Try solving south first every time. Also try to make sure everyone is out of the zone when trying to reset, or that some who are zoned in aren't in Eternity Vault 2 while you're in Eternity Vault 1.

Results may vary depending on the raid. We haven't had any really in 3 months.

Legit? If so I feel bad for your server.

Wonder if there is something else besides resetting the zone that affects it, any time we've done a NM run in under 2 hours in either zone we've gotten the title.

Like good old Blackwing Lair when the game had been out like 8 months?

That must be it. I'm sure we're the only guild that kills him with no trouble every week who chuckle hearing it's "all RNG".

That's fantastic. We also have been clearing it for months and have our Infernal titles as well. I'm not sitting here saying that bugs don't exist, only that literally other than dealing with floor pieces missing the first week or two 3 months ago...the only "bug" that people bring up that we've dealt with on Soa is lightning balls getting off that extra shock seemingly when they shouldn't be (and even this is only an issue on Nightmare). I'm not disputing the "facts" that other guilds run into issues, I'm only stating that we've been doing it the same way for 3 months, with 1 tank, and don't have any of these issues week after week. Pretty much every issue people bring up certainly seems to be controllable by actions you take as a raid. I understand it's frustrating for people, but people stating it's pure RNG and any run without experience bugs is just "lucky" are not stating the facts.

Sounds like a player ran through the ball that was not targeted on them...and due to the fact the person it was actually targeted on hadn't run through it (since the other person wouldn't actually be able to explode it) eventually after a period of time it would turn invisible. Thus you have raids swearing up and down players ran through "their" ball without it exploding to hover invisible waiting to kill someone else. Just a theory, but it's what I would bet my money on hearing how most people think they know what's going on in this fight.

It absolutely is true, works for us just fine with zero issues. The majority of the time I ever even need this to see them is when it's someone else's ball because I always blow mine up as quickly as I can. It's fairly easy to tell the difference between a "dead" one and a live one as well. I wish I knew what so many people did on this fight.

I agree it had challenge to it, and you do note above that Muru was above and beyond. Frankly it wasn't that much more challenging (if at all) than pre nerf Gruul even. Kael and Muru were well above the Vashj fight. I'm not saying we went in and one shot it, not at all. But really a couple nights working phase 2 and it was done.

Zone resets fix the floor pieces missing. From our experience, as soon as we never wiped during a transition phase, we've never had issues with floor pieces missing whether we reset the zone or not. Invisible lightning balls means you need to turn nameplates on, and that someone wasn't exploding their ball fast enough. Not sure what the issue is with a mind trap at transition...they changed that so it auto releases someone once his shield goes up. If you're having him cast it right as the transition is going, that's just really bad timing, have never seen that happen in 3+ months. Battle rezzes, I don't know why people have problems with this. My only guess would be you can't do it during a transition but if you rezz someone during the phase they died in shouldn't have any issues (we haven't). If tank is too close to pylon dropping, it will do damage to them. As for it not hitting Soa, the working theory in some threads that some have semi confirmed is if you have him positioned too far on the "cracked" ground around the outer area in phase 3, sometimes the pylon won't register as having broken his shield. Our tank manages to position him properly for every pylon drop, pretty sure he just tries to keep him off the outer area as much as possible while still being on the edge of where a pylon is landing. Will full Rakata you should be demolishing HM Soa. With titles done we run it on HM every week and the only issue we've ever run into on HM/NM for the most part is lighting balls getting off an extra shock at times. On NM it can be a pain but on HM it's pretty much never an issue...especially in full Rakata.

Enough people have noted that SSSS or NSSN both seem to work. No idea why people have issues not being able to reset the zone. I feel like not everyone is out of the zone when they are trying to do it and it's screwing things up for them somehow.

The title/codex entry pops up as soon as you kill the final boss under the allotted time. Haven't heard of people getting screwed out of it, worked fine for us every time. Maybe you reset the instance at some point? Pretty sure that won't let you get the title.

Lol what? Comparing Vashj to Muru is an insult to Muru and any actual tough fight from that era and previous in WoW. Phase 2 on Vashj was the only difficult part of the fight. 1 was a joke, and the "soft enrage" mechanic in 3 was so easily dealt with/beaten it was barely worth mentioning. Kael was far tougher than Vashj was...and neither were as hard as Muru, or some of the later Vanilla fights.

Nothing wrong with enrage timers long or short. They just need to add mechanics to fights to make them more interesting. Having an enrage timer doesn't mean you can't have a fun fight with creative mechanics. Although I get the sense a lot of the "it's a lazy game design" complaints come from people who want fights with creative mechanics that are extremely easy to deal with...survive forever and win. My dream fights? A very tightly tuned enrage and plenty of fight mechanics that the group/raid have to execute properly as well. None of the enrage timers in this game are "that short" to begin with. People just walk into FP's in terrible gear having not really learned how to play their class.

The whirlwind after a taking a lightning ball explosion is probably the toughest part of the fight to deal with. There are ways to limit the chance of it happening, medpacs/hots right after exploding a ball help the most we've found. While I'm not sure if he does his whirlwind exactly on a timer, if he doesn't it's a pretty regular timing that once you've done the fight a few times you get the feel for...so a raid that is paying attention can do what they can to either break their balls soon as they can to get topped off/hot'ed/use a medpac before a possible whirlwind. It does happen with the worst timing occasionally, but it's pretty rare to see it happen more than once a fight (usually doesn't kill anyone on our runs) and combat rezz is there for a reason. When the chance is the only real mechanics/difficulty of the fight, removing any difficulty of having to deal with it will trivialize the fight. Apologies to those just getting to him on Hard Mode now, but the fight is pretty trivialized compared to how it was before they put limits on how many times each person could be targeted by mind trap/whirlwind, nerfed mind trap health/number of lightning ball spawns in certain phases, and put in the Giant Red Letters to let the raid know which people are being targeted by a lightning ball. Another nerf was when they made a mind trap break immediately upon hitting the 30% transition. This used to not be the case, and your dps had to be very smart and timely about pushing Soa to the transition at a safe time in between the next mind trap/whirlwind timers. Needing a relief from whirlwind now with the mind trap trivialization is just silly really. As far as some of the other issues, I think we've seen Soa reset during phase 3 a total of 1 time in over 3 months. We only run 1 tank, have never had issues. He also seems to be able to position Soa properly even when a pylon is hovering over cracked ground to still get each one to break his shield with no issues. Maybe knowing the cracked ground causes issues, others can copy what he does in trying to keep him as close as possible to the pylon coming down without being on the area that causes it to bug out. I understand the frustration, but it is possible to run EV week after week and deal with zero bugs just killing it like we have been everything normal.

I thought it was enough of a nerf when you stopped having to worry about mind trap timing at the transition. Boggles the mind that people actually need an easy mode solution for simply not pushing the transition with someone in the air. It shouldn't be a guaranteed wipe. Need to have better plans in place to deal with healers in the air or in a mind trap. It's not the targeting causing the wipe, it's the lack of awareness and a plan to deal with these situations. They already did change the frequency with which mind trap or whirlwind could target each player in the raid when people complained about how it was originally. It was much tougher to deal with back then than it is now and proper planning is easier with the current version. Given how much they have reduced the pure randomness of the targeting already on this fight, and even tell you now who lightning balls are targeting (wasn't originally like this), any further nerfs to this fight would make it far too trivial. Really the only challenge is how you deal with the chance of healers being out of commission for parts of the fight. One of which (mind traps) you have direct control over how long they are out of the fight for. I know this fight is frustrating for a lot of newer raiding guilds, but good awareness/communication is all that is needed for almost any situation in this fight. There are various bugs, but many guilds don't even end up dealing with them because it's pretty simple to not have them ever come about.

If you're doing nightmare, 13k should be easily survivable. We usually have issues with some doing a lot more damage than that to some people in the raid...but you should have more health if you're geared for Nightmare.

Before the rush of people telling you any number of SSSS, NSSN whatever because multiple ways clearly work for people... 3 months ago we read that if you let the south pylon complete each wheel first it solves this issue. Been doing it ever since with zero issues.

I personally think either SSSS or NSSN works just fine...but that's just a theory. I can only say SSSS has worked every single time for us and we probably have as many reps with it as anyone can. Since the consoles only seem to lock up (or were for us and others on our server I talked to) after solving the 2nd or 3rd wheels, obviously both strats have you solve the south pylon first so I figure whatever the bug/workaround/whatevs is, that is what takes care of it. (excluding the single turn 4th wheel of course)

Or did you have the normal issue many people have where the consoles become unclickable after solving the 2nd or 3rd wheel. Guess it's impossible to know, suggest solving south pylon first for at least those wheels (we just do every wheel to make it easy) and see if the consoles don't lock up. For us it was just like the top wheels were a 2 spin solve like any other.

We had both 4th wheels already solved this week, did our south finishing first on every wheel as normal when we got to 4th wheel turned each one left once, then right once to solve it again (letting south finish first of course). Collected our loot.

If it took any appreciable extra effort...I'd agree with you. But it doesn't.

When done right, it works for everyone. Several groups is completely underselling it. One shot every week. Even had the top row solved already this week, just spun it one way then back the other making sure south solved first. Waiting for Bioware to spell it out for you and not listening to advice from those that have zero issues for 2+ months on the encounter is why threads like this still show up.

Let south finish first on all 4. I don't know how we still have threads about this.