28/02/2017

Thanks, Gree!

While I've complained about Bioware's urge to make the player base level more quickly pretty much since the first double XP weekend was held, back in the day these enforced levelling boosts were never enough of a disruption to my way of life to seriously affect my play time. I do have to draw the line at the current event though. Don't get me wrong, I like the Command XP portion of it well enough, but 3.5 times regular XP gains? Considering how much levelling was already sped up in 4.0, that would mean that class quests currently give 21 times as much experience as they did at launch! Twenty-one times! If you're still trying to follow the intended flow of the story that's just madness. Even if the quests never go grey anymore due to level sync, it just feels crazy and wrong.

So I was pleasantly surprised that today's patch brought back the White Acute Module, a feature that I believe was first introduced for the first 12x XP levelling event and which cancels out any "enforced" XP boosts. It can be purchased from "Hathe'k", a jolly Gree vendor on the outer ring of the combat section of either fleet. It's bound to legacy so you can pass it around, but it also costs zero credits so you might as well pick up several while you can. Clicking it once puts an eight-hour buff on your character that cancels the event boost. You can reactivate it at any time by clicking the buff off again, but you can also re-use the module at any time since it has no cooldown. I picked up a couple and am looking forward to playing several of my alts again that I've carefully avoided during the past month.

It's funny how something as simple as this can feel like an exciting opportunity to get back into playing certain characters. Previously I hadn't played most of these alts in ages, but feeling like I "couldn't" because of the event suddenly really made me want to play them again.

15 comments :

  1. Aww, it actually looks like that cute white gree is hugging your character. :)

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    1. S/he (?) is nice like that! ^^

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    2. It (?) - who knows how the Gree procreate?

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    3. As Urdnot Bakara would say: "Very clumsily".

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    4. "Purple perpendicular bisects pink parallel?"

      (Most common Gree chat-up line.)

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    5. I do love the unexpected turn this comment thread took.

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  2. I'm actually finding the opposite problem - I'm not levelling my alts fast enough. Limited playtime isnt helping things though.

    WoW has a vendor somewhere were you can turn off EXP gain entirely but it was fairly expensive when originally released.

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    1. Well, considering you can already proceed straight through the story without any distractions, there isn't really a way they can make it even faster for people who simply don't have the time to play... unless you'd want them to cut out parts of the story?

      I could see the ability to stop XP gains entirely making for some fun gameplay opportunities, but there are potential issues as well. Rav, Mox and Jason actually talked about this subject on a recent CRR episode.

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  3. Oh, I'd not heard about this. I have the stone of the tortoise in LOTRO which turns off all XP gain (for a retired duo-character crafting alt) but I don't think I've come across anything that similar elsewhere.

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    1. Sadly, implementing the equivalent of the Stone of the Tortoise in SWTOR would break the balance in lowbie PvP: players would use it to keep their character at the highest level of their bracket, making those brackets unplayable for new players of lower levels. So the developers would have to come up with something creative to make that work.

      I love the stone of the Tortoise in LOTRO as well. I use it for on level 'nostalgia runs' of instances with friends. The only thing I dislike about it is that it takes up the pocket slot, which I would like to use for items with important mitigations that are hard to come by otherwise for those low levels.

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  4. Wow NPC links:

    http://www.wowhead.com/npc=35365/behsten
    http://www.wowhead.com/npc=35364/slahtz

    Its 10g to turn off, 10g to turn it back on - expensive for a low level character, but trivial for any high level.

    Some comments say it had issues working for high levels in newer expansions.

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  5. Hallo, Shintar.

    Ich kann mich noch sehr gut an die Zeiten erinnern, als ich mich als F2P-Spieler ohne Artefaktausrüstungsberechtigung gegen mein Kapitel-3-Endboss abmühen musste. Das mein Frontkämpfer-DD in Tank-Haltung mit List ausgerüstet war, hat ebenfalls nicht geholfen. Das Ende von Kapitel 3 war aber immer etwas ganz besonderes.

    Aber...und jetzt die Überleitung zu Deinem Artikel...finde ich den heutigen, schnellen Levelprozess angenehmer. Frühzeitig alle Fähigkeiten freizuschalten hilft mir, ausgiebig Zeit zu haben, um die jeweilige vollständige Rota bis Ende Kapitel 3 im Solospiel zu üben, bevor ich dann in den härteren Gruppencontent einsteige.

    Die Gegnergruppen sind zwar keine Herausforderung, aber allein die Möglichkeit als Tank auf Alderaan auszuprobieren, wie ich weitauseinanderstehende Gruppen am Besten schnellstmöglich zusammenführen kann, ist hilfreich. Zu überlegen, wie ich es am Besten angehen kann, mit allen Fähigkeiten, die mir mit Lvl 70 zu Verfügung stehen. Dazu das Verinnerlichen der Keybindings.

    Ich finde, das hat was. Zumindest für mich...

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    1. Ich kann durchaus verstehen, dass man gute Gründe haben kann, um schneller leveln zu wollen. Ich mag nur nicht, wenn es einem quasi aufgezwungen wird. Weshalb ich mich sehr über die Option freue, es abzustellen. Max-Level ist man immer noch lange genug...

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  6. Whereas I hate the feeling of incompleteness I get with non-level-cap characters; where you get certain powers that are interesting, but because you are lacking the powers and passives that complete them, you can't use them in the "intended" fashion. (This is one of the reasons that Set Bonus formerly being locked to raid/PvP gear chapped my crawfish - the classes are balanced and tuned to the 6-piece set bonus, and are subtly but systematically crippled without it)

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