Hounds tooth and Boosk

Farming is always better than gacha packs

The trade off is it takes more time. If you want instant gratification full lizard brain mode and a disgusting aftertaste then gacha is for you. Otherwise, if you are the type of person who enjoys hard earned long term delayed gratification stuff then it will take you about 2-3 months to get the things you want the farmable way.

Nothing wrong with spending money on entertainment you enjoy. The benefit of farming hounds tooth with energy refreshes (instead of just buying the shards) is that you will also get jango fett shards from the same node and he is a very good addition to a bounty hunter squad.

Energy and node refreshes are slower but the best value.

Packs with a fixed.number of shards for a specific character/ship may be worth it to you.

Packs with a variable number of shards e g. 10-330 are a ripoff because the odds are heavily biased toward the low end. (Assume you will get the lowest value and ask yourself if that's worth the cost)

Nothing wrong with spending money to support a thing you like, never mind the haters.

Anyway, as far as getting Bossk and Hound's Tooth goes, farming is your best bet unless the Bossk/Hound's Tooth combo pack comes back for sale next time Han's Milennium Falcon event comes around.

Farm Bossk because there are just so many characters that the odds of getting him in a chromium are too low. Farm Hound's Tooth because the node it's on is just so great--Hound's Tooth, Jango Fett, Stun Cuff. It's arguably the best node in the game.

The probability to get one specific ship/character from packs is pretty bad... not sure it would be faster.
But since you've been away for a year, you could probably get shards for characters or ships you don't have yet.
Anyway if you want Bossk/HT farming is the way to go, although it will take some time..

Buying chromiums for one specific character is a real, real bad idea. If you bought 10 dark side megapacks you might get one or two clumps of Bossk shards.

The only time chromium packs are even arguably worth it is very early on when just about any character you get equals "progress." If you want to turn crystals directly into shards, grab him from shipments. And as has been mentioned, farming is always the most resource-efficient way of doing it, but it's also the slowest.

+1 to all the responses

I took a long time off too and am grinding bossk and HT on nodes, it’s slow going for sure, but chromiums are a really bad idea for this.

I recommend spending your crystals to do all 4 BH ships at the same time. That will set you up for Han's Falcon.

If you took a year off and you want to spend money then the smartest thing to do would be to start a new account and buy the cryatals there.

Take it from someone that took 1.5 years off, and is still not catching up in arena and fleet 1 year later.