I participate in a couple of ops per week, mainly on SM and HM difficulties. Most of them are ops from 3.0 or earlier (So no Gods or Dxun). On PTS I played a concealment DPS operative and tested SM. I think it's also worth noting that all players were geared in 330 from the pier vendor, with several being augmented as well.

I'm not sure if it was intended but at about 70-60% HP, all adds, bombs, turrets, wall lasers, and fire tiles stopped spawning. Then the boss continued to fire lasers and repeated a 45-second cast until we downed it. At the start of the encounter, it felt chaotic but enjoyable, though for SM it felt like a lot was being thrown all at once. This may prove overwhelming to any players who may be new to ops and diving in for the first time.

Difficulty-wise, it felt more mechanically harder than other ops bosses. But pretty similar to similar Lord Kanoth specifically. The group I joined was able to down it in one go, without voice-chat on SM. However, there were several deaths and we relied on multiple battle rezes to revive players.

Damage-wise, the encounter felt good. Nothing super low or super high, the worst was the bomb detonations. Which the healers were able to manage. Adds and the environmental hazards (fire tiles and laser I assume) were constantly mixed together.

Our group spread out for the grenades, and I was personally able to avoid most of the fire tiles and wall lasers with the operative roll. I'm not sure about tanking the droids, however, but I believe we had them separate. As for the bombs, I don't think we ever got that mechanic down. We always healed through it.

As a mDPS, I felt like I was more focused on adds or moving out of the way than burning the boss. At least until we encountered the repeated 45-second cast.

I am a marauder and I have recently beaten this boss with 330 gear on SM. on the live servers I usually do a lot of vets and SM ops.

To start off with, this fight was really fun. I love the idea of having to pay attention to my surroundings and being constantly on the move to avoid damage. Doesn't really make the fight feel stale, and it was surprising how challenging it actually felt, especially for SM. There is just a couple things I would like to see tweak.

First off disarming the bombs. While I did eventually figure out how the mechanic worked it did feel really weird at first because there really was no visual feedback that the panel I was clicking was actually doing anything to the bombs. It took me far too long to realize that when we hit the panel with matching color, it changes to a different one. Mind you, the game was muted for me because my computers sound was broken, so if there was a audio cue, I could not hear it. Also wasn't sure if once you bring down the shields on all bombs if they just disarm right away, or if you had to dps them down to stop them from exploding. In the end, we kinda ignored the bombs and just focused on the adds.

As for the difficulty in SM, I do think it can be toned down just a bit. Our whole raid group was in 330 and it took a long time to get down some of the adds and the boss. I might understand that if I was in vet, but in SM the health should be a bit lower. I also think the amount of aoe effects going out my be a bit too much for SM at the moment. Might be a bit too much for the more casual player, so my suggestion would be that if you can, trying making it so not as many lasers and floor panels go off at once, and for the gernades, maybe not have the huge red aoe show up in SM. Also for SM mode, maybe have it so one enforcer spawns instead of two. Everything else felt really good.

Overall this is a really good opening to this op and I cannot wait to try out the other bosses!!

Background:

How often do you participate in Operations and on what difficulty?

4-5 times a week mostly Nightmare

What role did you play on PTS?

Healer, Scoundrel

What difficulty did you test on PTS?

SM

Feedback:

What are your overall impressions of IP-CPT?

Was fun and challenging.

What are your top three suggestions for improving this encounter?

Floor vents could be more visible.

Unsure if it was a burn phase at the end, but it started around 60% and the mechanics stopped, keep the floor vents going.

Longer time to react to the floor vents

How did the difficulty feel relative to other bosses on this difficulty?

Significantly more difficult

Were you and your team able to defeat the boss on Story or Veteran difficulty?

Yes on story, did not attempt veteran

If you were unable to defeat the boss, what gave your team the most trouble?

Did the length of the fight feel appropriate?

No, the fight felt long, since at the front there was all these mechanics to do, then around 60% they all stopped and pretty much just needed to burn the boss, the final burn took 5-6 minutes as I recall.

It would be very helpful if video of your encounter with the boss could be provided.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1413783228

Damage and Health

Were there any enemies or abilities that seemed to deal far too much damage?

No

Were there any abilities that seemed too trivial or ignorable?

No

Were adds consistently surviving into the hazards phase throughout the fight or only towards the end?

No

Did the health of the adds during the bomb phases seem appropriate?

Yes

Mechanics

Did you feel the need to spread out for Positional Adjustment Grenades to avoid raid damage?

The grenade damage were not significant enough, that it required positional adjustments.

Were you able to avoid most of the floor and wall beam hazards after some practice?

Yes

Did your team tank the Enforcers separately or stack them?

Stacked

Did you feel the need to tank swap the Enforcers on Veteran?

Was your team able to disarm the bombs in time? Did you feel the need to?

Yes, unsure

Roles

If you played as a tank, did managing the Enforcers require the use of defensive cooldowns?

If you played as a healer, did you feel like the fight required enough healing output?

I completed the fight in 318 on SM as noted by the post by Jackie, I felt myself and the other healer were able to keep up.

If you played as a melee DPS, did you feel like you were able to achieve acceptable damage uptime?

Hi,

today we encountered the first boss of the R-4 Anomaly Operation in veteran difficulty. We did manage to kill it and I will link a PoV of the kill below.

As for the boss itself, the fire panels are quite nice and they swap at a decent speed. The shields-phase in which you have to deactivate the shields by clicking the consoles with the matching symbols didn't make much sense to me though, atleast when it comes to the late ones.

You can easily manage to get the double shields down and kill the turrets. When it comes to the tripple shields though, it becomes insanely tight. Communicating the symbols takes way too much time which is why we had 4 people camping on one of the consoles and just spamming it. Since there is no punish-mechanic for clicking the wrong symbols, you can simply spam all 4 at the same time to get rid of all the shields as fast as possible (which you have to do since the time is getting way too close for the triple ones).

So we basically ignored the symbols and just spammed all consoles.

If you want people to communicate the symbols the timespan of 30 seconds it definitely too close it there are more than 2 shields at the same time. Being able to click all 4 consoles no matter which symbols are currently active allows us to fully ignore them.

After the triple shields phase the boss didn't really do anything anymore so we simply burned the boss until it was dead while dodging a few voids. It felt quite empty in the second half of the fight.

Heal PoV -

Hi,

yesterday we found different bugs in R4-anomalie pts.

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.

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 agree with this post.

Tried with 5 DPS in SM and the boss exploded at 16%

I was in this same group, and the boss currently one-shots at 7:09 minutes into the fight. We ran the fight with a 2 Tank, 4 Dps, 2 Heal composition, and a 1 Tank, 5 DPS, 2 Heal composition, and the lowest we got the boss to was about 16%.

The group consisted of 8 decently to very experienced Master Mode raiders, and we were unable to push it beyond 16% even with 5 DPS in Story Mode, as the one-shot mechanic seems unavoidable.

The remainder of the fight definitely seems doable and survivable though, it's mainly only the boss's health that is proving to be a stopping point.

Hi,

so after the new patch we tested the first boss on veteran mode again. The DTPS are slightly higher which is a good change. The turrets have very low hp which is fine since it takes much time to get rid of all the shields. I will link down below a few videos of gameplay we collected during our testing.

It seems that there is currently no way of avoiding the "Disproportionate Intrusion Response" cast which always wipes the group. Since we always get this at ~60% HP remaining we can also not kill it before the cast is done. The only way we were able to kill it again was by hiding behind a wall so the boss cannot see us at the end of the cast. Then he re-casts it and we do it again.

A member of our group clipped a few moments which I will link here.

1. Boss kill after the first patch (breaking line of sight)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0jKk1lkZ8g

2. Getting killed by "Disproportionate Intrusion Response" since we were not able to avoid it, even when clicking all symbols correctly and not letting a single turret explode

-

Another thing I wanted to add here is a bug where you cannot respawn after a wipe at the second boss. This is probably changed due to the "fix" where you can no longer re-enter the boss room after dieing. Now you cannot even respawn at all and the encounter stays active even though you're not in-fight and the boss has reset. So every time we died we had to expand the group by leaving and formed a new one. Even re-entering the operation wasn't possible anymore since the "group is engaded with an encounter". So forming a new group with a new phase was necessary.

-

The encounter would be vastly improved by lowering the health of the boss making the final burn phase much shorter. You have 2 alternating phases, play each twice and then burn. The encounter should not take 10 minutes. That's just too long and the length adds nothing to the challenge. A tightly tuned 6 minute encounter is way more enjoyable than those absurdly drawn out fights you had at times and seem to be going for again.

I also find it questionable that you'd add a burn phase at the end. Seems like a lazy mechanic. Why not just an enrage instead? Allow groups to have more damage in this or that phase - allow more variation in DPS specs instead of forcing classes that can do the most dmg in x amount of seconds in that one phase.

The fight also just hates melee. You have two patterns that allow range to continue DPS while melee has no choice but to run away and do nothing. Why do all 4 vents around the boss have to light up? Make it 3 - give melee a chance to position themselves and continue DPS. Pattern across the mid section has the same issue - range can continue DPS, melee has to stand around idle. No fun. You have to avoid it all the same but you actually get a reward if you do it well. The cross beam centered around the enemy has the same issue. Leave a spot for melees (with only 4 m range because it doesn't affect those with more range as much).

lastly - might want to tone down the graphical intensity of the fight. This will run like total crap on many player PCs while there is no need for those absurd beams of light or that much visual fire. We all know swtor does not run the smoothest for most people so why add to the problem? Visual cues could be sufficiently done with less overkill.

I was in this same group, and the boss currently one-shots at 7:09 minutes into the fight. We ran the fight with a 2 Tank, 4 Dps, 2 Heal composition, and a 1 Tank, 5 DPS, 2 Heal composition, and the lowest we got the boss to was about 16%.

 

The group consisted of 8 decently to very experienced Master Mode raiders, and we were unable to push it beyond 16% even with 5 DPS in Story Mode, as the one-shot mechanic seems unavoidable.

The remainder of the fight definitely seems doable and survivable though, it's mainly only the boss's health that is proving to be a stopping point.

Did the fight today, Although the check is kinda high for SM it certainly is do-able. We had no issues.

DPS check is way overtuned for SM right now. Difference in health between the SM and HM version is also only 1million. We wiped but were able to kill it at the very last second.

Test Date 2022-03-09

What difficulty did you test on PTS?

SM

Feedback:

What are your overall impressions of IP-CPT?

Fight felt more challenging, maybe even overturned in regards to damage taken and hard enrage.

What are your top three suggestions for improving this encounter?

Decrease damage taken

Decrease IP-CPT health

Add lockout to bomb phase when the wrong symbol is choosen, example if there is no square to be, and the person clicks square console, they are locked until they click a different console.

How did the difficulty feel relative to other bosses on this difficulty?

Was unable to test other bosses.

Were you and your team able to defeat the boss on Story or Veteran difficulty?

Yes on SM

Did the length of the fight feel appropriate?

No additional time is required, or health of the boss needs to be reduced.

Found a raid wide wipe mechanic at 7:10.

A member of our raid discovered that this mechanic can be avoided by line of sighting the boss. We are unsure if this is intended or not. but you can do this indefinitely until the boss is defeated, which we did.

It would be very helpful if video of your encounter with the boss could be provided.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1421007519

Damage and Health

Were there any enemies or abilities that seemed to deal far too much damage?

Floor vents are very punishing as visibility is still an issue, that we experienced from last week

The combination of floor vents and beams is leaves some room for error, but continually eating them is very punishing

Were there any abilities that seemed too trivial or ignorable?

No

Were adds consistently surviving into the hazards phase throughout the fight or only towards the end?

Adds survived, because we were focused on working the symbol consoles.

Did the health of the adds during the bomb phases seem appropriate?

Yes

Mechanics

Did you feel the need to spread out for Positional Adjustment Grenades to avoid raid damage?

Yes

Were you able to avoid most of the floor and wall beam hazards after some practice?

Yes

Did your team tank the Enforcers separately or stack them?

Stacked

Was your team able to disarm the bombs in time? Did you feel the need to?

Yes, and yes.

See above note about how to improve, as we discovered if you just spam click the consoles, until all the shield are down, we could clear it. If noted is added, please add a few more seconds to complete as it was very tight, maybe 5-10 more seconds could be added.

Roles

If you played as a healer, did you feel like the fight required enough healing output?

We all tried to complete in 318 gear, but in the end for that last few pulls we swapped to 330. In my opinion it is very punishing to complete if you entire group was in 318

Notes:

See time stamp 1:45:32 of video posted where we line of sight the boss to ignore the damage from disproportionate intrusion.

Background:

-How often do you participate in Operations and what difficulty?

Me and my team are doing NiM operations three times a week for several years.

-What role did you play on PTS?

Assassin tank

-What difficulty did you test on PTS?

Veteran mode

Feedback:

-What are your overall impressions of IP-CPT?

Very positive. This encounter is funny and I like it.

-What are your top three suggestions for improving this encounter?

The tile, where is gonna be a flame soon, is by my opinion not properly indicated. I mean if I am tanking Inferno Enforcer, I have a problem to see it with big yellow circle (inferno protocol I think) all around me. Otherwise I think i don't have any more suggestions.

-How did the difficulty feel relative to other bosses on this difficulty?

We only tested first boss on VM. But if you mean overall, I find it the most challenging fight in VM of all operations. But it's a new content so it's perfectly fine by me.

-Were you and your team able to defeat the boss on Story or Veteran difficulty?

We were able to clear all 3 bosses on Story difficulty. We were progressing this boss yesterday but we didn't kill it.

-If you were unable to defeat the boss, what gave your team the most trouble?

I think it was clicking consoles and killing armed explosive droids in time.

-Did the length of the fight feel appropriate?

Yeah.

-It would be very helpful if video of your encounter with the boss could be provided.

Feel free to watch it. The video is without sound because we don't communicate in english. Sorry for a quality of vid.

Damage and Health

-Were there any enemies or abilities that seemed to deal far too damage?

Our DPSs and healers were complaining about damage from Shrapnel wound ability. From tanking perspective I think I did't find any heavy hitting ability to me.

-Were there any abilities that seemed too trivial or ignorable?

I think none of them. Maybe Positional Adjustment Grenade: Minor. I think we sometimes stacked them and it was considering other dmg nothing. So we kind of ignored them, yeah.

-Were the adds consistenly surviving into the hazards phase throughout the fight or only towards the end?

They were surviving throughout the fight I think, yeah. Were were not able to kill them in time I think.

-Did the health of the adds during the bomb phase seem appropriate?

If you mean armed explosive droids, their health is fine. Inferno and Overload enforcer is another story. After we finish disarming droids, there is seems to be not enough time to kill enforcers and turrets before another hazard phase.

Mechanics

-Did you feel the need to spread out for Positional Adjustment Grenades to avoid raid damage?

Definitely. Mainly because of the Shrapnel wound dot from Major grenade.

-Were you able to avoid most of the floor and wall beam hazards after some practice?

Yeah. From my perspective as a tank I was able to avoid most of them. Our DPSs and mainly melee were struggling to maintain uptime on boss and avoiding them, tho. Healers were heavy struggling to avoid them. But I think with a little bit more practice, it won't be a problem.

-Did your team tank the Enforcers separately or stack them?

I tried to have both of them on myself but it was too much. So one tank per Enforcer and we were trying to stack them and swapping on 2-3 stacks of increased dmg from them. But they were separated most of the time because second tank was trying to click console.

-Did you feel the need to tank swap the Enforcers on Veteran?

Yeah. Definitely.

-Was your team able to disarm the bombs in time? Did you feel the need to?

We were not able to disarm them. We dedicated 4 ppl to do consoles (3 DPS and 1 tank). And I, as a second tank, was trying to call the geometric shapes. We heard that you can spam console just to get rid of it, but we have tried to done it properly. After dropping the shield from Explosives droids, there was not enough time to kill them I think. Maybe consider to extend time for their cast. I think with a few more seconds(5 seconds more??), we should be able to do that. Problem is the wave with 3 explosives droids mainly.

Roles

-If you played as a tank, did managing the Enforcers require the use of defensive cooldowns?

Yeah, I was using them to avoid damage.

- I typically participate in operations every week, 3-4 days a week depending on my workload. I often do difficulties ranging from story mode to nightmare mode.

- I played a healer (tried both merc and operative. PLEASE fix the merc overheating issues)

- Testing story mode difficulty

- Took us 2.5 hours to defeat this boss...we all died, but the boss died too, so that's good?

- I do not believe there are any other bosses at this difficulty on story mode. The closest may be Ixax

- video not provided due to toaster computer.

- Healer output was not really that high unless people stood in fire/lazers...healer stress was high because you had to run across the room most of the time to heal someone, and the debuff was uncleansable so someone who wasn't able to move fast enough out of fire would take extra damage. This is most of the group. Due to the pattern of the boss, we were able to move ahead of the floor fires at the beginning, but there isn't enough warning to move out of them if you don't know what to anticipate (Took me several wipes to notch down the pattern. I like the mechanic, needs more warning)

I noticed most of the posts on this thread occurred in early March prior to the first 'fixes', so this is current as of March 16, after the LOS 'fix' and other patches done.

Some feedback (I'm one of the few who know the feedback will likely be ignored but would like to give as much info as possible so there are fewer bugs when it goes live and everyone else plays the game doesn't get burned out going against unkillable bosses.) Before we go into it, thank you for fixing a few of the other issues - though taking away the LOS interrupt...well, I'm not going to thank you for that change. Mostly thank you for making the boss killable. So far we've only killed the first boss. I may update this thread tomorrow when we pull the second boss.

My team went to work on the OP in Story mode today. A few thoughts

- There needs to be more warning in story mode for the floor fire. ESPECIALLY since story mode should be able to be completed by all players in the game. It was extremely difficult for experienced players to kill the boss with the uncleansable debuffs ticking on them, and this will be impossible for most story mode players to complete. I understand making it challenging - it should be - but most players are not at the skill levels of the sales teams on the servers, so when they get together for an op, it should be (In story mode) a bit more survivable.

- For story mode, I would also suggest reducing the number of clicks needed to drop the shields around the bombs. 2 would probably be better for story mode players.

- Story mode the end cast either needs to be longer or interruptable. Again, please take into account that most players are not on the level of the sales teams. Story should be difficult but not impossible for newer players.

- I do not like the size of the room. As a healer I spent most of my time running around to get in range of the other players to heal them. Even standing in mid often means you're out of range of the other players a lot. This is more of a personal complaint, but again, for story mode raiders this is something that really ups the challenge, especially with the fire and lazers going out and moving people around. It's very unfriendly for AOE heals, and very unfriendly for melee dps.

- We started the attempts with 2 tanks, 4 dps, and 2 healers, and ended up switching to 5 dps due to the one-shot mechanic. There's too much down time due to the shield on the boss for 4 dps alone to kill it.

- Prior to starting the fight I pulled an invisible add with a kolto bomb which put us in combat...even without having pulled the boss. Please make it so the Kolto bombs won't pull the invisible adds in the walls.

- I can't comment on the graphics since (due to issues that no one is able to figure out) PTS is not loading on my new computer, so I was playing on my old toaster (which is able to run the pts but god forbid you try to have semi decent graphics on it or it will explode) but from what my team mates were saying it looked pretty good.

- Why does the first subway tunnel have an exhaustion zone and not the second? (Mostly curious and wondering if it's connected to an achievement)

- Overall, the concept is good. I think the dev(s) who came up with this are extremely Sadistic, but it will be challenging even in the new gear. However, if this op is one that you actually want pug groups to play using the group finder, the difficulty will need to be dropped a bit. Currently, everyone needs to be in voice chat communicating everything, and this is not typically possible in pug groups. I do not believe this op is currently at the skill level for the average pug group to complete. The feedback that I have gotten from other teams that have also tried this is that it is difficult (even for Nim raiders), and most who completed the op did so prior to the LOS interrupt 'fix'.

- Side note: The first boss did not drop loot. I know this is probably intended in the PTS, but please don't forget to change that when it goes live.

After trying each week, we were finally able to kill IP-CPT on 8-man SM today with 5 DPS, 1 tank, 2 healers.

Combat log: https://parsely.io/parser/view/635493/1

In general, the boss is tuned correctly for SM but feels too difficult for a first operation boss. There's too much AoE going out (and not enough time to avoid it), too much coordination involved (with clicking buttons).

It's a shame that now that all AoE damage was reduced, players can stand inside the AoE and heal away the damage. I'd rather that players have 1-2 seconds more time to move out of the AoE but then have the AoE cause a lot of damage.

Anyway, to sum up I'd say either nerf IP-CPT further, or buff Watchdog and Lord Kanoth. Or switch the order so that Watchdog comes before IP-CPT. While IP-CPT feels correctly tuned for SM, the first boss should never be more difficult than the following bosses.

We found one bug that must be fixed before the operation goes live: You can stand in the entrance/exit doorways and completely avoid all fire/laser AoE damage, both in SM and VM. Please add a collision to the doorways so that players cannot enter this area during the boss fight, or increase the AoE areas.

I'd like to add to what Jerba was writing:

for SM

I agree there should be more Time between ground indicators and the Fire. requiring memorization of the pattern is great for Nim and ok for HM but while it should be important for minimizing downtime and optimizing DPS/HPS it shouldn't be required to perfectly memorize the Pattern in SM, yes it wasn't necessary with last Fridays tuning, but being able to just Ignore the fire is worse then trying to get out, not having enough time and thus wiping for failing the mechanic. There should probably be an 0 damage one-shot at a certain number of stacks, or more Damage so the mechanic can't just be ignored.

the above changes are what I think should definitely happen.

below are some thoughts on why I disliked the fight from a tank perspective, doing something about that would be nice but being able to one tank the fight or just live with it being boring for most of the fight doesn't make it a terrible fight.

when I played Kinetic the previous times we tried IP-CPT It felt very unenjoyable not getting hit for the entire first part of the fight meant not being able to just play like usual due to a lack of Resources.

if we killed the Enforcers that meant I could help with the Burn at the end without grilling DPS/Heals -> but I'd be back to having no one hit me -> the Rotation would feel lacking.

clicking the console is already hard for me because it's such a tiny Button and I like playing with High DPI and Zoomed out a lot, turning the camera just right so that I get zoomed in by having a Wall behind me sometimes works.

but when I have an Enforcer it feels really bad. I don't get why we couldn't just have a Temporary ability while standing in the Corner, have a much bigger target for clicking or something.

Then last Friday when I played dps I had way more fun, there wasn't these ugly Downtimes when there was nothing to Tank, everything died much quicker (probably more because of tuning than my meager DPS), no Enforcer getting in my way when clicking the console,...

Maybe making the console easier to click and making the Boss hit the two Players with the highest Threat for smoothing out Tank rotations will make it better but I'm not sure if you can fix the fight from a Tank perspective to be Honest, making the Enforcers stacks scale faster would enforce two Tanks but it would still feel terrible for the other Phases, please if you decide to enforce two Tanks also fix the console clicking with an add behind me and do something about the phases when there are no Enforcers.

lastly could you make the Boss Hitbox just a little bit larger so that Melees can still Hit the Boss when a single laser goes trough the middle and 10m Abilities work when two Lasers go through the middle?

I don't think it would create a Safe Spot where Melee could just sit at 4m and not move, instead (because of the combination of reasons to move) it would still require just as much Movement but cause less / no downtime.

Info: Co-written by tank main (me, Sin) and healer main (Merc). Our group has been solo tanking and the other healers is a Sorc. All comments are about the current HM version of the fight on PTS.

I enjoy the fight overall; it is keeping the game alive and exciting for me (someone who is nearly 100% on ops). It is reminiscent of fights in FFXIV where you have to dodge a lot of mechanics (fire, beams, grenades x2) and get a debuff of shame if you mess up (in this case, letting a droid explode, standing in fire, or standing in a beam). The debuff auto-killing you at 5 stacks feels like SWTOR's spin on the idea, which I also like. Further, as a tank, I appreciate that a lot of thought/care was put into where the beams and fire spawns. There are very few times where I feel like I can't DPS the boss at all. The choice to do a set pattern over a random pattern is much appreciated as it helps me plan ahead in certain parts. However, as I am still learning the fight, it gets progressively hard to see where is safe and where the fire is going to spawn. There are red beams, red circles from bombs (big and small), orange and blue circles from droids, red droid conals, turrets shooting, boss in the middle, and whatever effects I/other players have going on from abilities (sniper shield, deflection bubble, etc). Further, the "fire will spawn here" effect is very faint and difficult to make out by itself, let alone with everything else going on. The fight would be so much better if it could stand out more.

For this next piece of feedback, I don't expect this to be "fixed," but you all should consider it for the future. FFXIV is able to get away with the "all the floor is lava" approach because the arenas are much smaller and the bosses are much bigger. Everyone can still do damage to the boss a good majority of the time (which I feel is also true for the boss, but not the adds), and healers can still reach everyone for healing. Meanwhile, everyone is incredibly spread out for this fight and requires constant cleanses. If the cleanses were like Apex (i.e., most people can take care of their own cleanse most of the time), I feel this would be a non-issue. However, considering the frequency and urgency for cleansing dots, the size of the room is a huge struggle that takes away from the fight. Players are often unreachable to healers due to beams/fire/grenades/button placement. So healers are unnecessarily stressed and have to run around constantly. If the room was a bit smaller, this would definitely be more reasonable. However, I doubt that you all will change the room size this late into the game, so I would suggest decreasing the number of dots that need to be cleansed (e.g., literally changing how many dots go out, how often they go out, how long they last, how long they tick, etc). As it stands, this fight puts non-cleansing classes (PT/snipers) as well as classes with slower cleanses (Sin/Jug/Sentinel) at a huge disadvantage to classes with cleanses (Sorc/Merc/Operative). Going back to Apex, there were ways to get around the non-cleansing disadvantage through tacticals (which is great!) but that is not the case here. As a Sin tank, I have 3 cleanses (shroud + 2 stealth shrouds) and I still have to coordinate with my healers to get all my cleanses. I cannot image being a Jugg tank or God forbid a PT tank (I love both tank classes, I'm just talking in terms of cleanses).

Besides the cleansing issue, healers are literally unable to heal people a significant portion of time due to the mixture of mechanics and room size. When people are on button duty, due to the DPS requirements during that phase, one healer must be on button duty. This is fine except that they are unable to heal anyone else who is on a button (not by a long shot). They can throw some DPS on turrets or heal the roamers, but it is up to the roaming healer to take care of nearly the entire group during this part. This would be reasonable except that in SWTOR, the healer's primary job is to heal. If one healer is stuck not healing and the other healer is wasting time scampering around the room getting people topped off/cleansed (see issue above about cleanses going out too frequently), then there is something fundamentally wrong with the fight. Either the DPS requirement is too high and the buttons should be occupied by 2 tanks and 2 DPS (with both healers able to roam), or the buttons should be closer together (allowing the button healer to cover more of the room), or some other solution (admittedly I am not a game dev). Regardless, something needs to give. (Our group has hardcore PVE players who have cleared most if not all available ops content, so please don't write this comment off as simply DPS not pulling their weight.)

I'm not sure how I feel about the button clicking mechanic being so tight that you're guaranteed to fail two turrets over the course of the entire fight. It feels like the boss should just give you a stack of shame at those instances instead. (Why make it the player's fault if it's inevitable?)

TL;DR (I hope you did R though):

1) Fight is awesome and reminds me of FFXIV with SWTOR spins. Love it!

2) Make the animation of where the fire is going to appear easier to see.

3) Think more critically about room size vs other mechanics.

4) Button mechanic timing is too tight. If the intent is to force players to pick up stacks, have boss give stacks.

- How often do you participate in Operations and on what difficulty?

Weekly, mostly HM and started some NiM.

- What role did you play on PTS?

Tank

- What difficulty did you test on PTS?

HM

Feedback:

- What are your overall impressions of IP-CPT?

I really like the fight, it is something new and the current state is quite enjoyable to me.

- How did the difficulty feel relative to other bosses on this difficulty

Comparing it to live servers atm it feels similiar to other fights. Pretty well balanced but with a harsh dps check.

- Were you and your team able to defeat the boss on Story or Veteran difficulty?

HM - 3 times so far in different weeks/builds

- If you were unable to defeat the boss, what gave your team the most trouble?

(dps requirement on the boss)

- Did the length of the fight feel appropriate?

yes

Damage and Health

- Were there any enemies or abilities that seemed to deal far too much damage?

no

- Were there any abilities that seemed too trivial or ignorable?

no

- Were adds consistently surviving into the hazards phase throughout the fight or only towards the end?

We have one Enforcer life into P5 (About 30% HP left) and we left turrets allive in P5/6 in favor of dps uptime on the boss. Tanks taunted them from time to time.

- Did the health of the adds during the bomb phases seem appropriate?

yes

Mechanics

Our composition:

Tanks: 2 Sin, Heals: Oper/Merc, DPS: PT, Sniper, Jugg, Assassin

- Did you feel the need to spread out for Positional Adjustment Grenades to avoid raid damage?

We let the major big greandes being carried out to the edge, while the rest were stacked up under the boss. We more or less ignored the minor grenades dmg in favor of having more dps uptime.

- Were you able to avoid most of the floor and wall beam hazards after some practice?

As a sin tank with the +15% movements speed and force speed I was able to dodge nearly everything. Other members were able to do it good enough to not die.

- Did your team tank the Enforcers separately or stack them?

In Phase 2 we stacked them up. In Phase 4 seperate until the puzzle was finished then stacked up aswell. (1T each)

- Did you feel the need to tank swap the Enforcers on Veteran?

Maybe not a "need", but we did a swap for the last Enforcer that was alive in P5 to make it easier for the healers.

- Was your team able to disarm the bombs in time? Did you feel the need to?

Yes, we have 1 person calling the colours/shapes and without mistakes we clear the bombs in P4 with ~3s to spare. It is punishing to miss a bomb, mainly that the stacks refresh if you already had some. (I like the current state)

Roles

- If you played as a tank, did managing the Enforcers require the use of defensive cooldowns?

In P4 I had a Enforcer backpacked while pressing a console. With some selfcleanses, Overcharged Saber and some minimal heals I was able to tank him until the puzzle was finished. Damage output seems good for me.

Overall I think the current state of this boss is really good. It comes with a high dps check on the boss itself. Adds and puzzles are tough but fun.

Today, we tested IP-CPT for 90 minutes on VM, followed by a quick kill on SM.

In general, IP-CPT does not feel like a fun boss at all, and given how difficult it is tuned, I don't look forward to progressing on it for weeks on end after release, especially since it is the first boss and blocks all subsequent bosses.

There is way too much going on with too many flashing animations. This is not a relaxing fight but requires a lot of attention from the group, way more than any previous boss in the game. The fire and lasers are too punishing, there is not enough time to move out and the hitboxes are too big. As a raidleader, it is difficult to keep the group motivated when every mistake (standing in fire) is displayed as a debuff and stays on the player, massively increasing damage taken. As a healer, players are frequently out of range. When getting the large bomb, it is difficult to move out if a fire or laser is in the way. As a button clicker, there's nothing to do for 20 seconds (everyone is out of range for healing, and no adds to kill), and it is no fun when you have to click multiple times because either you clicked on the wrong spot or there is a phantom GCD (replacing the buttons with a temporary ability would help).

Unfortunately, I also don't see a way to improve the situation without nerving all mechanics until they are not punishing anymore, which cannot be the correct solution. I'd say swapping the boss order (so that IP-CPT is the third instead of the first boss) would still be the best solution.

It could be that we are having problems due to ping (180ms vs. 40ms on live), so not enough time to move out of AoE in time.

In SM, we quickly killed it (1 tank, 2 healers, 5 DPS), only having problems because one player forgot to repair and another had major FPS drops. I'd say SM is correctly tuned at the moment.

The previously mentioned bug (you can stand in doorways to avoid all AoE damage) still exists.

In addition, we found the following bugs in the R-4 Anomaly instance:

• Players can duel each other. In all other raid instances, dueling is disabled, so it should be disabled in R-4 as well to prevent players from using push/pulls or other abilities and interfere with boss mechanics.
  
• Throughout the evening, various players had a bug where one player showed up as dead even though he was alive (Screenshot). If this bug happened on a healer, it meant the healer could no longer heal this player. Please ensure that this bug won't hit the live servers.
  
• Some players would not get the Ready Check window, this happened multiple times. They saw that there was a ready check in chat but they did not get the window and were automatically marked as "not ready".
  

Background:

 

[*]How often do you participate in Operations and on what difficulty?

2-3 nights a week, mostly VM or MM

[*]What role did you play on PTS?

Immortal Tank

[*]What difficulty did you test on PTS?

SM

Feedback:

 

[*]What are your overall impressions of IP-CPT?

My Ops team from Live played, and didn't do any research on the encounter before trying it. Overall we thought it was a fun encounter, but SM seems tuned more like a VM on live.

[*]What are your top three suggestions for improving this encounter?

For SM I think more needs to be done to explain the bomb disarm mechanic, or perhaps it has to place symbols only over one bomb at a time to help players focus each bomb. The current mechanic will not be PUGable when it goes live.

Move the terminals a little bit out of the corner so that is easier see the room while also being able to interact with the terminals.

[*]How did the difficulty feel relative to other bosses on this difficulty?

In SM it felt more like what I would expect a VM encounter to feel like. Maybe close to or on par with VM Underlurker in TOS

[*]Were you and your team able to defeat the boss on Story or Veteran difficulty?

We only got it to 12% on SM. Our team was fully geared and augmented to the highest level the PTS offered, and we only spent about 2 hours with no research on mechanics on it.

[*]If you were unable to defeat the boss, what gave your team the most trouble?

It took us a while to learn how the bombs worked, and then the DPS check at the end was the biggest hurdle. With more time our team would be able to defeat it, but it seems overly hard for SM.

[*]Did the length of the fight feel appropriate?

Yes

[*]It would be very helpful if video of your encounter with the boss could be provided.

I will try to remember to record next time we run PTS.

Damage and Health

 

[*]Were there any enemies or abilities that seemed to deal far too much damage?

No

[*]Were there any abilities that seemed too trivial or ignorable?

No

[*]Were adds consistently surviving into the hazards phase throughout the fight or only towards the end?

We were able to get all down before the boss dropped it shield on all but the phase leading into the burn phase, then we typically had the droids and some turrets up. I think this is mostly because the droids seem to spawn later in this set.

[*]Did the health of the adds during the bomb phases seem appropriate?

Yes

Mechanics

 

[*]Did you feel the need to spread out for Positional Adjustment Grenades to avoid raid damage?

Somewhat. It became difficult to do that while keeping melee on the boss. It seems a very anti-melee mechanic.

[*]Were you able to avoid most of the floor and wall beam hazards after some practice?

Floor hazards were easier than beam hazards. It doesn't help that the hit range for the beam is wider than the beam graphic, so you might think you are safe then still get hit.

[*]Did your team tank the Enforcers separately or stack them?

Separately. We found stacking them was problematic with the large cone attacks they do.

[*]Did you feel the need to tank swap the Enforcers on Veteran?

N/A

[*]Was your team able to disarm the bombs in time? Did you feel the need to?

After we figured out that we needed to have a team member coordinate the clicking of the terminals it felt like the bombs were easy enough to disarm. Early on while trying to figure the bombs out we debated ignoring them, or some of them, but decided not too since we plan to eventually do VM and MM for live progression and figured we'd have to have some understanding of the mechanic for those modes.

Roles

 

[*]If you played as a tank, did managing the Enforcers require the use of defensive cooldowns?

Yes

[*]If you played as a healer, did you feel like the fight required enough healing output?

N/A

[*]If you played as a melee DPS, did you feel like you were able to achieve acceptable damage uptime?

N/A, but as a Tank who has to be in melee, I felt it was very difficult to be in close on the boss very much, I have to imagine Melee DPS were also negatively impacted by this. Our team has 2 melee on it.

We found one bug that must be fixed before the operation goes live: You can stand in the entrance/exit doorways and completely avoid all fire/laser AoE damage, both in SM and VM. Please add a collision to the doorways so that players cannot enter this area during the boss fight, or increase the AoE areas.

/bump as this bug is still present as of today's patch, allowing players to avoid all fire/laser damage. This bug MUST be fixed before the boss goes live; can't believe it hasn't been fixed yet.