Ops in 5.1 - Will unassembled pieces drop from every boss, or just the last boss?

[benzodiazepine]

Musco wrote the following post:

Hey folks,

 

Thank you to everyone who tuned in today. Here is a wrap-up of what we talked about:

 

Gearing Changes in Galactic Command...In PvE

• Unassembled Gear pieces are a guaranteed drop from the last boss of each Operation, with specific drops on a boss (Ex: Soa dropping chest).
  
• Each other boss in an Operation has a chance to drop any token. Bosses that are later in an Operation have a higher chance then those early in the Op.

 

-eric

 

...which I understand to mean that there will only be ONE assured drop per operation (on the final boss), with no guarantee of anything dropping from the preceding bosses.

 

However, if you were to re-watch the

again (fast forward to 10:21), Ben makes the following statements:

 

(10:32) "The other bosses that you defeat along the way WILL ALSO contain unassembled gear pieces, but they won't be specific things."

 

(11:00) "...but also to make sure that EACH BOSS gave something rewarding."

 

Both Ben's and Musco's statements appear to contradict each other. I'm hoping we get Ben's version of things instead of Musco's, but it would be great if one of the devs could come and clear this up.

 

If what Musco says comes to pass, I'm definitely not renewing my sub. Priority HM loot drama and ninja-ing in 4.0 was bad enough, and that was 5 pieces shared among 8 people. Just imagine how much more toxic the game would become if 8 people had to squabble over one measly miserable piece.

[Sportiva]

The last boss is the only guaranteed drop ... bosses leading up to it will have a chance to drop a UA piece. I believe that each subsequent boss has a greater chance to drop a UA piece ... so its more likely to get a piece off of boss 4 vs. boss 1.

[Ryenke]

Only the last boss has guarantee and they didn't specify the "chances" on the other bosses, but given the NM loot situation in 4.x before they fixed it (5% chance of dropping nightmare loot), I expect it to be something on the order of the next to last boss having a 5% chance to drop something, the boss before that boss 4%, ... That is a GUESS, they haven't said anything about what the chance percentage will be.

 

Like you, only one guarantee drop per op is nowhere near enough to tempt me to resub.

[benzodiazepine]

The last boss is the only guaranteed drop ... bosses leading up to it will have a chance to drop a UA piece. I believe that each subsequent boss has a greater chance to drop a UA piece ... so its more likely to get a piece off of boss 4 vs. boss 1.

 

After re-watching the producer's stream again and again, I'm getting the sense that Ben is on a different wavelength from Musco and Charles.

 

Ben seems to understand it as "each boss definitely drops something, with the later bosses having a greater chance to drop the same item as the last boss" (to help ops teams get more than 1x of what they were chasing).

 

Charles seems to understand it as "only the last boss definitely drops something, the earlier bosses may or may not."

 

Sigh.

[Tsillah]

When he says "will contain" he basically means they have it on the loot table. The actual drop chance is another thing.

 

I've advocated giving all the bosses in an ops aside from the last one an equal percentage chance in the 50-60 range instead of a progressive system.

 

Why? Because first of all bosses don't get progressively harder in operations. Their difficulty is random.

 

Secondly because people will start using boss locks just to get to the last couple of bosses, which I would think is not what they want to achieve with this. So far no reaction on that point though.

[Tsillah]

Musco wrote the following post:

 

 

...which I understand to mean that there will only be ONE assured drop per operation (on the final boss), with no guarantee of anything dropping from the preceding bosses.

 

However, if you were to re-watch the

again (fast forward to 10:21), Ben makes the following statements:

 

(10:32) "The other bosses that you defeat along the way WILL ALSO contain unassembled gear pieces, but they won't be specific things."

 

(11:00) "...but also to make sure that EACH BOSS gave something rewarding."

 

Both Ben's and Musco's statements appear to contradict each other. I'm hoping we get Ben's version of things instead of Musco's, but it would be great if one of the devs could come and clear this up.

 

If what Musco says comes to pass, I'm definitely not renewing my sub. Priority HM loot drama and ninja-ing in 4.0 was bad enough, and that was 5 pieces shared among 8 people. Just imagine how much more toxic the game would become if 8 people had to squabble over one measly miserable piece.

 

You really should keep watching that livestream because they specify it later starting at the 13:00 minute point I think.

[-Spc]

Well last boss has guaranteed ONE unassembled piece.

That means if you do 16 man ops group, only ONE person will get ONE token.

 

 

So no, i will not be doing that, takes way tooo looong.

Other bosses will maybe have like 5% chance to drop some tokens, which means 99% of the time they'll drop nothing.

Edited December 20, 2016 by -Spc

[benzodiazepine]

You really should keep watching that livestream because they specify it later starting at the 13:00 minute point I think.

 

Trust me, I've watched it enough times to know the segment you're referring to.

 

Musco answers a question at 11:37 and is followed by Charles shortly after, then Ben on 12:26. Pay attention to what each of them says. This makes me believe Ben and Musco/Charles are on different wavelengths (which was what I said 2 posts above yours).

Edited December 20, 2016 by benzodiazepine

[Tsillah]

Trust me, I've watched it enough times to know the segment you're referring to.

 

Musco answers a question at 11:37 and is followed by Charles shortly after, then Ben on 12:26. Pay attention to what each of them says. This makes me believe Ben and Musco/Charles are on different wavelengths (which was what I said 2 posts above yours).

 

Well hence my explanation of what I think he meant with that. Ben was sitting next to them when they specified it and he didn't stop em there. So I think you're reading too much into Ben's comment there. Just my opinion of course.

[gabigool]

This makes me believe Ben and Musco/Charles are on different wavelengths.

 

It's more likely they are still in the "figuring out" stage.

 

Why, now, they are still in that stage is scary.

 

But it was very clear from that stream that they are still working out the nuts and bolts of this.

 

Personally, I think there needs to be more than one guaranteed piece of gear per Operation. As they are describing it, the value of running Ops over PvP for 95% of the playerbase is non-existent and will be an absolute disaster in pugs.

[FtWorthJim]

Well last boss has guaranteed ONE unassembled piece.

That means if you do 16 man ops group, only ONE person will get ONE token.

 

 

So no, i will not be doing that, takes way tooo looong.

Other bosses will maybe have like 5% chance to drop some tokens, which means 99% of the time they'll drop nothing.

 

Just to clarify - a 5% drop would mean a 95% chance of no drop, not 99%. Math is your friend.

[-Spc]

Just to clarify - a 5% drop would mean a 95% chance of no drop, not 99%. Math is your friend.

Not really, a person can go in 100 times, and get nothing from it, because it's 5% random chance.

 

This means in 100 times of you get 0 because of randomness of this 5%.

[EricMusco]

Hey folks,

 

There is some good conversation going on in this thread but I thought I would pop in and explain how it is currently planned to work in 5.1. The last boss of each Operation is guaranteed to drop unassembled pieces of a specific slot (we are still working out how many pieces drop). Each other boss in an Operation has an increasing chance (by boss) to drop any unassembled piece, not a specific slot. For the sake of the example I am about to make, I will use Karagga's Palace.

 

Everything listed below is an example and not necessarily what will be in-game, these are just representative of the way the system will work.

 

1st boss (Bonethrasher) - 20% chance to drop any unassembled piece.

2nd boss (Jarg and Sorno) - 25% chance to drop any unassembled piece.

3rd boss (Foreman Crusher) - 30% chance to drop any unassembled piece.

4th boss (Fabricator) - 35% chance to drop any unassembled piece.

Final boss (Karagga) - 100% chance to drop unassembled head piece.

 

Hopefully that clears up any confusion!

 

-eric

Edited December 21, 2016 by EricMusco

[Jerba]

My fear is that this will only result in operation players continuing to do PvP because it gives them faster gear than via operations.

Unless there is a very steep price on the PvP vendors, 242 gear will be more easily available via PvP than via operations. There are very few guilds left that can kill NiM bosses, and the skill required for NiM is miles above what you need for PvP, where you only need to put in enough time and can even AFK.

 

Regarding the drop chances, I hope that you will take your data into account, e.g. look at how many players are able to beat each boss and base the drop chance off of that. We don't need another period where EV/KP drops the same loot as all the other ops. E.g. if you give the bosses in Rav/ToS a 60% chance, the bosses in EC/TFB/S&V/DF/DP a 40% chance and the bosses in EV/KP a 20% chance, players are actually encouraged to run the harder operations. (numbers are just an example, you have more than enough data to finetune them)

Edited December 21, 2016 by Jerba

[psikofunkster]

After re-watching the producer's stream again and again, I'm getting the sense that Ben is on a different wavelength from Musco and Charles.

 

Ben seems to understand it as "each boss definitely drops something, with the later bosses having a greater chance to drop the same item as the last boss" (to help ops teams get more than 1x of what they were chasing).

 

Charles seems to understand it as "only the last boss definitely drops something, the earlier bosses may or may not."

 

Sigh.

 

^ Pretty much that, all these "changes" are still on the works, what is coming next for everybody for sure are the holidays, but as Ben "producer" said: keep playing......and paying.

 

Still with those changes the important thing here is the lack of new endgame content.

Edited December 20, 2016 by psikofunkster

[gabigool]

Hey folks,

 

There is some good conversation going on in this thread but I thought I would pop in and explain how it is currently planned to work in 5.1. The last boss of each Operation is guaranteed to drop unassembled pieces of a specific slot (we are still working out how many pieces drop). Each other boss in an Operation has an increasing chance (by boss) to drop any unassembled piece, not a specific slot. For the sake of the example I am about to make, I will use Karagga's Palace.

 

Everything listed below is an example and not necessarily what will be in-game, these are just representative of the way the system will work.

 

1st boss (Bonethrasher) - 20% chance to drop any unassembled piece.

2nd boss (Jarg and Sorno) - 25% chance to drop any unassembled piece.

3rd boss (Foreman Crusher) - 30% chance to drop any unassembled piece.

4th boss (Fabricator) - 35% chance to drop any unassembled piece.

Final boss (Jarg and Sorno) - 100% chance to drop unassembled head piece.

 

Hopefully that clears up any confusion!

 

-eric

 

That's brilliant Eric.

 

You guys are offsetting the outcry against RNG by adding another layer of RNG.

 

Well played.

 

You still have not put your finger squarely on the problem here. If you think this scenario - and let's be honest bro, what you implement will be nowhere near those percentages - in any way solves the problem you haven't been playing the game very much.

 

At least in a manner where gear is important.

 

Seriously, what is so wrong about putting gear back on the bosses and allowing GC/CXP to be a mechanism for players who do not care to PvP or run Ops?

 

In what way does that make your game worse, rather than better?

 

I mean, I'm having fun grinding Fractured (until you nerf it) but some of us - especially players that have been here for years - have exactly zero interest in grinding gear to play four year old content. Can we just play it without this bull ****?

[gabigool]

My fear is that this will only result in operation players once again doing PvP because it gives them faster gear than via operations.

 

Lol of course.

 

The T1 gear will be farmed in Ops but anything past that? Or course not.

[teclado]

Bummer. I originally understood it to mean that every boss drops a piece.

 

I know that your percentages are completely made up, but let's say that you could reasonably expect 2-3 gear pieces per operation. Let's say that an ops team runs twice per week. That would be 4-6 pieces per week. With 14 slots and 8 team members, that's 112 pieces required. Ignoring the RNG factor of gearing pieces being duplicated (actually, we could trade the RNG boss drop with the RNG Command Crate Drops and make the two somewhat cancel each other out), you'd be looking at somewhere around 18-28 weeks to gear up your team. Forget about alts.

 

It is apparent to me that the dev consensus is that 4.0 gearing was way too fast and things needed to be slowed down substantially.

 

I am somebody who does operations and pvp. I'm not a fan of the removal of expertise (and hence pvp gear). I liked the 4.0 pvp gearing system because it took only a short period of time to gear up multiple characters. I'm absolutely an altoholic. If pvp is supposed to be about player skill and not gear, that 4.0 system was fantastic. It put people on a level playing field rather quickly. I suppose that some people who only played 1-2 characters got bored and stopped playing when they ran out of gear to grind, so that's why y'all "fixed" the 4.0 pvp gearing system?

 

Furthermore (still on the pvp gearing), I generally want different stat allocations for my pvp and pve characters. Having expertise and a separate gear set made that easier to deal with. Now it's kind of a mess. I have to SLOWLY acquire 2x everything from command crates and hope I get the right enhancements (accuracy vs crit vs alacrity). Forget about pvp tanking. There's no way to get those mods because if you open the crates in tank spec, you get traditional PVE tanking mods. If you open the crates in dps spec, you get dps mods. I want endurance heavy dps mods for my tank with tank armorings (and set bonus). So you have to craft everything.

Edited December 21, 2016 by teclado

[Rryla]

Musco wrote the following post:

 

 

...which I understand to mean that there will only be ONE assured drop per operation (on the final boss), with no guarantee of anything dropping from the preceding bosses.

 

However, if you were to re-watch the

again (fast forward to 10:21), Ben makes the following statements:

 

(10:32) "The other bosses that you defeat along the way WILL ALSO contain unassembled gear pieces, but they won't be specific things."

 

(11:00) "...but also to make sure that EACH BOSS gave something rewarding."

 

Both Ben's and Musco's statements appear to contradict each other. I'm hoping we get Ben's version of things instead of Musco's, but it would be great if one of the devs could come and clear this up.

 

If what Musco says comes to pass, I'm definitely not renewing my sub. Priority HM loot drama and ninja-ing in 4.0 was bad enough, and that was 5 pieces shared among 8 people. Just imagine how much more toxic the game would become if 8 people had to squabble over one measly miserable piece.

 

So the Dev's are nothing but Fing liars, If its not Bens way I will closing my accounts, I am not going to spend 60-90 mins and have to roll against 7 other people, its BS.

[ChunkyGoodness]

Hey folks,

 

There is some good conversation going on in this thread but I thought I would pop in and explain how it is currently planned to work in 5.1. The last boss of each Operation is guaranteed to drop unassembled pieces of a specific slot (we are still working out how many pieces drop). Each other boss in an Operation has an increasing chance (by boss) to drop any unassembled piece, not a specific slot. For the sake of the example I am about to make, I will use Karagga's Palace.

 

Everything listed below is an example and not necessarily what will be in-game, these are just representative of the way the system will work.

 

1st boss (Bonethrasher) - 20% chance to drop any unassembled piece.

2nd boss (Jarg and Sorno) - 25% chance to drop any unassembled piece.

3rd boss (Foreman Crusher) - 30% chance to drop any unassembled piece.

4th boss (Fabricator) - 35% chance to drop any unassembled piece.

Final boss (Jarg and Sorno) - 100% chance to drop unassembled head piece.

 

Hopefully that clears up any confusion!

 

-eric

 

 

Quick question, which Op is this? I don't ever recall running one with repeating bosses in the same Op. Perhaps you meant:

 

Final boss (Karraga) - 100% chance to drop unassembled head piece

 

and not

 

Final boss (Jarg and Sorno) - 100% chance to drop unassembled head piece

[blackopsranger]

Hey folks,

 

There is some good conversation going on in this thread but I thought I would pop in and explain how it is currently planned to work in 5.1. The last boss of each Operation is guaranteed to drop unassembled pieces of a specific slot (we are still working out how many pieces drop). Each other boss in an Operation has an increasing chance (by boss) to drop any unassembled piece, not a specific slot. For the sake of the example I am about to make, I will use Karagga's Palace.

 

Everything listed below is an example and not necessarily what will be in-game, these are just representative of the way the system will work.

 

1st boss (Bonethrasher) - 20% chance to drop any unassembled piece.

2nd boss (Jarg and Sorno) - 25% chance to drop any unassembled piece.

3rd boss (Foreman Crusher) - 30% chance to drop any unassembled piece.

4th boss (Fabricator) - 35% chance to drop any unassembled piece.

Final boss (Jarg and Sorno) - 100% chance to drop unassembled head piece.

 

Hopefully that clears up any confusion!

 

-eric

 

Real question is will each person get something or just 1. Here come master loot trolls

[Jerba]

I mean, I'm having fun grinding Fractured (until you nerf it) but some of us - especially players that have been here for years - have exactly zero interest in grinding gear to play four year old content. Can we just play it without this bull ****?

Same, Fractured is a fun way to spend the time, in fact I'd rather do that than doing ops. After 200+ runs, it gets a little repetitive but it's still the most efficient way. I already have 3/14 BiS 242 pieces, so by the time 5.1 rolls around, I'll be fully equipped except for the pieces where RNG was not with me.

 

The 5.1 changes will be great for filling out the remaining slots, and for getting the other raid members equipped who won't put in the time to play the game, but they don't solve the original problem. Players will go for the path of least resistance, and operations have a very, very high inhibition threshold.

Even though I love operations, I'd rather do uprisings because it gives me gear more quickly and has no risk of wiping. My guildies have been doing nothing but PvP/GSF the last few weeks (outside of raid night) because it gives easy CXP.

Edited December 21, 2016 by Jerba

[benzodiazepine]

Hey folks,

 

There is some good conversation going on in this thread but I thought I would pop in and explain how it is currently planned to work in 5.1. The last boss of each Operation is guaranteed to drop unassembled pieces of a specific slot (we are still working out how many pieces drop). Each other boss in an Operation has an increasing chance (by boss) to drop any unassembled piece, not a specific slot. For the sake of the example I am about to make, I will use Karagga's Palace.

 

Everything listed below is an example and not necessarily what will be in-game, these are just representative of the way the system will work.

 

1st boss (Bonethrasher) - 20% chance to drop any unassembled piece.

2nd boss (Jarg and Sorno) - 25% chance to drop any unassembled piece.

3rd boss (Foreman Crusher) - 30% chance to drop any unassembled piece.

4th boss (Fabricator) - 35% chance to drop any unassembled piece.

Final boss (Jarg and Sorno) - 100% chance to drop unassembled head piece.

 

Hopefully that clears up any confusion!

 

-eric

 

Hi Eric,

 

Thanks for clearing this up quickly. I know you have a policy of not posting in random threads as explained in the interview with SWTOR Central, so your reply here is much appreciated.

 

My suggestion would be something along the lines of:

 

1st boss, 2nd boss, 3rd boss, 4th boss - Two guaranteed drops for unassembled random pieces between these four bosses (I don't really care how the drops are spread out)

Final boss - 100% chance to drop two unassembled specific pieces

 

Four drops shared among an 8m ops team is an acceptable outcome and I'm sure many others would be happy with this.

 

Cheers

[benzodiazepine]

There are very few guilds left that can kill NiM bosses, and the skill required for NiM is miles above what you need for PvP, where you only need to put in enough time and can even AFK.

 

Not to mention PvP has no lockouts.

[FrozenGoalie]

Hey folks,

 

There is some good conversation going on in this thread but I thought I would pop in and explain how it is currently planned to work in 5.1. The last boss of each Operation is guaranteed to drop unassembled pieces of a specific slot (we are still working out how many pieces drop). Each other boss in an Operation has an increasing chance (by boss) to drop any unassembled piece, not a specific slot. For the sake of the example I am about to make, I will use Karagga's Palace.

 

Everything listed below is an example and not necessarily what will be in-game, these are just representative of the way the system will work.

 

1st boss (Bonethrasher) - 20% chance to drop any unassembled piece.

2nd boss (Jarg and Sorno) - 25% chance to drop any unassembled piece.

3rd boss (Foreman Crusher) - 30% chance to drop any unassembled piece.

4th boss (Fabricator) - 35% chance to drop any unassembled piece.

Final boss (Jarg and Sorno) - 100% chance to drop unassembled head piece.

 

Hopefully that clears up any confusion!

 

-eric

 

I HAVE TO KILL THEM TWICE??