GTX 980 is awesome, especially the MSI 4G model (though ASUS Strix and other zero fan models are probably in the same league). It's high performing and super-silent. Best card I have ever owned. Seriously.
Aaaannndd to get back on topic
I've been using mine lately to play SWTOR again. Yes, that's right. You'd think with my backlog, I'd actually work on catching up some and play some new games, right? Well, not so fast.
I don't know where it came from, probably left field, but one day a few weeks ago I got that Star Wars itch and since there isn't anything new out there except for the Shadow of Revan expansion for SWTOR, I thought might as well play that one.
So I resubbed and found out they changed quite a bit since the last time I played which was when I played through and finished the Hutt Cartel expansion with my level 55 Jedi Sentinel (DPS).
In fact, all my skills were reset and my toolbar looked a little.... incomplete.
What to do? What to do? Well, spend days researching the new game mechanics and figuring out the best Sentinel build or just level up a new dude?
I went for the genius idea to level up a new Jedi Sage (Healer), first at a fairly casual pace until the weekend two weeks ago (I think) when they had a double XP weekend. Couldn't resist to go on a gaming spree and took my Sage from level 47/48, thereabouts, straight to the max level of 60 in those two days.
I even skipped my class quest (the character story line) for that, since I had totally outlevelled that content anyway, and just went for the high XP stuff including dailies and flashpoints (= small scale four player raids).
[By the way: It occurred to me during leveling up that, on a whole, they actually simplified the whole class system and it would have been pretty easy to just continue my Sentinel... so rolling a new character was pretty unnecessary... but also fun
]
Then at max level went back to wrap up my class quest and some other loose ends and started the Shadow of Revan prelude. Then made quite a bit of a stupid mistake by not finishing Shadow of Revan. Instead I decided to grind basic (and a bit of elite) commendations for level 60 gear for my character and my companion. Dumb idea.
If anyone of you is playing SWTOR. Don't do as I did. Use the commendations from the prelude (you get 297 basic commendations nicely packaged in three boxes for finishing the prelude) for gearing up a little but then just continue playing Shadow of Revan. Don't grind for gear at this stage.
You'll get decent equipment for yourself, lots of commendations and then really awesome gear for your companion once you reach Yavin. Just play through Shadow of Revan rather straight... maybe do a daily here and there, like the flashpoints via group finder but no more than that.
Anyway, I'm on my way to my personal finishing line now. I need to wrap up a few more loose ends like getting all of the collectible datacrons (already got more than half of them), finish the planetary quests on Belsavis, Voss and Corellia that I skipped when that double XP weekend hit, finish the Hutt Cartel expansion (Makeb) and then I think I'm done for this time with SWTOR.
I don't really want to get in a guild and participate in high level raids. Too time consuming. And the flashpoints (small raids) are already getting old and stale again due to the repetition.
To seriously gear up further, I'd have to get into raids though for ops gear and that's not really happening. It also has to do with a very anti-social community. I'm not sure if this has spread to all MMOs now or if it's just SWTOR but I remember back a few years ago when I played games like SWG that people were actually, you know, friendly and helpful. Not so in SWTOR.
Typing seems to be too hard for most people so even if you try to start a chat in a flashpoint, no reply most of the time.
Then, with me as the healer, the tank often times rushes ahead like a mad man and starts combat (which slows everyone in the group down to a crawl since you move slower in combat) and gets killed because I'm not even in range or have a line of sight on him (so how could I heal him if I can't even reach or see him?).
And what does the guy do instead of apologizing for jumping the gun? Initiates a kick vote against me to eject me from the group and the flashpoint.
Or then you have the DPS who get killed in hard mode (HM) because they get zapped by a boss' special AoE attack and blame it on me, the healer. WTF? In HM I usually have to focus all healing on the tank and carefully decide whether I can spare a heal for someone else. In many cases the answer is simply no. So DPS dies and then you get this in chat "yo healer r u even awake u n00b?????". Wow....
I wish all of this was the exception but it's not. I'm not a fan of ignore lists at all since I don't like censorship in general or even censor myself by using an ignore function but in SWTOR I'm now making fairly frequent use of it.
Helpful players who will give you tips on improving your gameplay are sadly the exception, rather than the norm.
And that (plus the time consumption factor) is why I'm not really interested in the very group or even large group (raids/ops) focused end game content in SWTOR. Games should be fun and not work where you get yelled at, often times not even justified.
As for the Shadow of Revan expansion itself, I'd say it's definitely worth playing. Just like the class stories and the Hutt cartel expansion, this is another quality delivery by BioWare that would make a pretty decent KotOR 3 expansion if it was single player. There are a few oddities in the story where you can tell that BW was struggling and stretching with the plot device of bringing Revan back to life but on a whole it's quite enjoyable indeed.
The new locations are pretty neat, too. Rishi is a pirate nest (Star Wars scifi kind... no scarlet sails and no jolly roger, I'm afraid
) with lots of aliens so it feels a bit like a big outdoor Mos Eisley cantina and Yavin (end of Episode IV: A New Hope) is a jungle planet with ancient ruins. It kind of has a South American feel to it (Maya/Inca ruins).
The locations are visually well done but BW has apparently still not learned how to avoid the frequent clipping issues which makes the world design feel a little unpolished at times.
I'm definitely looking forward to their next expansion, though I doubt I would ever want to level up a new character yet again. Next time I'll just play the add-on and that's it. Right now, I'm looking forward to wrapping things up and then there is another bounty week event coming up (with a daily bounty target to hunt down and a weekly one). And almost a full week of double XP starting on April 16 so I might actually replay Shadow of Revan with my Sentinel then to take him to level 60 as well.
And
then it's finally time to get back to that backlog of regular, single player games... goddamn sidetracking Star Wars itchy crap...
