speeders that actually take you to a boss, rather than to a point after the previous one with a long run back to the next one.

 

A "medic station" to rez inside of the instances (at the start?).

Huge yes to this! Less time wasted means more time actually playing the game for my guild

Both of these were mentioned, but I'll add my vote/comments to them.

1) The Hub-Spoke raid with tied in Flashpoints. IE, A BIG Raid. Where you can 'finish' one part, move on to the next.

(And I hate using this since it's quoting another game, but Uldaar for example).

2) "Alternate Gear". Why is the Top PVE gear only the set gear? Make the mobs 'useful' in ops, and have a gear alternates that drop as semi rare randoms from them.

3) EPIC Loot items. Same idea as above, but entire quest lines to get them. And I'm not talking easy. These should be the BIS slot that anyone can get, but they need drops from OPS, Flashpoints, and maybe even PVP to get them. And not even 1 OP run, but lets say 20 runs just to get that one mat.

[*] New Flashpoints. I may not be a "take vacation time to raid 18 hours a day" progression raider, but I'm fairly serious and in a fairly serious group. Despite this fact, I don't want to see *just* 8/16 man raids going forward. I still believe that LI HM is some of the best content in the game. The fact that even radically over-geared groups are under serious threat of wiping *repeatedly* on its bosses is a testament to how well-designed the mechanics are. The rewards are disproportionate, but who cares? We don't spend all our time raiding with an ops group. More 4 man content of this caliber would be *very much* appreciated. If I could get a flashpoint at the challenge level of LI HM but tuned for augmented Dread Guard rather than Tionese gear, I would be *begging* Bioware to take my Cartel Coins.

[*] Less "Side Show" Story Themes. With the launch of Makeb, I have very little hope for this one. Did you know that the Dread Guard were the first ops bosses to use a lightsaber? (I don't count the Infernal Council as a real boss) So much for Star Wars… 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. Same bosses, same mechanics, just reskin everything. Red lightsabers instead of blue/green.

Love these two

Two ideas for bosses:

1) Just a flat out a massive army attacking. With tanks having to blow their AOE taunts, this would get pretty hairy. Kind of like the pull between Operator and Kephess, but more adds coming in constant waves.

2) A team up encounter where your party of 8 or 16 has to team up (maybe even go down separate paths) to beat a set of enemies. Could even be like a mini Council/Dreadguard fight, but teams of two. Should be different ways of beating each boss based on the two roles that pair up. Another way to do this would be more like a council but where the enemies change abilities in the middle of the fight causing all players to have to figure out who to attack next and how to switch.

But in general I'd like to see more fights against people with lightsabers, Bounty Hunters or humanoid aliens. Jarg/Sorno, Dreadguards really stand out as classic Star Wars fights.

I like the idea of team up. I thought Bioware could of made the TfB Operation be a mixed team of pubs and empire to make the players on either side start getting to know each other and to add variety.

As you are going against a common enemy there is no reason why (even in the midst of war) can two enemies not form up to fight a bigger enemy. Maybe make this a group finder Op where 4 imps and 4 pubs have to queue up. Obviously having voice chat in the game would make this smoother but I still think they missed an opportunity here.

speeders that actually take you to a boss, rather than to a point after the previous one with a long run back to the next one.

 

A "medic station" to rez inside of the instances (at the start?).

Huge yes to this! Less time wasted means more time actually playing the game for my guild

Huge yes to this! Less time wasted means more time actually playing the game for my guild

And as a follow on to this, if you must run back to the boss for whatever design reason/decision... Can we at least make the entire instance count as an "outdoor" location so I'm not constantly mounting, getting kicked off my speeder (e.g., "speeder aren't allowed here"), remounting on the way to the boss?

The long run backs are made that much more annoying by the seemingly arbitrary restrictions on where in the raid personal speeders can be used.

For example, TfB boss 1. You initially mount your speeder, get kicked off when you go into the building that has[had] 2 spawns in it, then remount, go 250m, get kicked off, run the rest of the way to boss.

What I would like to see is an Op that has several Flashpoints leading up to it, in one cohesive story.

The concept?

A unified story where you have several (4 or 5) flashpoints that are going to be used to strictly gear towards the OP. To play the OP, you need to at least clear all the flashpoints, which will be available in Hard or Nightmare only.

The catch to the mechanic is this - In this particular series, you not only have your group, but every group member is allowed to have a companion out. This means full on flashpoints and an OP balanced for a full group plus companion play, and it also means gearing your comps as well. It will allow a barrage of "Heroic Moment" uses and should allow the gameplay to be absolutely crazy fun.

And as for the final destination OP - handle it same way with comps, but Shadow of the Colossus style - no trash, just boss battle after boss battle, each getting harder and more challenging.

Pair that with an exciting story, and you should have something that is incredibly entertaining. You can have new daily-weekly-monthly missions too in order to help gear based on your progress.

1. More FPs of Lost Island difficulty. It is nice to be actually challenged in a FP occasionally.

2. A way to save Ops progress -- we have some 'alt character' ops groups in our guild that only run once a week, and being able to save progress from week to week would be much appreciated.

-Op with 6+ bosses

-A puzzle boss that is dynamic EVERY time you tackle it. In EV people used solvers to do it, in KP people had a set strat for Fabricator, and in EC people almost always went down the sides. In TFB, it feels more like a puzzle for the first few times you do it, but as you do it more and more there is a strategy that does NOT CHANGE. A puzzle boss should have DYNAMIC mechanics that change every time that players tackle it. It would make it a true puzzle.

-Less fights that are reliant on specific classes (NiM Kephess requires good AoE)

-More bosses that are gigantic and otherworldly. In terms of looks, this game needs more epic bosses like Gharj, Soa, TFB, Annihilation Droid XRR-3, and Bonethrasher. In many of the bosses such as J+S and the 2nd part of Vorgath you are fighting tiny enemies. Nothing is wrong, however, with the more star wars themed bossfights such as Dread Guard.

an OP were you had to fight the opposing faction.

Imagine you enter tomb of badaboom. The other faction got there first and have dug in. You need to take their position. Some massive gauntlet style thing with loads of inc soldiers of opposite faction and maybe even incoming paratroopers if you miss certain timers. When you take the hill or whatever the possition would be you got a chest.

Second encounter could be the other faction forward comand post. bit of scouts and guards trash leading up and in the comandpost would be a mix of the other faction. Generals and overseers or whatever. Think mandalorian raiders type fight.(think that´s the one) They guard the entrence to the tomb.

Next fight would be a puzzle fight to open the tomb. and you could then add a few bosses in the tomb itself.

I know it´s not fighting any of the named faction leaders, but that would be asking to much i guess. Making generic fights with soldier opposition shouldn´t be that hard. just a namechange from republic soldier to imperial soldier and a change of armor. The fight itself would be the same. Give them a mix of imp and rep abilyties or some unique abilyties for this OP only. That´s not too important.

when the new "super secret" space project is completed it would be fun to have it incorporated into the ops. For example a big (optional) space battle in the beginning were the entire operations group is fighting to board a ship/ space station.

As long as it is Optional and doesn't give anything for it I have no issues. If it drops loot or something, forcing people to do space missions in an Operation would be boggus, especially for those who do not really like space combat in an MMO.

Big ops with lots of bosses (Naxx or Ulduar are good examples).

I also really like the idea of space battles in ops. We're in Star Wars for goodness sake, shouldn't we be doing something other than hand-to-hand fighting in corridors?

I like the one-on-one fight of Infernal Council, although it does end up being fairly easy. Something more challenging would be good.

Dynamic puzzles. Something that you have to solve differently each time and takes each person solving their own.

Also, vehicles. Honest to pete, I want a AT-AT walker battle.

An actual clone fight.

In Directive 7 we fight poorly made clones that don't look ANYTHING like us.

I want a fight like the on the Sith Warrior gets on Tatooine.

Similar to the Infernal Council in EV, it would be 1vs1.

Moreover, they would match our AC - but would have access to the entire skill tree. Thus a healer sorc would have an opponent who could self-heal and use Force Lightning with no Cooldown. This would be a FANTASTIC fight. Since they would have all your abilities, more health and equivalent hps/dps there'd only be one way to win. SKILL.

For a Hub style Op with 6-7+ bosses., I rather we do not get an "option" to skip a boss OR for the bosses we get to be random e.g. Need to defeat 7 bosses from a pool of possible 10 bosses as this would then create too much randomness to the achievement as inevitably there will be some which are easier than others.

What could be a solution are that the bosses are not arrange sequentially but as a selection where the group can decide which boss to tackle first as this would remove some Luck/randomness and those less equip/prepare can also attempt the first couple of bosses with a clear aim to progress/achieve while the "raiders" can sink their teeth into something tougher as well.

Also, we're a year in maybe its time for a legendary or a new set bonus(es) gear.

I would like to see a boss fight with your group is in 2 ships with 3 jobs during the fight

pilot(tank) in charge of keeping damage lower

gunners(dps) kill stuff

engineers(healer) keeping the ship together

i think this type of fight would be a good starting point on a operation like assault on a capital ship maybe the dread masters flagship could then use a format with multiple levels that would have to be cleared in any order in order to get to the bridge and the final encounter you could put levels like security engineering armory could even do a timed event to prevent an attack and have the floor be set around this

What could be a solution are that the bosses are not arrange sequentially but as a selection where the group can decide which boss to tackle first as this would remove some Luck/randomness and those less equip/prepare can also attempt the first couple of bosses with a clear aim to progress/achieve while the "raiders" can sink their teeth into something tougher as well.

You could have a set up where you have to kill all the first tier bosses in order to unlock the big main boss.

Three items I would suggest to spice up OPS:

• Four man Mini-OPS - L2/L3 like HM LI with BETTER LOOT being dropped. I'm thinking Rakata Geared+ and you can take four good players into and walk out with say the final boss drops DREAD GLOVES or Hazmat Implant every time. (Lock it to ONCE per week ability to run this in order to prevent farming). I'd suggest something harder than the current Heroic 4 in Section X - Expanded to include another 2-3 bosses.
  
• Ability to "OPT OUT" of resetting certain weekly OPS progress. IE: The group could "SAVE" the progress longer than a week and continue at the same point in time as stopped. Only way to do this would be the reset only happens when you pickup a quest maybe at the terminal. This helps those guilds trying to down all the content to finish all the content (But lose out on repeating the first few bosses each week). Using the same approach today that you have to acknowledge the group is further along... (you know..).
  
• Speeder Stations! For example: Have an console in front of Kephes doors that once clicked takes the speeder to that location. (Add a nasty scanning droid to prevent a steathy from sneaking all the way to the item and skipping content. Option B would be to drop KEYS on trash to unlock that console and not have to clear trash again if you are required to RESET the phase - something that is really messed up when the game is glitched and required to do.)
  

I want to add my vote for the puzzle ideas: It would be nice to have a puzzle, where the solution is different every time. On top of my head I have the idea of some kind of maze, which looks different every time. (Of course one has to make it so that there always is a way throught;)) Some players would have to enter the maze and explore it step by step, while one or two players would have to stay outside and use some controls to transform certain parts of it to open up the way. (similar to the minefield in EC but you need the players inside to explore the area so the players outside the maze can see where they can open a way.)

Another thing I would like to see are situations where the group has to split up into smaller groups that have to complete a certain part of the OP on their own (loot will be found at the point where the meet again), while the successes of each group ease the encounters of the other groups. Again an example: Some players have to stay behind and slow down some enemy that cannot be defeated in the ordinary way (this would probably turn out to be a Tank+Heal duo), while the rest has to go ahead and activate some machine/weapon that will weaken/destroy the otherwise invincible enemy.

This goes into a similar direction as the 1vs1 encounters mentioned already (which I would like to see as well), but also smaller groups that complete smaller tasks of a bigger fight can feel very epic.

Please note that the examples above are far from completely thought through, but they demonstrate the direction I would like to see.

The trash in TFB is perfect imo keep it that way.

I would love to see more bosses in an ops as asked before, but one little change. The people can choose the order of killing the bosses in their own order. Except for the first and the last boss.

I posted this on another thread a while ago and I guess this is the right place for it:

I would love to see a boss encounter similar to that of Kaon Under Siege turret boss.

Basic idea would be the same (no turrets), mechanics following:

1. You are defending a hill top, or a camp of republic/imperial fighters.

2. Location is under attack by random npcs, from huge waves of weak enemies to strong ones.

3. NPCs waves would be random, so you wouldn't know what comes next.

4. Instead of players sitting on turrets, you'd defend npcs sitting on those, for an example.

5. Attacks could come from any direction, sometimes from two directions at once (still random).

Idea behind this is to request team to play together with high sense of awarness and to add surprise to the encounter. The fight could be extremely easy or really hard (RNG), but rarely the same. This would make it something to look forward to. Be the waves of enemies spices with minibosses, walkers or sith, tanks or aircarriers.

Make it feel like a brutal war!

Yours, Rus/Mra

A "hub and spoke" raid of 6-10 bosses.. Minimal but challenging trash leading to 2-4 bossfights pr. "spoke".

 

Crafting encounters.

 

More fights requiring awareness and class abilities instead of hard dps checks and simple tank swaps.

why not just say i want Naxx?

but anyway i agree, maybe a operation that involves assaulting a fleet station which is alrdy round they just need to adjust it slightly.

Edit: upon thinking a bit about it i feel i should put a bit more down.

so basically the operation is centred around attacking a fleet station. upon docking you get trash etc and a boss, once he down you have access to the central area of the fleet, you come up in the middle somewhere around where the entrance to the lounge is or something, from there you have 4 different ways to go for 4 different bosses.

all 4 bosses must go down before you can advance.

each section of the fleet has its own boss, ie, a boss at the pve section, crew skill, GTN, and PvP area.

ive only had 1 idea for one of these bosses so far and that would be the PvP one, make it a type of pvp fight, various classes and specs of enemy say 8 of em and you have to take em down, but not like in EV where its 1 on 1, must be 8 V's 8.

anyway, once these 4 are down you can access the elevator for the fleet lounge, maybe another boss in here, then you head to the Bridge for the last boss and capture of the fleet station.

1) Removal of Enrage Timers / Improved Mechanics

Virtually all bosses in this game boil down to tank, spank and avoid the AoE. We're getting more tank swop mechanics and a few more bosses with adds but essentially the mechanics of bosses in this game are extremely easy, the hard part is playing your class well enough to heal through the damage and beat the 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 would rather ditch this requirement and increase the mechanical difficulty of bosses so that even if you have the best DPS on the server, you can still die if you fail to avoid an attack or dont move at the right time etc. I would hope this would open up different class combinations for more bosses, increase the accessibility of bosses whilst making the learning curve for each boss longer whilst farming the bosses would remain as easy as it is now.

For reference, I came from LOTRO which at the time had 0 enrage timers but most bosses were harder than here.

2) Star Wars Theme

This is a fecking star wars game! Where is the Star Wars in Operations??!?! My one and only Star Wars moment in a raid is Kephess: he has the walker (AT-ST) and we get to grapple up to it (Hoth). The flashpoints deal with having your small-group iconic moments and one-on-one-esque moments like the films (false emporer is great for star wars feel). So what happened in ops? 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.

3) Raid Layout

Linear is old fashoined, wings / spokes are the current best philosophy. Enter the raid and get a choice of what to tackle first. Sure, gate the final big boss behind the others, but let us choose the order in which we do the previous ones. For a good example, check out Ost Dunhoth from LOTRO. That raid had 6 bosses (disease, poison, wound, fire, shadow and final boss). It was split in to 3 wings of two bosses each. You could choose which wing to tackle first, fully clearing two wings opened up the third wing with the final boss in it. In addition, the raid only had 9 trash pulls in total iirc, each one was actually challenging and required tactics of their own.

4) Horizontal Gear Progression with a Purpose

Tiered progression invalidates old content and thus should *never* be done again. I hope you learnt your lesson from the original launch and the lack of people doing flashpoints. Change to proper horizontal gear progression. 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. Potentially remove modding like we have now so that there is a clear advantage and disadvantage to different sets. For example, one set for shadow dps might reduce incoming damage by 10% but have virtually no power on it, so it'd be a great set for bosses with loads of AoE but bad for standard tank and spank DPS races. however, the player would be able to choose which set to use based on the fight itself and their group makeup.

I know Jeff hickman mentioned in his podcast that they were gonna move towards horizontal gear progression with Makeb but tbh I dont trust him, he's ruined too many games already so it's worth restating the purpose of horizontal gear progression here.

5) Rare Loot Drops

All future instances should have rare (5-10%) loot drops for endgame BiS / comparable incomparables. This is to keep people coming back to old / outdated instances in the hopes of getting that rare item, reward people who stick with the content, offer an incentive for people to help out others in old instances etc. these items should have stat distributions that are truely unique.

For example, if a standard item has 300 points, e.g. an implant with 80 end, 120 willpower, 100 power (roughly distributed), then have a rare implant drop which has 20 end and 280 willpower. Such a drop has the potential to increase someone's DPS significantly so it would be highly desired but it comes at the cost of survivability. An instance farmer who collects all of these items might end up with 3000dps but only 10k hp resulting in lots of deaths.

Such items would offer us much more customising and choice for our characters, incentive for repetition and really introduce a proper meta game with regards to gear, rather than what we currently have which is accepted BiS gear with no alternatives, i.e. boring!

I like the quality of life stuff that other people have mentioned (instant speeders, respawns inside, less trash etc) so I support those endorsements too, however I'd rather see better bosses fights and better mechanics and gear progression so that the raids stay fun for longer.