Darksabers

Most of my force characters, Jedi or Sith, use "darksabers" with most of their outfits; lightsaber crystals that have a black core rather than a white one. For no other reason than because I think that they look way cooler. Keep in mind too that all of my Wave 1 and Wave 2 characters were created when there was no weapon in Outfitter, or Outfit Designer, or whatever they called it back in the 6.x era. Everyone had one weapon, and you had to make it make do for all of your outfits. So, my older Jedi and Sith characters don't really have much in the way of weapons in outfitter, even though I could add them now, of course. And I haven't really created many Wave 3 force characters, and only one Wave 4 Sith Warrior. Maark, my main, has a blue darksaber. Mat Thew, my original Sith Warrior, has twin orange darksabers. Elemer Kell and Taul Kajak, both Jedi Sentinels, have twin red darksabers and twin green darksabers respectively. 

My less advanced Wave 2 and 3 characters have more variety, but still mostly use a single color. The images below are of Phovos Maledict, a Sith Warrior Juggernaut from Wave 2, showing off four outfits that all use a red darksaber, for instance.

These are pretty classic "Sithy" outfits, unlike, say, his white jumpsuit or his Sith Disco outfit. Sometimes you want to play to type, and sometimes you don't. Anyway, I'm playing a fair bit of him right now, thinking that he was sadly behind where he should be in the low-40ss for level and having just gotten his ship at the end of Dromund Kaas. I'd like to at the very least do Balmorra and maybe Nar Shaddaa while he's "hot" and I turn to someone else. Many of my wave 2 characters who haven't already moved into semi-retirement are sadly behind, and aren't even keeping up with some of the wave 3 characters. I want to specifically advance a few of them, particularly Phovos Maledict, Revecca Arden, and Elemer Kell. That leaves only Embric Stane of the Wave 2 characters left, but honestly; I've come close to deleting him several times, so he's not important to me for whatever reason. Phovos is sitting just shy of level 50 now. I grinded a few Heroics, because I also noticed that some of my gear is behind. Sadly, my lowest piece of gear, chestpiece, didn't drop. It's barely better than half the gear rating of my higher stuff; 54 vs 98. More work to do, obviously. More heroics to grind. I'll probably wait until they reset tomorrow and do the same ones again, though. Two on Dromund Kaas and two on Korriban that are fairly quick and easy to pull off.

On that note, Vant Galaide finished his story and officially moved into "semi-retired" status, just yesterday. I'll probably take him to Ilum and do those missions, though. In fact, I think I want to finish Ilum with all of my "semi-retired" characters, because... why not? It's a pretty short planet, and I like it. Wave 2 characters are about half and half now; four semi-retired ones, and four active ones who need to advance their story. I have ten in total of all waves who have finished their class story, nine in "semi-retired" and one in "post-retirement" who's done Knights of the Fallen Empire and Knights of the Eternal Throne. (Not counting the three that I deleted, who also finished their class stories, of course.) Mat Thew might soon join that crowd; the "post retirement" guys. When he does, that count will rise from one character to two. 

Nobody else is super close to semi-retirement, however. Mirabeau Tane and Gael Heckett are in the 60s for level, so they're at least threatening reaching max level, but they're still a much farther cry away from "retiring" by finishing their main class story. I don't even think any of my other characters have finished Act I yet, which markes the halfway point. Last night, I mostly played Phovos Maledict, and I've done about half of Balmorra now (half if you consider the Bonus Series an integral part of the planet. Which I think that I do at least up until I hit max level.) And I mostly did him in my Disco Sith outfit. I'd also like to run him through some of the non-story Flashpoints and see how he does. In theory, I should have already done Hammer Station with him, and Athiss isn't too far away. I've played Hammer Station with some characters before when I was grouped, but I'm not sure if I've played Athiss before. I probably have, but I don't remember. I wonder how well I can play them solo. Some of these Flashpoints aren't doable very easily by yourself, which I think is still a major mistake. Every flashpoint should have a solo mode with a combat support droid. I don't know why they did that for "story" flashpoints but not all of the flashpoints, honestly. How hard would it be to add a mode that already exists? You probably don't even need to rebalance the difficulty or anything, just add the combat support droid and you're good to go.

That said, I'm going to try it anyway and see how it goes. At least for Hammer Station, and if that's successful, I'll try Athiss, Mandalorian Raiders, Cademimu, Colicoid Wargames, Kuat Drive Yards, Red Reaper, etc. Might give me a chance to either 1) flex my stealth character options, or 2) group with my son-in-law and see how well two characters do. I probably can't make it work forever, but the lower level flashpoints, maybe. I've failed in the past to run through CZ-198 Flashpoints by myself. The difficulty was simply too hard and I got killed repeatedly before giving up.

Finally, on SWTOR news, although I doubt that I'll do another Wave 4 character, I might do a Wave 5 where I do a few more combat specs for stealth characters. I enjoyed finishing up Anstal Tane and playing around with Hutran Thanatos recently. I use these specs a lot as my "second" spec, but I don't really count those; what I want is a character who plays through the entire story using the combat style as his "main" for me to feel comfortable with them. Since I've only actually played one scoundrel and one operative, in theory, I should have two more of each to try. Sigh. That's four more characters. And they have to be tech origin stories, which I've already done or am doing in many, many iterations. Nineteen of my twenty-seven characters are already tech characters. I clearly am biased towards them. 

But I'm out of character slots, and those cost 600 cartel coins, so I won't be buying new slots anytime too soon. At a minimum, it'll take me a couple of months to have enough cartel coins that I don't plan on using somewhere else just to have access to enough to buy another one.

On a completely different note, I'd like to convert all of my SWTOR characters into potential Capes & Rayguns characters, but of course even the ones with good names, like Vant Galaide, use geography names from Capes & Rayguns, the Galaide Worlds being a small confederation of half a dozen or so star systems. So, I can do it, but I'll need to do some renaming here and there. But that's a topic for another post and another time.