Having been playing Star Wars: The Old Republic since it launched back in 2011, I find it quite fascinating to look back at how my playstyles have changed over the years. What I used to do but no longer do, things I wouldn't have dreamed of doing at one point but now will willingly do nowadays, that sort of thing.
For example, I started on the endgame scene with a Scoundrel healer, then a Vanguard tank, and finally a Commando DPS. I remember typing in Guild Chat one day (while en-route to kill Needles as the aforementioned Vanguard) something about how DPS at endgame seemed like it would be boring, but at least as a Tank or a Healer you would actually have something meaningful to do.
I now have a cast of purely-DPS characters, so make of that what you will.
As for what I wouldn't have dreamed of doing (okay, maybe pushing it there) when I started out but now do on pretty much every character involves questing. Like most people, I'd imagine, once I'd finally worked out how to level 'properly' (let's not talk about my very first character, a Commando) I would completely stop doing quests beyond my class stories once I'd out-levelled them. Exploration was entirely incidental and was rarely ever deliberate.
I forget exactly what caused this particular switch to flip in my brain, but at some point I decided to completely reverse this decision. Map-exploration became a lot more deliberate, to the point where the majority of my characters have every single planet fully-uncovered with as many lore objects as possible discovered. Quests, regardless of how out-levelled they were, were all completed - bonus points as I would eventually find myself taking three of my max-level characters back to various planets throughout 3.0 and 4.0 and picking up where I left them off at.
Of course, as with everything, there has to be at least one outlier.
Enter my Sorcerer, Vahnora.
Vahnie is one of my oldest active characters, being one of now the only three characters I have left who were created during the 2.0 patch cycle, alongside Cal Pheiya and Pippera. She is the youngest of the three, with Cal being the oldest and Pip being the problematic middle character who started this change of attitude.
I'd always been aware that Vahn had still left missions incomplete, as she was just one of the characters who from 3.0 onwards I kinda left to their own devices apart from getting her to max-level by completing the newest expansion's story and maybe doing a bit of group-content with her (including a notoriously-painful Dread Palace Hard Mode guild-attempt in 4.0). Since I'm now focusing on her properly again, I'm beginning to realise just how much I neglected her questing services in the past.
I had just taken her down to Dromund Kaas from her Stronghold to start proper work on the Seeker Droid and Macrobinocular questlines when I got a very good indication of just how much she still needed to do.
She had quests in Kaas City.
Now, 4.0 reset several missions in their entirety and re-branded them as "exploration missions". Even a character who had done every single mission in the game before 4.0 would find themselves facing these specific quests reappearing, which confused the heck out of me when I first noticed it on Cal.
However, the quests in this scenario weren't exploration missions. They were normal missions. Specifically, the missions given by Weng Wrightsyn for investigating the Devaronian bounty hunter Renegin and the one on the mission terminal for disposing of bombs by the monument to Lord Ergast.
Intrigued, I proceeded to open up my codex entry for Dromund Kaas, just to check whether or not she had missed anything specific like some bestiary codices or an obscure lore object which I possibly hadn't known about while she was levelling. Mostly fine; all beasts, available lore, and Datacrons accounted for but wait -- is that a location she's missing?
Assuming it to be the Imperial Intelligence Headquarters, the only location which didn't need to be visited for either story or lore object reasons, I took her there for a visit - nothing doing. Opening up the trusty swtor-spy website to verify that I hadn't somehow forgotten a location turned up nothing suspicious, so I browsed through her embarrassingly-sparse location codex page to find what was missing.
It was the Revanite Compound.
The Revanite Compound is a location visited as part of the main Dromund Kaas storyline, and this is something that I thought each and every single one of my Imperial characters had completed. Yet here was a character which had never even started it, with a big purple triangle left sitting proudly above Sandor's head. Bizarrely, she actually has the entirety of Dromund Kaas explored, as well as the "Obliteration of Kressh" codex unlocked, so she actually had visited the compound - just... never done... the quest.
Since I will need to visit the various planets in order to scan the transmitters and dig up the Dreadseeds, I will also be using this time to mop up all outstanding quests I can find. Taking a brief look through the rest of the codex reveals other surprising results as well. I can understand not taking her through the Voss or Corellia planetary storyies since by that point she would have been Level 55 so that would fall firmly under the category of "out-levelled so not worth doing". But Balmorra? Taris? Tatooine? What exactly did I do to level this girl up!?
When I discussed this with some guildies, the suggestion was made that Vahn was created during the 12x-XP period. This would at least explain why she skipped so many missions if just doing class story content was enough to get a character to max-level during this time. But still... so many good missions just completely bypassed. I've since managed to mop up on Belsavis, Corellia, Dromund Kaas, Hoth, Quesh, Taris, and Tatooine, and I aim to complete Alderaan and hopefully Balmorra today. Ilum, Nar Shaddaa, and Voss will come later in the week.
It seems I did at least manage to get her to complete the Belsavis planetary questline way back when, but in the most infuriating way possible as far as I'm concerned. She apparently picked up the questline only from the final outpost. This would have been fine, were it not for the fact that it locks out the entirety of the first area of Belsavis in terms of mission content. This therefore prevents a character from unlocking both the Imperial Guard and New Men codices, something which is rather infuriating to someone who likes collecting as many codex entries as possible on various characters.
Oh, past me, why were you like who you were?
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