After 18 months...

... I resubscribed, for at least one month, although I'll almost certainly add another two-month option as the month ages. Maybe more after that, depending on how I'm doing. I finished up Vant Galaide's Hoth missions, went to Dromund Kaas to see the two stupid fake Makos, and am about to go to Nar Shadaa to find the other Great Hunters murdered and my story will get out of treading water like it does for a few planets there. Because he's max level, I'll almost certainly skip the planetary missions on Belsavis, Voss and Corellia and just do the class story missions. I should be able to easily finish his story and move him into the semi-retired state in the next week or two. I can't remember exactly where I am with Anstal Tane, because I haven't logged into him yet since resubscribing a couple of days ago, but I think he's on Belsavis and max level too, so he should be able to move quickly as well. Both of them will be into "retirement" along with Hutran Thanatos, Taul Kajak, and the OGs that I didn't delete (Maark, Johhn, Luukke, Galation, Graggory, and Mat Thew. Man, those first generation characters of mine really have stupid names. I have to keep them though; they're all finished, max level, and are accomplished crafters with maxed out crafting and lots of extra schematics. Plus, Maark in particular is the one who's doing the advanced expansion missions, and Mat Thew is the next one to do them, assuming I get around to it. I'm very reluctant to lose my companions and go to the Odessen companion menu, but I'll eventually get them back, or at least most of them, and I can finally finish my lightside Jaesa romance. I've always meant to do it, but I just don't want to go through that weird companion transition. Maybe I should level up a backup artifice crafter to work on stuff while Mat Thew's companions are unavailable. But those names. It's ridiculous that name change is prohibitively expensive. Unless there's a 90+% sale, I'll never consider it. And even that is too much, honestly. It needs to be 99% off. From 1,000 cartel coins to 10. Otherwise, I'll just not care anyway.)

What's next after "retiring" Vant Galaide and Anstal Tane? I started playing Saxon Hettar, in part because I wanted to see the new (to me, anyway) Hutta graphics, and see if they slowed down my performance like the Voss graphics did. Luckily, they did not, and they do look improved. Voss was just a terrible change. Sigh. I'm probably overdue to replace my whole computer, and that would solve the problem too, but not going to happen in the next few months, so oh well. I'll keep playing Saxon for a while, probably get him his ship, at least, before putting him on the backburner for a little while. I also have two other characters who haven't really started anything yet (although I've run them around on their home planet doing heroics and leveling up for a while, but I haven't actually started their first story mission yet)—a trooper powertech rattataki named Karr Tanus, a hunter sniper republic zabrak named Beorn Hengest, and a smuggler vanguard human named Vandal Guent. Although I have a Sith Lord that I'm playing who's romancing Vette, and I've got Mat Thew to do the lightside Jaesa romance, I'd maybe like to start another one to do Jaesa dark side, and call him Goth Severax or something like that. I'd at least create the character and equip him, but I probably wouldn't actually start him until I do some other characters first.

So:

• "Retire" Vant Galaide and Anstal Tane by finishing their class stories. They can later go on to Ilum and Makeb, but even most of my OGs haven't finished Makeb, so no hurry there. Unless I have momentum with those two and want to keep playing them a little longer, I'll probably fly to Ilum but not even get out of my ship yet.
• Get Mirabeau Tane and Gael Heckett, who are both in the mid to upper 60s for level, up to max level of 80. They won't be able to retire, because they'll probably be on Hoth too when they get there, but if I keep playing even longer, maybe I can "retire" them in the medium/longer term. But for now, my shorter term goals are just to max level them. 
• Get one of my "retired" characters to be a backup artifice crafter. He won't have all the schematics, but I can at least get the levels all the way up with him, and the regular schematics that you get from leveling. I need to have a look at them to decide who's the best candidate. Ideally, I'd have a backup for all of the six crafting skills, but that'd be a little bit time-consuming, so I'm probably not going to do it unless I stay online for several months.
• Play Knights of the Fallen Empire and Knights of the Eternal Throne with Mat Thew. Finish all of the chapters, and then go "recover" my companions. This is one where I need to concentrate on just this.
• I have a lot of characters in the first chapter and in the 30s or so in terms of level. Maybe low 40s for some of them. Ideally, I'd at least finish them off on the planet that they're on and fly them to the next planet, staged to start the next step.
• I have quite a few characters, and maybe soon one more, that are either just barely at the beginning or haven't even started at all yet. I'd like to get them all to their ship after the capital planet. But that's a longer term goal.

The mid-level characters; there's probably too many of them. Here's the list and current level:

• Gandalf Grayhame 20
• Elemer Kell 42
• Wulf Hengest 38
• Vash Galaide 40
• Phovos Maledict 35
• Beorn Hengest 30
• Codon Veile 35
• Haul Romund 43
• Revecca Arden 39
• Embric Stane 32

Yikes. I can't get all of those guys up another 15-20 levels. But if I can get all of them to the next planet from the one that they're on? There's ten of them, and most of them are probably right at the beginning of their planet. And they need to do both class and planetary story arcs, and maybe even the post planetary story arc. That's a lot of playing. I don't know for sure how much of that I'll get done in two months of game time. But I'm not doing the current season, because it ends in just a few weeks and I can't finish it, so whatever. Gandalf is clearly lagging behind the rest, but I'm less interested in him, because I don't really like the Jedi consular story that much.

I wish there was a way to go back and do the seasons that I missed when I was offline. The bounty hunter Season 7 had some pretty good stuff. I went offline after finishing season 6 and came back with season 9 more than halfway over. I'll have missed 7, 8 and 9. But only 7 really had gear that I'd be excited to get, if I still could.

And I've been meaning to do a class review. I'll probably post it as a post here, but write it so that it can be a "script" for a YouTube video as well. That's more difficult to do than I thought. I can certainly review all of the classes, and its mostly off the shelf with minor alteration. But the forced ranking is difficult. Clearly the consular is #8, and the inquisitor is #7. But the next six? They're all good but they're all flawed, but in different ways. The daylight between them is already very small, and the order can shift depending on how I'm feeling about the flaws and how much they bug me. In the past, my order was like this, worst to best:

8. Consular
7. Inquisitor
6. Trooper
5. Knight
4. Agent
3. Warrior
2. Smuggler
1. Hunter

I don't think I like that order at all now, though. While I still love the smuggler and hunter, I give too much credit to them because I'm a huge fan of the high concept of the freelance gunfighter in space which they represent. The knight and the warrior are probably the two most important to play, but I have a bias towards the tech classes. I need to think about that some.

My older order was as follows:

8. Consular
7. Inquisitor
6. Smuggler
5. Trooper
4. Warrior
3. Knight
2. Agent
1. Hunter

That one's even worse, because I was really irritated by the smuggler's beta male personality. But when I played it again, not caring as much about pleasing my companions, it came across as much more what I'd expect, and I liked the experience much better. But like I said, I think the smuggler and hunter are over-rated by me because I just like the archetypes much more. I want to have a more "objective" ranking.

That said, the success of mid-shows like The Mandalorian and the even better Andor make the tech classes more appealing, since you can kinda sorta do them in game with any of the tech classes; both the agent and trooper do spy stuff like Andor and both the smuggler and hunter do gunfighter stuff like The Mandalorian, etc. Like I said, the smuggler and hunter are both probably too highly rated because they appeal to my tastes most particularly. However, "objectively" they're probably a little more mid.

For what it's worth, just looking at the number of characters I have of each origin story, clearly all four tech classes are the ones that I play the most.