Nar Shadda Living
Lately I have been on this Star Wars kick and like I said before… I absolutely blame the Force Awakens hype for putting me in this position. My good friend Tam mentioned something last night about playing SWTOR again… that absolutely rings true. We were both brought up in “good catholic families” so he mentioned something that is happening to me too. When we hear someone say “May the Force Be With You” it is absolutely instinctual to want to say “And Also With You”. Even worse… I have this irrational need to make the sign of the cross at the same time. The funny thing about playing this game again is that I guess I did not realize how often I have subscribed for a month or so in the past, that said I guess I am happy I did. I had access to Section X and the HK-47 quest line without having to pay to unlock it, because apparently I subbed at just the right time. When it came time to look into Strongholds it seems like I also have a five room Nar Shadda Sky Palace unlocked for free as well. The cool thing about that is that if I had to choose one of the housing options… it probably would have been Nar Shadda anyways because I have been in love with the concept of that city since I first encountered it in Dark Forces.
For the time being most of us are going through a bit of a lull in Final Fantasy XIV. Right now I am absolutely enjoying raiding and I really hope we down Ravana Extreme before the launch of the 3.1 patch… but past that I really don’t have much desire to log in. I could force myself to grind out the esoterics every week, but my fear is that if I start forcing it… I will also start resenting the game like I have World of Warcraft in the past. That was a cycle I would get into with WoW, where I would force myself to be there… “for the guild” or “for the raid” and then ultimately it would lead to my cancelling of my account once more. Final Fantasy XIV is my new home base of operations, and I am happy with it… I just don’t want to do anything to tarnish my enjoyment. There is never a point where Lalafell things or Final Fantasy XIV news does not give me warm fuzzies right now… but I also know me. I like playing lots of different games, and if I force myself to ONLY play FFXIV it will ruin the experience for me.
The Search for Parts
I have to say I am enjoying the HK-47 quest line. I spent most of last night working on it and gathering bits and pieces scattered around the galaxy. It seems like it provided just the right amount of friction, in that you had to go to the PVP area on Tatooine first and once that was out of the way, were able to explore the galaxy at your leisure finding the rest of the bits. The first part on Taris was the most annoying, because you had to get used to using the scanner to determine if you were close to a piece. All of the other pieces seem to have a clear path that you can search along, but in Taris it is hard to see the pattern of where the pieces will show up. Luckily there was a large group of people roaming around looking for it while I was there, and fortunately the quest is fairly pro-community. When someone finds a piece it stays there for about a minute allowing anyone in the vicinity to loot it. So when someone finally hit on being 10 meters away from the piece we quickly gathered together and found it. Essentially to get a piece to show up you have to be within 2 meters, which means a lot of staggerstep movement right around the 10 meter location.
From there I had to travel to the Jedi Temple and the Dark Temple. These steps require you to have an alt of appropriate level on the opposite faction, and the pieces you get in either can be mailed to any character on your account. Since I was doing this on my Jedi Guardian, the Jedi Temple was a pretty quick process. From there I mailed the scanner to my Sith Warrior and I proceeded with the same thing… but this time on the Dark Temple approach rather than the temple proper itself. After doing all of the locations… essentially my suggestion would be to stay on the path and keep moving forward a little bit until you hit on a piece. No piece that I found was very far off of the main path, so that at least seems to make life a little easier for you. By the time I was working on the final piece on Hoth I had gotten pretty decent at the whole searching process and it came the quickest of them all. Now I need to do both a normal mode dungeon and a hard mode dungeon, and I am hoping that Tam gets caught up so that we can grab Ammo and Sol and run them as a four player group. As far as plans go for today… I am going to return to leveling on Makeb and plan on binging the Star Wars movies… since I am clearly apparently going through a phase.