Tell that to the people on Darth Malgus who lost Destruction Incarnate.

Dear Devs, On todays patch, you have managed to create the greatest advertisement for World of Warcraft you could ever have imagined. You unfairly and arbitrarily removed many raider's achievements and titles for completing timed runs just for completing these achievements within the same week some players had discovered a bug to enter Karagga's Palace Master Mode and Eternity Vault. This is ridiculous as you should have just removed the titles and achievements for this operation, instead you removed them for all operations. Even before the bug was discovered, I did Dread Palace timed and you removed my achievement and title for that even though I did not participate in this bug. After contacting support, we were simply told "just do it again". This is an extremely unfair reaction to a small amount of people abusing two specific raids. You have undermined our trust as now we can simply have our achievements and titles arbitrarily removed. How do we know this won't happen in the future? You have just set a precedent of this behaviour with today's patch. Fix this.

I don't really agree about your point about OEMs and RPMs. My opinion is that difficulty of gold augments come from the crew skills and how expensive the materials are, not the difficulty of the content needed to get the actual OEMs and RPMs. Gold augments are something you get when you want to squeeze a few % on your game but are not mandatory. My post wasn't intended to gatekeep things behind harder content but encourage and help new raiders get into harder content as story mode ops do such a poor job at teaching new raiders anything about the fight as the mechanics themselves are either non-existent or are so trivial that they are not worth remembering in SM.

Good afternoon, I am a raider on Darth Malgus and currently, the state of story mode Operations are laughable which is bad for the scene. I understand that many players wish to do play Operations for story purposes which is completely fine but many players who I have seen in these SM Ops are looking to get into harder content and I think SM Ops right now does a terrible job at helping these players learn the mechanics of these Ops and encourages players to simply play DPS specs. At the start of the expansion, SM Ops were at an acceptable difficulty level but as the gear of players has increased, all sense of challenge has been removed from them. If you are to go onto the fleet currently, the overwhelming majority of SM Ops being played are DF, DP, EV, KP. The group compositions are almost always 6/7 DPS and 1/2 healers. Except for EV and KP HM that do require 1 Tank and potentially a DwT and 2 healers, but the difficulty of these operations on HM are still not difficult. The main issue I take from this is SM Ops have been completely dumbed down to something that requires almost no thought and challenge and especially with the fact that none of these Ops even require a tank anymore. This is further worsened by the fact that there are almost no tanking mechanics in a lot of SM Ops so if a group takes a tank, it will be a tank and spank and nothing more. This has caused very few of new raiders to actually take up tanking in any capacity and sometimes even trying to get a healer is a struggle. At this moment, master mode flashpoints require more strategy and are harder in general. Finally on this issue, almost all of the raids take place are on Imperial side which can be frustrating for players trying to do the story on Republic side. Some operations like DF and DP could be cross-faction as the story of Oricon (at least on the Imperial side) sort of implies this. Finally, not only is the overall difficulty level of SM Ops too low, there are almost no mechanics any inspiring raider can take from these raids. I am not suggesting turning SM Ops into HM or anything, but just to give the difficulty level more crossover so those who wish to get into HM raids can at least learn something from SM Ops. SM currently does absolutely nothing to prepare players into doing the same Ops but on HM. Let's take Dread Fortress for example: Nefra On SM, the current strategy is just to have 7 DPS and 1 healers for the entire raid. Most of the time, the group does not understand that the player with aggro needs to share damage with someone else otherwise they will die very quickly. This has led to the prevailing strategy being to turn Nefra into the whole group. Nefra does so little damage this is completely viable. The droid that spawns does not kill players. The DOT Nefra puts out is a joke. Compared to HM: 2 Tanks need to share damage from Nefra and face her to the gate. A ranged or a healer can shoot the droid to move the AoE away from the group. Said AoE one shots players. The DOT does a fair bit of damage and needs to be cleansed by healers of self-cleansed. There is so little overlap between SM and HM that it may as well just be a completely different raid. Carrying on with DF. Draxus On SM, just kill everything, no need to interrupt anything, no need for a tank to hold Draxus, no need to cleanse. On HM, you can't kill all the adds before pushing Draxus otherwise you will start the next wave. Mass Affliction needs to be interrupted otherwise it does pretty heavy damage. Tank needs to taunt back after he chucks a poison grenade and the grenade spreads. The Guardians do massive damage if you do not move away from the conal. Subteroths explode. Bulwark adds with a shield that needs to be killed under the shield. Dismantlers's knockback provides a debuff that will get the player one shot if there is no aggro swap or stealth out. Draxus is shielded on the final phase until the Guardians are killed. Again, there is so little overlap between SM and HM. I am not suggesting that SM should have all these mechanics but at least adopt some of them so the gap between the difficulties as monumental as they are now. Grobby This isn't as bad as the other bosses but there it's still not great. On SM: DwT holds Grob and moves him into the magnet when there is a pipe. Just kill the adds under the boss and move out of fire. Again, no need for a tank. HM: It's the same but the main "gimmick" of this fight (pipe smash and the magnet) are not a joke. Tank has to move the boss under the magnet quickly as the boss will do big AoE damage and will keep interrupting player casts. On HM, there is an enrage timer. Corrupter Zero SM: Kill adds at the start, kill the boss and adds. If you're fast enough, you can just skip the laser phase. Said laser phase is a joke on SM, the beam is too narrow and hardly does any damage. HM: 2 Tanks are needed as there is a tank swap and need cleansing. Need to LoS adds to get them to the boss. Big droid needs to be interrupted. DPS and healers need to spread a little otherwise they will get destroyed by Missile Barrage. Gravity mine requires the player with it to stand near the boss or they will die. Beam one shots and is much quicker and bigger. Again, the jump from SM to HM here is huge. The jump from HM to NiM is not this big. Brontes SM: Just DPS everything. Face Brontes away in third phase. Cleanse Nanites. Go back to killing everything. Droids getting hit by the beam has almost no consequence. HM: 2 Tanks for the hands, need to swap hands every time they are pushed otherwise they will start taking huge damage. DPS on hands need to be somewhat equal otherwise you will screw one tank. Fingers to need be killed quickly or they enrage and start doing huge damage. When Brontes comes, there is a tank swap mechanics on stacks. DPS need to to blow orbs up between 15-20 stacks and not in the group. Other tank needs to kite Kephess to the group and he does a conal cleave. Healers need to cleanse nanites constantly. On the lightning phase, the droids have a lot more health and need to be killed ASAP, it can be quite a tight DPS check. On the 6 finger phase, everyone needs to be touching distance from a finger except tanks. Tanks need to slam orbs with the hand, DPS need to kill their finger and healer's finger and need to make sure no finger enrages as they start deleting people fi they do. Hands in this phase need to be DPSs fairly equally as orbs keep spawning and when one hand is pushed, the tank can't slam these orbs. Then there is a burn phase which is not just "kill Brontes". Tanks need to rotate taunts, need to stunbreak fire and forget. Need to push the hand to get the shield at 6-8 stacks to lose them. Group needs to move to the other side of the room and do the same thing. After both hands have been done, need to kill the boss ASAP before she starts deleting people. The difference here is utterly insane. Again, the mechanic difference between HM and NiM is nowhere near this big. Why have I written this? In the guild that I am a part of, I run a HM progression team and these differences between difficulties are so huge that members of the guild can blitz through all SM content with ease but will hit massive roadblocks on anything that become slightly more mechanically difficult. Furthermore, even in an easy HM like KP, mechanics have been so dumbed down that people don't can't/don't know how to do the puzzle on the third boss so it's not uncommon to see groups fail at this point. And because of how easy SM Ops are, no one anymore is exploring into playing Tank and Healers. I understand that there is always need for more DPS as it makes up the majority of a raid group but currently, no is learning to play Tank especially, but also Healers and unless they do content outside of SM Ops, there is little incentive for them to do anything else except DPS. Thank you for your time.