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Gods from the Machine Nightmare/Master Mode


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Hello Keith!

 

First of all, thank you again for providing the raiding community with a Nightmare operation, I hope you have seen some of the forum threads, discord conversations and twitch streams where groups are discussion strategy, wiping for hours and finally downing some of the hardest bosses in the game. Speaking for myself and the raiding team I am in (Group <Farming Components> on the European server Darth Malgus), we have had a great time with these bosses, coming up with strategies and killing bosses, Matt did a great job with creating challenges that REALLY felt next to impossible at the start.

 

That said, something that has been on my mind recently is how almost 8 months have passed since the release of Gods Nightmare, but a mere 5 teams have managed to get the timed run and just 8 teams have killed Izax. I know quite a few teams are close, a few friends of mine are doing their best on Izax and will likely be killing it sometime this summer, however many more of are in teams that simply do not have the capacity to kill some of these bosses.

 

The raiding community, in particular on Darth Malgus, has been growing steadily during the last few years as more experienced raiders are helping new players and the Nightmare community today has loads of players with the capacity to clear most of the older Nightmare operations. However, Gods Nightmare is not one of them and I think this is a huge issue going forward, in particular as players end up clearing the old Nightmare operations but feel like Gods Nightmare is too much of a jump in difficulty.

 

Thus, I think that a slight decrease in difficulty of Gods Nightmare could be an option, looking at the fights I think that the HP of bosses/adds and their damage dealt could be reduced and that would still ensure the fights keep part of their unique difficulty. Perhaps this could be done in a similar manner as when Dread Fortress and Dread Palace lost their Nightmare Power and how Gods Hardmode had a period during which it was harder, followed by a patch in which most of the fights got significant nerfs.

 

Although I am not sure, perhaps this is what you guys have been thinking all along? When I first killed Izax and were rewarded “Slayer of the Machine Gods” title it seemed similar to how players gained “Conqueror of the Dread Fortress”, “Deposer of the Dread Masters” and the “Bane of Izax” titles prior to nerfs. Speaking with a lot of raiders that have cleared Gods Nightmare, I think that a lot of people wouldn’t mind nerfs to the Nightmare mode to allow the larger raiding community to start venturing into the operation and experience the fights. A key argument I think is that so many of the mechanics are fun and that the boss fights are really challenging both on an individual level as well as for the team, however, the current difficulty level excludes a lot of the larger raiding community.

 

Tldr: Reduce the difficulty of Nightmare Gods from the Machine to allow for the larger raiding community to experience the fights, remove the “Slayer of the Machine Gods” title upon killing Izax as a token to the players who killed it prior.

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I'm hopeful the number of teams to kill Izax will almost double in the next month or so. To my knowledge there are three teams on Satele Shan currently working on Izax. I would hate to see thier hard work rewarded with only an achievement.

 

That being said, difficult content is rewarding content. So long as content isn't driving players away from the game because it feels unkillable I don't think a nerf is required. A rebalancing is likely to happen in 6.0 and with the addition of Tacticals to a players arsenal I'm not sure a nerf is needed.

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I agree it seems to be a step above most the other NIM fights, I think a large portion of that is the fact that it's newer and less people understand the mechanics. I don't think it makes sense to nerf it right now as that would be time and effort for the developers and also as mentioned kinda be a kick in the face to all the teams who are close to killing a boss and know they can without a nerf given more time but then suddenly it's nerfed. I will say when 6.0 comes around I think it should be tuned slightly easier, no dumbing down mechanics, just maybe slightly less health and slightly less damage as OP mentioned.
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I agree it seems to be a step above most the other NIM fights, I think a large portion of that is the fact that it's newer and less people understand the mechanics. I don't think it makes sense to nerf it right now as that would be time and effort for the developers and also as mentioned kinda be a kick in the face to all the teams who are close to killing a boss and know they can without a nerf given more time but then suddenly it's nerfed. I will say when 6.0 comes around I think it should be tuned slightly easier, no dumbing down mechanics, just maybe slightly less health and slightly less damage as OP mentioned.

 

 

I personally think it should be kept exactly the same, this type of difficult content is what makes the game fun, old content is that much easier right now because of the 258 gear that we have at hand. Come 6.0, everything will be tuned to the same gear level, gods will still be the hardest, but it just won't be as big of a "jump" as it was before

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There is no need for a nerf just for the people that are not able to kill it, why would you get a reward (achievement in this case) if you don't deserve it, this applies for the old content as well, because many players that don't deserve old content achievements, speeders and titles are just farming those because of the new gear which makes old nim a joke.

 

 

I think chip had his point there with the title "Slayer of the Machine Gods", in my opinion that title should get removed in the future, maybe with Dxun expansion, just to reward somehow NiM community and the players that killed Izax NiM at the release, because at the moment we, NiM community, didn't get any reward for the time we spend progressing that and killing it ( from Izax you get a speed that you already have it from HM, because most of players killed HM "NiM tunned" and you get the speeder just for having it in inventory)

 

 

Musco said he is gonna give us back the achievements that we lost with the bug, on Izax and Gods Timed, that happened in january and we still didn't get those back.:mad:

Edited by AlexIonutPlay
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Just to clarify what I meant exactly with "nerf" so we all are on the same page, first of all, if it would be to happen I guess best time to do it would be 6.0 with Dxun launch, considering all top teams and everyone else who cleared GFTM before 6.0 will be grinding Dxun at that time, so other teams that want to catch up and are still pulling bosses in GFTM instance would have a slight better chance to do so, secondly, I did not mean all out nerf on Gods operation, but a slight damage nerf or so, slight HP decrease on bosses, or maybe something like increased enrage timer, but I leave those things to Matt because he's done a really fantastic job tuning all the bosses as they are now, thirdly basically what Cola said about Slayer title achieved by killing Izax because I noticed some people think I want it removed right now, of course not, it's been out for so long it doesn't make any sense to remove it NOW. What I meant is and what Cola said already, best time to make it unobtainable would be 6.0/Dxun launch, I might get slandered for it for wanting Slayer title to be unobtainable anymore because it was said from the very beginning that it is NOT Nightmare Power whatsoever, but I guess lots of people would agree with me for all the gamers that were farming Old Content operations for so long in hopes for new operation that we finally got and so we could get rewarded with an Exclusive title for clearing Gods just like back in 2.0 with DF and DP. Hope that cleared things up but I probably forgot about something anyway, heh. Edited by chipequssmlgpro
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Just to clarify what I meant exactly with "nerf" so we all are on the same page, first of all, if it would be to happen I guess best time to do it would be 6.0 with Dxun launch, considering all top teams and everyone else who cleared GFTM before 6.0 will be grinding Dxun at that time, so other teams that want to catch up and are still pulling bosses in GFTM instance would have a slight better chance to do so, secondly, I did not mean all out nerf on Gods operation, but a slight damage nerf or so, slight HP decrease on bosses, or maybe something like increased enrage timer, but I leave those things to Matt because he's done a really fantastic job tuning all the bosses as they are now, thirdly basically what Cola said about Slayer title achieved by killing Izax because I noticed some people think I want it removed right now, of course not, it's been out for so long it doesn't make any sense to remove it NOW. What I meant is and what Cola said already, best time to make it unobtainable would be 6.0/Dxun launch, I might get slandered for it for wanting Slayer title to be unobtainable anymore because it was said from the very beginning that it is NOT Nightmare Power whatsoever, but I guess lots of people would agree with me for all the gamers that were farming Old Content operations for so long in hopes for new operation that we finally got and so we could get rewarded with an Exclusive title for clearing Gods just like back in 2.0 with DF and DP. Hope that cleared things up but I probably forgot about something anyway, heh.

I do NOT agree with the nerf, I agree with the title as a reward for people that killed it before next expansion.

Edited by AlexIonutPlay
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Gonna throw in my two cents to this topic since I'm currently progging NiM Izax and arguably part of the demographic that is most realistically effected by this idea.

 

First of all I 100% agree with the underlying reasons behind why those who've cleared the fight want to have the title removed, it's a cool reward that requires a lot of hard work and progression to get and understandably people who cleared the fight when it was at it's hardest want some kind of exclusivity -- outside of their achievement date -- for putting in the work and for that reason I support the argument for removing the Slayer Title.

 

That being said I personally feel that without the title the Izax fight in NiM simply doesn't offer enough meaningful rewards outside of the title currently to justify its removal. The wings aren't a high enough desired mount since a lot of people currently pulling NiM Gods most likely got it from the HM achievement already and it can randomly drop from HM (and SM from what I've heard), the mats will be nebulous rewards come 6.0 (if they are even still in the game), and the CM drop are not rare whatsoever and are also CM drops. This realistically only leaves the deco drop from Izax and the Timed Run title as the only meaningful rewards for completing the Raid outside of achievements which I personally don't think are a meaningful reward. This combined with the high mechanical challenge of the instance, and assuming the output checks are reduced in some way come 6.0, I don't see a realistic reason for people to want to do NiM Gods for anything other than Achievements and the Timed Run after the release of Onslaught.

 

For these reasons I think that if the Slayer title were to be removed come 6.0 then something would be needed to be added to loot table of Izax (outside of gear) that offers a meaningful reason for players to want to put in the effort to reclear the instance. Obviously the big meme here would be to have the devs finish the Nahut Eclipse mount and implement it with 6.0 but it could be as simple as a new flair, or weapon tuning, just something cosmetic that makes it worth putting in the effort to get to and kill Izax.

 

Finally as a slight philosophic aside if the devs are okay with removing the Slayer title based off of community opinion I would offer the argument that they are ethically obligated to remove the Revanchist title for the same reasons that Slayer would get removed and that all NiMs that release past this point should have something exclusive like the Slayer title or Nightmare Power titles intrinsically tied to the release of the instance.

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Great post Chipefuss and I agree with a lot of what you are saying, it saddens me to see what so few of the players that have posted so far in this thread has grasped the core of the post, the suggested nerf isn't to make content "boring", it's meant to make the operation available for the rest of the raiding community, not just the 8 groups that have killed it.

 

It is encouraging to read that you hope that the number of kills will increase from 8 to 16 this month and as far as I can see, one has already managed to kill Izax which is great! That said, it still seems that the post has been mostly skimmed through, having just 30-35 players experiance the whole fight after a full year is simply inadequate in my opinion. The raiding community in SWTOR is growing as it is with more and more teams being able to run Nightmare operations and getting their timed runs, still, the jump from the old Nightmare operations and Gods Nightmare is massive, despite 258 gear.

 

The argument about the removal of the Slayer title being unfair for teams progressing on the boss is an understandable one, however, keep in mind that we are already 9 months in, if I remember correctly we only got 3 months for Dread Palace and Dread Fortress during Nightmare power. With 6.0, during which I think that a nerf and removal of the Slayer title would be appropriate, close to a year has passed and I think that a nerf along with a rework would be reasonable to make the content in line with the other old Nightmares.

 

I understand that players who have yet to clear the encounter feels differently and perhaps think they are being treated in an unfair way, but there is a multitude of timed based rewards including gear, pets, mount, weapons, companions, titles and other things in this game already. Providing small rewards for active players while at the same time making content available for the larger player base helps ensure that both old, as well as new players, feel appreciated by the developers.

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I agree with you on both counts, Chip.

 

Gods is tuned well considering it's on tier. It provides a nice challenge that can't be found in the other operations at the moment. That said, every other operation has received a nerf at some point. Due to it's current difficulty, Gods has been largely inaccessible, even to those who have done everything else. It seems logical to make it easier when 6.0 and the new op roll out. As far as the title goes, it only makes sense to remove it. No other nightmare op has had a last boss title after it's been nerfed. The timed title will still be around if people want a Gods title post-nerf.

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This isn't Nightmare Power, stop pretending it is to justify something exclusive for yourself. I can't see BW randomly removing a title from the op just to stroke our collective ego's and why should they?

 

Should they correct our achievement dates? Absolutely. Should they "nerf" God's and remove rewards? Absolutely not. We're how deep into farm on this content now? It's not our content any more, it hasn't been for 6 months. Let the rest of the game enjoy it now and in 6.0.

 

You want Nightmare Power style titles? Give some feedback on PTS when Dxun is available saying why it's a good thing and I'll be right there with you.

Edited by auroroavalor
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Personally, I'm ok with the operation getting nerfed and slayer being removed with the launch of 6.0. If the op is always left as is, I don't think many more groups will be able to clear the instance at its current difficulty, so I argue that keeping the instance as is would do less for the community comparatively to if it was nerfed. As such, I also argue that if the instance is nerfed, Slayer should be removed with it to reward those who killed Izax in its most difficult state. Imo, NIM raiders got shafted with rewards this tier so it would be nice to have an exclusive reward for those who killed it before 6.0.

 

P.S. Join 2 man Trial and Error Prog for a real challenge

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It's pretty standard in MMOs to get a title from killing a boss so I think it's kinda awkward for them to just hard remove it given there's no currently available title from sm or hm.

That being said BW has obviously hinted that they want timed run to be more of an optional thing since they've made it zero achievement points now so you could probably just remove that with 6.0 and achieve the same purpose. Given that very few teams even are attempting timed run and many are using shared lockouts for progression (a strategy which neglects timed run preparation massively) it definitely feels like the title only the much more dedicated teams care about and probably the better one to target if you want exclusivity.

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All I read was "bla bla we want to be the only ones with this title so remove it bla bla bla" :)

 

I mean, sure, it was like this with DF DP back then. My group was wiping on Brontes NiM with buff and we didnt get it in time, It was all or nothing, if you beat 4 bosses with NiM buff u didnt get anything, after the NiM buff dropped my group stopped going for Brontes fully and I had to kill it much much later to even have the achievement due to lack of interest. DP was same, but I only managed 3 bosses. Killing council was only due to people respecing to dps on operative in stealth with macro, which was a silly way tbh.

 

I dunno, it was nice to have "Bane of Izax" back then, but that was also not thought through, cause Devs didnt know there will be a NiM mode in the future. The Slayer title is a cool one, but will also be forgotten. There are very few who know the old Deposer titles anyway, but if people get a kick out of it sure, have them remove it, but that will cause people to stop doing the ops like it was with DF DP, there are no interesting mounts or anything..... it might lead to do the ops now, before title is removed but in the long run it will lead to a decline in running the ops.

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So my perspective on this is under the assumption that if you are good enough to do Gods, you are currently working on it right now/have cleared it already. I think that the operation's current difficulty obviously limits out a significant majority of the community. I don't really see how leaving the operation as is will lead to many more full clears in the future, unless the skill cap of specific groups increases and they want to go back to Gods instead of progging something like Dxun (which hopefully upon release is nearly as challenging). I'm also not saying that the difficulty of Gods should be nullified, instead, just a reduction of the DPS/HPS requirement to give more groups the opportunity to go into the operation if desired while still needing to adhere to mechanics.

 

Again, if the community wants to leave the operation as is, it doesn't very much affect me; I just don't understand how leaving the operation as is proves to be beneficial to the rest of the community.

Edited by Pizza_boy
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Again, if the community wants to leave the operation as is, it doesn't very much affect me; I just don't understand how leaving the operation as is proves to be beneficial to the rest of the community.

 

I think its a simple principle which is applied even in the school system. You slowly get harder and harder tasks to learn since you slowly develop. Swtor applied the same, it started with operations like EV, KP then came EC. Scale in difficulty. This improves the players.

 

Imagine a new player in the game. When he gets his gear (after a zillion weeks on Ossus :D ) he tries the operations from SM to NiM. They vary on difficulty which improves different parts of the players skill. Whats unique about Gods is the usage of the temporary quickbar for example, thats not found in the old ops. Basically you need a "way up the ladder" and not offer a horizontal difficulty.

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On the one hand I feel nightmare should be as hard as possible because that's the whole point of it, on the other hand having probably less then 100 players worldwide clear the entire operation in 8-9 months isn't great either. To justify future ops getting a third tier (development costs) and not just hardmare the game needs more players killing nightmare. If this isn't done you get a situation like HM ravagers where by the players who can clear it can do it and few players now even try it because of the MnB wall and that op is over 4 years old.
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The clearing rate is absolutely on point for the amount of players left in the game.

There are maybe 10.000-20.000 players left and over 100 players cleared the operation. So 1%-0.5%, which is way more than any raid in World of Warcraft even after the mythic nerfs.

The more disappointing number is that not even 1% of the people who cleared GftM MM thought it would be a good idea to publicly release guides to help everyone else along the way.

 

The game lost pretty much every good player due to content drought and still the operation is cleared by the same amount of people as in WoW, percentage wise.

This shows you how easy GftM MM really is. We are in the process of proving that, expect results in 1-2 weeks.

Edited by Zwirni
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The clearing rate is absolutely on point for the amount of players left in the game.

There are maybe 10.000-20.000 players left and over 100 players cleared the operation. So 1%-0.5%, which is way more than any raid in World of Warcraft even after the mythic nerfs.

Your perception is just flawed. The game lost pretty much every good player due to content drought and still the operation is cleared by the same amount of people as in WoW, percentage wise.

This shows you how easy GftM MM really is. We are in the process of proving that, expect results in 1-2 weeks.

 

No my perception is not flawed because the amount of players in WoW is far greater than SWTOR therefore resources are far higher in WoW. My point is putting resources for content only 100 players can clear when resources are so low is not good which is my I tend to agree that a nerf is probably needed at 6.0. If you haven't cleared it by September you have had 10 months to clear it and it's clearly above your skill level. Again in a perfect world Nim ops shouldn't get nerfed by all of them have since they were launched. But why above all else do you compare the raiding of SWTOR to WoW is beyond me. You said yourself the depth of raiders in this game is non existent and it has a fraction of the player base. Resources are limited and adding a third tier (which we all want) requires a greter clearance rate IMO.

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No my perception is not flawed because the amount of players in WoW is far greater than SWTOR therefore resources are far higher in WoW. My point is putting resources for content only 100 players can clear when resources are so low is not good which is my I tend to agree that a nerf is probably needed at 6.0. If you haven't cleared it by September you have had 10 months to clear it and it's clearly above your skill level. Again in a perfect world Nim ops shouldn't get nerfed by all of them have since they were launched. But why above all else do you compare the raiding of SWTOR to WoW is beyond me. You said yourself the depth of raiders in this game is non existent and it has a fraction of the player base. Resources are limited and adding a third tier (which we all want) requires a greter clearance rate IMO.

 

I don't know whether you noticed but everything you said proves my points.

There are way fewer raiders in SW:ToR than in WoW. Still the operation has the same clearance rate as for example Battle of Dazar'alor mythic. Which shows that the difficulty is not too high, it isn't even higher than WoW raids after being nerfed couple of times to make them more accessible

 

But now you want to talk about content being created for 100 people. That is a whole different discussion.

What I am saying is, MasterMode should be difficult enough so that the average player aspires to killing it and is in awe when someone else does it. This is only possible if the clearance rate is below 1% of the total population.

Given that the playerbase has gotten worse and worse at playing the game it was not easy to achieve that but Matt still did it. Which is a great accomplishment.

 

What I meant with your perception being flawed is that you look at total numbers and forget relativity. It doesn't matter how many people clear GftM MM, as long as the percentages are correct.

Unfortunately I cannot see a single argument that would convince me that a clearance rate of 5% or even 10% would not be an issue because you would lose all the above mentioned advantages.

 

Lastly, why do I compare it to WoW? Because it is the only big player in the game and you should learn from it one way or the other. For example you could learn from the Ulduar raid. In that raid people actually decided themselves whether they wanted "hardmode" buffs on the boss or not and got special titles and rewards for killing the bosses in a harder version. It is a very simple solution that doesn't even require a MasterMode.

Edited by Zwirni
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I don't know whether you noticed but everything you said proves my points.

There are way fewer raiders in SW:ToR than in WoW. Still the operation has the same clearance rate as for example Battle of Dazar'alor mythic. Which shows that the difficulty is not too high, it isn't even higher than WoW raids after being nerfed couple of times to make them more accessible

 

But now you want to talk about content being created for 100 people. That is a whole different discussion.

What I am saying is, MasterMode should be difficult enough so that the average player aspires to killing it and is in awe when someone else does it. This is only possible if the clearance rate is below 1% of the total population.

Given that the playerbase has gotten worse and worse at playing the game it was not easy to achieve that but Matt still did it. Which is a great accomplishment.

 

What I meant with your perception being flawed is that you look at total numbers and forget relativity. It doesn't matter how many people clear GftM MM, as long as the percentages are correct.

Unfortunately I cannot see a single argument that would convince me that a clearance rate of 5% or even 10% would not be an issue because you would lose all the above mentioned advantages.

 

Lastly, why do I compare it to WoW? Because it is the only big player in the game and you should learn from it one way or the other. For example you could learn from the Ulduar raid. In that raid people actually decided themselves whether they wanted "hardmode" buffs on the boss or not and got special titles and rewards for killing the bosses in a harder version. It is a very simple solution that doesn't even require a MasterMode.

 

Ok well I think the economics of something that only maybe 75 players (based off the clearance posts and given how many players have doubled up in those clearances) in 8-9 months isn't viable. My view is make nightmare as hard as you want in a game the size of WoW there is still enough players who will play it to justify the costs. Also if it's so easy why are you suggesting that you will clear it in a week or 2, eight months after release or are you suggesting you are bad and that if you can clear it anyone can?

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Ok well I think the economics of something that only maybe 75 players (based off the clearance posts and given how many players have doubled up in those clearances) in 8-9 months isn't viable. My view is make nightmare as hard as you want in a game the size of WoW there is still enough players who will play it to justify the costs. Also if it's so easy why are you suggesting that you will clear it in a week or 2, eight months after release or are you suggesting you are bad and that if you can clear it anyone can?

 

Well if you want to have another whole different discussion we can do that as well.

BTW: Do you even realize that we are not done with the other 2 discussions you brought up?

a) GftM is too hard / clearance rate is too low ?

b) Creating content for 100 people is a waste of resource ?

 

But sure let's go to

c) Is it smart to have something in the game people aspire to ?

 

Economically it makes all the sense in the world to have something in the game people aspire to. Because it keeps them playing. The 20-30 guilds who are still progressing are only doing so because they haven't cleared it yet. If you would take that away, you would also take away the carrot on the stick for those players.

So the content is not created for the people who clear it. It is created for everyone who aspires to clear it or is in awe by the achievements of other people.

Edited by Zwirni
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