This. A thousand times, this. Making the enrage tighter is a bit of a cheap way to make a fight hard, but it works. I'm delighted that BioWare has made this fight meaningfully difficult. I don't want it to be cleared on Day 1. I don't want it be cleared even on Week 1. I want to beat my head against the screen, cry tears of frustration and stay up late nights brain storming about ways to eke out just a few more DPS points.

I would be more enthused about this if I wasn't in an APAC guild where most of the raid team are over 200ms now.

If the fight's tuned this tightly, then the lost APM and false GCDs will make it genuinely impossible.

Can you post the HP on each boss, the HP of the adds, the hard enrage time in seconds and the approximate amount of time required to break Ciphas's bubble (being over/under on this value by a little bit doesn't have much impact on the DPS minima).

 

Personally, I'm really glad the enrage timer is hard. Everyone was complaining about trivial DPS checks on the PTS, so it's good to see things have been retuned. Whether or not it is truly mathematically over-tuned is still up in the air since we haven't seen numbers.

 

Something to consider: with a Resolve stim and DPS relics, I can get almost 1.2k DPS on my tank on Styrak. I'm almost positive I can get quite a bit more on the Dread Guard as the fight is more static and has fewer debuffs. 40% of Kel'sara really isn't that much, relatively speaking (even assuming even HP levels, 40% is equivalent to enraging at 13% on a normal boss). You may be able to eke out that much just by having your healers drop Affliction once every so often and your tanks pull more damage.

Tried it with guild tonight

Heirad has about 1.3 million health

Ciaphes has 1.7 million health

Kel'Sara about 1.4 million

I would be more enthused about this if I wasn't in an APAC guild where most of the raid team are over 200ms now.

 

If the fight's tuned this tightly, then the lost APM and false GCDs will make it genuinely impossible.

heh the GCD issue sucks even for the people in the timezone of the server. Having a lot of issues with the GCD especially at the start of this fight. Usually get hit with a few right out of the gate.

Spoken like someone who doesn't know they increased the damage output as well as the HP of this fight.

 

This fight is impossible given current enrage timer.

Because higher DtPS is correlated with lower DPS?

I hear what everyone on this thread is saying. I have a lot of respect for the DPS in <Death and Taxes> and <Grey Order>, so I'm well aware of the magnitude of what is going on here. What I would very much like is for you to just look at the numbers. Let's assume you can do 2.8k DPS on a dummy (and I know many of your DPS are over this mark). This fight is tuned allowing you to lose 15% of your maximum theoretical DPS due to movement/mechanics/etc. 15% is a very, very wide margin.

I'm well aware that Nightmare Mode has more movement and higher requisite raid awareness. 15%!!! You can't tell me that it's mathematically impossible when the margins are as high as they are.

I will also take this moment to point out that the technique I used to compute the DPS minima on this fight has proven to be extremely accurate on other fights with hard enrage timers (like Styrak when we were all under-geared). I'm quite confident in the conclusion that this is doable.

So what you're telling me is that you're finding the fight difficult. You're using that assertion to make an argument from authority, claiming that nothing I say is valid.

 

I'm sorry you're wiping. I'm sorry that your tanks aren't able to multi-task with their CDs and their high-damage attacks. The math is in an earlier post if you're interested. The fight is doable, it's just not going to fall on day 1.

The fight difficulty from a mechanics point is spot on. The healers are 100% stressed the entire fight, the tanks are living cooldown to cooldown, and everyone needs to be raid aware because one slip during the second or third phase will cause a wipe. The fight has to be perfect, regardless of HP on the bosses.

We have done this fight perfect, we have reached the third phase and seen every mechanic the fight has to offer and progressed through them. When the boss enrages halfway through it's phase, it's a numbers failure, it's as simple as that. I've never said a fight was impossible before, people said that about HM Z/T even after it was downed within 2 hours of release, people have said that about NiM Kephess even after multiple guilds first week cleared and second week titled. We've hit DPS check walls before that we lolwut'd, but there were 6 bosses to get endgame tier from that we could farm on alts. This has a pair of bracers.

Looking at our numbers and cross referenced with the guilds who have gotten to the same point, we all need ~20% more DPS to down this fight. Call it 15% because I'm sure we can pull off a 5% enrage one-shot lawlstomp race. We're not the best players in the world. We are however top 5%, arguably some of us are top 1%. We're taking off of work for this, people can laugh but it shows the level we play at. There aren't many hardcore raiding gulids who don't take off on content releases to down the new stuff, if we're not pulling it off, people who casually raid aren't going to even figure out the mechanics for weeks. Tell me how this goes when you actually zone in.

This. A thousand times, this. Making the enrage tighter is a bit of a cheap way to make a fight hard, but it works. I'm delighted that BioWare has made this fight meaningfully difficult. I don't want it to be cleared on Day 1. I don't want it be cleared even on Week 1. I want to beat my head against the screen, cry tears of frustration and stay up late nights brain storming about ways to eke out just a few more DPS points.

. Farming bracers for 8 weeks off the first boss is not going to help, nor is it good game design.

usually when there is a tough fight in an mmo I like to say "there is no such thing as impossible, the word itself says I'm possible." but this fight in its current state is impossible. All it really needs is 1 minute added to enrage timer...hell even 45s. This is definitely nightmare worthy but they slightly overdid it with their last minute changes that they apparently didnt test phase 3 of. Tanks have to work, healers are stressed the entire fight, and dps don't have a lot of wiggle room and must pump that dps. The only problem with fight is the enrage timer. BW is taking a step in the right direction with this fight but they honestly need to test more thoroughly in house before releasing.

This. Exactly what we were saying, to the t. If we were able to break 20% before enrage I'd say it was doable, I'd switch from Watchman to Combat to get up to 2.8-2.9k DPS from 2.5-2.6 I'm at. I'm sure our healers could pull it out and we could use cooldowns during Heirad to stay alive for one perfect run without the raid heals. However, we're missing 400-500DPS from ALL 4 PLAYERS. On top of that, I"m already raid frame swapping my berserk/zen heals based on who needs raid heals, DPS or tanks. No, I'm not losing DPS by doing that, modesty aside I'm that good at the class. It's what is keeping the tanks alive at certain points. This **** is very, very tight as is. It's perfect. Minus the impossible enrage. If this was the last boss, I'd say it was absolutely perfect, with 4 other bosses to do mandatory gear farming for just like DMS HM 8man was. It's the second boss, and it's broken.

Farm bracers FTW.

However, we're missing 400-500DPS from ALL 4 PLAYERS.

If you're enraging at 40%, then yes you're correct, you're missing 399 DPS from all 4 DPS assuming that your tanks can't improve *at all*. Let's go with that assumption…

By the exact same math which makes the 400 DPS determination, your damage dealers are (on average) parsing 1972 effective DPS. We can tone that down a bit if we assume the tanks are only pulling 1k a piece, and so we'll generously assume that you're parsing 2072. This is what I mean when I say that the fight is doable.

If you're enraging at 40%, then yes you're correct, you're missing 399 DPS from all 4 DPS assuming that your tanks can't improve *at all*. Let's go with that assumption…

 

By the exact same math which makes the 400 DPS determination, your damage dealers are (on average) parsing 1972 effective DPS. We can tone that down a bit if we assume the tanks are only pulling 1k a piece, and so we'll generously assume that you're parsing 2072. This is what I mean when I say that the fight is doable.

your numbers are wrong

What has me curious is why hasn't BW responded to this issue by now? There are multiple streams running from top guilds and we are all saying the same things....BW where are you?

they released a patch that means its time to go on vacation to block all negative feedback

Why should they reply.

A boss fight in a Nightmare fight is hard - Stop the presses.

GOOD we wanted a challenge - now we have one. Why is everyone so keen to dumb down Nightmare content. We want this difficulty to continue to have something to say "SWTOR has some of the hardest raids" its a good selling feature for those who enjoy that kind of thing.

your numbers are wrong

Great. Where are they wrong? I laid it all out very clearly. If there is something that I'm missing, tell me! I'm more than willing to concede that the fight is mathematically impossible if you actually show that it's mathematically impossible. All you've done so far is make vague claims about high damage levels and mechanics and then dismissed my numbers with broad, sweeping assertions.

I'm not being closed minded about this, but thus far you and the other guilds have not given any evidence which supports your claim that the fight is impossible. Give me evidence and I'll believe you. Right now, the only concrete evidence in the thread is mine, and it says the fight is doable (albeit tight).

Better then clearing the last raid within half a day of the servers going live then having nothing to do but gear grind a boring op for months.

My guess is that most people have issue with the fact that they're hitting the wall at the second boss in the instance and not on something deeper in. The math suggests that it's *theoretically* possible, so I don't think it's apt to claim that it's outright impossible in practice right now. I'd say give it a week to see how close other guilds manage to get before asserting that claim.

Why should they reply.

 

A boss fight in a Nightmare fight is hard - Stop the presses.

 

GOOD we wanted a challenge - now we have one. Why is everyone so keen to dumb down Nightmare content. We want this difficulty to continue to have something to say "SWTOR has some of the hardest raids" its a good selling feature for those who enjoy that kind of thing.

We want harder mechanics, not impossible enrage times. Enrage times are the lazy programmers failure program. Why make a difficult puzzle that takes skill when they can just add 500k HP and lower te enrage by 30 seconds.

You just don't get it until you try it with the changes. dps in HM vs nightmare is a completely different story. Nightmare involves a lot more movement and a lot more dmg done/required. A tank doing 200 more dps isnt going to come close to solving the gap in dmg required to down this.

O.o

Ansalem, you've practically made a career complaining about how easy this game is.

I would think you would be pleased there was finally an activity in this game worthy of your vast and incomparable skill.

O.o

 

Ansalem, you've practically made a career complaining about how easy this game is.

 

I would think you would be pleased there was finally an activity in this game worthy of your vast and incomparable skill.

I am happy with the mechanics and challenges of this fight. the problem is BW obviously didnt test p3 of the fight after their fixes. The enrage timer needs to be addressed. I'm not saying to add an insane amount of time to it or to lower boss hps etc. I'm saying make it within the realm of possiblity. The math doesn't add up at all the other guy throwing out arbitrary numbers of % dps loss scaling for nightmare is plain wrong he needs to go inside and try it. I don't expect nightmare modes to be cleared within the first day, but this fight right now is a complete impossiblity. It would take a month of farming bracers/random drops in main and alt raids to get your mods/enhancements to the level required to even come close to this enrage timer.

KBN, let me start by saying that I have a lot of respect for you and what you do. And at no point in this post am I claiming to be anything close to a mathematician, but from what I can see, you're looking at the plainest, most simplistic version of the #s for this fight. For instance, the Legionnaires will spawn at least 4-5 times in a successful kill, you have moments of dps lost when you are being Strangulated, or have to stop cast to interrupt the aforementioned strangulate. Or if a melee receives a doom, what kind of effective dps can a Sin/Shadow do while having to run through 6 green circles? You also make the assumption that both of your tanks are assassins with resolve stims/ attack adrenals and therefore the tanks can be expected to provide 1200 dps each, but as you've heard from multiple sources, the healing is too tight to afford this luxury, and more realistically, your dps will be at about 900-1k without the stim/adrenal.

I personally am in the camp that the fight is THEORETICALLY doable. But it would require the worlds most flawless run to do so and the margin is so small that you might as well call the fight impossible. If we take the 4 BEST parses ever from off of Torparse in hardmode, which is ~3k dps. Then we can deduct 300-350 dps of that as AOE, considering that those parses include 2 lethality operatives and 2 Sorc/sage's which have a Death Field and chain lightning causing splash damage to the other 2. I would then assume about 50-100 dps lost due to the changes from HM to NiM (I base this off my personal experience in there today). This puts the BEST possible dps at about 2500-2600 each.

In our # crunching, we found that the DPS requirement is 12,400 damage every second of the fight. If you assume both tanks to be at 900, and all the dps at 2550, you come out at 12,000 dps coming from these sources. Healers can make up a bit of that, but this still means that you need literally the best recorded DPS all in the same raid together to down this boss. The issue we're running into is not that we aren't capable of pulling the flat #s required to kill the boss, it's just that the changes to the fight have made it impossible to have the uptime and effective dps to make the enrage.

Those of us in Tempest are encouraged by the difficulty of these encounters. I personally hope that it doesn't get nerfed, let's see what the SWTOR community is really made of on this one.

Donttazeme - Officer of <Tempest> - POT5

If you're enraging at 40%, then yes you're correct, you're missing 399 DPS from all 4 DPS assuming that your tanks can't improve *at all*. Let's go with that assumption…

 

By the exact same math which makes the 400 DPS determination, your damage dealers are (on average) parsing 1972 effective DPS. We can tone that down a bit if we assume the tanks are only pulling 1k a piece, and so we'll generously assume that you're parsing 2072. This is what I mean when I say that the fight is doable.

Your numbers are broken, and you're dumb. We are all parsing at 2400-2600. We are still hitting enrage in numbers that aren't even fathomable. By the token of our parses alone, you are wrong. It doesn't get any more simple than that. Do the fight, then comment on the numbers. Nothing like good old fashioned.

All of my calculations are made on theorycrafted math, not true, parsed, hard numbers. Whether or not we pull that out or do more, or less, whatever. It's what we have to go off of for showing improvements we need to do in order to kill the boss. We've done it before for other DPS walls we've hit, and we've always known the exact point we have to break in order to down the boss. We cleared to DMS in 63's, upgraded our gear, still hit enrage, geared on alts and legacy'd gear, and we beat the boss after a 5 second enrage. When you're good at something, you don't need exact numbers, you can feel it to a certain degree. Between all of the streams I've watched, all of the other elite level players I've talked with, we're all seeing and feeling the same thing. What isn't theorycrafted is our ability to feel the fights, to know where theory doesn't mesh with in game play. Your numbers can say whatever you want them to say, it's not the way the fight works. Go do it, and report back to us on how your numbers worked out.

drives me nuts because everything about this fight is perfect except the enrage timer.

this is pretty much what everyone who has done the fight is saying

I am happy with the mechanics and challenges of this fight. the problem is BW obviously didnt test p3 of the fight after their fixes. The enrage timer needs to be addressed. I'm not saying to add an insane amount of time to it or to lower boss hps etc. I'm saying make it within the realm of possiblity. The math doesn't add up at all the other guy throwing out arbitrary numbers of % dps loss scaling for nightmare is plain wrong he needs to go inside and try it. I don't expect nightmare modes to be cleared within the first day, but this fight right now is a complete impossiblity. It would take a month of farming bracers/random drops in main and alt raids to get your mods/enhancements to the level required to even come close to this enrage timer.

Well, I'll be home in a couple of hours and I'm sure I'll be wiping along with the rest of you, and I'll get a feel for it myself

But I find it silly for anyone to claim "mathematical impossibility" on the first day.

We want harder mechanics, not impossible enrage times. Enrage times are the lazy programmers failure program. Why make a difficult puzzle that takes skill when they can just add 500k HP and lower te enrage by 30 seconds.

Increase the enrage by 10 seconds each week until someone clears it sure - however don't nerf it so people can have instant gratification rather than trying something hard.