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The Ease of Current End-Game Operations


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Anyone feel that the current end-game goes by way too fast? My guild walked into Eternity Vault (normal) for the first time on Friday, with most of them fresh 50's with little to no HM-Flashpoint gear. They cleared it in 4 hours (not a great time, but they didn't watch any Youtube videos or read any strategy). Then on Sunday, they returned and went 4/5 EV on Hard-Mode, opting out of SoA due to being a melee heavy group.

 

I can understand normal being easy, but HM was a pushover (except SoA). I don't raid with my guild (I go with another guild, ironically), and I feel that even Nightmare mode is easy, save SoA and the "turret boss".

 

Furthermore, every boss (in 8 man) drops 5 pieces of gear. So mathematically speaking, an 8 man raid will be fully geared after just 4 runs. Where does that leave us, as a subscriber? I'm not advocating we change everything to a super-slow Everquest I style grind. But unless BioWare is content on releasing new FP's and Operations every month, it's going to be looking a little stale.

 

Thoughts?

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Anyone feel that the current end-game goes by way too fast? My guild walked into Eternity Vault (normal) for the first time on Friday, with most of them fresh 50's with little to no HM-Flashpoint gear. They cleared it in 4 hours (not a great time, but they didn't watch any Youtube videos or read any strategy). Then on Sunday, they returned and went 4/5 EV on Hard-Mode, opting out of SoA due to being a melee heavy group.

 

I can understand normal being easy, but HM was a pushover (except SoA). I don't raid with my guild (I go with another guild, ironically), and I feel that even Nightmare mode is easy, save SoA and the "turret boss".

 

Furthermore, every boss (in 8 man) drops 5 pieces of gear. So mathematically speaking, an 8 man raid will be fully geared after just 4 runs. Where does that leave us, as a subscriber? I'm not advocating we change everything to a super-slow Everquest I style grind. But unless BioWare is content on releasing new FP's and Operations every month, it's going to be looking a little stale.

 

Thoughts?

 

You cant do only the easy encounters and then complain when you find the content too easy. Normal mode is about the equivalent difficulty of doing a flashpoint but with 8 people instead of 4. Hard mode is more or less the first real "raid" mode, and even then the first 4 bosses are still easy.

 

If you want more of a challenge, you're going to have to either NOT skip Soa (the only hard boss in the instance) or bump it up to 16 man. Everything else can be done pretty easily in 8 man even in nightmare mode, assuming your dps/heals are good enough to beat annihilator.

 

As for loot...loot in normal mode is autoassigned, and anyone who's done it can tell you that the auto-loot system is, well, "less than efficient", as it takes literally nothing into account beyond what class you are. As a shadow I can get auto-assigned one of 3 different pieces of gear - the one I want, the one that sages want, or the tanking one. And that's assuming you get assigned something you might want - the last time we went in my shadow friend got about 3-4 pieces of columni gear, all of which he ended up vendoring because he had the same or better already - but they were ALL upgrades for me.

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You cant do only the easy encounters and then complain when you find the content too easy. Normal mode is about the equivalent difficulty of doing a flashpoint but with 8 people instead of 4. Hard mode is more or less the first real "raid" mode, and even then the first 4 bosses are still easy.

 

If you want more of a challenge, you're going to have to either NOT skip Soa (the only hard boss in the instance) or bump it up to 16 man. Everything else can be done pretty easily in 8 man even in nightmare mode, assuming your dps/heals are good enough to beat annihilator.

 

As for loot...loot in normal mode is autoassigned, and anyone who's done it can tell you that the auto-loot system is, well, "less than efficient", as it takes literally nothing into account beyond what class you are. As a shadow I can get auto-assigned one of 3 different pieces of gear - the one I want, the one that sages want, or the tanking one. And that's assuming you get assigned something you might want - the last time we went in my shadow friend got about 3-4 pieces of columni gear, all of which he ended up vendoring because he had the same or better already - but they were ALL upgrades for me.

 

The raiding situation is similar to WoW at the end of WoTLK. All the bosses were super easy on normal mode and hard-mode with 1 exception: HM-25 man Lich King. While it's nice having a challenge (for the most part SoA is fine, save for the reset issue when the MT gets ported), I don't think it's necessarily a good one of balancing the encounters.

 

I will do the 16 man operations with my guild and see where that leads. From what I've read on the PTR notes, that is getting nerfed to be more in-line with the 8 man operation (which makes sense given that they drop the same gear).

 

I still think the loot is somewhat "excessive". Not from an ease perspective, but from a "What am I going to do now that I'm fully geared?" perspective. If BioWare fixes Master Looter, it will literally take 4 weeks to get your raid fully geared and have no reason to ever run those Operations again. It doesn't seem that great from a design perspective, especially when people may stop subscribing.

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I still think the loot is somewhat "excessive". Not from an ease perspective, but from a "What am I going to do now that I'm fully geared?" perspective. If BioWare fixes Master Looter, it will literally take 4 weeks to get your raid fully geared and have no reason to ever run those Operations again. It doesn't seem that great from a design perspective, especially when people may stop subscribing.

 

But you have to keep in mind that the loot you get from normal/hard modes is still equivalent to the heroic flashpoint loot aka columni gear. The only pieces from hard mode that you cant get from doing heroics I think are the main hand weapon (Soa hard mode, just got mine yesterday) and helm (bonethrasher hard mode).

 

"Raid" gear is really the rakata stuff.

Edited by Jurugar
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