Is it canon that falling to the dark side gives you respiratory issues? It certainly doesn't do much for your complexion. Or perhaps Darth Malgus was just a trend setter and this is what all the fashionable Sith are wearing.
The story on Balmorra, the next stop on the Imperial side after Dromund Kaas, gets off to a slow start but finishes strong. The attack on the arms factory is well staged, with the leader of the resistance forces establishing a presence in the story through a series of intercom speeches that play out as the character fights their way through the base. Since face-to-face showdowns with the Sith tend to end in only one way, and often very abruptly, it's a good way to give this adversary some build up before that final confrontation.
That's the planetary story, but there's also a good finale for the Warrior storyline, and some fun interactions along the way with Malavai Quinn, the next companion. Since Vette is now shifting into No Collar Or No Story mode I'm glad to have one companion who'll actually talk to me.
There's some other good stuff along the way on Balmorra, like the action heavy lower levels of the droid factory that I mentioned in my last post, and a very funny Heroic featuring a battle droid with an experimental emotion chip. All of the Heroics can be obtained from the terminal at the spaceport, and I daresay that's convenient for a player who's just running them as repeatable content, but the text in some of the briefings does mention when there's additional information available by talking to the mission contact, and I prefer to do this when possible since otherwise I'd miss out on scenes like that one.
Balmorra is also the planet where the game expects the character to have obtained a speeder bike, and using a mount is encouraged by this world being larger than those that preceded it, and by it having a layout that leads to some long detours. There are very few straight line routes here. I'd had my eye on one of the more expensive speeders and my habit of sending my companions off on crafting missions at every opportunity had left me a little short on credits, so I saw a lot of this planet on foot. Rather too much perhaps, and I was glad to finally mount up.
At the end of this run I'm not quite done with Balmorra. I'm at more or less the same place I was with my Trooper on Taris, having completed the class and planetary stories, the side missions and most of the Heroics. I now have the choice of either staying on this world a little longer to run the bonus series of missions or moving on to Nar Shaddaa. I'll likely stay, seeing as this is a completionist run and I'm already so far ahead in levels it won't make a difference either way.
The next time SWTOR does show up in my rotation it'll almost certainly be this character that I return to. Not that I don't enjoy the Trooper, but playing as a Sith the character interactions are simply sharper and funnier, and there's also been a few good dramatic moments like the confrontation with the Jedi on this world. Aside from that the combat is just more enjoyable on this character. The game does what it can to make blasters interesting, but it's the Force users who get most of the fun abilities, and if I had any doubt of that it was dispelled once I got the ability to force choke enemies.*
*This isn't only fun to use but it's also a really well designed ability. The option to interrupt the channeled damage while continuing the hold allows it to be used in multiple ways, such as following it up with another attack while the target is still held, or turning away from that enemy to focus on another.
There's also the fact that the unbalanced combat I've often talked about actually adds to the sense of a Sith being far more powerful than most of those they go up against. It may fall short if measured solely as game mechanics, but it's undeniably satisfying in an area with high mob density to power through them like it's the Rogue One corridor fight all over again. That may sound like shallow reasoning, and perhaps it is, but the ways in which this game evokes the iconic sights, sounds and spectacle of Star Wars remains one of the best reasons to play The Old Republic.
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