Sacrifice

[VirtualMorrigan]

*takes off hat*

 

Sigh. It's just sad.

[Acidnessu]

This is both sad and extremely amusing.

[mfourcustom]

Rip

 

My God have mercy on their souls.

[AngFour]

*music on the speakers play "In the Arms of the Angels" by Sarah McLachlan*

[ArcTrooperElite]

As much as I hated Billy Ray Cyrus, I'm hearing "Some gave all" in my head while reading this.

[Rheshalea]

I really, really, REALLY shouldn't read this thread.

I had decided not to do so, but just two days later I had to come back and see if there are any sacrifices left to be made.

 

Now I'm sad again.

I guess I'll be back in another couple of days when I've gotten over this sadness.

[Aletheos]

Here’s finally the delayed obituary for:

 

Sacrifice #9

 

Lord Insultan, lvl 70 juggernaut, The Shadowlands

I don’t normally use character titles for my toons, but in the case of this impressive-looking body type 3 pureblood Sith I couldn’t but put Lord before his name. Dressed in Ancient Paragon’s body armor and greaves, Gladiator handgear and boots, Fortified Electrum belt, and Force Champion headgear (which perfectly modulated his voice and saved the otherwise uninspired voice-acting), he was in every respect my most Star Wars-y toon. I have to admit, I was a bit taken aback when he was to be sacrificed so early in the minigame and I couldn’t stand the thought of deleting him without levelling him to the XP cap first. He was to exit the game at the height of his power! Hence the jump from lvl 64 to lvl 70.

 

Insultan was my third toon in the game and his story is as much about him as it is about his wife, Vette. As a matter of fact, I decided to roll the class and play a LS male Sith because of a Korriban playthrough video I watched on youtube where Vette was the unrivalled star: she was funny, she was witty, she was full of energy ... and running with her was one of the greatest treats in the game. (If only Jedi Consulars had a companion like that...)

 

As for Lord Insultan himself, he was responsible for some of the most exciting, but also most embarrassing moments I experienced in SWTOR. One of the latter ones came fairly early in his career when, despite his numerous objections that he had never done anything like that, he was talked into tanking HM TC. (Until then, I played mostly solo, save for an occasional flashpoint or H4.) Not surprisingly, Lord Insultan failed his mission that day, the group wiped, and he felt so embarrassed that he wouldn’t tank another op ever again (I would successfully tank ops on my shadow later on, though ).

 

But there are kind memories as well. One of them takes us to Section X (oh, those days when we had open worlds for endgame, with their own world bosses to farm...) where, after defeating Dreadtooth, we decided to storm the Republic base. Mind you, back then getting through the outer defences was a task for an ops group (there’s no way you would two-man them as you can these days), and then you had to climb a steep rock-wall to get to the base proper (I’m not even sure it’s still possible, for the map was probably modified since then). Nevertheless, we successfully invaded the base, killed everything inside and claimed it for the Empire. Back then, you could expect the opponent’s reinforcements to show up in a matter of minutes and sure enough soon we were facing a wave of newly arrived PvPers trying to reclaim the base for the Republic. Before long the base was littered with the bodies of the imperial invasion squad. Both parties had a great time and at the end took a screenshot together: them standing victoriously above our corpses.

 

Those were the best years of this game. Nowadays? I dropped by Outpost Thorazan on my lvl 60 F2P shadow two days ago, only to find it under imperial siege. Well, it was the PvP instance of the map and it was just me against five imps, so why not to have some fun, right? Wrong. After I killed two of them (lvl 67 and 65, btw), I was called names... In the PvP instance, in our own base...incredible.

 

Anyway, I meant to take Lord Insultan to the VIP section of the fleet before deleting him, but then I opened the companion page one last time and to my horror I realized that his HK-51’s influence lvl was only at 49½! Thus one last trip to Odessen was in order. I just couldn’t bear the thought of retiring Lord Insultan’s faithful assassin droid ... without first perfecting his assassination protocols!

 

Total time played on this toon: 26 days, 13 hours, 10 minutes ... just over 637 hours of my life.

[Aletheos]

Here are 3 more crates:

 

Crate 5/18 ... a moddable blue item, no sacrifice required.

Crate 6/18 ... a useless green item, two sacrifices are required.

 

 

Roll 5: 10, which is ... my KotFE/KotET toon on The Harbinger

Roll 6: 8, which is ... my colony on the Ebon Hawk

 

 

Crate 7/18 ... a moddable blue item, no sacrifice required.

[Aletheos]

Here are the obituaries for Rolls 5 & 6:

 

Sacrifice #13

 

Pheyarra, lvl 67 guardian, The Harbinger

In the 4.X cycle, I started a few guardians/juggernauts that abandoned the traditional Jedi/Sith looks and went for a more unorthodox “rogue” one instead. On the pub side, they were mostly brown-skin Togrutas (female, body type 1) decked out in the Shrewd Rascal’s armor set, and armed with the Merciless Raider’s vibrosward. When I got the MSM J-37 jetpack from one of the DvL crates, I threw that into the mix as well and the result was surprisingly refreshing. Phey falls perfectly into this “rogue JK” category, with one important exception: she’s human. But the color of her hair is the same one as the color of the above-mentioned Togruta’s skin and the effect is equally pleasing.

 

Phey was supposed to be THE Jedi knight of my legacy on the Harbringer. She provided the pub side cheevos for the DvL event, she made it though KotFE and was to run KotET as my account’s one and only 5.X story-grinder. Let’s face it, having a JK to run through the last two expansions made them significantly more palatable than when I tried the same with an operative... Now with Phey’s demise, I will not become the galaxy’s new ruler – and that’s a good thing, for (in my not so humble opinion) turning everybody into THE hero of the galaxy in an mmo was an exceptionally dambass move.

 

Phey is now to spend 4 or 5 days (till my sub runs out) in Limbo: the death sentence is irrevocable, but since she’s the only toon on the Harbinger that can turn in the command crates, I will need to keep her alive for just a little bit longer...

 

 

Sacrifice #14: a mass offering

 

My expedition force on the Ebon Hawk consisting of three name holders: a lvl 23 merc, lvl 24 assassin, and lvl 51 shadow. The shadow was supposed to unlock Tulak Hord’s and Xoxaan’s armor sets for my account (she got lucky during the DvL event), but as I no longer have any sith warriors or sorcerers, I won’t even miss those sets. And on the bright side, the threesome made me at least 120 free CCs granted for some low-hanging cheevos, so the mission on TEH was not a complete waste after all.

[fishpeople]

Damn. Did 5.0 really push you into doing this? Or have you bee considering giving up SWTOR for awhile?

[Aletheos]

Damn. Did 5.0 really push you into doing this? Or have you bee considering giving up SWTOR for awhile?

 

I was annoyed with 4.X, but I still found a way to enjoy the game. I knew we wouldn't get any real mmo content, and though I wasn't happy about it, I was reconciled with that. But 5.0 went much further than that and pretty much cancelled any reason to play the game. If I were to stay a sub, I would have to pay to grind the RNG lottery just to re-enter the same years old content, and I'm not gonna do that (40 crates on my main and ZERO bonus set pieces speak volumes...). And to lapse into the preferred status means you can no longer meaningfully participate in the game. (BTW, BW got rid off the weekly passes, but did not pay what they promised to ... and I'm not only not surprised, but not even able to get upset about it any more...). With the changes to gearing and endgame, it makes no sense to spread colonies across the servers and level alts; one toon and its mirror on the opposite side is pretty much all one can reasonably have. Thus my alts became redundant, and feeding them to the RNG goods is about the best thing I can do with them...

[VirtualMorrigan]

I sort of understand why. But still, this is damn sad to read.

[Aletheos]

Everything that has a beginning has an end. My sub ran out just before Christmas and with that my minigame came to an end as well. Being otherwise occupied, I failed to report on its final stages at the time -- a failure I’d like to remedy now, before BW comes back from their holiday and, with the first patch to go live, bars me from posting on these forums.

 

The last crate I opened here (on Dec 16) was 7/18; thus I still had 11 CXP levels to grind and I was almost running out of time to do so: to produce a command crate at CXP lvl 40 takes forever if you cannot play during the prime time to get GSF and PvP pops. In that situation, I took advantage of my merc’s just hitting lvl 70 (mostly due to participating in conquests) and I started to open her first command crates instead, as those could be gained at a significantly faster rate. And man, did she fight hard to save her skin! Her first crate: a set piece! Three crates later: a purple implant! Two more crates and another set piece! That’s 10 free rolls just like that, which left me with only one more crate to open. For that I returned to my main: a green gear piece required 2 final sacrifices.

 

For the last roll, I removed the valiant merc from the death row and was left with 6 toons: 3 DvL chars and 3 founders. To make sure that one of the sacrifices is a founder, I assigned them the first three odd and even numbers, respectively, and literally rolled a die. The first odd and even number rolled yielded the following result:

 

Sacrifice # 15: a lvl 50 Powertech, a DvL char on The Harbinger

 

Even though my first and third (?) chars in SWTOR were a Kinetic Combat Shadow and an Immortal Jugg, it was not until fairly late in 3.X that I discovered the beauty of the third tanking class – but when that finally happened, it was “love at first sight”. A Combo of Mako (in dps stance) and a female Shield Tech Powertech both dressed in the old PvP vendor armor (the lvl 40 one), or even better the TH-16B Elite Corpsman set (neither of them no longer obtainable after the removal of vendor gear from the game in 4.0) was always so much fun to play. For a while, I was even considering founding a guild for them: Durasteel Dolls would have been the name. In 5.0, however, gearing a tank “just for fun” has become a luxury only the most dedicated can afford – and I’m no longer one them.

 

Sacrifice # 16: Draganna, a lvl 62 Operative, a founder, Jung Ma (she had transferred to The Harbinger in the meanwhile and gained another XP level or two by the time she drew the shortest straw, so to speak)

 

Draganna was my first truly DS toon in the game; though not bloodthirsty or sadistic, she was conceived as coldblooded (Draganna the Heartless was her character title for a reason) and she would never do anything that would disadvantage her.

 

Draganna was social 10 and valor 90 (being stranded on a dead server for over a year cost her the Manhunter title), and even though I was never a particularly good operative, it was a lot of fun to PvP on this char. Incidentally, Drag witnessed firsthand the rise of one of the most interesting PvP guilds on Jung Ma, Taking Lives, but she was a shy murderer and didn’t last long in a guild that was quickly turning into a hardcore PvP combine harvester.

 

Clad in the Dark Reaver Enforcer’s set (another PvP set that’s afaik no longer in the game), she had this late 1960s look about her and I dubbed her my “hippie assassin”. It was for this reason that when I finally moved her to The Harbinger (where her name was already taken), I was shortly flirting with the idea of calling her Les Vanhouten, but my better judgement prevailed and I refrained from potentially offending some players. Yet her most memorable SWTOR moment was very van Houten like.

 

It happened on Ilum, during the Gree event (back when it would be only held like twice a year). The event was about to end (it was almost 3 am) and Drag was still 12 kills short of securing her Red Octagon title (a great title, btw, as it is no longer obtainable due to the lvl sync introduced in 4.0), when she ran into a group of 4 pubs ... who were from a guild she had an alt in. She hesitated for a split second only – after all she was about to go solo against four, during a PvP event on a PvP server. Her conscience was clear. Her blades were sharp. 8 minutes later she was a Red Octagon.

 

Total time played on this toon: 40 days, 10 hours, 55 minutes. Only my main logged in more hours than Drag...

[NayntaLot]

Wow, 5.0 really was the killer for you? I'm not sure how to respond to this thread. Bioware?! You caused this!

[Aletheos]

Hey guys and gals, as the servers go off-line in a few minutes, I’ll be taking an indefinite leave of these forums and pretty much of the game as well. I wanted to say good bye and toss a few numbers your way before I go.

 

In the course of my minigame, I sacrificed 21 toons that combined for 101 days and 13 hours of playtime. Yep, that’s some 2,437 hours, if my math is correct. SWTOR was fun when it lasted, but I doubt it will ever be fun again; I wouldn’t mind being proven wrong, though. As it stands, I’m still left with 4 founders. I’m sorely tempted to summarily delete three of them as well and keep just the main for nostalgic purposes, but I may leave that till January 24 or till 6.0 hits – let’s see what the future has in store for us first.

 

When I started my minigame, I wanted to experience the grind for a while to see how bad it really is. It became tedious very quickly and my main’s bad luck speaks volumes about how screwed the whole things is. To get CX lvl 40, as she did, one needs to amass 89,351 CXP. Imagine you like to PvP. An average PvP match yields 596 CXP (regs solo win with 8 or more medals is 662 CXP, a loss under same conditions is 530 medals), thus you need 150 WZ matches to get to CX lvl 40 ... and at the end of those 150 matches you still have zero set pieces. ZERO! Now that’s EXCITING!

 

Anyway, I didn’t mean to end on a negative note. May all of you have a great 2017 and good luck in all you do.

[AlrikFassbauer]

Anyway, I didn’t mean to end on a negative note. May all of you have a great 2017 and good luck in all you do.

 

Good luck to you in RL as well !

 

 

 

Sacrifice ( by Shiny Entertainment ) was one of the far weirdest games I've ever played. Needless to say I didn't made it through it.

Edited January 5, 2017 by AlrikFassbauer