Galactic Season 9 in Review

It's finally done! I completed all Galactic Season 9 meta achievements on all servers. I didn't have to wait with writing this until that was done, but I kind of wanted to, just in case anything that happened towards the end was going to change my mind in some ways - it didn't.

Galactic Season 9 was easily one of my favourite seasons so far. While most of the rewards were solid and the armour sets pretty versatile, my enjoyment was mostly down to the theme. I love flashpoints! I ran the featured flashpoint of the week up to six times per week, sometimes multiple times per night, and it never got boring because no two runs were the same.

I saw people that were in a hurry, and I saw others that were proceeding at a more slow and careful pace. I had groups that tried to skip as much trash as possible and others that killed absolutely everything in their way. Most importantly though, it was almost always good fun. There were a couple of badly behaved exceptions early in the season, but the vast majority of runs were pleasantly uneventful or filled with some amusing shenanigans. It was pretty reaffirming really, both in the way it reminded me of just how much I really enjoy flashpoints and have been missing having a good reason to run them more regularly, and how the majority of the SWTOR community is pleasantly chill and considerate of others in group content.

If I had to cite any negatives, I'd say the fact that the weekly objective was limited to veteran mode only meant that few guildies could be motivated into running flashpoints during our weekly guild event, as vet mode is so easy and quick, I can understand why many didn't see it as worth the extra effort of waiting for a dedicated time and place. I did appreciate though that there was at least an optional master mode objective during quite a few weeks, which I always did when it was available.

The special queue for the veteran mode of the week was a bit of a double-edged sword. Some nights I really would've preferred to just walk in with two guildies and a companion for example, but undermanning like that or even just going in manually with a full group to see the cut scenes was simply not an option. On the plus side though, the simplicity of this system meant that it saw plenty of use, as it was very straightforward with not much room for confusion.

As far as other objectives go, I was glad to see that the addition of all the new dynamic encounters in summer led to much more varied objectives from one week to the next, and we weren't constantly hopping back and forth between Hoth and Tatooine like in GS8. That said, I still felt a bit burnt out on these and mostly skipped those two planets, focusing mostly on the objectives for the starter planets, capital worlds and Ilum instead.

In general I reached a state this season where I spent very little time doing things I wouldn't really have felt like doing otherwise. The flashpoints were always a joy to do, and then I'd just add two or three other weekly objectives from the list depending on what I liked most.

I don't expect to go this hard (going for all the achievements on all servers) next time around, but even so I feel like I'm pretty well set to continue completing the season on all servers without too much stress in the future - more so than before, in fact, as this season was a stark reminder of how comparatively little effort it takes to just max out the reward track. That said, we now know that Galactic Season 10 will "work a little differently than previous seasons" - I'm very curious to find out what that means.