Shintar's Galactic Season 2 Diary, Week 1

I wasn't sure whether I should keep a diary of my Galactic Seasons progress again with the launch of season two, what with the many changes coming to the system and the novelty potentially having worn off, but I thought I might as well do it at least for the first week, just to see how things shake out.

Reminder of the biggest changes: There's now only one daily season objective (to earn 25k Conquest points, down from the initial PTS iteration of 50k), and a selection of ten weekly objectives which are the same for everyone, include a greater variety of activities, and count as fully completed as soon as you've fulfilled seven of ten, meaning you can pick your three least favourite ones and ignore them without missing out on any progress.

Day 1:

My daily objective completed itself just from me playing through the new story on my main.

I then had a look at the weekly options to consider which ones I liked/disliked the most. Here's the full list and my initial thoughts on them:

• Do some space missions: I initially misread the description of this one as requiring heroic space missions and therefore instantly discarded it, as I've never been able to complete anything but the easiest ones. A guildie later pointed out to me though that you just get more points for doing the heroics, but you can still complete the objective with normal space missions as well.
  
• KotFE chapter 6 on veteran or higher: I wasn't keen on this one either as chapters aren't fun repeatable content to me, and I didn't have a character at the right place in the story to actually be close to needing this for story progression.
  
• Killing the Coruscant / Dromund Kaas world boss: This seemed like a viable option to me that I figured might be nice to do with guildies.
  
• Do some quests and kill mobs on Coruscant or Dromund Kaas: An easy but boring one. Perhaps something to do with a lowbie alt that actually needs some of the quests there.
  
• Play some GSF matches: Definitely an option, as I don't mind GSF.
  
• Collect Underworld Syndicate Plans: Something to do with the mechanics of the new season, but I hadn't yet looked into how time-consuming this was going to be, so I mentally marked it as an unknown. The fact that I'd apparently already gathered a few without noticing was a good sign though.
  
• Do flashpoints: Easy, we were going to do that to gear up anyway.
  
• 200k Conquest points across your legacy: This one actually completed itself on that same day without me even trying, after I'd run a few flashpoints.
  
• Gain Shadow Syndicate reputation: Similar to the Underworld Syndicate Plans, I didn't really know what this was going to be about yet.
  
• Craft some stuff: I figured I might want to save myself the materials if I could easily get the points elsewhere, but in general this was going to be an easy enough objective to complete.
  

Day 2:

On day two I completed my daily objective the moment I logged in, because I'd had a Dark Project craft and some crew skill missions queued up, and the latter caused one of my companions to go up an influence level. Both of these together added up to more than 25k points instantly.

I also completed three more of the weeklies with ease. Running some more master mode flashpoints with guildies completed the flashpoint objective, and the flashpoints also dropped enough Underworld Syndicate Plans to tick that one off. I decided that the crafting objective was ultimately too easy for me to pass up and completed that one too.

While doing the flashpoint objective, we discovered our first seasons-related bug: According to the objective description, certain flashpoints were supposed to award bonus points, but in reality they not only didn't give the bonus, they gave zero (unless you killed the bonus boss, but that was a separate item on the list). Fortunately we were running so many of the things anyway that this barely slowed us down.

Day 3:

My daily was once again completed with a single Dark Project craft and the gain of a companion influence level.

I decided to make a start on the Coruscant questing objective by taking a lowbie alt through some of the story quests she had there, just to discover that class missions didn't count towards the tracker. A guildie later pointed out to me that the objective description actually did specify that the quests had to be repeatable, exploration or bonus... so basically anything but class missions for some reason.

I also completed the Shadow Syndicate reputation objective, bringing me to five out of seven weeklies completed. I'd actually gained a bit of rep the previous days already, after trying to figure out what to even do with those Underworld Syndicate Plans, but decided not to blow through all of the rep tokens at once since there's also a daily Conquest objective to increase any reputation.

Day 4:

Mr Commando and I agreed to do some heroics together since one of the new gear upgrade currencies pretty much requires you to grind dailies or heroics (bleh). Doing so completed my daily season objective, and since we chose Alderaan and Coruscant as our destinations, the Coruscant round also completed my weekly objective there.

Day 5:

I completed the daily once again pretty much by accident when I popped a Shadow Syndicate reputation token, which instantly gave me something like 45k Conquest points.

Looking at what objectives I had left, I decided on a whim to try to get into a group for the Coruscant world boss. My guild hadn't shown any interest in doing it, but I had seen people talking about it in Coruscant general chat, and guildies also reminded me that shared tagging was now a thing, so I could potentially even get credit if I joined a kill already in progress.

When I asked in general, no group was currently active though, so I actually ended up building it myself. It didn't take long at all and the boss went down fast! It was only when the seasons objective failed to pop up that I realised that it actually stated that you needed to kill both the Coruscant and the Dromund Kaas world boss, making this the third time I had misread a weekly objective description.

Day 6:

I was playing through the Imperial Manaan story on my bounty hunter around lunch time, so I completed the daily automatically shortly after reset from simply getting Conquest points for story progress.

It being a Sunday, I figured that this would also be a good time to finish my last weekly. The world bosses were at least half done, and getting into a run on Dromund Kaas probably wouldn't have been hard, but I wasn't really feeling it. Instead I decided to queue for some GSF, especially since guildies had mentioned that it was an excellent source for gear upgrades at the moment.

My first match was a domination that we won by a landslide, but after that it was only losses. Still, overall it only took five matches to complete the seasons weekly that way, and I also got a pair of new boots from the new thrice-a-weekly quest. With that, I had completed seven of the ten weeklies and the rest became greyed out.

Day 7:

I ran a couple of story mode operations with my guildies, and the daily seasons objective completed itself when we finished the first op. I was actually surprised it took that long.

Week 1 thoughts:

As expected, the second Galactic Season has a very different feel to it with all the changes Bioware made. I didn't have to concern myself with hitting the daily objective even once, because 25k Conquest points "happen" very quickly with a maxed out stronghold bonus and if you play the game at all.

What did kind of surprise me was how many of the weeklies also got done without me having to think about them much or at all. From the early examples that were given of the system, I expected them to be more extravagant in their requirements.

Even with the ones I did have to pay actual attention to, I never felt like I had to choose the "least annoying" option (like I sometimes felt with the season one dailies), but rather I would've been happy to do almost all of them anyway and it was just a matter of what I fancied more at the time.

I also noticed that the rewards feel much better so far. No more "here are bracers for a cosmetic gear set you'll never wear". Literally the next time I went to claim a reward I got a pair of cosmetic bracers, so I have to take that back. Also, ten copies of the same dye, something that doesn't stack! Argh.

I also ran into only one bug, the one with the flashpoint weekly... though it's kind of funny that based on my experiences last season, I expected there to be many more and was way too quick to blame Bioware whenever stuff wasn't updating instead of admitting to my own lack of reading comprehension.