Hello,

I seem to remember the devs saying that 16man ops were supposed to be easier than 8man ops.

this is most definitely not the case in any of them from what I've seen.

anyone heard anything else about this subject or of plans to tweak them down a bit to bring them in line with 8man ops.

thanks in advance.

I believe it was said at the guild summit, which is a long time ago and things change. However, with that said there is no reason to tone down any of the current 16 man encounters as they are not that difficult to begin with in the first place. Yes 8 man is easier, but it isn't like the 16 man versions are so insanely difficult they cannot be beaten.

Just learn the mechanics, and ask your guildmates to execute better.

8m is less forgiving when it comes to mistakes. If you lose one person regardless of what role the play you need to battle rez them fast. If a second person dies or the first person gets booted from zone upon accepting rez then its /stuck. In 16m you have more leniency to carry below par players as well as the ability to bring extra stealth classes to stealth rez during combat. In 16m if you lose one person you can still finish the fight with out them. However 16m is harder to organize. Instead of 8 people to worry about you have 16. That's twice as many people who can mess up and cause a wipe. Not to mention lag issues from having twice as many people on the screen.

A quick comparison as to the realistic differences beyond that. The walker in Kephess HM8 hits random people (the healers) for 5k shots usually in sets of 3 or roughly 15k dmg. That is not too bad until you remember you only have 2 healers and the tanks and dps still need heals because the bomber just insta-gibbed 3/4 of someones health. Now on 16m the shots are for about 7500 but you have 4 healers giving you the option to dedicate 1 or 2 or 1 spell from each to heal the person getting shot. Also there is a way to make him hit the 3rd tank instead of the healers.

Overall I have beaten both and I will tell you it took me longer to get 8m Kephess down vs 16 only because of the unforgiving nature of that fight on 8. Is it harder? I would say not really, just different. I will say this though, the typical 16m raid is comprised of a really great 8m raid and 4-8 people that would not be able to beat the 8m version.

8m is less forgiving when it comes to mistakes. If you lose one person regardless of what role the play you need to battle rez them fast. If a second person dies or the first person gets booted from zone upon accepting rez then its /stuck. In 16m you have more leniency to carry below par players as well as the ability to bring extra stealth classes to stealth rez during combat. In 16m if you lose one person you can still finish the fight with out them. However 16m is harder to organize. Instead of 8 people to worry about you have 16. That's twice as many people who can mess up and cause a wipe. Not to mention lag issues from having twice as many people on the screen.

 

A quick comparison as to the realistic differences beyond that. The walker in Kephess HM8 hits random people (the healers) for 5k shots usually in sets of 3 or roughly 15k dmg. That is not too bad until you remember you only have 2 healers and the tanks and dps still need heals because the bomber just insta-gibbed 3/4 of someones health. Now on 16m the shots are for about 7500 but you have 4 healers giving you the option to dedicate 1 or 2 or 1 spell from each to heal the person getting shot. Also there is a way to make him hit the 3rd tank instead of the healers.

 

Overall I have beaten both and I will tell you it took me longer to get 8m Kephess down vs 16 only because of the unforgiving nature of that fight on 8. Is it harder? I would say not really, just different. I will say this though, the typical 16m raid is comprised of a really great 8m raid and 4-8 people that would not be able to beat the 8m version.

Thanks for this.

My guild have cleared EV and KP on hard mode and readily farm it its no trouble for us at all, equally we now farm EC story mode, again with no trouble at all and indeed can still manage in all those cases undermanned, we have completed EV hard mode with 7 people and killed the first boss in EC with 7 people so i think our skills are okay as is our gear.

We breezed through EV 16m story mode and struggled on KP story mode 16man (the droid got us)

Organising the 16 people is also not something we are struggling with but 16man story mode firebrand and stormcaller was an absolute nightmare for us.

There is, in my experience, a significant disparity in difficulty and it seems in contrast to what the devs have said.

Again, I appreciate the appraisal.

Yea being able to drop a boss without 2 deeps is so difficult.

So much harder to execute.......lol

Obviously its harder to organize 16 people

Mathematically 8 man is harder. Thats why they said it.

I don't think they factored in "How hard will it be to find good guildies" into their metrics

What's your point, other than trolling? We've cleared 8-man hard mode content with a DPS down, so what? Losing raid members makes everyone else's job harder, but not impossible, regardless of your ops size.

I get it, really, I do. When you're doing 8-man content, you want to believe it's the hardest. The 16-man guilds want to believe what they're doing is harder. It's an ego/e-peen thing. When it comes down to it, and it took some realization on my part given that we were reduced to 8-man ops at the time, 16-man is more difficult.

Now, if you have ****** players, then it doesn't matter what your raid size is. Anything is going to seem really hard.

I'll give you that 16 man is way glitchier.

But harder? Same **** just double the people and not double anything else

lol

And if you can take down bombers without one deeps while ur in full 58 props to u. But i doubt it

I'll give you that 16 man is way glitchier.

False

But harder? Same **** just double the people and not double anything else

False

And if you can take down bombers without one deeps while ur in full 58 props to u. But i doubt it

We did just that in some of our early attempts. I find your lack of faith... disturbing.

As soon as you log out of the game and come back to real life, none of it really matters.

Your mind's = blown.

The walker in Kephess HM8 hits random people (the healers) for 5k shots usually in sets of 3 or roughly 15k dmg. That is not too bad until you remember you only have 2 healers and the tanks and dps still need heals because the bomber just insta-gibbed 3/4 of someones health.

(1) You can control the walker to some extent, especially in P1. In P1 you can get the walker fire to hit only a tank.

(2) The bombers should never hit anyone but a tank if your tanks are quick on the pickups.

As to whether or not 16-man is easier than 8-man, I'd say that 16-man is probably easier on 3 out of the 4 fights in EC. Firebrand and Stormcaller is the one exception. However, part of the reason 16-man is easier is because of issues in the game that will be fixed in 1.3.

Armor debuffs stack right now. This means 16-man raids are more able to get 5 armor debuffs up on bosses, and so 16-man DPS will do more than 8-man DPS as a result. Also, the bosses in EC just have double the health of 8-man bosses. This makes them easier to kill, since a 16-man raid has 10 DPS and an 8-man raid has only 4 DPS. Instead of doing 2x the damage, a 16-man raid is doing 2.5x the damage. Once you add in the extra armor debuffs it's more like 2.75-3x the damage.

Bioware should make sure to buff the health of the 16-man bosses to 2.5x 8-man health instead of just 2x 8-man health in order to balance this properly going forward.

The two raid sizes will get much closer in difficulty in terms of Enrages once the stacking debuff issue is fixed, but yes, right now, I'd definitely say 16-man is easier.

Firebrand and Stormcaller is harder on 16-man though. You get into some real cat-herding coordination with 4 shields, especially on the Firebrand side, where both of them can be randomly placed anywhere. At least on the Stormcaller side, one of the four shields is always fixed to be a side shield. Double Destruction also hits very hard, and can be a bit challenging for raids to deal with initially if their DPS doesn't beat the second DD before Defensive Systems.

One thing I would add to this though is that at least before transfers, it was pretty challenging to get 16 great raiders together to do an Operation. You're much more likely to be able to get 8 great people together than 16. Most of the 16-man guilds were struggling to barely fill raids and have had to make recruiting compromises etc. or bring along more casual players just to fill out slots.

So in that sense 16-man has had some real coordination challenges just in terms of running at all. I can see why Bioware might have tuned them to be a bit easier as a result of having to wrestle with these kinds of issues.

I expect the server consolidations will shake things up considerably as far as giving 16-man guilds access to a larger talent pool. Once paid transfers to any server come online, that's when you will probably see truly competitive squads finally able to form.

As was said at the guild summit, the task of coordinating 16 people is a great challenge in itself, and thus the actual difficulty of the encounters is scaled back a bit.

That does not mean easier than 8-man. It means easier than twice as hard as 8-man. And, it actually means potentially harder than twice as hard as 8-man due to player dynamics, but they're hoping that backing off on the encounter difficulty will bring it on par with the target difficulty level by offsetting the inherent difficulty of the larger group.