Crosspost from r/swtor:

 

So, last night our guild decided to hit up this place and clear it out on Normal. Haven't tried HM yet as afterwards we went to go resume HM Soa attempts, but will likely be taking a crack at it tonight. Here's some thoughts (minus Bonethrasher):

 

Trash: There is a lot of it. Could stand to be a little less. The trash after the 3rd boss is challenging at first, but then becomes annoying quickly due to required CC on the healer mobs and some terrible positioning. One pull literally aggros as soon as you take 2 steps off an elevator. The trash also will wipe you if you attempt to zerg it. This will definitely get tiresome to clear week after week.

 

Jarg & Sorno: The idea is that one is a merc healer, and one is a powertech DPS. The powertech guy (Jarg) does a fire AOE that hurts, the healer (Sorno) has a medscan that needs to be interrupted. Occasionally, one will jump to the balcony, shoot random people and CC the tank they were aggro on while the other continues to beat on people. We used 2 tanks, was pretty easy. Midway through the fight, someone suggested one character would probably enrage if we killed the other, so we switched off the healer at 10% and I finished him off with tank damage while everyone else zerged the other mob. Sure enough, his buddy enraged when we killed the healer. Predictable, boring, easy.

 

Foreman Crusher: Big guy, hits hard, knockback, adds. Yawn. Occasionally he frenzies and starts hitting every .5 seconds with crazy damage. This is a tank-swap mechanic apparently, because he snares whoever he hits and you're supposed to kite him during this time, but I just popped a CD and took the damage which on normal was pretty insignificant. Another boring boss. ..but that is about to change.

 

G4-B3 Heavy Fabricator: BY FAR the most interesting bossfight I've seen in an MMO, ever. This is a combination puzzle boss and tank/DPS check. There are 2 floors, on the top floor are 3 control panels and you play a puzzle game to align 3 symbols in the right order to activate an incinerator jet under them. One of our raid members referred to it as "Tower of Hanoi" or something. Below, there is the robot, who starts with 10 stacks of armor (think the forgemaster boss in Blackrock Caverns) that prevents him from taking damage. Getting hit by a flame jet will strip his stacks and give him a debuff for a few seconds to ake additional damage. After it wears off he rebuilds the stacks. Idea is to solve the puzzle to reset his stacks. He hits hard and applies a stacking sunder armor to the current tank, you NEED to swap tanks. There are also adds that stun and lay mines. We ended up having the offtank who was currently not tanking intercede up to the top platform and help solve the puzzle (consoles are spread out) and tankswap when the other tank got to around 5-6 stacks.

 

Karagga: Very, very hectic and healing intensive fight, tons of raid damage going out. Think of XT from Ulduar on meth. Boss does several abilities that interact with each other in interesting ways. He puts flame patches on the floor that never despawn, these serve as a soft enrage timer as you eventually run out of room. He spawns adds that aggro on and blow up people, and most importantly does a Gravity Bomb type deal on a random raid member that does an AOE grip of all raid members to that person, dealing damage while they are near them. Usually he'll also pick that person to put fire under (this happened to me several times as a tank) and it must simply be cooldowned or healed through. He did a drill that randomly hit people as well from the ground. Very crazy boss, was actually pretty fun.

 

Warning: the normal-mode autolooting is severely bugged and is giving nonset loot to the wrong classes, so be warned. Otherwise, gear that dropped from normal was random 126-rating loot, with Karagga dropping Columi weapons and Soa mount as well. Considering that the bosses were much tougher than EV (especially the 4th/5th ones which are almost nightmare-mode EV level) this is kinda disappointing. However, there was a completely awesome relic that dropped for our DPS classes that worked similar to the Lightning Capacitor from Karazhan.

 

Overall, pretty cool instance and a much better raid than EV was IMO.

Your opinion of Jarg & Sorno will change drastically in the harder difficulties. They were easily the 2nd hardest boss in nightmare mode, I could buy arguments for hardest.

Agreed. Jarg and Sorno (Bounty Hunter Twins) seemed decently ahead of Karagga and the rest of the bosses on the Nightmare difficulty scale.

Any recommendation on when to start resetting the stack?

We opted to start about when he got back to four.

 

Unfortunately two fire jets didn't take and he still had ten stacks.

We assumed it may have happened because he wasn't close enough to the jet, but getting him any closer resulted in people getting hit by the fire and dying.

 

 

The only idea to avoid that was leave the one Guardian behind and have him use cooldowns.

 

 

Also, is the jet fire a 'tech' ability(i.e. can be avoided by Inquisitors/Shadows?)

Can you post a picture of sorno and jarg, please?

 

And must you sound say "adds" and "raids" every 4 seconds?

Here are some video guides for Sorno and Jarg, and also Foreman Crusher if interested:

 

Sorno and Jarg:

 

 

Foreman Crusher:

 

Your opinion of Jarg & Sorno will change drastically in the harder difficulties. They were easily the 2nd hardest boss in nightmare mode, I could buy arguments for hardest.

 

We will see how hard they are on NMM but on hard mode they are also easy. Little rough on healing but we have sick healers. One shot!