We cleared him with a JK tank, Shadow DPS (me), Commando, and Sage Healer.

Everyone in our group had to be on the ball, me and the JK tank were all over the interrupts. The incinerate is really punishing and has to be interrupted IMMEDIATELY as it channels down from 3 seconds and immediately does damage over time, usually doing 100% dmg during it's full duration. You can't wait, if you hit it too late the tank will be near dead after just 2 seconds.

For the floor, we generally healed through the flames and our commando took care of the adds (since I can't run through lightning storms to hit a ranged add standing in a bubble and gunning the healer).

The fight is INCREDIBLY melee unfriendly. Taking 2 melee is possible but almost a near death sentence due to more lightning storms spawning on the tank.

You need incredibly high DPS as you do not want to extend the duration of this fight. The fight is overly hard on the healer due to the insane amount of AE damage coming in from the adds and lightning spheres.

***

Here is a breakdown of the bosses abilities:

Incinerate: Main ability, uses every 12 seconds. 3 second channel that does massive damage to the tank and stacks a debuff that increases it's channeled damage. This ability is overtuned and used way too frequently (even for an experienced group). This mechanic bars any group experiencing lag from beating this boss. Missing one incinerate and allowing the tank to bake in the full duration is an auto-wipe. Cooldown should be upped in order to keep it in line with groups that have limited interrupt capabilities (such as 1 interrupter with a 12 sec CD). Sometimes the boss delays being moved and uses incinerate while in a lightning sphere. Because no melee or the tank can get to the interrupt at this time this is an auto-wipe mechanic.

Spawn adds and Experimental Cannon: The boss spawns an assortment of specimen X ranged and melee adds. The problem with ranged adds is that they hide inside lightning spheres, making them near impossible to kill as melee (yet another melee hate aspect). Overall they aren't too bad and can sort of be healed through if the tank aoe taunts them off the healer.

Arc Lightning: The lightning sphere. Puts a blue circle down on one random person and extends a lightning sphere from that person's location. Very devastating if put on the tank or melee. Makes the fight almost impossible if the group dps is comprised of all melee. Is interruptable but interrupting it DOES NOT stop the effect. He will place a sphere down whether your interrupt it or not. The damage radius of the spheres is also much larger than the actual graphic, making this ability very misleading.

Floor Lava: Random lava jets on the floor panels, moderate damage and can be healed through. Only deadly when stacked on multiple mechanics (like people in lightning spheres).

***

Strategy and Suggestions:

We basically focused on incinerate as the main issue. We interrupted incinerate and after each interrupt the tank IMMEDIATELY moved the boss away from the lightning spheres. The boss usually alternates arc lightning and incinerate. He will usually drop one sphere between incinerate casts. The reason we move the boss immediately after he incinerates is to ensure he is in a new position for an interrupt and not stuck inside a lightning orb where the melee can't stop it. Ranged DPS was mortar shotting adds and handling them, we did our best to avoid the floor lava but it was second place to incinerate and positioning the boss.

We started at the center with the tank and melee on the center square, the ranged was kiting along the edge and away from the floor. The boss was moved every time he incinerated.

YOU CANNOT MISS incinerate, ever. The main problem with this fight is several things.

Experimental Cannon and Incinerate are channeled abilities. Arc lightning also has a cast time. This makes the boss very clunky to move because he stops and casts. Because this is a positioning fight, the boss should be more responsive to movement, as the boss standing in a sphere and casting incinerate is an autowipe. The cannon targets one random raid member and does focused damage. It's way too hard on the healer to be trying to focus heal one guy and be having the party taking add damage. If anyone gets hit by a sphere they are dead, not even the healer can keep up.

Incinerate is overtuned, he casts it way too frequently for groups without a sentinel to handle. Stopping incinerate requires both the tank and interrupter DPS to be in a interrupt zen. While I can understand the fight needs to be difficult, the frequency at which he uses incinerate and it's lethality to the tank is too much to handle. It immediately does damage on cast and channels down from a full bar. It needs to be reacted to instantly, making anyone who is lagging a liability to the party. We attempted to cleanse the debuff incinerate stacks on the tank but we had no luck due to it applying the debuff and killing the tank too fast. Honestly we didn't even know if the removal worked or not because our healing was too busy tearing her hair out with heals to spare a GCD for it other than once or twice (at which I was too busy being in interrupt zen to notice if it was removable).

The boss has to be moved EVERY incinerate due to avoid the growing lightning spheres. Sometimes the boss stops and uses experimental cannon then follows up with incinerate while stuck in a sphere. We wiped every time this happened, especially if the experimental cannon hits the tank and brings him down for an incinerate to instakill him.

The fight is very melee unfriendly as well, due to the boss being stuck in lightning spheres, adds being stuck in lightning spheres, or the possibility of lightning spheres being cast in the vicinity of the tank. Having the sphere casted on the vicinity of the tank puts the group in an RNG death situation. If the boss cycles through his incinerate or experimental cannon faster than the group can move him out of the radius, the group will wipe. Sometimes the group cannot control the rate at which he moves because he stops to use a channeled ability and then becomes enveloped by a sphere, making interrupting him without a ranged interrupter impossible without costing a death.

Ranged adds in spheres are impossible for the melee to kill. Due to the melee generally taking more damage and not being able to kite around the edge to avoid flames and spheres, they are a liability in this fight.

Much of the difficulty we encountered came from the following mechanics:

-The boss cycling through his rotation faster than his movement can be controlled, causing him to be protected by a sphere when he casts incinerate next.

-The frequency at which the boss casts incinerate too difficult for the party to keep up. The interrupter cannot leave the boss for even a second. If the interrupted pauses to do anything other than watch for the interrupt and the tank misses it, it will autowipe the group. Because the tank is responsible for moving the boss, the tank is not always in range to interrupt UNLESS they are a shadow or assassin, at which their short ranged interrupt makes them optimal for this fight.

-The boss needs to cycle through his abilities slower to allow groups to deal with the layered mechanics better. The recharge on incinerate needs to be increased. The boss should not use a near instant kill mechanic that frequently. His cast speed on incinerate reminds me of pre-nerf iron fist. While L5R doesn't chain cast incinerates they still come pretty fast and the great difficulty is managing moving him while still allowing your interrupter (if its melee) to be in range to get incinerate every time. Sometimes only god decides if that's gonna happen due to randomness if lightning and floor lava. If an interrupter dies to mechanics while trying to stay in range to get incinerate, that guy deserves a medal because he was doing it right.

-Lightning spheres may want to priority target ranged DPS to make the fight more melee viable. The ranged adds should balance out if the bosses more difficult and unfair mechanics (namely incinerate) are toned down. Personally, I don't think the boss needs alot of tweaking to be "fair."

-The fight is tuned to be very melee unfriendly as the melee is dealing with the floors, the heavy damage sphere, and losing alot of DPS on the boss for a very short enrage timer on the boss. The boss might be tunable by having him radiate an aura that causes melee dps around him to take less damage from the arc lightning spheres.

****

Overall this guy is freakin' hard. Certain group compositions that lean towards melee make him even harder to downright impossible. I think some of the tweaking suggestions above might improve this encounter, make him more melee friendly, and make things a bit easier for the group as a whole. While I don't want to see this boss trivialized, I do think that he is a bit unfair right now with his mechanics to certain groups.

Unforgiving would be the best word to describe this guy. Incinerate being on such a rapid cast rotation and melting the tank in 3 seconds combined with all his other mechanics that prevent your melee interrupters from staying on him makes him hard. Increasing the time between his cast cycles and perhaps cutting melee a break with the aura mechanic I suggested above may balance him out.

Currently if anyone messed up, lags, misses an incinerate, or allows the boss to cast incinerate while in a bubble, its a done deal. Currently, it is very hard to prevent the unfavorable wipe conditions above from happening.

I would never attempt this fight with two melee in it's current state. I'm sure that we would have been toast without our commando. The boss needs to be toned to be a bit more forgiving to certain group make-ups.

Totally agreed with the OP.

Besides, due to the 1.2 nerf to Commandos, many commandos dps are not showing up anymore since the patch (at least for my guild, it is now like 1/16 instead of 5/16), which leaves us no choice but to bring 2 melees.

Either their testers on the PTS are heavy hardcores that have completely no understanding on casual players experiences or they just don't want to give away too many blackhole comms to casual players by adding a Weekly FP Mission Impossible.

I've done this twice with the following group compositions:

Tank: (DPS) Vigilance Guardian

Healer: (Healing) Sage

DPS: (Healing) Sage, (DPS) Commando

I am the DPS Guardian, and this was our first attempt (had leftovers from an Op run, as you can see by two of the roles not being filled by the proper slots). This was hard, my tanking gear is a mixture of Columi and Rakata. Incinerate was the hardest hitter, though with an 8 second cooldown it was easy enough to interrupt - even while repositioning the boss (your tank was clearly moving too far too fast while moving the boss). Unfortunately, because of this, Plasma Arc went pretty much uninterrupted the whole fight and soon the room was full of electricity. I think we hit an enrage timer because the Plasma went gigantic but we still killed him (just) with me as the sole survivor. His abilities were quite easy to figure out and we did so on the fly resulting in him being one-shotted (though we had voice comms and have played together a lot here and in other games). Incinerate can, and we therefore assumed should, be cleansed via Sage once it's been interrupted.

Tank: (Tank) Shadow

Healing: (Healing) Sage

DPS: (DPS) Guardian (DPS) Trooper

This was our second playthrough of the Flashpoint and we had proper role assignments this time as well as the knowledge of how the boss works and everybody was in full Rakata. We pretty much killed it dead.

Is it overtuned? Yeah maybe. Try the cleanse after the interrupt hits, see if that helps. I will agree that it was easily the hardest fight in there and by extension the hardest fight in any hard mode so far. I can absolutely see pugs having serious issues. I believe in difficulty curves and this should really have been the end boss in terms of difficulty.

Shadow tank, Vanguard dps, sage/balance dps and sage healer. Resilience out of incinerate. Interrupt the next. Tank can do that. Bubble on boss due to melee. Np, move to the back of the room and stay on one side, moving to the next If the bubble hits again. Return to center when that bubble dissapears. Ranged and heals on east and west sides. First time through took us 6 tries. Now we kill him first try. This says "F*CK YOU MELEE"! all over it but please for the love of god do not nerf it. I love that this place is basically a 4 man hardmode ops.

Everyone asked for harder content and bioware answered with this lil gem. I for one, am gratefull.

Plasma arc doesn't seem to be what drops the balls of lightning. And everybody is complaining way too much about this boss. It's hard, but certainly doable. With a full melee group, it's about dragging the boss around the room. With ranged dps, it's about the ranged players grouping in the back and slowly circling about the room as the lightning balls drop.

First run in Tionese / Columni gear, we 7-8 shotted the boss.

The day after, 1 shotted. Strategy > Gear.

The only frustrating 'bug' I've seen is when the lightning ball gets dropped on me as the tank. That probably shouldn't be happening.

Edit: As for people saying the boss should have been the final boss instead of the first, I am fully against this line of reasoning. If you can't work on strategy and coordination to kill this boss, you shouldn't have the opportunity to kill the easier ones.

I agree, especially the part about this fight being far too unforgiving for melee DPS. There is simply too much AoE/environmental damage to deal with.

The AoE damage would be fine....if it didn't hit like a truck. That seems to be this fights biggest issue is it's totally big on AoE damage, interrupting every ability, not using melee (because of Plasma Arc), and simply being chaotic on top of everything hitting with massive damage.

I'm a Juggernaut DPS and as of yet I've yet to clear this fight simply because I was apparently a fool to think melee had any place in this game, as the devs seem to keep telling us.

I'm curious if the devs will ever actually understand the difference between hard/challenging and simply unfair and cheap?

The AoE damage would be fine....if it didn't hit like a truck. That seems to be this fights biggest issue is it's totally big on AoE damage, interrupting every ability, not using melee (because of Plasma Arc), and simply being chaotic on top of everything hitting with massive damage.

 

I'm a Juggernaut DPS and as of yet I've yet to clear this fight simply because I was apparently a fool to think melee had any place in this game, as the devs seem to keep telling us.

 

I'm curious if the devs will ever actually understand the difference between hard/challenging and simply unfair and cheap?

This is actually the easiest healing fight in the FP, besides the bonus boss; which doesnt count as a boss imo. The aoe damage can be mainly avoided by moving probably as a group, and what damage that is done can be easily healed with aoe heals. The tank, takes very lil amount of damage besides the channel ability (kolto probes keep a tank up 80% of the time for me), if the tank is slow on interrupting, be prepared to cure him/her quickly.

I always hate people that say L2P, but honestly all this fight takes is awareness of whats going on, it may take a few wipes to learn to pay attention to everything, and after that should be a walk in the park.

Tank him to the sides of the room, with the tank in front and other ranged/melee behind. Interrupting Incinerate must be top priority and when you see him put an electric dome down the tank and the rest of you must move him. Stay to the sides and move around the room in a clockwise motion (start at the bottom right corner of the room). When the adds come you can take out the first pack but you can leave the rest if you wish as they do minimal damage and you want as much DPS on the boss as possible. You can also run through lava if need me to go around the corners of the room as it doesn't do that much damage as long as you don't stand in it. Simply continue to have the tank kite him around the room moving him when needed and eventually he's dead.

This video is kinda how we do it:

To everyone who is saying the OP should "learn to play" or "get better gear" (it's coming) or similar, let me include a bit of information that the OP didn't…

Lordhelmos is probably the most skilled shadow DPS on our server. As for gear, he's (last I checked) in mostly Rakata with a few Columi pieces. I assure you, this is not a skill or gear issue. Though, I would be curious which DPS spec the OP was in (infiltration or balance). He tends to swap between them. Balance has a bit more range than infil, so it would probably be better for this fight.

Having now done this fight on hard mode with a highly skilled melee group (Tam, Obi-Dammos, Thornmist, Vit), I can confirm that stacking melee is pretty much death by composition. Even the shadow tank (me) isn't enough to balance this out, despite the longer range interrupts and superior cooldowns. I pretty much agree with everything the OP said, though casting incinerate inside of a lightning sphere isn't *really* instadeath if you have a shadow tank, since we never saw incinerate casted more frequently than the cooldown on my interrupt. That only works because of the ranged interrupt though, and isn't an option for many compositions.

In the "more information" from OP category, I'd be curious as to who the other party members were? I'm trying to get a feel for what skill and gear levels have been successful in downing this boss.

"Death by Composition" you say. And yet people have defeated the boss with a melee stacked group. Again, this is clearly not a balance issue, more that you're having trouble adapting to unfriendly melee mechanics. The fight changes with a whole melee party. Suck it up, or grab some ranged.

I won't say that the fight is unbeatable with a full melee group, but what I am saying is that a melee composition vs. a range composition raises the difficulty of the fight exponentially.

Sure you can down the boss with a 4 melee composition (which is a tad easier if the tank is a shadow or assassin since that tank type has better built in abilities for dealing with the bosses' mechanics), but bringing ranged makes the fight significantly easier.

My issue isn't that the boss is hard, I think that his difficulty level is not too bad, my main gripe is the difficulty when its a melee composition vs. a ranged composition.

There are many encounters in TOR that face similar issues due to the game's reliance on enrage timers in order to set the "bar of difficulty" for an encounter.

As you layer more and more movement mechanics into a fight, playing melee becomes significantly harder due to the enrage timer and the difficulty of having to stay in proximity of a boss that is dropping aoe and movement abilities while still trying to do enough damage to beat the enrage.

I would not mind if the fight was only slightly more difficult for a ranged composition vs. a melee one, but the difference here is night and day.

When creating an encounter, having the difficulty of one composition (melee) vs. another (ranged) vary so widely leads to behavior that is bad for progression players which includes what we saw in pre 1.2 nightmare raids with people stacking up to a full raid of commandos and gunslingers to deal with bosses like Bonethrasher and Fabricator while exiling melee dps.

When determining class balance and gauging encounter design, it is important that every class has something unique and appealing to bring to the encounter. For bringing melee dps, there should be some benefit vs. ranged.

In many fights melee leans more and more towards being a liability due to unfavorable mechanics. L5R is a perfect example of this.

Yes you CAN clear the boss with seasoned melee groups, but good players can overcome many challenges with skill. Does this make it balanced? In this case I would say no. Because an extremely geared group can clear it with all melee doesn't mean is balanced in a sense that is it fairly accessible to the majority of the population's group compositions.

I posted several decent suggestions on how to go about making the encounter more melee friendly. It can be as simple as making it so that the boss takes MORE damage from melee based attacks to compensate melee players who have to avoid blanket area attacks while working with an extremely small space (in order to be in proximity of the boss and beat the enrage).

Right now in most encounters (Bonethrasher, Fabricator, L5R, Gharj), there is almost NO punishment for stacking ranged over melee to decrease the difficulty of the encounter.

Many melee players feel cheated or that their class value has been diminished because of this, and in this context they have a valid point.

If its perfectly fine to create encounters with global abilities that generally may not favor melee, but when it is done to the extreme (like in L5R's case), counterbalancing mechanics such as:

-AoE boss aura that decreased aoe damage to melee players

-Boss takes increased damage from melee abilities

-Area effects prioritize ranged

-Disruption abilities done in melee range have additional benefits (such as locking down incinerate for a longer period of time)

There also many other options that the community and devs can come up with.

Here is a video to help you out. ANY group comp will work. people who say range have a clearer advantage are making excuses period. LR-5 fight is find the way it is. Stop over thinking it..

-Boss takes increased damage from melee abilities

Actually, in the combat log parses for my standard raid group (which is evenly mixed, melee and range), the average DPS for melee and range is almost exactly even. It's close enough that skill, gear and RNG are more than enough to account for the variance. This is significant, because it holds even on fights that have a very high amount of movement (e.g. Toth and Zorn). In other words, melee DPS is getting less of a chance to attack the boss, but it's still putting up the same damage numbers. This indicates that melee DPS *is* higher than ranged in this game, and that is the balance measure for all of these melee-unfriendly fights.

Note that on fights which *don't* have extensive movement (like Fabricator or the Annihilator Droid), melee easily out DPSes range (by about 25%). Note that this tallies pretty closely with what Gabe has said in the past: melee is intentionally higher DPS to compensate for all of their mechanical disadvantages.

All of that is an aside. L5R is an unusually melee-unfriendly fight, there's just no way around it. Still doable, but a DPS advantage of 25% doesn't seem like it would be enough to compensate for the AoE penalties imposed by the boss.

Actually, in the combat log parses for my standard raid group (which is evenly mixed, melee and range), the average DPS for melee and range is almost exactly even. It's close enough that skill, gear and RNG are more than enough to account for the variance. This is significant, because it holds even on fights that have a very high amount of movement (e.g. Toth and Zorn). In other words, melee DPS is getting less of a chance to attack the boss, but it's still putting up the same damage numbers. This indicates that melee DPS *is* higher than ranged in this game, and that is the balance measure for all of these melee-unfriendly fights.

 

Note that on fights which *don't* have extensive movement (like Fabricator or the Annihilator Droid), melee easily out DPSes range (by about 25%). Note that this tallies pretty closely with what Gabe has said in the past: melee is intentionally higher DPS to compensate for all of their mechanical disadvantages.

 

All of that is an aside. L5R is an unusually melee-unfriendly fight, there's just no way around it. Still doable, but a DPS advantage of 25% doesn't seem like it would be enough to compensate for the AoE penalties imposed by the boss.

This is interesting, a lot of the posts concerning raid dps on AskMrRobot show gunslingers extremely high on the parse over most other classes (probably due to grav round/tracer missile being broken atm). Sentinels come up there to be competitive, this might just be a reflection of player skill. Thanks for the number crunch on this, this is interesting information.

You need alot of luck on this boss, the blue cicles drop very randomly.

Last week we did this quest with a team of:

operative healer

Assassin dps

Sorcerer dps

Assassin tank

All of us in columni/rakatta gear and high dps.

It took us 3h to get past the droid, we tried our own strategies, looked up video's, read some guides.

We finally made it with 1 person and less then 1k health standing.

Today we did it again and we downed the boss on the 5th try.

We got him down once to 5%, the other times we wipped around 40%

Same team except we have a powertech tank now instead of a assassin.

The battle does not forgive mistakes, not on the incinerates, not on the heals, not on the positioning.

Personally i dont mind a hard fight, i like the fact that you need a good interrupt for this boss.

I've been the main interrupter for both groups and people appreciate that 'skill' of hitting it before he ticks once.

hard mode should be hard, i just would like to see a better reward system so that everyone can get something usefull from this.

OP, this is a nicely written post, and I pretty much agree with you on your comments.

I have to say though, you made a couple of comments that were big "aha" moments for me and have made this encounter much easier for me:

* The fact that interrupting plasma arc does NOT stop the probes.

* The fact that the probes spawn on everyone but the top aggro holder (tank).

Prior to reading this post, my group wiped for about 3 hours on this boss LOL

The first time after I read this post, we brought him down to 20%, and downed him on the second try. We were me (tank), 1 melee dps, 1 ranged dps, 1 healer. We had to keep moving him around tho, because he spawned the probes on our melee dps which affected me as the tank. This was a PITA because I had to make sure that I keep an eye out for incinerate while moving him and avoiding the probes.

Even better, next time I brought a team of only ranged dps and the fight was ridiculously easy. I mean *literally* all I did was jump in the center and *STAYED THERE* the entire time. I don't ever need to move, because he doesnt spawn probes on the top aggro holder, and my group knew better than to come close to me. All I do is interrupt incinerate (which is admittedly zen like), and hold aggro. The others just move camp around the room when a probe spawns. We got him down on the first attempt with a full ranged group.

If you learn the movement of the fight it is actually quite easy. My group is all melee(Sin Tank, Mara, PT, and Ops healer) and we take him down fairly easy now. Just because you can not go in there and one shot the boss, doesn't mean it's too hard. It means you need to learn the fight. Reading a strat and doing it are two different things.

Operatives/scoundrel healers are not melee. But i commend your group for taking it down with 2 melee and a close range dps

It took us a couple of fights to get it down but we managed to do it with myself (Shadow Tank) a Sentinel DPS, a Guardian DPS, and a Scoundrel healer. It took some coordination and we basically had the DPS stand behind him in and I kited him around the room in the same fashion as Karraga. As the tank I took care of the interrupt on him and totally ignored Plasma Arc. If I missed my interrupt I had Resilience to self cleanse myself.

It took some intense coordination and teamwork but we got it down. It does take some pretty well geared people to do as well, especially if you're melee DPS. The rest of the fights were cake after that. -.-

Did it last night with two sentinels, Shadow Tank, and Commando Healer. It was tough being melee heavy but we found a system that works and got it on our fifth try. We're 2/3 Rakata geared.

I do kind of wish that the blue globes would be interruptible so that if we're perfect on interrupts the melee could stay in. Unforgiving is a fine mechanic. I do think if this is the way that Bio wants the encounter to be its fine and can be solved by geared melee, but range has a huge advantage from what I have seen and that's cool too.

It was fun regardless.