Hello I did not play the previous iterations. I tested story mode.

I play story operations frequently and vet/nim once a week. I play tank.

XAM_XAM VIDEO - https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1493707351?t=03h17m43s

IP-CPT is really fun!

PUG - My biggest impression was that it is NOT going to be an operation I bring a random group / unskilled group into especially not a group of 8 - we struggled w the shapes phase even with full callouts and full assignments for the corners. I like to run "no experience required" story ops and I can do it for any operation except I do not think I will include this one.

CONCENTRATION - I felt like between all the stuff on the ground (fire, circles, lasers) and then the fast buttons I needed almost Nightmare-mode levels of concentration, like when we were running NIM Dread Palace before 7.0. I was very surprised about that. I knew the storymode would likely be harder than other storymodes but not necessarily that high. I don't know if it's good or bad (I enjoyed it - I don't think I will have the skill level for vet). The bombs were not HARD skill wise but definitely gave us a run for our money to learn / progress!

DAMAGE - The two big droids seemed to be doing too much damage for story mode I think. The Inferno droid was just melting me as an Assasin tank in 330. I'm not a great tank but I didn't have enough cooldowns for every time he did the fire attack ouchie. Extra hard cus my healers were helping click buttons on opposite side of the room! We ended up separating them then when things cooldown bring the remaining one to the center. Maybe we should have stacked.

DEFEAT - We got him down with like... less than 2 seconds to spare for the final timer!! Another time we wiped with the boss at 0.1 % health. Haha.

GEAR - we finally defeated him and he dropped no loot except tech frags. haha.

If its helpful here is my little guide for players on how I think the fight works for an explanation.

IP-CPT has two main mechanics. The first is to stay out of as much stuff on the floor as possible (fire, lasers, red circles) and the second is the "shapes" mechanic.

 

During the first part of the fight, your team will watch the floor for a fuzzy orange animation - this will appear where fire will appear on the squares the ground. There will also be a red laser beam that blasts through the red laser marker lines. A player will be randomly selected for a large red circle - they will need to take that away from the group the best they can. The smaller red circles will ideally not overlap onto other players' bodies, as they hurt anyone they overlap onto when they explode.

 

The difficult mechanic for this fight is the shapes. Partway through the fight, the boss will float up into the air. Some smaller shielded droids will show up, in pairs of two or three, spread across the room. These droids will have a shape appear over their heads - green circle, purple triangle, blue square, and red hexagon. These correspond with the four buttons, one in each side of the room, which become clickable during this phase. The goal is to click the terminal that match the currently displayed shapes over the droids heads as quickly as possible. If you aren't fast enough, and the droids finish their castbar, they will wipe the group. If you click the terminals enough times, the shield will go down, and you can kill and/or interrupt the droids. It's quite fast - so you will want to assign a player to each terminal to help click. If you are on voice comms, which help a lot, have players call out what shapes they see as they pop up, for example "circle. square. square again." The shapes can repeat at random, and the timing is not always consistent, so your team needs to stay aware. There will also be turrets around the room, have your team try and take them out between button clicking wherever possible, but button clicking comes first.

 

Tanks will need to grab the two large droids that come up - Inferno and Overload, have each tank pick one and bring it to their button area if they are clicking and turn it away from the group. These large droids hit quite hard so make sure tanks are ready to use their defensives and healers are ready to heal them. Once the center starts cooling down you can carefully bring the droid to the center where the boss is once it comes back down to the ground.

We've killed IP-CPT SM again yesterday and outside of some graphical changes (e.g. the boss now lifts into the air while shielded) we did not notice any differences. We will check out VM next week.

Kill video (healer POV):

We are a VM/MM raid group, so we had no trouble killing the boss in SM. I'd say the tuning is slightly too difficult for SM (especially because it's the first boss) but overall, it feels fine.

Nevertheless, there are still some pain points:

• There is not enough time to move out of the fire/lasers, we still get a few stacks which are not a problem in SM but will wipe us in VM. Please increase the time significantly so it is in line with other movement bosses in the game.
  
• Clicking buttons is very boring. When standing at a button, there's nothing I can do for 30 seconds except wait for my color to be called out. Sometimes, a player is in range for healing but as soon as I cast, my color will be called out so I need to interrupt the cast and wait for the phantom GCD before I can click the button, sacrificing valuable time.
  The main issue is that you have to rotate the camera toward the console, you cannot watch the room. Maybe move the consoles a few meters toward the center of the room, that way players could point their camera at the center of the room with the console in the foreground.
  

I do believe that VM is significantly overtuned but I will wait with feedback until our next PTS raid next Friday.

Fight seems good and balanced the way it is.

In case you want to make it easier or harder, just add or remove bit of health.

ROUND 2 of IPCPT story mode! this time I got to run with some players who were highly skilled and mostly knew the fight. Were able to get it defeated a lot easier than last time. Stream video on Johno's channel https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1496788441

They mentioned that you could just spam-click the four buttons in the corners and not even care what was showing up in the center so...

ROUND 3! We went in with a lower skill group many of which had never seen the fight. My channel video https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1497169953 and Johno's channel video https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1497103664 .

Shapes Buttons - We decided to spam-click the buttons in the corners after struggling and.. LOL. great success. Everything was dying super fast. No mechanics except spam clicking were paid attention too. IDK if it is supposed to work this way but it helped us clear that portion very easily. On one hand, ignoring mechanics is dumb, on the other hand, there's lots of story modes where you ignore the mechanics in tory mode (Karagga's Palace fabricator droid, Underlurker cross mode in ToS, Dread Fortress maze and doors to Draxus.) At this point we kinda ignored enforcers in favor of button smashing LOL.

Final Phase - No matter how well we did the previous portions of the fight though it didn't help us get thru the burn phase. We tried.. doing better at the earlier parts of the fight (no difference), having everyone alive (difficult. lmao. I think we only managed this once.), switching one tank to dps (helped get from 30% to 20% for the burn phase death). We might have gotten close IF we'd had everyone 100% alive uptime, our 5th DPS was higher and if we gave up the tanking role all together and switched to 6 dps 2 heals. Here is our starparse where we got closest at 9% https://i.imgur.com/zfBCF6V.jpg We were in mostly 330 gear I don't think everyone augmented tho. Team members definitely were struggling w staying out of the bad stuff and dps up time due to the bad stuff.

Final Thoughts - My main goal was to answer the question, "can I take a pickup group into this op, as long as i have voice to give them clear instructions, can they still pass it with low operation experience and low dps du to lack of skill/practice?" At first I thought the answer might be yes - especially with ignoring the buttons phase, then the only mechanic to really learn is to stay out of all the bad stuff.... which is hard, but not impossible. But with the burn phase being such a hard check, I think I would have to require a parse submission before taking anyone into this operation in story mode, even if they are fully geared. I asked my chat "Do you think it was intended to be this hard?" and they were split almost 50/50, players seem unclear on whether or not this storymode is supposed to be this difficult or not. Some players were excited to see a breath of fresh air for harder content, others said "wow too hard" haha. I THINK if the final phase timer wasn't as harsh for DPS it might be ok for my style of pickup groups, but like I said, we can't figure out if you want it to be easier / more accessible or not.

my nim group tried SM yesterday and killed it well enough but the fight still has quite a few issues. We play three nights a week, I'm DPS.

The fire vents are simply not well visualized. I don't understand why a barely noticeable dark orange hue is considered to be a good visual clue. It's not easy to spot on the dark gray floor taking away attention at the rest of the fight. Basically, everyone is just looking at the floor, which is just plain stupid. I can also imagine a lot of people struggling to get out on time. This is more a concern for more casual players but since this is SM, the time between visual clue and flames might be better off being longer. It can be tight in VM, that's fine but the R-4 SM bosses are generally more tuned like 'harder' VM content imo.

The lasers are well visualized as to where they'll hit but the actual hit is completely overblown in terms of length and visual impact. It could be much shorter visually while losing nothing of its mechanic and also be ground based instead of flying through the middle of the screen giving you eye cancer for no reason.

The vast amount of voids surrounding players is fine except when you play 2+ melee and you have to quickly move out of flame vents and then also both want to DPS and avoid voids simultaneously. It just does not work as well, especially if you have DPS like Fury/Rage who change position with some skills like Obliterate. It's just minor dmg in SM so it doesn't matter that much but in VM, this makes me want to just switch to ranged dps instead.

The button click phase is just badly designed where playing it the right way is strictly inferior to just spam clicking stuff. Why do people spam click? because you can't see the field when turned to push the button and when as you really have to be quick about pushing buttons, you can't do anything else. That means you stand there like an idiot watching a wall waiting for your colour to be called out. Where is the fun in that?

A much better solution would have been to make 4 players be able to pick up skills for the temp ability bar (each player gets 1 colour) and then still have them react quickly but still be able to play the game instead of standing there like an idiot looking at a wall. The mechanic would be the same but the players could still do other things and not suffer greatly if colours aren't being called out as they could actually see it themselves. This is imo the best change you could make as the wall panels are just such an unintuitive and zero fun mechanic.

There is also a weird thing with the turrets and the robots that spawn. For some reason, you can't immediately target them which is annoying as hell. And there is no reason for it. Ofc you should give the turrets some wind-up time before they just focus oneshot your squishy agent heal but they should be target-and attackable. This was one of the things that really ruined damage uptime.

All in all, the fight could be fun but the wall panel click stuff and the bad visuals really hurt otherwise good design.

You cant see the floor transitioning to fire very well on potato settings (very low graphics)... I can see it transitinging on very high but my PC is not great on very high settings.

I feel like the repair cost are too high.. Its an op that is scaled so hard that people are gonna wipe a lot so its not a good incentive to do progression raiding..

OK for nim raiders who farm credits selling mm runs maybe....

You cant see the floor transitioning to fire very well on potato settings (very low graphics)... I can see it transitinging on very high but my PC is not great on very high settings.

I feel like the repair cost are too high.. Its an op that is scaled so hard that people are gonna wipe a lot so its not a good incentive to do progression raiding..

OK for nim raiders who farm credits selling mm runs maybe....

This is disappointing. While I have a PC that can easily play the game on Ultra, I find I prefer my graphics settings on Very Low. I do change them for certain fights, but I really don't like doing that.

So I did it again on SM with the new patch, again with a group with full 330 gear on. So with the new patch the bombs damage was increased so that meant we couldn't ignore it which is great. now having said that, I think there is way too much damage going out for SM. for being in 330 gear, we are dying way too much. the lasers and floor pits do so much damage that the healers can't keep up. Most people will not be doing this in 330 gear so it will probably be much harder for them. I also think that the cast times for the bombs is a bit too tight. if you can make it last a bit longer that would be perfect.

 

one other suggestion to make this fight better on SM is maybe have the floor pits wait a couple more seconds before they activate. Sometimes it feels like I have no time at all to move before it activates. maybe also make some of the red circles you get from grenades a bit smaller on SM, so people don't have to worry about spreading out as much.

 

Not really sure if the length of the fight felt good since we couldn't get past first bomb phase that often.

 

Overall I still really enjoy this fight, and think its a great opener for the ops, I just think that in its current form on SM, it is too over tuned. lowering the damgae going out to players and maybe lowering the health more on some of the adds and dps will make it better.

 

edit: So another thing to add after watching so footage of someone else do it on twitch. i think this op fight might be great if it was more of a survival focus that it was a huge dps check. I like the idea of having to go through 2 phases of bombs before the boss goes into burn mode to kill everyone. problem is that I have seen some pulss of people in 330 get to that phase around 50%, and dying at 41%. if boss had lower health, that survival feeling of a fight could really work.

I dis the fight yesterday and i agree with this assessment. It’s wayyy too hard for SM, we wiped and wiped. Feels like HM level. But mechanics are really fun

This boss is way over tuned and complicated for SM level groups. I can't imagine a PUG group ever being able to do the mines as they are now.

The Terminals being in the corners really doesn't work well with raid awareness and your terrible camera system. they should either be moved 1 square closer to the center of the room, or while standing on the square in front of them you should get an activate control on the special action bar.

The laser beam warning zone needs to be colored more solidly; it is visually hard to tell the bad areas from the good areas near where they cross.

Last week (right after the patch), we attempted IP-CPT VM again and once again, we did not get very far.

Video of our best attempt:

Combat log: https://parsely.io/parser/view/665436/16

My opiniion still stands: This boss is tuned way too hard for VM, especially since it is the first boss. It is not a fun fight (way too much movement, way too much AoE on the ground to see anything, way too much downtime when pressing buttons) and because of the quick reaction times required, most mechanics are at a MM level.

Given that the new gear is locked behind VM bosses and most of endgame community can no longer clear anything beyond EV/KP VM and Nefra MM, the last thing we need is another hardmare operation.

I really don't understand why this operation is targeted at the top tier raid groups who already cleared the operation on PTS, and will likely clear it on live on launch day and then unsubscribe. Meanwhile, raid groups like ours will be stuck on the first boss with no chance to get better loot than 330.

I have no problem with progressing on the second, third or last boss. However, the first boss in an operation should always be an easy (but not faceroll easy) kill.

having tried VM now with two different groups, the main issue was pretty much always the console clicking because it's just badly designed. You can't see anything of what's happening in the fight and you can't do anything but stand there and click unless you're a healer perhaps or range dps with something in your vicinity. It's mechanically bad. You can either spam buttons or you have to have voice chat to call colours. There are easy solutions.

You could give players a remote type thing with a special ability bar to play the mechanic.

You could make something like that pop up when players are near the consoles.

You could move the consoles to the ceiling / have them drop down in view and make them interactable from some distance.

Basically anything is better than staring at a wall and clicking.

The other major issue is adds spawning and not being interactable immediately. The delay is just infuriating.

The fire being more visible is really a good change. The laser should still be both visually more apparent on the ground and then just not as big when actually blasting through the room. It's such an ugly effect. Why not have it be an electric type ground effect with some lightning running on the ground instead of this diarrhea Christmas light spectacle. All other things about the boss fight are great and it's really fun, just the console clicking is so lacking because it takes 4 people out of the fight who get to stare at the wall instead. Pointless.

after having played the fight several more times now:

it's terrible to tank, not hard, just bad.

please give us a console in front of the Boss Room that improves resource Regeneration/triggers procs and converts our Tank-stats to DPS Stats.

Alternatively, recreate the Boss fight with the adds being active the full fight except for the button phase and the burn phase in the end.

Tanks have no Job until the Droids spawn.

In the Button Phases, as a Tank I feel like I should really be clicking the Button as preventing the bombs from going off is what removes the incoming Damage, DPS are required to finish off the Bombs and the adds need to die -> I feel double Worthless.

then there's nothing for the Tanks to do until the next Button Phase.

-> it's not Fun

This is a followup post for my feedback on VM in regards to the recent changes.

I consider 2T 2H 4DD as standard composition and like to play that wherever possible. We have killed the boss with 330 gear and that composition before. Tho with the last changes I'm getting mixed signals, on one hand you upped the dmg on enforcers/their debuffs which I'd take as you want there to be tanks, but on the other hand increased the dps check so much that this is plainly not possible anymore.

From my calculations the current dps check in phase 5/6 is around 140k. With 4DDs doing ~25k each (keep in mind this is with carrying grenades out) it is simply not doable.

So with that in mind we did switch to 5DDs and were able to kill it again. I'd say it is balanced well around that specific composition.

I still enjoy the fight very much and I'm looking forward to do it on live servers.

A additional note on the mastery achievement for not getting any stacks of escalating exposure.

Is this achievement supposed to be individual or group wide? I checked the combat logs and I did not get a single stack and did not receive the achievment. Which leaves me to believe it is either bugged or all 8 players need to do it simultaneously. If that is the case, why?

This is a followup post for my feedback on VM in regards to the recent changes.

 

I consider 2T 2H 4DD as standard composition and like to play that wherever possible. We have killed the boss with 330 gear and that composition before. Tho with the last changes I'm getting mixed signals, on one hand you upped the dmg on enforcers/their debuffs which I'd take as you want there to be tanks, but on the other hand increased the dps check so much that this is plainly not possible anymore.

From my calculations the current dps check in phase 5/6 is around 140k. With 4DDs doing ~25k each (keep in mind this is with carrying grenades out) it is simply not doable.

So with that in mind we did switch to 5DDs and were able to kill it again. I'd say it is balanced well around that specific composition.

I still enjoy the fight very much and I'm looking forward to do it on live servers.

 

A additional note on the mastery achievement for not getting any stacks of escalating exposure.

Is this achievement supposed to be individual or group wide? I checked the combat logs and I did not get a single stack and did not receive the achievment. Which leaves me to believe it is either bugged or all 8 players need to do it simultaneously. If that is the case, why?

The DPS check with 4 DPS is very very hard, but it is doable. Also in the burn phase there are no grenades, just dummy parse. You need to have 4 very good DPS with correct meta classes and rest of the group also DPSing, nobody can stand in any voids.

My feedback is simple, its far far too difficult to even be remotely considered a story mode operation. The idea of story mode is that its supposed to be relatively casual content you can do without much effort in a pug. The R4 op even on sm requires seriously dedicated and experienced players fully geared communicating through a voice channel to even have a chance. I regularly do veteran raids and i do master mode raids when i get together with guildmates for it. Throughout none of this have i encountered anything so exceptionally trying and exhausting as the R4 op. This is on the story mode difficulty, i havent even tried its veteran variant and probably never will. Its absolutely absurd and inexcusable you would bring out story content with such a high level of demand for skill, experience and gear. We have veteran and master modes for a reason, so nerf the r4 sm op, ASAP.

11 hours ago, Wulfurkin said:

My feedback is simple, its far far too difficult to even be remotely considered a story mode operation. The idea of story mode is that its supposed to be relatively casual content you can do without much effort in a pug. The R4 op even on sm requires seriously dedicated and experienced players fully geared communicating through a voice channel to even have a chance. I regularly do veteran raids and i do master mode raids when i get together with guildmates for it. Throughout none of this have i encountered anything so exceptionally trying and exhausting as the R4 op. This is on the story mode difficulty, i havent even tried its veteran variant and probably never will. Its absolutely absurd and inexcusable you would bring out story content with such a high level of demand for skill, experience and gear. We have veteran and master modes for a reason, so nerf the r4 sm op, ASAP.

I would like to say I agree with you but that I do not necessarily fully agree with how you say it. Yes I do agree R4 is absolutely overtuned for a SM operation... by today's standards, before 4.0 a lot of operations would also require a great amount of coordination between players. Especially in specific bosses known as PUG killers, that would just stonewall your progression if your group lacked the skill and cooperation to get past them, Draxus from Dread Fortress is a good example. I remember back in the day having to enter teamspeak in order to beat DF and DP, and even then it wasn't every PUG that could do it. So by those standards, R4 is actually normal. However since 4.0 with how nerfed the SM ops were, sometimes outright removing mechanics, raids like Gods, Dxun and R4 stand out since the bosses aren't just punching bags and you actually have to do the mechanics. And even though Bioware has nerfed Gods and Dxun, they clearly haven't done that to the same extent that they did with the other operations, and R4 barely got any nerfs if any at all since its launch. So I say the issue is Bioware can't pick a lane and stick with it here, they want SM ops to be acessible? Fine, completely understandable, so nerf everything so anyone can do it. Do they want SM Ops to actually require coordination and prepare you for HM and NiM? Also fine, so unnerf the other operations, because right now there is a cognitive dissonance in terms of design between the pre 5.0 ops and the post 5.0 ops in terms of accessibility and difficulty. I would personally welcome SM operations requiring coordination and understanding of mechanics again instead of op bosses being glorified punching bags, however its clear Bioware's overall intent with ops isn't that which begs the question why R4 is so overtuned in comparison to its peers.

On 4/2/2023 at 6:00 PM, FlameYOL said:

I would like to say I agree with you but that I do not necessarily fully agree with how you say it. Yes I do agree R4 is absolutely overtuned for a SM operation... by today's standards, before 4.0 a lot of operations would also require a great amount of coordination between players. Especially in specific bosses known as PUG killers, that would just stonewall your progression if your group lacked the skill and cooperation to get past them, Draxus from Dread Fortress is a good example. I remember back in the day having to enter teamspeak in order to beat DF and DP, and even then it wasn't every PUG that could do it. So by those standards, R4 is actually normal. However since 4.0 with how nerfed the SM ops were, sometimes outright removing mechanics, raids like Gods, Dxun and R4 stand out since the bosses aren't just punching bags and you actually have to do the mechanics. And even though Bioware has nerfed Gods and Dxun, they clearly haven't done that to the same extent that they did with the other operations, and R4 barely got any nerfs if any at all since its launch. So I say the issue is Bioware can't pick a lane and stick with it here, they want SM ops to be acessible? Fine, completely understandable, so nerf everything so anyone can do it. Do they want SM Ops to actually require coordination and prepare you for HM and NiM? Also fine, so unnerf the other operations, because right now there is a cognitive dissonance in terms of design between the pre 5.0 ops and the post 5.0 ops in terms of accessibility and difficulty. I would personally welcome SM operations requiring coordination and understanding of mechanics again instead of op bosses being glorified punching bags, however its clear Bioware's overall intent with ops isn't that which begs the question why R4 is so overtuned in comparison to its peers.

I actually dont mind the mechanics that require coordination, but thats why we have veteran mode. To do these you join a guild with a progression op team who will tackle these bosses through discord voice chat. When you master these operations you jump into nightmare mode where there is no room for error. In sm no such requirements should exist, the bosses SHOULD be punching bags where the only requirements are the proper gear and understanding of how to handle your own class in pve. My criticism is specifically aimed at the r4 sm op, because its not accessible like that. You cant expect a pug to coordinate the way a guild progression team would over discord voice chat. 

10 hours ago, Wulfurkin said:

I actually dont mind the mechanics that require coordination, but thats why we have veteran mode. To do these you join a guild with a progression op team who will tackle these bosses through discord voice chat. When you master these operations you jump into nightmare mode where there is no room for error. In sm no such requirements should exist, the bosses SHOULD be punching bags where the only requirements are the proper gear and understanding of how to handle your own class in pve. My criticism is specifically aimed at the r4 sm op, because its not accessible like that. You cant expect a pug to coordinate the way a guild progression team would over discord voice chat. 

You don't have the understanding of your own class if op bosses are only punching bags

On 4/7/2023 at 12:56 PM, Wulfurkin said:

I actually dont mind the mechanics that require coordination, but thats why we have veteran mode. To do these you join a guild with a progression op team who will tackle these bosses through discord voice chat. When you master these operations you jump into nightmare mode where there is no room for error. In sm no such requirements should exist, the bosses SHOULD be punching bags where the only requirements are the proper gear and understanding of how to handle your own class in pve. My criticism is specifically aimed at the r4 sm op, because its not accessible like that. You cant expect a pug to coordinate the way a guild progression team would over discord voice chat. 

I definitely think the mechanics should be more forgiving but I disagree with the idea of SM OP Bosses being only good for punching bags. There should be still some amount of effort you need to put in to defeat them if those operations are meant to prepare you for harder difficulties. Its a stepping stone, SM prepares you for HM which prepares you for NiM. Sadly as it is in the game now the majority of SM ops don't prepare you for anything. And that IMO is a bit of an issue, though again ultimately if Bioware wants it so that's their prerogative. There are benefits to having the ops be that accessible. My problem is the cognitive dissonance between their usual approach and R4. 

5 hours ago, FlameYOL said:

I definitely think the mechanics should be more forgiving but I disagree with the idea of SM OP Bosses being only good for punching bags. There should be still some amount of effort you need to put in to defeat them if those operations are meant to prepare you for harder difficulties. Its a stepping stone, SM prepares you for HM which prepares you for NiM. Sadly as it is in the game now the majority of SM ops don't prepare you for anything. And that IMO is a bit of an issue, though again ultimately if Bioware wants it so that's their prerogative. There are benefits to having the ops be that accessible. My problem is the cognitive dissonance between their usual approach and R4. 

This is actually my criticism too, the cognitive dissonance. We can disagree on what sm ops should be like but thats not the point here. The problem is the R4 op requiring a different kind of skillset from other sm ops.

30 minutes ago, Wulfurkin said:

This is actually my criticism too, the cognitive dissonance. We can disagree on what sm ops should be like but thats not the point here. The problem is the R4 op requiring a different kind of skillset from other sm ops.

Ops split into two, legacy and not legacy. Legacy op sm can be even done by monkeys and all mechanics were pretty much removed from what sm ops used to be. Anything that is not legacy still has mechanics even in sm, havent done dxun and gods sm in ages but think their mechanics were never removed.

Either way this is not to post to make any kind of suggestion or feedback, this feedback when the op was not released yet and was only available on pts 

1 minute ago, xxSHOONYxx said:

Ops split into two, legacy and not legacy. Legacy op sm can be even done by monkeys and all mechanics were pretty much removed from what sm ops used to be. Anything that is not legacy still has mechanics even in sm, havent done dxun and gods sm in ages but think their mechanics were never removed

Dxun and gods do have mechanics on sm but they are easy to grasp, similar to challenging a flashpoint boss. It might take a few tries but then you are good. The R4 op goes well beyond this, it requires planning, strategy and communication during the fight. If i want to have a chance at conquering this raid i have to setup for it with my op progression guild.  We have so far not succeededd, despite having beaten every VM op aside from R4 of course. The fact that this op even has a veteran mode in its current state is lunacy.