First Impressions of Galactic Season 10

I know we're already two weeks into the season, but I'm behind in terms of blog posts I want to write because with everything going on in SWTOR and the new WoW expansion (which I'm also playing), there's just way too much to do in the limited free time I have. I'm reminded of that comic where a guy looks at a pillar made of blocks representing his life, bemoaning that he doesn't have enough time for video games in his schedule, until he considers replacing the sleep slot in the last panel.

The comic in question. The "Owlturd" site no longer seems to exist, but I can still credit "Shen Comix".

Galactic Seasons are often particularly bad for this because no matter how much I tell myself that - even with my cross-server ambitions - I don't need to go quite so hard to achieve my goals and that there's plenty of time, it's still easy for me to get caught up in doing just one more objective because it was already halfway done anyway, and before I know it it's 1 a.m. and I curse myself for not being a more sensible adult.

Anyway, that is my way of saying that I jumped into the new season with gusto but almost immediately regretted it a bit and had to remind myself to step on the brakes a little. It's fun but I'm over forty now! I do need my sleep!

While I said that I didn't mind this season being a combined re-run of Seasons 1 and 3, I've got to admit it does feel a bit weird and bad to constantly claim rewards just to delete them (because I already have the Mythran armour set unlocked in collections and really don't need another copy of its belt right now).

My own crazy tendencies aside, I'm also a little worried after two weeks that this season may end up feeling somewhat grindier than previous ones. When it was said during the livestream that the "themed activities" for this season would basically be objectives to kill mobs and earn Conquest points with Altuur and PH4-LNX, I didn't think too much of it, but after two weeks of seeing these objectives in action I'm not so sure I like them.

They're not "hard" exactly - but they are a lot more demanding and restrictive than the objectives they replaced. Take the "earn 200k conquest points" weekly for example. In a regular season, I would often complete this automatically on the first or second day of the week without even really trying, just by playing the game in the way I enjoy. But earning those same Conquest points with one specific companion out is an entirely different kettle of fish.

Any group content that dismisses your companion is out: flashpoints, operations, PvP, GSF, world bosses. (Occasionally the points seem to get attributed even if your companion was forcefully dismissed, but this seems to be very inconsistent and is probably not intended.) Story content also either requires or at the very least encourages you to have a specific companion along that is not Altuur or PH4-LNX - this is also an obstacle to the "get kills with this companion out" objective.

So the only really viable things to do are to... do grindy open world solo content like heroics or dynamic encounters, probably my least favourite way of getting anything seasons-related done. Oof.

Mind you, even there you're not 100% safe. The most heart-wrenching experience I had in that regard was in week one when I was on 14 out of 15 dynamic encounters completed when I got a flashpoint pop. When I came out of the flashpoint, another dynamic encounter was active right on top of me and I was immediately in combat again. It completed and... I realised that my companion hadn't automatically been re-summoned when I came out of the flashpoint, meaning that the resulting 85k Conquest points were completely wasted as far as seasonal progress goes.

So I don't love that part. We'll see how I get on with it as the weeks progress. I did enjoy that the "do a master mode flashpoint" objective from the last season stuck around, and I had a bunch of very entertaining pugs that week. The integration of the Dantooine Crash Site into the weekly objectives was also welcome, and seeing a dozen Altuurs zerg every encounter that week was certainly amusing. I'm just wrinkling my nose a bit as I'm looking ahead at the next couple of weeks, as I fear there'll be a lot more dailies in my future.

Oh, and let's not forget that Broadsword brought the DvL bosses back yet again. Funny how they didn't mention that during the dev livestream, huh? I'm guessing they knew it wasn't going to be a popular decision and it was simply the easiest option to copy and paste that meta one more time. I've killed these buggers three times over at this point, so this will be my fourth time on Darth Malgus, not counting additional duplicate kills and the fact that I've also done some on other servers. Just ugh.