SWTOR: Notes on Raid/Operation Content

A co-worker here has already gotten into raiding with his guild and dropped some info on me this morning. I'm going to quote from his emails and our conversation for your edification. I figure we can use this as a starting point to talk ops for IPP. (And GC, I guess. Filthy pubbies!

Most of these were filmed before Christmas, and we have cleared everything but the last boss on 16man nightmare now, so if anyone wants to examine the fights/difficulty modes in closer detail, I can grab those files next time I go home. The three videos I put down show (in my opinion) swtor’s best/most original raid encounters. All of the SWTOR raids are designed around 8man normal mode difficulty, They almost all scale terribly when you put them on 16man or Heroic or Nightmare difficulty. (Heroic and Nightmare for the most part just add extra health and no new mechanics). Really really solid 8 man normal content, really terrible for 16man and people that like difficult stuff.

SOA (Final Boss) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XFlJlXbjpo
Lolplatforming boss- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJqr1TYoDRc
DPS/Healing Race Droid- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLUt8bEq91c

I then asked him:

If you had to compare ToR’s opening offerings with a set of raid content from WoW, how would you compare them?

His response:

It’s hard to compare it to WOW stuff, the fights aren’t nearly as complicated as ulduar hardmodes and it is clear they did not spend a lot of time on these before they had to launch. If you do the content on 8 man normal, it is really fun. Nothing will really challenge you aside from SOA, but the content is still enjoyable. I really like SOA, but I’m super disappointed with what little they did to heroic and nightmare. It is definitely a challenge in phase 3 nightmare, but it just becomes a DPS race. There are so many obvious mechanics that could have been added to that fight to give it some more oomph, but all they do is crank the health and damage up and make it so you have to run into the lightning balls to make them go away. It just feels like they never got to actually crafting the other difficulty settings.

If you decide to scale up to 16’s or hardmodes, 2 words of advice.

1. Do everything on Nightmare, with no new mechanics all of the bosses are very easy for hardcore raiders on nightmare difficulty. The only exception to this rule is SOA, SOA phase 3 on anything other than normal is very challenging.
2. Don’t do Bonethrasher on anything but 8man normal unless you have a raid composition of 100% ranged. This boss was very poorly designed and he will turn around and 1 shot your entire melee group on something above normal.

If you have biochems, learn to love them. They should start De’ing stims to get the blue versions as soon as possible. Also be prepared to pay A LOT for repairs. If I go red, my repair is 70k.

TLDR version: 8 mans are good, and you can probably do them in nightmare no problem. 16-man content is not that interesting right now. Biochems are invaluable at endgame. Repairs are ridiculously expensive.

Tagged for future futility

5k-8k a death with the lvl 50 gear i have now. I'm sure it's more for others since i dont have that many high end purples yet.

Could've sworn i saw a note in beta where they fixed Bonethrasher.

At level 50 how are you guys financing things? As a tank if I'm going to be dropping that kind of cash for repairs after a raid am I going to be stuck farming trash for hours on end just to pay the bill?

That sounds a bit like a downer. I was really looking forward to figuring stuff out again and maybe see some more challenging encounter "puzzles". Never played raids before, but from what I can tell the "figuring out" part is the one which makes it an interesting experience for me.

I have to give "Schiebi Commendations" again to fellow guildmates in every FP so far who either took the time to explain what everybody was supposed to do or sat back and discussed the "ok, let's recap what we know and try ... solution" approach.
It's really refreshing to have so many folks around that value the strategic approach vs. "WAHH - KILL!!!"

Kehama wrote:

At level 50 how are you guys financing things? As a tank if I'm going to be dropping that kind of cash for repairs after a raid am I going to be stuck farming trash for hours on end just to pay the bill?

pvp and dailies. Got around 150k credits (and 4 purple mods)with just one round of dailies and i didnt do them all.

Kings: Trust me, even knowing the strat doesn't mean we'll execute perfectly the first time. The fun of raiding as far as 'figuring things out' is, IMHO, not the fun part for the majority of raiders. For most folks, it's successful execution that is the fun part, not the discovery bit. And even wiping is fun, honestly. Just ask the other WoW vets how much our current guild leader likes to wipe raids by standing in fire! (Love you grinds!)

Running with the BHA crew (a bunch of the folks in IPP), my experience has been that folks are very willing to explain fights and ensure everyone's on the same page. If it's not your cuppa tea no worries, but I'm sure I speak for a lot of people when I say making sure people are having fun is one of the primary goals of any guild activity.

I'm just happy to see that the raids are geared for 8 man groups. The worst, and I mean WORST part of any raid for me was sitting around for literally 2 to 3 hours just waiting on everyone to show up, be at the keyboard, and get ready to go. An 8 man group should be cake to organize. And I swear to Bob if we start having huge guild spats over what kind of system we're going to use to roll for raid loot I may just lose it. With 8 man raids I can't really see a reason to institute some archaic points system for any kind of loot and I long for the day when I can go on raids and just roll for the loot when it drops.

Michael Zenke wrote:

Kings: Trust me, even knowing the strat doesn't mean we'll execute perfectly the first time. The fun of raiding as far as 'figuring things out' is, IMHO, not the fun part for the majority of raiders. For most folks, it's successful execution that is the fun part, not the discovery bit. And even wiping is fun, honestly. Just ask the other WoW vets how much our current guild leader likes to wipe raids by standing in fire! (Love you grinds!)

Running with the BHA crew (a bunch of the folks in IPP), my experience has been that folks are very willing to explain fights and ensure everyone's on the same page. If it's not your cuppa tea no worries, but I'm sure I speak for a lot of people when I say making sure people are having fun is one of the primary goals of any guild activity.

Nope, that sounds perfectly fine and I'm at least looking forward to the coordination in an 8 peeps group.
4 more levels and I can finally join the high roller club!

Seems to me that loot shouldn't be an issue on the Empire side. You want it, you take it. And if someone else wants it too, then you kill them and take it.

Good post, Zenke.

I'm glad that the 8 man stuff sounds easy, I think we're going to have a lot of new raiders with us and it will be good to ease them into it.

Also, I'm planning on taking a pretty laid-back approach to gear. In the 8 mans it will be very much just your usual need/greed situation, no need for loot systems.

If we do end up doing the 16 man versions... we'll see what we need when we get there. I raid weekly with BHA but I'm in no way what you would call a "hard core raider." I get my enjoyment of raiding out of working together as a team and hanging out with the guild. In fact, in BHA when we wipe too much and it's clear some people are frustrated and not having fun, we tend to call things off pretty quickly. No sense in beating our heads against the wall when we could be having fun elsewhere.

Chances are we might get sick of this content pretty quick if it's super easy so we'll cross that bridge when we get there but keep in mind that, even taking into account the WAR guys on the team, Bioware is new to making multiplayer encounters. They'll hopefully get better and more engaging as we go.

Michael Zenke wrote:

Kings: Trust me, even knowing the strat doesn't mean we'll execute perfectly the first time. The fun of raiding as far as 'figuring things out' is, IMHO, not the fun part for the majority of raiders. For most folks, it's successful execution that is the fun part, not the discovery bit. And even wiping is fun, honestly. Just ask the other WoW vets how much our current guild leader likes to wipe raids by standing in fire! (Love you grinds!)

Running with the BHA crew (a bunch of the folks in IPP), my experience has been that folks are very willing to explain fights and ensure everyone's on the same page. If it's not your cuppa tea no worries, but I'm sure I speak for a lot of people when I say making sure people are having fun is one of the primary goals of any guild activity.

You do realize I do that cuz I live in such a cold climate right?

FYI there's no /roll or /random tool in the game yet. Bioware posted they will add it, but no clue as to when.

I thought I saw master looter in there, though. Hm. We'll have to see how it works.

oilypenguin wrote:

I thought I saw master looter in there, though. Hm. We'll have to see how it works.

Yes, they have master loot in but no way to roll. GC discovered this the hard way last night.

Badferret wrote:
oilypenguin wrote:

I thought I saw master looter in there, though. Hm. We'll have to see how it works.

Yes, they have master loot in but no way to roll. GC discovered this the hard way last night.

I feel as though I say this just about every day, but IPP officers are not above bribes. And now that we can hand out gear arbitrarily... well, you're smart people. Figure it out.

oilypenguin wrote:

I thought I saw master looter in there, though. Hm. We'll have to see how it works.

Yea GC tested master loot last night. When you loot a boss the loot shows up. You can then right click on the loot piece and assign it to a person. Of course you use Shift+Left click to link it in chat, then right click on the piece to give it to someone.

Without a roll option though it was tough deciding who gets what. I suppose the officers could pick a number 1-100 and share it between a couple people, then whoever (that doesn't know the number) is closest to that number wins.

Still silly, but the only fair random option I can think of.

Otherwise we just went old school and assigned by class, level, and amount of need.

It is extremely strange that they couldn't stick a random number generator in here given how often it's used in every other MMO.

Ah well. Good suggestion on sticking a number into /o chat.

oilypenguin wrote:

I feel as though I say this just about every day, but IPP officers are not above bribes. And now that we can hand out gear arbitrarily... well, you're smart people. Figure it out.

Or, we could just kill you, play soccer with your head, then take the item out of your bag?

I'm just saying.....

Something we talked about but didnt get to try was have master looter on then when loot dropped have discussion on who would roll and then try to change it back to regular roll and have everyone pass, but the ones rolling.

Maybe since they dont have a roll option they will allow you to change loot roles...