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Sunder's The End and Saber Reflect


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I love tanking on my Juggernought, and no boss is more fun than Sunder from the Cartel Warlords encounter. Especially considering Saber Reflect.

Now one of my friends tell that Saber Reflect no longer reflects the damage from Sunder's ability "The End".

Is that truly the case?

I cannot find any information to this effect anywhere in the patch notes.

I'd love to know.

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I love tanking on my Juggernought, and no boss is more fun than Sunder from the Cartel Warlords encounter. Especially considering Saber Reflect.

Now one of my friends tell that Saber Reflect no longer reflects the damage from Sunder's ability "The End".

Is that truly the case?

I cannot find any information to this effect anywhere in the patch notes.

I'd love to know.

 

That would be a major nerf to the ability, and I don't think it's one that would go without mention. My group does kill sunder last, and we do occasionally run with a guardian tank, but we didn't do so this week (double shadows instead). There may be a bug there, but I couldn't tell you for sure. I know that resilience/force shroud is currently very buggy and sometimes fails to mitigate things. It's possible saber reflect is afflicted with the same issue, though this would be the first I've heard of it.

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I love tanking on my Juggernought, and no boss is more fun than Sunder from the Cartel Warlords encounter. Especially considering Saber Reflect.

Now one of my friends tell that Saber Reflect no longer reflects the damage from Sunder's ability "The End".

Is that truly the case?

I cannot find any information to this effect anywhere in the patch notes.

I'd love to know.

 

I don't see why or how that would happen. It's possible he just resisted it or there was a lag/sync issue. Saber Reflect isn't subject to accuracy beyond the chance for the attack to be resisted or dodged instead of reflected. My guild kills Tu'chuk last so we don't deal with the ability but mechanically it SHOULD work. Given that Resilience still works we can conclude its still Force/Tech, so unless its suddenly an AoE ability....

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I don't see why or how that would happen. It's possible he just resisted it or there was a lag/sync issue. Saber Reflect isn't subject to accuracy beyond the chance for the attack to be resisted or dodged instead of reflected. My guild kills Tu'chuk last so we don't deal with the ability but mechanically it SHOULD work. Given that Resilience still works we can conclude its still Force/Tech, so unless its suddenly an AoE ability....

 

The only 2 possibilities in my mind are that it suddenly became an AoE (as you said, incredibly unlikely) or the Resilience bug has infected Saber Reflect. My guess is that, if the bug affects Saber Reflect, the devs are much more likely to jump on it, especially since it indicates that it's not a hit/miss issue. I still think that it's a packet loss issue where the server doesn't learn that Resilience was used until several seconds after the client sends it and only catches it when the client resyncs or resends the information 1-2 seconds down the line. It would grok with the fact that combat logs (which are tracked through the client) don't catch it while also explaining why it's so hard to reproduce (and, if the testing is done on their local, in-house servers, why it's near impossible for them to find it at all under test conditions).

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Just to rule out the most simple and formerly overlooked cause.

Did your friend account for the travel time of the ability?

If Saber Reflect runs out before the "damage wave" gets to you but after the cast is finished you'll take damage, at least it happened to me once with Force Shroud and I've avoided it ever after.

 

Oh and just to repeat what everyone has been saying in vain for a dev to notice: Resilience/Force Shroud is bugged and sometimes does not work, might be due to ability, client or specific bosses. Although only the first two are likely.

 

It's unlikely that the Force Shroud/Resilience bug has "infected" Saber Reflect since whether they work or not is determined by different parameters. Resilience looks at damage type (K/E vs I/E) and Saber Reflect looks at attack type (singular vs aoe, T/F only though). Unless it's the client lagging, or experiencing package loss.

Edited by Panzerfire
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Resilience looks at damage type (K/E vs I/E) and Saber Reflect looks at attack type (singular vs aoe, T/F only though). Unless it's the client lagging, or experiencing package loss.

 

Uh.. no. Resilience looks at attack type and is only effective against Force/Tech and not against Melee/Ranged. The damage type is irrelevant but all I/E damage is from F/T attacks so I can see how you might get confused there. Saber Reflect on the other hand only applies to single target (not an AoE), direct damage (ie. not DoTs, although the first tick will still get reflected if its a ST F/T or Ranged ability) Force, Tech or Ranged (anything but Melee) attack.

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Uh.. no. Resilience looks at attack type and is only effective against Force/Tech and not against Melee/Ranged. The damage type is irrelevant but all I/E damage is from F/T attacks so I can see how you might get confused there. Saber Reflect on the other hand only applies to single target (not an AoE), direct damage (ie. not DoTs, although the first tick will still get reflected if its a ST F/T or Ranged ability) Force, Tech or Ranged (anything but Melee) attack.

 

Oh.. ok. I thought Resilience looked at I/E type of attacks since "melee attacks" like the damage part of the knockback on EC Kephess also gets resisted, but I guess it's a Tech attack then, same for Terminate. Saber Reflect I got the Ranged part wrong ^^

 

What about the travel time theory? If the mob finishes the cast then its attack has been "assigned" to the person it was targeting at the start of the cast. Once the attack hits it is determined what happens to it. At least it seems like that on Sunder.

Edited by Panzerfire
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Somewhat related.

 

What is the reason behind leaving Sunder last? Tu'chuk's soft enrage is really easy. Is it for challenge?

 

This has been discussed quite a bit before. Killing Sunder last leaves ENORMOUS margins for essentially everyone in the group. It essentially negates the hard enrage, since Resilience/Saber Reflect continue to work even after the hard enrage point. It also eases the healing tremendously since the adds can be focused down. Granted, the Sunder adds do a lot more damage than the Tu'chuk adds, but still. Our healers can literally just DPS once the adds are dead, because no more damage will be taken by anyone after that point. Additionally, killing Sunder last bypasses the Fixate mechanic. This is precisely why my group does it, since we only have a single melee DPS. It allows us to maintain significantly higher DPS uptime over the length of the fight.

 

The only real downside to killing Sunder last is the fact that you a) cannot bring a vanguard tank, and b) your tanks need to be competent at life when it comes to cooldown timing. I've done this strategy with several tanks who I wouldn't consider to be cream of the crop, and even then, it still went just fine. When you tell someone to press Resilience RIGHT NOW, they're usually pretty good about hitting it.

 

So overall, killing Sunder last leaves the widest margins of any strategy – which is precisely the point of a good strategy: providing the most cushion to absorb RNG/derp/low dps/whatever and allow the group to reliably clear the boss. I honestly don't see why you *wouldn't* kill Sunder last, except if you have a Vanguard. Killing Tu'chuk last is much more challenging for everyone involved.

 

(note: my group has variously killed each of the bosses last, and even killed them all at the same time, so it's not like we haven't tried the "standard" strategy)

Edited by KeyboardNinja
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We recently switched from killing Sunder last to killing Tu'chuck last, but before that saber reflect always worked fine on Sunders ability.

 

We've done that too! Before, the way we got past Sunder was having the two shadows in the group resilience "The End" but after having only one shadow one night, decided to switch to Chuckie last, and found its better over all.

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I heard good opinion about the killing the stealthy guy last. What do you think about that?

 

It's one heck of a heal check. Stabbing Spree does a lot of damage, and it has the potential to take out a healer (which really sucks). Additionally, the Vilas Garr adds *all* Explosive Surge. Since everyone is grouped up to kill Vilas, that's basically a 15-20k surge of damage to everyone in the group simultaneously. We've done it in hard mode, but I really don't recommend it.

 

The only strategy which is *harder* to heal than Vilas last is Horric last.

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(note: my group has variously killed each of the bosses last, and even killed them all at the same time, so it's not like we haven't tried the "standard" strategy)

 

For our next hm run (we cleared it twice now, leaving Tuchuk for last), I'm goin to suggest a mix of that. Horric and stealth dude first and then get both Sunder and Tuchuk at like 10% or less, so whoever is left for last, won't make much difference anyway

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For our next hm run (we cleared it twice now, leaving Tuchuk for last), I'm goin to suggest a mix of that. Horric and stealth dude first and then get both Sunder and Tuchuk at like 10% or less, so whoever is left for last, won't make much difference anyway

 

They heal up. Not quite to full, but close. You either have to kill them simultaneously (a Focus knight works really well here) or leave one of them untouched until the other is dead.

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They heal up. Not quite to full, but close. You either have to kill them simultaneously (a Focus knight works really well here) or leave one of them untouched until the other is dead.

 

oh, I didn't know of they healed up like that. Then I guess it would be a good chance to try lolsmash on them with my mara. Though it'd be a b****** to leave them both at like 6k health (dont know for how much my mara can crit a smash atm) or less when you run with a Lethality sniper and Madness sorc :D

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oh, I didn't know of they healed up like that. Then I guess it would be a good chance to try lolsmash on them with my mara. Though it'd be a b****** to leave them both at like 6k health (dont know for how much my mara can crit a smash atm) or less when you run with a Lethality sniper and Madness sorc :D

 

It's tricky. We usually massage them down to about 10-15k, then basic attack them to 5k. After that, we group up, the sentinel Force Leaps to Sunder (since that does less damage than Zealous Leap), and once Vilas appears pops Valorous + Zen + Force Sweep and they all die. You do need to have VERY disciplined DPS, but it's not difficult per se. The advantage is you bypass every single mechanic in the fight.

 

Video here from the first time we did it, if you're curious:

We gave a long explanation for the first-timers in the video, so you might want to jump to where the fight actually starts (it's linked in the summary). Edited by KeyboardNinja
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It's tricky. We usually massage them down to about 10-15k, then basic attack them to 5k. After that, we group up, the sentinel Force Leaps to Sunder (since that does less damage than Zealous Leap), and once Vilas appears pops Valorous + Zen + Force Sweep and they all die. You do need to have VERY disciplined DPS, but it's not difficult per se. The advantage is you bypass every single mechanic in the fight.

 

Video here from the first time we did it, if you're curious:

We gave a long explanation for the first-timers in the video, so you might want to jump to where the fight actually starts (it's linked in the summary).

 

Oh, that was really cool !

 

Was that on hm or sm ?

 

Not sure we can pull it off with all 4, but I was thinking more of doing that with only Tuchuk and Sunder, perhaps a bit more controlled without the other 2 bossess putting potentially a lot of random group damage.

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Oh, that was really cool !

 

Was that on hm or sm ?

 

Not sure we can pull it off with all 4, but I was thinking more of doing that with only Tuchuk and Sunder, perhaps a bit more controlled without the other 2 bossess putting potentially a lot of random group damage.

 

That was on SM. We've done it on HM as well, but I hate doing it. :-) It just requires so much discipline from the DPS. It also requires me to tank Sunder in the face of a very high-damage melee DPS when I'm not allowed to build any threat (due to kiting).

 

Killing just two of them at the same time would be really interesting. I wonder what the other two do… Probably just act as if two bosses had been killed and move on (e.g. if you kill Tu'chuk and Sunder simultaneously and first, then Horric would do Bullet Hell at the same time that Vilas does Stabbing Spree. uggghhhhh…)

 

There needs to be an achievement for killing them all at the same time.

 

I totally agree with this. :-) I think there should be achievements for doing all sorts of cheesy things with bosses. Killing Kel'sara first, leaving all the Jealous Males alive, killing the NiM EC Kephess walker in two burns (and surviving!), etc. Two-man achievements would be epic. There's a lot of fun things BioWare could do here.

Edited by KeyboardNinja
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