I have to admit, I queued today with a sense of great trepidation. Under-geared and inexperienced pugs are what drove me away from farming S&V and TfB, but with the new Bolster mechanic and with a bit of competent tanking and healing, our ungainly mish-mash of a group managed to steam roll through the operation in less than 90 minutes without a single wipe! This almost never happens! Anyway, these are my impressions:

BOLSTER: The bolster is a bit OP. A group which was otherwise well geared, but had half the people decked out in Basic/Arkanian gear hit like a truck! Titan-6 fell before his 2nd rock phase, and the first boss was killed half a mnute after reaching the second rock!

WAIT TIME: Managable. As a DPS I had to wait about half an hour before the first group finder window popped and then had to wait another 15 minutes before replacements were found for people who quit the queue.

TEAM DYNAMICS: In a team where one of the tanks never raided before and several DPS-ers have never run that Ops before, the importance of having a good Ops leader really showed. Luckily, we had one. I'm guessing that standard Pug do's and dont's apply here as well, except you have less time to figure out who is the leader and who is the weak link in the chain.

And that's about it, really. Feel free to queue guys, it's not all that bad .

I have to admit, I queued today with a sense of great trepidation. Under-geared and inexperienced pugs are what drove me away from farming S&V and TfB, but with the new Bolster mechanic and with a bit of competent tanking and healing, our ungainly mish-mash of a group managed to steam roll through the operation in less than 90 minutes without a single wipe! This almost never happens! Anyway, these are my impressions:

 

BOLSTER: The bolster is a bit OP. A group which was otherwise well geared, but had half the people decked out in Basic/Arkanian gear hit like a truck! Titan-6 fell before his 2nd rock phase, and the first boss was killed half a mnute after reaching the second rock!

 

WAIT TIME: Managable. As a DPS I had to wait about half an hour before the first group finder window popped and then had to wait another 15 minutes before replacements were found for people who quit the queue.

 

TEAM DYNAMICS: In a team where one of the tanks never raided before and several DPS-ers have never run that Ops before, the importance of having a good Ops leader really showed. Luckily, we had one. I'm guessing that standard Pug do's and dont's apply here as well, except you have less time to figure out who is the leader and who is the weak link in the chain.

 

And that's about it, really. Feel free to queue guys, it's not all that bad .

Bolster is crap any way you look at it. Bolster CAN NOT make up for a lack of mechanics knowledge which is the problem with most PuGs.

Bolster them to 99999 hp for all I care. Mechanics will still kill them since they want to be carried through anyway.

Bolster is crap any way you look at it. Bolster CAN NOT make up for a lack of mechanics knowledge which is the problem with most PuGs.

 

Bolster them to 99999 hp for all I care. Mechanics will still kill them since they want to be carried through anyway.

I agree, that is where a good leader comes in. Fortunately, bolster makes the heals better and the attacks stronger, so some mechanics are more forgiving and last shorter than others. Ffor example, my team really fudged the first boss, failed to move the shield for a full minute and then moved it waaaaay behind the group. And yet, when it finally arrived, the supercharged heals meant that the group was at 90% health on average, in spite of being in the sandstorm .

If I go in with my 180/186 gear, will I get boosted even higher?

You will probably be reduced . At full DF with a DM implant, all my stats remained the same. Can't improve on perfection .

Bolster is crap any way you look at it. Bolster CAN NOT make up for a lack of mechanics knowledge which is the problem with most PuGs.

 

Bolster them to 99999 hp for all I care. Mechanics will still kill them since they want to be carried through anyway.

The only thing bolster does is spare people from doing their 40 minutes Oricon run for the 156 gear required for ops. That's all. There are people who know their class and know the ops. Others don't. The Oricon run doesn't change that. Neither does Bolster. The sky is not falling.

Were you perchance in that Ebon Hawk run that I ended up leading on Alliare? Even I was a little surprised at how smoothly it went; I'm just glad that I randomly got picked as ops leader since it made life a lot easier than if I'd been trying to lead while unable to re-arrange raid frames & use announcements.

Can also confirm that bolster will improve the stats on tanks, even in full 180/186 gear. Haven't done one as a dps yet, so no comments other than to agree with the OP that things died a lot faster than usual.

Hey all--

I have to say, I had my own fears about this GF thing, but also am really happy people who really only care about comms or gear rolls will have a place to do that. For the person who asked about their gear bolster a few posts above, I really was surprised. In my mostly dread forged tank set my stats were bolstered to an almost insane amount it seemed. I tanked the first boss naked completely except my MH and OH, and did just fine, and the burn started at the second rock, we just let the shield die and burn him down from 20% I myself didn't pop my shield but I cannot speak for others. Titan 6 melted. Thrasher was thrasher (i had my gear back on by this time) and it was fine, someone noobed with the fire bug and it still went fast. (We also had good healers)

Now I should mention that this was not a pug per se. It was a premade of friends and a few friends of friends, lol, but most of us were excellently geared and knew the fights in and out, plus being in voip. So we formed and GF'd in. Now I couldn't stay to tank past thrash and also a skilled and geared dps left, but the replacements they got did them fine I was told.

As a new system, I don't think it is a bad thing, especially if those replacements last night were skilled or showed potential then they probably would have been asked to join us again on our next story mode fun night. In this way I think this is a cool system, to mine new talent into the pve raiding communtiy that would have otherwise (maybe) gone unnoticed.

Also as a place for us to get alts into the environment at level 50. I personally am excited to be able to bring my scoundrel to its first op later this week or early next, and start learning to heal raids with out being so much of a gimp to my teammates. Now please realize that for this aspect I am talking premades, I don't think I would bring a lvl 50 new healer to a 55 pug ops even if its bolstered since I am wanting to learn from my friends. For things like this, the new GF system will be amazing as well as or what I stated above.

For the folks who are saying that mechanics will wipe ya no matter what your bolstered to, yes you are correct,, but if the group is lucky and gets a good leader or a few good, experienced people, then it should go fine. Have fun folks, Q up for your GF op today, it will either be neat and fun or it could be a hot mess but you will never know till you give it a go.

Be well

Sandari

The only thing bolster does is spare people from doing their 40 minutes Oricon run for the 156 gear required for ops. That's all. There are people who know their class and know the ops. Others don't. The Oricon run doesn't change that. Neither does Bolster. The sky is not falling.

Can anyone confirm only gear below 156 is bolstered, and that it is only bolstered up to 156 and no further?

Or does the ops bolster bring players above 156 rating?

I've a bad feeling about this. Tried 2 times. Sadly S&V isnt the best operation to start is up, it's too long for an average PUG patience.

First run: we start with one tank left. Someone miselected his role and apprently want to stick. We kick him and start after a minor drama. The group was good, and another tank join us at the second boss. However we had a couple newcomers and had to explain each fight (shortly) which delay the op. Only one leave at weekly. After Oasis city a few people start complaining it's taking too long... and the server crash, everyone disconnected, we're unable to rerun it.

Second run: Same thing, some rookies here, we take time to explain each boss. Albeit one mess up the first boss generator and bails. Another one bail without a word right after. We keep progressing, slowly without too much trouble. Still queuing, we don't get any DPS replacement during maybe one hour (I guess something is really broken here). After the weekly more people leave and we can't even reach Oasis City.

On both time, the time spent in queue is important enough for people start gathering in the fleet and queue when the group is almost full. We also had some issue of being unable to queue. This just defeat the purpose of queuing, and cause more trouble since we can't recruit manually anymore once in the GF.

Not been able to try it since groupfinder is broken on the server I play on.

I hope it will work soon though, I want to try it

Lets hope it works tonight

Used it for the first time today for dread fortress. It worked brilliant when I was tanking on my PT.

The second queue I was on my marauder. 2 people disconnected before the first boss and one at the second boss. We could not get any replacements. After all, how many people actually have join raid in progress selected??? Not many. We tried and wiped. After that the raid fell apart.

The only way I can see this group finder working is if Bioware revamp their lockout system. Lockouts should prevent you from receiving coms/gear drops from a boss but STILL allow you to participate in any boss fight.

eg.

Dread fortress

Boss 1 -> completed - > gear / coms lockout

Boss 2 -> Raid falls apart

Requeue

Join a fresh Dread Fortress

Boss 1 -> completed - > No gear or coms due to lockout

Boss 2 - > completed -> gear / coms lockout

ETC.

spent an hour in the queue with 8 people, 2 heals and 2 tanks... no pop. it was 9 pm though.

made me wish we could queue for 8 man.

Hey-

Well, it seems the point has become moot, as there will no longer be any 16 man group finder operations. As it turns out, they are what broke the game after update 2.8. For the source of this please see dev tracker. I am happy tho, as they are making it an 8 man bolstered group finder, and really, 8 man is always better. The only thing that makes 16 man more desirable, for me, is the extra comms, but I myself do not play for the comms anymore after I learned comm gear is crap and it is the drops I want. In a 8 man team setting, it does not take that long to gear everyone with drops. Hail the return of the 8 man raid.

Really, its all a matter of choice, and playstyle. I like smaller raid settings but others do not, but even though 16 man will no longer be on the bolstered gf Q, the rewards will still be more comms per raid I would assume. It does not seem likley that they will keep the 30 ultimate comm reward for 8 man gf. I may be wrong.

The rewards stays as per the dev post. Whether or not they keep the ult comm drops for beating bosses remains to be seen. Sort of makes more sense to keep ult comm drops for bosses in 8M seeing as it's actually harder.

There are no ultimate comm drops in 8M.

If the changes go through without affecting the GF rewards, the total comms for a full op will be as follow :

TFB 8M: 42

TFB 16M: 32

S&V 8M: 42

S&V 16M: 40

DF/DP 8M: 46

DF/FP 16M: 36

With 16M being much more advantageous for partial completions.

That actually sounds about fair, OP bolster nonwithstanding.

Of course, what's tragic here is that a lot of people who can only play dps will have a harder time finding a group. Some of them might even need to learn another role. The horror...

Which with bolster should be pretty easy shouldn't it? Simply respect as tank or healer ( most classes have specs for something other than dps surely? ) and the bolster will at least get your tank specs up to the required bolstered amount. What's more ideally you would retain the dps bonus from your existing gear so you would ideally have high dps capability from gear with good tanking from the bolster.

So far no one has confirmed or denied for sure if bolster in GF works this way - the devs did say boslter applied to shield/absorption etc. so I assume it does.

Something else I wonder is how it chooses what bolster to apply. Does it just bolster everything for everyone or does it base it on your role choice when choosing the GF and which role it puts you into?

Still until tomorrow we won't know for sure if they have changed/removed the ult comms for the new 8M GF also. They seemed pretty eager on giving people ult comms and getting them into end game ops etc. so perhaps with only the 1 x 8m GF op you can do each week ( I assume lockouts still apply ) they will give 16m level ult comms as it would have given before they had to forcibly reduce it to 8m due to their own poor testing and optimization? Makes sense if you follow the concept they are practically trying to give ult comms away heh.

So this server issue has nothing to do with the 6 instances of Nar Shadaa with people wasting their money that they wanna get out of the economy before the guild ships hit eh?

They just don't want to give away 70 coms fr a 16 man SV run.

Simple. Remove OPS Queue

We don't use it. We still pug them. Vey few used them except for the bonus comms. That's all.

The groups suffered even with bolster. The 4 DF runs today were the worst I've had. The 4 S&V runs I had were rancid. These were all GF just to test it out. We had to explain fights. It's SM. Things took longer than expected even with out wipes. Everything was NEEDed. We do not see this with pugs. We had people drop after the weekly still. We had people drop due too the runs taking too long.

GROUP FINDER for OPERATIONS are not needed. Mostly unwanted. Added code that clearly bogged down the servers.

Get rid of them instead of putting a band-aide on the leaky pipe.

Oh. No ultimate comms in 8-man. We were maxing comms after 4 ops and a daily FP. So weekly cap reached in a day. Why give us more comms yet no cap raise? We blow through content too fast as is. They just made it worse.

I'm tired of going premade then Q. We had serious issues with Q today. Dropped too many times to count. Ended up someone bugged but had to boot players out one at a time to find out who. Everyone shows green on lockouts. It took too long to set up. Even doing 2 short on DPS didn't work. No one was in Q. We only used it to get 30 ult comms. Well I was already maxed so didn't matter to me.

This Op queue needs to go. It's not needed. We already group, premade, pug it. Why add to server resources?

It must be a server by server issue.

Aside from people rage quitting, on Jedi Covenant I didn't have any problems with dropouts... lockout issues, or anything else you describe.

We had to explain fights. It's SM.

GF's purpose is to get more people into raiding whilst avoid the gear curve that often puts people off taking the initial leap. You are going to find new people in GF queues BECAUSE THAT'S THE WHOLE DAMN POINT.

Too many elitist people don't want to have to "carry the noobs".

I agree, thats why i havent botherd to do any OPS yet, people get so frustrated if you dont know anything 110% the first time ._.