1, 6, and 10?
1. Least favorite class story?
Consular, hands-down. I really wanted to like it, too! I loved the first Chapter. The whole Plague storyline was really cool. And since I’d played Jedi Knight previously, I liked that the Emperor’s Children cropped up and we learned more about them (oh Master Sio, you poor fuck). But… auuugh. The story didn’t flow well at all. Chapter 2 was so incredibly dull for me. Chapter 3 felt… dislocated from everything else. It bothers me that Nadia is a romance option when we don’t even get her until after Belsavis (wtf). And none of the companions other than Qyzen and Felix really click with me, and they fumbled Felix’s backstory hard.
But I could deal with all of that. Really, it’s the poor voice actors who got like the worst direction in the world. I feel so bad for Athena Karkanis and Nolan North because they were very obviously directed to be as monotone and emotionless as possible, and… they pulled it off. Especially Athena. But unfortunately that destroyed all possibility of any immersion or emotional connection I had to the character I made and the story going on. So… yeah :/
6. Least favorite romance?
I haven’t done as many of them as Aki has, but of the ones I’ve done… nnngghh I want to say Raina Temple, but I’m not sure that’s fair because her romance was okay if completely unremarkable; really I just hate everything about Raina herself. She exhibits so many qualities that evoke the purest disdain from me. There was also a sketchy line I remember after the first time she bangs the IA about the IA being “exotic” b/c she’s never done an alien before and that was :/ But again, I just don’t like Raina.
In which case, it might have to go to Lana. Because I love Lana. I love her with all of her flaws. And her romance starts out great on Imperial side! There’s gay-ass hand-holding and at the end of Manaan she just hugs you. There is no kiss, she hugs and it was great!!
And then in kotfe they just… drop the ball. There’s a few really good flirt options, but then once you confirm the romance in chapter 9, there’s NOTHING. No flirt options after that, no dialogue that indicates you’re even fond of one another. There’s, you know, the 1 scene at the end of the expansion just before the climactic battle and that was… cute but…
It’s very… pristine. And it reminds me too closely of the “women must be pure and chaste blah blah” BS. The like, one upside is that it’s totally possible, if picking your flirt options, to see Lana’s romance as a purely asexual romantic thing, which is very nice in that light, but almost certainly unintended.
10. Worst multiplayer experience?
Ohhhh man. I’ve had a couple of p. bad ones, and initially my thought went to this group finder Op I did of Dread Palace, but other than the group leader being weirdly and abruptly very abusive towards another player, the whole Op went smoothly, no wipes, done and I left.
No, the worst multiplayer experience I’ve ever had happened on my old server. I don’t remember what op we were trying to do… it was the Hard mode of one we’d done before, and the boss was a droid we had to like, keep underneath some furnace blasts, and one of the ranged dps was in charge of turning the furnaces on and whatnot.
Everyone else was just… in a very very bad mood. The tank specifically was in a bad bad mood, and the off-tank had died again. And the main tank needed a reprieve because the stacks of Awful from the boss were nearing critical (hence the need for an off-tank to swap back and forth), so the tank asks me if I can hold the boss for a few seconds.
I am playing a sentinel. A sentinel, if you recall, can only dps. All three specs are dps specs. I do not know a single damn thing about tanking. I know that tanks have taunts, but I also know that high-damage abilities generate threat spikes, and I was one of the higher-dpsing players in the group, so the tank reserved a taunt for when I drew aggro and had force chamo on cooldown.
So I said “okay, I’ll try!” and move to stand next to the tank figuring that like… the tank would drop aggro and the boss would aggro onto me and I’d pop my handful of cooldowns and a medpac if I needed one and the tank would grab the boss back and we’d be good.
But nothing happens. The tank doesn’t drop aggro. The boss stays on him. The tank is clearly waiting for… something?
So I’m like “I don’t have a taunt, I’m not sure what you want me to do”.
The tank gets all kinds of grouchy and upset because somehow I lead him astray? A seasoned player who’d been doing this for years longer than I had?
So I ask (this is all in voice chat btw, extra fun): “Do you have an agg-drop?”
And their response, I shit you not, is: “I’m a tank” in the nastiest possible tone.
Which, you know, is basically how it ends because the tank dies and we wipe and decide not to try again.
But here’s the kicker.
The tank was a shadow tank.
SHADOW TANKS HAVE FORCE CLOAK. Things that I have learned since starting to play an assassin tank: force cloak is an integral part of your damage mitigation and general mechanics. It triggers force shroud with the right utility. It resets your “1 medpac per battle” timer. It’s great for stealth-rezzing. It works as an interrupt against abilities the boss is trying to cast while focused on you.
Why does it work as an interrupt? Because it drops you into undetectable stealth.
That is the most agg-drop of any agg-drop.
Not, realistically, that it would have mattered much because I was still a pure-dps class with no taunts whatsoever, but at the very least the tank could have recovered and then drawn the boss back to the designated furnace it it wandered off.
It’s been… years and I’m still salty about this.