This is basically a post in response to numerous questions I've received over the last few days as well as thoughts about current raiding in 5.0.

 

So we're 1 week into the expansion and in the very first lockout our group of players; an 11 man roster, has already cleared 24 out of the 26 NiM bosses as well as all Hard Mode bosses. We haven't killed styrak or terror from beyond yet, mainly due to a lack of pulling.

 

This isn't because we're the best players ever (those people left long ago). This is because Bioware have chosen to rehash old content for a second time. Each rehash is a drop in difficulty as players become more proficient at the content. Furthermore, this time round a lot of the difficulty decreased due to the direction Bioware has taken the meta (both via class changes and total outputs achievable, particularly with healing).

 

This tier (if you can even call it that) has been absurdly easy and is possibly the easiest tier of raiding this game has seen. In particular it is highly evident that this content was never balanced with the newest class changes in mind. This is likely due to a real lack of PTS feedback as the necessary players were not taking part (getting raiders alone is not enough, full raid teams are required.) There are some fight breaking aspects right now which we have PM'd devs about which should have been picked up but weren't since no one was even running NiM on PTS. Furthermore, the release of these ops has featured heavy desyncs in fights adding to frustration; things like delayed and choppy player movements on master blaster, bosses appearing where they actually aren't, orbs showing further than they are all show a lack of attention. These desyncs can be seen throughout the videos posted.

 

A major concern right now is that given how easily we have managed to clear content undergeared as we are; how trivialised will the supposed 'hardest' content of the game become as we hit tier 2 and 3 galactic command ranks and go up an entire tier of gear. I understand ops development is time consuming and costly, but if you are going the route of rehashing content repeatedly, measures must be taken to ensure it remains relevant and challenging

 

I've received a dozen PMs since the launch of 5.0 here on the swtor forums and reddit asking questions about what we've cleared, what sort of gear is required, what progression order is recommended etc. To briefly answer;

Go for whatever NiM bosses you can kill (easier bosses include nefra, writhing horror, 6/7 snv, to obtain gear schematics, use said schematics to gear your team. As of right now I'd say prioritize gearing DPS and potentially tanks (depending on comp) as heal checks are a bit of a joke, and higher DPS indirectly makes healing easier. As far as full clearing an instance goes; it appears to be DP > EC > DF for us, can't comment much on TFB and SnV as we haven;t killed the apex bosses of these 2 raids yet.

 

I've mentioned what we've cleared, but to give the community some insight on our strategies to overcome our low gear levels; videos of our kills are in the playlist below.

 

I don't expect we're the only ones who will steamroll through content. I expect any competent NiM team will clear quickly. It may not necessarily be as fast as this but I'm certain teams will find they will clear content at a considerably faster rate than in 4.0 due to the complete disregard of appropriate tuning.

 

TLDR: Content this tier has been rehashed a second time with zero consideration of how class meta changes and player experience may impact its challenge and, in many cases, fights appear to have even been nerfed as a result. If this is the content bioware plans to give us, then more appropriate tuning and scaling is necessary.

 

If you have questions or would like some elaboration, I'm happy to answer to my best extent. Remember, this is merely my viewpoint (it's also the general view of many in our group).

Edited December 6, 2016 by THAT_EPIC_GUY

Congratulations.

 

But I couldn't disagree more with your conclusion.

In reality there are very few players who can clear the content like you did. Additionally those players are scattered over many guilds because the really good guilds, which they were all in, stopped playing long ago. So there is no reason to tune the content according to your needs only because you managed to stay together or find new competent players with ambition. Even while you call this content "the easiest ever" many guilds who call themselves "semi-progress" will not be able to kill it.

But I think on one thing we can agree, that Bioware doesn't care about the top 1% of raiders. They stopped caring when they didn't release a nightmare for Revan and since then we are just not welcomed in this game anymore.

Edited December 6, 2016 by Zwirni

Congratulations.

 

But I couldn't disagree more with your conclusion.

In reality there are very few players who can clear the content like you did. Additionally those players are scattered over many guilds because the really good guilds, which they were all in, stopped playing long ago. So there is no reason to tune the content according to your needs only because you managed to stay together or find new competent players with ambition. Even while you call this content "the easiest ever" many guilds who call themselves "semi-progress" will not be able to kill it.

But I think on one thing we can agree, that Bioware doesn't care about the top 1% of raiders. They stopped caring when they didn't release a nightmare for Revan and since then we are just not welcomed in this game anymore.

 

They cleared 24/26 in the first week. I am not sure what kind of gear that the team had overall, but I know that they didnt have 242. NiM should be tuned for the top level gear. If a team, regardless of how good they are, can clear the content in gear that isn't top level when there is no progression, than the content is not tuned high enough imo.

 

I think point made here is a valid one. If they keep rehashing the content, it becomes easier and easier to perfect strategies that work. The more you fine tune the strats, the easier the fights become. If you couple this with poor tuning and the failure to take into account class changes, then you arrive at the inevitable; the content is too easy for what it should be. This is NiM. You should have to work to clear it. First week clears represent poor tuning, and there is no getting around it.

 

I don't want to make it sound like the kills aren't impressive because for you to clear it the first week, even if it is undertuned, is impressive. I congratulate you on your continued effort. Now you just need to clear it with the worst comp imagineable since its going to be that easy.

To be fair, you already knew this going into 5.0 - operations are the lowest priority at the moment. They haven't even fixed the 16-man bug yet.

While I agree with all of your points and have sympathy, you should know that BioWare doesn't care about you or me or any other operation player anymore. We can be lucky that the bosses are still in a somewhat playable state.

To me, this has first been clear with how they handled the Coratanni in 3.0, and since then, we've had more than enough signs - no NiM for Rav/ToS, Priority Ops, NiM crystal, raid designers leaving, 16M bug, lack of balance... BioWare is happy if you stay subscribed but they don't care if you quit the game.

 

My raid group cannot clear the bosses yet, we need better gear. Like we could clear TFB VM but we hit enrage at 30% on Golden Fury VM. Clearly the bosses are not tuned correctly, especially because it looks like Golden Fury drops the same tokens as the bosses in EV/KP.

For now, I'm staying because my raid group is staying. I really don't like that there are CXP boosts being sold in the Cartel Market, and I'm sure it is only a matter of time before full gear is being sold as well.

 

Just read through this interview (which as I understood, is from this Saturday, four days after early access) and see for yourself what the devs think about the expansion. Maybe they'll put a token vendor in? But everything else about GC is perfect? What about the fact that we need to do PvP to get the most CXP? Or that PvP rewards CXP for doing nothing yet for raiding you need high skill to get CXP? Or why they don't consider the CXP boost to be P2W?

Clearly, the devs are no raiders, maybe not even gamers or they'd notice these things. At this rate, I don't expect the game to last very long. BWA is in serious trouble because the monthly chapters failed, and from this interview, it seems like they have learned nothing. If story players can get the full story unlocked with just one month of subscription, they will not stick around. I expect another massive loss of subscribers early next year, and then there will not be enough players coming back for 6.0 anymore.

 

NiM should be tuned for the top level gear.

I respectfully disagree. There are very few raiding guilds left, and maybe just 2-3 guilds that could kill all the NiM bosses in the first 2-3 weeks.

For example, my group has DPS with 6k DPS, while the top guilds have DPS with 7k DPS. Even when we get top gear, we will still not hit 7k DPS, yet we are bored by HM and want to run NiM. Are you saying that the bosses should be tuned for the 20-30 players from those top guilds, and the hundreds of more casual raiders should be locked out from doing NiM?

Now, I have nothing against leaving 1 or 2 difficult bosses, like Brontes NiM during 4.0, but other nightmare bosses should be killable by more casual raiders (whose skill is still miles above the average player, even the average SM raider).

Your way of thinking would have been fine during 2.0 times when we knew that eventually, there would be more gear tiers or levels added and the more casual raiders could eventually move onto the NiM bosses. But now that the bosses are always increased to the max level and there is no nerf via new gear tiers, the NiM bosses should be tuned for 230/236 gear, so that players with less skill have a chance to kill them with 242 gear.

Edited December 6, 2016 by Jerba

I respectfully disagree. There are very few raiding guilds left, and maybe just 2-3 guilds that could kill all the NiM bosses in the first 2-3 weeks.

For example, my group has DPS with 6k DPS, while the top guilds have DPS with 7k DPS. Even when we get top gear, we will still not hit 7k DPS, yet we are bored by HM and want to run NiM. Are you saying that the bosses should be tuned for the 20-30 players from those top guilds, and the hundreds of more casual raiders should be locked out from doing NiM?

Now, I have nothing against leaving 1 or 2 difficult bosses, like Brontes NiM during 4.0, but other nightmare bosses should be killable by more casual raiders (whose skill is still miles above the average player, even the average SM raider).

Your way of thinking would have been fine during 2.0 times when we knew that eventually, there would be more gear tiers or levels added and the more casual raiders could eventually move onto the NiM bosses. But now that the bosses are always increased to the max level and there is no nerf via new gear tiers, the NiM bosses should be tuned for 230/236 gear, so that players with less skill have a chance to kill them with 242 gear.

 

I do not agree with this logic at all. Maybe I erred in saying that it should be geared towards 242. 240 would probably be acceptable. As for bosses being tuned so that less skilled players can beat them, no I do not agree with that. This is Nightmare difficulty. If you want to be able to beat it, you have to perform at the highest level. For people who can't do NiM, there is HM. I am not saying that every NiM boss should be Brontes level of difficulty. I am saying that if you want to be raid NiM, you can't expect to be just above average. NiM should require near perfect execution of all mechanics and roles.

 

Why should casual raiders just be able to walk into NiM and kill it if they have the best gear. Beating these bosses should be based on skill with gear providing only the baseline stats necessary to beat the boss. This game has been simplified and dumbed down enough in basically every aspect, I would prefer they leave NiM at a really high level since they aren't adding new raids. Not everyone is good enough to beat NiM. I myself only went 24/26 in 4.0. I don't claim to be the best. However, if I kill a boss in NiM, there should be a sense of accomplishment that I beat something that was exceedingly difficult through hard work, determination, and team coordination. If someone isn't at that level of play, that's fine, but the content shouldn't be nerfed or tuned down so they can feel good about completing it. If they want to beat NiM, they have to learn to play at a NiM level.

 

Please note that any uses of the word you are the impersonal 2nd person and not directed towards any specific individual.

Now, I have nothing against leaving 1 or 2 difficult bosses, like Brontes NiM during 4.0, but other nightmare bosses should be killable by more casual raiders (whose skill is still miles above the average player, even the average SM raider).

.

 

Totally disagree, As someone who missed Brontes and Styrak NiM clears in 4.0 I'm glad the DPS check gates raiders, including myself. It's hard for a reason.

Silly Mac, do you really believe Bob the Intern (also head of PvP ) can balance let alone fix bugs in Ops? (Kappa) If they did they would probable break 3 other things or delete a Boss. I'm thankful they didn't "accidentally" remove them.

 

But honestly BW doesn't really care as it's not a priority for them and even if they did they lack the expertise to go fix it due to letting go the person in charge of that. Honestly it's not a problem for BW as the "grind" is meant to keep casuals not us busy. In retrospect even when we had an Ops guy balancing NiM was always bad with many log in bosses. But I digress. And in the end I'd rather they devote resources to something 8m new that at least semi challenging even if I beat it pretty quick it's at least something new I guess lol.

 

TLDR: I agree if this was 1.X-3.X maybe even 4.X but since it's all rehashed now twice, I simply can't bring my self to care that much since we are going to get bored regardless of difficulty since it's been done before. Not to say your points are wrong but does it matter anymore if you get my gist.

Edited December 6, 2016 by FerkWork

Totally disagree, As someone who missed Brontes and Styrak NiM clears in 4.0 I'm glad the DPS check gates raiders, including myself. It's hard for a reason.

Like I wrote, I have nothing against having one or two difficult bosses that my group can't beat. But there must be room for a middle ground between "NiM bosses tuned for 242 gear with perfect skill" and "HM bosses killable by all PuGs with 224 gear".

The main issue with the game right now is the steep learning curve going from solo content into raiding content. BioWare has the perfect opportunity to provide content for every skill level so that new players can get into the endgame easier - and every raider will agree that we need new players. Just because the bosses are all labelled NiM doesn't mean they should all be tuned for 240/242 or whatever, and drop the same tokens.

Now you just need to clear it with the worst comp imagineable since its going to be that easy.

Oh yes, this!!! Merc healers, PT tanks, and Fury Maras. I would say Lightning Sorcs for DPS, but then you wouldn't get some of those awesome anti-melee mechanics.

Oh yes, this!!! Merc healers, PT tanks, and Fury Maras. I would say Lightning Sorcs for DPS, but then you wouldn't get some of those awesome anti-melee mechanics.

 

merc healers can compensate for the dps loss with reflect.

I don't claim to be the best.

 

What have you done with the real Sion?

The issue with rehashed content is that it is rehashed; regardless of whether it is easy, reasonably challenging, or silly hard to beat. Rehashing it a second time is just doubling down on the fail that was 4.0 rehashed content.

 

Also assuming NiM would require having all NiM gear to complete would be a catch 22 - how would you gear up if it is tuned to require gear only it drops?

 

End bosses could be tuned assuming players had geared up on earlier bosses, but the earlier bosses would need to be tuned assuming gear from the previous tier / difficulty level (assuming classic gear progression, not the abhorrent RNG box gearing system).

The issue with rehashed content is that it is rehashed; regardless of whether it is easy, reasonably challenging, or silly hard to beat. Rehashing it a second time is just doubling down on the fail that was 4.0 rehashed content.

 

Also assuming NiM would require having all NiM gear to complete would be a catch 22 - how would you gear up if it is tuned to require gear only it drops?

 

End bosses could be tuned assuming players had geared up on earlier bosses, but the earlier bosses would need to be tuned assuming gear from the previous tier / difficulty level (assuming classic gear progression, not the abhorrent RNG box gearing system).

 

I understand the catch 22, but that we aren't in the classic gearing anymore. That is why i said top gear because even though everyone hates the GC RNG loot box crap, I don't see Bioware getting rid of it anytime soon.

Would you say that the poor implementation of reflect abilities made the progression any easier or that omitting it doesn't affect any more challenge into a fight?

Replying to as many comments, but I'm not gonna quote cos wall of text is big enough as is, you can probably figure out what is in response to what quite easily though.

 

Doesn't matter what peoples' perception of our skill level is. We are far from flawless and have still cleared this too fast for what it should be. Furthermore tuning down because players can't reach the true capabilities of their class is a bad step; it will never incentivize any improvement among players. We hit walls and because we hit them, we got better. You can ask players in my group how many tiny differences I'd suggest even to save 1 second off our ttk to beat an enrage.

 

As Sion said; the point is that this content was clearable at such a low gear level in such a short space of time. It does not bode well for the longevity of the content since there are higher gear tiers to make it even easier. I don't think tuning for 242 is necesarry, but tuning for full 240s would be nice. This way content is still challenging when you have full 242s but the slight padding of stats makes farm less stressful.

 

I'd like to reiterate. Tuning should not take into account player experiece, this is just unfair on new players. The biggest issue for myself in this tier is that tuning did not factor in any class changes and in some cases, regardless of class changes certain phases appeared to be nerfed anyway. You can't be making content easier if rehashing is the only thing you're doing.

 

 

Nightmare bosses should not be clearable by casual raiders. That being said, nightmare in 4.0 and now in 5.0 is the most accessible it has ever been. Players have always talked about how much harder it was on tier and I believe this statement is largely (of course with the exception of some hard nerfs such as p2 of council) only true because you had to learn fights. Fight knowledge is all there right now. Furthermore, player competency at classes has never been easier because class playstyle and rotation has not significantly changed since 3.0 launch. BW has slowed really slowed down with their changes and thus keeping up with the meta has never been easier.

 

I agree that a major issue is the learning curve of the game. Individual player responsibility, whether it be personal output or mechanics, is not prevalent enough and when it is, it jumps in skill requirement too drastically. Again though; getting good at the game has never been easier than now.

Progressive difficulty is also of course something BW have never been good at. Fun fact; I found Draxus NiM harder to heal than Brontes NiM in 5.0.

 

I posted my suggested progression path and there are easier bosses from which you can get schematics to help you push into harder bosses.

 

Reflect made some progression easier. It was useless in other cases and fights still remained relatively easy. Reflect is of course a factor of the class changes I said which were not accounted for when tuning this tier.

Like I wrote, I have nothing against having one or two difficult bosses that my group can't beat. But there must be room for a middle ground between "NiM bosses tuned for 242 gear with perfect skill" and "HM bosses killable by all PuGs with 224 gear".

 

Yes but the solution is not to bring NM down. It's to bring HM up where it is supposed to be.

 

There is exactly zero reason for casuals to be doing/clearing NM. None. There used to be a pretty good compromise, which was over leveling it. Of course, that requires actually creating new content from time to time.

 

If you've seen what Mac is talking about, some of these fights are so broken now because of new class abilities no one thought about. There's something wrong with that.

I don't know if you have done this one, or thought of this Mac (I haven't gotten through all the vids yet), but the Sin utility that gives them reflect has no cap. You can eat a Doom or a Color Deletion for example and reflect the full damage back. Now granted the Sin will die, but one death for that kind of damage is well, ridiculous. Now for Ciphas it would be kinda stupid to do unless you already had enough green circles out, but Color Deletion would just be hilarious. Gotta wonder what other bosses it might be good on, since a no cap reflect can be really fight breaking for some bosses.

I don't know if you have done this one, or thought of this Mac (I haven't gotten through all the vids yet), but the Sin utility that gives them reflect has no cap. You can eat a Doom or a Color Deletion for example and reflect the full damage back. Now granted the Sin will die, but one death for that kind of damage is well, ridiculous. Now for Ciphas it would be kinda stupid to do unless you already had enough green circles out, but Color Deletion would just be hilarious. Gotta wonder what other bosses it might be good on, since a no cap reflect can be really fight breaking for some bosses.

 

We tried to avoid really baiting things to the sin reflect as we thought it was absurdly broken and took a lot of satisfaction away from kills

My raid group cannot clear the bosses yet, we need better gear.

 

lol mate so is that why you are grinding all that gear for? At least you can see how useless it is to go through the GC thing. The only thing gear is good for is PVP now, its not needed for PVE! Im doing Master Uprisings and KOTFE/KOTET chapters in 224 gear, Master might need a few 230 pieces for now, you dont need it.

 

It always was skill > gear

 

As "Mac" mentioned its the same content meaning most people can do it blindfolded as they really know exactly what to do, where to go, etc. Overall this wasnt even an expansion, you basically did the story, achievements for Uprisings and you are done with the "expansion" in a week and what now? Your gear is sufficient for NiM so what should we do now??

I just remembered something...This thread is not 100% true.... Becauae TFB been rehashed 3 times now. #Recyclebeforeitwascool.

I guess I shouldn't have used the word "casuals". By this word, I meant the raid groups that are not in the top 5, but maybe in spots 6-100. Those groups have HM on farm and are looking for a challenge in NiM.

The way NiM was tuned during 4.0 was fine IMO, there were a few bosses that were a challenge to the top guilds, and the "semi-progress" groups had still plenty of NiM bosses they could kill. For me, it's still too early to know how the 5.0 tuning is. You write that it is easier now but to me, it looks like there are some tight enrage checks, like you killed Tyrans on the last tile even with reflecting the fire. My group never had a problem with mechanics, like we killed most bosses on-level, and the final bosses 5 levels above, so the NiM fights are all in muscle memory, but we can get stuck on DPS checks. If there is a tight enrage, no matter how well we play the mechanics, we will be unable to kill a boss, and that makes me sad.

Edited December 7, 2016 by Jerba

Draxus (unless they changed it) becomes immune shortly after hard enrage. On Tyrans you can run out of tiles. On Calph there's burst check on crystal/orb. Can't remember any other fight where it won't be possible to survive through enrage, especially with 5.0.

Granted, my pve experience in current "tier" is super limited due to both teams leaving game, but what I've seen was utterly depressing -- staying over 90% hp for 99% of the time, having spikes to ~50..60% hp 2-3 times per fight. Right now tanks are outright broken, and healing is overtuned even more than 4.0 (where it was already a joke imo, with good players doing sick stuff like healing 10 stacks on brontes or solo healing mb hm 2nd phase).

Even if you drop all broken stuff as much as you can (don't take op utilities, don't reflect, respec to drop stance bug etc), there are still multiple issues. Burst specs only became burstier, while so called "dot" specs also gained burst. AoE meta changed dramatically since last ops were released, I don't remember last time I heard any arguments from team members about bringing strong aoe class for certain fights that weren't voiced with a healthy doze of sarcasm (and 95% of aoe discussion in general is lethality/concealment aoe, ofc). Rough scaling for 240-242 gear with minimal attention to few choke points (mainly spike damage from bosses and stuff like raptus healing challenge) seems to me like most time and resource efficient solution since content is at least twice rehashed and doesn't matter much anyway.

New players shouldn't be allowed in nim from the start anyway, there's hm for that.

And those "casuals" that farm hm but can't into nim... well, I don't think bwa removed nim sucker's crystal, didn't they?

Hello thar,

 

So just a heads up to all those "NiM" Guilds out there farming Nefra, sexploiting Horror (fixed?), DarudeSandstorm, ZnT or Bestia (?)....... have u collected all the Mods schems yet? (Gotta get em all)

Wonder where Enhancements/Barrel/Hilt/Armoring Schems are?

 

Well...there is a pattern for loot (Schems) list that drops off certain bosses in 5.0. Ive given permission to Dulfy to use our Drop list, but i guess operations arent on her important list, so she hasnt made a post about it yet.

 

Basically in the first 4 days of the expac, we quickly worked on clearing HM (VET) Ops to test out the difficulty of the current tier, and in the process we noticed a pattern for drops. We then started NiM (MASTER) Ops and noticed the same pattern but instead of 48 Schems from HM, NiM was 51 Schems. We went 24/26 NiM Bosses in Week 1 and pretty much confirmed the loot table. We did 4 kills of NiM council week 1 to try get 240 DPS Hilt but it did not drop for us till late in Week 2....

 

4 Bosses Ops (EC)

First Boss - Mod

Second+Third Boss - Enhancement

Final Boss - Barrel/Hilt/Armoring

 

5 Bosses Ops (TOS/RAV/DF/DP/TFB)

First + Second Boss - Mod

Third + Fourth Boss - Enhancement

Final Boss - Barrel/Hilt/Armoring

 

7 Bosses Ops (SNV)

First + Second + Third Boss - Mod

Fourth + Fifth Boss - Enhancement

Sixth + Seventh Boss - Barrel/Hilt/Armoring

 

Lair Bosses (MONO/TC)

Only did Mono HM once and we dont plan on rekilling cuz dumb fight, it dropped a 48 Mod for us.

 

So yea.. go work on the harder bosses for more schems so you can quicken your progression. I know of Guilds who have used Nightmare Crystals to help them clear bosses to gain schems. Kudos to them, whatever helps them get to working on apex bosses quicker.....Or buy our gear off the Harb GTN, we dont mind the credits.

 

*to the Harb NiM Community so salty about our sales, go get your own schems already... stop whining about us not crafting gear for you...

Edited December 16, 2016 by SupaHsuB

snip

Thanks for that Info

Thanks! We were starting to suspect that Nefra only drops mods because on our server everyone only got mod schematics. Sadly, I can't convince my guildies to use nightmare crystals. We have bought the schematics, we have more than enough materials and now would be the perfect time for them, but they refuse to use them.

Oh well, I'm already in Tier 3 so I can get 240/242 pieces from crates but some of the guildies don't play as much. Hopefully, the remaining 240 schematics will soon become more widely available so we can get the raid equipped.

Edited December 19, 2016 by Jerba