You can pretty much do that for Hateful so I'd definitely yes you can do Dreadful with just a couple of people, definitely < 8.

Thanks! I just added this and also fixed the Perforated Vitals DoT from 5s to 15s which should be the correct value. I'd like to take the chance to say that while covering all aspects of these fights is a massive undertaking (and there's much that has to be omitted, sometimes), I very much have appreciated to have our guides hosted by Dulfy during this content cycle.

Very odd maybe there is some more timing to it or when you push the boss that can make it more likely. Still agree it's not intended.

Yeah this happens due to timing and probably should not be in the game. When some of the longest mines haven't exploded yet but Blaster puts out a new wave, they are more likely to end up with multiple on one person. This is a bit of an oversight that has never been corrected. It's not that common but you will probably see this at least once every 15-20 pulls.

The essential idea is as follows: 1) The raid group needs to make sure to stay well clear of the tank since they will be kiting AOEs from both walkers. Also, Unit 1 will Mega Blast the raid if they are caught in the middle. 2) Have the solo tank start by aggroing Unit 2, with all DPS on Unit 1. The solo tank should put all of his normal tank aggro GCDs into Unit 2, but all of his taunts into Unit 1 starting about 5-10 seconds into the fight (let the DPS have threat for the beginning and then build off their threat, but take Unit 1 before the first Rapid Fire). Throughout the fight, the tank need only attack Unit 2, but keep taunting Unit 1 on cooldown. 3) From there, proceed normally with all the mechanics. The solo tank will be need considerable healing but it can easily be done with a normal two healer composition, and if well geared, even a solo healer on SM.

However Sorcerer bubble is indispensable in certain situations where mitigation beats healing, such as Coratanni (all phases not just mouse droids) and Revan floor 3. Also Roaming Mend is the best multi-target smart heal in the game and has "situational burst". I agree in general that Merc has a slightly stronger healing profile, but it's mostly due to Healing Scan and Progressive Scan hitting like a truck while Kolto Shells tick. If Healing Scan was a bit weaker, it would be pretty even. Operative healers have the highest raw HPS capacity, especially when the raid is stacked up. As others note, they can get insane numbers on fights like Walkers and Underlurker. In practice, however, this is not that necessary for most fights, and Operatives have the worst burst heals at the end of the day. I like them in 3.0 but the other two healers have really come into their own. Also, bring Operatives for stealth rezzes. This is particularly good on Blaster/Master, Coratanni, and Revan.

Just saw the kill live, really nice job.

The fire barrel comes every 10-15 seconds so if you get Load Lifters on you and you don't have an amazing defensive, you should probably kite the Load Lifters for a few seconds and watch the fire go out on someone else. That way, you have time to receive extra healing or hit a medpac if you did get the fire, but before any Load Lifters explode.

Also like others have mentioned, the advantage of Hydraulics on Revan now, while much less, is still a bit high. Anyone who has to pivot to face circles while midair during a pull in knows what I mean. From a healer PoV, Sorc bubbles for everyone, as well as Roaming Mend is great, and probably worth bringing in any case to extend how long you can survive Machine Core phase. But conversely, it's nice to be able to stand there and not worry about the pull in, and this needs to be removed for nightmare or we will bring a bunch of bounty hunters again. There are some times I could add more healer DPS on my Sorcerer for example, but I simply don't want to bother with the whole process of running in for 3 GCDs just to speed out so I can get pulled in. As for Operative healer, there's simply no benefit at all? They have the worst healer DPS, no hydraulics no knockback,, no bubble... poor Operatives. Clearly Merc/Sorc is the best combination for Revan, and also probably for most of the other fights. And DPS can run/in out but they will have to do a lot more work and focus. BH hits Hydraulic on a 30s cooldown mindlessly and will survive all pull in by doing so. Other DPS must keep track of the pull in timing while watching purple.

My main comment is that Coratanni in 198 gear is vastly easier since you are much less likely to die to spikes and/or mistakes both when Coratanni is up, and also for Ruugar (P2), and the DPS check is much easier. If you are in 186 to 192 gear, and combine that with how Revan used to be totally cheesable, I would potentially argued Coratanni was just as hard as Revan at one point. So like Smugglin, I have to reconcile the truth of how the operations are now (Revan is a good bit harder than Coratanni since Unstable Aberrations force a tighter DPS and mechanics check on your group) with the fact that Coratanni and hydraulics Revan in December were similar difficulty to one another. Grats to all on kills.

I don't see why you shouldn't use any tools available within the terms of service. Creating arbitrary limits on yourself is only disadvantaging yourself. We have been using vocal cues when available in Zorz, but that doesn't mean a timer cannot be useful too. I think Ambassadors use of timers was very well thought out since there is no vocal cue and the mechanics "shift backwards" in alignment each phase of Unstable Aberrations. In any raid group, I'd rather clear the boss using timers than decide I don't like timers so we're going to wipe longer because we're trying to learn mechanics, do our max DPS/heals, and also keep in track of cascading events. We did not use mechanic-specific timers in Zorz and used visual/audio cues as you say. But I have nothing but positive things to say about people who set them up. Whereas we were keeping track of it by estimating 2-3 seconds shifts, they can perform even better by using the timers as their vocal cues where none exist. This is clever not unfortunate.

Also impressive kill because your stack count/DPS pace meant that you had to survive an additional heave.

Yes congrats again. I personally disagree with Milas and welcome more complicated mechanics that encourage the use of timers. It means we're heading in a direction where you really have to pay attention to mechanic timings, which says something about the complexity of raid design increasing. Top WoW raiding sometimes uses very complex timers so it's not like you can't have exciting progression with some add ons. Also, while I did not set up timers that specifically say the mechanic names, I did use a stopwatch in our original kills of Revan and Coratanni.

Likewise to your group, we are very happy to see other guilds progressing and killing Coratanni and Revan. This content is very nice for pushing all of our groups to play our best and showing we are, as a community, capable of more than bosses like NiM Calphayus.

Yes it's still broken. For an assured kill use 4 healers on 8 man and 5-6 healers on 16 man. It makes the fight somewhat long, but it's not really a big deal. It's possible to do with 3 healers on 8 and/or 4 on 16, but it's quite difficult. Adding an off heal or two can also help. For example 3 healers with 2 off healers works really well. The regular amount of healers on any mode is simply not enough so don't feel bad just add healers until it's fixed.

Yes you can have a bugged repair droid or two still, that is, repair droids that sit around and do nothing. But in our experience, just respawn it at a good time (after Shoots Lasers dies) and you should be ok, the fight has become more tolerable and it seems to happen a lot less.

I do agree there's a good argument for Cora 16 being harder since the spikes in Ruugar phase can be immense, although we came incredibly close to 1-shotting it whereas that was definitely not the case for Revan since you need most of the raid to survive the first few purples with few mistakes to get good initial DPS burn on the Machine Core. The main thing in Revan that is difficult is the Essence Corruption is much more chaotic and difficult in 16 on first floor. Otherwise (from a healer perspective), the fight is fairly easy on 16 and I was just focusing on staying alive as long as I could, not even doing anything really clever or using cooldowns well.

Thanks to all and good luck with the content. Just thought I'd throw in my two cents on the composition: it definitely can be done without Hydraulics by simply adjusting your position (we did not start this week with 8 BH), but the raid gains 2-3 GCDs every single Hydraulics which is a good net gain in DPS (we were approximately 5 seconds away from dying to the final Heave, although we did have a tank dead for almost the entire Machine Core phase which could add DPS). The only way Bioware can address this discrepancy is to make the in/out mechanic either have a fundamentally different role on the top floor or to also ignore Hydraulics/Entrench. The other benefit to using Hydraulics on top floor is that it makes it slightly easier to perform the Unstable Aberration mechanic correctly since you do not have to worry about being thrown in/out while dealing with explosions. We start coming to the point where you ask if the problem is with the mechanics or the abilities. I really like the mechanics on this fight, they are quite unique for this game. At the same time, it's not really fair to these classes if every time their utility is valuable, you make the mechanic override that utility. It was necessary to disable those physics resistant cheeses for Unstable Aberration in order to not trivialize purple circles, which is the technique we stuck to for the first month of the content. Is it necessary for the in/out pulse too? Definitely not, but it's still frustrating that it makes things easier to a degree that we all ultimately came on a BH to simplify the kill (at least while we were learning to do Unstable Aberrations without getting blown off the edge, which is still easy enough to mess up). I don't necessarily foresee this being changed, since it is currently much closer to "Brontes unfair" as in using a bunch of Snipers to laugh at circles and not take knockbacks. When you could cheese both the in/out and Unstable Aberrations, it was blatantly overpowered. However, it seems to be a recurring issue that I don't have any easy answers to. We have had a lot of fun progressing on this but some of those questions left unanswered for Nightmare, and for future raids. edit: And I think I speak for everyone in Zorz when I say that we are far happier with this iteration of Revan than whatever we were killing before with pure Hydraulics for every mechanic, since it is much closer to being fair now and requires a high level of execution. But whether this should be the final state of this fight, I'm really not sure.

The Unstable Aberration mechanic can be done without hydraulics but requires a high level of coordination and inevitably slows DPS/Heals to some degree. I would say that with cheesing the Unstable Aberrations, you still needed some awareness and ability to beat it, but it wasn't that tightly tuned. It is definitely tightly tuned when you can no longer cheese Unstable Aberrations.

Honestly very specific positioning mechanics just don't work wonderfully in this game. Every time we see positioning become key, there end up being some sort of "bag of tricks" you have to learn to outsmart the game. It's almost always possible, but more frustrating to the community than it ought to be. I don't foresee any major changes at this point other than continued attempts to fix. But in the long run, for future operations, this is probably something they should keep in mind when coming up with mechanics. Just like in the other threads where we discussed how it's important to choose mechanics carefully so that they harm both melee and ranged to some degree, since for purposes of game balance it's difficult to justify just making melee stronger across the board, for fear of PVP imbalance.

Technically I agree with you. Scrapper benefits more from Cunning augments and (this could be one reason I parse virtually the same DPS with both specs, since I use Cunning augments). I probably should have a note of this in the guide. However running different augments for Scrapper versus Concealment would be incredibly annoying, gearing-wise. Also, although I run Cunning, a lot of people recommend Power for healing (I believe in modest crit/surge healing builds), so that makes Power slightly better for 2 of 3 Disciplines, if we're splitting hairs.

Rough estimates since I'm no longer in my DPS gear (with Purple Anodyne stim) Cunning 4100, Power 1500, Crit 250, Accuracy 760, Surge 320, Alacrity 0. Essentially I have straight 186 BiS with extra Accuracy in there compared to pre 3.0, plus a 198 offhand. Next goal full 192s, might be awhile for 198 mainhand since I used my first one for my heal sorc. Also what do you mean by 9? I believe I rated all the specs 6 in overall dps.

We did both Revan and Coratanni in mostly 192 gear with a few 186 and 198 pieces. We got somewhat close to full 192s from farming the hell out of story modes Week 1 in the first few nights using many alts and other guild members to help us. Unfortunately, pending any future updates from Bioware, stacking to beat it is so incredibly effective that it is still by far the easiest way to get through it, so while everyone in our guild is getting their 198 MHs, no one wants to go through the extreme hassle of non-cheese since we can just do it with our normal strategy. And the non-cheese alternative is hard enough that no one has managed it yet including our raid teams. Note the cheese does not really help for floor 1 and 2, only floor 3, so you still have to get there first. One specific phase as noted by others. As for the rest of the discussion, I love our mercs in Zorz but IO is a bit too strong. They would still be a valuable sustained DPS spec if they did a few hundred less, putting them near Pyro PT or Watchman Sent (which are both melee in some form anyway) Yes, there's no need to completely nerf it into the ground. Then you'd only want to run Arsenal. There's no need to overreact, but we shouldn't minimize the impact of the very strongest and weakest classes on our raid compositions. Yes, IO is more difficult than most specs in the sense that messing up your Speed to Burn with respect to your windows is more than a very slight DPS loss. However I agree with KBN that it's not out of this world difficulty either. That being said, at least half of the reason to bring Mercs to fights is that they have reasonable survivability plus Hydraulics for several mechanics. The fact they're the top DPS is an extremely beneficial bonus, but not the only reason by any means.

Making the mechanics better is a hope we can only reserve for future content. For all current content it's too late, any feedback from testers on these issues was ignored or the developers simply did not have the resources to address. Besides, there is a class balance issue regardless of mechanics. Ranged should not have the same overall single target DPS, equal or better AOE capacity, and equal or better armor, than any melee (as in, they should not get ALL of those, maybe one or two of those). There has to be some sort of tradeoff, that's what I'm suggesting. Powertechs are the only "melee" who actually do have enough benefits to offset their status, and one of those benefits is ironically that they can effectively perform most of their rotation from outside melee range.

Ranged DPS simply needs to be toned down a bit overall (it is their stated intent that ranged should do the same or less as melee, at the very least). Plus, the melee should get the more powerful AOEs (not ranged) if they're not willing to make ranged lose some defensive capacities. Sages are the only ones squishy enough to penalize their ranged capacities somewhat. Of course in the PVP metagame all of this isn't necessarily true.