Galactic Season 8 in Review

We're once again at the point where the current Galactic Season has several weeks left in it, but more and more people are done (or close to being done) with it. Personally, I've hit level 100 on all servers, and on Darth Malgus I just need a few more weekly objectives to complete the last meta achievement. So what did I think of this season?

I was very negative about it when the details about it were first revealed, and was then disappointed a second time when even the few hopes I had for the uprising theme were quickly crushed. All that said, it ultimately turned out... alright, I guess.

I would still put it near the bottom of my ranking of all Galactic Seasons so far, for having a theme I didn't really care for, not having any rewards that particularly excited me (there was quite a lot of stuff that was "nice", but I've said before that I consider it a downside when there isn't a big central reward that also supports the theme), and for feeling more repetitive than any season before it (I still can't quite believe they made me kill all the DvL bosses again for a third achievement). 

At the same time though, things were not as bad as I had feared. Once they made the fixes to make doing your weekly uprising via the group finder more viable, the system worked well enough to funnel people into that to guarantee regular pops even on the smaller servers. (I could even get it done on Shae Vizla, where I hadn't done anything through the group finder in a long time.) With Trench Runner being the one notable exception, the tuning was such that even a group of low-level or generally underperforming characters could muddle through without too much effort.

I saw more than one comment, whether explicit or implied, that indicated that the person making it was actually doing uprisings for the first time, which is something that's always nice to see. And while my overall opinion of uprisings hasn't changed (still not a fan), I'll admit that I liked them more as levelling content than as max-level content, if that makes sense. The XP was pretty good every time I went in there on a levelling character, and somehow mowing down hordes of weak mobs feels more "on-brand" on a low-level character. It's what you do on the starter planets after all, when you're just learning how to play and might not necessarily have that many abilities yet. As endgame content I've always found that kind of gameplay a bit unsatisfying though.

The other thing I did like about this season was how the devs incorporated the dynamic encounters on Hoth and Tatooine into the weekly seasons objectives. I think they're a fun new kind of gameplay and I appreciated their addition to this. Especially on the other servers, where I hadn't had any reason to do dynamic encounters before, so I enjoyed gathering a bunch of achievements all over again.

There are a few things I hope they tweak in coming seasons though: First off, there were two variants of each dynamic encounter objective as far as I could tell, one that required you to do 15 for the weekly, and one that required 25. I thought the first was reasonable, while the second was too much. I still did both types this time around because I also had the draw of wanting to work on the achievements to keep me motivated, but when that's no longer applicable I don't think I would bother with doing 25 again; it's just too time-consuming.

The second "issue" I had was that just having encounters on Hoth and Tatooine made things a bit repetitive. One of my favourite weekly seasons objectives up until now has been the one to do "repeatable or exploration missions" on a number of planets, and I think the dynamic encounter objectives largely replaced those this season. (I did a count, and in the same number of weeks, Season 7 had 17 objectives of this type, while Season 8 had only 7.) This makes sense in so far as they fill a similar niche and the DEs were the new hotness, but it also meant that what previously made this objective so much fun to do - that it was so varied in its locations and could be done in a number of different ways - was kind of lost as we were just stuck on either Tatooine or Hoth week after week.

We'll see how they'll handle this in future seasons, but I think my personal preference would be if they simply merged the two types of objectives together, into something like "Complete Dynamic Encounters, Repeatable, Exploration, or Bonus Missions while defeating enemies on Coruscant or Dromund Kaas", therefore restoring the "rotating between different planets" aspect while also including dynamic encounters in the mix.

Still, I've got to admit I'm going to try and temper my expectations for whenever they announce Galactic Season 9, because I'm definitely a bit bored of the repetition and lack of even small bits of newness at this point. And by god, if they ask us to kill all the DvL bosses a fourth time... I actually don't know how to finish this sentence, but I still hope they come up with something different for us to do next time.

Dread Master Shintar

I have a somewhat strange relationship with operations in SWTOR at this point. I think most raiders would posit that for them, raiding is about some sort of progression: seeing the content, beating the challenge, getting the gear... and once you've hit your goal, you move on.

SWTOR doesn't really support that kind of attitude towards raiding anymore, or at least not if you're a long-term player. If you're coming to the game completely fresh, there's plenty to do and many encounters to work your way through, thanks to scaling keeping all the old content relevant, but new operations come out way too infrequently to keep existing players busy for very long.

I sometimes find myself wondering why I'm still so focused on that part of the game after more than a decade to be honest. I've seen all there is to see, many times, and while my skill at the game has improved over the years from sheer repetition, if I haven't been able to beat a higher-difficulty encounter that's been in the game for over a decade at this point, I'm not holding my breath that it's still going to happen.

I guess it's just a habit, a way of hanging out a few times a week, and the fact that Mr Commando and I do it together has led to a sort of feedback loop where we keep each other going even if one person's interest flags at some point.

That said, there's been turnover in the people we raid with over the years, and every now and then we'll get some fresh faces who haven't yet seen it all and who'll be excited to tackle this or that operation for the first time, and I'll be like "sure", because what else am I going to suggest?

In line with that we cleared Dread Palace master mode again a couple of months ago, and it actually went so quickly and smoothly (considering that some people had never done it before), that I found myself daring to hope for some personal progression for the first time in a while, because I'd never gotten the achievement for the timed run, which requires you to clear the instance within an hour.

Everyone was game for working on it, so we kept going back every week, just to get better at the fights and progress that little bit more quickly, with fewer wipes along the way. Progression was far from smooth, as some nights would see us one-shot the first four bosses in a timely manner just to keep failing on the final Council fight, while on others, we would mess up repeatedly at the very beginning and then never even finish the instance.

However, improvement did happen, and this Wednesday we finally got there. We were actually off to a very bad start at first and wiped twice on the very first encounter. We'd learned early on that whenever this happened, it was possible and indeed recommended to just reset the entire instance and try again from the beginning, but it still didn't seem to bode well for the rest of the evening. However, it turned out that the third try was the charm, and we then proceeded to one-shot every boss after that, including the Dread Council themselves.

Embarrassingly for me, I died a few seconds before the end because I got into healer tunnel-vision mode, focusing so hard on keeping someone else alive that I missed my own health getting dangerously low - oops. Fortunately we'd basically won at this point so it wasn't a big deal; it just made my "victory" screenshot look a bit awkward.

A guildie also recorded the whole run and uploaded it to YouTube if you're curious, though he failed to record his own voice so some bits of conversation may sound like non-sequiturs without the inclusion of his comments.

Anyway, it was just nice to have one of those little success stories to share, as they've become more and more rare for me at this point.