The current state of the end game in SWTOR is slightly concerning to me. From the moment I put my hands in the Beta I knew that this would be the game I would be playing for a long, long time. When the game pre-lunched I was amazed by the leveling and by how much fun leveling as a healer was. Everything on my way to level 50 was pure fun and challenging, which is way more than it can be said of most MMOs.

 

Within 2 weeks I reached level 50, and as soon as my guild was ready we started doing Operations. Our 1st week on The Eternity Vault was fun. On the 1st day we got to Soa, but it was so bugged we only managed to kill it the week after.

Soa is by far the most fun fight in the game. It's also the most bugged.

 

I can't remember a single fight in any other MMO with mechanics similar to Soa's. Usually the arena where you find the boss is the same where you kill it, with few to no changes at all during the encounter. Soa has 3 arenas and 2 transition phases. Usually on other MMOs the fight get's more complex by adding adds. This was a breath of fresh air to me.

 

While the fight is refreshing, it's not really hard to beat. Not in the sense it takes a really well thought strategy and execution. What makes the Soa encounter hard to beat is the enormous amount of bugs in it.

 

I understand this has been reported to exhaustion, but I feel it must be said again. The Fight is amazingly fun, but it's bugged. Hard modes are a easy as taking taking candy from a baby, and though I haven´t done Nightmare modes yet, I don´t think it will change that much.

Hard Modes in my opinion should add more mechanics to the fight, and nightmare modes should had even more mechanics and more damage/HP.

 

Granted KP and TEV are the 1st tier of operations, and because of that we should look at them as entry level operation, in the same way as we look nowadays to Molten Core back in vanilla WoW.

 

I just hope that BioWare ups heir game in the future and gives us something with less bugs and more challenging. Something like Soa meets the Lich King.

 

Just my humble opinion.

We just did 'the infernal' the other night for new members... and I don't know what bugs you are talking about? (We did it on 16man). Soa was bugged out the *** earlier in release, but they patched it completely. I know right now there is an issue with the threat drop but that didn't affect us at all. Hell, we didn't realize it was bugged until after killed him.

Do people read patch notes or test realm patch notes before complaining about bugs?

 

Didn't think so. You should try it some time. No point in complaining about things that are already fixed, or fixed on the test realm.

Do people read patch notes or test realm patch notes before complaining about bugs?

 

Didn't think so. You should try it some time. No point in complaining about things that are already fixed, or fixed on the test realm.

 

SOA's been "fixed" like 5 times now

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=2897337#edit2897337 !

Cool, so they're fixing a bug that was caused by a previous patch that attempted to "fix" Soa. Unfortunately there are still a bunch of other bugs still floating around such as:

 

* Platforms randomly missing in P2, potentially causing an unavoidable wipe when you transition from P2 to P3 depending on which ones are missing.

 

* Soa not losing his stacking buff as you move downwards while killing the pylons, causing him to AoE the group down at the start of P2 or P3.

 

* Soa himself randomly despawning, which still occurs even after their horrible bandaid fix that also caused him to randomly drop aggro

 

The fight itself isn't even hard - it's just frustrating that this stuff is still bugged 2+ months into the game. I would honestly be 100% fine with the Soa fight even with the threat drop if it was completely bugless - it wasn't hard regardless, you just let him float until one of the spinning pyramids spawned then you taunted and dragged him under it.

 

It's obvious there's no internal testing (or they're highly incompetent if there are) for endgame content. The best thing Bioware can do right now is to set up PTR character copies and/or premades ASAP so their playerbase can test it for them.

Edited February 17, 2012 by Exertim

My theory and my guild's theory is that they rushed this game out before the Holiday deadline. Thus there were major flaws in EV and KP only had 1 boss released at the time.

 

Then, they went back and had time to really get KP polished so that it's a lot less bug-ridden then Soa.

 

Every time the prioritize fixes they try and fix some issues on Soa, but they still have to do deal with lvl 1 - 50 content, PvP, and new content coming out.

 

I think part of the reasoning is that it's "doable" and hopefully when new content comes out people will be doing that instead... letting EV sort of fall off the radar for how bug-ridden it is.

 

/endtheory

 

My problem with this theory is that it means that the next operation will be just as easy since people will then be able to skip EV and the loot will be about the same.

 

I want harder content that requires EV/KP to be stepping stones. I want real raiding content where you feel great about downing a boss that takes you to raid nights to learn how to execute. I want operations completed after a few months of attempts, like a boss/week or a boss every 2 weeks.

 

If they don't fix Soa, how are people going to get the gear needed to do this next tier of raiding... if this isn't a "next tier of raiding"... then it's going to suck big time.

I want harder content that requires EV/KP to be stepping stones. I want real raiding content where you feel great about downing a boss that takes you to raid nights to learn how to execute. I want operations completed after a few months of attempts, like a boss/week or a boss every 2 weeks.

 

 

I see what you're saying.. but they can never make it that way. Hard enough to where it takes 3-4 days to figure out and down a boss. Instances reset once a week. You shouldn't be able to clear a whole Op in 1 week. 5 bosses should take at least 3-4 weeks IMO. Although I am used to REAL raiding and boss encounters.

 

The resets really screw it. They have to make it easy or no one but extreme elitists will ever see the last boss of an instance.

 

 

(Btw, I totally agree with you)

I see what you're saying.. but they can never make it that way. Hard enough to where it takes 3-4 days to figure out and down a boss. Instances reset once a week. You shouldn't be able to clear a whole Op in 1 week. 5 bosses should take at least 3-4 weeks IMO. Although I am used to REAL raiding and boss encounters.

 

The resets really screw it. They have to make it easy or no one but extreme elitists will ever see the last boss of an instance.

 

 

(Btw, I totally agree with you)

 

They can do the gradual nerf of operations like WoW and Rift did so that guilds that were having problems can eventually clear it.

 

If they don't fix Soa, how are people going to get the gear needed to do this next tier of raiding... if this isn't a "next tier of raiding"... then it's going to suck big time.

 

If in fact it comes to be that the next raid is still teir 1 then yea there goes my sub

Do people read patch notes or test realm patch notes before complaining about bugs?

 

Didn't think so. You should try it some time. No point in complaining about things that are already fixed, or fixed on the test realm.

 

I'll be going throw the patch notes and I'll tell you how many times Soa got fixed before a new bug appeared.

Oh and where in my post am I complaining? I'm saying it's a awesome fight like none I've ever seen in a MMO that unfortunately it's bugged till kingdom come. If anything I'm asking for a bug fix that doesn't bring new bugs.

 

 

We just did 'the infernal' the other night for new members... and I don't know what bugs you are talking about? (We did it on 16man). Soa was bugged out the *** earlier in release, but they patched it completely. I know right now there is an issue with the threat drop but that didn't affect us at all. Hell, we didn't realize it was bugged until after killed him.

Besides the drop in agro, which to be honest is easy to work around (we have our tank taunt on CD) there was the platforms missing on transitions, the flying pylons hitting him and not collapsing the shield, the void zones on p1 invisible to some people.

 

My post is not only about bugs, if anything that's just a footnote, my post is about the difficulty on hard and nightmare mode. I talk about bugs in 2 sentences.

I've seen a lot of people complaining about missing platforms, or invisible void zones...maybe we've just been lucky, but we haven't encountered those problems yet.. (betting that next week, because I made this post - we will have missing platforms )

 

The aggro wipe on mind trap cast was a surprise when we hit him last week, that's something you can rebound from (as stated by the OP).

 

I really hope the next op, or ops after this one require some sort of "attunement) - like when you had to do SSC, TK and Hyjal to get into BT in WoW.

Edited February 17, 2012 by scarfino

Attunements are great if you have a group of 8 or 16 people with the exact same gaming schedule, all of whom have been playing together for a good length of time. They are terrible in every other respect.

Attunements are great if you have a group of 8 or 16 people with the exact same gaming schedule, all of whom have been playing together for a good length of time. They are terrible in every other respect.

 

Um. No. Unless we are thinking Attunement means 2 different things.

 

 

You need to kill X to get the key to unlock Y. Once you kill Y you get a scroll to unlock Z.

 

X, Y, and Z being 3 tiers of raiding. Generic attunement and true "progression"

 

 

This is a stretch.. but EverQuest: Planes of Power is the best and (my personal) favorite "progression" type. You need to acquire a key to fight the boss, you need to kill the boss of a zone to unlock the next tier. 3 zones per tier.

Edited February 17, 2012 by Alchropie

They can do the gradual nerf of operations like WoW and Rift did so that guilds that were having problems can eventually clear it.

 

NO, this is not how to reward people. reward people that are willing to take the time and effort not the horible method that blizz is using.

NO, this is not how to reward people. reward people that are willing to take the time and effort not the horible method that blizz is using.

 

^^this

They need to add more mechanics to the HM/NMM fight for it to even come close to presenting even the slightest challenge.They need to add a detramental or curse that randomly gets put on an ops member throughout the fight, that needs to be cured within 'x' amount of seconds or it wipes the raid.

 

Mabey add to that curse another mechanic inwich the cursed ops member can't cast any abilitys until the curse is cured or it wipes the raid.Added to that, all the while..mabey the cursed ops member also has to run and click a clicky before the curse gets cured or its a wipe.

 

Plus they need to add some elite or champion adds that need to be killed quickly..or its a wipe.. etc etc. Encounters like these set the real fun challenging mmos like the EQ series (1&2) apart from the standard cookie cutter WoWish mmos of recent.I still don't know why wow was so popular.besides that it was easy mode (yes even vanilla) and you could run it on your 300$ dell...

 

where are the 'cure' / 'cleanse' mechanics at in swtor?!?! I want my healers to sweat!

Edited February 18, 2012 by XaviourEQ

What BW needs to do is to distinguish normal/hard/nightmare in a meaningful way. And that requires alot of thought and fine tuning wich they perhaps are not used to.

 

(So far only Blizzard is able to work with their internal data and make meaningful decisions along the lines of add 2% or reduce by 2%)

 

People's DPS in ops can vary by x10 and nobody will notice. All bw did is increased HP/Damage by some number pulled out of sarlakk pit disconnected from reality.

 

 

real fun challenging mmos like the EQ series (1&2) apart from the standard cookie cutter WoWish mmos of recent

 

Look who's mad. Hahahaha god it never gets old

Edited February 18, 2012 by Oneiros_IV

 

Look who's mad. Hahahaha god it never gets old

 

You're right.Look what WoW did to the MMO market... WoW was/is cookie cutter garbage that catters to ages 4+.There will never be another truely outstanding MMO thanks to WoW.Thanks blizzard... thanks for the bright idea of instanced pvp.It's pretty awsome.LMO is the new term. Linear multiplayer online.lets sit and que for instanced pvp allday so the open world is dead... also lets make super faceroll content so that its all fair... please.Yea, WoW is cream of the crop right? lmao..just..just LOL!!

 

ps: even the next eq is gonna be dumbed down.Atleast SOE will be able to compete in marketing next go round... little timmy will be able to hop right on and faceroll content... thanks blizzard for making such an outstanding game!! /sarcasm off </3

Edited February 18, 2012 by XaviourEQ

Attunements can be fun the 1st time you have to do them, but down the line when you have a steady group of raiders and for some reason you need to recruit, attunements will cut the recruitment base too thin. Imagine if by the end of an x-pack there were 4 tiers of ops, finding a player attuned would mean the ops would have to be really easy so that everyone was attuned or we wouldn't have that many people ready to do it.

 

They need to add more mechanics to the HM/NMM fight for it to even come close to presenting even the slightest challenge.They need to add a detramental or curse that randomly gets put on an ops member throughout the fight, that needs to be cured within 'x' amount of seconds or it wipes the raid.

 

Mabey add to that curse another mechanic inwich the cursed ops member can't cast any abilitys until the curse is cured or it wipes the raid.Added to that, all the while..mabey the cursed ops member also has to run and click a clicky before the curse gets cured or its a wipe.

 

This mostly. Adding difficulty to a fight is not just adding more damage/XP, most of the times that's just adding a gear check. Adding complexity will increase the challenge, we're gamer exactly for the challenge!