Four dps have been able to clear the H4 since it launched, and it launched the same day Campaign/Black Hole gear was introduced, so it was doable in Rakata (and probably less, but I'm not going to pretend I remember the quality of the gear of the various PUGs I've done that one with). Since mid/late summer using the group finder for a flashpoint has awarded Black Hole comms, which may be exchanged for gear that is better than Rakata. Meaning the requisite level of gear is available to everyone. Also, now everyone has a full set of Tionese, which is probably sufficient. I guess if the entire group only had Tionese gear it might be a problem, but that strikes me as an edge case; a group of four friends who do dailies but don't do flashpoints? Actually, now I wonder if I can get some people to try that H4 in just Tionese and see what happens. Could be fun.
I certainly wouldn't describe it as hard in the 51/50/50 modded gear we were all in, certainly, but when you've got healers and dpsers with 14k hp you could get into trouble on a couple of the pulls (the very first one might be the hardest actually) if there wasn't some amount of mob control going on. A group of all DPSers might have enough CC to just do it that way too, I suppose, which was not an angle I had thought about until just now.
When I do Chasing the Shadow in a group of four well-geared DPSers, we just AoE everything down and ignore tanking, healing, and CC. When I'm with four dps but a few of them have newly-50 gear, we just coordinate with CC. It's never been a problem. As far as I know, all the H4s are balanced for any four players, not a holy trinity team. I always roll my eyes when I see players spamming general for 15 minutes, "LF1M for Long Shots, need healer".
Oh, yeah, cc is definitely a part of it. I'm not sure what it looks like when there's no cc, but unless you're running a mixture of four vanguards and guardians you don't have to find out. EDIT: Going by Marchhhare 's simultaneous post, apparently it looks like an apocalypse. Not sure I'd want to try that without fairly good gear.
The way Sjofn feels about Corso? Well, I have about 6k affection with Doc halfway through Act 3, and I now find him repulsive. I'm not sure I can fully articulate why, but it's a combination of incredibly insecurity, sociopathic disregard for other people (except when they're in danger of dying, I guess. Although not always, see his "clever scheme" to gain fame and fortune), and bravado he can't come close to backing. Though he does have his moments, such as Aaaand looking back earlier in the thread I see that "Tell Doc he's a moron" is apparently a viable way to further the relationship. Dammit. I guess I'll start doing that.
So I figured I'd give SWTOR another whirl and thought maybe I'd move my highest-level char, a sentinel, over to Harbinger where it seems the largest contingent of BF'ers live. Come to discover that among all of the wonderful things Bioware/EA is happy to sell you for good, hard cash is NOT a character transfer. Really guys?
Thanks, fixed it. I think my brain was recalling the first SW online game (as opposed to EQ, which I never played).
They're working on paid transfers, supposedly. Not sure what the timeframe is, all their old 'soon!' promises are sort of out the window with the staffing changes and the panicked switching to F2P. I'm not holding my breath, really, but I'd hope it is vaguely soon as we have some friends on another server who want to switch to ours and keep their legacy levels.
I don't envy the dev team. Game gets pushed out before it's done, so they're playing catch-up on things like dual spec (still not implemented!) while also trying to maintain and update a live game. And then before they're caught up they lose half their staff. And then some more of the staff. And then they're told to covert to F2P. And then they're told to adhere to what appears to be a fairly demanding release schedule, in perpetuity. Also this schedule doesn't seem to allow sufficient time to iron out all the bugs.
Yeah, a lot of little bugs seem to be sneaking through - there have been weird problems with the cartel coin item packs, sometimes items bind themselves incorrectly, some of the items are listable on the GTN but don't show in searches, some items are tradeable but still unlistable (this was a problem with the pink-purple crystals for a couple weeks, and is also a problem with the cyan-blue ones if the lack of them on the GTN is any indicator), etc. Color-matching is messed up right now, standing corpses still happen, double saber people have been bugged on first summon for what feels like decades. None of these are game-breakers, of course, and I haven't had a bug in a flashpoint for ages, so that's good at least.
My current favorite cartel-related bug is that the Satele/Malgus holostatues count as companions. And you can deploy them in operations. Meaning you can put one down and then use heroic moment (2% regen/second for one minute. Yes, that sounds handy), or the DS/LS abilities that fully heal you or cause you to take half damage. Oh, and if you have an Agent at 50 you can of course use Legacy Orbital Strike. Boss encounters become slightly easier. Though that's probably less a bug and more unintended consequences. Also a miniboss is currently MIA in TFB. Which no one would care about, except he drops a couple million in crafting mats. Also the final boss in TFB currently has a phase that's completely non-functional, so after you kill two tentacles you stand around for 30 seconds and wait for them to respawn. Also when NiEC launched the third boss' most important mechanic was nonfunctional (you have to navigate a minefield. You fight a sequence of minibosses. They have knockbacks that need to be dealt with because duh, minefield. Except the knockbacks didn't fire). It's almost as if they don't have the time or manpower to properly test things, but I can't imagine why that might be.
First Digital Expansion announced featuring a lot of stuff I thought was going to be free content released by year end. http://www.swtor.com/rothc?intcmp=sor_bwa-mkt-t-us-hp-013 Don't want to click? In a nutshell: 5 more levels, new planet (Makeb), continuation of the class quest lines, no word on Cathar.
IIRC, Cathar are going to be a paid unlock on the Cartel market. I read a post that if they sell well, they'll do the same for other races (apparently creating the animations for every possible class ability is quite time consuming). That really bums me out, because I'd be interested in playing a Nautolan or a Togruta but not a fucking space cat. One of my guild mates remarked that he may unlock the Cathar with his free subscriber Cartel Coins just to encourage future species development.
I'd probably unlock it just to have something to buy. I bought a few cartel packs, but their definition of "rare" is really distorted. Most of those rare items are available for cheap on the GTN. They should have just followed the LOTRO store model. You want something? You buy it. The collectible card games aspect of it is just annoying.
My questions about this mostly center around what happens with gear and endgame content volume. Are the current flashpoints going to just scale up to 55 for hardmode? Etc.
Anecdotally, I suspect their gambling pack model is working. There's a guy in my guild who has spent a crazy amount of money (so much that he's too embarrassed to tell us the exact amount) on cartel packs because he wants all the rare items (white crystal, throne mount, Nihlus mask, etc.). I think the industry calls people like him "whales".
The rumour I've heard is that all the current hard mode flashpoints will be rebalanced for level 55 players and new hard modes will be added for all the existing FPs that only have a normal mode (e.g. Hammer Station, Athiss, Cademimu, etc.)
Well, that and they clearly adopted it because it worked for ME3. I don't think anyone ever told us what kind of revenue the gambling system in ME3 generated, but it was sufficient that when the Austin team were given five months or whatever to convert to F2P they went with it rather than writing it off as a total disaster and cloning Turbine's model. Obviously there are important ways in which TOR!=ME3, and we'll see with their ongoing releases whether there's a noticeable shift away from packs toward direct purchases or vice versa. As far as flashpoints, my only real question is if they'll fix the existing dungeons so you can't skip 90% of the trash and half of the bosses, because that gets pretty old. Lost Island was a solid step in the right direction. On an unrelated note, it amuses me that finding a PUG group that won't be totally demolished by HMLI is still an exercise in frustration. Oh! That reminds me, if you folks on the Ebon Hawk haven't done Hard Mode Lost Island, well, it's actually harder than the first two raids (not in terms of gear checks, in terms of mechanics), so that might be worth doing if you can't get a full raid together. Or even if you can. Plus it drops a Rakata chestpiece and Columi mainhand, which are otherwise dropped by the final bosses of the first two raids on Hardmode. Tionese is good enough for HMLI if you know what you're doing. If not, you want Columi and ideally some Black Hole mixed in. Just, again: it's not a gear check, it's an execution check.
Has there been any announcement of a talent tree re-vamp when the expansion is released? I was looking at the trees of my preferred classes, and they're designed such that five more talent points isn't really going to give me anything meaningful.
Nope, there hasn't been any detail at all really, just teaser-level stuff. They did clarify that there will just be the two major faction stories, not 8 individual class ones for Makeb.
No new class stuff? Not surprising, but disappointing. Is Lost Island Hard mode the one where the second boss is basically in the middle of a lightning generator? Because I've never been past that. Granted I've been stuck in crappy pugs. I need that one and quite a few of the ops. (The only one I've done is EV)
LR-5 (I think that's its name) is generally considered the first boss. The critter preceeding him is a miniboss. But yeah, that's the one. First boss is a tank check, second is a healer check, third is an everyone check. Basically. Everyone needs to be on the ball for every pull, really, trash included.
Do you and Sjofn want to give it a try? My friend/partner in crime can provide his Sentinel/dps. And I have my healer smuggler.
I can try DPSing on my trooper (he's specced for it and has an actual DPS suit now, but I haven't actually done it in months) and Ingmar could tank, I suppose! I'd offer to tank but I haven't actually done any flashpoint tanking on my JK since ... uh ... level 30-something and that is probably not the flashpoint to re-enter the tanking world in. :P
I have 2 pieces of Columi, Black Hole mods in my chestpiece and a Dread Guard relic, I'm totally geared up for TIER TWO flashpoints, rite?
Yes. It's not the gear that's going to kill you. When half my raid group went in blind (with full campaign), it was a goddamned massacre. I actually had to read strats! For a flashpoint boss! L5-R is not a gear check.
I haven't done all the operations, but it's the hardest fight I've encountered in game. The playing field is definitely tilted against you.
Knowledge is power. Guard it well. EDIT: I may have been a bit hasty. We went in with three players (dps and tank) in Tionese and a hugely overgeared and experienced healer. It was...exciting. We didn't lose anyone to bosses (though we died a couple times on careless trash pulls), but Jesus Tionese tanks are squishy as hell in HMLI. My Vanguard's shield chance and absorption percentage are twice as high as my Guardian's, and it was very, very nice noticeable.
Responding to this again with an actual example: here's a Fraps recording of Tatooine Royal Navy's kill of Nightmare-mode Kephess (currently the hardest raid boss in the game) this week. Our raid setup was a Vanguard ( ehm ecks) and a Shadow for tanks, a Sage and Scoundrel for healers, and two Gunslingers, one Commando, and one Sage for DPS. The video is recorded from my (Kingfisher) POV. You can hear both tanks, one healer, and our Sage dps relaying key bits of information over voice comms, but the other healer, the Commando, and both Gunslingers (me being one of them) don't say anything. An explanation of what's going on: The first phase of the fight is to kill three droids. Each one casts an ability that, if not interrupted, gives the droid a buff that increases damage done and reduces damage taken. If it reaches eight stacks, it's an automatic wipe. The droids cast the ability too frequently for one person to interrupt, so we had to setup an interrupt rotation on each droid. This is why you hear one of our tanks calling out "1...2...3..." over voice comms. We pre-assigned a number to each person so they know when it is their turn to interrupt next. While this is happening, Kephess himself is standing on a walker that occasionally shoots ground fire in a cone pattern. There are five possible locations for the fire, which we refer to as Cones 1 to 5. Cone 3 is directly in front of the walker. Standing in the fire is, of course, bad. After the three droids are dead, a Baradium Bomber spawns. The Bomber has to be killed in about 15s or else he blows himself up. The player that lands the killing blow automatically loots the bomb and then must run underneath the walker, fire a grappling hook up at it, and then attach the bomb to the walker. This was obviously inspired by Luke doing a similar trick in ESB. When the bomb detonates, the walker is vulnerable for exactly 20s. During this time, everyone (including tanks and healers) blow all their damage cooldowns and burst the walker down as much as possible. If you aren't able to kill it within three vulnerability phases, you will probably wipe. This part of the fight is a huge dps check. In our video, I think we took the walker from 100% to about 65% in this phase before it became invulnerable again. When the walker has about 5s of vulnerability remaining, a large pack of adds will spawn. There are two types: Trandoshan Warriors and Trandoshan Trenchcutters. Each type has to be separated and killed away from each other. We have one tank fight the Warriors in front of the walker while our other tank gathers the Trenchcutters behind the walker. Three waves of adds spawn, each one containing two Warriors and (I think) eight Trenchcutters. All the dps focus on the Trenchcutters first with AoE abilities. We purposely leave one Trenchcutter alive because killing it starts the next phase. Once all but the last Trenchcutter is dead, the dps then takes down the Warriors. After that, we wait for our healers to let us know we're in good shape, then we kill the final Trenchcutter to trigger the next phase. Another Baradium Bomber spawns, same as before. The person who lands the killing blow once again has to grapple under the walker and plant the bomb, making the walker vulnerable again. This time we took the walker from ~65% to ~22%. The next phase has two droids appearing. Everyone except for one tank has to stack on top of one of the droids. The tank who isn't stacked with the group will be periodically attacked with one of the droid's Rail Shot abilities (a high-damage single-target attack). Every ~15s or so, the droids will "shift polarity" and the raid group has to run across and stack on top of the other one. Repeat until both are dead. At this point, Kephess himself jumps off the walker and has to be tanked. The fight's (very tight) enrage timer begins as soon as Kephess appears. His regular attacks hit very hard, and he also applies a brutal DOT to his current target. Whenever he puts the DOT on a tank, the other tank has to immediately taunt as it's impossible to heal through both the DOT and his regular attacks. According to one of our healers, this is by far the hardest part of any boss fight from a healing perspective. On a scale of 1-10, he said this phase of the Kephess fight is a 10 while the next hardest boss to heal was a 5. A few seconds after Kephess appears, a third Baradium Bomber spawns. As before, it must be killed in about 15s or else it explodes, except now the raid doesn't have the benefit of the healers and tanks helping with the Bomber because they have their hands full with Kephess. When the Bomber dies, the walker again becomes vulnerable and must be killed by the four dps players. In the video, a fourth Baradium Bomber spawned while the dps were finishing off the walker. This is not supposed to happen and is bug in the game. We dealt with it by having one of our tanks pick it up and letting it explode after 15s. When the walker was destroyed, the dps start attacking Kephess. The idea is to burn him down to 60% as quickly as possible because he stops casting the DOT after that. At around 60%, he uses an ability that sucks everyone into melee range and does a high-damage pulse to anyone near him (this is the big purple circle on the ground). We try to take advantage of LOS to prevent the ranged dps and healers from getting sucked in. Additionally, Gunslingers/Sniper have an ability they can activate that prevents them from being moved while they're in cover. You can see me use this in the video. From 60% to 0%, Kephess is a straight-up DPS burn. He also puts a debuff on one of the tanks that causes them to drop Purple Circles of Death on the ground, but the main challenge in this phase is to kill him before he enrages. Even without the DoT, he still hits really hard, though. You can see in the video that one of our tanks was down to 6% HP remaining once. And that's pretty much it. It's really not that much different than a typical WoW raid encounter. We make it look pretty easy in the video, but that's only because we wiped several dozen times to get to this point. The phase with the Trandoshan Warriors and Trenchcutters was especially challenging when we were first learning the fight. Once we figured out how to handle that, the next biggest hurdle was beating the enrage timer.
So yeah, pretty much WoW with a different raid size + lasers and robots. Thanks for the info, though. How creative are they with the encounter designs overall?
That actually sounds quite a lot more complicated than most non-hardmode WoW raid encounters, but then again it is Nightmare level so I guess that makes sense.
They run the entire range from boring tank & spank to very interesting and creative. The devs always include one "puzzle" boss in every raid tier. For example, one of the bosses in Karagga's Palace has a huge damage reduction buff that doesn't go away until a few members of your raid group solve a Towers of Hanoi puzzle by clicking on computer consoles. Here's a video walkthrough of that fight (not my video): Overall, I'd say the encounter designs are on par or maybe slightly more interesting than WoW's (with the caveat that I stopped playing WoW during the Tier 11 era, so I have not seen anything in Firelands or beyond).
It's not that complicated, there's just many different phases, each with their own unique challenges. I'd say the complexity of Kephess is on par with maybe the Lich King or Yogg-Saron in WoW.
