He has an AoE attack that is completely invisible and deals a lot of damage. Have everyone stand near the activation consoles. If you stand in the center of the room, you die.

Hmm...I do have shadows off..

Camera is zoomed out all the way. I've tried rotating it. It's so damn challenging to move him safely under the pillars without some sort of ground mechanic. Are people putting their camera in first person, or is there something I'm not realizing about this? Any help would be appreciated.

The current end game is buggy, unpolished, and clearly incomplete. You're in a paid beta. It will get better. I wish there was a better answer.

Amazing. This feels like exactly what I've been seeing for a long time now.

It's good to hear some people handled the fight just fine. We definitely weren't playing at maximum potential and I'm sure we could get it (we had a low percent attempt). It still felt very unpolished, a bit buggy, and like there wasn't any true design we were trying to defeat.

The Bugs - Critical Every attempt one of our members would die to fall damage instantaneously upon landing at the bottom of the arena. It seemed like it was perhaps the last person to finish the Karagga conversation. This was not due to an initial swipe or anything. Just instantly they would die after being moved to the pit from clicking on the door. - Critical Targeting the Gamorrean adds that he spawns is virtual impossible because the selection box of the rancor is so large. As a melee I always had to run until Bonethrasher was almost not even on my screen just to target the adds. Occasionally a tab target would be successful at selecting it. - Occasionally the acid around the ring actually doesn't deal damage. At other times you can walk through it as much as you want without taking any damage. We used this to reset the boss occasionally. It was at least bizarre, although not game breaking. The Design - The Pull The pull for this boss is extremely tricky and ends up feeling really strange. The first time you start the encounter you have a few adds to kill before the pull. That feels right. Subsequent times, the rancor would usually just begin the fight with a slash, and if we didn't organize when everyone falls down we would just all start the fight at half health. That felt wrong even if it is intended for everyone to take an initial slash since we were able to circumvent that by staggering our conversation completions. - Lack of a Predictable Threat Mechanic This seems reasonable for a boss mechanic. He simply has no aggro table and just chooses targets randomly throughout the fight. The combat is certainly chaotic and interesting. This doesn't bother me so much beyond the fact that there's virtually no reason to bring a tank to this fight. Tanks should almost certainly respec DPS to do this boss. As an aside, occasionally it felt like he did have an aggro table and would target the tank for long periods of time. After a few hours of wiping to this boss, though, it seems like this was just dumb luck of the tank getting targeted a few times in a row. - The Swipe Effect The swipe effect can be pretty difficult to dodge if you don't see the animation as soon as it begins. The animation looks very similar to the ground pound animation which can feel a little strange. This effect does very high damage for normal mode. Taking a swipe in combination with a ground pound or the ground slam will almost certainly kill any non tank. Perhaps that's okay, but the effect is extremely punishing to folks who are slightly slower at gameplay mechanics. I'd recommend not bringing non-gamers to the fight because of this mechanic. They will likely die to it frequently and frustrate themselves and everyone else. - The Ground Pound Pounding someone into the ground is a very cool effect and a good mechanic for a rancor. This definitely felt correct. - The Ground Slam This was a great AoE effect for a rancor to have. It felt right, for sure. - The Adds The adds didn't really add much to the design at all. They just come out and take some DPS time off of the boss. The inability to target them because of the aforementioned huge targeting box of the boss made them more frustrating than anything else. I'd say they were a net loss for the overall design of the encounter with a small shout out to rancors eating gammoreans being cool. I'd love to see the adds fall from above as knocked in by The Hutt rather than just spawning... =) - The Enrage Timer The enrage timer seemed pretty good. We were a very average if not below average group and we had a low percent wipe where things seemed to go pretty well most of the fight. We mostly felt that if anyone died before 40% or so there was no way we'd make the enrage. Because of this, I definitely wouldn't recommend bringing players who aren't pretty confident they know they're pushing the right buttons. Folks who aren't really gamers probably would hold you back a lot. The Group's Sentiment We did not defeat the boss, and largely walked away feeling pretty bad about the night. We didn't have amazing gear, but we were mostly organized players (all in Ventrilo, mostly guildies who have been playing MMORPGs together for years). We aren't struggling with the hard mode flash points and are managing to take those down pretty easily. It seems like the normal mode ops are quite a bit harder than the hard mode flash points, so the language there might be a bit deceiving. The most significant reason that this night was frustrating was that the boss didn't feel like he has a defeatable mechanic. The swipe being the most challenging and avoidable mechanic we were conscious of and managed to kill one or two people every attempt. Losing people to swipe was definitely why we were losing (besides the fact that we were 7 manning every pull because one of our members instantly died to fall damage every pull). We didn't let him eat gammoreans frequently, and managed to tank and dispatch the 2 adds that spawn at 50% with no problem. We watched this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouMddmyV20c) and were largely executing the same strategy of spread out and let him walk around, run when he's after you, and avoid swipes. We mostly lost melee and healers to swipes. The range of swipe seemed a little strange at times, and you need to be max melee range behind him to be completely certain you don't get clipped by it accidentally. Standing behind his feet will sometimes get you killed. I'd say an announcement or emote when he starts performing the swipe would be a pretty substantial improvement to the overall game play. The animation can be difficult to discern at times when you're trying to manage things like intercedes and health bars. No emote or announcement when the adds spawn is fine. Keeping an eye out for them can be interesting game play. Additionally, some of the bug fixes would vastly improve the quality of the encounter. But that goes without saying. Thanks for making a great game, Bioware! Angarr <The Turks> 50 Sith Juggernaut Jedi Covenant - PvE

I have noticed that some bosses seem to wipe threat occasionally. Also, until we can get a better idea of threat generation from other classes things will be a bit unpredictable.

Tanking is often more about strategy, and understanding the way the threat system works than knowing which buttons to push. Since these can be complex topics to explain and understand I think many MMOGs (such as WoW) just skip it altogether and provide high impact AoE abilities to absolve the players of needing to dig deep to figure this stuff out. Maybe we can keep tanking dynamic and interesting by teaching rather than nerfing... =)

Im still not 100% sure the exact threat mechanics of this game. If Taunt behaves the same way it does in World of Warcraft and other MMOGs, it's function is this: You become the top of the threat list. No other aggro is generated. An example: Player A Threat on Mob A is 100. Tank A Threat on Mob A is 50. Tank A taunts Mob A. Player A Threat on Mob A is 100. Tank A Threat on Mob A is 101. The other things that affect this strategy is threat thresholds. In World of Warcraft, you must be at 110% of the current target's threat to become the new current target if you are in melee range and 130% of the current target's threat to become the new current target. If it behaves like this, the taunt strategy is even better because it gives you a 10% threat threshold every time you taunt.

You're right. The point wasn't about the semantics of what ranged means but rather to describe a tactic in which melee elites/champions can be indefinitely kited by juggernauts. Your corrections are appreciated. =)

That's fair. And the point is that it out ranges most melee attacks. This tactic won't worked for ranged champions/elites

Melee attacks are a 4 meter range. 5 > 4. Ranged.

Hey all, A common theme on this forum among the lower level Juggernauts seems to be that AoE threat is a problem. I imagine most of you are struggling with keeping AoE threat in Hammer Station and Black Talon. A few of you are probably poking into the higher level dungeons and noticing that all you have is smash. Frowny Face. Here are some solutions: Tank only mobs that pose a real threat This one's a pretty easy mental shift you can make that will help you a lot. Do not try to tank normals and strongs in Flash points. These mobs generally don't do enough damage to cause problems for healers. In good strategy, these mobs will be killed off first because they have low health anyway. Use your group's crowd control effects Tanks are often the ones who have to assign CCs, because we're the ones who choose to break them. Know who can do CCs. Sorcerors can Whirlwind anything, Operatives can Sap non droids, Marauders can Disable Droids. Right click the portrait of the mob you want CC'd and set it's mark to something then tell your group to do it. After you do this make sure you don't smash after you charge. Choose a Taunt Target and a Threat Target A great strategy for holding aggro on 2 mobs is to pour most of your threat generating abilities and attacks into a single mob and just taunt another mob on cooldown. Most packs don't have more than 2 mobs worth tanking, so in general you'll be able to get a lot of mileage out of this strategy. If there are more than 2 mobs worth tanking, maybe you should use a crowd control effect... =) Stand with the mobs between you and the rest of the group A lot of the problems with AoE threat are actually due to targeting visibility. It's hard to known when a mob isn't attacking you (especially without Target of target frames). Since mobs face the target they are attacking, if you stand on the opposite side of the mobs it will be vastly easier to notice which mobs are not attacking you. Do not expect Smash to do your job for you Smash, even with the Soresu bonus, doesn't do enough threat to keep a mob on you through nearly any DPS. You will need to use your taunt and change targets frequently to hold aggro on more than 1 mob. Even if you're using the threat-target/taunt-target strategy, your taunt target will need an occasional Sundering Strike or normal attack. Put Guard on the highest Ranged DPS threat Choosing a good Guard Target is a big deal. In general I suggest putting it on the highest ranged DPS threat party member. The reason for this is that if your ranged DPS pulls aggro, the mob is going to run away from you. If your melee DPS pulls aggro, the mob will still be in range to target switch and threat dump as well as pick up glancing threat from Smash. An aggressive healer is also a decent choice if you notice they're picking up mobs frequently.

If anyone reads this far... Just a quick tactics blerb. As a Jugg you have a ranged AoE Snare and a ranged taunt. If you have a ranged companion (like Vette) you can repeatedly snare melee mobs and just kite them while your ranged companion kills them. Taunt and Scream as necessary... No problems killing anything as a Jugg with Vette as a companion up to level 30.