7.1: Initial Impressions

So, after almost six months, here we are at last! 7.1 is out, and I've been a fair bit busy with it thus far.

The main thing which has been preoccupying me has been helping my various alt-characters catch up to 330 gear, and for this the introduction of mods has been an absolute godsend. It was, admittedly, a bit of a palaver actually getting all the mods sorted, but that's mainly because it wasn't initially specified that if you wanted the equivalent of full Rakata 330 gear, you'd need to disintegrate an item of artifact 330 and an item of prototype 330, not just one piece of the former.

Still, it's done now, and after some acquisition of some extra tech fragments all of my character pairings (Agent / Trooper, Consular / Inquisitor, Hunter / Smuggler, and Knight / Warrior) now have at least one pair of 330 legendary implants and a tactical to share between them as well as their armour, relics, and earpieces, with only the rare occasions that my knight needs to go sage or my smuggler needs to go back to being a gunslinger being the only times where they will need to pilfer items from a different character.

Although, now that completing the Implant Destiny: 330 achievement means that legendary implants are cheaper to get to 330 than they were before, that likely may not be the case for very long!

That's pretty much all I'm concerning myself with for gear at the moment. Unlike several of my fellow guildies, I'm not setting my sights on 334 implants anytime soon. At the moment, my feeling toward raiding is that it's probably best if I focus purely on the casual scene and not commit to anything 'serious', which is also why - despite signing up for one of 'my' team's raid weeks for the first time in a while - I've set myself deliberately on bench for all three nights.

Hey, if I were on the team and somebody who hadn't been around for weeks just showed up out of the blue once the new raid was on the horizon, expected and was given a spot over someone who had been there far more consistently, and then decided to bugger off again soon afterward, I certainly wouldn't be too impressed!

Seriously, though, I feel it is not my place to "barge in" at this point. It's infinitely more important that those who are likely to stick around on a consistent basis get immediate priority, and it's not like I won't ever get the chance to see the new op. I'd like to see it, of course, but I'm in no rush. Time has rarely been in short supply for me over the past couple of years, something which will change at some point.

Job hunt still continuing, by the way.

For now, I'm happy to be around as and when needed. That said, I feel I've once again fallen into the trap of doing "too much", especially this past weekend, so I'm definitely not keen to let the past few days become the norm. I need to find a happy medium, and suffice to say I haven't succeeded yet.

I really liked the 7.1 story update, short though it was, and while we still know frustratingly little about Malgus' plans the last few beats of the Digging Deeper mission set up some things which I am interested in seeing more of. I'm not going to spoil it for those who haven't seen it yet.

The Manaan daily zone is... well... big. There's a lot going on, with a couple of missions per area, but it's also very tight-knit, to the extent that it's very easy to accidentally pull something without realising, which can be an issue given how tedious some of the mob groups are. The daily missions I have done on Repside are decent enough, but they're nothing special, and I feel it's a massive oversight that these dailies reward neither daily resource matrices nor tech fragments.

There's a certain irony about the Manaan daily zone being the reason behind the original name of the resource matrices when the missions in the actual zone itself yield none.

The Republic NPCs in the story arc are okay. Wo Kasto is, I feel, a nice follow-up to Colonel Gallo, being distrusting at first but gradually offering you his begrudging respect and opening up more about his past at times. Minn Ishkah is quite a conniving character, always keen to try and present herself as an aid to the Selkath while always trying to find some methods of undermining their trust - once again, no wonder the Selkath don't trust the Republic!

I'm intrigued to see what happens in the Imperial story arc, but I expect it to be much the same in terms of functionality. Go to area 1, do quest, go to area 2, do quest, go to area 3, finish story arc. It's a novel concept in SWTOR to do this style of questline in a daily zone, and it seems almost Neverwinteresque - the only difference being that you don't need to do weeks of grinding on Manaan to unlock the subsequent quests and / or areas.

So, that's how 7.1 is going for me thus far. There are some things I really like, and other things I'm curious to see how they evolve or function. I think I would be reasonably content to just let things stall where they are here if that's what I decide to do, as I've finally got my characters up to speed with an equal gear-rating and have also thus negated the need to worry about keeping up with currencies of many different types all the time. 

But anything can happen going forward!