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Craxim

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  1. Gear is a crutch, and a necessary one at that. What you should be asking for isn't to make gear trivial, but to just add more rewards that aren't gear. Because raiding as we know it can't really be truly successfully done without gear, just take a look at the current day most successful MMO on the planet right now, WoW, and the way it has been set up. Look at it from a business standpoint. As a developer/producer, you want everyone who buys your game and pays to play it be able to really play it, to experience everything. But people have different levels of skill ability, so how do you make content for everyone on the skill chart? You design challenging content, that only the best players will be able to beat right when you give it to them, they did well on this in HM TFB, and even more so on NMM EC. Then you make bosses drop gear, which is going to make fights easier. The best players will have a challenge suitable for them, right when the raid releases. Lesser skilled players might only be able to kill the first boss, so how do you get them past it so they can see everything? You reset the raid once a week so they can keep getting gear, the crutch, from that first boss to make the next fight easier. Putting in a raid with gear is like putting in a raid with a set nerf timer on it, the longer the raid stays current, the more it is essentially nerfed because more people have more gear. This is the same in the end as just straight up patch-nerfing content so lesser skilled players can see it. By the time the lesser skilled players are wrapping up the raid, finally getting to the end, a new one should be coming out of the oven soon, ready to re-challenge the most hardcore players. This way there is never a period where content becomes "garbage", the more hardcore guilds just have more time to get more gear in preparation for the next raid, which many enjoy doing. It's a very small % of players that don't want to walk back into a raid after they've cleared it. I personally enjoy doing it multiple times. If the average person doesn't mind doing a boss 8 times, then this means that there should be new bosses in 2 months, because you can only kill the boss once a week. The better you are, the faster you clear the content, regardless of gear. Gear exists not because content isn't challenging, but because not all players that do finish raids now could if there was no gear. So what I think you really want isn't to have gear be irrelevant or easy to obtain, but for there to be more incentives on top of gear to help more players want to do the raids more often after they've killed them, to keep content relevant for a longer period of time for reasons other than just gear. The gear is necessary, I know you say "trust me, it can be done" but if it could be, then WoW wouldn't be where it is today, 8 long gear-filled years after it's release. Maybe there is some other form of endgame that we're not aware of that could be fun, rewarding, challenging, and not a raid, but as far as raiding in and of itself goes, it needs gear. If anything IMO PvP is the thing that doesn't need gear, but that's a whole different cookie to crumble later on maybe. But I really do have to be against your statement of "content becomes garbage", I disagree with that highly. Maybe if there were titles and mounts and pets and cool effect weapons or questlines or cutscenes or whatever it is you want in raids that you feel isn't there now, you'd enjoy and want to do them more, but all of those things need to happen in addition to, not in replacement of, gear. Many people do enjoy the gearing process, many people do enjoy the progression process, and re-inventing the wheel just feels unnecessary to me, I just think we need to improve upon it instead.
  2. I think what you're missing is that HM is supposed to be roughly on par with WoW's Normal Mode raids, and it is. It's actually harder than WoW's Normal Mode in my opinion. The mechanics are creative for the most part (although I agree that phase 1 of TFB is a little too repetitive, but for 16 people phase 2 is 30 times more hectic than Operator IX in my opinion). NiM is supposed to be what challenges hardcore players, and until we see the brand new form of NiM that is supposed to be a real nightmare, we don't know if this raid or EC is easy. Maybe NiM will be easily on par with WoW's Heroic raids or harder, maybe it'll be a letdown and it'll be too easy, we don't know, but to write off the raid as easy before we see the hardest difficulty setting is a little premature in my opinion. It also is more obvious with this raid than any in SWTOR that 16 requires far more execution than 8 does, and is far less forgiving because of that. Speaking of execution, that's something that SWTOR seems to want to make important. There aren't as many smash your face off DPS checks, or as many healing checks or tank gear checks, or 1 big ability that is so insanely hard to handle that you wipe for weeks figuring out the best way to deal with it. Raids in SWTOR are more a 2 step process. Step 1 is "can you figure out what's going on" and when you do, Step 2 is "can you be perfect long enough". Kephess the Undying is a great example of this, it really takes practice for any raid to get good at handling the lightning balls or rotating through nanite towers (in 16 man at least, we've heard its rather easy on 8). A fight like this on NiM might be just the kind of challenge we're all looking for in this game. The last thing when comparing WoW to SWTOR that I think is important to note is that the majority of Vanilla difficulty came from having 40 people to coordinate, along with the fact that so few people fully understood what hardcore raiding was. Add the fact that WoW designs fights with addons in mind, which allows them to be much more complex with mechanics in general, and sure, you'll see more complex raids in WoW. But this game is still relatively new, and so far, every raid has been a major step in the right direction, KP was much better than EV (Jarg and Sorno I'm looking at you ) and EC was much better than both EV and KP, especially since that is when they decided to create the "Nightmarish NiM". TFB is, just like the others, such a great step forward. I'm excited to see what the fights in SWTOR become as BioWare gets more in depth with their UI customization which would allow them to start being crazier with the fights. I guess what it comes down to is that the MMO raiding community is changing with the times just as the MMOs are. If you're looking for a raid to hold a candle to "the glory days" of Vanilla or TBC, you're probably not going to find it. WoW's current raids don't even hold a candle to it because it's just not profitable to make your raids as brickwall hard and requiring hours over hours of farming to get one piece of gear when the market as a whole is turning to allow more access to the average player. But like I said earlier, we won't know if "SWTOR raids are easy" until we see the new and improved NiM of EC, which I heard from somewhere will be out much sooner than we expect.
  3. Our tanks were taking varied damage, I know I was taking a solid 941 a tick and it never changed, our PT tank said his was vary from 300 a tick to 1200 a tick sometimes. Just trying to help clarify for anyone reading that it's not quite as strong as you said here. Everything else in your post was spot on though.
  4. The debuff didn't damage our raid on PTS or live, if it did for you on PTS, maybe you experienced a bug? Or we experienced a bug? But what I know for certain is that it didn't do damage to friendlies for us, we made sure to try it out to see if it did.
  5. Turns out they fixed the bug, so Monday night we'll be looking at 5/5 HM 16 man TFB hopefully and we can put this testing to rest finally. Still working on guides, been extremely busy is the only reason it's taking so long.
  6. Not sure, they talk a lot about the difficulties of "managing resources" and stuff. They said it was difficult to patch PTS, yet they've done it like 3 or 4 times already in a barely over a week so I don't know where that comes from.
  7. Thank you very much. I hope to have the next 2 out soon, it doesn't look like we will be able to get 16 man HM Terror from Beyond down, it enrages at 50% when it is not supposed to, the devs in our stream confirmed this was a bug, and also said that they don't believe it will be fixed before it goes live. Will write it as soon as we do down it, on PTS or live, whichever it is.
  8. Kephess the Undying down. Will get the guide up as soon as I can find time. Hopefully soon.
  9. Sure thing! Some things already need to be updated, working 2 jobs so I'm doing my best with time management. You'll love it, trust me. Fun raid.
  10. What guild are you in? You've cleared 16 man HM Kephess the Undying?
  11. All we can say is that 8 man is much easier than 16, and seems intended to be.
  12. There have been many posts made to the devs about this on the PTS forums. They haven't responded. I personally believe something will be done about this. The only boss that he'd be prohibited from is the 3rd boss, Operator IX. This is the puzzle boss that deals with colors.
  13. Jesse Sky (Lead Flashpoint/Operation Designer) told us this today. This would explain why we haven't killed Operator IX yet. Will be fixed Monday, so we should get it then.
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