So after playing quite a few hard modes I would have to say my least favorite feature of this game is Enrage Timers. While I can understand the use of them in making sure you don't run too many healers, their function as a "Gear Check" is total nonsense in my opinion.

 

People should be encouraged to push their limits, not punished by a ridiculous feature that ensures they must have a set of gear that makes the flashpoint/operation so mindnumblingly easy even a child could do them.

 

I played this game 2 levels under the content I was doing and ridiculously undergeared from Coruscant to Corellia, and I wouldn't want to play it through any other way.

 

However when I started doing hardmode flashpoints undergeared I noticed a huge problem. While I was managing to heal my team through the fights (alone I might add) my team was not beating the enrage timers as they were simply undergeared.

 

Now I have a gear rating of ~127 and have started running with people of similar gear strength. While we can beat the enrage timers most of the bosses are not challenging.

 

Not challenging = Not fun

 

My solution is simple. Enrage timers need to work differently. It shouldn't be a set timer after which the boss gets a star, a firepower, and takes Chuck Norris form instantly one shotting the whole team. They should perhaps be a function of healing done vs. damage done meant ONLY to stop teams that replace their DPS with more healers.

 

If you keep a form of enrage time in order to ensure DPS are still doing their job, then make it so that after a certain point the boss starts getting SLIGHTLY stronger. Or put more adds into boss fights.

 

Make it more of a skill check and less of a gear check. If I can survive encounters meant for 120+ gear rating at 105, I should be applauded for my skill, not denied my rewards by Chuckzilla.

Edited February 7, 2012 by AndiusTheGreat

I agree on enrage timers.

One or two bosses with an enrage is an acceptable mechanic, adding to the urgency of those bosses.

Every boss in the game having an enrage is a clutch, nothing more.

If you can survive long enough but aren't doing enough dps then your heal/dps ratio will be bad and the boss will enrage according to your plan... so nothing will change?

 

Your way also sounds much more complicated to balance. How can the fight tell undergeared DPS being different from having 2 tanks? a tank will do the same damage as an undergeared dps but won't die nearly as quickly, so all the encounters will just now be 1 heals 2 tanks 1 dps.

 

or what about a heals who mostly dps's until the boss "soft" enrages as you say and then switches to healing. Since the enrage is slower you can change over for the last part of the fight to keep going, so 2 heals a tank and a dps would be ideal.

 

The fact is that DPS have NO responsibility in a group at all EXCEPT to DPS... if you can't do enough dps for the fight then you have failed at the responsibility given to you and need to improve.

 

The solution to a tank being undergeared and killed quickly or not being able to hold aggro is not to make the boss do less damage until it is trivial.

 

The solution to a healer being undergeared and not being able to keep up is not to make the healer a spam button fest or reduce all damage to being trivial

 

The solution to a DPS being undergeared and not being able to do as much damage as they should is not to remove enrage timers or come up with all sorts of convoluted systems to make it easier for the dps... just gear up and better learn your class.

If you have a bad tank you will notice this by him losing agro and generally being quite sluggish picking it up.

 

If you have a bad healer, people will die, including the tank at seemingly random times.

 

If you have a bad dps, well... you finish the instance a few minutes later. Without enrage timers DPS have an incredibly low skill cap in regards to actually playing their class and not just moving out of fire.

The mechanic itself is a clutch.

There are much better and less immersion breaking methods of killing off a party with low DPS than just "lol i hit u harder nao"

 

I like soft enrages for this reason.

 

"OH **** THERE'S FIRE EVERYWHERE! What do we do!?" is much better than. "Oh the boss is red, not enough dps."

Edited February 7, 2012 by Keii

They need less "hard" enrages and more soft enrage timers like add spawns or a stacking buff/debuff that makes the boss do more dmg or your tank take more dmg. Putting every boss on an enrage timer is a bit much, but they have their reasons. Hard modes are supposed to be gear checks any way to get you ready for raiding. It's not like every single hard mode flashpoint requires you to have full champion pvp gear or full operation sets, they seem to progress like they did when leveling starting w/ black talon and ending w/ the end game hard modes. I have to agree though, there needs to less enrage timers in the game, but it's not an excuse for being undergeared. An undergeared player will be somewhat of a set back ,depending on how skilled they are with their class, enrage timer or no enrage timer. I'm no gearscore fan, but gear has its place and enrage timers allow you to know whether you are ready as a player and ready in terms of gear for a raid. That's why BW put one of the hardest raid bosses first in eternity vault, the annihilation droid.

I think some form of enrage timer on all bosses is fine...some should be well outside the challenging zone too because they aren't there to be challenging, they are there to stop the boss from being 3 man'd. If the boss mechanic isn't interesting or challenging enough don't blame the enrage timer for not making the fight more exciting, its not what they are there for.

Could do like aion and aoe one shot everyone with bad gear.

 

I prefer enrage timers, bosses being boring is not due to enrage timers but due to how most bosses are tank and spank.

If you have a bad tank you will notice this by him losing agro and generally being quite sluggish picking it up.

 

If you have a bad healer, people will die, including the tank at seemingly random times.

 

If you have a bad dps, well... you finish the instance a few minutes later. Without enrage timers DPS have an incredibly low skill cap in regards to actually playing their class and not just moving out of fire.

 

This.

 

Also it's called progression for a reason, you don't just hit level 50 and jump right into Nighmare Operations in your quest gear. You follow the progression path and you'll gear up properly. There should absolutely be dps checks in the game, and it involves having geared out properly and knowing your spec/rotation. If you can't meet the dps requirement for hardmodes then you haven't done enough dailies(or bought crafted epics) to get yourself geared out properly. Or you simply just don't know how to build/play your character.

as a player who cleared 10/10 nightmare mode, I %100 aggre, it doesnt add any fun to game, it just checks gear, there are many other ways to make a fight challanging and fun (look to other mmos, ps:not WoW )

If you can survive long enough but aren't doing enough dps then your heal/dps ratio will be bad and the boss will enrage according to your plan... so nothing will change?[/Quote]

 

They can run tests but I am 95% sure that if they ran tests they would find a clear split in DPS vs. Healing Output between highly skilled but undergeared groups, and groups with too many healers. Its like at the duel tournament our server had on Voss this past week. I survived my duels by outhealing my opponents damage. I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn my healing to damage ratio in the deuls I won was in excess of 20 healing per 1 damage. Groups that replace hard DPS with more healers would likely have a similarly ridiculous ratio. I put out a lot of healing as an undergeared healer, but I was pushing my limits only getting by washing off negative effects and spamming emergency medpack at our almost-dead tank in some of their fights. (That is what I consider fun as a healer not "Lets minimize the time my team isn't at 100% health.")

 

The solution to a DPS being undergeared and not being able to do as much damage as they should is not to remove enrage timers or come up with all sorts of convoluted systems to make it easier for the dps... just gear up and better learn your class.

 

First off this comment is written from the perspective of "You aren't doing your job as DPS." Don't insult my skills when I clearly stated in the OP that I am not DPS, but a healer. No matter what you believe the enrage timer has little to do with me as my DPS comes to taking pop-shots and putting DOT at the enemy with an occasional XS flyby if I get the time.

 

Really I think the function of DPS in a large fight SHOULD be to kill off adds, or too take over misc. tasks like flipping switches if the boss fight calls for it. If DPS is not challenging enough, then start having more bosses that get reinforced by waves of adds or add more misc. tasks. You could even have the waves of adds stack up if they aren't killed off fast enough. (I mean these fights are supposed to feel "heroic" anyway. 4vs1 =/= heroic. 4vs1 + tons of adds = heroic.) What I find too often is we actually ignore adds just to take the boss down faster in order to avoid the enrage timer.

I agree on enrage timers.

One or two bosses with an enrage is an acceptable mechanic, adding to the urgency of those bosses.

Every boss in the game having an enrage is a clutch, nothing more.

 

This.

 

I agree with the op 100%. It's a lazy mechanic and completely unfair. The challenge of the boss fight should be in the mechanics and particular strategies of the boss, not in a stupid "Can you beat it in X amount of time before it murders your face?". Battles are boring as all hell with the mechanics as well, because if someone dies for whatever reason, battle rezing them and going on isn't an option, you've lost too much DPS to beat the timer so it's just count as a wipe and redo. The flow of battle is always "Be perfect or ****" and there's never a close boss fight.

 

If the enrage was something where it would just increase in increments up to a point where it hits hard, but not the 1-2 shot BS it does now, then it would be a non-issue. But the way it is now every fight is timed for no reason other than to be a gear check and it's killing all fun out of the game for me and my guild. If not for enrage timers we could beat anything that came our way, but because of it we hit walls for no reason. A number of us are ready to quit over such a bad mechanic (along with a few other big game breaking things that are being ignored, but that's another topic).

Infernal Council is a gear check.

 

Enrage timers are not.

 

They are very generous on most bosses to begin with. There are only soft enrages and with proper CD usage and healing the fight can go on for quite a while after that.

Some encounters that simply need an Enrage or the mechanic would be too easy as you could just take your time and exploit the lack of pressure.

 

And most importantly you could just run two tanks and five healers and have a raid that can't die. That alone is more than enough reason to keep the enrage abilities.

Even the OP himself acknowledged this fact, so I don't really see a discussion here.

 

No enrage timers leads to excessive healer numbers, wich in turn breaks raiding as dying will start to become almost impossible. You'd just longer for each kill.

Edited February 7, 2012 by Hxxr

I still wonder how people hit enrage in that game...

I still wonder how people hit enrage in that game...

 

Well, in 4-man content if you hit enrage you should just go back and do some more normal mode flashpoints.

In raids it happens. People sometimes die unlucky deaths or the ones clicking the panels at puzzlebot in Karagga's aint fast enough and so on.

 

 

@AndiusTheGreat:

Adds are fun as dps from time to time, but every fight with adds?

I play ranged dps for 11 years in various mmo's now and I'd happily quit a game that has freaking adds on each and every encounter.

Adds are a mechanic to make fights more versatile, there I agree. As a staple mechanic it would suck. Having the honor of honing your skills, polishing your equipment and then killing the bosses is something that's just fun to some of us. Min/max style of play is more than just spamming Tracer Missiles and frankly it's a lot more fun too.

Well, in 4-man content if you hit enrage you should just go back and do some more normal mode flashpoints.

In raids it happens. People sometimes die unlucky deaths or the ones clicking the panels at puzzlebot in Karagga's aint fast enough and so on.

 

 

@AndiusTheGreat:

Adds are fun as dps from time to time, but every fight with adds?

I play ranged dps for 11 years in various mmo's now and I'd happily quit a game that has freaking adds on each and every encounter.

Adds are a mechanic to make fights more versatile, there I agree. As a staple mechanic it would suck. Having the honor of honing your skills, polishing your equipment and then killing the bosses is something that's just fun to some of us. Min/max style of play is more than just spamming Tracer Missiles and frankly it's a lot more fun too.

 

Well i kinda meant it in the way that people start mass posting on forums how unfair enrages are in this game... I mean yeah it can happen on nightmare soa if you miss a pylon but seriously i never experienced a situation where you could actually be stuck because of enrage.

 

Of course its gonna be harder (not *hard*) if you got not so good gear and you try to start with D7, BoI, FE or Kaon. BT, BP and Foundry should be easy.

Edited February 7, 2012 by HellFlame

 

And most importantly you could just run two tanks and five healers and have a raid that can't die. That alone is more than enough reason to keep the enrage abilities.

Even the OP himself acknowledged this fact, so I don't really see a discussion here.

 

No enrage timers leads to excessive healer numbers, wich in turn breaks raiding as dying will start to become almost impossible. You'd just longer for each kill.

 

 

This ^

As a raider I dont understand were the problems with enragetimers are.

They have a reason wich was explained in this thread a few times.

 

If you have enrage -> oneshot people

or

Shorter enrage but boss gets stronger over time/more adds etc.

 

It doesn't change the fight.

An enrage is an enrage, no matter how you implement it.

 

I can understand that from an "immersion" or "diversity" factor it would be cool to have different types of enrages but i think some people are missing the point here.

 

The problem for "these guys" isn't that there is always the same type of enrage timers. its that THERE ARE enragetimers.

And frankly I like them.

 

But ok.... lets remove enrage timers and introduce mechanics that one shot you if you dont move out in a millisecond... would be the same :-)

Has anyone ever really confirmed that these enrage timers are more gear checks then skill checks? I'm wondering if these complaints come more from just bad DPS'ers who don't know how to formulate a plan of attack. And if that is the case then it makes perfect sense for these enrage timers to be in place.

 

I really need to get my guild to hit all 8 up in greens to see how close the enrage timers really are.

"effective enrage" timers are fine and all but when the game is as young as it is now, it's better to not let players find work-arounds and just out-raid composition an encounter like, by bringing an extra tank or a couple extra healers you trivialize the enrage and it means your dps is irrelevant.

 

Hard enrages are fine. If you're meant to complete the encounter in X amount of time, that's just another criteria. It's not your decision which criteria of an encounter you want fulfill or not. They're not lazy, and it's whiny posts from people like you that want everything handed to them on a platter and want the game tailored to your liking even if it means completely ruining it for others that take all the fun out of an mmo. If you're undergeared and too lazy to figure out how you can be doing more damage, that's your problem. Not ours. Go back to farming heroics, start googling your class's spec/rotation, and then come back and do current content. EVERYONE else did.

why the forum necro?

I am ok with Enrage timers. We progressed our way on Toth and Zorn Hardmode, once we got the tactic down, we hit enrage toth at 22% and zorn at 34%. Now that we knew the tactic dps could loosen up, and be more stationary and focus their dps instead of focusing too much about tactics. End result: Toth and Zorn dead.

 

Fights I personally can see needing Enrage timers in current content: Fabricator, Bonetrasher and Infernal Council.

Fabricator and Bonetrasher are basic DPS races(once positioning is fixed), Infernal Council is a gear check.

 

The rest of the fights till now are definetly not a DPS race, because the fights promote too much movement(one exception might be Zorn and Toth). These fights could do with a soft enrage, like Doctor Lorrick last phase, or possibly other mechanics like gaining an extra ability, spawning adds, or simply increase their attack speed by say 50%. these things can make the fight more interesting, meaning those people with too little dps would have to increase their DPS to make the fight easier for the healers.

 

most guilds that are done progressing EC HM by now, have no issues with their DPS and almost never hit enrage(to my knowledge). But those guilds who are still farming their Rakata gear from EC Story Mode, and clearing it in a day, who have extra raid days to spend and chose to spend them on EC HM might end up struggling.

 

Another thing I've noticed, too few fights make the tanks have to do anything then being a punching bag. The tank swaps that got introduced in EC was a step in the right direction. But you could also introduce abilities which would require the tanks to use a cooldown rotation, maybe run around and pick up effects to counter ability X or something like that.

Enrage timers just force you to play the game how Bioware wants you to play it. Strict one tank, two dps, one healer groups only. Shame on you for wanting something different. Eight man ops are two healers, maybe two tanks, four/five dps (depending on how many tanks you bring).

 

You have two tanks for that flashpoint? Sorry, have one respec. Two healers? Respec. A friend who is a little slow on the dps? Kick his behind to the curb and get a new dps. Show no mercy to your casual guildmates, because Bioware's enrage timers will show you none.

 

I understand the need for some players to be challenged, but some people's primary focus is to have fun. Because I am not an elitist, because some of my guildmates are casual players who are merely 'okay' at playing, I am undeserving of better gear and should be locked out of certain content? I'm not asking to be handed gear, but because I don't have a proper group setup, I am stonewalled from advancement?

 

"Well just join another guild that has better players," some might say. If I want to get the better gear, join a better guild. Again, I am being forced to choose between playing with friends or getting better gear, which shouldn't be an issue.

 

All in all, the challenge of the boss should be in the mechanics, not because it has a time limit. Make nightmare mode have the enrage timers for people looking for that particular challenge.

Only one person in this whole necro'd thread is even on the right track.

 

The primary purpose of rage timers is not a gear check, or to force a particular party composition (beyond a certain point).

 

The primary purpose is to ensure that you can't cheese fights and take their mechanics out of play. The enrage timer forces you to figure out how to overcome each fight's mechanics, rather than find one or two marathon tactics that work all the time.

 

Even then, if you look at things like LI, I think it's clear that BW is moving away from just slapping a hard enrage on everything, and moving towards fights with mechanics that include soft enrages. It's somewhat ironic, though, that LI is a much harder gear check than any other "Hard" mode Flashpoint, if only in that you need a certain base level of gear/DPS to win the 2nd phase of the final boss.

 

That said, any other HM can be feasibly done by fresh 50s who've done a couple rounds of dailies to get purple armoring/mods.

I would just like to see enrage timers that start out lower and slowly build rather than instantly giving a boss mob the ability to hit 200% harder between 1 second and the next. What would be the harm in having it gradually build over the course of a minute? This would give groups starting out doing them a little more chance to make some minor execution mistakes and still be successful, while letting them know they still have to improve their strategy or gear.

 

Instead we have a case where if an under geared or inexperienced group makes a tiny execution mistake, they might as well jump off a cliff, while a nearly geared group can all but faceroll the encounter without any strategy. It becomes frustrating to the under geared or inexperienced group and makes no difference to the geared group.