Shintar's Galactic Season 2 Diary, Week 2

I can already tell that I won't feel compelled to keep a weekly diary for the entirety of Galactic Season 2 the way I did for the first season, but I did still come across some things that I considered worth writing about in week two, so here we go:

Day 1:

I said in my last post on the subject that I encountered only one bug during the first week of the season, but as soon as the weekly reset rolled around I had instant déjà vu to all the shenanigans tied to non-functioning weeklies in season one. This time around, the objectives updated at reset time, but the weekly missions available from the terminals and required to actually complete certain objectives did not, meaning that said objectives were - at least initially - impossible to fulfil. However, Bioware was able to react quickly and managed to make the missions "roll over" without requiring emergency maintenance or even a server restart.

Like last week, I'd like to simply list all the weekly objectives with what my initial thoughts on them were:

• Earn 45 warzone medals: Easy enough if you enjoy PvP (which I do) - I thought this should maybe take me 5-6 matches.
• Collect Underworld Syndicate Plans: Same as last week, now known to be easy enough and to pretty much sorts itself as you play.
• Do flashpoints: Same idea as last week, but with some different flashpoints highlighted.
• 200k Conquest points across your legacy: Again, easy peasy.
• Gain Shadow Syndicate reputation: Again, same as last week and more or less an automatic follow-up from collecting the Underworld Syndicate Plans.
• Do uprisings: Not a fan of these but they should also be easy enough to do with guildies.
• Earn 25 specific medals in GSF: I wasn't sure about this one at all. I don't mind GSF, but unlike in regular PvP, I'm terrible at earning medals in it, and this objective required very specific ones as well, not just any medals. I figured I might end up playing some matches for gear anyway and would then see how it goes.
• Do some quests and kill mobs on core worlds: This being Alderaan, Balmorra, Corellia, Mek-sha and Onderon, I might be able to cover this with another heroic run with Mr Commando like I did last week.
  
• Affect 15 enemies with destructible objects (exploding barrels etc.): This sounded interesting but it's not something I ever paid a huge amount of attention to - I thought that there must surely be some quests that are great for this, but I wouldn't even know where to start.
• Complete the CZ-198 weekly twice or Iokath once: I thought I might do that to see how bad Iokath feels now that you can't save up missions anymore like I used to do.

My daily 25k Conquest points objective was once again ticked off by simply acquiring and popping a reputation token for the Shadow Syndicate. I realised that basically, as long as I don't max out this reputation track and Bioware doesn't decide to change the reputation Conquest objective, I'll be able to get the daily done with the click of a button every single time.

I also did some PvP on my Sage, and she achieved her 45 medals in only four matches! I still lost all but one of those though. Doing some ops with my guildies later on also completed the 200k Conquest points and Underworld Syndicate Plans weeklies again.

Late at night I ended up in the new flashpoint, Ruins of Nul, on master mode with two guildies and a pug. It took us about two hours, but we did manage to complete it in the end (minus the bonus boss), which added a good chunk of progress to my weekly flashpoint objective.

Day 2:

I guess I don't need to mention the daily objective anymore as it's basically always the same thing now. In terms of weeklies, I got the core world one ticked off by doing heroics on Corellia with Mr Commando, and earned enough reputation to complete the Shadow Syndicate weekly as well. In the evening I did a round of CZ-198 and I've got to say that's one area where the new shared mob tagging rules are definitely helpful.

Someone on Twitter also pointed out to me that day that not all weekly objectives give the same amount of points - I'd just thought that it was eight points for all of them, just like it was last season, but no, this time some of them give twelve instead. The commenter on Twitter expressed annoyance about that and I can see why. If you're happy to do any of the objectives and want to min-max your point gains, you'll obviously want to do the 12-pointers every time, but some of the 8-pointers pretty much complete themselves (like the one to collect Underworld Syndicate plans... almost impossible not to pick them up), and of course as soon as you've completed seven, the whole thing locks down, meaning you could potentially miss out on points without meaning to.

I suspect that my point gains for the first two weeks have been "sub-optimal" that way for sure, and doing a bit of napkin maths it looks like if I continue on that same path, it'll take me two weeks longer to complete the season than it would've done if I'd optimised my point gains more. I guess it's not a big deal... other people I talked to said they'd still rather pick their favourite activities regardless of point values, but I know that I'll be bummed whenever the first person announces that they completed the season just by playing and doing their objectives every single day and week, and I, having done the same thing but sub-optimally, will still have two weeks to go. I'll just say that making the point values different seems unnecessary to me and I don't know why Bioware did that if their objective was to make players feel like they could choose whichever weeklies they liked best, but oh well.

Day 3:

I did another round of CZ with Mr Commando, during which we got credit for the heroic mission from him firing a single hammer shot towards the big droid just before it died. This also completed the CZ-198/Iokath weekly for me. 

We followed this up with some heroics on Nar Shaddaa, where we kept looking for barrels to blow up on mobs and did find some, but it wasn't quite enough to complete that objective. Later on we also did a couple more flashpoints, which completed that weekly.

As that was my seventh already, all the others became greyed out and I never did find out about those GSF medals, though some posts I saw on the forums seemed to indicate that this objective was a pain. We did find a lot more good locations for exploding barrels throughout the week though. Plus I also did Iokath a couple of times and it's worth noting that they changed it so you can now do that weekly mission in a single day as well.

I had also seen some talk on Twitter about the new seasonal companion, Fen Zeil, actually having a couple of companion quests, even if they're all just dialogue in alien gibberish. That's still more than Altuur had! People kept saying that it was tied to your influence level, which confused me as I already had Fen up to influence 22 but had not seen any indicators that he wanted to talk to me. Eventually I just went on my ship and there he was, suddenly wanting to chat! So if you rarely go on your ship anymore and haven't seen a conversation prompt either, make sure to check in there at some point.

Days 4-7:

Nothing more to say about these in terms of seasons, as my weeklies were all done and my dailies continued to be completed with the press of a button.

Week 2 thoughts:

The second week seemed even easier to complete than the first, with me being done with my weeklies after only three days and without any of them taking a particular amount of effort. Finding out about the differing point values initially annoyed me a bit, but I got over it. With how relaxed this new system is, doing two weeks more of it won't feel like any effort at all anyway.

Learning that Fen Zeil has a little bit of story going on, even if it's not much, was neat, compared to Altuur last season basically doing nothing other than exist and provide an excuse to make us kill insectoids.