Manaan & Ruhnuk story--my thoughts

[Ardrossan]

I played through both Manaan and Ruhnuk on a few toons recently and I generally really liked the story. Both have a lot of options, more than Onslaught. Of course, the options were largely flavor text and all came to similar endings, but that goes back to their storytelling in vanilla, which isn't a bad comparison at all. For example, I really liked that there were so many choices about what to do about Korrd, it wasn't a straight LS spare him / DS kill him like i've been used to seeing for most post-Makeb content. The options for saboteurs made sense and I liked that they had good flavor text differentiating each of the classes, especially the rationale for deciding what to do about Darth Norok--I played through on a BH and an LS SW and both have great lines, great VA delivery! 

While the imperial storyline for Manaan was much better than the Republic storyline (again, nothing new, imperials always get better quality writing), I thought that the writing for the Manaan Dailies favored the Republic side moreso, the plot was much more intricate and I liked having to navigate between the Manaan versus Republic diplomat; both had good motivations and again it wasn't a simple DS/LS choice. Manaan was the first daily I actually wanted to play through, too bad the combat in these areas is so tedious. And Ruhnuk of course is even worse for this. 

Ruhnuk also has some good storytelling although not nearly as impressive as Manaan, but at least you have lots of options during the Shae/Heta fight. One issue is that the fight is kind of long and boring the second time around, wasn't that interesting the first time--Bioware seems to think that a knife fight is just a sword fight with smaller weapons lmao--and again, whatever you do gets you similar outcomes. The gimmick that brings your PC down is pretty dumb but this is the problem of endgame writing in general; when your character has defeated multiple high level bosses, anything that can take you down has to be a world-destroying power. I'd rather they do it the way they chose rather than have Heta do it, which would evoke memories of Arcann/Vaylin impossible to win fights. But what they should have done is take the opportunity to use the Darth Nul holocron in some way. It's not good that we know literally nothing about what it actually does or how it can be used as a weapon.

Ruhnuk's daily is okay, definitely not as good as Manaan but at least they hired an actual VA, I'm sick of alien gibberish. Ruhnuk has the same problem as Makeb with mob density and respawn rate, fights taking forever. They need a 20/20/20 rule: 20% more DPS, 20% less HP, and 20% slower respawn rate. I definitely would not do the daily area more than the first time around, and it's bizarre that Bioware doesn't learn from stuff like Makeb or for that matter looking at most of the dailies in this game, they should be comparable; if it takes twice as long as Black Hole and three times as long as CZ-198 then players probably won't do it except for the cheevos. 

I would like to hope that the Saboteur storyline is nearing completion. I'd also like to hope--since they have always had the technology to do this--that there is some internal tracker keeping count of all your saboteur choices and if you've done say 8 or more, you 'win' and have the option to do a faction swap, and if you have less than that you get caught by your side before you can leave or the other faction betrays you, and you get locked out of both factions, even if it's just flavor text.