So our guild was running a through Dread Fortress this evening and ran into a weird situation with Gate Commander Draxus.

 

Basically we were getting to the 7th and 9th waves and suddenly encountering seemingly random spikes of damage from an unknown Damage-over-time ability. This was not [Mass affliction] from the Dread Guard Corrupters as there are none in the 7th wave, only one in the 9th, and we were spot-on about interrupting them. Basically an icon appeared as a debuff(looked like a little green skull screaming) that ticked us for 5.5k-6k per second. It affected random raid members and we couldn't spot any ability that was being cast by either Draxus or the Guardians that would have this effect.

 

After reviewing our combat logs, we found that the Guardian of the Fortress was hitting us with [Afflicition]. This, again, ticked for ~6k per second which wiped up the group pretty fast as it was not only hitting random members, but was also unable to be cleansed. We can't find any info on Dulfy, the forums, or even in-depth google searches for anything to do with the abilities used by a Guardian of the Fortress.

 

We're wondering if any other group has run into this situation or noticed anything strange going on?

Noticed this as well, for Empire side it looked like a Green Corrosive grenade debuff that couldnt be cleansed by either a sorc or an operative.

 

Since we couldnt do anything we spanked the boss hard whenever he was up, interupted and killed everything like usual.

 

But at the very last time the boss comes out hes always with 2 of the big adds that jump to ppl, ravage and slam. So we killed boss and got killed by his stupid adds.

 

I hate the fight so much

Yeah, we do fine until that DoT starts getting thrown around, then things get ******. Our healers are EXCELLENT, and I do mean EXCELLENT, so its not a healing issue so much. But when you've got 4-5 people getting ticked for 6k a second as the tanks get beat on by those Guardians, all bets are off.

 

The part that bugs me the most is how random it seems. We got the debuff on wave 7 the first time we saw it, but then we went 2 runs to wave 9 before it popped up, so its extremely unpredictable.

 

I also hate that I can't find any info the ability itself anywhere as if it hadn't existed before the Ops went live today.

The "corrosive Granade" alike DoT is casted by boss, can be cleansed by tech classes, or selfclenased by snipers/sorcs/ops

The "corrosive Granade" alike DoT is casted by boss, can be cleansed by tech classes, or selfclenased by snipers/sorcs/ops

 

You are correct, but that's not what OP is talking about. That dot is barely even an annoyance, and (as you said) easily able to be cleansed.

 

 

 

Our group experienced this as well, and it's one of the reasons this fight gave us trouble. If intended, this fight seems tuned EXTREMELY differently than any other encounter in the place. It was called Affliction (not Mass Affliction), and it was not able to be cleansed by Ops or Sorcs (I think our Merc dps also tried, and failed, to cleanse it, but I'm not 100% sure).

 

At first, we were mistaking it with the Mass Affliction that we got from Corruptors...until we noticed that we got it when none of them were alive. We also established that it apparently came from the Guardians, but we didn't notice any cast for it.

 

We weren't in Parsec, so I don't have accurate damage numbers, but 6k ticks seem about right. It hit HARD. Like you, we ignored adds in the final Draxus phase and just burned him down, and then all died, Writhing Horror style.

 

I see no reason why this would be different for each faction, but I should note that we are Imp side also.

Unless we missed some major mechanic to this encounter, the difficulty of the Story Mode version seems way out of line, at least in 16-man.

 

We went in, without having read spoliers, as a mostly guild group using TS, and picked up 4 pugs because we didn't really need the gear. The first boss was trivial, then the 2nd was a very rude awakening. We weren't expecting the Mass Affliction the first time, so that was a quick wipe, but on subsequent runs we still had several wipes before the boss finally died. Even in story mode, he hit hard enough to take me down from 20k to zero very quickly (almost full augmented Underworld but with useless enhancements swapped out).

 

The rest (except for Brontes), including the actual weekly boss were easy -- we didn't have time to finish up on Brontes last night.

I was so frustrated not knowing where this was coming from. As it can't be cleansed in anyway, ticks for very significant damage, and is passed out at a high frequency (People in our OPS including me have been double dotted with this nasty thing). I find it strange there is no way to prevent it, or at least some kind of tell to try to direct it at a certain player.

 

I will continue to observe the fight and see if there is something we are missing.

We had the same problem. We also initially mistook the damage and the debuff as Mass Affliction. Mostly because of what we read on Dulfy. So we really focused the Corruptors, interrupting and killing them. Ofc it is not related to Mass Affiction >.< I think we wiped 3 or 4 times, a little baffled, as I mean this is Story Mode?? And we were going to go straight into Hard Mode lol. Until more moderate voices prevailed. First night and all:) A little OP for Story Mode? Do they do things like this on purpose? As an obstacle to progression? Or, is it just bad tuning? Anyway, we're going to try again tonight. I think the strategy might be to just ignore adds and burn the boss down. But, of course, he flies away...

My group had the same problem I was hit for an average of 2103/sec for 33 seconds from the Guardians.

 

My parser also says I got hit by the Subteroth 8 times for an average of 6728. However, it is blank as far as the damage. The normal mele attack from them was less than 500 each.

 

We were able to get the boss down to 18%.

 

What is funny is Nefra's average DOT in hard mode was only 1396.

We were running this on SM on a pick-up run with guildies last night, and one thing we did that SEEMED to alleviate the casting of the guardians affliction was to not interrupt any of their abilities. I would ike to spend more time looking at more parses to see for sure if this is "interupt" related, but until then it would be worth a try I think to see if it makes life any easier to just not use interrupts on any of the guardians casts

It's poison and is tech. Mercs can cleanse it and it's important to stay on top of. Healers can and should increase the debuff scale in their interface editor.

 

Additionally a challenging fight does not mean it's too hard for SM. It just takes patience, coordination and persistence.

 

We ran 16man with 12-13 folks. Some minmaxed in 72s and others in 66s.

 

TLDR; QQ

We had a successfull kill here, but it did take several wipes, adjusting tactics and practise before a successfull kill. From this video from yesterday you can see that there's plenty enough of dots at the last wave before boss comes for the kill. We weren't able to cleanse all of them, could've been because of a bug or a missing class in the raid etc. For sure our healers weren't able to do the cleansing of one of the dots.

 

Additionally a challenging fight does not mean it's too hard for SM. It just takes patience, coordination and persistence.

 

We ran 16man with 12-13 folks. Some minmaxed in 72s and others in 66s.

 

TLDR; QQ

Kindly keep your patronising comments to yourself; we're clearing S&V and TFB HM every week.

 

Making a STORY MODE operation that the target audience can't actually finish defeats the point of it being story mode -- especially since it's in Group Finder along with the older Operations.

Kindly keep your patronising comments to yourself -- we're clearing S&V and TFB HM every week, but making a STORY MODE operation that the target audience can't actually finish defeats the point of it being story mode -- especially since it's in Group Finder along with the older Operations.

 

You want the rewards handed to you on a platter? Every new Op will be a challenge day 1. For this fight you have to pay attention to debuffs and read. Oh noes! You need to hand out assignments and interrupt things. Oh noes!

 

I am the target audience and I have no issues with the challenge.

 

Let me guess, when EC first came out you had issues with it being too complex.

 

TLDR; QQ

Kindly keep your patronising comments to yourself -- we're clearing S&V and TFB HM every week, but making a STORY MODE operation that the target audience can't actually finish defeats the point of it being story mode -- especially since it's in Group Finder along with the older Operations.

 

wasn't in the finder last time i checked, I'll have to see if I can't get a spot as Heal.

as tank I didn't find it all that hard but the coordination has to work and I'm pretty sure we are missing something because our Healers are really troubled. and if it is indeed the intended challenge level then the other part of the inni have to be corrected upward by a large margin.

It's poison and is tech. Mercs can cleanse it and it's important to stay on top of. Healers can and should increase the debuff scale in their interface editor.

Yeah right....DoT from boss which can hit 1 to 4 people depending on their placement is cleanse-able and it is tech, dodge will also get rid of it, so even slingers and scoundrels can cleanse themselves. The other one that looks like affliction was not clease-able in HM last night. Neither dodge, nor Triage would remove it. The sage's purge did not work on it either. Best we could do was bubble, hit defensive cooldowns and heal through it. It worked, one death, the sawbones died after the boss was toast (me). Not sure if it not being able to purge it is a bug or not, but I was trying to cleanse it every time dodge or Triage came off cooldown.

Yeah right....DoT from boss which can hit 1 to 4 people depending on their placement is cleanse-able and it is tech, dodge will also get rid of it, so even slingers and scoundrels can cleanse themselves. The other one that looks like affliction was not clease-able in HM last night. Neither dodge, nor Triage would remove it. The sage's purge did not work on it either. Best we could do was bubble, hit defensive cooldowns and heal through it. It worked, one death, the sawbones died after the boss was toast (me). Not sure if it not being able to purge it is a bug or not, but I was trying to cleanse it every time dodge or Triage came off cooldown.

 

Interrupt the corrupters so you don't get hit with mass affliction. That would be the preferred strat.

 

Oh let me add that there may be a HM strat I don't know about. I thought this gripe was over the SM version. Dulfy has the HM details.

Interrupt the corrupters so you don't get hit with mass affliction. That would be the preferred strat.

Little busy actually healing and interrupt is not on that short a timer. Next thing someone will tell me I need to heal, purge, interupt, dps and do the windows. Joking I know that, but was a little fustrated last night with everyone yelling purge me!

Interrupt the corrupters so you don't get hit with mass affliction. That would be the preferred strat.

 

The debuff in question is not Mass Affliction. During the guardians phase an uncleansable "Affliction" goes out that hits players for 5K per second and has no source that is immediately evident. For SM it seems a bit excessive and not on the same level of difficulty of the rest of the operation. On the Dulfy HM video it seemed to be ticking for 4K per 2 seconds. That video was in the PTR, but it may be that this HM mechanic slipped into SM by accident.

 

edit: just saw another post with logs that showed it ticking for 5-6K per 2 seconds. methinks its broken.

I also noticed the debuff on a couple of our pulls last night. It does not appear to be mass affliction and is also not cleansable. The only tactic that appeared to work was for the group to spread out as much as possible and split into a L and R side group to handle the adds on the left and right.

 

By spreading out we had less people affected by this weird debuff, and know it wasn't the grenade neither as that could be cleansed.

 

I do believe this fight is slightly over-tuned for SM and is more akin to a HM fight.

The debuff in question is not Mass Affliction. During the guardians phase an uncleansable "Affliction" goes out that hits players for 5K per second and has no source that is immediately evident. For SM it seems a bit excessive and not on the same level of difficulty of the rest of the operation. On the Dulfy HM video it seemed to be ticking for 4K per 2 seconds. That video was in the PTR, but it may be that this HM mechanic slipped into SM by accident.

 

edit: just saw another post with logs that showed it ticking for 5-6K per 2 seconds. methinks its broken.

 

 

After a couple wipes on this i decided to try and hover over the debuff to see what it was. It is in fact an Affliction debuff, same icon and everything. I was healing this fight and me and the other healer could not cleanse it at all, both of us are sorc heals. We also tried having someone with a tech cleanse give it a try, also to no avail. We were getting all the interrupts on the guardians so my guess is you can either interrupt them and deal with the debuff or just deal with the aoe thing and not interrupt. Last night our other healer got hit with 2 uncleansable afflictions and a corrosive grenade dying almost instantly. With two force healers we couldn't even cleanse him of the grenade. The only way at this point to remove the uncleansable affliction debuff is with force barrier. So only sorcs can cleanse it and its once every three minutes, which is worthless because the guardians are in add waves 7&9. Now if we could just get a response from Bioware, is this a bug, a mechanic, *** is going on?

 

Another crappy experience we had last night is after clearing Dread Fortress in SM only the right column of our raid frames got credit for completing the op. The others got weekly, achievements, but the actual quest [OPS] didn't advance for half the group. Now we are stuck yelling at Bioware to fix it so we can raid Dread Palace on saturday..

delete

Your non healer classes/DPS should help cleanse the buffs if you are having trouble. Snipers should first use their evasion/dodge to cleanse the first tick they get. Mercs should cleanse themselves.

 

The debuff being discussed cannot be cleansed.

If it's not mass affliction and it's not the poison tech debuff then I don't know. We wiped multiple times on our 16man SM because we were learning the fights but aside from those 2 major debuffs, I never saw anything else.

 

Maybe it's an 8man thing.

 

In that case suck it up Francis and heal through it.

The debuff being discussed cannot be cleansed.

 

Oh my bad i was thinking of "Affliction" (nanites) from Brontes T_T