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EV and General Boss Encounter Feedback


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we've recently cleared EV for the first time and I wanted to give a little feedback from a Guild Leader of a transferred semi-casual raiding guild.

 

 

Annihilation Droid XRR-3: fight is fine as is, kinda easy but that's what it should be on normal for a first boss IMO. Good intro fight.

 

 

Gharj: needs an additional mechanic in normal mode as this is a really boring fight as is.

 

Ex. mechanics -

*"have to jump and be in the air as the boss lands from his jump or take a damage spike" (timestamp boss's jump and give players 2.5? seconds to jump)

 

*"stalactites fall from the ceiling each time the boss lands, hitting the platform that the raid is on and causing raid members to have to move out of the impact spot or take a damage spike" (pull code from Revan fight in Foundry and adjust art/density/damage/speed).

 

 

Ancient Pylon: sort of a "chess event" (WOW, Khara), fine for what it is. We were pretty surprised that this was the boss and not the way to access the boss. Feels anti-climactic IMO, not sure how to change that w/o complete rework. I don't have an issue with these types of events but it should be clear that the event is the boss so players aren't left scratching their heads waiting for the real boss to spawn. The chess event had an obvious conclusion so players knew what to expect, this one doesn't.

 

 

Infernal Council: I was excited about this one as it looked pretty cool and while it has promise, it lacks any depth. Add another mechanic in normal which gives the encounter some spice.

 

Ex. mechanics - each time a council member is killed add a stacking buff to the remaining council members causing them to hit harder/gain health per stack. Also, add a rotating buff to the attacking player, this buff should randomly appear on additional raid members allowing them a "window of time" to assist the attacking player.

 

 

Soa The Infernal One - I like this fight pretty much as is but it is buggy. One change I would make is to have the pylon (floating thing in Phase 3) cast a light spot or shadow to make it more intuitive where the tank should park the boss in order to pop his bubble as camera angles can get pretty wonky.

 

 

Aesthetically the instance looked and sounded great and minus the bugs (there are many) it ran very well too so great job from your art team on this IMO.

 

As a general Suggestions: I understand that the harder versions don't include additional fight mechanics, this is bad IMO. Hard modes should offer additional challenge by way of more cooperation and learning required, not raw numbers. Further, harder modes should unlock some additional content as a reward, perhaps a bonus boss or something that isn't available to normal mode with exclusive loot and bragging rights (Alganon from WOW is a good example).

 

I would also make all boss damage output, percentage based to allow these encounters to scale with gear and keep updating the loot tables, this effectively increases the amount of content, give players more choices and adds re-playability. This should be done in hard mode FPs at the very least.

 

I really dislike the auto-assigned loot in its current implementation, this should be a choice and not mandated. Further, allow those assigned loot the option to pass and let others of the same class roll for the item. Permit items to be traded to other members of the raid. It's a good intention but the implementation screams of poor planning and lack of experience.

 

The above are simply suggestions and I'd love to see others' input in a similar format.

*What do you like about each fight?

*What is your favorite boss mechanic in SWTOR?

*What is your favorite boss mechanic in another game?

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I agree with most everything you said, but the Infernal council one I disagree with completely. They shouldn't be made tougher as the fight goes on, because the problem with that fight at present is because of the short timer on it (2 min 30 sec) if you have a single weak link even if it's just someone not very well geared yet, the whole group hits a wall, and it's going to be the weak links that will be dealing with the enemies in the end. The fight is enough of a gear check if you bring someone to an ops to try and gear them up, there's no reason to further punish people for bringing someone to get geared up.
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I am guessing you ran in normal. While the fights can be similar, the tactics used change (especially on Soa).

 

The first droid is easy even in hard mode as long as you stay out during the missile barrage.

 

They do add a debuff in the puzzle area so one person cannot continually lock in the puzzle pieces. You have to rotate people. The timer is strict, and if you don't get it fast enough you will wipe (4 or 5 elites spawn per side and destroy everyone).

 

Gharj is still way too easy no matter what the mode.

 

The Infernal Counsel is bugged for warrior dps. We had to have the guy respec rage in order to complete it (and yes, he did not use any of his group abilities...no matter what he used his guy caused the debuff). It's not bad, but I would like to see a few of them deal more damage. I understand it's essentially a dps race vs. the clock, but throwing in more damage or other abilities would make it more interesting. Instead it's simply a "how geared are you and is your dps rotation correct" test.

 

The biggest issue I have...glitches on Soa, especially in hard mode. If someone is in the air when the 2nd phase ends, he comes down and glitches out essentially removing him from the fight (happened to me twice). The person should just die and then the group can battle res, not be glitched out for the rest of the fight. We also had a random mind trap spawn as soon as we got to the 3rd phase. I got pulled in, and when we destroyed it I glitched out and could not re enter the fight. Hard to describe what happens, but I ended up in a room by myself. Cannot be revived, cannot /stuck, etc. We had this happen to one member of our ops group about 2 out of every 5 tries. It's really annoying. We tried to stop dps if someone is in the air, but that just kills us for enrage timer. You either have to have a crazy geared group that can down him with 6 or 7, or just get lucky. Bosses should not come down to luck.

Edited by McGarnagle
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I agree with most everything you said, but the Infernal council one I disagree with completely. They shouldn't be made tougher as the fight goes on, because the problem with that fight at present is because of the short timer on it (2 min 30 sec) if you have a single weak link even if it's just someone not very well geared yet, the whole group hits a wall, and it's going to be the weak links that will be dealing with the enemies in the end. The fight is enough of a gear check if you bring someone to an ops to try and gear them up, there's no reason to further punish people for bringing someone to get geared up.

 

you make a good point, what I probably didn't do a great job communicating is my intention with the stacking power buff on death mechanic would be so the raid needs to work together and ensure the council members are killed in a logical order so the final one/two council members end up being the one(s) the tank(s) are on. This mechanic emphasizes strategy and coordination over raw numbers even though at first glance it doesn't look that way.

 

the random buff mechanic can even be taken a step further in nightmare by making it so anyone who assists while they don't have the same buff as the final tank impacts the encounter negatively, for example a healer trying to heal when he doesn't share the tank's buff would actually heal the council member instead or a DPS beating on the council member when they don't have the same buff as the final tank would have all their damage done affect the final tank and not the council member. This would punish people for assisting at the wrong time and therefore require more raid awareness and strategy.

 

as a side note, I rarely advocate "raw numbers" as a viable encounter primary mechanic as it's not fun, not replayable and very gear dependent; it's a lazy/unskilled way for an encounter designer to setup a fight and so all these enrage timers are kinda stupid IMO.

Edited by stout
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I am guessing you ran in normal. While the fights can be similar, the tactics used change (especially on Soa).

 

The first droid is easy even in hard mode as long as you stay out during the missile barrage.

 

They do add a debuff in the puzzle area so one person cannot continually lock in the puzzle pieces. You have to rotate people. The timer is strict, and if you don't get it fast enough you will wipe (4 or 5 elites spawn per side and destroy everyone).

 

Gharj is still way too easy no matter what the mode.

 

The Infernal Counsel is bugged for warrior dps. We had to have the guy respec rage in order to complete it (and yes, he did not use any of his group abilities...no matter what he used his guy caused the debuff). It's not bad, but I would like to see a few of them deal more damage. I understand it's essentially a dps race vs. the clock, but throwing in more damage or other abilities would make it more interesting. Instead it's simply a "how geared are you and is your dps rotation correct" test.

 

The biggest issue I have...glitches on Soa, especially in hard mode. If someone is in the air when the 2nd phase ends, he comes down and glitches out essentially removing him from the fight (happened to me twice). The person should just die and then the group can battle res, not be glitched out for the rest of the fight. We also had a random mind trap spawn as soon as we got to the 3rd phase. I got pulled in, and when we destroyed it I glitched out and could not re enter the fight. Hard to describe what happens, but I ended up in a room by myself. Cannot be revived, cannot /stuck, etc. We had this happen to one member of our ops group about 2 out of every 5 tries. It's really annoying. We tried to stop dps if someone is in the air, but that just kills us for enrage timer. You either have to have a crazy geared group that can down him with 6 or 7, or just get lucky. Bosses should not come down to luck.

 

you are right, we did do normal. This was a spontaneous raid, our first time in with no strats and we cleared to council and the exact bug you mentioned caused us to agree to return the following night and finish up after some bug research.

 

We also had Soa reset several times randomly sub 10%, members getting thrown in the air while the boss crashed the floor and be stuck in "purgatory" as we started calling it lol. My point is we probably would have cleared the place first night w/o a single vid or strat were it not for the bugs, that's not a good thing IMO.

 

I asked one of my officers on way in to EV, "think I should look up some strats?" his response was "nah, if they're anything like the FPs we'll have no problems figuring them out on the fly", he was right and that definitely isn't a good thing.

 

Again, enrage timers are poor encounter design and really only make sense in the hardest mode on certain bosses IMO.

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Ancient Pylon: sort of a "chess event" (WOW, Khara), fine for what it is. We were pretty surprised that this was the boss and not the way to access the boss. Feels anti-climactic IMO, not sure how to change that w/o complete rework. I don't have an issue with these types of events but it should be clear that the event is the boss so players aren't left scratching their heads waiting for the real boss to spawn. The chess event had an obvious conclusion so players knew what to expect, this one doesn't.

 

My suggestions for this fight as you start doing HM or if you were to get stuck I would suggest checking out the video I made...I went in depth on the correctness and how to do it.

 

My guild has successfully killed/solved this without any bugs for the past 4 weeks using the same mechanic. I made a video explaining how and showing how it had to be done in normal mode with a brief explanation in the description for how to do the fight in Hard Mode. Please watch the video as it should answer your questions. If you have any other questions please let me know. Thanks! :D

 

 

Side note...if you want to know any other boss strats please PM me either here or on youtube and I will make a video, post it and link it to you. Have a great one peeps!

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It would be nice if they added new mechanics to all fights on hard/nightmare. Some fights in this tier are a joke even on nightmare mode.

 

For example, my guild killed gharj for the first time on nightmare this week (8 man). One of our healers died about halfway through the fight, res had been used on someone else (who got stuck in the fire) but we still killed it easily. That shouldn't happen on 'nightmare' IMO.

 

Some trash could do with being tuned as well. The trash before the first EV boss on nightmare is more difficult than most of the bosses. There is too much between first and second boss. It would have been better to split it up more. Not being able to use CC on 16 man trash is also a bit strange. Since they already have more health and damage I dont see why that is needed. I think we wiped more on trash than on any of the bosses.

 

The Infernal Counsel is bugged for warrior dps. We had to have the guy respec rage in order to complete it (and yes, he did not use any of his group abilities...no matter what he used his guy caused the debuff).

 

Putting him in his own group in the ops frame solved that for us. Something about their DoTs healing group members. No players in his group, no problem. Still, it shouldn't be needed. We wasted a few tries on that before we realised what was going on.

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