Hardmode bosses need mechanics not unfairness

[Gamstun]

Have you ever tried to contribute to a tier 2/3 raid with little to no raid gear?

I have plenty of times.

 

TL;DR:

I'm the bastard that keeps teaching casuals to ninja into your raids. You just don't know they're casuals as long as they don't open their mouth.

 

 

so basically you're just a trolling d-bag.....

[Merraith]

MIn any event - currently I'm still enjoying the game and I haven't been impacted by the enrage timer so it doesn't annoy me directly.

I still have EQ2 that I play and raid in weekly to hold my attention above playing 'beat the clock'.

 

Doesn't sound much like "beat the clock" then.

[Loendar]

Doesn't sound much like "beat the clock" then.

 

Not for me - no.

 

Interestingly enough - I can still form an opinion on a mechanic and see the negative (and/or positive) aspects of it without having been directly impacted by it.

 

I'm special like that.

[Merraith]

Not for me - no.

 

Interestingly enough - I can still form an opinion on a mechanic and see the negative (and/or positive) aspects of it without having been directly impacted by it.

 

I'm special like that.

 

I can do the same, I just feel with obviously having more experience with it I do it a little more accurately. The debate went from a meta discussion on the need/purpose of the mechanic to a lot of exaggerating the negatives of it that don't really exist in reality and a lot of lack of acknowledging that it does in fact serve its purpose...and this thread is pretty good evidence of that. But again, a lot of the debate got mixed up with what people would prefer to see in their game versus whether or not this way works.

[Xaearth]

This...wouldn't change my mind about enrage mechanics at all. I'd just know I've had extremely bad luck. Given how long I waited to get gear when I first joined 8 years ago the guild I'm still with today, just par for the course. I had to sit out at times, and that was fine. From reading the rest of your post, it's pretty clear to me I have slightly more raiding experience than you do. It would require a much longer post to explain the differences in teaching casuals to raid and what I've seen over the years. We just have very different ideas on raiding mechanics/enrage timers/player skill, and that's fine. Hopefully we both find a game with encounters that do what we want them to do.

 

Sounds to me like you've got a skewed opinion about casuals that is inherently biased by your guild.

 

How exactly do you have the experience to say whether or not casuals can be taught to raid when you've stuck with the same raiding guild for 8 years?

 

PS: I didn't say I had to sit out. I merely said someone with less skill and the right gear was able to perform far better than I could.

 

Plenty of times enough I'd fill in when there wasn't someone with the gear, and we didn't auto-fail, but we accepted the fact that we only had a chance of succeeding because a few of the members were overgeared to compensate.

 

Edit:

I can do the same, I just feel with obviously having more experience with it I do it a little more accurately. The debate went from a meta discussion on the need/purpose of the mechanic to a lot of exaggerating the negatives of it that don't really exist in reality and a lot of lack of acknowledging that it does in fact serve its purpose...and this thread is pretty good evidence of that. But again, a lot of the debate got mixed up with what people would prefer to see in their game versus whether or not this way works.

 

You said yourself in your previous post that you had to sit out at times...

That was because you had no skill back then right?

 

There is no discussion about the "need/purpose of the mechanic" or "exaggerating the negatives" or "lack of acknowledging that it does in fact serve its purpose".

 

There are, simply put, two camps:

1) Those who know the mechanic is nothing but a gear check and has nothing to do with skill

2) Those who know the mechanic is nothing but a gear check but don't care because they don't have a problem with it

 

Both groups just keep avoiding saying "lol-gear" because we don't want skill to infest the endgame when the only reason people play it to begin with is for the carrot.

Edited February 6, 2012 by Xaearth

[Merraith]

Sounds to me like you've got a skewed opinion about casuals that is inherently biased by your guild.

 

How exactly do you have the experience to say whether or not casuals can be taught to raid when you've stuck with the same raiding guild for 8 years?

 

PS: I didn't say I had to sit out. I merely said someone with less skill and the right gear was able to perform far better than I could.

 

Plenty of times enough I'd fill in when there wasn't someone with the gear, and we didn't auto-fail, but we accepted the fact that we only had a chance of succeeding because a few of the members were overgeared to compensate.

 

Being in the same guild doesn't mean I've never been in a raid/group without them. Far from it. That is the point, I've seen both sides of the equation, and it's a very different look from each side.

 

Your gear/skill comparison you make just kind of reinforces my thinking to me. We just see things differently . Good luck in future raiding/games

[Frozenshiva]

There are, simply put, two camps:

1) Those who know the mechanic is nothing but a gear check and has nothing to do with skill

2) Those who know the mechanic is nothing but a gear check but don't care because they don't have a problem with it

 

Both groups just keep avoiding saying "lol-gear" because we don't want skill to infest the endgame when the only reason people play it to begin with is for the carrot.

 

This is where you're wrong. Gear is a small/moderate/huge factor depending on the group. But skill is just as much a small/moderate/huge factor.

 

Lets look at things from a different perspective so you understand it better.

I know i know, i'm about to relate to the W word but bare with me for the sake of the example at the very least.

 

When a new expansion/major content patch releases (or in TOR's case the game itself releases) there are people who are able to clear a content a lot faster/earlier than others. For the sake of this example i refer to normal modes and not HMs.

 

How is it,that people with suboptimal gear (esp in the case of release) are able to defeat an encounter that most people with adequate gear can't? Answer is plain and simple.. It's skill.

 

A boss can be beaten by exerting X amount of DPS/healing/whatever the fight requires. In order to do that effortless you would need an "itemlevel" of Y. The best guilds in the world generally don't use the Y ilvl to beat the encounters. They usually use gear bellow Y.

In order to compensate for the lower average dps the class now offers, they have to make less mistakes be more aware and be optimal in the way they are doing it. The only thing gear does for these people is offer an easier, less daunting time, and room for more mistakes as time goes by as well as a quicker kill in order to get back to the more important bosses you might not have killed yet.

 

Now i agree that this is a gear check but it does relate to skill unlike you said earlier.

[FriarChuggs]

The terrible players you mention will never make it to the enrage timer - they will be dead way before that.

 

If you are able to solo the mob - more power to you. Who cares? The chance that you will need the gear if you are a one-man wrecking machine is minimal at best so why would you bother to start with.

 

Again - maybe it is a difference to what people expect because WoW does it and what I expect because I don't play games that assign arbitrary caps on my progression based on a 'timer of the day'. I can solo anything I want in EQ2 and if I can kill it - I get the reward.. if I can't, I move on.

 

The game is to kill the mob - not beat the clock.

 

Enrage timers exist to prevent every encounter being beatable by a team of tanks + healers. Enrage timers are one of the only ways to put pressure on DPS to be good at their jobs, otherwise it is just a tank/heal skill check. You can also test DPS with adds or something, but for the most part their ability to pump their numbers up is best tested with enrage timers.

 

Get better DPSers, or gear, or both. It's the same principle as finding a tank who is well geared enough to take hits, and skilled enough to hold aggro. Engrage timers are no more arbitrary than making a boss hit harder, or stack debuffs, or any of the other ways a boss can test the gear and dmg/threat/heal output of a raid.

[Ruwe]

I'd say I fall into the casual gamer category, I work 60 hours a week, have a four year old kiddo and a nag.. *cough* ..I mean wife . I get a couple hours a night to run and the majority of my guild is the same way.

 

We manage every single HM, sometimes we have a couple of wipes, and sometimes it feels like easy mode. We run EV normal mode and it feels pretty easy... We're currently running KP, not quite as easy but we're learning the mechanics :-) waaayyy more enjoyable, but then again we have also made sure to help each other out in running the FP's we need to get our sets of columi.

 

Unfortunately this is your standard MMO, the first boss in both Raids is a gear check for the group, if you don't have the gear you won't make it. As for HM's... my only advice is find someone to carry you for a couple, get your two piece set bonus and then go back and start helping your guildies do the same.

 

You don't have to be a "Hardcore" raider to raid or do HM's in this game. Some people will want to maximize their groups and run the content as fast as possible, and others will want to take their time and just be social, everybody has their own play style.

 

Like I said, we're casual gamers just having fun. We've been on KP for two nights now, just a couple hours a night learning the mechanics, nobody getting upset about timers or wipes, we're just there to chat with each other and have a good time :-)

 

If any casual or hardcore Rep players need a healer on The Harbinger send Ruwe a tell and I'll come give you a hand as long as your there to have fun and I'm not currently in the middle of a run

Edited February 6, 2012 by Ruwe

[Risingstars]

Both groups just keep avoiding saying "lol-gear" because we don't want skill to infest the endgame when the only reason people play it to begin with is for the carrot.

 

There are plenty of fights in HPs and OPs where understanding mechanics > gear. We even carried some under-geared guildie through 5/5 clear of HM KP last night.

[Xaearth]

How is it,that people with suboptimal gear (esp in the case of release) are able to defeat an encounter that most people with adequate gear can't? Answer is plain and simple.. It's skill.

 

A boss can be beaten by exerting X amount of DPS/healing/whatever the fight requires. In order to do that effortless you would need an "itemlevel" of Y. The best guilds in the world generally don't use the Y ilvl to beat the encounters. They usually use gear bellow Y.

In order to compensate for the lower average dps the class now offers, they have to make less mistakes be more aware and be optimal in the way they are doing it. The only thing gear does for these people is offer an easier, less daunting time, and room for more mistakes as time goes by as well as a quicker kill in order to get back to the more important bosses you might not have killed yet.

 

Now i agree that this is a gear check but it does relate to skill unlike you said earlier.

 

You're overlooking the fact that every enrage timer is going to include a margin of error.

 

Humans aren't perfect, they make mistakes. The less mistakes they make, the more that margin of error can compensate for undergeared players.

 

Avoiding mistakes that would be covered by the margin of error is not a function of skill.

What's the best way of putting this... It's a function of conditioning - physical and mental preparation to reduce the natural occurrence of human flaws.

 

If two football teams meet on the field, where the lesser team has been conditioning the past few days while the skilled team has been partying, who is more likely to make mistakes?

 

Not to mention, all of this doesn't take into account that "the best guilds in the world" are hardly going to be that undergeared for a new encounter.

 

Will they be missing some new gateway gear when they first start the new encounter? Most likely.

But they also most likely have the best gear previously available while those gateway gear encounters are generally tuned for people that don't necessarily have a full set of the best from the previous tier to begin with.

 

Edit: Almost forgot, you also didn't take into account that the majority of "best guilds in the world" are involved in the testing of content prior to its launch.

 

So they can condition themselves knowing what's coming.

That's assuming, of course, that they aren't among the players who playtest future content to figure out how to best exploit it when it goes live...

Edited February 6, 2012 by Xaearth

[Loendar]

Enrage timers exist to prevent every encounter being beatable by a team of tanks + healers. Enrage timers are one of the only ways to put pressure on DPS to be good at their jobs, otherwise it is just a tank/heal skill check. You can also test DPS with adds or something, but for the most part their ability to pump their numbers up is best tested with enrage timers.

 

Get better DPSers, or gear, or both. It's the same principle as finding a tank who is well geared enough to take hits, and skilled enough to hold aggro. Engrage timers are no more arbitrary than making a boss hit harder, or stack debuffs, or any of the other ways a boss can test the gear and dmg/threat/heal output of a raid.

 

This is not a unique perspective and has been hashed/re-hashed a lot in the course of this thread.

 

I and others argue that the encounter itself should be making those checks and not a mechanic that simply appears at the end of the fight. A well designed and implemented encounter will do all the things you are saying the enrage timer does natively and transparently without needing to resort to a timer. A well designed encounter requires the DPS to do their job by its very nature - you don't need an overinflated sense of impending doom to do it.

 

There is nothing about the enrage timer that makes the actual fight itself different/challenging. If it brings nothing to the table other than a relatively unforgiving fail condition then it isn't really needed at all. People who already know the fight and execute the same rote steps as they do on the normal one are never going to see it. Those that experiment with rotations, suboptimal group alignments, etc. are going to be harshly punished to make the min/max crew feel good about themselves.

 

And while I have certainly used the word arbitrary in the past, I suppose I should more likely say unnecessary. The other items you mentioned are a better/more elegent solution to the problem than an enrage timer - just not as easy to implement.

 

I honestly don't know who some of you are playing with that they NEED to have a harsh fail condition applied at the end of the fight just to play their toon.

Edited February 7, 2012 by Loendar

[Hiro_Vitality]

My guild doesn't even hit the enrage timers on Nightmare. You're doing something wrong.

[BigGazell]

My guild doesn't even hit the enrage timers on Nightmare. You're doing something wrong.

Agreed, up your DPS.

[Ilintar]

This is not a unique perspective and has been hashed/re-hashed a lot in the course of this thread.

 

I and others argue that the encounter itself should be making those checks and not a mechanic that simply appears at the end of the fight. A well designed and implemented encounter will do all the things you are saying the enrage timer does natively and transparently without needing to resort to a timer. A well designed encounter requires the DPS to do their job by its very nature - you don't need an overinflated sense of impending doom to do it.

 

While you have in fact stated that point, you have failed to provide a mechanic that does exactly that - test DPS "doing their job" without resorting to an enrage timer. Damage threshold? That results in an incredibly boring fight - you deal minimal damage to a boss, if you deal any damage at all, then it's healing / damaging ad nauseam. Any other mechanics? They don't involve gear checks and an MMORPG, being in part an RPG, has to include gear checks because the idea is it's about your character, not about you. Want a pure skill-based game? Play StarCraft (or Quake, or Battlefield, or Counterstrike).

 

There is a fight that doesn't have an enrage timer (or I'm yet to hit it) - Mentor fight, final in Dir7. Moreover, it's a very tactical encounter. Still, the last round doesn't have an enrage timer simply because it's a post-enrage DPS race - basically, the boss starts enraged, but with low HP and you're supposed to bring him down before you die. Which is exactly the same mechanic you hit with normal enrage timers - they increase boss damage by 200%, not 500%.

 

The problem isn't DPS doing their damage - it's a check whether the DPS are good enough in the first place. Now, since this is an MMORPG, the "good enough" is a function of player skill, but mostly of prior effort put into progressing your character. Overgeared characters having no problems with hardmodes? That's exactly the idea - represents your character getting stronger and the relative easiness with which the character handles the encounter represents this strength.

 

Also, an enrage timer is a great feedback provider. While in any other mechanic, you can assign blame to other characters in the group (for example the healer for missing heals), an enrage timer is a very clear test method - if your group hit the enrage timer, it was not the healer's fault, it was the DPS (conversely, if a group member dies not by doing something stupid earlier, it's not their fault, it's the healer's or the tank's).

 

Next thing, you said that boss fights have pure enrage mechanics which just mean "have enough gear to hit the timer", but that's simply wrong. Most boss fights have distractors (in the form of adds, special boss attacks, environmental hazards etc.) to also make sure that players pay attention. For example, the Bulwark fight has the "defensive protocols" healing shield and the adds that come to repair it, requiring DPS to either kill the mobs or CC them properly. Now, what an enrage timer does is it makes those distractors count. If you simply knew that failing to catch the repair bots on Bulwark would cost you an additional 30 seconds of a fight, you probably wouldn't care. Once you know that it means beating or not beating the enrage timer, you have to really pay attention to that. When a fight lacks an enrage timer, it's easy to make it linear. If it's linear, there's no way to instill a sense of urgency and thus prod players into making mistakes - it all turns down to memorizing repetitive notions.

 

Finally, there are already encounters in the game that have non-enrage mechanics to check for DPS, one notable is the bonus boss in Kaon, the amount of healing he requires makes it necessary for a healer to move to a draining rotation, thus becoming a resource race. However, this still makes for an enrage timer, only instead of being fixed, the enrage timer is decided by the healer's gear and skill (the end result is just the same as with a hard enrage - when the healer runs out of energy, the team gets instawiped).

[Ilintar]

My guild doesn't even hit the enrage timers on Nightmare. You're doing something wrong.

 

My guild 8 mans 16 man nightmare ops! Your guild sucks!!!!1111oneoneone

 

Excuse me, my bullsh*t detector is ringing, gotta go turn it off.

[schnopsnosn]

TL;DR[/b]:

Why oh why do endgame encounters have to be done with a stick up your rear end?

Let's loosen up, have fun, punt mobs for ***** and giggles. It's a game, lighten up.

If people want to goof around and have the skill to get ir done without constraining themselves to the optimal mold, why handicap them with an artificial time limit?

 

Hell, if me and 3 buddies want to run a HM FP with 4 DPS for the lolz, why should we be penalized just cuz we take turns running around yelling over VOIP "I AM ON FIYAAAAAAAAAA" rather than doing constant damage to the boss?

 

If you want to goof around do normal-mode FPs then.

Also pretty funny is that BT, BP and Foundry actually make us do stuff like that in HM(except that we still have the HDDT-setup).

[SentinelBorg]

Hardmodes/NMM in this game are so boring and uninspiring. Only larger numbers, no new mechanics, no additional or alternate bosses like in other MMOs.

[Nyrkkimyrsky]

But what actual purpose does it solve? Why does it matter to anyone how long it takes to accomplish the goal if you can accomplish it?

 

My point being - we have the DPS to down the mob, we have the gear to not die while doing it, we have the tactics to defeat that actual 'real' mechanics of the encounter. We just take 30 seconds longer to do it than you do and we get a solid wall of 'no pass' put up because of it.

 

That is poor design and arbitrary and we need to stop accepting it as a 'valid' solution to content.

 

If cant manage to keep yourself alive for 30 seconds after the boss enrages, then you are doing something wrong... because that's where your cooldown skills will help you win the fight.

 

And in my opinion, the hardmodes are meant to be done after you get atleast some kind of an lvl50 gear from flashpoints/GTN/pvp or whereever you can. It isn't wrong in any kind that your group cant clear HM flashpoints with some lvl40-49 questing gear...

Edited February 7, 2012 by Nyrkkimyrsky

[Crixaliss]

I actually quite enjoy that point where you hit an enrage timer, and still beat the boss, gives a nice feeling of "phew, that was a close one, but we managed it!".

 

I echo the sentiment of those saying that its good as a check that the dps are doing their job properly, i.e. not everything is down to the tank and healer for once.

 

To those saying its not necessary as a dps check - what mechanic would you implement to make sure dps are doing enough dps?

[Whatsalightsaver]

I don't think enrage timers are useless or even necessarily bad boss "mechanics". However I think if most people stop and think about it, numerical superiority is by far the least interesting and lazy way to make a boss hard. I'd rather have fire to stay out of, a difficult interrupt, or a punishing positional mechanic than a gear check on every boss. What happens is when people are able to hit that timer, it's not all that different from normal mode because you were able to hit the minimum mathematical requirement. You wouldn't even really know something had changed because instead of added mechanics, the bar for what you have to pull was simply set higher. Like I said, not a bad mechanic, but not that exciting either.

[Zilkin]

Not true. Our group is perfectly capable of killing the mob - it is down to 5 percent health, nobody is dying and everything is stable.

 

Suddenly some arbitrary 'timer' kicks in and decides that even though we have no issues with the mob we didn't kill him in 5 minutes so we suck. That is a stupid, arbitrary and ultimately worthless distinction that does nothing to enhance the game.

 

Enrage timers are there to have skill/gear check for the DPS'ers and also to prevent you from just stacking healers. If you think that is arbitary then I don't know what to say.

Edited February 7, 2012 by Zilkin

[sikandar]

Enrage timers are definitely unoriginal. I will not say lazy due to the amount of work that goes into development of any encounter. I would rather each class be pushed to the limit of all their abilities not just DPS. Crowd control, target prioritization, environmental awareness are just a few mechanics that should be considered, not a 3 minute faceroll that is completely dependent on an upgrade from rating 120 to 124+.

 

Let me use more than :

 

<Begin Loop>

Grav Round x 3

Full Auto

HiB

Grav Round

Charged Bolt

Hammer Shot

Grav Round

Full Auto

[Check Enemy Health]

<EndIf Enemy Dead Else Begin Loop>

[Xaearth]

If you want to goof around do normal-mode FPs then.

Also pretty funny is that BT, BP and Foundry actually make us do stuff like that in HM(except that we still have the HDDT-setup).

 

You're so funny, actually thinking Hardmodes are supposed to be "hard" and not the lvl 50 equivalent of their normal 1-49 counterparts.

 

There's a reason for nightmare mode you know...

 

While you have in fact stated that point, you have failed to provide a mechanic that does exactly that - test DPS "doing their job" without resorting to an enrage timer. Damage threshold? That results in an incredibly boring fight - you deal minimal damage to a boss, if you deal any damage at all, then it's healing / damaging ad nauseam. Any other mechanics? They don't involve gear checks and an MMORPG, being in part an RPG, has to include gear checks because the idea is it's about your character, not about you. Want a pure skill-based game? Play StarCraft (or Quake, or Battlefield, or Counterstrike).

 

I've suggested mechanics several times that people keep outright refusing to address.

 

Use of one or more of the following mechanics can and will test DPS by the very nature of the fact that you can't sit around and rely on the tanks and healers to make sure no one ever dies:

1) Make bosses have less predictable aggro patterns (less easily tanked)

2) Spawn adds that cannot be easily tanked (as a function of damage/armor penetration/lifesteal rather than threat), cannot be mezzed, and near-instantly respawn when killed

3) Spawn adds that cannot be mezzed, and heal the boss with a lifesteal mechanic based on the amount of max health of their target (tanks tanking them = higher heals on the boss)

4) Take people out of the fight unexpectedly for a significant amount of time, either through death or a banish mechanic of some sort

 

These are only a few examples of mechanics that would require encounters to be completed efficiently and promptly, but, more importantly, also puts a burden in testing the DPS skill in their ability to survive an encounter without relying solely on the healer and tank. In other words, everyone is held responsible for their own survival and the tanks and healers support the innate survival skills of each individual group member.

 

The problem isn't DPS doing their damage - it's a check whether the DPS are good enough in the first place. Now, since this is an MMORPG, the "good enough" is a function of player skill, but mostly of prior effort put into progressing your character. Overgeared characters having no problems with hardmodes? That's exactly the idea - represents your character getting stronger and the relative easiness with which the character handles the encounter represents this strength.

 

That's not a function of skill, not even for the "character".

It's a function of having a wealthy enough benefactor to make saving the princess trivial.

 

Also, an enrage timer is a great feedback provider. While in any other mechanic, you can assign blame to other characters in the group (for example the healer for missing heals), an enrage timer is a very clear test method - if your group hit the enrage timer, it was not the healer's fault, it was the DPS (conversely, if a group member dies not by doing something stupid earlier, it's not their fault, it's the healer's or the tank's).

 

Except good, skilled DPS can and will make up for the shortfalls/mistakes of a tank or healer, but will then just end up failing to the enrage timer because they are putting support of the group ahead of optimal numbers. In other words, DPS contributing to group success can and will lead to the DPS getting blamed for "not doing their job."

 

Next thing, you said that boss fights have pure enrage mechanics which just mean "have enough gear to hit the timer", but that's simply wrong. Most boss fights have distractors (in the form of adds, special boss attacks, environmental hazards etc.) to also make sure that players pay attention. For example, the Bulwark fight has the "defensive protocols" healing shield and the adds that come to repair it, requiring DPS to either kill the mobs or CC them properly. Now, what an enrage timer does is it makes those distractors count. If you simply knew that failing to catch the repair bots on Bulwark would cost you an additional 30 seconds of a fight, you probably wouldn't care. Once you know that it means beating or not beating the enrage timer, you have to really pay attention to that. When a fight lacks an enrage timer, it's easy to make it linear. If it's linear, there's no way to instill a sense of urgency and thus prod players into making mistakes - it all turns down to memorizing repetitive notions.

 

Or, you know, you could actually make the encounter the least bit threatening to players to begin with so those 30 seconds would matter.

 

Finally, there are already encounters in the game that have non-enrage mechanics to check for DPS, one notable is the bonus boss in Kaon, the amount of healing he requires makes it necessary for a healer to move to a draining rotation, thus becoming a resource race. However, this still makes for an enrage timer, only instead of being fixed, the enrage timer is decided by the healer's gear and skill (the end result is just the same as with a hard enrage - when the healer runs out of energy, the team gets instawiped).

 

Goodie. "Soft enrages."

Too bad the party still isn't actually being threatened.

The healer just can't do the Boris "I AM INVINCIBLE!" anymore...

[mArchangel]

My guild doesn't even hit the enrage timers on Nightmare. You're doing something wrong.

 

Aren't you epic? LOL

 

Nobody cares. And yeah again the ****** talk: You cannot do what we do. You are doing something wrong!

 

 

What a load of arrogant and egocentrical, elitist BS!