Fine with Failure
I have come to accept the fact that there is no way in hell I am going to manage to finish all of the class story lines before tomorrow, when Knights of the Fallen Empire launches. I allowed myself to get massively distracted by Destiny, and for the most part I am okay with this. Last night I hit the start of Act 3 on my Sith Sorcerer and I should be able to wrap that up tonight if I am lucky. That leaves only the agent to play, and as a friend suggested last night… it might be interesting to see what leveling is like post KotFE. In truth while I am excited for this expansion, I am not just rushing headlong into the content. I still have yet to complete Shadows of Revan on any of my characters, and while my Jedi Guardian is sitting at 57… I have no real desire to rush through that. Honestly at this point I might ding the new level cap before I even set foot into the new chapters content. I want to play, but I am not feeling like I have to rush ahead, since really I am not trying to keep up with anyone. That normally is why I push so hard at the beginning of an expansion, is that I feel like I am obligated to grind my way to the top of the heap so I will be available for tanking as we level. That ended up in a small bit of burnout recently with Heavensward, so with SWTOR since I am now enjoying it again… I want to futz around a bit.
My biggest complaint about this game is shared with party based role-playing games in general. Nothing frustrates me more than anything, when the game forces me to take a specific character on a mission. This happened last night with Talos, and while I like the companion just fine… a healer and a dps/healer grouped together is not exactly the best mix in the world. I had to stop what I was doing in the middle of this mission, go back to the fleet, upgrade my mods and only then was I able to keep myself alive during a section where I am essentially soloing while Talos fiddles with something in a tomb. I tend to get really connected to a specific group of characters, and when the game forces me to mix that up I get frustrated. I am one of those people that plays Dragon Age with the same party every time, and never switches to use any of the others except begrudgingly when the game makes me do it. I like building a small tight knit team and then using everyone else for crew missions. The worst moment in Dragon Age was the bit where you have to split up and use all of your companions… only half of which had anything other than their starting gear. I had to load back in from a previous save and go out of my way to figure out how best to gear them all. It was pretty much the opposite of fun, and that is how I feel in SWTOR when I am forced to use a specific companion pairing for a specific mission.
The Distraction
The reason why I am mostly okay with not hitting my goal is because I have been having a silly amount of fun playing Destiny. Over the weekend I spent some more time working on my Hunter, which I hope to also get to 40 at some point soonish. After playing around a bit on the Warlock, I decided to use my boost to level 25 on the Hunter instead… because Blade Dancer seems like a really fun spec. I also just like the look and feel of the hunter better than the warlock, and it makes me a bit jealous that my Titan doesn’t have a knife to stab things with instead of just punch them. At this point I am level 30, and considering starting the Taken King content proper soonish if for no reason other than to unlock the Dreadnought for patrols. Ultimately I want to be able to get all of my characters up there in level so that I can share the benefit of having multiple near cap characters. A lot of the cooldowns can go faster if you can swap an item back and forth between your characters. The Agonarch runes can gain one charge per day per character, so if you bank the item you can pop on another character and gain another charge… ultimately getting special event access faster.
I am still very much in the slogging phase of the game, and I have been hovering around the 290 mark for over a week now. Ultimately my only way out is to start chain running Heroic Strikes, but I just have not been able to bring myself to do that. I am having fun with the game, and I am afraid pushing that hard is going to ultimately break it for me. When I start to resent the RNG, or resent the other players… I know my fun time with Destiny will be over. So I am sitting in this realm of finding enjoyment in the little moment to moment gameplay and trying to ignore the larger picture almost entirely. There is part of me that would love to see the raid… but a whole other part of me that doesn’t want to take that hit of heroine. I know what I am like when I start chasing raid drops… I approach them with a single minded determination and focus that ultimately leads to me being completely hollow as a result. I obsess over gearing… and grind myself into the ground destroying whatever enjoyment I had for the game in the process. I tried really hard not to do this with Heavensward, and in part it is why I have been taking this break and playing other games in the process. My hope is that by the time we end up going back to Final Fantasy XIV it will feel fresh and enjoyable again with the launch of the 3.1 patch. Similarly though I am trying to keep Destiny and SWTOR as enjoyable as I can for the time being… and it seems like not caring too much about reaching a particular destination is my way for doing that.