The Ballad of Sorcluk and Sellonel

One of the many things I love about being part of an MMO like SWTOR is that there are a few times when a single offhand comment or situation spirals off into its own little beautiful entity.

Within my guild on Darth Malgus, Twin Suns Squadron, we’ve had one such moment occur within the past week that really needs to be documented.

It all starts with the guild perks. Shintar of Going Commando, a fellow officer within Twins, plugged in a few perks following their re-implementation and unintentionally activated the Might set bonus. This makes it so that whenever you deal or take damage, there is a small chance that the guild ship will begin an orbital bombardment on some unfortunate foes. It cannot trigger in master mode operations or PvP, so there are quite a lot of instances when it can happen.

It's almost always great fun when it does, as it really feels like we have a supporting crew aboard the ship that’s managing it in our absence that we can just rely on every once in a while to help out. Sure, there are moments when it isn’t ideal; in veteran mode Explosive Conflict it can kill the shield generators, and there was one glorious occasion in Ruins of Nul master mode when we were trying an ill-fated strategy to CC the gold adds and burn the Volatile Monitor. Either my dealing damage to a silver add or Shin taking damage from a gold add just before it was CCed triggered it, causing the guild ship to plonk down an AoE smack-bang in the middle of both CCed adds.

Thanks, guild ship!

Overall, however, it is quite entertaining to see it happen.

To move on, I’ll turn to loot in operations now. They’ve brought back all the old Tionese, Columi, and Rakata shells for the endgame operation gear, and it’s nice to see some of these old shells back. Well, apart from the brush-hat. However, while they have coded in both factions’ looks, it’s luck of the draw whether you get the look that corresponds to your faction. You could be a Sage and get Sage gear, but you could also get Sorc gear. I’ve had mainly Sorc gear but with a few Sage pieces as well. I do not have any Imperial specs on my Consular.

Amusingly enough, the one Consular-themed piece I could use from VM Eternity Vault, the greaves, turned into their Inquisitor equivalent when ported to Impside. I have confusion.

During a quick Explosive Conflict story mode, Shin noted that she received her first Hunter-themed piece from Colonel Vorgath. Until that point, she had been very lucky in only getting Trooper-themed pieces. I commented that I had received pieces that assumed the form of both “the Sage and Sorc look”.

Cue one of our resident jokers commenting something along the lines of “Sorc-look sounds like exactly the sort of name you’d find in a fantasy RPG”, to some laughter. Going from this, I decided to combine this joke with the now established running-gag of the guild ship helping us out. Was this individual really the person in charge of the guild ship? This led to the establishment of Commodore Sorcluk as our guild-ship pilot.

Just outside of Kephess’ compound, discussion turned to one of our member's choices for combat styles. She is well known for having a miniature army of Sentinels, and so it was quickly joked that each of her Sentinels would simply be a “different form” of Sent. A Guardian would be a Sentinel who forgot one of her lightsabers, and a Shadow would be a Sentinel who had joined both her lightsabers together.

Somebody then quipped that this last one was achieved through Sellotape, leading to Shin coming up with the portmanteau “Sellonel”. Cue “is that Commodore Sorcluk’s second-in-command?” in ops chat, and, lo, Lieutenant Sellonel was born.

There was some debate whether they should have been “Captain” Sellonel, but the “lieutenant” title seems to have been what’s stuck.

I said in my retrospective post for the past ten years of SWTOR that I absolutely love these anecdotal moments, but it is remarkable just how many elements have come together quite by chance to make this joke happen.

Had we not had the Might set bonus plugged in we would never be commenting about the guild ship helping us out. Had BW made the loot more robust between factions we would never have had the opportunity to discuss alternate faction appearances, especially if Shin had never received a Hunter piece from Vorgath. Had I said "Consular and Inquisitor look" instead of "Sage and Sorc look", or had our resident jokester not been part of that group in the latter instance, we would never have been introduced to the concept of “Sorc-look” sounding like a name. Had combat styles not been introduced, nor our resident Sentinel enthusiast been part of our group at that time, we would never have discussed the many different forms of Sentinel leading to “Sellonel”.

Yet now, as a result of every one of these things aligning at once, we have our own little bit of guild lore. Our guild ship is piloted by Commodore Sorcluk with his second-in-command Lieutenant Sellonel. It’s brilliant, and it’s only a shame that the other Explosive Conflict group in the guild wasn’t in the same voice channel at the same time (for understandable reasons, of course!) to understand and appreciate just how that joke came to be.

Since I also have access to decorating our guild ship on my Smuggler, I felt it would be appropriate to have NPC representations of both characters on our bridge. As it is, I had the foresight to plonk down a Republic General decoration by our command terminal when the Republic and Imperial personnel bundles were released over a year ago, so Sorcluk was already in position. Sadly, there weren’t too many NPCs who really suited Sellonel; a lot of these NPC decorations have a weapon out or are dressed in field-attire, so the SIS Commander decoration was the only one that seemed completely appropriate for him.

The one downside of both decorations is that, courtesy of BW's new system whereby many NPC appearances are randomised between various presets, including decorations, Sorcluk and Sellonel can appear very different on repeat visits. Ah, well.

I’d love to get more NPC decorations who could work well as bridge-operators down the line, but for now we only have two named ones so there’s nothing extra we can gain from more decorations beyond nameless entities to pad out the numbers.

So that’s been the most entertaining thing by far to have come from our guild’s first week of 7.0!