From an arena/GAC standpoint he’s a clear advantage, but he’s still beatable. You’ll lose banners using a soft counter on him, but with the right strategy, you can work around that. That’s exactly what I could hope for from any meta shift. You don’t want the new character to be equal or weaker because then he isn’t worth chasing, but you also don’t want the new character to be an insurmountable gate no one can cross no matter how disciplined or well tuned your squad is. It makes for better gameplay when the new best team is a cut above but not a hard requirement to enjoying the game.

As an aside, for the purposes of this article, a soft counter is a counter that may not succeed, requires stronger mods and/or gear to succeed, or is a counter with a high likelihood of losing several banners. We have a guide for the current soft counters to General Skywalker, which you can find here:

https://gamepress.gg/general-skywalker-soft-counters

General Skywalker is quite strong, almost impossible to get 60+ banners on even in a mirror match, nonetheless several soft counters, outlined in the article above, exist for the team, which gives F2P and low spenders who didn’t get General Skywalker a fighting chance to make up for the lost advantage. If you have General Skywalker, you can breathe a little bit easier in your matchups, but if you don’t and you’re matched against a player with him, you have a chance with tight enough gameplay and a strong enough roster to earn that win anyway. General Skywalker is probably the smoothest meta transition in the entirety of the game with the most soft counters available at release, and relics may provide even more as more teams are tried and tested.