Priority Target is Eternity Vault - WTH?

[Lodinn]

As it stands, some of the hardest fights in the game offer the exact same rewards as bosses that you can button smash with 7 pugs and still win.

You can button smash everything in this game with 7 pugs and win. Only things that weren't successfully completely pugged for real were 16m Cora and Revan, although I'm not sure. Maybe that's because just 7 pugs ain't enough for this

 

All you get is a nearly worthless Rocket deco (because let's be honest, the market is still flooded with from exploiters).

Deco drops in SM now. End of discussion here.

Same for Revan deco. Only titles remained the same I think and I don't like Revan one, if to put it mildly.

[eskimo_brother]

Ah, yes, Elitists complaining again ...

 

I'm really starting to think thats what it is in this case.

 

Who cares who has some 224 gear. It's not like there is a reason to show it off or even give a rats arse about what some other gamer got in a raid of the week.

 

EV is the raid of the week. Is it a easier? Sure is. Enjoy.

 

Ah, yes, Casuals complaining again ...

 

I'm really starting to think that's what it is in this case.

 

Who cares who has some 224 gear. It's not like it bolsters in SM so who gives a rats arse about what is dropping in HM EV this week it doesn't get me GF Radiant Data Crystals.

 

EV is the GF of the day. Is it a glorified FP? Sure is. Enjoy.

 

(How come your comments will be acceptable, but I will be demonized for mine?)

[Voths]

I, for one, welcome the flood of 224 items without having to set foot into Nightmare.

[onegoldpls]

Do you even realize that 224 gear compared to 216 gives you like 3-5% more dps/hps and literally pointless to farm?

Or do you simply rage that noobs getting your "bis" items?

This thread is so pathetic really.

[Jerba]

1) Why do you find it sad? I mean, what's that 'filthy casuals' attitude uprise on forums lately?

Traditionally, gear has always been a status symbol in MMOs. You could immediately see who put in work to perfect his gear, compared to players who just run some groupfinder ops.

We already had this situation with 3.0 where having the Cora HM achievement didn't mean anything since everyone could get their 198 chest piece setbonus. But now it is even worse because the whole tier is up for grabs.

This removes the exclusiveness and reward for doing difficult content. Gear already became needless when they added bolster to flashpoints and SM operations, and implemented level sync where it doesn't matter which gear you have - you are synced to the same level. And now it is meaningless as well.

 

We can debate what impact this will have on the general health of the game. I still maintain that raiding guilds are one of the most stable groups (aka the guild keeps them tied to the game when the devs don't) and that they are early adopters that give a glimpse on the future of the game because they find bugs faster and clear content first.

Without them, you are left with casual players who see it as nothing more than a casual game, who complain when something changes because they don't read patch notes, and who don't see any strong urge to stay subscribed to the game once they complete the story.

 

I have said in the past that I intent to play this game until the servers shut down and I stand by that. I only hope that there will be other players left, be they progression players, elitists, power gamers. early adopters or whatever disparaging term you want to use for them, and that the devs realize that we need more challenging content.

Edited November 10, 2015 by Jerba

[JouerTue]

i don't mind who gets what gear, but i like to show off mine, turn the bosses in pugs through guard, turn the wipe in a success with the strenght of big numbers(here comes the gear importance in MMOs), perfect execution of tactics and nim efficiency. when i raid with my guild, i like to think together how to beat a boss, then making the kill with a few alive and then achieve clean kills to move fast at the next boss. with 4.0 this is not the case, we just pick which ops has the tokens we need, go there and clear it. it doesn't sound like a challenge or a funny thing. it's because we are playing the game since years and it's good company, but i was happier wiping at brontes than farming poor soa ***.

 

also EV enlighted is too too easy, not worth being in the rotation..then who can take any gear from wherever he feels like, gj and have fun.

 

probably it's right that HM are so easy because if someone will ever need a replacement for an ops team it will be a pain having the newbies learn how to play at a decent level and how to gear up after the GF retarded mode.

Edited November 10, 2015 by JouerTue

[flavmad]

SWTOR is about story first and PvP and PvE second. PvE raiders there are other games more apropriate for you.

[davidp_newton]

To give you an idea of just how wrong this is in difficulty terms I'll relate what happened in my guild this evening. We one-tanked the whole op on HM, although we did have 3 healers rather than 5 DPS. On Soa during the last phase the tank's computer decided it was going to throw a wobbly and he DC'ed. Due to this we missed a pillar dropping and the boss enraged. I was able to tank the boss on my DPS guardian in shien form, including a pillar dropping down for about 20 seconds or so before the tank reconnected.

 

A DPS should NEVER be able to tank an enraged HM ops boss except for a moment using lots of cooldowns, let alone tank it for 20 seconds. EV HM is simply too easy at the moment compared to the other HMs. It should not be in the high priority HM rotation for that reason.

[eskimo_brother]

To give you an idea of just how wrong this is in difficulty terms I'll relate what happened in my guild this evening. We one-tanked the whole op on HM, although we did have 3 healers rather than 5 DPS. On Soa during the last phase the tank's computer decided it was going to throw a wobbly and he DC'ed. Due to this we missed a pillar dropping and the boss enraged. I was able to tank the boss on my DPS guardian in shien form, including a pillar dropping down for about 20 seconds or so before the tank reconnected.

 

A DPS should NEVER be able to tank an enraged HM ops boss except for a moment using lots of cooldowns, let alone tank it for 20 seconds. EV HM is simply too easy at the moment compared to the other HMs. It should not be in the high priority HM rotation for that reason.

 

To give you an idea of how wrong it is we 4m'd it and some of the people were in 204 PvP gear

[Kawabonga]

WTB highlighted Nightmare modes that drop 228. BiS gear can't come from content everyone can just go and roflstomp. Soa can easily be killed in 16m with 8 players (1h, 1t, 1dd). Just did. On alts. Such an easy boss shouldn't drop the most precious loot. Edited November 11, 2015 by Kawabonga

[Jerba]

WTB highlighted Nightmare modes that drop 228. BiS gear can't come from content everyone can just go and roflstomp.

That's actually a good idea. Given that it may take a few months for nightmare loot to be fixed, they might as well put in 228 gear into NiM, because by that time everyone interested in doing NiM will already have 224 gear. That might appease the raiding guilds because they still have something more to do until the new operation arrives. But I don't expect this to happen, it just doesn't appear that anyone on the dev team cares about PvE progession anymore.

 

2) There is no progression in 4.0 and nearest future. As far as my knowledge goes, every bit of raiding content was re-cleared in 4.0 already. And that's only two weeks have passed. People estimate new ops be anywhere from couple of months to an year from now, if happen at all.

Progression is not just about who kills a boss first though that is a big part of it. To me, progression means advancing with your group, pushing the limits and killing bosses you didn't kill before. Just because another guild (that puts in much more time than us) killed a boss doesn't mean progression is over for us.

So until we've rekilled every boss on nightmare mode, we are not done with progression.

Edited November 11, 2015 by Jerba

[DarthZaul]

The game is about story now.

 

Things like loot and gearing just don't matter any more. There is no actual progression anyway with old ops so it doesn't matter that gearing is completely trivialized.

 

Also TFB and SAV HM are also ridiculously easy too, apart from the last bosses, and they are in the priority targets.

Edited November 11, 2015 by DarthZaul

[juanpierre]

I'm unsubbing immediately.

[MuskyBoy]

The game now is akin to playing musical chairs with more chairs then people, so now every bodies a winner. Congrats.

[auroroavalor]

Having completed both DP and DF whilst highlighted with a group of mates I'm kinda disappointed there's no longer some semblance of skill stopping people getting the top tier gear. That being said plenty of guilds and PuGs can't down Draxus and Failed to down sword squadron.

 

However I think a lot of people are forgetting the highlighted hard mode servers multiple purposes, it's not just there to rush progression raiders to BiS it's also there to help HM Raiders get that extra gear to progress through DP and DF as well as Rav and ToS.

 

I'm sure BW has had a lot of complaints from people saying DF/DP HM were too hard, you might view them as casuals, I'm sure plenty of them are, but not everyone gets to be a deposer/conqueror/revanchist so maybe throwing some extra gear there way lets a few more people kill HM brontes or Council and gives them something to be proud of, is that really so bad?

[eskimo_brother]

Having completed both DP and DF whilst highlighted with a group of mates I'm kinda disappointed there's no longer some semblance of skill stopping people getting the top tier gear. That being said plenty of guilds and PuGs can't down Draxus and Failed to down sword squadron.

 

However I think a lot of people are forgetting the highlighted hard mode servers multiple purposes, it's not just there to rush progression raiders to BiS it's also there to help HM Raiders get that extra gear to progress through DP and DF as well as Rav and ToS.

 

I'm sure BW has had a lot of complaints from people saying DF/DP HM were too hard, you might view them as casuals, I'm sure plenty of them are, but not everyone gets to be a deposer/conqueror/revanchist so maybe throwing some extra gear there way lets a few more people kill HM brontes or Council and gives them something to be proud of, is that really so bad?

 

If there were complaints about DF/DP being too hard I did not see them, DF HM was cleared by a group I was in and a couple could have been considered undergeared, the tank was in 168's. If anything it should be considered too easy. I think some peoples complaints, and I'm sure people consider them elitist, is that they put a lot of hard work into clearing content and for BW to just give away the best gear(ala monolith) is kind of a slap in the face...again. They already reduced the difficulty of a lot of the tougher fights like Revan, and now you don't even have to roll a full group or a particularly well geared group into EV and get the best MH in the game from it. It's more ridiculous than Monolith. You can say what you want about me but if I'm clearing harder content then you it's not unreasonable to expect some sort of reward out of it and that I will probably have better gear. It's obvious though that BW does not care though as they give out gear to people that are undeserving of it and fail to even fix much less acknowledge that NiM is broken and not dropping NiM tokens. But if Conquest is broken that becomes a priority and they will get to the bottom of it ahead of schedule. They keep on talking about how small a percentage it is that they keep on driving away but eventually that percentage adds up.

[Jerba]

I mean, what's that 'filthy casuals' attitude uprise on forums lately?

Took me a while to think of a response to that but here you go:

 

I believe it to mostly be a misunderstanding. Like when I am talking about casual players, I don't mean it in a negative way. For me, a casual player is someone who (for whatever reason) doesn't want to put a lot of time into the game, who is not interested in advancing his character and doesn't take the game too seriously.

 

There are also another type of player, and those players annoy me when they:

• stand in fire in a flashpoint, which means I have to put in additional work to heal away the additional damage
  
• don't deal enough damage so the boss goes enrage, leading to additional repair bills
  
• don't want to group up in a heroic area which means the quest will take double the time for both of us due to respawns
  

But it is wrong to confuse them with casual players; yes, a lot of casual players are like that but I'm not thinking of this when I talk about casual players because not everyone is like that.

 

But casual players seem to take offense when being called that, and I don't understand that. If you are one, there's no shame in admitting it. I guess we could also use the term average player or storymode hero but in the end, it results in the same thing. They also seem to think that calling us elitists is offensive, I disagree. I'm proud to be a progression player, to have seen content other players haven't, to have higher DPS/HPS than other players, and I take enjoyment from playing the game at a high level.

 

In any case, the conflict between casual and elitist player has sharpened with 3.0. Before that, I could easily take along DPS who only deal 1k DPS because the other players in the group can carry them through, and I'll happily explain boss fights and let them know what they did wrong, provided they're willing to learn. But with bosses like Underlurker, this is no longer possible. If you have players who don't DPS the adds, who don't hide behind a rock or who won't run to the cross, you just cannot complete the fight. The HM flashpoints have also gotten more difficult and require a higher skill. And now that they took out a lot of the mechanics from SM, it's not even possible anymore to explain fights correctly. Like in TFB Kephess on SM, you could ignore the pillars but if I had new players in the group, I'd still show them how the pillars work so that they are prepared for HM. With the pillars gone in SM now, there's no way to prepare players for HM.

In my mind, the devs are reponsible for this situation, not the casual players, but I don't expect the tuning to change anytime soon.

Edited November 11, 2015 by Jerba

[Shwarzchild]

Great post Jerba. Spot on. I think there are a lot of times us "elitist progression" types get the wrong end of the stick. I feel almost like we're a catcher on a baseball team taking foul balls off the mask, or pitches in the dirt off the uncovered part of the thigh. Then, with 4.0 and the re scaling it seems like BW has removed our chest protector and like a shin guard and says go ahead. And, we do. But everything stings that much more. It's like we're being penalized for being progression raiders, or wanting real progression, from this game. And, we're just like everyone else who plays this game in that we want to find experience our own enjoyment as well. But, it seems there's a pocket of people that have labeled us as the devil, and we are treated accordingly. It's not a correct attitude.

 

I would hope that Bioware notices the fact that progression is completely a rudderless ship at the moment, and does something to get everything back on course. But, I doubt that will happen. Until they do though the divide between the "filthy casual" and the "devil elitist" will continue to widen.

 

And the gearing for hard mode is so "interesting". By offering the main hand on Soa they've removed much of the incentive to do other operations. It's just not good.

Edited November 11, 2015 by Shwarzchild

[Lodinn]

Sorry for not posting quotes properly, have to reply to too many people simultaneously.

 

So, HM DF/DP, huh? Most of the people have facerolled it during 3.0 and hence not really interested in doing this 'on level'.

I'll tell you what our problem with NiM Draxus was. We came there tired of grinding, on some alts we have more fun with rather than actual experience/ability to play... And failed DPS check. This phrase should already trigger you if you think about that problem deeply enough. No, we didn't struggle for a moment like you do in progression - 'something has killed us, let's try to figure out what the problem was and try to handle it'. Instead, we knew what's wrong with deadly precision few seconds before the wipe. And it was just like 'ok, %playername% logs her main, %anotherplayername% respecs to burst, one of the tank specs dps or whatever and we have it. Boring'. Group lost interest completely in but a moment after a couple of wipes.

If you ever seen the kid playing with some toy, dropping it right on the playground and going to other activities because he found it boring out of the blue, that was it. It's not like Revan progression where kill is so close but still elusive. No, instead you know the fight by heart, maybe respond imperfectly but still. We saw adds not dying fast enough, movement and such was fine, gear was partly old, partly new, not minmaxed etc.

No one seems to be interested in hours of wiping on the boss they know almost by heart to squeeze extra 100 dps with new rotation/abilities/whatever or gaining those 100 dps just by more grinding.

Of who I know on our server it's mostly top progression guilds grinding gear mostly out of the habit (they actually stopped and many ended up using the same gear on all dps/healer toons, throwing out the set bonus. Well, healers people do gear cause set bonus changes 'rotation' and overall perception, but when it comes to dps... Gear you main and don't bother anymore, this extra dps you'd get isn't worth the effort).

 

One of the first things I've heard logging in the game was DoB killing Revan without set bonus in their gear. Why bother? Most of the stuff is easy enough.

 

We do seem like extremely bored kids. In a neutral/positive way I mean. It's like

- Son, you look so bored... Come play with your Robocop toy!

- Dad, I'm 35. Just FYI I'd prefer some more complicated games.

- We've got none but look! I've polished it a bit and it looks almost like new! Remember how you liked playing with it when you was 5? Play it for now and maybe in an year Santa will deliver you Lego!..

- Dad... *Sigh*. It's not working. Better... Leave me alone, ok?

 

And EVEN if there are younger (no offense again!) pals, they are inevitably feeling it is the toy their dad was playing when he was small and it's like leaving in a poor family with one same cloth doll for three generations.

 

NOT. ENTERTAINING.

 

Let alone elitist talk, say I want raiding, I log into the game and what do I do?

a) Grinding the crap out of shining pinata GF ops. Oh, wish I had your patience for those advanced cutscenes. I mean, it's so easy now except for 1-2 bosses maybe that one should get the feeling like when you're smashing your console in a fighter and then realize it was a screensaver/menu animation all along.

b) Progressing HM ops (except SoR ones). See point about Draxus above. For this you should be a returning player who was absent for a long time.

c) Progressing SoR HM ops. Well that one could keep people entertained but many lost interest in this as 3.0 faded and, besides everything, Ravs scaling is just horrible. ToS is scaled pretty well, but Ravs... I've seen people reporting Sparky enrage and even saw that once myself on sm, Bulo is nothing, Torque you can just burn ignoring mechanics and M&B is harder than it was, one of a few bosses. Nice one.

d) Stepping into NiMs. Again, poor scaling. HM is too hard as compared to nerfed past beyond SM and NiM is only slightly harder on mechanic side. There are a lot of treads around, really. +too many consider this activity to be unrewarding.

e) Doing ops you already completed lots of times. G stands for grinding, M stands for masochism.

f) Doing FPs/Heroics. Why not? It's like everyone complaining tacticals are too hard, and BH and LI still too stronk. Go test your resolve, who needs mechanics where you have anything else but to run out of red or just 1 mechanic per boss anyway. And trash packs, we're pretty sure you hadn't your share in ops.

 

Yes, yes, I know, I'm thinking in a negative way. There were some good changes regarding solo PVE. Group content? Not so much. Everyone's demanding some new stuff to do, be it tactical ops where you just have to kill 5 random ops bosses and teleport between them, ops scaled in a way that would provide smooth learning curve with some challenge in the end or... Gosh, just anything. Really.

 

TL;DR: There's nothing to raid in the game unless you've missed 3.0 cycle (at least) almost entirely.

[Yswr]

How do you find out what the weekly priority Hm ops is anyway, I've never been able to see where it's highlighted.

[DarthZaul]

Holoterminal on Ziost Shadow.

[Lodinn]

Holoterminal on Ziost Shadow.

 

Next to EV entrance.

[DomiSotto]

Well, I guess, you can't keep everyone happy. I am happy to continue to be able to do the Operations. It's a lot of fun. Way more fun with the current diversity of the content and the end of hopelessness that it was starting to become before the update. And, yes, I am happy to be able to try the HMs and find that at least some of them will be doable.

 

Is that MH exclusivity >>> more people playing?

 

I mean, we've just emerged from a gloomy period when only very few were able to complete the entire HM tier. Are you nostalgic for that time, and felt that it was a healthy situation?

Edited November 13, 2015 by DomiSotto

[AndoEyrune]

Well, I guess, you can't keep everyone happy. I am happy to continue to be able to do the Operations. It's a lot of fun. Way more fun with the current diversity of the content and the end of hopelessness that it was starting to become before the update. And, yes, I am happy to be able to try the HMs and find that at least some of them will be doable.

 

Is that MH exclusivity >>> more people playing?

 

I mean, we've just emerged from a gloomy period when only very few were able to complete the entire HM tier. Are you nostalgic for that time, and felt that it was a healthy situation?

I can't speak for others, but I'm nostalgic for the 2.x era, in which the content was pretty difficult, though not as hard as Rav/ToS, as HM ops were semi puggable. , and gear had to be earned, not given away like HM EV. BW went from one extreme to the other, and has no sense of balance.

[Jerba]

I mean, we've just emerged from a gloomy period when only very few were able to complete the entire HM tier. Are you nostalgic for that time, and felt that it was a healthy situation?

Definitely not, even the world first progression guilds have said that the 3.0 raid content was scaled too difficult and I blame those progression guilds that were invited to the closed PTS and asked for scaling so challenging that SM become impossible for most groups and HM was tuned at NiM levels. In fact, in one of my posts in this thread I mentioned how the HM difficulty caused many raiding groups I know of to quit - they all cleared DF/DP HM and most NiM bosses so not being able to clear Rav/ToS HM was a big disappointment to them.

 

But just because one raid tier was too difficult doesn't mean the current one should be faceroll easy. There can be a middle-ground, as we've seen with the DF/DP scaling which IMO was the most successful raiding tier.

As it is right now, we have faceroll bosses and bosses with a tight DPS check that both drop the same loot. In order to make gear relevant again, they need to retune the bosses so that all bosses in a mode are somewhat equal in difficulty. But for this tier it is already too late and we have to hope that it will be better for the next tier.

Edited November 13, 2015 by Jerba