This is something I don't understand why BioWare would implement it. There is nothing positive from it. It causes raid burn out from the top guilds who have to kill each boss 3 times, and from other players there is no reason to continue raiding. When a boss is dead, it's dead, getting a few extra stats on gear is pointless. And again when you keep chasing that carrot for some extra stats, you again get burnt out.

 

One difficulty where bosses get harder as you go along is the raid model that is king. You ask any raider from WoW, what they're favourite time was and they'll say Burning Crusade. And it's not just nostalgia talking, it's real.

 

At least WoW started with a good raiding model before it came to it's current garbage, enough that they were able to suck players into it. Here's to hoping they fix this in the next Operations patch, but based on the last Q and A. I doubt it.

Yeah, BC was great. If you wanted to do harder content, you did different content. The problem was that a lot of people just weren't good enough for that harder content and never made it past Magtheridon's Lair or Gruul, and never got to see Hyjal or BT, much less Sunwell. In this model, everyone gets to see all the content. It's not a model I agree with, but I understand the logic.

Wait, let me check....

 

Yep. http://www.swtor.com/....

 

It gives fresh lvl 50s a chance to get gear.

Stops the 'need gear to get gear' scenario.

Having content that only the top % of the hardcore raiders can access is a waste of development time and money - by having different diffculty modes - everyone has a chance to see the content if they want to - casuals and hardcore alike.

 

Also, you are incorrect when you say people will kill boss 3x times. Nightmare and hardmode share a lockout, so you can only kill 2x of the same bosses per week if they want to - want is keyword here. Guilds in nightmare/hardmode won't bother with normal anymore as most of the columi stuff that drops isn't an upgrade.

Having content that only the top % of the hardcore raiders can access is a waste of development time and money - by having different diffculty modes - everyone has a chance to see the content if they want to - casuals and hardcore alike.

 

Also, you are incorrect when you say people will kill boss 3x times. Nightmare and hardmode share a lockout, so you can only kill 2x of the same bosses per week if they want to - want is keyword here. Guilds in nightmare/hardmode won't bother with normal anymore as most of the columi stuff that drops isn't an upgrade.

 

That is the same mentality that has ruined raiding in WoW. This should be a new game, a different game. These "casual" raiders that have brought down WoW to the level it's at, they're not playing SWTOR. Why should BioWare cater to people who aren't even playing their game? Seems like they do that in all their other games, so not a surprise I guess.

 

And I didn't mean 3 times in a week, I meant 3 times in general. There's no "happy feeling" of downing a boss anymore, because you know you have to down it again before it's actually "dead". And by the time you down it on the highest difficulty(if you even get that far because your raiders are burned out by then). you no longer care.

 

If they do want hard mode raiding, then at least implement the same way it was done in Ulduar, that was hard mode raiding done right, after that it's all been down hill.

I'm really getting sick of the whole "only the top % of guilds will see the raids if they make them hard" argument. For those of you who believe that argument to be true, you should go to MMO-Champion and take a look at their raiding statistics they released about a month ago where they break down how much of the player base has done the content in Cataclysm.

 

Blizzard made the tiered raiding system so that, like you say, casuals can see the content. The problem is, even with the easier raid models, casuals are still not doing the raids. So Blizzard decided to make LFR, which is an extremely easy raid geared towards the casuals where they only have to do whatever bosses they want and then they can leave. Well guess what? They are still NOT doing the content.

 

Why? Because casuals don't raid. It's not why most of them play these games. So trying to make end game content available to them, you're actually alienating an even bigger player base of people who actually WANT to raid.

WoW's raiding model in Vanillia and BC was functionally terrible. It may have felt cool if you were lucky enough to get picked up by a guild willing to redo attunements and gear farming for you (or if you were selfish enough to ditch your guild for one a higher up on progression), but for most people it wound up like this:

 

 

Step 1: Farm resist gear and/or attunements for everyone in your raid.

Step 2: Attempt higher tier raid.

Step 3: While undergoing learning process in new raid, have half your raiders poached by guild farther in progression than you.

Step 4: Farm resist gear and/or attunements for new recruits by redoing raid no one wants to run anymore.

Step 5: Attempt higher tier raid.

Step 6: While trying to teach new recruits fights in new raid, have raid members poached by guild farther in progression than you.

Step 7: Farm resist gear and/or attunements for new recruits by redoing raid no one wants to run anymore.

Step 8: Weep quietly because you're stuck doing Kara/MC for an entire expansion with occasional forays into SS/TK/BWL, since your only real options are jumping ship to a guild farther in progression than you or repeatedly doing a raid no one wants to do in vain hope that maybe this time you'll get some loyal people in your group that don't suck at raiding.

 

 

On the other hand, you could be part of the top 10% or so that, usually for arbitrary reasons, belonged to a good progression guild from the get go. Congratulations! You're now able to run raids beyond the first tier of endga- oh wait, what's that? Your buddy wants to play? One of your healers ran into real-life issues and has to quit? Anything else happened to throw a minor perturbance into the raiding availability of your members? Your options are now:

 

1)poach new raid member from lower tier guild like *******es

2)Farm resist gear and/or attunements for new recruits by redoing raid no one wants to run anymore.

 

 

 

Man, that was such a fun era of raiding.

This is something I don't understand why BioWare would implement it. There is nothing positive from it. It causes raid burn out from the top guilds who have to kill each boss 3 times, and from other players there is no reason to continue raiding. When a boss is dead, it's dead, getting a few extra stats on gear is pointless. And again when you keep chasing that carrot for some extra stats, you again get burnt out.

 

One difficulty where bosses get harder as you go along is the raid model that is king. You ask any raider from WoW, what they're favourite time was and they'll say Burning Crusade. And it's not just nostalgia talking, it's real.

 

At least WoW started with a good raiding model before it came to it's current garbage, enough that they were able to suck players into it. Here's to hoping they fix this in the next Operations patch, but based on the last Q and A. I doubt it.

 

 

Really dont get why you dont understand it. We can finish both normal mode operations in under 2hrs. Its just way way too easy. Across the board every boss is zero challege. If you cant die and healing people is a joke then something is wrong. I understand needed to make a normal mode easy though b/c some people just dont play alot and they dont want a really difficult operation. Without the harder modes, raiding would be dead.

 

And i played wow for very long time and ive been hardline raiding for most of it,,,Burning crusade is not my favorite. Its real in your mind maybe but thats about it.

I hate different difficulties too, but I don't think you'll ever convince BioWare that people shouldn't be able to see the "story" if they don't have what it takes for harder raids.

That is the same mentality that has ruined raiding in WoW. This should be a new game, a different game. These "casual" raiders that have brought down WoW to the level it's at, they're not playing SWTOR. Why should BioWare cater to people who aren't even playing their game? Seems like they do that in all their other games, so not a surprise I guess.

 

And I didn't mean 3 times in a week, I meant 3 times in general. There's no "happy feeling" of downing a boss anymore, because you know you have to down it again before it's actually "dead". And by the time you down it on the highest difficulty(if you even get that far because your raiders are burned out by then). you no longer care.

 

If they do want hard mode raiding, then at least implement the same way it was done in Ulduar, that was hard mode raiding done right, after that it's all been down hill.

 

 

Actually I hate to break it to you but those casuals ARE playing this game. And the content shows that is indeed catered to them. Blizzard learned this mistake in cataclysm by making the first tier of content super challenging to them. Personally I thought the first raids/heroics of Cataclysm were tuned just fine, but not everybody is me either.

 

I do think they should just implement different raids for 8 man and 16 man content and tune them appropriately rather than using the same raid for both. That way you get a little more content to do, and the dev's wont have to deal with "attempting" to tune both to relative difficulty. I say it like that because so far Blizzard has not been able to succeed on that front, and the same goes for Bioware, it pretty obvious both 8/16 are on different levels of difficulty.

Really dont get why you dont understand it. We can finish both normal mode operations in under 2hrs. Its just way way too easy. Across the board every boss is zero challege. If you cant die and healing people is a joke then something is wrong. I understand needed to make a normal mode easy though b/c some people just dont play alot and they dont want a really difficult operation. Without the harder modes, raiding would be dead.

 

And i played wow for very long time and ive been hardline raiding for most of it,,,Burning crusade is not my favorite. Its real in your mind maybe but thats about it.

 

Under 2 hours is a joke, that's my point exactly. Content that easy shouldn't exist.

 

And just because Burning Crusade isn't your favourite doesn't mean it isn't widely considered the best, that + Ulduar is what most people would say when they talk about raiding in WoW. You get a few of the guys who did 40 mans back in the day say that was the best part to, but very, very few will say anything positive about totc and onwards.

Actually I hate to break it to you but those casuals ARE playing this game. And the content shows that is indeed catered to them. Blizzard learned this mistake in cataclysm by making the first tier of content super challenging to them. Personally I thought the first raids/heroics of Cataclysm were tuned just fine, but not everybody is me either.

 

I do think they should just implement different raids for 8 man and 16 man content and tune them appropriately rather than using the same raid for both. That way you get a little more content to do, and the dev's wont have to deal with "attempting" to tune both to relative difficulty. I say it like that because so far Blizzard has not been able to succeed on that front, and the same goes for Bioware, it pretty obvious both 8/16 are on different levels of difficulty.

 

And I hate to break it to you, but as someone posted earlier, those casuals aren't raiding, even if they are playing this game, they're still level 12.

 

The people that want the loot handed to them for just logging in, aren't casuals, I hate how people constantly call them casuals. They're just bad players who want to look pretty.

The positive seems pretty obvious. The only problem here is that the hard modes in TOR are mostly numerical tweaks rather than new mechanics (which is what's making things boring and ). When you have hard modes with flavor and interesting new mechanics, they work great (see: Ulduar). Edited February 18, 2012 by Sylriana

And I hate to break it to you, but as someone posted earlier, those casuals aren't raiding, even if they are playing this game, they're still level 12.

 

The people that want the loot handed to them for just logging in, aren't casuals, I hate how people constantly call them casuals. They're just bad players who want to look pretty.

 

I wasn't just referring to raids,, I meant the game as a whole is tailor made for the casual player, all you have to do is look around and see it. But looking at my earlier post, I can see how I wasn't clear enough on that point.

 

And if you didn't notice I agree with you, I would much rather see different raids of varying difficulty and size types, but unfortunately its all about cost effectiveness. BW is gonna stick with the 3 size model now as its cheaper to redo the instance 6 times and just adjust health bars and damage output, than it is to make new different instances.

 

Side note: Its not a wise idea to go by a 3rd party site for numbers on games as theres a lot of things those sites dont pick up. For example WoWprogress only marks guilds that get successful kills, not guilds that don't kill anything, or PuGs. So I really I wonder where people are pulling those raiding numbers from. Frankly until I see something official from BW, I take any poster on this forums, supposed statistics on whos doing what and how well, with a grain of salt.

This is something I don't understand why BioWare would implement it. There is nothing positive from it. It causes raid burn out from the top guilds who have to kill each boss 3 times, and from other players there is no reason to continue raiding. When a boss is dead, it's dead, getting a few extra stats on gear is pointless. And again when you keep chasing that carrot for some extra stats, you again get burnt out.

 

One difficulty where bosses get harder as you go along is the raid model that is king. You ask any raider from WoW, what they're favourite time was and they'll say Burning Crusade. And it's not just nostalgia talking, it's real.

 

At least WoW started with a good raiding model before it came to it's current garbage, enough that they were able to suck players into it. Here's to hoping they fix this in the next Operations patch, but based on the last Q and A. I doubt it.

 

To each their own. Every player has a different preference for playstyle. You may find Warzones awesome yet another player can find it utterly boring. The same goes for raiding. Some players who are satisfied with normal mode can just feel accomplished after a clear of normal mode raiding but there are other players who may prefer a little more. The game is meant to cater to multiple playstyles and preferences. Some people just prefer sprinkles and nuts on their plain vanilla ice cream.

That is the same mentality that has ruined raiding in WoW. This should be a new game, a different game. These "casual" raiders that have brought down WoW to the level it's at, they're not playing SWTOR. Why should BioWare cater to people who aren't even playing their game? Seems like they do that in all their other games, so not a surprise I guess.

 

And I didn't mean 3 times in a week, I meant 3 times in general. There's no "happy feeling" of downing a boss anymore, because you know you have to down it again before it's actually "dead". And by the time you down it on the highest difficulty(if you even get that far because your raiders are burned out by then). you no longer care.

 

If they do want hard mode raiding, then at least implement the same way it was done in Ulduar, that was hard mode raiding done right, after that it's all been down hill.

 

I do agree with you, having done some of the top-tier raiding in other MMOs, the satisfaction of killing a boss isn't really there. That being said, you really have have to look at the general player population - raid sizes are already smaller in SWTOR compared to other games - (Rift 10/20, EQ2 12/24). The leveling/story experience is a blast - the focus isn't all on endgame. It is quite casual friendly and Bioware want to introduce raiding to the casual people as well.

 

It is not necessarily a bad thing - as I mentioned before, if only a top% of the player population is doing raids, why devote so much money and resources to it? By catering to a larger audience, you will get much more use of it - which in turn means more development time and resources on them.

 

Causals pay just as much subscription fee as you do - they have every right to the content as you are. Ultimately MMO companies make more money from casuals than hardcore raiders.

 

While I understand alot of you are from WoW and can relate your prior experiences to it - the WoW model doesn't work for every game and the same statistics from WoW cannot be applied with a different game with a mix of Star wars fans and experienced MMO gamers.

I do agree with you, having done some of the top-tier raiding in other MMOs, the satisfaction of killing a boss isn't really there. That being said, you really have have to look at the general player population - raid sizes are already smaller in SWTOR compared to other games - (Rift 10/20, EQ2 12/24). The leveling/story experience is a blast - the focus isn't all on endgame. It is quite casual friendly and Bioware want to introduce raiding to the casual people as well.

 

It is not necessarily a bad thing - as I mentioned before, if only a top% of the player population is doing raids, why devote so much money and resources to it? By catering to a larger audience, you will get much more use of it - which in turn means more development time and resources on them.

 

Causals pay just as much subscription fee as you do - they have every right to the content as you are. Ultimately MMO companies make more money from casuals than hardcore raiders.

 

While I understand alot of you are from WoW and can relate your prior experiences to it - the WoW model doesn't work for every game and the same statistics from WoW cannot be applied with a different game with a mix of Star wars fans and experienced MMO gamers.

 

 

Very nice said, not to mention that different lvls of difficulty means more options and more flexibility. I really can't understand how someone can complain about having more options; if you find something too easy/hard, you have the option to choose a harder/easier version. No one is forcing you to run all lvls of difficulty, you can choose the one that's best for you.

Edited February 19, 2012 by AlyII

I'm really getting sick of the whole "only the top % of guilds will see the raids if they make them hard" argument. For those of you who believe that argument to be true, you should go to MMO-Champion and take a look at their raiding statistics they released about a month ago where they break down how much of the player base has done the content in Cataclysm.

 

Blizzard made the tiered raiding system so that, like you say, casuals can see the content. The problem is, even with the easier raid models, casuals are still not doing the raids. So Blizzard decided to make LFR, which is an extremely easy raid geared towards the casuals where they only have to do whatever bosses they want and then they can leave. Well guess what? They are still NOT doing the content.

 

Why? Because casuals don't raid. It's not why most of them play these games. So trying to make end game content available to them, you're actually alienating an even bigger player base of people who actually WANT to raid.

 

 

^ what he said!!!!!!!!!

Edited February 19, 2012 by masterkushy

This is something I don't understand why BioWare would implement it. There is nothing positive from it. It causes raid burn out from the top guilds who have to kill each boss 3 times, and from other players there is no reason to continue raiding. When a boss is dead, it's dead, getting a few extra stats on gear is pointless. And again when you keep chasing that carrot for some extra stats, you again get burnt out.

 

One difficulty where bosses get harder as you go along is the raid model that is king. You ask any raider from WoW, what they're favourite time was and they'll say Burning Crusade. And it's not just nostalgia talking, it's real.

 

At least WoW started with a good raiding model before it came to it's current garbage, enough that they were able to suck players into it. Here's to hoping they fix this in the next Operations patch, but based on the last Q and A. I doubt it.

 

Huh? Three times? We did everyone on normal, then went right to Nightmare. So you don't need to kill everything three times. While BC was fun, by far the most liked raid in WoW that I know of was Ulduar as it was the most dynamic raid to be designed to date. One raid, with activated hard modes on fight should you chose to do that boss on hard mode rather than changing the entire raid's difficulty. So no, BC was not the shining beacon you make it out to be. BC was the model SWTOR doesn't want to go towards, where only a small fraction of players completed it before it was gutted, where entire guilds had to be Leatherworkers in order to make drums for Brutalis and if you weren't then you got benched. That's a poor way to design a raid tbh.

 

That aren't going to suddenly remove the multiple difficulty tiers, and to think they would is silly and ignorant of their design philosophy. All they need to do is fine tune each one to truly make each tier unique rather than a copy with more hp, a little more damage and shorter enrages.

 

My only issues with Operations are: the loot system is garbage and loot is dropped from too many places, and that they want 16 mans to be easier than 8 mans. Way to effectively make 16m progression guilds pointless in the long term. Though this should have been seen from the beginning with BW's belief that small group game play is better for SWTOR in the end.

Edited February 19, 2012 by SageH

Because they just copy wow...

 

Also their difficulty understanding is terrible, just give boss more hp, tighter enrage time, hit more, take less damage and you got higher difficulty, it is like a crappy fps game's difficulty understanding, mmo community is not at early 2000s now, we have seen alot of games, come on bioware you can do better than this, if you want to do give us higher difficulty give different abilities to bosses, make it more tactical (Also dont try to do it with releasing brand new bugs for soa, make it nightmare, not bugmare...). And please stop copying everything wow did good and bad for god's sake...

Edited February 19, 2012 by Kakachan

Having content that only the top % of the hardcore raiders can access is a waste of development time and money - by having different diffculty modes - everyone has a chance to see the content if they want to - casuals and hardcore alike.

 

Also, you are incorrect when you say people will kill boss 3x times. Nightmare and hardmode share a lockout, so you can only kill 2x of the same bosses per week if they want to - want is keyword here. Guilds in nightmare/hardmode won't bother with normal anymore as most of the columi stuff that drops isn't an upgrade.

 

 

 

This ! "want is the key word here"

The only problem is that there is no real jump from normal mode to hardcore and nightmare. Its the same fight; if they added more mechanics to the fight this wouldn't be an issue. Really there is no real point to continue after doing normal mode besides loot progression. Plus imo the best WoW raid was 40 man naxx in vanilla. However those don't even come close to FFXI bosses; now those fights where legendary I.E absolute virtue one of the best if not the best MMO experience I ever had.

And I hate to break it to you, but as someone posted earlier, those casuals aren't raiding, even if they are playing this game, they're still level 12.

 

The people that want the loot handed to them for just logging in, aren't casuals, I hate how people constantly call them casuals. They're just bad players who want to look pretty.

Actually, I have a full guild of casuals. Most of us have at least 1 level 50, we all want to raid, and many of us are new to MMOs, so we're experiencing some challenge with normal modes. We've spent about 9 hours raiding (three weeks, one night a week, three hour raid session) and have cleared EV and gone 2/5 in Karraga's Palace. We're having fun, feeling like we're accomplishing things, and hoping to perhaps try out Hard Modes once we get the hang of raiding. I'm sorry that you find normals a waste of time, but as a member of their target audience (who was a more hardcore raider in WoW, Vanilla to Cata, but needed to cut down his playtime) I think they're great!

 

The positive seems pretty obvious. The only problem here is that the hard modes in TOR are mostly numerical tweaks rather than new mechanics (which is what's making things boring and ). When you have hard modes with flavor and interesting new mechanics, they work great (see: Ulduar).

 

This is the most agreeable part of this thread to me. I would like to need to relearn the fight (partially) when I step up in difficulty. Simply hoping we've geared enough and tightened our DPS priorities enough to beat enrage with more HPs is not all that engaging. This means that only having "the best" loot as a motivator to beat our heads against Hard Modes. Not terribly appealing for folks who like the challenge of working out how to beat a fight.

Here's a simple solution: don't do normal mode.

 

This is not WoW. You do not need a clear of normal to do hard mode. Just ignore normal mode and clear the raid on hard / nightmare.