At which point, I utter some uncouth language.
Little Jedi responds: “Mommy, what’s a ‘stinky ho’?”
/facepalm (at least she didn’t pick up the word “skanky”…)
[Screenshots] It’s Kinda Like Dancing On Mailboxes
666 Meme is the Debbil (C Wut I Did Thar?)
Go into your image folder
Open the sixth sub-folder and choose the sixth image.
Publish the image! (and a few words wouldn’t hurt, though I dare say I couln’t stop a blogger from adding a few words of their own).
Challenge six new bloggers.
Link to them.
I’ve been totally ignoring the 666 meme even after getting tagged but I have a good excuse: I recently got a new PC after my old one decided to fail in a quite dramatic fashion. You may have noticed my screenshots suddenly looking less “squished” top to bottom. I joked that my old PC added 10 lbs to my toons! An unfortunate side effect of this is that one of my toons that previously looked OK is now, in my mind, unacceptably weird looking. However, it’s my bank alt. I’ll cope. And I have a new PC, so I’m sure you’re crying big salty tears for me.
Back to the point, though. I needed to build up some screenies before I could participate in anything that required an examination of screenshot folders or folders-within-folders.
I don’t actually have 6 subfolders yet but in the spirit of this, I’ll try to do the 6th of what I do have.
From my screenshot folder. I was apparently taking a picture of guild chat for the Snark Side blog. I was standing on my husband’s ship at the time with my boytoy, Doc.
Seriously, my screenshot folder is downright sparse and my pictures folder is even worse.
Now the challenge is finding 6 bloggers who haven’t done this yet. I probably have effed this up too, but we’ll just pretend that I am good at memes.
- Anachan, Light Rank V
- Targeter, Imperial Intelligence
- Shintar, Going Commando
- Draconian One, Get the Girl, Kill the Baddies
- Saya, Force Mocha
- Peal, Peal’s Heals
And I officially can count to 6 (thanks, ordinal list). Yay.
Companion Wishlist
I really like companions, but there are a few things I would change…
1. Hide Helm. FFS people! I want to see my companion’s face. I don’t want to listen to a voice coming out of a bucket head.
2. Get Companions Earlier (before level 30). You spend SO LONG with your first companion and you’re wishing for some variety. Also, when I get a companion at level 40, you might as well just print “ur a crafting mule” on his head. If a companion is going to be invaluable to my role (like, say, a healer companion for a melee dps toon), I’m going to suffer if that companion is given to me very late.
3. More Healers and Tanks. It would be ideal if all companions had a heal or tanking mode. Generally, you find yourself taking along a tank or a healer. If you had more than one healer, you’d have some more variety in choices of whom to bring along. Right now, as soon as you get “the” companion that is appropriate for you, that’s your perma-buddy.
4. Easier Gearing. Once you have 5 companions, it’s hard to keep them all geared, which just leads to the same old problem of bringing the same one every time. And many of them can’t wear orange pieces that are restricted. For example: heavy armor that is restricted to “trooper or jedi knight” cannot be used by your friendly neighborhood Corso.
5. More Companion Quests. I was pretty disappointed that the first companion gives you a quest to go somewhere and do something, but all the rest just want to have conversations. Sigh. I realize that if your companion/main combination is not ideal, a quest where you’re forced to bring a specific companion might be difficult. But the companion quests could be easier than others…
6. Conversation Spacing. Ok, when my companions gain affection, they want to talk to me at specific affection levels.. which is spaced out nicely. Unless the conversations are gated by finishing chapter 1 or whatever – in which case, they just build up and once Chapter 1 is done, the companions want to chat and chat and chat and have all the conversations back-to-back. Maybe there should be a minimum time between these conversations? Maybe a day? It’s pretty disconcerting to have your companion say “this will take a long time to track down” – you finish the conversation, and then there’s another triangle… you click and “HEY I FOUND IT!” Mmkay.
7. Chat when I want to Chat. I joke the Corso is a typical man… when he wants to talk, I should make time to hear him out, but when I want to talk and I click on him he says something like “I have nothing to say.” Grrr. Even if it’s a dumb little inconsequential conversation, there should be SOMETHING.
What would you change about your companions?
Little Jedi’s Lightsaber
Little Jedi: I want a lightsaber.
Me: We can get you a toy lightsaber.
LJ: I need two lightsabers.
Joun (the husband): What color? Qui-Gonn has Green and Darth Vader has red…
LJ: I want two blue lightsabers.
Joun: This is all you.
We ended up with one purple lightsaber due to selection (no blue) and the fact that there’s no way for a 4-year-old to actually hold up two at a time.
Two Hours Later…
(Electronic WHOOSHING noise)
LJ: “PEW PEW! I’m PEWING the BAD GUYS.”
50 Is Overwhelming
Yay I did it. And at the same time it’s all just beginning. It feels a little daunting, but at least I have a plan, albeit a half-assed one. Remember, folks, unless you’re cutting edge progression, there’s more than one way to get where you’re going.
Gear
I want to raid, so I need to gear up for that. I have a few options (or combinations thereof):
- Reverse engineer for purplez
- Do dailies for purple augments etc
- Grind cash to buy stuff off the GTN
- Do instances with guildies
My answer to this is, of course, a little of everything, but I’m focusing on crafting. I don’t have unlimited time. So I make sure to “send off the idiots” to gather stuff before I even start anything else, because a lot of the “heavy lifting” for crafting can happen while I’m not even paying attention or online. So far, I have reverse engineered purple pants, hat, and bracers within the last two days (working on boots now). Not a bad start. I haven’t finished my story quest yet so I won’t be doing dailies until I complete that.
Datacrons
All I can say about Datacrons is fucking hell. There are a ton of them and a lot are simply impossible to get to – particularly for someone who is jumping–impaired like I am.
So I’m doing the half-assed version as follows:
- Only target datacrons with my primary stat (strength) AND
- They must not be ridiculous to obtain
The one that requires a 30 minute balloon ride? Hell no. If I get all the easily-obtainable strength ones, I may start to get some for other stats. If I have time. Priorities!
What To Do If You Get To The Fleet At Level 9
Ideally, you will finish your story quest and all your intro planet quests (minus maybe the heroics) and get to the fleet at level 10, pick an advanced class, and go on your merry way.
Now, say you create an alt. And, well, now you’re a little more efficient. You know where everything is and you don’t end up killing extraneous mobs. Your class quest ends, and you’re level 9.5 and you have nothing left to do but group quests. And if you’re like me, you hate other people and don’t want to group with random people from general chat.1
So what do you do? Do you kill boars? Hell no. Get your butt to the fleet!
1. Do the crafting quest. You will be able to get the “learn a crew skill then talk to your trainer” quest. Do that. But also talk to ALL the trainers. You get a codex entry and xp for each.
Still at 9?
2. Exploit your companion. I’m assuming here that this is an alt and you have some cash to burn. Right? Ok good, get yourself to the GTN or the companion gift vendor and start buying up the stuff your companion likes. Start giving the gifts. It’s a 30 second cooldown.
Eventually, the companion will want to chat with you!
Important note about companion chats: Sometimes you will get the “companion wants to chat with you” icon but the companion doesn’t actually want to chat. The way you know for sure is to click on your companion and he or she will say that they want to talk. It’s a different phrase for each of them…
Get to the fleet cantina and have a nice heart-to-heart. At the end, you will get xp. Maybe enough to get off the fleet. No? Rinse, repeat.
As a side note, early gifting of companions behooves you and is cheaper in the long run. If you have the cash, it’s not like you’re wasting it getting your companion affection up early.
- True story: grouped with a random dude for one of those instance-cave thingys… he drops and because he was the first in the cave and it was technically “his” story area, I got booted out and had to re-enter as my story area and re-kill all the crap I had just killed. Not cool. ↩
My Awesome New Belt
I got the awesomest new belt, guys! And when I realized how “awesome” it was, I had already DE’ed RE’ed my old one.
Actually, more than a leaf or a heart, it reminds me of Pingu’s snowboarding adventures and how his friends strapped a pillow to his butt to cushion his falls…
In case you’re wondering how this saga turned out, I narrowly escaped the clutches of the Fashion Police. I crafted a bunch of green belts with synthweaving until I managed to RE a blue recipe out of it, and then crafted myself a normal looking belt, though with ever-so-slightly worse stat distribution. To quote Darth Meatloaf: “I would do anything for stats, but I won’t do that.”
Links, Blogroll, and Emailing Me
Stuff You Should Read
One of my guildmates posted about Sage healing on our guild blog. Wait, you’re not already subscribed to it? What’s wrong with you?
See, a lot of our guildies are bloggers – and those who don’t have their own blogs like to have a platform for when they want to make an occasional post. It’s definitely not the kind of “guild blog” that announces what we killed when we killed it. We write about normal bloggy-things with only the occasional “guild news” post.
While I’m Learning 2 Sentinel, I’ve found this post on the official forums very VERY useful. But I’m always looking for more things to read if you have suggestions.
And I’ve been obsessed with fashion for both my sentinel and smuggler lately, so imagine my rejoicing that there is a Smuggler Fashion Show thread on the official forums. All the pieces are fully-moddable (orange), so most of them work for sentinels too (except smuggler quest rewards that are unobtainable by non-smugglers).
Mah Blogroll
I updated my blogroll to prune blogs that are inactive. And I am always looking for new fun blogs to add! So holler if I missed yours.
Email and the Contact Form
Every so often, my inbox gets the bright idea that messages submitted through the contact form are spam. Sigh. If I don’t answer you, it probably got caught in spam. If that happens, or if you find contact forms annoying, you can always just email me at njessi [at] hawtpantsrepublic [dot] com.
More Adventures in Companion Customization
You know how I said I was customizing all my companions? And how I wouldn’t ONLY IF the kits were so disgusting that I couldn’t stomach it? That happened.
Apparently, it was too much to ask to get rid of the mustache on Doc.
Apparently he has to have facial hair of some disgusting sort on most of the customization kits. Unfortunately, the previews are small. Also unfortunately, I was throwing up on my mouth for some of them.1
- Note: I don’t have a picture of Kit 1, which comes from the Ilum security key vendor. It’s a very dark-skinned guy with a blond goatee. ↩
Being Gray
I was a little bummed that being gray (i.e. not “light side” or “dark side” but rather somewhere in the middle) had no super duper gear choices like full-light or full-dark.
But then I realized that for non-min-max purposes, gray was awesome.
(1) Every choice is a choice
If my character is really goody-goody, chances are I will pick the light side option most of the time because that’s what a goody-goody character would do, end of story. Vice versa for being totally evil. But if my character is truly neutral, every choice, every single one, could go either way, and I get to sit there and debate with myself what to do. I love that.
(2) Diplomacy
I took up diplomacy. Some people use it to grind light side or dark side points, depending on their preferences. I use it for money. That’s right, I’m a smuggler, dammit, and light and dark make no difference to me. I choose the mission based on the profit.
I would be so super-pissed if I saw a diplomacy mission with a rich payout but was light side and didn’t want to take the dark side hit (or vice versa). As a gray, whatever, money is money.
Jedi are totally different. Jedi aren’t influenced by money. However, it’s awfully easy to get dark side points just making choices that a normal person might make. Failure to tattle to the council? Dark side. Covering for a friend? Dark side.
