1) Removal of Enrage Timers / Improved Mechanics

While I support making the mechanics more intense so that they can't just be laughed through (HM/NiM EC, HM TfB do a good job of this, imo), the removal of enrage timers is *really* not something that should happen. Enrage timers exist to require a minimum level of DPS. Without them, you could bring in *any* DPS (or none at all, honestly) and still finish the content.

I have to wonder what tier of ops content you do if you think that the mechanics aren't important and that only DPS/HPS matter. Sure, it's that way on SM because that's entry content where the devs have explicitly stated they want everyone to be able to see (re: it has to be feasibly puggable). On HM/NiM, most of those mechanics that can just be laughed at have to actually be dealt with properly.

At max level, we should have multiple sets of armour, all with different stat distributions and different set bonuses which are useful in different situations to encourage us to collect them all.

Dear. Jeebus. No. One of the *worst* things about classic Vanilla WoW was having to have a different set of gear for *every single raid*. For MC and BWL, you *had* to have fire resist gear. For AQ40 and parts of Naxx, you *had* to have nature resist gear. For the other parts of Naxx, you *had* to have frost resist gear. It was bad for healers and DPS, but it was *especially* bad for tanks, who often had to devote half or more of their bag slots *specifically* to all of the different gear they needed for different fights.

Horizontal gearing should be about multiple optimal methods of stat allocation. It should *not* be about having to carry around 3 full sets of gear because certain fights demand it.

5) Rare Loot Drops

There are already rare loot drops in most of the content that encourages people to keep doing it: pets, mounts, companion skins, and unique shells. I *really* don't want to see all of the screwery that would occur with rare drops that were actually tied to specific pieces of statted equipment: you would see *everything* become master loot to prevent randoms from stealing the potential rare drop from guildies (or the ops leader if the ops leader needs/wants it). There are already sufficient rare loot incentives to run content; such rare drops don't need to be made even more competitive by making them required for optimization.

1) Base camp to rez at, thats a real good idea :-)

2) Maybe an operation where it's five bosses but the encounters are all puzzles and they're all randomized for the week. Make 26 boss encounters or so (and I realize this would take a lot of time and effort and would never happen but go with me on this), then for each week five are selected at random when the first person walks into the Operation's instance. Each instance is different for each group that walks in, and you would get a title for completing all 26 different puzzles. The lockout would be simple: you can't do the same puzzles twice in one week, and since there would be 26, guilds could go in and do the raid multiple times. The boss rewards could simply be BH comms and daily comms, as well as exotic crafting materials and maybe some special looking armor pieces. No actual raid/high end gear should be available since, well, if you did the operation multiple times in a week you could get geared up in only a few runs (which I dont think is the goal ). It might be fun to play with puzzles every week!

3) A boss encounter similar to the first crescendo/boss event in Kaon or in CWG, where you hold out against waves/phases of adds instead of fighting one big boss (like an arena).

Thats all I can think of now. I dream big

There are some fantastic ideas in this thread. I just wanted to highlight some of my favorites.

gear drops that are unique and not part of boring sets but are actually more valuable than set gear

 

for example, they should have wiped DG drops from the NM EC and added in unique class AND spec specific items that had better stats, unique looks (maybe particle effects), AND some focus effect or bonus that would benefit that class spec, like maybe an item that increased force regen on sorc for example or something like that.

I like this idea. Take a page out of games like Borderlands - there isn't necessarily a BiS, there are several combinations that are equally great, but each lends itself to different playstyles.

However, it *would* be interesting and apt to see a piece of content where you free pairs of bosses, one of which is allied with you (I imagine it being one Jedi and one Sith in each pair, their allegiance swapping based upon which faction you are for the raid but each boss being functionally identical), that are in eternal stalemate and need the help of a specific role in order to win

 

you're coming to the aid of an amazingly powerful ur-Jedi or ur-Sith and finally ending the eons old battle they've been carrying on. It would be like breaking Captain America and Red Skull out of their imprisonment just to help Cappy beat the crap out of Red Skull in their final dramatic confrontation.

This would be absolutely amazing. ESPECIALLY if you could choose who you were going to help. Maybe I'm a dark-side Smuggler and I want to help the Sith for selfish reasons.

We don't spend all our time raiding with an ops group. More 4 man content of this caliber would be *very much* appreciated.

I agree with this. Sometimes I'm in the mood to run something interesting and productive, but I don't want to sit on Fleet for two hours trying to put a group together.

I want to walk into the next operation and be fighting a pitched battle against the Empire. When I walk into the same op on my Imp alts, I want to be fighting the Republic.

This sort of ties into Kitru's suggestion above in the sense that it really brings in that Star Wars feeling. I'd live to see something like this. Seriously, who is Kephess and why is he suddenly more ****** than the most dangerous Sith?

Give some incentive or ability to win this among your raid group. Whoever is the first to achieve their goal gets a piece of loot automatically, no roll on it. This should probably be a title, pet, or mount and not a piece of gear. That way displaying the title/mount/pet would mean something rather than you bought it or won a random roll.

I really like this idea. Give me something to show off my accomplishments, even if I didn't win the roll for that super rare tank mount.

How about making it so the mechanics of the boss change thereby it isn't just a memory check of click this, dodge this AOE, tank swap etc...

This is an awesome idea. I don't really know how it could be implemented, but if it's done right it would be amazing. Every fight would be a different and unique experience, and it'd keep my interest a lot longer.

Removal of Enrage Timers...Whilst I appreciate the desire for people to be able to play their class well, once you have achieved this ability it basically trivialises the entire game.

I don't think enrage timers should be removed across the board, but it would be neat to see SOME fights which don't have enrage timers. If a group is good enough to survive for 20 minutes, why not let them? What's the harm in allowing different methods to achieve victory? Heck, you could even grant titles for speed and/or endurance.

Also, where are my epic battles?!?! The films and books are full of epic, large scale battles where everyine contributes and sacrifices but heroes rise up to help win the day. That doesn't happen in game, anywhere, and it's a real shame.

I think you'd have to fix the latency issues that tend to crop up when there's too much movement; but if you can take care of that, this would be awesome.

Horizontal Gear Progression with a Purpose...Tiered progression invalidates old content and thus should *never* be done again.

I know this idea has been around a while, and it's implemented successfully in other games. Lets put it to use for us, since we have the opportunity to redesign how end-game works. As of right now, I don't run anything that doesn't grant me Black Hole comms...and that sucks, because that means I'm running the same 5 pieces of content over and over and over and over and over and...

Some ideas that I think would make things a lot more fun and help keep the content interesting through several runs:

Vehicles:

What? We have to hop on podracers to beat the bad guy to the fortified position? Wait, you mean we can steal/repair those abandoned/disabled Walkers and wreak havoc?

Factions:

This has been mentioned already, but I just wanted to emphasize how awesome this would be. The war is still raging, I'm one of the most powerful Jedi in generations...why aren't I helping? Give us a scenario where we are helping our side win this epic war of the ages.

Knock-down drag-out brawl:

I'm not saying every fight should be like this, but it would be cool to have a "boss" battle that's less about mechanics and more about just letting loose and surviving the chaos.

Rare drops:

Yes, there are some rare drops already...but keep them coming. When's the last time we got a cool new color crystal? How about something for the non-saber wielders? What about schematics? Hey, how about end-game vanity schematics? Biochem can make some new pet, Cybertech can make a new mount, Artifice get a new color crystal, Synth/Armor/Weapon get some adaptive armor schematics.

Easter Eggs:

I'm not talking just a slightly hidden chest, but something that gives some reward for exploring or figuring out some non-boss puzzle. Maybe if you do a full clear and explore the entire map, it gives your party some unique buff.

Random trash mobs:

I definitely wouldn't want this everywhere, but it might be cool if some of the trash spawns were more random and thus less predictable. It would add a slight element of surprise to the otherwise tedious grind of dealing with trash mobs.

Server-wide LFG chat channel:

I've got better things to do than sit on fleet repeating "LFG for any HM op" for hours. Let me go out and have some fun while at the same time waiting to put a group together.

Achievement buffs:

How about some special buff as an achievement award? I can't think of any specific examples other than Nightmare Pilgrim, but I think it'd be a neat idea. It could be an buff for an achievement within a single run, or an achievement of clearing 10 times, for example.

Large scale warfare:

You'd have to address the latency problems, but how awesome would it be to wade into some epic scale battle, single out the champion that's wrecking your forces and take him down? All while dealing with the various baddies around you.

Different ways to obtain the same gear:

Why not have two ops, each with a chance to drop the same gear? If these two new ops are designed to be the same difficulty, it allows for multiple paths to the same gear objectives.

Speeders and Medic Stations:

Just adding my voice to the mob that says we need better speeder dropoffs and respawn points inside the instance.

AVOID mechanics that are annoying b/c of non-gameplay reasons, ie:

1) SOA - the pylons need a shadow or something. It's just annoying to not be able to tell when I'm under the stupid thing. And if I don't zoom my camera out completely, there's no way for me to even see the pylon.

2) TFB Kephess - in the first phase where he's connected to a specific pillar, you'll never see that lightning stream if you don't have your camera zoomed out. Why should camera preference affect gameplay?

1) SOA - the pylons need a shadow or something. It's just annoying to not be able to tell when I'm under the stupid thing. And if I don't zoom my camera out completely, there's no way for me to even see the pylon.

Pylons don't explicitly need a Shadow. If you've learned how to place yourself, you can do it without every getting touched by the pylon. Of course, I agree that it's friggin' *annoying* finding the right spot to pull Soa so that he gets hit while you don't, especially when you're just learning, but I see that as less of a problem with the camera zooming and more of a problem with there not being a useful ground effect: I would have no problem with the pylons if they fired a beam downwards when the spin is speeding up and it's preparing to drop with a visible ground effect to show the area where it's gonna slam into the ground (I imagine something like the T&Z Baradium Hurl meets the Twin Tanks skybeam visual effect).

Of course, it's old content now, so it's not really a big deal.

2) TFB Kephess - in the first phase where he's connected to a specific pillar, you'll never see that lightning stream if you don't have your camera zoomed out. Why should camera preference affect gameplay?

This is only a real consideration if you're in melee. A ranged DPS or a healer can easily call out the proper pylon. Of course, it would be nice if the effect was closer to ground level, but it's not exactly *required*.

There was a thread many months ago very similar to this one - it has a lot of good discussion, although some of it is out of date:

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=469773

There was a thread many months ago very similar to this one - it has a lot of good discussion, although some of it is out of date.

Most of the stuff discussed there references things that aren't explicitly tied to Operations design: improving the UI, removing CDs on cleanses, etc. The only real thing mentioned explicitly concerning Operations design is the health based phase transition comment, which BW seems to have taken to heart looking at TfB.

Bear with me on this one guys, it's a bit different. A live content raid, similar to how bioware has had it's live content events.

Here's an excellent scenario, (as Imperial side faction) The Imperial Fleet has been seized by the dread guards, and in emergency protocol the empire has relocated everything to a nearby much less elegant space station. The fleet will literally be unaccessible, UNTIL a raid group has downed a series of boss encounters to regain control of fleet. The guild that accomplishes this is announced server wide with all toon names currently in raid and fleet is able to be used again. They all receive a unique title and mount, that no one can then ever get again. At that point, the entire server will have access to fleet again and the operation is then accessible as a "legacy" raid in a holosimulator for everyone that drops loot rewards just like the original raid. Honestly, this would breed some SERIOUS server competition and be honestly the funnest thing I could imagine for a raid. Trust me, I would want my factions fleet back!

Personally I would love an operation where storytelling is the focus. Outside the operation there is a questing zone introducing the major players, the conflicts and themes, while leaving some mysteries. Maybe even a couple flashpoints that continue the story. Inside the operation the encounters are all tied to the story and a quest line guides you through. The quests doesn't simply have to be "kill X boss" but maybe collecting intelligence from a computer and using it to defeat a future encounter or even modify the encounter based on how successful you were at slicing the computer. E.g. There is a tech deleting/scuttling the computer during the encounter. If you are very successful you learn how to disable an impenetrable security system that leads to an extra boss (or gives you extra loot on the next boss) (or you learn some neat lore). Or something - I'm not really an expert on these things. I like the ideas in this thread like "assaulting a space station/military base".

This would be sort of like having Taris, Kaon, Lost Island, and a rak ghoul operation released at the same time - only with a bit more cohesive structure between them.

While I support making the mechanics more intense so that they can't just be laughed through (HM/NiM EC, HM TfB do a good job of this, imo), the removal of enrage timers is *really* not something that should happen. Enrage timers exist to require a minimum level of DPS. Without them, you could bring in *any* DPS (or none at all, honestly) and still finish the content.

 

I have to wonder what tier of ops content you do if you think that the mechanics aren't important and that only DPS/HPS matter. Sure, it's that way on SM because that's entry content where the devs have explicitly stated they want everyone to be able to see (re: it has to be feasibly puggable). On HM/NiM, most of those mechanics that can just be laughed at have to actually be dealt with properly.

Atm, we've got TFB HM on farm and we've done T&Z NiM, so im doing fairly high level stuff.

In terms of boss fights where the mechanics are *significant*, by which i mean both hard to figure out and hard to execute, there are very few. I would say just EC Kephess, TFB Operator and TFB Kephess. The rest, the mechanics are fairly straight forwards.

Dear. Jeebus. No. One of the *worst* things about classic Vanilla WoW was having to have a different set of gear for *every single raid*. For MC and BWL, you *had* to have fire resist gear. For AQ40 and parts of Naxx, you *had* to have nature resist gear. For the other parts of Naxx, you *had* to have frost resist gear. It was bad for healers and DPS, but it was *especially* bad for tanks, who often had to devote half or more of their bag slots *specifically* to all of the different gear they needed for different fights.

 

Horizontal gearing should be about multiple optimal methods of stat allocation. It should *not* be about having to carry around 3 full sets of gear because certain fights demand it. [/Quote]

 

Think we're basically talking about the same thing. The ultimate goal of horizontal scaling is to offer the player as much choice as possible with the way they build their character. At the moment for pve endgame, there is basically 1, maybe 2 specs that are "optimal" and 1 setup for gear for each spec. Everything else is demonstrably worse. That is boring, but that is the way the classes, and more specifically the endgame is designed.

 

Horizontal gear scaling, combined with more mechanic-heavy fights should aim to open up the game to more choices for building your character. I dont want to force people to carry multiple sets of gear, hell, I already carry just over 3 full sets of gear on my shadow! But I do want people to have options. I want people to be able to optimise for different raids / bosses if they choose.

 

I guess I was just spoiled in LOTRO. That had horizontal gear scaling with multiple different options, plus the rare unique drops. For most people, 90% of the time you'd wear your "BiS" gear for maximum DPS/Healing/Mitigation, however for progression raiding we'd always tweak our gear to make it easiest to get through. For example, the shadow boss in Ost Dunhoth was a real ***** to heal through and in my guild one of our healers was quite weak. So, for that boss only we'd all put on our shadow mitigation gear, pop shadow mit buffs and whilst our DPS was lower, it shifted the pressure from the healer who couldn't keep up, to the DPS so that we could clear the boss. Basically, we had options beyond just "play better".

 

There are already rare loot drops in most of the content that encourages people to keep doing it: pets, mounts, companion skins, and unique shells. I *really* don't want to see all of the screwery that would occur with rare drops that were actually tied to specific pieces of statted equipment: you would see *everything* become master loot to prevent randoms from stealing the potential rare drop from guildies (or the ops leader if the ops leader needs/wants it). There are already sufficient rare loot incentives to run content; such rare drops don't need to be made even more competitive by making them required for optimization.

 

We don't have anything to incentivise doing old content beyond the GF daily. Sure, there are mounts etc, but thats all fluff, its not useful!

 

Rare drops wouldn't be required, they'd just be nice to have. They'd be an incentive to farm all content, not just focus on a small bit of the endgame. You can have rare drops without them being required or even BiS.

We don't have anything to incentivise doing old content beyond the GF daily. Sure, there are mounts etc, but thats all fluff, its not useful!

 

Rare drops wouldn't be required, they'd just be nice to have. They'd be an incentive to farm all content, not just focus on a small bit of the endgame. You can have rare drops without them being required or even BiS.

In the first part, you're asking that rare drops be made useful so that people will feel some compulsion to farm it, and, in the second, you're saying that they shouldn't be required or BiS even though, unless the gear actually *is* BiS, you're never going to see people farm it or care about it all that much (excepting it being several tiers of better quality than what the normal drops are, such that it's only *slightly* worse than the actual BiS).

You're essentially contradicting yourself here. You're also ignoring the fact that some people actually *do* farm said outdated content for the "useless" fluff benefits. I farmed the living *bejeesus* out of Lost Island to get my Orosquab and Midnight Rakling. I did the same for SM KP and EV until I got my Tirsa Elite (it only took a year of doing it virtually every week to get it on my main...). People farm leveling FPs to get specific shells. Just because it's not mechanically "useful" doesn't mean it's not desired. If anything, it would probably piss off *all kinds* of people that optimize if the only way to get (insert useful stat increase here) was to farm the hell out of a piece of old content.

Rare drops with tweaked stats don't make people farm old content when the stats on it are no longer worthwhile (which is what you're pretty much asking for; if the rare drop isn't BiS for a couple tiers above it, then it's not gonna be farmed after that content is over). What makes people farm content that *doesn't* lead to BiS gear is the intangible stuff: mounts, pets, interesting models, etc; stuff that remains relevant when the stats no longer are.

In the first part, you're asking that rare drops be made useful so that people will feel some compulsion to farm it, and, in the second, you're saying that they shouldn't be required or BiS even though, unless the gear actually *is* BiS, you're never going to see people farm it or care about it all that much (excepting it being several tiers of better quality than what the normal drops are, such that it's only *slightly* worse than the actual BiS).

Take this example:

LI HM Rare Drop: Implant of Power - 20 Endurance, 280 Power

Kaon HM Rare Drop: Implant of Devastation - 20 Endurance, 200 Crit, 80 Surge

False Emp HM Rare Drop: Implant of Willpower - 20 Endurance, 280 Willpower

D7 HM Rare Drop: Implant of Surviving - 100 Endurance, -5% Inc Damage, 100 Power

Each of these implants *could* be best in slot, depending on the rest of your gear. If you go for the LI implant, it means you need to get your crit elsewhere. Go for the survivability implant and you'll need damage from elsewhere. The point is, each one is useful, they are comparable incomparables. Each one offers a boost to one area of stats at the expense of another. Its all about choice

Tbh, I don't expect it to ever get implemented as it is extremely hard to balance out, but I've seen it done before in LOTRO and LOTRO's itemisation (with the exception of radience) has always been miles better than in TOR imo.

LOTRO's itemisation (with the exception of radience) has always been miles better than in TOR imo.

I actually think TOR has done an amazing job with its itemization, barring the some of the more recent problems (DR curve screwery primarily, insofar as progressing to certain points drastically limits the effectiveness of the various stats, especially for healers and DPS with crit/surge compared to power). The only reason it seems bad is because everything is so customizable it's relatively simple to just find the best loadout and stick with it rather than just having static gear with given stats and very little actual variability within it. Essentially, it's the ability to customize that most people really have a problem with from a design standpoint, rather than an actual problem with how gear is itemized (since you can have whatever you want rather than having to choose between 2-3 items with given itemization for each slot). It's just one of those wonderful things about human psychology: we're happier when we're given fewer options because there is less perceived opportunity cost even if you actually chose the best option.