I understand the need for some players to be challenged, but some people's primary focus is to have fun. Because I am not an elitist, because some of my guildmates are casual players who are merely 'okay' at playing, I am undeserving of better gear and should be locked out of certain content?

You don't want to understand it, do you?

Its called STORYMODE!

HM/NM aren't content from my point of view, it''s the SAME content just harder.

You have your easy faceroll content, so stop complaining!

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~

No enrage timers force you to have better gear and figure out your energy management, not to mention team work. Otherwise all PvE would JUST be a healing game. It wouldn't matter who you take in or what gear anyone else besides the healer would wear as long as they could take a few hits and your healer(s) could pull them back up.

You could basically do an all heals nightmare then if there were no enrage timers. Timers are what make DPSers important.

My issue with hard enrages is that I inevitably ask myself the same question every time I see the boss hard enrage:

"Well, you stupid boss - why didn't you just start the fight enraged?"

Why would a boss, that is supposed to be keeping us (the raiders) from something, not start the battle at full power? It makes no sense and most times it will never make sense. The entire "point" of bosses being there is to protect something from us - be it the flashpoint group or operations group. There are only a very few ways to write a "story" behind a boss to explain why that after exactly 6 minutes, the boss goes into super_god_overpowered mode.

Story can support a hard enrage when the boss has some sort of technology that takes time to charge up; however, I guess Bonecrusher just chugs a super stim?

I far prefer systems where there is a stacking debuff that the longer the boss stands, the harder it is to heal his damage, but - it's still healable. Alternatively, the boss could gain additional armor over time to reduce damage done to him. Enrage mechanics need to be soft though as hard enrages do nothing but destroy morale. It's not hard to look at a stacking raid-wide buff and know that if it reaches "20 stacks" - your dps is fail.

On top of all that - why is it such a big deal in the MMO genre if someone wants to bring 2 tanks and 6 healers to a raid fight? If they want to fight each boss for 45 minutes to 2 hours to kill it, what in the world is wrong with that? It's their time - not mine. My ops group is going to be killing it 5 mins and moving on.

Hard enrages are like Bioware just flipping the light switch off, saying - "You fail, insert another quarter." There will never be anything fun with seeing a boss ability that hits for 4k suddenly get ramped up to 20k+ just because a timer expires. The same hard enrage also insures that a few years from now, this content will not be able to be downed by small groups of 1 to 2 players wanting to experiment with extreme soloing - like some do in WoW now.

I remember some warrior / holy paladin duo that spent hours taking down Onyxia. I would never spend that kind of time trying to duo that boss, but it was cool to me that the option was present to do so. Not so with TOR operations bosses though. It's sad.

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.

It just makes it much easier with an "ideal" lineup, but you certainly can do the content without it. My guild, who are "casual" raiders (we have spent about 6 hours/week on progression content), are now 2/4 on EC HM. Using 1 ranged, 3 melee dps. We only got about 4-5 attempts in on the Colonel, but I'm convinced we can take him the next night we go at him.

When we first started EC SM, we were hitting enrages. We practiced the strategies more and more and then were able to make it through by brute force. Then we went to Hard Mode and again, were hitting enrages. Some of them were because we had people die, but then we ended the night with a "flawless" run (according to the strategy we were using), but still hit enrage at 10%s. We determined that the strategy that allowed us to brute force through SM would not work on HM. We spent some time determining another strategy to use, and went the next night and with the new strategy one-shot him. The new strategy allowed us more time-on-target and that made the difference.

I've always been a mostly casual raid group who still progressed well (back in WoW we cleared ICC HM while only spending 2 nights/week on raiding), and it's clear from all these games that tactics > brute force. Good players learning the strategies and being able to adapt on the fly are gonna do things with unorthodox raid makeups.

All that being said, Mimiron HM is still one of my favorite and one of the more difficult fights, and it's due to soft enrage not hard enrage. I think there needs to be more fights that are more reliant on tactics and the ability to perform versus gear checks.

"Hey guys, please remove the damage that the tanks and dds take!"

Making healers obsolete

"Hey guys, please make the bosses do exactly the same damage on every specc..."

Making tanks obsolete

Sounds ridiculous right?

"Enrage timers are stupid, remove them"

Making DD obsolete!

Probably some people will understand me now^^

You don't want to understand it, do you?

Its called STORYMODE!

 

HM/NM aren't content from my point of view, it''s the SAME content just harder.

You have your easy faceroll content, so stop complaining!

From what I understand, you can't do EC op without at least rakata gear, which you can only get from HM ops. By not doing HM EV or KP, my guild can't do EC.

"Hey guys, please remove the damage that the tanks and dds take!"

Making healers obsolete

 

"Hey guys, please make the bosses do exactly the same damage on every specc..."

Making tanks obsolete

 

 

Sounds ridiculous right?

 

"Enrage timers are stupid, remove them"

Making DD obsolete!

 

Probably some people will understand me now^^

No. There is nothing preventing development of dps checks without also putting in hard enrages. NOBODY (that I've seen) is arguing for the removal of all soft enrages and other dps checks. Karagga is a PERFECT example of this. He's got a freaking great soft enrage. But you know what? It never gets there because the idiotic hard enrage kicks in long before the soft enrage would become an issue.

There are all kinds of GOOD ways to ensure dps is on the ball. Hard enrages on every single fight is NOT one of them.

Yeah the extreme usage of tight enrage timers is just lazy coders and damn booring.

Which enrage timers are tight? They're all really easy to beat.

"Hey guys, please remove the damage that the tanks and dds take!"

Making healers obsolete

 

"Hey guys, please make the bosses do exactly the same damage on every specc..."

Making tanks obsolete

 

 

Sounds ridiculous right?

 

"Enrage timers are stupid, remove them"

Making DD obsolete!

 

Probably some people will understand me now^^

Removing enrage timers (or using soft enrage mechanics) does not impact DPS. A raid still needs to bring DPS. Even if there were no enrage timers at all, there will not be some overwhelming number of guilds doing HM EC with 2 tanks and 6 healers. It_won't_happen. What might happen is some guilds might bring a 3rd healer and take a bit longer to kill some bosses but apparently players having fun is against some unspoken MMORPG law somewhere.

People are not going to want to spend 2 hours killing a single boss with 6 healers. Good luck getting 6 healers to sign up for that.

How about we use some more creative mechanics other than enrage, like healing mechanisms - where a certain level of DPS has to be present to overcome the self-healing capability of the boss? There are other ways to make DPS important other than the binary "thou shalt kill the beast in 6 minutes or it will one shot you for no applicable story reason whatsoever."

It just makes it much easier with an "ideal" lineup, but you certainly can do the content without it. My guild, who are "casual" raiders (we have spent about 6 hours/week on progression content), are now 2/4 on EC HM. Using 1 ranged, 3 melee dps. We only got about 4-5 attempts in on the Colonel, but I'm convinced we can take him the next night we go at him.

 

When we first started EC SM, we were hitting enrages. We practiced the strategies more and more and then were able to make it through by brute force. Then we went to Hard Mode and again, were hitting enrages. Some of them were because we had people die, but then we ended the night with a "flawless" run (according to the strategy we were using), but still hit enrage at 10%s. We determined that the strategy that allowed us to brute force through SM would not work on HM. We spent some time determining another strategy to use, and went the next night and with the new strategy one-shot him. The new strategy allowed us more time-on-target and that made the difference.

 

I've always been a mostly casual raid group who still progressed well (back in WoW we cleared ICC HM while only spending 2 nights/week on raiding), and it's clear from all these games that tactics > brute force. Good players learning the strategies and being able to adapt on the fly are gonna do things with unorthodox raid makeups.

 

All that being said, Mimiron HM is still one of my favorite and one of the more difficult fights, and it's due to soft enrage not hard enrage. I think there needs to be more fights that are more reliant on tactics and the ability to perform versus gear checks.

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

"Hey guys, please remove the damage that the tanks and dds take!"

Making healers obsolete

 

"Hey guys, please make the bosses do exactly the same damage on every specc..."

Making tanks obsolete

 

 

Sounds ridiculous right?

 

"Enrage timers are stupid, remove them"

Making DD obsolete!

 

Probably some people will understand me now^^

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.

FFXI kicks you out of the fight (burning circle) when the timer is up. Not having an enrage timer lead to the 22 hour epic Pandemoium fight, not knowing the boss can only be killed after using a random item from a totally unrelated quest.

For all pre-1.2 content, if you're hitting enrage, you're doing something wrong. With the combat log, it is now possible to see what kind of DPS each player is doing. Let's take Bulwark for instance, the mid-boss in D7, which is considered one of the harder bosses with 380k hp, and enrages in 3.5 minutes. (210 seconds). Total dps required is 1.8k dps. That adds up to 400 dps from the tank, and 700 dps from each DPS. That is 42k damage per minutes. This is a damage level that any DPS in Tionese gear should achieve if they know what they're doing.

I grouped with a friend who plays a Madness sorc for iD7. We hit enrage, but managed to down it. because I did around 90k damage to it as healer. (Supercharged Gas + powershot is great!!) After looking at his combat log, his DPS was around 400 despite wearing 2 piece Columi and the rest Tionese. Upon investigation, we discover that:

1) He didn't use Death Field at all, so no death mark. Death Field is not even on his toolbar.

2) He didn't use Force lightning, so no Wrath

3) He simply spam whatever skill it not on cooldown is until he runs out of force, Then he just stands there.

So hitting the enrage timer usually says that someone in your party is doing something really wrong.

No. There is nothing preventing development of dps checks without also putting in hard enrages. NOBODY (that I've seen) is arguing for the removal of all soft enrages and other dps checks. Karagga is a PERFECT example of this. He's got a freaking great soft enrage. But you know what? It never gets there because the idiotic hard enrage kicks in long before the soft enrage would become an issue.

 

There are all kinds of GOOD ways to ensure dps is on the ball. Hard enrages on every single fight is NOT one of them.

We hit it once essentially 5 manning it when three people DC'd. We weren't happy about it.

Hard enrage timers are outdated, moronic and a cop out so the developers don't actually have to put any work into making the encounter difficult. LOLOLOL SUDDENLY AFTER FIVE MINUTES THE BOSS IS 500% TOUGHER!!!

No.

If anything, soft enrages are the way to go (under the current Tank/DPS/Healer triangle paradigm MMO's seem to favor). Fights that get progressively more difficult as the length increases. Examples from WoW (since I raided competitively there for six years) in no particular order:

Lady Vashj

Prince Malchezar

Thorim

Flame Leviathan

Assembly of Iron

Auriaya

Anub'arak (Trial of the Crusader. Also, I should note that this boss had both a soft enrage in Leeching Swarm and a 10 min hard enrage)

8 out of twelve bosses in Icecrown Citadel

Atramedes

Nefarian (Blackwing Descent version)

Ascendant Council (only in p3)

Cho'gall

Beth'tilac

Lord Rhyolith

Majordomo Staghelm

Ragnaros

Gruul the Dragonkiller

Toravon the Ice Watcher

Ultraxion

As you can see, WoW began adding soft enrages to many fights in WotLK and Cata (note also that some bosses with soft enrage timers also have hard enrage timers because really, after 15 min if you haven't killed it yet you're not going to). Note that this does not coincide with the "dumbing down" of WoW (as not even the most skilled player can deal with a hard enrage once triggered) so much as adding soft enrage timers coincide with the increasing mechanical complexity of raid encounters within WoW.

Clearly, then, soft enrages are superior to hard enrages.

Also:

My issue with hard enrages is that I inevitably ask myself the same question every time I see the boss hard enrage:

 

"Well, you stupid boss - why didn't you just start the fight enraged?"

 

Why would a boss, that is supposed to be keeping us (the raiders) from something, not start the battle at full power? It makes no sense and most times it will never make sense. The entire "point" of bosses being there is to protect something from us - be it the flashpoint group or operations group. There are only a very few ways to write a "story" behind a boss to explain why that after exactly 6 minutes, the boss goes into super_god_overpowered mode.

Algalon (option heroic-only boss in Ulduar in WoW) is the only boss I've ever seen with a legitimate story as to why there's a hard enrage. Screw spoilers since the content is four years old and completely obsolete but, basically, he's been sent by the "gods" of the WoW-verse to assess whether or not the world is fine or if the figurative destroy-everything-so-it-can-be-remade button needs a good pressing. After a timeframe I can't remember (it's tied to an ability he does; the fourth one is the hard enrage IIRC) he simply goes "newp, world's not worth saving," kills the entire raid, and then leaves.

Some sort of enrage is necessary, you can't have people dragging a fight for tens and tens of minute, simply out healing their way through encounter.

Now the enrage can be hard (sudden increase of boss damage) or soft (progressive increase of damage)

Keep in mind that

- Soft enrage are often mitigated or even nullify by outgearing the encounter, do we want that?

- Soft enrage should start earlier in the fight so that it become unbearable at about the time a normal hard enrage would hit

I believe, we need a mix of both, but maybe an effort in the mechanic so that hard enrage make sens. For example.

What if there was a bomb you need to defuse, if you fail to kill Kethess in time, you fail to defuse the bomb, it explodes, you die, hard enrage. Or maybe the boss, seeing the fight doesn't go well, trigger a suicide mechanism. Remember when freeza threaten Goku that the planet will explode in 5 minutes (about 30 episodes of 20 minutes each in dragonball universe ^^)

From what I understand, you can't do EC op without at least rakata gear, which you can only get from HM ops. By not doing HM EV or KP, my guild can't do EC.

Wrong, you can do EC Storymode with columi gear.

The difference between Columi and Rakata isn't that big.

Some sort of enrage is necessary, you can't have people dragging a fight for tens and tens of minute, simply out healing their way through encounter.

You could but would that be fun? Would that be "fair" for the people that play the encounter the way it was designed?

 

Now the enrage can be hard (sudden increase of boss damage) or soft (progressive increase of damage)

Keep in mind that

 

- Soft enrage are often mitigated or even nullify by outgearing the encounter, do we want that?

- Soft enrage should start earlier in the fight so that it become unbearable at about the time a normal hard enrage would hit

 

That are all valid points but i fail to see the difference between a soft and a hardenrage. I know what they are but hands down, and enrage is an enrage...

Some sort of enrage is necessary, you can't have people dragging a fight for tens and tens of minute, simply out healing their way through encounter.

What is wrong with having that option available? If a raid literally wants to spend 7 hours killing one boss because they brought 7 healers - it's their 7 hours of time, not mine. That's a high opportunity cost to pay for a tiny bit of gear, IMO.

Now the enrage can be hard (sudden increase of boss damage) or soft (progressive increase of damage)

Keep in mind that

 

- Soft enrage are often mitigated or even nullify by outgearing the encounter, do we want that?

Isn't that a benefit of acquiring better gear?

- Soft enrage should start earlier in the fight so that it become unbearable at about the time a normal hard enrage would hit

You are asserting the assumption that having a "time limit" is a necessary thing from the start. There are a number of raiders that would rather play against real mechanics in the encounter rather than race against the script simply turning the event off after a fixed amount of time that has no story to back it up.

It's not exactly as if each one of the raid boss encounters are setup to where we only have 6 minutes to kill the boss and disarm the nuke - or we all die.

I believe, we need a mix of both, but maybe an effort in the mechanic so that hard enrage make sens. For example.

I don't really think we need another hard enrage at all. I'm tired of having one DPS die and the raid is ready to just suicide it out and reset because we know we're probably not going to beat the hard enrage timer now.

What if there was a bomb you need to defuse, if you fail to kill Kethess in time, you fail to defuse the bomb, it explodes, you die, hard enrage. Or maybe the boss, seeing the fight doesn't go well, trigger a suicide mechanism. Remember when freeza threaten Goku that the planet will explode in 5 minutes (about 30 episodes of 20 minutes each in dragonball universe ^^)

I could live with hard enrages that have a story reason to exist but beastly bosses like Bonecrusher? What's he doing? jabbing himself with a 3 ton stim that we didn't see him carrying?

1-shot deaths due to a hard-enrage are marginally tolerable (for me anyway) if there is a good story reason to explain the mechanic being there. With no story to back it up, I treat hard enrages just like I do mountains of status ailments - it makes me rage and destroys my desire to continue raiding longterm. I'm just glad Bioware hasn't made a Molten Core like debuff session yet.

I don't really think we need another hard enrage at all. I'm tired of having one DPS die and the raid is ready to just suicide it out and reset because we know we're probably not going to beat the hard enrage timer now.

This struck me more then anything else. Why should it be OK if a DPS dies and you can still kill the boss with ease while a tank or healer dies and it's a guaranteed wipe? A DPS dies then that means to team fails, end of story.

This struck me more then anything else. Why should it be OK if a DPS dies and you can still kill the boss with ease while a tank or healer dies and it's a guaranteed wipe? A DPS dies then that means to team fails, end of story.

Agree.

If a dps dies, it should be a wipe. That's the intent. Do the fight right, or don't get loot.

This struck me more then anything else. Why should it be OK if a DPS dies and you can still kill the boss with ease while a tank or healer dies and it's a guaranteed wipe? A DPS dies then that means to team fails, end of story.

lfm dps gs215 must know fight

lfm dps gs215 must know fight

I'm not sure what gs215 stands for but I'm assuming it refers to the gear score that some how replaced the scale of skill involved with WoW shortly after I quit. I'm also not sure how this relates to my post. Last I checked, skill was still a determining factor for players in this game.