansion that I haven’t touched, and realised in media res that my character seemed to be struggling against silver mobs and that two of them at once was a deadly encounter. I reached out on Twitter, but had the embarrassing realisation afterwards that I wasn’t using my best healer-bot companion (the one with the highest influence rank (i.e. combat effectiveness). Switching to my favoured companion from the Knight expansions (Koth) helped me progress as he had double the rank of the other and his healing was enough to prevent each fight being a struggle to the death.

Theron’s healing wasn’t enough

Even so, I was barely managed to kill the gold mob at the end of the ‘palace’ story arc, and afterwards felt I needed a break from the knife-edge stress of combat so I logged off. As a player of Everquest 2 I have gotten used to mob levels and quest levels not always matching my character’s or each other. Signature quests often have a level nearer the expansion level cap from the get-go. In most MMORPGs that’s a sign of something being out of the ordinary, or a sign your character has gotten ahead of him/herself. In this case in the starter instanced content of Onslaught, where the mission level and my character’s level were both 70, all of the mobs were 75 (the new starter level for Legacy of the Sith I imagine?). As Shintar commented on my Twitter, the scaling may be bugged on the mission.

Definitely a level 70 mission

So if I can get past what might be a scaling bug, I intend to play through Onslaught and then play through the new expansion’s content as a duo of content patches. Given other time-pressures, I can’t say it’s going to happen that quickly, I’m not one to rush content in any case. But I’m looking forward to playing a lot more Star Wars in a game I’ve invested a lot of time in over the years. As to what the new expansion is like, I’ll tell you when I get there!