I did the operation Explosive Conflict. Because it was my first time doing it on this particular character, there was a cutscene at the end. The cutscene is inside the instance. Midway through the cutscene, I was bounced out of the instance (and therefore the scene) because everyone else quit the group and it disbanded, and you can't be inside an op instance without an ops group. Now, even if I form a new ops group, I still can't do the cutscene. Why? Because it's inside the instance, and I'm not allowed inside the instance, because I'm locked out of the op, because I've allegedly finished it. Is there a single good reason why the droid NPC you talk to in order to trigger the cutscene, which takes place on the Ziost Shadow on the fleet, is inside the instance at all? If not, move that son of a Hutt out of the instance. This would also mean I could do the cutscene that starts the op (which is also always set on the Ziost Shadow) without making the rest of the group stand around waiting while I finish, because I could do it beforehand.

I first played SWTOR eight years ago this week. The first class story I ever chose to play was the Sith Inquisitor (because I wanted to spec into an Assassin so I could throw lightning and have a double-bladed lightsaber). Given my experience with it, it probably qualifies as a minor miracle that I kept on with other toons. Today, after playing off and on for eight years and completing all eight of the class stories (most of them multiple times), I feel comfortable expressing my considered opinion that the Inquisitor storyline is the worst written of the lot. It really is a shame, too, because the Inquisitor as a character has a lot going for them. The "rags to riches story" trope is a classic for a reason, of course, the Inquisitor's dialogue includes some of the funniest one-liners anywhere in the game, and I cannot deny that I find playing as a Dark Councilor to be the most fun way to experience the Imperial sides of "Rise of the Hutt Cartel" and "Shadow of Revan." Moreover, from a gameplay perspective, the Assassin/Shadow playstyle is my favorite, so much so that the first thing I did after the introduction of combat styles was to roll a Sith Warrior Assassin. No, the issue I have is certainly not with the Inquisitor as a character or as a class. The issue is with the story itself, and after spending the past couple of weeks replaying the story and the past couple of days arranging my thoughts, I feel that the problems plaguing the Inquisitor storyline can best be divided into three broad categories: (1) The lack of scheming, politicking, and accumulation of social power, in favor of making three-fifths of the Inquisitor's story revolve around behaving like an Indiana Jones villain. Granted, this one is not entirely the fault of the actual writers; the marketing team, who chose to emphasize the Inquisitor as a Palpatine-like figure while rarely if ever mentioning their archeological and occult interests, bear their share of blame for creating unrealistic expectations for the player. But the fact remains that various NPCs constantly remind the Inquisitor of the importance of a Sith's power base, while for the bulk of the story the Inquisitor's power base consists of four people on their personal starship and little else. The issue here almost entirely comes down to one of emphasis. The writers could easily have made recruiting minions and assets the focus of the plot (we know they were not unfamiliar with such a concept, as the Dark Side versions of the Smuggler and Jedi Consular storylines consist of precisely that), or even simply made it an ongoing subplot of most planets they visit, in the mould of Nar Shaddaa. But instead, the Force walking ritual and its fallout consumes the plot for the entirety of Chapter 2 and the bulk of Chapter 3, and the Inquisitor recruits no one between solidifying control of their cult and making their alliance with Moff Pyron (after Voss, a whole two chapters and seven planets later), and in fact ends Chapter 2 in a significantly worse position than they began it, having lost whatever assets they inherited from Darth Zash — said assets, incidentally, being represented by two people, Corrin and Kaal, who the game insists are the Inquisitor's apprentices, but who the Inquisitor will speak to for a sum total of less than five minutes before they are murdered offscreen. (And while you have seen me cite Nar Shaddaa as the apex of the story's handling of its political element, and doubtless will again before I'm through, let it also be noted that the aftermath is badly bungled, with the cult founded there being entirely forgotten until partway through Chapter 3, when the Inquisitor suddenly learns that this group of impoverished religious fanatics have somehow become arms dealers trafficking in sophisticated targeting chips for ship-mounted weapons, with their nominal leader none the wiser.) (2) The Inquisitor's archenemy, Darth Thanaton, is simultaneously grossly overexposed and sadly underwritten. Overexposed because, in contrast to the villains of most other class storylines — who typically appear in person only once or twice in the story, and may call the protagonist on holo once or twice more to taunt them — Thanaton appears almost constantly. After speaking to the Inquisitor by holo twice during Chapter 1, he meets them in person twice at the beginning of Chapter 2, again at the end of Chapter 2, and three more times at the end Chapter 3. Amongst those appearances are no fewer than three boss fights (not including the cutscene where he kills the Inquisitor instantly at the start of Chapter 2 or the fight with the dream-walking apparition on Voss), two of them back to back on Corellia and Korriban. Underwritten because, despite rarely allowing the player to start to miss him, Thanaton doesn't actually have much to say for himself. His motivation for pursuing a vendetta against the Inquisitor — that they are the servant of Zash, a "corrupt master" who violated unspecified Sith traditions, and must therefore bear the punishment for her crime in her place — is so vague as to be laughable. And his backstory — rich as it is in parallels with the Inquisitor's own — is relegated entirely to his codex entry and one or two vague allusions the player may never even hear if they don't choose the right dialogue options. Dovetailing together with (1), even Thanaton's ascension to the Dark Council, which serves as the entire basis for the storyline's triumphal ending, is underwritten to the point of parody, with Moff Pyron simply mentioning it in passing partway through Chapter 3. He even assumes he's referring to something the Inquisitor already knows about! And why shouldn't he? After all, a plot twist that important deserves at least its own cutscene, if not a whole mission, dedicated to it. The writers would have been best served by simply picking a lane when it came to their portrayal of Thanaton and sticking to it. Is he a constant presence throughout the Inquisitor's story, whose background and motivations are extensively examined, in the mould of Darth Baras? Or is he a distant, largely inscrutable figure, rarely interacted with and acting more as an obstacle to be overcome than a character to be explored, like General Rakton or the Voidwolf? (3) The Inquisitor's general lack of angency, intelligence, and control over their own story. This is, admittedly, an issue unique to the Inquisitor among all player characters in SWTOR, yet also perhaps the one most fundamentally responsible for the story's problems. After all, every other PC ultimately answers to someone else: the Jedi Knight and Consular to the Jedi Council, the Sith Warrior to Darth Baras and the Hand, the Agent to Keeper, the Trooper to General Garza, the Bounty Hunter to their clients, even the Smuggler to Darmas Pollaran and Senator Dodonna. Not so the Inquisitor; starting with Chapter 2, they are a Lord of the Sith, with a (mostly) dead master and a superior who is openly seeking their murder. By rights, they should be answerable to none but themself, setting their own agenda and thinking up their own plots to achieve it. Instead, they handle this nominal independence of thought and action by taking direction from literally anyone that offers it: at various times, Thanaton, Kallig, Zash, Pyron, and even their own minions all tell them where to go and what to do when they get there. Rarely does the Inquisitor have an original thought on how to achieve their goals. Even more rarely does it actually work out the way they meant it to. And that, really, brings us to the larger issue when it comes to the Inquisitor's portrayal; they are, not to put too fine a point on it, an idiot who survives mainly by luck and the intervention of their friends. From the the training rooms of the Sith Academy to the tombs of the Dark Temple, from Zash's ritual to Thanaton's first assignment, and from Lord Paladius's office to the Jedi Enclave on Taris, the Inquisitor genuinely seems to have never met an obvious trap they didn't walk right into, even if they've been explicitly warned about it beforehand. (Especially if they've been explicitly warned about it beforehand.) With a habit like that, is it any wonder they constantly need to be saved by others from the consequences of their own stupidity? Why they would have died three times in just the two missions ending Chapter 1 and beginning Chapter 2, if not for the intervention of first Khem Val, then Kallig, then finally Corrin and Kaal? Why they have to waste the entire first two-thirds of Chapter 3, which is supposed to be about building themself into a champion of the Empire capable of challenging a Dark Councilor, instead trying to not die from the side effects of their own actions in Chapter 2? Bearing these three issues in mind, and in an attempt to be constructive in my criticism, here is an outline of how I feel the Sith Inquisitor storyline should have gone. In writing it, I have attempted as much as possible to keep the basic structure of the story intact: the Inquisitor still mostly goes to the same places and more often than not does broadly the same things when they arrive, but the context is changed, and the order of certain events is rearranged. In doing so, I hope you will agree, I have redesigned the story to divide the emphasis more equally between the Inquisitor's twin pursuits of mystical and political power, improved Darth Thanaton's portrayal by giving him clearer motivations and a more nuanced relationship with the Inquisitor, and allowed the player to feel as if their character's own actions are chiefly responsible for their eventual victory. Prologue: This is actually mostly very good as is, and therefore left almost entirely untouched. A particularly meritorious sequence is the bulk of the Dromund Kaas arc, in which Zash and the Inquisitor meticulously identify the weak points of their enemy Darth Skotia, gather the resources needed to exploit those weak points, then eliminate Skotia in a manner calculated to make their involvement obvious while stymieing the efforts of his allies to prove their guilt. The only big change is that, instead of the ritual the Inquisitor is investigating here and in Chapter 1 being different from the ritual they learn at the start of Chapter 2, they're actually the same ritual, which Tulak Hord created and Ergast claimed to have rediscovered. For now, this mainly amounts to slight alterations in the nature of what Zash sends the Inquisitor to find: Naga Sadow's treatise on the ritual from his tomb on Korriban and Ergast's secret laboratory in the Dark Temple, which the paranoid Sith hid in Kallig's tomb. As far as writing missteps that need amending, the only one that really sticks out is the finale of Korriban, when Zash kills Ffon without the Inquisitor even having the option to do it themself, setting an unfortunate precedent for the eventual fates of Darth Thanaton and Zash herself. It would be better if it were instead a DS/LS choice between killing him and casting him out of the Academy to join the failed acolytes in the tombs. Chapter 1 Legacies of Old: Following on from the changes to the nature of the ritual in the prologue, a bit more specificity in the Inquisitor's pursuit in this chapter is called for. Rather than the MacGuffins the Inquisitor seeks being generic "artifacts" whose nature and function goes unexplained, each one instead has a specified explanation of what it is and why Zash needs it: on Balmorra, the key to Ergast's ritual chamber in the Dark Temple; on Nar Shaddaa, the vessel the caster drinks from during the ritual; on Tatooine, Andronikos Revel, who stole the final component from Paladius and knows who has it now; and that component, a vial of the poison that goes into the vessel, from the Elysium vault on Alderaan. Furthermore, rather than the establishment of the Inquisitor's power base only being in focus when they visit Nar Shaddaa, it now plays a background role on every planet they visit. In addition to their personal cult, they also collect their first minions from the Imperial military on Balmorra (Major Bessiker, if he survives, or Ilun, if he doesn't) and the galactic underworld on Tatooine (with Casey Rix, Andronikos' ex-girlfriend and the new local Exchange boss, swearing them fealty in thanks for rescuing him from his mutinous crew), as well as a wetwork team on Alderaan (perhaps a choice between Urtel Moren and his fellow Sith or a squad of Rist assassins, depending on how the storyline ends). Finally, the ending of the chapter is reworked to make the Inquisitor's survival less a matter of luck and more one of cunning. Instead of them just wandering blithely into Zash's trap, and only surviving because she stupidly insists they bring Khem Val along, here she does the opposite, instructing them to leave him behind with some excuse about his presence interfering with the Dark Side energies of the ritual. Although the Inquisitor appears to agree, they remember the warnings about Zash they received from both Khem and Kallig, and secretly arrange for Khem to sneak in anyway, thus making his interference and the Inquisitor's victory a result of an actual strategic move on their part. As an alternative resolution, perhaps Khem doesn't interfere at all, and Zash instead brings about her own defeat by trying to use the ritual on the Inquisitor without fully understanding it. Thinking that it's a ritual to bind the souls of other Force users to her and allow her to control them and consume their power, she turns it on her apprentice, but, since it was actually designed to bind the power of Force ghosts, and the Inquisitor is still alive, it rebounds on her and bind her into the Inquisitor's body as their first ghost. Admittedly, this wouldn't grant the Inquisitor any influence over the outcome, but it would carry a certain dramatic irony in Zash's fate, as well as reinforcing the lesson Darth Thanaton earlier tried to impart to the Inquisitor: the reckless have a way of defeating themselves in the end. Chapter 2 Sith Hierarchy: Here is where really radical changes start to kick in, starting with this: instead of bluntly and immediately trying to have the new Lord Kallig killed, Darth Thanaton decides to be subtle and take this interesting young Sith — who has risen from slave to Lord, apparently killed two Darths, built a respectable power base, and discovered a powerful lost ritual of Tulak Hord, all in the space of about a year — under his wing to keep an eye on them. Rather than the Inquisitor visiting Thanaton at his office, he calls them and gives them their first assignment on their ship's holoterminal. This gives Zash and Kallig the chance to advise the Inquisitor before they go rushing off: Thanaton is testing whether they really know Tulak Hord's ritual. If they do, he'll keep them around to try and learn it too; if they don't, they'll die in Darth Andru's tomb and dispose of themselves. Since they actually don't know the ritual yet (Zash wanted to use it on them, and so never intended for them to learn it), they venture into the Dark Temple to learn the ritual and bind Ergast's ghost, then do the same to Darth Andru. Thanaton now assumes the role of mission control for the rest of the chapter, dispatching the Inquisitor to Taris and Hoth to bind the ghosts there and collect the artifacts they were guarding, and meanwhile discussing Sith philosophy and their similar backgrounds between assignments. The focus here is on building the Inquisitor's mystical power rather than their power base, except for Quesh, which they visit to do a favor for Moff Pyron (making an early appearance), who treats the whole thing as an audition to see if they could be a useful ally. Following their success on Hoth, Thanaton informs the Inquisitor that he has just joined the Dark Council after the sudden and regrettable demise of his own superior Darth Arctis, and recalls them to Dromund Kaas while dropping hints that he will promote them to Darth and give them Zash's old job. This turns out to be a trap, however; the chance to kill Darth Arctis and take his Council seat was too good for Thanaton to pass up, but now he's decided that his new, lofty position means that the potential reward of learning the ghost binding ritual for himself no longer justifies the risk of keeping such a notoriously ambitious and potentially dangerous underling around. The Inquisitor escapes the trap and flees in their ship, but faces a new challenge: though the ghosts they have bound give them the raw mystical power to potentially defeat Thanaton in a one-on-one duel, the imbalance between his power base as a Dark Councilor and theirs as a mere Lord is so great that Thanaton can easily insulate himself from direct combat while sending armies of minions after them until one gets lucky. They must therefore build up their forces while searching for some method to coerce Thanaton into fighting them directly. Chapter 3 Spheres of Influence: Since the ritual backfiring on the Inquisitor never happened, the focus of this chapter can be entirely on the Inquisitor building a power base to rival Thanaton's. This has the benefit of both being less frustrating than having the Inquisitor spend a chapter fixing a problem they created for themself in the previous chapter and also creates a parallel with the Jedi Consular building the Rift Alliance. We start with Moff Pyron contacting the Inquisitor. He's still not entirely sold on them as a viable rival to Thanaton, but the cancelation of the Silencer project has forced his hand. If the Inquisitor can get it completed, they will have his fealty and that of his fellow moffs. This works out just the same as it does in the game, except the source for the vital sensor chip isn't the Inquisitor's cult, nonsensically coming out of left field as defense contractors, but instead Casey Rix and the Tatooine Exchange (with bonus awkwardness if a female Inquisitor is romancing Andronikos and brings him along). With a fleet of warships and a few battalions of troops secured, the Inquisitor uses Pyron's intelligence network and Zash's esoteric knowledge to find powerful assets to recruit on Belsavis and Voss. The focus on Belsavis is still the Mother Machine, only now the Inquisitor first presses the Circle into their service, then either uses the Rakata control chip to coerce Ashaa (Dark Side) or else cuts a deal to use the Circle's expertise to free her (Light Side) in exchange for an army of monsters. On Voss, the parallel with the Consular and their recruitment of potentional Voss mystics continues — as well as giving the whole "bringing the Gormak to the stars" subplot an actually satisfying payoff — by having the Inquisitor learn the secret of dream-walking to make contact with Hadrik and recruit his tribe of renegade Gormak shamans, then using the Forbidden Ritual to sever the mystical bond preventing the Gormak from leaving the planet and bringing them into the wider galaxy to outfit the Inquisitor's forces with experimental arms and armor. Everything comes to a head with the Kaggath on Corellia, but once again the context changes to give the Inquisitor more agency in their own fate. Rather than Thanaton making an unforced error by challenging the Inquisitor and limiting the battlefield to Corellia, the Inquisitor learns of the Kaggath, realizes they can use it and Thanaton's devotion to Sith tradition to maneuver him into place for the killing blow, and challenges him instead. Each stage of the Corellia quest sequence then chronicles the Inquisitor leading an element of their power base (Moff Pyron's troops, the Mother Machine's monsters, their Rist/Sith assassination squad, etc.) against one of Thanaton's, slowly but surely cornering him until finally he flees to Korriban to appeal for the Dark Council's aid rather than face them. The duel in the Dark Council chambers then proceeds much as it does in the game, except, of course, that the Inquisitor gets to deliver the final blow to Thanaton instead of Darth Mortis being a kill-stealing jerk. (Since Thanaton has to die, both to end the Kaggath and for the Inquisitor to get his seat, the DS/LS choice boils down to how cruel or respectful they are to him as he dies, rather than whether to kill him at all.) Darth Marr bestows upon the Inquisitor their new position and Darth title, they make their final decision regarding the disposition of the ghosts, Khem Val announces the new Dark Lord to their followers, they make a brief speech, cue dramatic music, curtains. The end.

I received the following message when I attempted to create a new thread in the Spoilers section of the Story and Lore subforum: "Unfortunately, your content contains terms that we do not allow. Please edit your content to remove the highlighted words below." And the highlighted words were just...the entire post. Every word of every paragraph.

Nearly eleven years after launch, there are still a number of codex entries in the base game that do not always (or, in some cases, ever) unlock when they are meant to. Examples off the top of my head include the entry for the Agent's personal ship, the Inquisitor's entry for Rehanna Rist, the Smuggler's entry for The Real Darmas Pollaran, and Jokull's entry for all Imperial players.

I'm currently playing a male, Mirialan, Dark Side aspected Sith Inquisitor and considering who to romance. Ashara is absolutely, positively out. I find her to be one of the more annoying storyline companions, ranking below Skadge for that dubious honor but above Tanno Vik. I don't know if later expansions made Andronikos romanceable by male Inquisitors, but he's probably out too; not because I dislike him, but just because he's voiced by the same guy as Oghren from Dragon Age and Grunt from Mass Effect and I can't take him seriously as a romantic interest. Who, then, is still in the running? I liked Lana when I played KOTFE and KOTET, but I was an Agent romancing Kaliyo, so nothing came of it. I also find the idea of a romance with Khem Val rather amusing, since his relationship arc with the Inquisitor (they get off on the wrong foot and start out resentful, but slowly grow to feel respect and affection for each other) has always had strong rom-com vibes. And I am intrigued by Major Anri and Darth Rivix, but I've actually never advanced the story far enough to meet them and I'm unsure about passing up all earlier chances at romance for characters who haven't actually been made full love interests yet, and may never be if the devs decide to kill them off instead. So, in my typical fashion, I am seeking advice, comment, and potential ridicule from strangers on the Internet before I lock myself in to any decision.

All of the Sith and Jedi classes get a padawan/apprentice companion during their storylines. The Knight gets Kira Carsen, the Consular gets Nadia Grell, the Warrior gets Jaesa, and the Inquisitor gets both Ashara and Xalek.

So it's not a bug, the devs just chose to make it as difficult as possible to run a non-GF op without actually banning it. Great. <_<

I'm at the Ops Terminal on the Imperial Fleet, and there are only weekly missions for Hive of the Mountain Queen, Dread Fortress, Dread Palace, The Nature of Progress, and Toborro's Courtyard. Where are the missions for Karagga's Palace, Terror from Beyond, Explosive Conflict, and so forth?

I recently got a new SSD, which necessitated reinstalling SWTOR. When I go into the launcher and try to log in, I get a red banner saying that the launcher is checking for updates. This banner then disappears, giving me a chance to log in. When I do, a spinning blue circle that I take to mean loading appears. This circle turns and turns endlessly, never resolving the operation. When I went to the install wizard to uninstall SWTOR, I received an option to repair it. This then returns the following error message: "The install wizard is unable to complete the repair of Star Wars: The Old Republic due to the following problem: Failed to access content on disk Write operation Operating system error Resource not found" Uninstalling SWTOR, deleting SWTOR_setup.exe, and redownloading does not fix the problem.

I found the this fan art on Tumblr and I like the look of that outfit. Is there an in-game armor set that looks like that?

In PVE, that particular ability isn't much use during leveling because most stun effects last for only a couple seconds and can be mitigated by setting your companion to heal or tank. In ops, though, it's practically mandatory since just about every other boss can spam stuns with fairly significant durations.

All four players are supposed to click the control panels simultaneously. How did you manage to be in four places at once?

I don't play PVP, so I'm not sure how I got in the chat (maybe it's automatic?), but I'd like to not be if it's possible.

Although taking said Light Side option is like painting a big ol' target on your Inquisitor's back, so I personally never do it regardless of how Light Side my Inquisitor is.

What it says on the tin. Preventing players from sharing these makes finishing the Seeker Droid quest line very difficult and the Macrobinocular quests (which end in two Heroics in a row, one of which requires four players who can all interact with quest items) basically impossible. There's a reason why every other quest intended for a group can be shared and repeated: because finding three, seven, or fifteen other people who just so happen to be on the same quest you are at the same time is entirely dependent on luck. And the older the content gets, the less likely you are to find anyone doing it.