Galactic Season 5 in Review

I finished my last GS5 achievement on Darth Malgus the week before Christmas, so it's time for my usual review of the season as a whole.

Let me start off by saying that overall, I had a really good time with Season 5. I will admit though that I'm not sure about the causality here, which is to say that I don't know whether the season was so good that it made me have more fun with the game as a whole, or whether I was already having a good time anyway and therefore also enjoyed the season more.

I really liked the way they expanded on the seasonal story, but I'm not going to go through all that again because I already wrote a dedicated post on the subject two months ago.

I will say though that the omission of a new companion didn't bother me at all. I can tell from the forums that there were people who did miss getting one, and to be honest there were always going to be some - however, only the devs have the metrics to know what the bigger picture looks like in terms of (dis)approval. All I can say is that to me personally, it felt really liberating to not have to deal with all the extra clutter that usually comes with a new seasonal companion, such as special companion gifts, customisations and companion-only weapons. I really appreciated that it made the reward track feel a lot "cleaner".

The only thing I didn't like were the "Brrazz's Gift" thingamabobs, which felt useless to me as I always earn more of the seasonal currency than I "need" to max out my rep each week anyway, just from doing the objectives, so I never felt the need to specifically farm them and boost the drop rate. I'm also not sure the buff was even working correctly, as I heard people complaining about it repeatedly and the one time I made a point of popping one of the buffs before an operation just to see how it worked, not a single dark spore dropped during the entire run. Make of that what you will.

I really liked the inclusion of a few more "high-quality" rewards, such as the white/white dye and the loth kitten pet, but more than anything else, this was the season of stronghold decorations for me. I went back and compared the reward tracks for Seasons 4 and 5, and unless I miscounted, Season 4 gave more random deco packs, but Season 5 gave more decos overall since it included more unique, season-specific ones.

Either way, I'm usually not much of a stronghold decorator - and I'm still not really, but at one point during the season while I was playing on one of the other servers, I was doing something in my stronghold when it suddenly hit me that I had a dozen of a particularly nice looking couch or something like that, and it gave me pause because I always claim free decos without looking too closely at what they even are. It was only then that it hit me that I'd claimed some very interesting items across different servers throughout the previous seasons, and for the first time I started to actually invest a bit into decorating my strongholds there. My efforts still wouldn't impress anyone who's actually deeply into that aspect of the game, but for me it was actually kind of surprising and a big step. I guess the devs weren't too badly off either as I then ended up buying a few more decos on the other servers with Cartel coins as well.

I also liked most of the other rewards this season, such as the mounts, dyes and armour sets, and am actually using some of them - which is saying something when most of these types of rewards tend to just get claimed and thrown into the cargo bay/collections with barely a second look. Even as someone who mainly plays Republic side, I liked the strong Imperial theme. As a guildie commented, that theme is another thing we probably wouldn't have gotten if the season had included a companion, because due to the nature of such a companion having to be suitable for both factions, you could never really have one that's strongly entrenched on one side or the other. However, having an Imperial villain instead and theming the rewards around that worked just fine, and I'd love it if they did a similar thing with a Republic focus in a future season.

As for objectives - again, first of all, I appreciate that the devs tried to vary things a bit this season with some changes. I was grateful for the addition of the operations objective, but as I wrote previously, their first implementation of the idea was just waaay too time consuming. As the season went on, we also learned that when the ops objective reappeared, it always asked for the exact same operations, which was kind of sucky. I think in future they should trim this down to requiring no more than two story modes or one vet mode operation, and it also shouldn't require the same one(s) every time.

I have to admit the changes to the flashpoint objectives that I also discussed in the post linked in the previous paragraph started to wear on me a bit after a while, because it meant running pretty much double the number of flashpoints compared to previous seasons, and with me doing this across multiple servers... it was just too much. I like flashpoints, but some of them can also be quite time-consuming and it just got a bit tiresome, especially as there seemed to be a flashpoint objective pretty much every week. I could've just done something else or not done that many objectives to begin with I guess, but especially on the secondary servers my options are sometimes limited in terms of what I have access to in terms of story progression, queue pops or group content in general.

I think the secondary servers were perhaps my biggest challenge this season in the sense of reining myself in to not overdo it and spoil my own fun. This isn't a new thing and I've talked about it before, but I think the addition of an eleventh weekly objective to choose from, even if the total you could do was still seven, meant that I often found myself capable of doing exactly seven objectives on the other servers... and so I did them, even if that wasn't necessarily super fun. In a way it was easier when my choices were more obviously limited, because now that I often can complete the maximum number of objectives, it takes an extra bit of willpower to not always push myself into that.

Oh, and I did almost no chapter objectives this season because unlike in Season 4, they were all over the place in terms of story order. I think I did chapters one to three at one point as I pushed a couple more alts into KotFE, but then the objectives jumped all over the storyline again and since I saw no rhyme or reason to it I decided to focus on other objectives instead.

Still, all in all I thought this was an excellent season and I'm looking forward to seeing what the devs have planned for the next one. I'm kind of hoping they go "companion-less" at least one more time as I'd like to see what else they can come up with when not tied down by the seasonal companion concept.