Getting tired of content difficulty, not because of the actual difficulty, but people

[Levram]

Now what? I can clear it over and over on SM, but that gear isn't quite good enough to do HM, unless perhaps everyone in the OP has it, and that group is harder to put together.

 

ToS is still too broken for my taste...

 

192 token gear from the 3.0 SM operations is perfectly appropriate for clearing the HM versions of those operations. And yes, everyone in the group needs to be in 192 token gear, that's why you run with a guild for HM operation progression content. The current HM operations are not PUGable with players in commendation gear, just as DF and DP HM weren't when they were current at-tier content.

 

I can't identify any ToS bugs that prevent boss clears since the 3.1 patch. The fights all work as intended now.

 

My problem with the current operations are mostly centered around the RNG elements that can wipe a group no matter how perfectly they are doing the mechanics.

 

With Bulo, it's the random jumping and random locations of the pirates.

 

The spawn location of each set of Drunken Pirates is not random. It is controlled by the player whom Bulo is aggroed on.

 

I would contend that there are no RNG elements that "can wipe a group no matter how perfectly they are doing the mechanics." As long as the RNG elements are handled appropriately by the player(s) affected, there is no reason why a wipe would occur.

 

Progression operation teams are one-shotting the new HM operation fights. Therefore the RNG elements, when they are handled by skilled players, are not causing unavoidable wipes .

[Aerich]

My other issue with it is...Excepting the boss and bonus boss, these bosses drop 184 gear. This means you should be able to get by with 184 gear or less, because when you do content in any video game, you should expect the rewards, assuming you are rewarded with gear, should be an upgrade to what you currently have equipped. This is only the case half the time - less than half if you don't do bonus bosses, and is not only NOT an upgrade, but isn't even on-par with what most people come to HM's with - 186's.

 

This is the biggest issue right here. If you require better gear than what the content rewards then either the content is overtuned or the itemization is undervalued. Sadly, this has been the way EAustin has done many HM FPs since Rakghouls - the only masochists who did HM Lost Island where the drops would have been upgrades was the random pug dps who assumed the other three people would be *massively* overgeared and carry them (and every time it didn't work out that way, the group fell apart).

 

By the time people are geared enough to go through these with a reasonable chance of success, then there ceases to be any point in running them at all since you're probably not going to get anything out of it. I think the biggest problem is, they cannot decide what role HM FPs are supposed to fill. Long ago, they were a gear progression to get you in to OPs - but now you can jump straight in to an OP and HM FPs have become kind of mini-OPs in themselves. Which is fine if that's what they want to do with them but if the content needs OPs-ish level gear and OPs level coordination but isn't dropping OPs level loot, then why am I running it instead of an OP?

 

For HM FPs they need to:

1) re-tune all of the fights for people using only 186 basic comm gear - no augments, no voice chat, any combination of classes so long as the 3 roles are filled

2) have all bosses except bonus and final drop 192 comm gear

3) bonus and final boss drops 198 comm gear

4) final boss, bonus boss, and daily reward should be a balanced number of ultimate comms

 

OR

 

Keep things as is, declare HM FPs 4-man OPs and have the bonus and final boss drop OPs loot.

Edited February 19, 2015 by Aerich

[Levram]

Which is fine if that's what they want to do with them but if the content needs OPs-ish level gear and OPs level coordination but isn't dropping OPs level loot, then why am I running it instead of an OP?

 

I run the new HM FPs because they are fun in that they actually present a moderate challenge. I don't care about the loot drops in the least. The challenge is enough of a reward for my time.

Edited February 19, 2015 by Levram

[Shoraan]

I got tired of content difficulty when I saw people forming pug groups and demanding achievements - less than three weeks after SoR was released.

 

But that's ok, I don't have to do the ops. I can craft all the gear I need for any single player content and I only need the ops level gear if I actually take part in an ops, which is not going to happen anyway.

 

When the next level increase comes I will be able to craft level 204 gear with basic mats, so no loss there either.

Edited February 19, 2015 by Shoraan

[Grayseven]

 

The spawn location of each set of Drunken Pirates is not random. It is controlled by the player whom Bulo is aggroed on.

 

I would contend that there are no RNG elements that "can wipe a group no matter how perfectly they are doing the mechanics." As long as the RNG elements are handled appropriately by the player(s) affected, there is no reason why a wipe would occur.

 

Progression operation teams are one-shotting the new HM operation fights. Therefore the RNG elements, when they are handled by skilled players, are not causing unavoidable wipes .

 

Really, because our tanks follow the same routine every time...that is, they go to the same place every single time...and it's a 50/50 split between the Drunken Pirates spawning up top and spawning below in the corner to the right of Bulo.

 

Are you going to tell us next that Bulo doesn't randomly jump positions?

 

As for the Coratanni cannons being there to keep the tanks from getting bored...RNG should never...NEVER...be an aspect of a boss fight mechanic. If you don't want the tanks to "be bored" try more mechanics like Bulo, don't throw RNG cone effects that can triple stack to the point that there is no "safe area" for players caught in the middle of it. This is especially true when the games basic systems can't agree with the clients where the players actually are with any certainty.

 

And for people talking about "skilled players"...what a joke. The object is to make the game fun for everyone, no matter what their skill level is. That is why you have SM, HM and NiM operations. These current operations on SM are worse than previous operations HM's in certain fights. You should not have to be a progression raider to do SM operations.

 

EA/BW is chasing players away from end game activities. Tacticals are too boring, HM FP's ramp up the difficulty in too big of a step for a lot of players and provide crap rewards that don't prepare players for operations and the SM operations are entirely unsuited for the SM title or for the more casual raider.

 

Yeah, it is painfully obvious that EA/BW does not play their own game. They will stream a couple of their community folks playing around with low level toons in PvP or leveling activities but I'm willing to bet you won't see a single stream of 8 and 16 EA/BW employees running Rav or ToS, or better still, let a handful of EA/BW employees run a GF and try these SM operations with PuGs...

[Tfranco]

The op is right, there is a difference between fun and agonizing when it comes to difficulty. Especially with the communities attitude of "one person died? Time to flame them to no end, pull the room and rage quit"

I haven't done any pve content this xpac, because I'm sick of pve, but it sounds like the rewards from HM should be normal mode rewards and HM needs a boost to rewards.

[GopherLuV]

Really, because our tanks follow the same routine every time...that is, they go to the same place every single time...and it's a 50/50 split between the Drunken Pirates spawning up top and spawning below in the corner to the right of Bulo.

 

Are you going to tell us next that Bulo doesn't randomly jump positions?

 

 

As far as I know the jump is random, but yes he was correct, you can absolutely control WHERE the ads spawn... it's something done by many many tanks in the HM bulo fight in order to control them better... I've never tanked it but have listened to them, and it works very well. As long as the tank has aggro and is in the correct position, the ads will spawn where he wants them to. Also, bulo is a big heal/raid awareness check... you raid team needs to not be cracked out monkeys when mass barrage comes down, or your healers will get overwhelmed and have range issues... as well as tanks controlling ads, if they aren't killed right away, they need to be taunted or the tank needs to be there with a barrel, because about 10s of all the ads hitting a healer, and your dead/overwhelmed and someone else (probably a tank..) has died.. in HM anytime the tanks are just a few seconds slow, the healers will be ~60% hp down and unable to heal the tanks, which means death at that time (mine carts >.<)

 

To the few who still say the ToS is bugged, theres one, exactly one, bug that i've seen still in that operation... In revanite commanders, the bosses sometimes stay bugged on the ground while they are actually up top...... thats it.... Underlurker functions amazingly well now (mind you it's a VERY serious DPS check for a pug group, but everyone pulling 2750+ it's an easy fight... if your DPS can pull HM DPS and push 3500+ in that fight, it's basically 2 ad waves and boss dies...) I haven't run the SM much lately but do know that it was functioning wonderfully last few times I have run it..

 

Again though, to the original topic of HM Flashpoints... yes they are far to difficult ATM, I ran battle of Rishi in a full min/max 192+ ( 3 or 4 198 pieces, maybe more) commando healer with guildies for tank/dps and for one, there was NO WAY we were clearing that bonus boss, it's to much healing to quickly while still managing your cleanse on CD... but, the rest of it? barely broke a sweat.. It has some pretty tight burst healing and I would assume some 186 geared healers will have issues with that... but I dont see a nicely geared 186-192 healer having to much trouble in there if they know how to heal. The DPS checks seemed non-existant, any ads died quickly... The tank was very well geared, but I assume a crappy comm geared tank would give the healer a bit more trouble, still not to bad. But, again, they are very very difficult for what they reward is my point... I think at the very least ever boss should drop 192 gear.. bonus/final maybe drop some 198 (actually bonus should drop like some 204 *********** GOD mODE **** if you can clear it with 1 heal 2dps, 1tank...)

Edited February 19, 2015 by GopherLuV

[g_land]

Our tanks haven't learned the cadence of the bulo fight so they are unable to position appropriately to control the pirates spawn point.

 

Fixed it for you... or they are just bad. Your choice.

 

At the start of a content cycle SMs are progression regardless of what you guilds focus is. Same thing happened when tfb was bumped and sv was released. By the time df and dp came out it was a joke because everyone was 2 tiers at least above the minimum required gear level for their SMs, that minimum required was 156 btw.

 

If the more casual/SM focused guilds could just burn through that content then you would have a log jam of people bored with them but complaining about HMs being to difficult Lol.

 

Whenever the next operation comes out and you all can still clear the sm in 186 rating gear, I hope we don't hear about it being a problem because by then most will be in a mix of 192/198s.

[Grayseven]

Fixed it for you... or they are just bad. Your choice.

 

At the start of a content cycle SMs are progression regardless of what you guilds focus is. Same thing happened when tfb was bumped and sv was released. By the time df and dp came out it was a joke because everyone was 2 tiers at least above the minimum required gear level for their SMs, that minimum required was 156 btw.

 

If the more casual/SM focused guilds could just burn through that content then you would have a log jam of people bored with them but complaining about HMs being to difficult Lol.

 

Whenever the next operation comes out and you all can still clear the sm in 186 rating gear, I hope we don't hear about it being a problem because by then most will be in a mix of 192/198s.

 

Wrong, but you go ahead and believe whatever you want. We have countless hours of video proving that our tanks know their business and the fact that they go to the same spot EVERY SINGLE TIME and the Drunken Pirates do not spawn in the same place EVERY SINGLE TIME proves you wrong.

 

In previous tiers, the SM Operations were not the level of difficulty the current operations are. Not even DF/DP. In previous tiers, everyone had end game raid options because the operations, while challenging, were not set up with random crap that can wipe you. They also weren't set up using mechanics that the game engine and/or hardware can't handle.

 

But you keep making excuses for EA/BW, I'm sure they appreciate players they cover with crap telling other players that it smells like roses.

Edited February 19, 2015 by Grayseven

[Grayseven]

Underlurker will be bugged until EA/BW fixes whatever hardware/engine problem they have that doesn't properly update players positions.

[FerkWork]

Fixed it for you... or they are just bad. Your choice.

 

At the start of a content cycle SMs are progression regardless of what you guilds focus is. Same thing happened when tfb was bumped and sv was released. By the time df and dp came out it was a joke because everyone was 2 tiers at least above the minimum required gear level for their SMs, that minimum required was 156 btw.

 

If the more casual/SM focused guilds could just burn through that content then you would have a log jam of people bored with them but complaining about HMs being to difficult Lol.

 

Whenever the next operation comes out and you all can still clear the sm in 186 rating gear, I hope we don't hear about it being a problem because by then most will be in a mix of 192/198s.

 

SM Progression made me giggle. Unfortunately there will be those who still won't clear even that late as I've on off nights from Progression(HM the true progression) I help fill an empty slot for other guilds running it. Even with voice I still see many failing mostly due to healers wasting heals at wrong times, DPS lacking DPS, and tanks who stand in stupid or drop stupid on people (I was bomb running one time for a group and had a tank drop rapid fire on me ) The only fight that should be anti-pug is Sword Squadron only because the tank swap requires voice and bomb runners need a timer.

Everything else can be beaten with patience and practice.

Edited February 19, 2015 by FerkWork

[GopherLuV]

@greyseven... And you keep clinging to the thought that you can't control the pirates because i've watched it happen umm idk 26 pulls the first night and 7 last night... then literally countless times in SM... Perhaps your tanks just don't know what they are supposed to do in order to set where the pirates spawn. . . .

 

And keep blaming clients for underlurker issues . . . It's not broken... functions very very well now and almost all the problems I see are due to DPS issues/people being stupid in the cross... I do take back what I said because there is still a small bug in underlurker, if you have sages/slingers with AoE trying to hit that back two ads at the same time, sometimes the boss (when stacked there..) messes that up and one of the ads won't get hit, to fix you just move the boss to the far side of the ads and bam, aoe hits everything again... this was introduced when they changed up the bosses hitbox a few patches back...

 

OH and btw... even if your tanks can't control where the pirates spawn, it's really not that hard of a fight... you just need tanks who know what they are doing.. e.g. if they spawn on the right while your barrel tank is somewhere else, other tank aoe taunt ads and hold for 6 sec while the other tank runs and grabs them.. also need to learn how to kill the even numbered waves with mass barrage, as well as sometimes getting lucky and killing odd or even waves with volley (yes, tanks can get volley if they know what they are doing) and that makes the fight a cake walk... even in HM...

Edited February 19, 2015 by GopherLuV

[DisIzMe]

So, in other words you can't.

Lol. Yup,i cant. Pretty sure you can't either. Cause its impossible,unless trolling gives in game buffs.

[Levram]

Wrong, but you go ahead and believe whatever you want. We have countless hours of video proving that our tanks know their business and the fact that they go to the same spot EVERY SINGLE TIME and the Drunken Pirates do not spawn in the same place EVERY SINGLE TIME proves you wrong.

 

You should definitely go back and properly study your "countless hours" of videos wiping on Bulo. Obviously you're not actually being observant of the mechanic that results in the spawn location of the Drunken Pirates being completely controllable by your team.

 

Rather than just assume you're right because you've spent hundreds of thousands of credits wiping, try listening to the multiple other players in this thread who are telling you it's a controllable mechanic, because it is.

 

My team's chosen spawn location for the first set of Drunken Pirates is always the bottom right door because that's where we want them to be. There's no RGN involved.

 

And no, I will not explain the mechanic for controlling their location in this thread because, if you were actually interested in clearing this boss, you would bother to go research the detailed mechanic responses that players have provided for Quartermaster Bulo in the Flashpoints and Operations sub-forum.

Edited February 20, 2015 by Levram

[Bachannal]

You will be flamed by fanboys until the cows come home, but you're right...

 

There is fun/challenging, then there is frustrating/challenging...

 

I've now been able to clear more of the 3.0 content, being overgeared makes all the difference in the world... but I find that if I am not doing it with guildies, then I'm wasting my time...

 

I've been in GF for a long time now, I find myself going to click on it, only to think, "what's the point, the odds of getting a PUG that can clear HM 60 is low, waste of my time".

 

 

FWIW, at least for the 4 HM's before Blood Hunt/Rishi, I can pug almost all of them without blinking. These new HM's...they kick my butt. I wanna get better at them, but pugging them? Not gonna happen.

 

I think my own frustration is that so much of the new content seems to be blatantly anti pug (that or Bioware just expects literally every player to be great that their role, who knows). I like pugging, I like meeting new people and I like there being some level of uncertainty as to if you can finish content, but trying to pug the two new FP's? Hell no.

[Bachannal]

^^ This.

 

I posted a raging rant over in the Ops forums about the inability to complete the new HM's (Bloodhunt & Rishi) and the fact that the New ops are challenging and unforgiving. I think this post here pretty much sums up the problem.

 

I am actually going to cancel my sub, my girlfriends sub, and I am going to bring 5 friends of mine with me. All because its just not fun anymore.

 

There is ZERO and let me say it again, ZERO reason to cue up for the lvl 60 HM's. None! They are painful, likely to wipe, give you a repair bill and all to get 6 more elite coms over the 55 Hm's AND the gear is complete crap as well. Frankly the entire comms gear is crap and I just dont feel like its improving me in the least.

 

Again its the silence that speaks volumes.

 

Whats silly is my friend and I were talking about when we would form up 16 man raids 4x a week on fleet and there would be 4 to 5 each night forming up. Now there are NONE and really who wants that pain? The game went from FUN to (not) FUN very fast and I do not think the Dev team really cares or is listening. I would love to be proven wrong.

 

 

YES. I am clearly not the only one with his 60 toons almost maxed out (if not maxed out) with Elite Comms that are not being spent...why? Because I have already cannibalized the Elite gear sheerly for the ONE armor augment in it that's worth anything. The rest of the mods don't even make sense half of the time, and you have to pick/pull mods to make the gear usable. I get that it's not supposed to be perfect out of the box, but how about being anything other than mostly worthless?

 

And the slow rate at getting Ultimates now? Psh. I dunno *** people over in Bioware's product team are thinking, but they really need to reassess how they handle key aspects of this game.

[Heat-Wave]

192 token gear from the 3.0 SM operations is perfectly appropriate for clearing the HM versions of those operations. And yes, everyone in the group needs to be in 192 token gear, that's why you run with a guild for HM operation progression content. The current HM operations are not PUGable with players in commendation gear, just as DF and DP HM weren't when they were current at-tier content.

 

This is the problem, right here...

 

You would need a group of people who run SM together over and over and over to obtain the 192 tokens, and since you can only run it once a week, you'd be at it for months to get everyone geared up in token gear. All to do a harder version of the same content that you've been clearing for weeks.

 

The number of people who will do that is very, very low, it sure isn't the core of the game.

 

So we're back to the problem of too large a gap between SM and HM. I've now completed SM in 8 and 16 man flavors, so what next? I could do it 10 more times, but those 10 runs might net me 1 or 2 bits of token gear, not enough to run HM. I have no interest in running SM 100 times.

 

So HM might as well not exist.

 

This is the "lack of end game content" problem that the launch game had, and to some extent 2.0 had (but it had other things to do).

 

The HM 60 FP aren't worth running, the HM ops are too hard to run unless you have nothing else to do with your life, the story content with the expack has been run over and over.

 

---

 

I keep hearing elites talk about, "well, SM is for PUGs and casuals". Ok sure, but once they do it, then what? There is nothing for them to move on to.

[Bachannal]

So, in other words you can't.

 

 

http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/200/420/BRTky.jpg?1321408042

 

Edited February 19, 2015 by Bachannal

[SomeJagoff]

Progression operation teams are one-shotting the new HM operation fights. Therefore the RNG elements, when they are handled by skilled players, are not causing unavoidable wipes .

 

There is 1 guild across all servers that has even cleared Both of the new HM Operations, let alone "one-shotting" all the new bosses.

 

If you are referring to Sparky HM (The first boss of the first operation) as a catch all for "the new HM operation fights," then yeah, there are quite a few guilds that have cleared that one boss, the first boss, on HM difficulty.

 

Considering the sub par performance of most P.U.G. players, all Group Finder content should have bolster to carry undergeared players through. Though, even with bolster, most P.U.G. groups would still fail to clear the HM 60 Flashpoints, because your average P.U.G. player cannot follow mechanics. If mechanics were easy to follow, then there would be more than one guild that had cleared both of the new "HM" Operations 3 months after release.

 

As for HM Flashpoint rewards, you all need to realize that top tier gear and even second top tier gear is only designed players who run operations ad nauseam (or buy "gear runs"), not for players who run Flashpoints. Flashpoints have had no role in serious gear progression since the 1.0 days. If you ask the top tier raiders about this, they will say it is a good thing or "how it should be."

 

The same goes for the laughably horrid elite/ultimate comms gear. Your 192 comms gear is "almost" (and that is being generous) as good as 186 operations token drop gear, but if you want the 186 token gear from Nightmare DF/DP, even above level, good luck, the mechanics will still wipe the vast majority of players. In short, top tier raiders do not want players outside of operations to have any properly itemized gear....and BioWare agrees.

 

Thus, you are all correct in stating that the effort and time investment does not justify the rewards outside of guild runs. Does this defeat the purpose of the group finder? Yes, definitely.

 

 

Is content "too hard" since 3.0? I will let the "SM Progression" thread answer that:

 

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=762898

 

 

Fear not though, the development team in charge of designing operation content and associated difficulty do not care that you cannot clear their content. They design their Operations with one guild in mind. They want to make content challenging for that One guild. Do they care that the one guild happens to be leaps and bounds above every other guild in the game? No. They want to spend all their efforts (fruitlessly) to ensure that the one guild remains subscribed by making "HM" ops absurdly difficult for the rest of the vast majority of other Paying subscribers. Better to satisfy the few and displease the many than to satisfy the many and displease the few, amirite?

 

On the bright side (for that one guild at least), since "SM Progression" is now a thing, that one guild can sell "SM" runs for millions of credits.

 

The fact that BioWare has not made adjustments to difficulty curb this practice shows how little they care about the PVE community (and even less about the small PVP Community), outside of an obsessive focus of keeping one guild in the game Almost challenged by the content.

 

You know something is wrong with the difficulty when players are selling runs for STORY MODE content.

[Bachannal]

There is 1 guild across all servers that has even cleared Both of the new HM Operations, let alone "one-shotting" all the new bosses.

 

If you are referring to Sparky HM (The first boss of the first operation) as a catch all for "the new HM operation fights," then yeah, there are quite a few guilds that have cleared that one boss, the first boss, on HM difficulty.

 

Considering the sub par performance of most P.U.G. players, all Group Finder content should have bolster to carry undergeared players through. Though, even with bolster, most P.U.G. groups would still fail to clear the HM 60 Flashpoints, because your average P.U.G. player cannot follow mechanics. If mechanics were easy to follow, then there would be more than one guild that had cleared both of the new "HM" Operations 3 months after release.

 

As for HM Flashpoint rewards, you all need to realize that top tier gear and even second top tier gear is only designed players who run operations ad nauseam (or buy "gear runs"), not for players who run Flashpoints. Flashpoints have had no role in serious gear progression since the 1.0 days. If you ask the top tier raiders about this, they will say it is a good thing or "how it should be."

 

The same goes for the laughably horrid elite/ultimate comms gear. Your 192 comms gear is "almost" (and that is being generous) as good as 186 operations token drop gear, but if you want the 186 token gear from Nightmare DF/DP, even above level, good luck, the mechanics will still wipe the vast majority of players. In short, top tier raiders do not want players outside of operations to have any properly itemized gear....and BioWare agrees.

 

Thus, you are all correct in stating that the effort and time investment does not justify the rewards outside of guild runs. Does this defeat the purpose of the group finder? Yes, definitely.

 

 

Is content "too hard" since 3.0? I will let the "SM Progression" thread answer that:

 

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=762898

 

 

Fear not though, the development team in charge of designing operation content and associated difficulty do not care that you cannot clear their content. They design their Operations with one guild in mind. They want to make content challenging for that One guild. Do they care that the one guild happens to be leaps and bounds above every other guild in the game? No. They want to spend all their efforts (fruitlessly) to ensure that the one guild remains subscribed by making "HM" ops absurdly difficult for the rest of the vast majority of other Paying subscribers. Better to satisfy the few and displease the many than to satisfy the many and displease the few, amirite?

 

On the bright side (for that one guild at least), since "SM Progression" is now a thing, that one guild can sell "SM" runs for millions of credits.

 

The fact that BioWare has not made adjustments to difficulty curb this practice shows how little they care about the PVE community (and even less about the small PVP Community), outside of an obsessive focus of keeping one guild in the game Almost challenged by the content.

 

You know something is wrong with the difficulty when players are selling runs for STORY MODE content.

 

I'll bite...PM me the name of the guild. I've never seen anyone offering to exchange creds for SM runs, but it wouldn't surprise me either.

[Grayseven]

@greyseven... And you keep clinging to the thought that you can't control the pirates because i've watched it happen umm idk 26 pulls the first night and 7 last night... then literally countless times in SM... Perhaps your tanks just don't know what they are supposed to do in order to set where the pirates spawn. . . .

 

And keep blaming clients for underlurker issues . . . It's not broken... functions very very well now and almost all the problems I see are due to DPS issues/people being stupid in the cross... I do take back what I said because there is still a small bug in underlurker, if you have sages/slingers with AoE trying to hit that back two ads at the same time, sometimes the boss (when stacked there..) messes that up and one of the ads won't get hit, to fix you just move the boss to the far side of the ads and bam, aoe hits everything again... this was introduced when they changed up the bosses hitbox a few patches back...

 

OH and btw... even if your tanks can't control where the pirates spawn, it's really not that hard of a fight... you just need tanks who know what they are doing.. e.g. if they spawn on the right while your barrel tank is somewhere else, other tank aoe taunt ads and hold for 6 sec while the other tank runs and grabs them.. also need to learn how to kill the even numbered waves with mass barrage, as well as sometimes getting lucky and killing odd or even waves with volley (yes, tanks can get volley if they know what they are doing) and that makes the fight a cake walk... even in HM...

 

First off, if you can "control" the pirates why don't you fill the rest of the player base in on exactly how you do that? If the same tanks do the same things over and over and the pirates come out at different locations, either it is bugged or you are wrong. Not one guide I've researched has said word one about controlling the pirate spawn locations on Bulo. Now, that fight isn't hard once the mechanics are understood and we don't have issues with it as a guild group but you can't honestly believe that a PuG group can get past it unless the entire PuG knows the mechanics perfectly, can you?

 

As for Underlurker, I again have video showing every single player in position on the cross, in one instance for 5 full seconds, and the cross going red and blasting a player. Numerous times. That isn't fixed. And no way in hell is any PuG group getting past that fight unless the entire PuG has cleared it once already.

 

But this topic is getting off track. The fact that experienced players don't find the SM operations introduced in this patch isn't of concern here. The simple fact is that this round of operations are destroying any hope of casual players to at least experience end game. No group of PuGs in 186 gear is going to get past Underlurker, especially in 16 man mode. The jump from Tac's to HM FP's is too great since Tac's don't teach mechanics and the rewards for HM FP's are absolutely worthless.

 

But go ahead and keep pretending everything is fine. Ignore the fact that EA/BW employees refuse to even discuss these issues because they aren't related to the Cartel Market. You can even look down your noses at casual players if you like but remember first that they are the majority and if they aren't happy, the game won't be healthy.

 

And from everything I can see so far, there are very few happy casual players right now.

[Grayseven]

I'd like to point something out that many may not have noticed...

 

Do a Google search on guides for DF, DP, S&V and the like and look at how many guides there are.

 

Now do a search for Ravagers and ToS.

 

Notice the difference? Why do you think there are fewer guides available for the new ops? Why are the guides that are available inevitably wrong in one or more aspects? Seems that Dulfy's guide is the "defacto" guide but it appears to have been done with the PTS versions of the operations and not the ones that went live, and they haven't been updated since they were put on the web.

[Aieranda]

The loot changes for 3.0 were very carefully laid out and it's abundantly clear to me why they've done it. This is all opinion, but I think it's pretty straightforward. It's been done to draw out the time it takes to gear each character in the hopes that extending that time will keep more end game players around for longer time (and hence subs subbing longer).

 

Essentially, EA/BW wants the Ops to be a gearing treadmill. This is a given by the very existence of weekly lockouts, rather than daily lockouts or any other lockout system that is less than a week. They fine tune their control of the ops gearing treadmill by how many tokens drop, what type of gear you can get for comms and by how many comms they give out for content in addition to the rewards from current at level hard modes.

 

They additionally control it by making comms gear of varying qualities. In the past, you could use comms to buy practically BIS gear (Black Hole days), and you could even upgrade your armors because the SHELLS had the set bonus, even if you had just a Tionese or Columi shell. This faster method of gearing was reduced just before or after 2.0 (I don't recall exactly at what point) when set bonus was eventually taken back off of shells and non-optimized enhancements were on comms gear for 2/3 of the roles and almost no good comms gear existed for any tank. Now, after 3.0, almost no decent comms based gear exists at all at the new tiers with the notable exceptions of halfway decent Shadow/Sin Implants. Crafted 186 are almost always better at 186 and tokens are clearly better in effectively most cases at 192 and 198, with some shuffling of a few extra tokens to move things around. Also after 3.0, they've introduced 6-piece set bonuses, and while some sets are lackluster, it basically means that you can't just "comm" out your belt, bracers, and a 7th piece of random other armor if the set bonus is actually any good for your class.

 

Smuggle via Legacy mitigates gearing treadmill time a bit. However, smuggle via Legacy tokens has been essentially the same, other than a few offhands and whatnot, since the introduction of Legacy gear. So Legacy smuggling is practically a constant when considering the time to max out gear at any given release.

 

The issue is further controlled by crafting. Allowable crafting is 1 step below the current BIS tier. This was done to mitigate players circumventing the gear-earning treadmill of ops-based gearing by earning (or buying) mats more easily and just crafting what they wanted. It was also done, apparently, to give the HM and NiM mode clearing players some kind of feeling of accomplishment that they could supposedly crow about.

 

So what does all that really mean? If game activities are more rewarding in terms of comms, tokens, or crafting, then the time on the treadmill for any given character in any given situation at any given skill level is inevitably shortened. If the treadmill is too short, they might lose players too fast who get bored by having too many maxed characters too quickly. If the treadmill is too long, too many players might leave as their sentiments about the level of effort to receive a particular level of reward ends up not being personally desirable.

 

To me, the ops-gearing changes from late 1.x into 2.x and now 3.x have been done to extend the ops-gearing treadmill while keeping the illusion of fairness in earning token gear from Ops drops. It even extends into the optimization of the individual components (usually requires a few extra tokens at BIS level which can't be crafted). They don't want to go all the way back to the original treadmill they had at launch of class specific drops and take seeming fairness out of it as well. But this trend of slightly extending the gearing treadmills is very evident. The last time they did it with the release of S&V, DF, and DP, I think it was to basically extend the lifespan of that content. The fact that they've gone just a tiny bit further in 3.0 towards trying to extend the ops-gear treadmill again (if they hadn't screwed up and had the Ravagers exploit), tells me they are looking ahead and know they need to get an even longer lifespan out of Ravagers and ToS than what we had with S&V, DF, and DP.

[GopherLuV]

Ok sooo real quick on the umm 1 guild clearing HM.... go look at the world progression in the ops forum.. 5 guilds have FULL 10/10 clears on the new HMs... many more have 9/10 and 8/10... There are many guilds who can easily (mostly 1 shot..) up to master blaster in rav and many who can clear 4/5 in tos...

 

If you want to learn how to control the pirates go find someone who cares to explain it because I dont... but it's very possible, and i'm sure someone out there is willing to spend time explaining, i'm not....

 

You must have some bad luck with underlurker cuz I just finished running him yet again and had no issues except the one I said, the boss seems to act as a wall where the back two wont take AoE damage... easily fixed by moving the boss behind the ads instead of in front... If everyone gets in the cross, jumps quick.. no issues...

 

Oh and yea, you will see hundreds of DF/DP guides because hmmm maybe theyve been out for a year........ 90% of people who care to write a guide are writing it for HM right now.. not SM...

 

And yea, it takes a lot of time to gear a toon in full 192 token gear if you only have 1 60 to run... thats where alts come in... If you can run 5-10 toons a week (more for some..) through both ops, you can have gear in no time... Other than that, join a guild that will be helpful.. limit people to 1 piece per run (if each person gets 1 unassembled and you clear 10/10, every single person will have something PLUS you will restart rolls.. usually at underlurker or commanders rolls are reset depending on if you get lucky with 2 relics/implants...)

Edited February 20, 2015 by GopherLuV

[SomeJagoff]

Ok sooo real quick on the umm 1 guild clearing HM.... go look at the world progression in the ops forum.. 5 guilds have FULL 10/10 clears on the new HMs...

 

Looked at that thread, looks like most of the people in the thread are posting corrections and that they are less far along than the OP indicated, looking like a lot of the listings were guesses, not posts by members of the guilds. Doing a google search, I see that Death and Taxes got World Second kill of HM Revan a week or two ago, so clears #3, #4, #5 were within the past week? You should really verify stuff and check the source before you start making claims.

 

The only issue I had was with your false claim that guilds were "1-shotting" the bosses (implying all of the bosses) in the new HM Operations, but you have corrected that:

 

There are many guilds who can easily (mostly 1 shot..) up to master blaster in rav

 

At best, you can still only go by One guild that can "easily mostly one shot" all the bosses in both HM Operations. On that note, here's a quote from Dulfy in that thread:

 

The issue I see with hard content like these is that you got a group of people that enjoy the extra challenge and another group of people that don't enjoy it or simply don't have the time for it. To kill Revan or Cortanni you need to be prepared to spend y amount of wipes and invest y amount of time as a whole raid group. Some people are simply not prepared for that. They log on to kill some bosses on farm and enjoy a good time with friends.

 

The previous hardmodes were simply too easy and thus boring. The current 4 bosses of each operation are a good difficulty level in my opinion. They are not something you simply one shot and may require several nights of progression.

 

If the increased hardmode level are meant to keep people busy until Nightmare, I don't think they are having the full effect. Some guilds will be making attempts to clear it until nightmare while other guilds will sit at 4/5 until the nerfs.

 

It would be good to know Bioware's reasoning for the increased difficulty. Are they providing challenge seekers with something to aim for or simply to tide the time until the next tier of content?

Edited February 20, 2015 by SomeJagoff