Please Do Not Nerf Lost Island. A Rational View.

[Fossman]

Its really not that hard if you know the fights. I dont understand why people are so fussy about it. If you want easy mode do it on normal. The difficulty for HM is exactly where it needs to be given the rewards. Possible rakata gear with chances of getting a mount and a mini rakghoul pet. I mean good god BH gear is sooo easy to get now theres really no excuse for nerfing content. Learn the fights and quit QQing about things being too hard

[grallmate]

Lost Island is just too big of a jump from the difficulty of Tier 1 flashpoints. If it remains a flashpoint, it should be nerfed so that more players are likely to use that fancy new group finder to PUG it to completion. There's no point in creating a group finder if future content doesn't facilitate its use.

 

I don't know what you would call it, but Lost Island and any similar future content should not even be called Flashpoints, and the rewards should more closely resemble that of raids rather than common flashpoints. Even if you disagree, I sure as heck shouldn't be getting Tionese and even columni is debatable. I would think Rakata should be minimum with some BH coms thrown in for certain boss kills. Perhaps BioWare could tout 4-man raids as a unique feature.

 

Drops are fine. HM FPs are about as tough (little bit easier) than SM Ops. They take 4 people about 45 minutes to get 1 (now a couple of) Columi piece and a few Tionese. HM LI is more like a HM Op and takes 4 people about 45 minutes to get 1 Rakata piece and some Columi (including the mainhand you can only get from Karagga otherwise) assuming they can figure out/know the fights. I could agree that it should drop Columi comms instead of Tionese though. We cleared it in 35 mins last night and we only have about 8 Rakata pieces between us. One of the guys was in mostly BM.

 

For other rewards, you already get Daily comms of all the bosses and 8 BH from the weekly. Aside from bumping Tionese comms up to Columi, the drops do not need to be increased. It is easily beatable in Columi and some Tionese if you get to know the mechanics. If you don't, having Rakata or Campaign will give you a bigger margin for error but it won't get you through the instance. Hell I could hack a lvl 100 max skills in all trees build and still die to Sav Rak if I don't know the mechanics. I could be immune to damage and still lose. I don't even think there IS another fight in the game where mechanics can still kill a 'God Mode' character.

 

In terms of the fights: LR-5 is a mechanics test on heals/DPS. Sav-Rak is a healer test. Lorrick is a mechanics test on the tank. That isn't to say that the others do nothing in those fights, but those are the biggest challenges. And thats a big change from most of the other FPs where all the mechanics are on the tank (move boss here, interrupt move A) or healer (cleanse DoT, lay AoE). On top of that, you can't cover for losing a player like you can in an Op, you either lose the tank and wipe, lose the healer and wipe, or lose a DPS and wipe on enrage. Anyway, when you do finally beat it that first time it feels like you have really achieved something in this game.

 

I guess to give you an idea of the difference between Tier 1 and Tier 2: compare SM EV and SM EC. Then come back and tell me the difference is bigger than the difference between any HM FP and LI HM. I guess that is what it comes down to: people see "Tier 2" and go "I've beaten all of Tier 1, this will be easy". They get destroyed and disheartened and state that it's too hard because they can clear all of Tier 1 easily but they died on HM LI.

 

Anyway, for what its worth Xerofive, if you are on Dalborra and you've got some kind of VoIP, I'm happy to help you through it and show you that its not that bad.

[NoTomorrow]

Lost Island difficulty scales down extremely with the gear you have on you. I was one of those ppl whining about how nobody wanted to play with me LI because it was too hard. Now we got a team of 4 ppl all full augmented rakata with 2-3 pieces of Black hole. The difficulty starts to remind me of black talon.. Edited July 9, 2012 by NoTomorrow

[Siorac]

In terms of the fights: LR-5 is a mechanics test on heals/DPS. Sav-Rak is a healer test. Lorrick is a mechanics test on the tank. That isn't to say that the others do nothing in those fights, but those are the biggest challenges.

 

LR-5 is a very easy mechanics test on the DPS if both of them are ranged. If any of them are melee then it becomes a matter or careful planning on the TANK's part. That's why that fight is flawed. If you have two ranged DPS, the tank can be braindead as long as someone interrupts Incinerate - he doesn't have to move even once!. If you have any melee DPS, the tank must plan his kiting very carefully to keep both himself and the DPS alive while providing 100% uptime for said melee player.

 

I don't really have any suggestion as to how to solve this problem with the fight. My one request would be to remove the adds. It is really quite aggravating that in addition to trying to avoid lava, lightning, paying attention to interrupt Incinerate you also have to do something about the adds which have a horrible habit of swarming the healer. And if the healer has to start healing himself that's a wipe in this fight.

 

OR, if they don't want to remove the "soft enrage" that adds and lightning provide then remove the hard enrage. Having BOTH is a bit too much.

[Aurojiin]

My one request would be to remove the adds. It is really quite aggravating that in addition to trying to avoid lava, lightning, paying attention to interrupt Incinerate you also have to do something about the adds which have a horrible habit of swarming the healer. And if the healer has to start healing himself that's a wipe in this fight.

Meh. The adds hit for about 80 a piece. I've had 6 of them beating on my face and even the pushback on my heals wasn't a big deal. You can virtually ignore them. I always tell DPS to AoE when it's convenient and stay on the boss otherwise.

[LarryRow]

as long as your tank can hit the int on incinerate it doesnt even tick = 0 dmg ppl and it can also be cleansed if u have a ****** tank that cant int

 

If this is true, the healers I have been matched with suck. Incinerate always seems to go the full duration for me.

 

Even with my finger on the button and knowing incinerate is coming, it always seems to sneak one tick onto me.

 

I also hate that sometimes you try to kite him and he doesn't follow you in melee range. Instead he channels incinerate and you are too far away to interrupt. Uncool.

[Aurojiin]

If this is true, the healers I have been matched with suck. Incinerate always seems to go the full duration for me.

 

Even with my finger on the button and knowing incinerate is coming, it always seems to sneak one tick onto me.

 

I also hate that sometimes you try to kite him and he doesn't follow you in melee range. Instead he channels incinerate and you are too far away to interrupt. Uncool.

Most healers are too ****** for cleanse, and need to prove this by healing through like a boss.

 

Frankly, though, get better DPS. They should really be interrupting Incinerate. Hell, as a healer I'll interrupt it via Focus Target if the tank is out of range.

[Scorpassailant]

I think its good to have challenges in a game that are not easy to overcome and LI HM is one of them. I agree it shouldn't be nerfed.

[NoTomorrow]

Most healers are too ****** for cleanse, and need to prove this by healing through like a boss.

 

Frankly, though, get better DPS. They should really be interrupting Incinerate. Hell, as a healer I'll interrupt it via Focus Target if the tank is out of range.

 

it takes skill to heal and to notice those tiny little debuff icons. I understand ppl not being able to perform all the actions.

[LarryRow]

it takes skill to heal and to notice those tiny little debuff icons. I understand ppl not being able to perform all the actions.

 

If the tank is their target, it's as big as their own debuffs. It's also like the only debuff you get. If they are giving out a heal to the dps, the castbar should show in target of target. If the dps are targeting adds, that's about the only excuse.

 

Edit: I get that healing well takes an awful lot of skill and attention, but given the devastating effects of Incinerate, they should be keeping one eye on these indicators to avoid wiping the group.

Edited July 9, 2012 by LarryRow

[sphyg]

Tank should interrupt incenerate. ALWAYS!!!

 

This flashpoint is easy sauce.

 

Me and my guild clear it multiple times a week. Heck I've even pugged a group with my alt healer and we cleared it.

 

If I run in my sentinel with a buddy who is also a sentinel we clear this in like 35 minutes.

 

2 melee on the lr-5 sentinel droid was tough to get down, but now we have it down to an art!

[Powerrmongerr]

You know what's one thing they definitely should change about this flashpoint (and perhaps in the game in general) ... they should make it more clear that incinerate is a continuing effect. Maybe continuing effects could glow, or something, so you could know without trial and error or checking online as to why interrupt isn't "working" properly. Edited July 9, 2012 by Powerrmongerr

[Kerkuk]

I agree with the OP. DO NOT Nerf. Please.

[Coriolan_Martius]

We nearly had it after 5 times but the healer had to "log off".

 

 

I agree that it is doable but only if you don't lag/stutter(which happens a lot even with very-low settings). It also helps if 1 or both DPSers are ranged. Btw, there are times when the tank can't interrupt because he is moving the boss. So one of the DPSers should try to catch those "fails".

 

Honestly, it is mostly the lag issue for me. When the "blue spheres" pop up my FPS goes under 1 FPS, although I usually average 10-20 FPS. All other FPs and OPs(Kaon excepted) run decently well. Our group collectively lagged /stuttered for 1-2 secs and got caught in aoe. That is what prevented us from clearing it. Mechanics are fine but fix the performance.

[sphyg]

This was me in augmented columni gear.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl1LS6hyn1k&feature=youtube_gdata_player

 

2 melee. We position the balls do tank doesn't have to kite. Therefore he can get interrupts.

Edited July 9, 2012 by sphyg

[xerofive]

Drops are fine. HM FPs are about as tough (little bit easier) than SM Ops. They take 4 people about 45 minutes to get 1 (now a couple of) Columi piece and a few Tionese. HM LI is more like a HM Op and takes 4 people about 45 minutes to get 1 Rakata piece and some Columi (including the mainhand you can only get from Karagga otherwise) assuming they can figure out/know the fights. I could agree that it should drop Columi comms instead of Tionese though. We cleared it in 35 mins last night and we only have about 8 Rakata pieces between us. One of the guys was in mostly BM.

 

For other rewards, you already get Daily comms of all the bosses and 8 BH from the weekly. Aside from bumping Tionese comms up to Columi, the drops do not need to be increased. It is easily beatable in Columi and some Tionese if you get to know the mechanics. If you don't, having Rakata or Campaign will give you a bigger margin for error but it won't get you through the instance. Hell I could hack a lvl 100 max skills in all trees build and still die to Sav Rak if I don't know the mechanics. I could be immune to damage and still lose. I don't even think there IS another fight in the game where mechanics can still kill a 'God Mode' character.

 

In terms of the fights: LR-5 is a mechanics test on heals/DPS. Sav-Rak is a healer test. Lorrick is a mechanics test on the tank. That isn't to say that the others do nothing in those fights, but those are the biggest challenges. And thats a big change from most of the other FPs where all the mechanics are on the tank (move boss here, interrupt move A) or healer (cleanse DoT, lay AoE). On top of that, you can't cover for losing a player like you can in an Op, you either lose the tank and wipe, lose the healer and wipe, or lose a DPS and wipe on enrage. Anyway, when you do finally beat it that first time it feels like you have really achieved something in this game.

 

I guess to give you an idea of the difference between Tier 1 and Tier 2: compare SM EV and SM EC. Then come back and tell me the difference is bigger than the difference between any HM FP and LI HM. I guess that is what it comes down to: people see "Tier 2" and go "I've beaten all of Tier 1, this will be easy". They get destroyed and disheartened and state that it's too hard because they can clear all of Tier 1 easily but they died on HM LI.

 

Anyway, for what its worth Xerofive, if you are on Dalborra and you've got some kind of VoIP, I'm happy to help you through it and show you that its not that bad.

 

I think the drops across the board are fairly poor. No matter the flashpoint, you get flooded with Tionese crystals (why do you need so many crystals per com anyway?) and Tionese coms which become obsolete in about two days of dungeon grinding. You can get columni from dailies, the weekly, and certain boss mobs, but as far as black hole coms go, you're pretty much screwed unless you're already raiding or you don't mind grinding dailies. As you have it now, people queue up once per day for the daily and then they have next to no reason to queue for another. 5 per day from the daily is pretty silly when the average piece of gear costs around 60 coms. I don't think it would be crazy for each main boss in T1 to drop a columni com and for each main boss in T2 to drop one BH com. That's pretty much how both Rift and WoW handle their boss loot.

 

You can argue against their being a problem all you want, but the fact that there's a 17 page thread of people arguing back and forth over this issue indicates that there is, in fact, an issue. I don't care what a group of people can do with guildies. I don't care what one or two people did with a really god PUG group. I mean, I cleared storymode KC with a PUG the very first time I queued for it without a single wipe, but even after doing so, I'm not going to sit here and say I expect every group to be able to do the same.

 

I'll reiterate. This is a flashpoint, but the mechanics of Lost Island are not friendly to pick-up groups. BioWare is going to have to design their flashpoints around the use of the group finder if they want people to continue using it. Blizzard realized this, Trion realized this, and if I were a betting man, I'd say BioWare will eventually realize this. Not everyone is in a high quality guild where they can successfully run Lost Island with a roughly static group of players, and unless they're willing to grind group finder dailies and BH dailies to get BH gear to trivialize the instance, they're going to leave just like so many did before 1.3.

 

This doesn't even mean Lost Island has to be nerfed into oblivion. I always thought the Zandalari heroics in WoW were ideal. You got twice the reward for putting in roughly twice the effort. They were a bit rough for the average PUG, but 90% of the time, we still got through the instance despite the fact that it took longer than average. I had no issues running both ZA and ZG once per day every day. I don't know how many people succeed in running LI once a day in a PUG.

[Chaqen]

I have found out recently that the second boss in LI Hm is really a tank positioning test, and if positioned right the tank can make sure no one else eats the frontal, and make it where they avoid it at least half of the time, reducing the amount of HPS that is required in this fight.

 

Morale of the story, play smart and you wont need an over powered healer dragging your *** through the instance.

[timmyw]

Sigh.

 

The more I do this place the less I like it. We have a group of 4 people that breeze through the place. But for what ever reason we haven't been able to do it for about 3 weeks together. Mostly it's because we all have pretty rich lives outside of the game so getting everyone on line at the same time seems to be like herding cats. Which makes me value the time I do spend playing a bit more.

 

Now I am not saying it's not easy when done properly but with only one exception whenever I have tried to pug a replacement in the place we have failed miserably. For whatever reason, it's wipe after wipe after wipe on L5-R. As soon as we go in with our golden 4 there's not a problem in the world. It's been a very unlucky time to pug I guess.

 

I have noticed as well that L5-R seems to be dropping those coil things on the tank occasionally now. This seems to be occurring since 1.3.

 

Seems to me that not many people run the place. I agree personally, it's nice to have hard content and really, it's not that hard when you work out the mechanics but it can get very frustrating when someone just "doesn't get it". Then continues to "not get it". Which seems to be our curse, everyone has to know what they are doing or bad things happen.

[Arousal]

Run this content over a dozen times. Gets funner and funner every time. All future T2 flashpoints should be tuned towards this level (or above).

 

To anyone who does not agree with this, or that it breaks the game - don't run it. That's your MO and up to you. But realistically, this isn't difficult at all.

 

Completely agree w/ OP

[nDjiin]

Any FP that can be blasted through in 20 mins does not need nerfing - quite the opposite in fact. Totally agree with OP.

[Aurojiin]

That's the amusing part, actually. LI is one of the fastest flashpoints in the game if you don't wipe.

[Fallenenjeru]

It does not need a nerf,when you know the mechanics ( and this is important! ) it becomes a lot quicker than the other FP's and definitely worth the time repeating. We have it down to 24 minutes now on our timed runs and trying to shave more seconds off . P.S. Finally got my Midnight Rakling !

[PainOfDemise]

I'm glad this is a harder flashpoint. I have tried it a few times and haven't been able to get past the first actual boss with the groups I have been in. I have to say, I like that. It is a challenge for once. It's been a long time since I've tried it and I'm going to start trying it more now.

 

They need to make more flashpoints like this, it actually makes me feel like I accomplished something when I finally complete it.

[Kalebratha]

Please make a nightmare mode version of this and all the other flashpoints.

[GabrielConnor]

The only thing I would change in this instance is make the first boss prefer ranged targets for his AoE of death. Other than that the difficulty is fine and we need more FP's like this.