Hi Bryant, I really appreciate the opportunity to give feedback on the R4 Anomaly. I'm going to take a bit of time to reply to most of your questions in the hope that they will actually be read by someone at Bioware.
Do you feel your group was able to progress in power through the Operation?
Yes, as we did the raid on PTS beforehand, we were pretty experienced in all the mechanics. Only thing that caught us offguard initially on the day of release was the differences in scaling on IP-CPT, but alltogether the scaling was/is fine.
Do you think improvements could be made to make it easier to progress as a group? If so, what do these improvements look like?
The operation in terms of scaling is fine as is. Only thing that could've been better are the various bugs that are still current to this day, like:
people being dead in the operation frame
the bug on IP-CPT where the boss disappears under the floor when you push him at the exact time as burn starts
the hallway encounter before Lord Kanoth where an infinite amount of attractors keep spawning in, making it virtually impossible to clear it in one go.
Did you want to upgrade your Hazardous gear?
We used it to buy the gear that was only available from Boss 4 Tokens first (especially Mainhands). The incentive was definitely there. They are also useful for buying gear for other classes/specs.
Was Hazardous gear helpful in completing The R-4 Anomaly?
Yes, see previous question.
Do you like the look of these armor sets?
I'm not a huge fan of them personally and I only know of exactly one person who likes them so far.
Did you attempt to clear The R-4 Anomaly to earn these armor sets?
No, the cosmetic aspect of the gear was definitely no reason to clear the operation.
Do you like the look of this mount?
Not a huge fan of the mount in terms of optics. Only reason I want to get it right now is the (temporary) exclusivity.
Did you attempt to clear The R-4 Anomaly to earn this mount?
Yes, this is the question I am the most excited to reply to. My team managed to 100% operation as world first and immediately started to do farm runs for every member where we killed Lord Kanoth with one person being on his main toon in an - as we later learned futile - attempt to get everyone one of this mount. Which means we averaged about 6-8 runs every week since the release and in those 12 weeks (around 80 kills already) we only saw the Wings drop exactly once! This is not accounting for all the kills each one of us did in pugs or other teams.
Is there anything you’d like to see from future Operations mounts?
An actual official statement what the dropchance is. You could've also made a vendor where you could trade in an arbitrary number of blue tokens (could've been anywhere from 100-200) to buy the mount like some other games do. But no, we're left with rumours of what the actual dropchance could be and killing a boss that gets more boring with every kill and praying for Eric Musco to bless us with an ounce of his godly grace.
In conclusion, the operation is fine in terms of scaling but aquiring the mount is the single most annoying thing in this game right now.