Disclaimer: Im one of my guilds 2 "main" tanks, done KP/EV nightmare a billion times, EC Hardmode 4/4, blah blah blah. When the logs came out and we ran the numbers through the parsers, we immediately starting suspecting something was a bit off (though just looking at the skill tree gave an hint really). Armor just didn't do that much of a difference, then you tack on deflection and resilience which, if used right, can mitigate an enormous amount of damage (and let you tank for a while during the craziest of enrage). The healing would often account for a huge percentage of all healing received (in some fights, over 30% of all damage taken would be self healed). Add the campaign shield relic with kenetic ward, and that few percent damage mitigation loss from armor really didnt matter much. When switching to campaign/blackhole geared up vanguard, our healers were crying (not because they couldnt heal it, but it was absolutely much harder). We could see the number, we could see the logs. Shadows were pretty much fine at launch (slightly underpowered), and they were buffed sky high. When 1.2 hit, i was VERY surprised to see shadows were not being nerfed. Now i'm not surprised at all to see this. The only challenge for a shadow tank in the entire game was keeping threat during the second fight on EC hardmode against campaign geared sentinels, and thats about it (and even that wasn't that hard, but they're removing that challenge now, lol). Just keeping the rotation a little tighter instead of smacking my keyboard while reading my emails will make up for the nerf No big deal really.

The buff right now appears even in normal mode (lol), but you only get the title for nightmare. We got the Infernal Title this week in nightmare from it. You get the buff the moment you start the first boss fight. If you kill Soa before it runs out, you get the title even if you weren't present for some of the boss fights (we did one of the boss 7 man due to a d/c and the person was not there for Gnarj, yet still got the title).

As someone mentionned already, there's a million ways to make sure that doesn't happen. EC's last boss for example: without enough damage dealers, you can't blow up the bombardier in time. Whats the point of the hard enrage? All it does is make it that if you lose a dps, its over. It does NOTHING to prevent dps from being obsolete, since even without the enrage timer you would not be able to do the fight. You'd just be fighting bombs over and over and over and over. That said, several other games have had solutions for that. Pretty much one of the first RPGs ever (D&D!) had that solution from the get go: healers with limited resources, damage dealers with mostly unlimited. Bring all healers for giggles. You won't last more than a few fights. FFXI, while it sucked in many other respect, had that too. You didn't need an enrage timer, or specific group compositions, but you had to tilt toward something or healers ran out of juice. Then there is the distinction between tanks and damage dealers. Sure, the idea of a glass cannon is nice, but do ALL damage dealers have to be glass cannons? Why do tanks have to be dedicated? DDO's encounters worked fine without that hard distinction. Non-MMOs have concepts that could be worked in (Diablo where there's no real tank, or League of Legends where most DPS are "Tanky dps"). If only there was an implementation of all those ideas so we could see it action to see if it worked... OH WAIT! THERE IS! Its called Guild Wars 2. No dedicated healers, no requirement for dedicated tanks. Their current encounters are zerg fests though for the most part, so that bit isn't a good example, but there's no reason their class system wouldnt work in a more classic game from other angle. Imagine SWTOR where everyone has self heals and the classes are generally tough enough and have enough tricks up their sleeves that you don't need dedicated tanks. That actually would work VERY well.

Criik. Look at my forum name for a second and think about it long and hard =P

Enrage timers are only a part of the much greater issue associated with the WoW-clone generation of MMOs (or EQ clones in some respect), that is pretty heavily emphasized in TOR. EC HM make it even more apparent. The fact that you must have 2 tanks, 2 ranged dps, 2 melee dps, and 2 healers to do any 8 mans (different numbers for 16 man, same logic but a little more fuzzy). Oh, you absolutely can deviate from this. You can do EV/KP HM with 1 healer. You can do most of the 1.1 content with 1 tank, and part of the 1.2 stuff too. You can do it with 4 melees. Point is, they are dead set on trying to force it on us. A boss that has mechanics to TRY en enforce (Note: my point isn't that they are successful, but they try): Tank swapping forcing 2 tanks. Keeping 2 separate groups of 4 away from each other, forcing 2 healers. One of the boss has a crippling AOE that falls just short of ranged dps. One that requires people to be within range to spread damage from the tank, encouraging melees. Mechanics that emphasis that the two bosses must die at the same time, preventing strategies such as kiting one while the rest of the group kill the other. Enrage timers calculated tightly enough to prevent extra tanks or extra healers. Now, having an encounter like that isn't a problem. Its actually pretty fun. But having all the encounters progressively try to enforce specific group compositions (and with the language the dev uses, it seems like they will try their best to make it even more and more so), and even worse, have only one "solution", really trash creativity and flexibility. Not only does it make it that if a small guild has a few members of the same class go in vacation, they can't do anything anymore, but it also means that several guilds that don't look up anything online, don't talk to each other, nothing, will all end up beating the encounter roughly the same way, in roughly the same time, with roughly the same group and classes. Now THATS freagin boring. (Note: I know you can vary a bit. And there's a handful of strategies to get stuff done. But nothing like some non-WoW-style MMOs or online games have, where player skill is the only limiting factor). While we've done EC HM and nightmare contents without much trouble, many of us find ourselves preferring the easier stuff (EC SM or HM for the rest), just because if, HORROR, someone can't make it that day, we can fill in with whatever class and still go through with a bit of creativity. Which is a shame, because I prefer having a bit of challenge... but class/gear checks aren't a challenge. Second tank is sick today? Don't have a replacement handy? WELP! Toth and Zorn HM will have to wait~

Fortunately there are a lot of MMOs where glass cannons are non-viable or inferior, because of the lack of a "trinity" of classes (heck, its probably the majority of them if you take out direct EQ and WoW clones). SWTOR is unfortunately not one of those, but stuff really toss around a lot of damage that ignore the people on top of the threat list. The final boss of EC, for example, really only has one difficult-ish part (not really, but...). A point where 2 droids go around shooting people for 15k damage, and they can't be taunted. While we managed the fight just fine, the people in the group who had switched out their mods to be pure glass cannons were bordering on being liabilities. A lot of other mechanics in EC will make lower hp people have to dodge a lot more than they should, no matter how good the healers are (there's always the GCD to deal with...). Hp isn't everything, but a large amount of endurance for a little bit of offensive stats is probably a desirable tradeoff for many classes, especially melees. As another note, in EC, mechanics are everything. Its very easy to "miss" a mechanic that, if handled properly, would let you put out way more damage. This is most visible in hardmode, but its there in story mode too. When we finished story mode we had people with orange gear with 1.1 daily mods in it, and had no enrage issues on our successful runs. We only had a single ranged (having more would make it even easier). A columi group can totally do it on Story if done the same way a Rekata group would do it on hard. Obviously full rekata/blackhole will make it a lot easier

So we've been tackling EC hardmode yesterday. The mechanics are fairly manageable with a bit of practice, and we can get them down to 12-15% without deaths. However, enrage kicks in there and its more or less over. Looking on youtube, I see two scenarios. 1) 4 ranged damage dealers, staying out of range except for the mechanics that require you to be closer, healers stay there too, switch target to even things out near the end, totally trivialize the encounter as only the tanks take much damage for 90%+ of the fight. 2) 2 ranged, 2 melees. Melees are always on Toth, tanks swap when jumps occure so melees dont have to move much. Ranged stay out of the deflect damage debuff on Zorn, so they can always attack, and melees can attack as soon as Toth is back to them. Ok, good, cool. But if you have a mainly melee group (3 or more), are you screwed as far as enrage goes (because they have to sit out of attacking zorn for a bit), or is there a strategy to handle this? Thanks~

That would happen if someone, let say a healer or a sentinel using their heal ability, was very very very borderline as far as threat goes, and actually pull threat from healing during the lightning spire phase.

I don't know about those youtube videos, but from having gotten half my guild through that flashpoint, this has always been the "soft enrage", that comes before the real enrage. If you're too slow, that happens. You can absolutely kill him before it does, but most people actually kill him during that phase. If you pull him to the area near the entrance when it starts happening, you can go through about 15%-20%~ without too much trouble during the crazy phase. Better if you kill him before though, but most people can't.

Keep in mind a LOT of the guilds doing higher end content were using stuff like 2 sorc/sages as a crutch. The guilds that could do stuff like EV Hard/Nightmare with 2 scoundrels or a scoundrel and a commando are doing great right now, even if they switch to sages. (we're one of those. We cleared pretty much everything with scoundrel healers, so all the strategies we had to use before to just barely pull off a win, make it a joke even if we use the nerfed healers now). We've completed EC Story with some people in the group still using orange daily gear (though most were in rekata, only a few were full). One of the "top" guilds on our server that cleared all the nightmare mode stuff super quickly and had the titles before anyone else, were relying on stuff like 4 sage healers and only ranged DPS in 1.1 to get anything done. Anyone who played TOR more than 10 hours a week could get the nightmare mode titles. Even hard mode EC's first boss is easier than the nightmare content used to be if you were to use scoundrel healers in 1.1. Most of EC is actually execution. So worse scenario, you'll wipe a lot until you get your first win, but after that you wont have much trouble. We ARE having trouble on the hardmode enrage timers (surviving is not a problem), but again, our DPSe are not fully geared. Worse come to worse we'll wait a few weeks, fill up on Black Hole gear, and that will solve that problem (we're a semi-casual guild, so not really expecting to clear all content with 1.1 gears, which is fine).

What i liked wasn't that it was difficult (It wasn't, really), it was the TYPE of difficulty. I could go and write a game right now where everything has 100000000 hit points, kill anyone in one hit, and you do 1 damage a hit. That would be "difficult". It wouldn't be fun. The 1.1 content, save for 1-2 fights, were all like that (but not really hard, obviously). The new content isn't really hard so much as it actually requires you to look at the screen and do a bunch of fun little mechanics. Thats actually fun, regardless of difficulty. The only sad part is that to experience that content, people need some basic gears, and they have to go through the "boring number check content" first, so they won't get to experience the fun stuff and may just quit. If they will already start upping the gear requirements to access anything beyond 2 operations, and the only really fun flashpoint, then they need to redesign the lower end content to be as fun as the new stuff so people stay interested.

Your tank should never have double or single destruction on him. EVER. If he did, you did it wrong. You're supposed to let people who wont be getting hit (much) for a bit take it. It can be your healers, it can be anybody, but if its the tank, you're going to get spanked (its survivable, but it heavily stresses the healers). The tank should move out of the way a bit so that other people are closer to take it for him. If you don't have enough, they get it by double destruction instead of single destruction, and thats bad news.

Meh, every generation of gamer feels that way about the previous ones. When the first videogames came out, especially the online ones via BBS and stuff, the tabletops people felt that way. When MUDS came out, BBS players felt that way. When everquest came out, MUDS players felt that way. When FFXI and Lineage came out, Everquest players felt that way. When WoW came out....oh man did the word "carebear" pop a lot.... And so on and so forth. Now Diablo 3 is coming out without letting you put points in and without a skill tree (even though those things were meaningless because of game designs), and Diablo 2 players feel that way. Guild War 2 will come out, and people will complain about new gamers not having to go through obsolete class trinity and skill systems. It will always be that way

My point was that there should only be 1 class per role, unless the 2 classes are different enough that they fulfill the role so differently that you cannot compare them. So where SWTOR went wrong isn't that the classes aren't balanced. They can't be unless they're all the same with a different rotation. The problem is that they only have 3 roles and that is freagin dumb. The closest 2 classes should ever be to filling up a role is stuff like in D&D Wizard vs Sorcerers, where the two are the same roles, but have totally different advantages and drawback to the point they're hard to compare, its all situational (and even there in an MMO where everyone should be able to do everything, its problematic). Guild Wars 2 goes the other way to tackle that problem, by making everyone be able to do all roles instead, and went to crazy length to make the stylistic difference more than just the order in which you push the buttons.. That may end up better, or much worse...we'll see. Those are just a few examples though. There's a LOT of games where classes are too different to compare, and the concept of having stuff fall in specific roles makes no sense. WoW really popularized those "role buckets", and the MMO industry suffered for it.

Since the new bosses often require you to split in 2 groups, scoundrels with their new buffs are disgustingly good. Kolto Cloud is freagin ridiculous now, ticking its whole power in 6 seconds. Sages are still awesome because of the ever so yummy Force Armor though We did do everything last night with a commando and a scoundrel healer without issues.