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Enrage, Enrage, Enrage


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Seriously Bioware? Ok, so this is going to sound like I'm whining, well, the truth in fact is, that I am whining. There are some operation bosses in this game that just should not have enrage timers, or maybe not a 200% damage increase, maybe a 50% damage increase, or 75%... Take HM Zorn and Toth for example; The mechanics of this fight alone are enough to make you want to rip your damn hair out. So last night 3 or 4 times we get these guys down to 8% (now i have beat them before, have the codex for HM, etc) and BAM, 200% damage increase, raid wipe... Come on guys, game mechanics are superb, people are almost guaranteed to die at least once in this fight if they screw up, but the sudden 200% damage buff followed shortly by a wipe....

 

This HAS to be one of the major reasons people are leaving this game. I know I'm fed up with it to the point that I just dont want to do it anymore. It's one thing to rely on 1 or 2 people to do their jobs flawleslly, it's another thing entirely to rely on 7 other people + their internet connection + the Denova lag (I think everybody here knows what i'm talking about on this last one). So seriously, is the 200% damage increase and uber short enrage timer REALLY needed? I've seen several groups wipe before they could even hit an enrage timer... I'd really like to see a developer response on this. Why can't you guys come up with something better than a friggin enrage for every dang fight in this game?

 

Sorry for the complaining, if you have nothing nice to say, go ahead and follow it up, but think about the logic here before you do so. I love mechanics, but the enrage on every single boss has to go.

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Without enrage timers you could bring in 5 healers 1 dps and 2 tanks and beat every fight. Without enrage timers, if 2 people die, you would still probably be able to beat most encounters (that had enrage timers) - Which is ridiculous if you think about it, because 25% of your raiders failed. These raids are about close to perfect execution, which many of the top end raiding guilds were clamoring for (which is who HM/NiM are supposedly catering to). If you do not like enrage timers, you can stick to story mode, those are a lot easier to beat.
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Without enrage timers you could bring in 5 healers 1 dps and 2 tanks and beat every fight. Without enrage timers, if 2 people die, you would still probably be able to beat most encounters (that had enrage timers) - Which is ridiculous if you think about it, because 25% of your raiders failed. These raids are about close to perfect execution, which many of the top end raiding guilds were clamoring for (which is who HM/NiM are supposedly catering to). If you do not like enrage timers, you can stick to story mode, those are a lot easier to beat.

 

Not necessarily true, especially with the mechanics of some fights and the fact that you can only rez one person every 5 minutes. Ever get hit by one of SOA's enraged pylons? insta death. Some groups cant even get to the enrage timer on zorn/toth fight. Yes, your point is valid to a certain degree. But it's not entirely valid.

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I can understand why the mechanics of enrage exist, so you have a dps requirement.

Could never get my head around the reality of it; "hey guys I was actually only fighting you with one hand, now you've pissed me off long enough I'm no longer going to take it easy on you and use both hands!"

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You get a 200% damage hit when you kill one of the two before the other, and another 200% if you hit the hard enrage timer. So one stack of 200% you will have to deal with every time.

 

The question is: which of them are you killing first? It matters, a lot. Toth locks into a ground smash phase with 200% increased damage that hits the entire raid. Zorn just... screams at the tank.

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You get a 200% damage hit when you kill one of the two before the other, and another 200% if you hit the hard enrage timer. So one stack of 200% you will have to deal with every time.

 

The question is: which of them are you killing first? It matters, a lot. Toth locks into a ground smash phase with 200% increased damage that hits the entire raid. Zorn just... screams at the tank.

 

We've been killing them at around the same time. Should we burn toth down similar to jarg/sorno? burning jarg down first and just dealing with a soft enrage or what?

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I can understand why the mechanics of enrage exist, so you have a dps requirement.

Could never get my head around the reality of it; "hey guys I was actually only fighting you with one hand, now you've pissed me off long enough I'm no longer going to take it easy on you and use both hands!"

 

That logic is somewhat faulty - if you were SOA - wouldn't you just continuously summon mind traps and throw people around the room and smash them with pylons? Why does he do them in phases? Why not just drop the platform from below everyone's feet and have them fall to death? If you ask these questions, it will never make any sense. Enrage timers are a mechanic, like anything else. As much as we wish all mechanics made logical sense, they really just can't (and shouldn't have to). If you want some kind of justification for enrage timers - think of it as a power meter - it takes a certain amount of time for that power meter to fill before it takes any effect (like Dragon Ball Z if you want to compare it to something).

 

Not necessarily true, especially with the mechanics of some fights and the fact that you can only rez one person every 5 minutes. Ever get hit by one of SOA's enraged pylons? insta death. Some groups cant even get to the enrage timer on zorn/toth fight. Yes, your point is valid to a certain degree. But it's not entirely valid.

 

I don't disagree with anything you said, but I don't think it necessarily invalidates anything I said. Just because someone can't get to the enrage timer, doesn't change the need for it - it is best to think of it as an additional mechanic that needs to be worked with (as a DPS requirement and as a group makeup check).

 

We've been killing them at around the same time. Should we burn toth down similar to jarg/sorno? burning jarg down first and just dealing with a soft enrage or what?

 

No - they need to be killed much closer together. The most you want to kill Toth ahead of Zorn by is 4-5% (as opposed to Jarg and Sorno where my raid tends to kill Jarg about 25-30% before Sorno). You can have your tank blow all his cooldowns when Toth dies to stay up against Zorn - but if your tank dies and Zorn does his shout at the raid, everyone dies (50k damage).

Edited by Nibbon
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This HAS to be one of the major reasons people are leaving this game.

 

I seriously doubt that.

 

I having nothing against having Enrage Timers in the game, or having them on every boss.

 

That being said, I do think that EC Hard Mode enrage timers and perhaps Lost Island HM enrage timers on the first boss are too finely tuned.

 

When your talents aren't working correctly (Deadly Cannon, anyone?) it means the metrics used to calculate the DPS required for the fight will be off. Then if you also factor in overall combat changes like the armor debuff no longer stacking...

 

It forces you to bring specific classes/not to many of a specific class.

 

In short, you stop bringing the player and start bringing the character.

 

 

So my view is: Enrage Timers, Yes. Enrage Timers without some breathing space for the inevitable bugs/nerfs that change our DPS: No.

 

 

Nothing sucks more than failing to down a boss due to an enrage that you were able to down the week before, but since your class was nerfed to balance PvP, your PvE got !@#$ed with.

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We've been killing them at around the same time. Should we burn toth down similar to jarg/sorno? burning jarg down first and just dealing with a soft enrage or what?

 

No, like Nibbon above pointed out they need to be closer. We've pulled off 8%-10%% on Zorn after killing Toth, but it is sketchy at best. 4%-5% is a nice range, as long as you drop Toth first.

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Experiences vary. The enrage timer I wish they would remove or at least retune is the turrent enrage on the minefield. It's just too frustrating to get a bad field from RNG, or to have the droids lag out and not spawn, and then a run that was going very well wipes due to turrent enrage.

 

The thing is that that fight already has two enrage timer mechanics. The Colonel's is mostly for show, but the droid enrages are all the DPS check your group needs. If your group can't kill the droids reliably before they enrage you're just not going to make it. If they still want to put pressure on the raid to finish the minefield quickly they could up the spawn rate of the assassin droids as the encounter goes on so that eventually you just get too many and they overwhelm the raid, but it's not a hard enrage so one droid that fails to spawn doesn't wipe the raid.

 

Or you could have the Col's enrage timer lengthened to account for the time needed to cross the minefield and then start at the beginning of the encounter, but I feel that would just set back the problem.

 

Either way there are definitely ways to enforce a DPS requirement without an enrage timer. If you wipe to Soa at the bottom, it's because mechanics eventually caught up with you because you couldn't kill him quick enough. His enrage is pretty laughable. While I'm not suggesting that every boss just have a final "burst now or do no damage at all" phase, it's certainly worth considering. Half the DPS requirement of Kephess comes from the Bombers exploding without ever having to worry about a true enrage timer.

 

Point is they obviously CAN make fights where an enrage timer is not the primary DPS check, so here's hoping in future they don't rely on it as much.

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Remember you can only have fun while watching the clock. and a watched pot never boils, in biowares case it really boils over with the crappy enrage timer.

 

Instead of coming up with better tactics the boss can use, and i don't mean a 1 shot mechanic that wipes the raid in 1 hit, they just make them enrage, they could make a mechanic/tactic that say commando can counter and thus it reset the mechanic/tactic for 3 minutes then the boss tries it again but this time only a tank can counter it and so on. keeps people on their toes.

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Enrage timer's are fine on most of the fights. If you're DPS are wearing a Columi-Rakata mix or stock Rakata (itemized terribad) then that might be the problem. Once you have a Rakata-Black Hole mix... this should not be happening every single fight. I'd suggest looking at your parser (if you don't have one - get one!) and seeing which dps is lowest. Maybe one or two of your group is a bit behind the others. If you can determine which one then you can help them bring their dps up - try not to start out by insulting them, that might "enrage" them.
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No, like Nibbon above pointed out they need to be closer. We've pulled off 8%-10%% on Zorn after killing Toth, but it is sketchy at best. 4%-5% is a nice range, as long as you drop Toth first.

You should try it in story mode sometime. It's quite hilarious.

 

I think the most ridiculous I've seen was when I took a bunch of newbies and Toth died with Zorn at around 30%. The tank just kited around and we ended up dropping him with a tank, healer, and two dps left alive :o

 

OT: For hardmode, get Zorn to 6% (pushing either boss through 5% triggers all the berserk effects) and then down Toth. Tank blows all CDs and you kill off Zorn.

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You could make make the argument that a few of the enrage timers in HM EC are a little too finely tuned, by which I mean you're really shaving it close when you get them down. But frankly, I kind of like that.

 

I like that there's a mechanic that puts expectations on your DPS, skillwise. The Vael BWL fight in WoW was always a favourite of mine, because until you overgeared for the fight, it was a great test of the skill of your DPS players, to maximize their output.

 

There are people in my raid group who also hate enrage timers, and I just don't get it. The only other option would to make fights a lot shorter, but nerf energy/force regeneration significantly, so at some point the healers are literally incapable of keeping the tanks alive any more. But how is that practically different from an enrage timer?

 

Where you really lose me, is when you mention that someone is guaranteed to die on Zorn and Toth, as an argument against them. No - someone is not guaranteed to die on Z&T, if your guild is prepared and coordinated, which is the entire point. Raids are rests of skill and group coordination. Enrage timers are the "test" for the DPs classes - can they take the boss down fast enough? If not, then maybe your gear isn't good enough yet, or maybe they simply aren't skilled enough.

 

Otherwise, why not take half as much DPS, double up the healers, and make every boss fight insanely easy, since you can take all day to kill stuff?

 

Lastly, enrage timers aren't even guaranteed wipes in this game. In one of my guilds most memorable (and terrible) Soa kills, we had one DPS disconnect early on, and another die at the last phase. The result was us fighting an enraged Soa for over a minute, and only one healer and one DPS standing by the end - but we got him down. One of the loudest cheers over our voice server that I've ever heard, because it was so terrible but awesome.

 

If you are constantly running into problems with enrage timers, your guild members need to look inward, not outward, for the problem. The timers in this game aren't terribly forgiving, but they can be beaten.

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You should try it in story mode sometime. It's quite hilarious.

 

I think the most ridiculous I've seen was when I took a bunch of newbies and Toth died with Zorn at around 30%. The tank just kited around and we ended up dropping him with a tank, healer, and two dps left alive :o.

 

And wasn't it awesome when you managed to pull it off? These are those terrible but awesome white knuckle moments I live for when raiding. Where you should have wiped, but managed to tough it out.

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(1)You could make make the argument that a few of the enrage timers in HM EC are a little too finely tuned, by which I mean you're really shaving it close when you get them down. But frankly, I kind of like that.

 

(2)There are people in my raid group who also hate enrage timers, and I just don't get it. The only other option would to make fights a lot shorter, but nerf energy/force regeneration significantly, so at some point the healers are literally incapable of keeping the tanks alive any more. But how is that practically different from an enrage timer?

 

(3)Otherwise, why not take half as much DPS, double up the healers, and make every boss fight insanely easy, since you can take all day to kill stuff?

 

(4)Lastly, enrage timers aren't even guaranteed wipes in this game. In one of my guilds most memorable (and terrible) Soa kills, we had one DPS disconnect early on, and another die at the last phase. The result was us fighting an enraged Soa for over a minute, and only one healer and one DPS standing by the end - but we got him down. One of the loudest cheers over our voice server that I've ever heard, because it was so terrible but awesome.

 

(1)Personally, I do think EC HM enrages are a little too finely tuned. But this is coming from the perspective of someone who hasn't raided it personally, only seen what it's doing to the community. EC HM is supposedly for standard progression guilds, it's NOT for the Hardcore guilds. That's where Nightmare mode comes in. Just because NiM has been too slow to come, doesn't mean HM should be hijacked for that community.

 

(2)&(3) Not so. This is the argument of someone who has never played a game that doesn't rely on an enrage timer. There are dozens (at least) of other ways to make dps checks. Hell, this game even has them. And yet, nearly every encounter still folds in the ridiculous enrage timer as if it means something, often completely invalidating the point behind the softer dps checks. Karagga comes to mind.

 

(4)Soa's particular enrage is a particular joke. I'm guessing you wouldn't last nearly so long if you enraged on, say... Heavy Fabricator or J&S. Sure, you can stand up for a little bit, but your window is much, much smaller.

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(1)Personally, I do think EC HM enrages are a little too finely tuned. But this is coming from the perspective of someone who hasn't raided it personally, only seen what it's doing to the community. EC HM is supposedly for standard progression guilds, it's NOT for the Hardcore guilds. That's where Nightmare mode comes in. Just because NiM has been too slow to come, doesn't mean HM should be hijacked for that community.

 

(2)&(3) Not so. This is the argument of someone who has never played a game that doesn't rely on an enrage timer. There are dozens (at least) of other ways to make dps checks. Hell, this game even has them. And yet, nearly every encounter still folds in the ridiculous enrage timer as if it means something, often completely invalidating the point behind the softer dps checks. Karagga comes to mind.

 

(4)Soa's particular enrage is a particular joke. I'm guessing you wouldn't last nearly so long if you enraged on, say... Heavy Fabricator or J&S. Sure, you can stand up for a little bit, but your window is much, much smaller.

 

dude this is an mmorpg, they need to cater to both casuals and harcore players.

 

Atm EC hm is the last operation released and is the top tier, so it should be aimed at the harcore player base, or else there is notting for the harcores to do whatsoever, when EC NiM comes, you can nerf EC HM so more casuals have a chance of beating the encounter.(just like EV and KP got huge nerfs when EC came out)

 

stop whiner over enrage timers, if you can figure something out that can replace enrage timers in raids but still provide the same mecanics, you can go make your own mmorpg and take over the intire market.

Edited by juleanden
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stop whiner over enrage timers, if you can figure something out that can replace enrage timers in raids but still provide the same mecanics, you can go make your own mmorpg and take over the intire market.

You hit the nail on that one.

 

Gents, we all know the enrage timer is overused but I personally have not seen anything that would be a viable alternative to it. Definitely not one that would replace enrage timers across the board; the fights would have to be (re)designed from the ground up to not utilize an enrage timer.

 

In my opinion, Soa is probably the only one of the final boss fights in SWTOR that showcases more about dancing and staying calm rather than having the group wipe simply from increased damage. In this fight, you need only to sustain enough DPS to destroy mind traps without falling behind. You can take as much time to down Soa provided you can heal through it and your tank can direct Soa to the pillars without taking damage.

Edited by xGBox
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I can understand why the mechanics of enrage exist, so you have a dps requirement.

Could never get my head around the reality of it; "hey guys I was actually only fighting you with one hand, now you've pissed me off long enough I'm no longer going to take it easy on you and use both hands!"

 

There's something to think about there...

 

Nothing to change an "Enrage timer" to a Re-enforcements Timer, where are this boss has a unique companion, elite squad, or some other form of help that arrives if you don't beat the boss in time.

 

Enrage timers are so 90s :p

 

There's other ways around the same mechanics essentially, on the whole they should exist, it's a good thing.

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I'm undecided on rage timers, that other rpgmmo used to have them but then removed them from the game. I suppose the line of thinking is which is more important 1) know the fight and dance the dance or 2) DPS gearcheck to ensure the boss can be killed before enraging plus #1 ?

 

As I said the jury is out on whether they should ever have been part of the game in my opinion.

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They are needed, otherwise you could just bring 4 healers and 4 tanks and pretty much guarantee a kill, making dps classes obsolete.

 

Besides, a lot of the enrages on bosses are tankable for a short time. It's not like you instantly die when they enrage. You can tank Soa for ages after he enrages.

Edited by NasherUK
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