HM Ravagers & Temple progression thread

The obvious answer IMO: The need to milk the ops content as much as possible since they are focussing on 'story' now. Nightmare modes gets pushed to q3 2015 and we wont see any new ops before 2016.
Enjoy.

The devs said we wouldn't go a year without a new operation again. If I ever have to wait near that long again for a new operation, I'm going to quit SWTOR. And I'll bet good money that many people that raid seriously in this game would too.

If we don't get new operation content by early in the second half of this year then it will be more than serious raiders quitting the game. I am now at the stage where I am only really logging into the game for raiding plus a bit of crafting to finish getting my secondary characters augmented and rating 186 geared etc. If we get a long raid drought again I will probably drop my subscription and I know there are several others in my guild who feel the same way. As I intimated earlier in this thread I am hardly a cutting edge raider in a cutting-edge guild. There is thus plenty of potential challenge left in this tier of raiding with the HM bosses for me. However these raids will get old for me as well, and if that happens without substantive new content there will be nothing to tie me to the game.

That is why I am anxious to see the issues of SM raiding fixed as well as getting the difficulty of the HM instances right. At the moment the progression chain is broken at the PUG level, storing up problems for the future just as much as, if not more than, if nightmare modes are too easy. If we don't have a solid base of PUG raiders then raiding as a whole in this game will eventually die. If we don't have a solid cap of nightmare raiders then we won't get the proper PVE balance feedback for the devs or proper boss guides or proper class guides which are so much help to those lower down the chain. At the moment the nightmare raiding community that is left seems somewhat mollified by the new HM difficulty. Both PUG raiding and nightmare raiding would be critically endangered by a content break of any longer than 6 or 7 months.

In other words Bioware if we don't have at least one completely new raid by July this year and also sorting out of the issues with PUG raiding fairly promptly you will most likely kiss raiding goodbye in this game as an activity of any real scope. PUGs will completely give up in disgust at inability to complete content and poor loot (if they haven't already) thus taking out a main entry route into operations and a lot of higher level raiders will give up out of boredom (and I'm not just talking about nightmare raiders here but guild SM and lower-end HM raiders).

This is another reason why more openness about future plans is needed. At the moment we know that they are aiming for a new daily area on Ziost and the outfit designer at the end of April. That leaves two to three months as the critical period before they need to launch a new operation or most likely suffer the consequences detailed in the previous paragraph. That does not take into account nightmare mode Ravagers or Temple of Sacrifice and the timing is too tight to give me much confidence that they will actually do anything properly.

Hello,
Very interesting data! Would you happen to know the server breakdown of the progression so far? Even by sides would be interesting too see to. I'm curious as I'm on JC and there seems to be few doing serious progression (Many are probable not recording it in the server thread). I was speaking to a member of one of the 2 guilds according to this player that had beaten HM Master and Blaster on JC.

This has probably already been said, but my only problem with the raids is how dependent some of these fights are on group composition. Difficulty is pretty good, but I think that for groups that can't swap roles/classes as freely, some mechanics should be slightly tweaked. But other than that im pretty happy about the current status of the raids.

Did they? I remember Musco saying something like the content drought during last years summer was bad and wont happened again.

Uhm, there is no way this will happen?
According to the... writings they call Roadmap for 2015, we'll get two major Content patches this year, one of which is 3.2.
3.2 wont have any PvE content beyond some class Story and likely a daily area. They ruled out FPs during the cantina Event. Operations are completely unrealistic.
Its possible of course they include Ravagers NM, but if they had any plans for it they would have said so. Since they didnt, its likely we will see nightmare some time after 3.2, meaning early July if they stick to their new slowed Content cycle.
Then there is the other major update, but according to them it'll be 'by the end of the year'. End of the year means December, just like 3.0.
We dont know anything about the update (and wont till someone leaks something somewhere by September or something) but if they had more operations to drop on us during the year, we would have three major content updates.
We dont however and so we may get new operations by the end of the year at best. Or not if they have decided to further embrace their new marketing philosophy of effectively focusing on the single player, Kotor 3 crowd.
As said this could easily mean Nightmare Content much later than everyone hopes.

Funny thing is, we were in the same position during this time last year. For laughts, this is a D&T discussion about the Roadmap 2014.
http://www.twitch.tv/fridge_sa/c/3663446
Sound familiar?
And remember, last year they weren’t focusing on ‘story’.

As I said if they have a gap longer than six or seven months between operations they will likely lose the majority of their remaining ops players. Lower tier players due to frustration at not being able to complete the content via groupfinder and thus giving up on a significant aspect of the game. Higher tier players due to boredom. I don't want this to happen, but I can see it happening.

<Vicious>, who is 9/10 on Jung Ma, is the only one even close on that server. The next closest is 6/10 (although they might go to 7/10 this week, I heard they had Torque to 3% before wiping.)

Meh, IDK if I agree about the composition thing except on Revan, where our marauder is going to have tons of fun (not!) We've cleared 8/10 running at least three melee DPS, including quad melee for Torque and triple melee for Blaster, with one PT tank and one Jugg tank. Only did Cortanni with 2 ranged because two of our DPS felt like playing their sniper and merc that night instead of their jugg and PT.

I think back to when I started raiding in September last year and R-DPS was favored for most of the Oricon ops fights, and that imbalance has continued in 3.0. But at least they can be overcome with coordination and skill for the most part. I compare Torque to Tyrans and I would never ever want to run three melee in the Tyrans fight. And triple or quad melee for NiM Council sounds impossible because of the Reaches and the DPS uptime you'd lack on Brontes. Could be wrong, though.

More EU guild 10/10 pls need to beat dem Yanks on the US to EU ratio

Updated

On the topic of content


Me personally I'd be ok with no more nightmare content and 6-8 raids a year of SM-HM of this caliber. If NM does come out I think from June - July. Outside that I may have to question playing the game and I usually take a break from HM-NM.

Or raids with more than 5 bosses. It was cool watching the Blackrock Foundry mythic progression. 6-8 new raids is probably unreasonable for this title but 20-25 bosses aren't.


Only Revan has extreme melee bias ( floor one only) and that is teether and ebola. Thing is Mercs/PT are just broke currently and are pulling amazing dps/heal and have hydraulics with makes the dps check on core easier.

Both Tyrans and Council were fine with three melee. DnT ran that most of the later part of the tier and Council phase two is easier with more melee ( 3+) because they spawn on the melee and its a easier rotation to stay clear of them if each end is maximum 5 meters apart.