As an Operative healer, I believe enrage timers were also implemented to counter the fact that fights can literally last forever as long as there is a tank and a half-competent healer living, due to the energy regeneration mechanics.

I still don't think it's the optimal way of doing it, and I would rather see more unique solutions, such as the ones in Lost Island. I believe that place shows that they are trying to move in the right direction.

Soft enrage timer is strictly worse than hard enrage. Either the soft enrage is too soft and then you just heal through it anyway, or if you do something like '1 add spawn, then 2, then 4, then 8', it might as well be a hard enrage by the time 16 adds spawn, but its worse in the sense that your encounter is now longer than it would have been without a hard enrage (a hard enrage would not require spawning extra adds to prolong the fight) so you wasted more of someone's time with the same outcome.

Enrage is needed beacuse developers suck at making encounters that bleed your resources. Invarabily in modern MMORPG it's almost trivial to achieve perpetual survivality if you have enough healers and if you never die, you'd never lose without enrage timer. Given SWTOR's resource system, it is practically impossible to avoid this too. If 2 healers can heal some 8 man content (which they better be able to) for at least 30 seconds, then 4 healers can heal that content indefinitely because it takes about 30 seconds to go from 100 heat to 0 (or 0 energy to 100). You can simply have the two extra healers act as a very bad DPS while they're regenning resource and this will always work without some kind of enrage.

The problem is not so much the enrage timer themselves as the fact that the enrage timers in this game and tuned in such a way that the encounters are trivially easy when you have the gear to beat the timer.

Seriously, 90% of the fights in SWTOR with enrage timers are /faceroll EXCEPT for beating the enrage timer.

90% of the average fight should not be about beating the enrage timer. That makes for terrible, boring gameplay.

The only thing I would change about hardmode flashpoints is to increase their rewards. Hardmode flashpoint = much harder than storymode ops with less rewards. Enrage timers are working as intended, you shouldn't be able to run missions with two healers or two tanks or a healer + healer/hybrid or whatever. It's intended that FPs get run with 2 DPS, 1 tank, 1 heal and that the DPS utilizes appropriate rotations and keeps damage on the boss while dealing with the fight mechanics.

Anyway, leave it as is but just make it more rewarding than one random columi piece that my group may or may not need (how many times have you had a trooper drop with all force users? great way to spend an hour and a half...)

People suggesting removal of rage timers entirely are just short sighted. If a fight was too hard you'd just stack more healers and no fight wouldn't be able to be overcame and there'd be no challenge to it and no sense of achievement. If you could finish content minus one DPS then whats your incentive to take that DPS? Just to do it faster, which means you could 4 man content if you felt like it or hell two man it with just a tank and a healer. These inherently lead to boring easy fights, which makes raiding lose all its enjoyment and while I might advocate bringing more DPS to get stuff done faster unless I have an unlimited list of guilds to choose from I will still be at the mercy of the group as a whole's opinion.

The problem is not so much the enrage timer themselves as the fact that the enrage timers in this game and tuned in such a way that the encounters are trivially easy when you have the gear to beat the timer.

 

Seriously, 90% of the fights in SWTOR with enrage timers are /faceroll EXCEPT for beating the enrage timer.

 

90% of the average fight should not be about beating the enrage timer. That makes for terrible, boring gameplay.

The problem here is that most enrage timers are practically impossible to beat if anybody died, so for an encounter with enrage timer to be beatable, you must be able to last until the enrage timer without anyone dying.

Yet this makes the encounter trivial until the enrage timer, precisely because if it was hard before the enrage timer, most people would never beat the enrage timer because someone will die and they will definitely fail the timer.

The problem here is that most enrage timers are practically impossible to beat if anybody died, so for an encounter with enrage timer to be beatable, you must be able to last until the enrage timer without anyone dying.

 

Yet this makes the encounter trivial until the enrage timer, precisely because if it was hard before the enrage timer, most people would never beat the enrage timer because someone will die and they will definitely fail the timer.

The encounters should not be considered trivial just because you hit an enrage timer and that is what caused the wipe. It has way more to do with the loss of DPS efficiency while working through the mechanics of the fight that cause the enrage to be a problem.

Would any fight with an enrage actually be hard if all you had to do was stand there and DPS the boss? No!

Would any fight be hard if the DPS were required to focus on other mechanics without the pressure of being timed to do enough damage to the boss? No!

It's the combination of these two that determines what skill level is required to down the boss!

I prefer soft enrages myself, as they allow strong group members to help carry. A geared tank can handle more stacks on a boss. A geared healer can also do the same. The downside being that it leaves it up to interpretation as to where the group needs to improve. And since the result is death, the healer tends to be the default target. The healer should have been able to keep everyone alive through the stacking AoE damage that was now ticking 5 times faster and 5 times harder. The healer should have healed the DPS that ran through fire because 80% of the room was filled with it. The healer shouldn't have let the tank die even though the boss was taking 75% of the tank's live with a single hit, or the DPS think the tank isn't geared enough for the encounter.

The one nice thing about the hard enrage is that if everyone is alive when it happens, it is fairly clear what the group needs to do next time to win. 9 times out of 10, the DPS need to do their job better.

Now, that isn't saying it is all about DPS needing to improve. Dispels and other similar mechanics are a factor. Not sure I've seen it in this game yet, but leaving a melee DPS rooted out of range of the boss is where an enrage can be partially a healer's fault.

The encounters should not be considered trivial just because you hit an enrage timer and that is what caused the wipe. It has way more to do with the loss of DPS efficiency while working through the mechanics of the fight that cause the enrage to be a problem.

 

Would any fight with an enrage actually be hard if all you had to do was stand there and DPS the boss? No!

Would any fight be hard if the DPS were required to focus on other mechanics without the pressure of being timed to do enough damage to the boss? No!

 

It's the combination of these two that determines what skill level is required to down the boss!

Let's say you assume the typical group is 1 tank 2 heal 5 DPS. You want to make it so that you need at least 5 DPS so you run some parses and give the boss enough HP that he will definitely enrage if you only have 4 DPS but not 5 DPS. This can usually be done reliably with good planning.

Now how do you take away DPS? The common way is to kill them. If 1 out of those 5 DPS die, then clearly the 4 DPS remaining can't mee the enrage timer. Here's the problem: if it's always easy to kill 1 of those 5 DPS, then you will always trip enrage and fail. Therefore, no matter how many loops you make people jump through, if the way you use to take away DPS involves killing people, at some point it has to be trivial to bypass it simply because otherwise, the encounter would never be beaten by those guys.

Now you can do something like Fabricator where the stuff that takes away your DPS is a puzzle, not DPS, but I'm not sure making people hit switches or wipe is a better way to go about it. Also, these mechanism becomes essentially soft enrage which is basically worse than a hard enrage. Let's say you tune Soa's HP so that he is absolutely impossible to beat if you miss one of the pillars, then why even give the illusion of the fight continuing if you miss a pillar? Just make everyone instantly die if you miss a pillar and it'll save you a minute or two of futility working on him but ultimately failing.

Soft enrage sounds good in theory, but they're actually very bad in the light of infinite resource problem that most modern MMORPG exhibit. If you go all the way back to EQ1, for a while it was never possible to have infinite mana outside of mod rods (which got nerfed pretty quick) so you can have the encounter gradually get more difficult knowing that because there isn't infinite mana, at some point the players will lose. It might be 30 minutes or 5 hours but it will happen at some point, so if someone have the ability to keep themselves alive for 5 hours and outlasted your enocunter by 3 minutes you give them the win for pulling off something crazy.

But EQ1 is probably the last major raiding game that had long fights that can actually deplete all your resources, and it's got pretty much infinite resources now (good healers can heal indefinitely just like most MMORPGs now). There seems to be a universal design issue. Mana or whatever your resource is supposed to run out, except they don't for modern MMORPGs so you need other artificial ways to make the fight challenging.

Let's say you assume the typical group is 1 tank 2 heal 5 DPS. You want to make it so that you need at least 5 DPS so you run some parses and give the boss enough HP that he will definitely enrage if you only have 4 DPS but not 5 DPS. This can usually be done reliably with good planning.

Now how do you take away DPS? The common way is to kill them. If 1 out of those 5 DPS die, then clearly the 4 DPS remaining can't mee the enrage timer. Here's the problem: if it's always easy to kill 1 of those 5 DPS, then you will always trip enrage and fail. Therefore, no matter how many loops you make people jump through, if the way you use to take away DPS involves killing people, at some point it has to be trivial to bypass it simply because otherwise, the encounter would never be beaten by those guys.

Or you can take away DPS by Forcing DPS to do stuff other then DPS the boss. This is where the other boss mechanics kick in. The DPS are forced to constantly move to avoid bad stuff in certain phases, burn adds in other phases, and Nuke the boss when available. By ensuring the most damage is dealt where little interruption will occur ultimately gives higher DPS in the end. Say when fighting Gharj in EV, a DPS that pops cooldowns followed by getting knocked off the platform just lost roughly double DPS for 20 seconds. A complete waste of resources right there. Stun droids on Fabricator can lock out DPS for a long period if ignored, along with mind traps on SOA. Death is only one of many mechanics that can stalls DPS from beating enrages.

Now you can do something like Fabricator where the stuff that takes away your DPS is a puzzle, not DPS, but I'm not sure making people hit switches or wipe is a better way to go about it. Also, these mechanism becomes essentially soft enrage which is basically worse than a hard enrage. Let's say you tune Soa's HP so that he is absolutely impossible to beat if you miss one of the pillars, then why even give the illusion of the fight continuing if you miss a pillar? Just make everyone instantly die if you miss a pillar and it'll save you a minute or two of futility working on him but ultimately failing.

The Soa piller drop is more of a tank testing mechanic, there are other roles being tested in these fights. Puzzles are unique in the aspect that they are suppose to test group communication, when done effectively then more DPS can be put out overall by the team. It's all apart of the same goal of stalling DPS until the mechanic is done properly, else the enrage will say your not good enough in the end.

Soft enrage sounds good in theory, but they're actually very bad in the light of infinite resource problem that most modern MMORPG exhibit. If you go all the way back to EQ1, for a while it was never possible to have infinite mana outside of mod rods (which got nerfed pretty quick) so you can have the encounter gradually get more difficult knowing that because there isn't infinite mana, at some point the players will lose. It might be 30 minutes or 5 hours but it will happen at some point, so if someone have the ability to keep themselves alive for 5 hours and outlasted your enocunter by 3 minutes you give them the win for pulling off something crazy.

Unless game mechanics in a boss fight are consistently changing to something different throughout the fight, I would not expect a fight to last anything more then 10 minutes. Repetitive actions really don't test much so as long as the soft enrage reaches the breaking point in a timely matter, it's all the same to me.

But EQ1 is probably the last major raiding game that had long fights that can actually deplete all your resources, and it's got pretty much infinite resources now (good healers can heal indefinitely just like most MMORPGs now). There seems to be a universal design issue. Mana or whatever your resource is supposed to run out, except they don't for modern MMORPGs so you need other artificial ways to make the fight challenging.

Yes, this game is not built around managing resources over a long period of time. That was a concept that became stale very quickly since fights could go for 30min-1hour just for you to realize people are out or resources at the last 10%. That was vary frustrating for everyone and future generations realized that shortening this can still accomplish the same challenge.

It's not always about about gear. How can you be certain it was just a gear problem and not a gear + skill problem? A lot of DPS classes are pretty complicated to play effectively.

Anyway there should be both types of enrages. Soft enrage based on health and hard enrage based on time.

Soft enrage will always happen ensuring the fight is challenging as you have to deal with an extra mechanic at 20% or something. This extra mechanic should be something that relies on skill, not gear, to win.

Hard enrage is still needed to deny kills to people who are not fit for HM or have a stacked composition. I'm not sure why you feel like you should be able to clear a HM when you said your whole group was undergeared.

The problem here is that most enrage timers are practically impossible to beat if anybody died, so for an encounter with enrage timer to be beatable, you must be able to last until the enrage timer without anyone dying.

I dont see the problem here.

If a tank dies = wipe

If a healer dies = wipe

But if a DPS dies it should be stay beatable?

Why?

And dont forget, in almost all cases its the DPS fault if he dies from my experience, because they took avoidable damage.

if your team has a similar gear rating to you, hardmode flashpoints are failing you because your DPS are bad. not badly geared, just bad. I'd say the majority of DPS potential comes from doing proper rotation, with gear simply buffing this. Initially my team had a few enrage timer issues as well, but one of the problems (final boss of BP on hardmode) had their timer nerfed, and the other (battle of ilum second real boss) is skippable.

In all honesty you should be looking more closely at what your DPS are doing than what they're wearing, because it sounds like they don't know how to play their classes.

I think one of the more ridiculous uses of enrage times has to be the colonel vogarth encounter. The turrets have enrage timers the droids have enrage times even the last guy has an enrage timer. First two times i did this easily one or two shot this encounter( although the turret bug doesn't help much bioware fix it alrdy) this thurs and sat must of spent 1-2 hrs on this encounter alone thx to the retarded enrages timers. Every fricken thing does not need an enrage timer stop using it as a crutch. Enough is enough be more creative.

If you cant beat the enragetimers get better dps... the enragetimers aren't that tight!

I think one of the more ridiculous uses of enrage times has to be the colonel vogarth encounter. The turrets have enrage timers the droids have enrage times even the last guy has an enrage timer. First two times i did this easily one or two shot this encounter( although the turret bug doesn't help much bioware fix it alrdy) this thurs and sat must of spent 1-2 hrs on this encounter alone thx to the retarded enrages timers. Every fricken thing does not need an enrage timer stop using it as a crutch. Enough is enough be more creative.

These timers are incredibly easy. Even with a 4 solve on hard mode you can beat the turret enrage timers by over a minute.

i think hard enrages really are the simplest most elegant solution to test dps, so i am all up for it.

Soft enrages actually overcomplexify encounters, i mean why start spamming random adds or w/e or any other off the solutions offered like 'less floor' when you can have a simple elegant solution, thats easy to test?

In reality most of the things you speak off as beeing gear checks are in reality skill checks also, lvl 50 daily gear can dish out all the dps needed for all the hms in this game, yes i have tested that with full-alt runs of HMs.

On the other hand operations do idd need gear checks as a measure to avoid some type of exploits, like selling runs through instances for title unlocks and gear to non-guild members.

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.

Because it's not a guaranteed wipe if a tank or healer dies. They can be battle rezzed and resume the encounter.

With hard enrages, if a DPS dies - you've lost so much DPS before the battle rez and the DPS gets back into their rotation - the raid will likely hit the hard enrage unless they seriously overgear the encounter.

Because it's not a guaranteed wipe if a tank or healer dies. They can be battle rezzed and resume the encounter.

 

With hard enrages, if a DPS dies - you've lost so much DPS before the battle rez and the DPS gets back into their rotation - the raid will likely hit the hard enrage unless they seriously overgear the encounter.

Tank goes down, boss runs around 1-2 shotting people while the tank attempts to get back up and fully healed. If that's not a wipe I don't know what is. If the tank does come back then the amount of added damage to the raid is stressing out healers to the point of no return and once another high damage phase come around, more people will die.

Same thing with a healer going down, the loss of healers for the brief moment is not something that is easily made up within a few seconds. You may be able to recover but it sure won't be as easy as if the healer never died in the first place. People will be sitting at low health for 1-2 minutes during the recover and someone very well could die. If this is not the case the your healers are strong for the fight and the same thing can be said about DPS vs the enrage.

If anything it's usually easier to recover from a DPS death then a healer/tank death. There is no risk of others dying in the process. If ~20 seconds of 1 DPS missing is causing the raid to hit the enrage then your raid is either under-geared or missing other means of being efficient in dealing damage over the course of the fight.

A death is a death, I don't care who or what it is that died, it's going to hurt the chances of downing the boss one way or another.

Tank goes down, boss runs around 1-2 shotting people while the tank attempts to get back up and fully healed. If that's not a wipe I don't know what is. If the tank does come back then the amount of added damage to the raid is stressing out healers to the point of no return and once another high damage phase come around, more people will die.

 

Same thing with a healer going down, the loss of healers for the brief moment is not something that is easily made up within a few seconds. You may be able to recover but it sure won't be as easy as if the healer never died in the first place. People will be sitting at low health for 1-2 minutes during the recover and someone very well could die. If this is not the case the your healers are strong for the fight and the same thing can be said about DPS vs the enrage.

 

If anything it's usually easier to recover from a DPS death then a healer/tank death. There is no risk of others dying in the process. If ~20 seconds of 1 DPS missing is causing the raid to hit the enrage then your raid is either under-geared or missing other means of being efficient in dealing damage over the course of the fight.

 

A death is a death, I don't care who or what it is that died, it's going to hurt the chances of downing the boss one way or another.

I didn't say a tank/healer death was without cost. It's just not always an autowipe. With all these hard enrage timers being thrown in everywhere, losing a DPS is almost always a wipe at the end of the timer.

I think it's pretty demoralizing when the attitude in the raid gets to the point where any mistake just results in hearing, "wipe it up and let's reset - probably won't beat the enrage now."

I'm still going to maintain what I said earlier in the thread - unless there is a story-backed reason for a boss to have a hard enrage, the developers should use something else to limit the encounter's duration. I'm not sold that such limits need to be in place though.

I've yet to hear a good explanation as to why 3 healer operation teams should not be allowed to viable.

I didn't say a tank/healer death was without cost. It's just not always an autowipe. With all these hard enrage timers being thrown in everywhere, losing a DPS is almost always a wipe at the end of the timer.

 

I think it's pretty demoralizing when the attitude in the raid gets to the point where any mistake just results in hearing, "wipe it up and let's reset - probably won't beat the enrage now."

I'm not sure what fight your running but there is never a moment that I recall where my guild has ever considered a death to a DPS as an insta-wipe. There must be something else your raid is missing when it comes to improving damage output. We are talking a matter of 20-40k damage lost on a boss that has 900K health. A healer can add that much damage over the course of a fight if they a focused enough. And that's assuming it takes 20 seconds to get the DPS back up (should be more like 10 seconds).

I'm not sure what fight your running but there is never a moment that I recall where my guild has ever considered a death to a DPS as an insta-wipe. There must be something else your raid is missing when it comes to improving damage output. We are talking a matter of 20-40k damage lost on a boss that has 900K health. A healer can add that much damage over the course of a fight if they a focused enough. And that's assuming it takes 20 seconds to get the DPS back up (should be more like 10 seconds).

Battle rez can't always be immediately cast on the person that died - especially during AoE phases. It is possible that a downed DPS (or healer for that matter) may have to stay down for 30 to 40 seconds. In an 8-man, that's a chunk of DPS lost - certainly more than 40k. Battle rezzed folks also start with a low amount of resource, which means they cannot just go full tilt to get their debuffs back up and get back into rotation. They also may not immediately get all the class buffs back immediately either - though there is really no reason for a serious raider to not be able to provide the 4 buffs by themselves.

This is a really silly tangent to be on - hard enrages on progression content have a tendency to minimize the benefit of having battle rez in the first place. I'm sure you'll argue against that though. Just keep in mind that every single guild out there that cares to do this type of content is not "pro" 100% efficient. That is something that Bioware needs to remember as well.

Just remember that enrage timers mean very little for guilds that have close to or already have the best gear.

enrage is fine.

Very constructive.

Here is the issue with enrage timers. Personally, I am okay with a hard enrage to a point. However, turning a fight into "beat the enrage or die" is lazy. It simplifies the encounter by turning the entire event into fighting the enrage timer instead of the encounter itself. The majority of the videos that are on the web show guilds hitting the enrage timer in HM EC. This is a pattern that should not be happening. Using EC as an example, there are only 4 bosses. Having the first 2 bosses with strict enrage timers ruins the point of getting a chance to gear up or "farm" some of the content before you hit those "dps check" bosses. This leaves you no chance outside of Rakata and whatever Black Hole you obtain to achieve more gear. So at the end of the day, your first impression of HM EC turns into fighting an enrage timer and not the joy of fighting a boss itself and strategizing the mechanics.

Some will argue that a hard enrage is so guilds don't stack healers. Well my friends, in an 8 man raid if you take away 25% of the dps (ie 3 healers instead of 2) you will notice a substantial dps loss. With 25% of your main source of dps missing it's understandable to run into an enrage timer. But it'd take you what, another 1 or 1.5 minutes to sustain enough dps to kill an 8 man HM boss if you're minus 25% of your dps? What it comes down to is fighting the mechanics of the fight, not the enrage timer. There is absolutely no harm in adding another 15 - 30 seconds on each hard enrage timer. This still accomplishes a goal of preventing guilds from stacking healers while at the same time you won't be seeing a hard enrage near the end of every fight even though it was executed perfectly. That's how a proper encounter should be. If there is still an argument on that, then BW should reconsider soft enrages. However, as it stands right now this game turns into "You vs. Enrage Timer". Not "You vs. Mechanics" as it should be.

I guess the question for enrage boils down to this: should losing anybody results in a wipe for your raid? Because that's what a tightly tuned enrage timer is. And if so, why even give false hope? Why not just have everyone instantly die the moment anybody died? And honestly, learning mechanisms isn't that hard. It's the execution that is hard and if an encounter demands perfection, then why not just flat out put that as a requirement and not waste everyone's time?

I'm not sure why people have just come to accept infinite resources = no problem in MMORPG. In virtually every RPG I have played, you have some resources that eventually run out. Even if you take a game like Final Fantasy, you can have at most 99 Megaelixirs and so on so in theory, it is possible to design a fight that makes you run out of even those. Yet for MMORPG the resources is indeed infinite and only fatigue can defeat this. In a world without enrage and without fatigue, all encounters would be beatable by grinding it out, and you won't even need to always resort to healer heavy wimp out methods. That is, most encounters as is can probably all be beaten with 2 healers out of 8 every single time if there is no enrage timer and there is no fatigue factor (i.e. people are more increasingly likely to screw up mechanics as time passes). How is that even a good design?