Monday, April 8, 2013

Fruits of SWTOR Double Exp



SWTOR celebrated the run-up to its new expansion with four consecutive double exp weekends (but no non-weekend days), and I used the time to work on my Imperial Operative.  I advanced from level 19 to level 45, completed half of Chapter 1, all of Chapter 2, and skipped the entire first planet of Chapter 3 due to having greened out all of the content before I arrived.  In the process, I claimed the Agent/Smuggler class buff and 40 presence for my legacy.  As is often the case when an exp bonus changes my crowded gaming calendar - bear in mind that I was up against the wire to hit WoW's level cap - the underlying exp curve has some quirks (deficiencies?). 

As a matter of principle, I don't see much point in experience boosts - especially such massive ones.  You get exp for playing the game, you either are or are not enjoying the game, and if you are enjoying the game then why make the game end more quickly?  (Shintar wrote on this topic part way through the promotion.)  Typically, when you see me grabbing at exp, it's more because there is something I'm less fond of that stands between myself and exp. 

In SWTOR's case, the challenge is that Bioware spent large amounts of time crafting great story content scattered amongst eight classes.  Short of extremely drastic measures - such as four consecutive double exp weekends - you will need to complete shared generic content for your faction, which is generally less interesting and does not change on future characters, to make your levels.  If you are also playing as a non-subscriber - which I do sometimes in SWTOR - you have even less leeway to skip content due to several stacking penalties on your exp gain.

As a result, the point of playing the double exp for all it was worth was not to skip content - though I did skip entire planets (while focusing my questing efforts on planets I saw less of during my first playthrough).  Rather, the point was to save the content for future characters.  That I will mostly likely be positioned to play the new expansion on both factions, using my previously level 50 trooper and my soon to be level 50 agent is a side bonus. 

1 comment:

  1. I'm with you here. I got the email 2 or 3 weeks ago about double xp and went "sure why not?" and logged in my Sniper. Got from 35 to 37 and it was decent enough, I suppose, but it didn't hook me back in either, so I only played that one weekend. It was a nice little diversion, I guess, but definitely will never be a main game for me anymore either.

    ReplyDelete

Comments on posts older than 14 days are moderated and will not appear until manually approved because the overwhelming majority of such comments are spam. Anonymous commenting has unfortunately been disabled due to the sheer volume of comments that are defeating Google's spam filter.