Woulda been cool to have a feedback thread for the original 7.0 gearing system.

Hello we just ran R-4 the very first boss (woohoo!!) in story mode and finally killed it, we didn't get any loot except Tech Frags (150 each). We got no tokens or currency. https://www.twitch.tv/xam_xam stream rcording on Friday May 3.

There is no gear on all four R-4 Anomaly bosses in story mode, only tech frags.

Boss tokens for Veteran.

 

My suggestion is for the Veteran weekly mission.

 

The veteran weekly mission should give you one boss token of your choice. Then the gearing would be ideal in my opinion.

As requested, here is my feedback on the R-4 gearing system.

 

We are a semi-progression raid group that since release has cleared most nightmare content (except for Apex & Gods), so we're definitely in the upper percentile but not one of the top progression groups.

By killing Nefra MM and running VM ops to farm OP-1 Catalysts (not our first choice but our only choice), we've been at full 330 for a few months now. At this point, players are bored running the same old VM operations, yet most MM bosses are too hard to beat with 330 gear at our skill level. Had the Crystal of Nightmare Fury not been removed, it would now give us the edge to meet some of the DPS/HPS checks with lesser gear. In addition, we've been progressing Dxun MM for the past two years and still haven't beaten Apex yet, so as a raid leader, I am having trouble keeping the group motivated.

 

Since people are starving for new raid content, we've been testing the bosses on PTS and it is not looking good.

• We expect to full clear R-4 SM on release day but that won't help because its loot can only be upgraded to 330, so it's no upgrade for us and there's no point in running SM, nor is there a point in helping other players on the server clear SM. Previously, I had a lot of fun forming 16-man SM runs to take along 8 newbie players with our raid group but even that is not possible with R-4.
  Sadly, the same thing is already happening with MM FPs: With no veteran players queueing in Group Finder, the queue times have increased and new players are no longer able to beat anything but Hammer Station.
  
• Instead, the only way for us to get better gear (and thus unlock more MM content we can beat) is by killing bosses in R-4 VM. From our PTS testing, it is pretty clear that we will not be able to kill the first boss, IP-CPT. The DPS check and amount of movement required exceeds our group's skill level, and the graphical effects are giving players headaches. Having exhausted all my game knowlege and strategies, as a raid leader I have two options:
  1. I can replace the worst-performing players, however the raiding pool on our server has decreased dramatically, so I doubt I'd find a better player. Most other raid groups have already quit.
     
  2. We can share a lockout from another raid group to skip to the second or third boss (whichever is the easiest). Unfortunately, some players are unwilling to do this as this goes against the spirit of progression raiding, and it would be my last option as well.
     

 

My point is:

It doesn't matter what loot drops in VM, as long as we cannot kill the first boss. The first boss in an operation must not be a progression blocker, it should be killable by a group of veteran players (most of us have been playing since release). Not as easy as Nefra but easy enough that we can kill it in 2-3 weeks of progression.

Any following bosses will have to step up the difficulty of course, but this way, we can continue farming the first boss to gradually increase our gear and meet DPS/HPS checks on the following bosses. This is the traditional way progression raiding works, except that with the Legacy system, it'll be a little faster since we are not bound by weekly lockouts, only by the number of alts (e.g. I'm a dedicated player so I have 14 Scoundrels at level 80).

 

Therefore, please reconsider the balancing of the VM bosses. My group will not survive a 6-months progression on IP-CPT VM, without any carrot (= realistic chance of gear upgrades).

We are among your most loyal players, having stuck around when most raid groups quit. We love the game and we love running operations. Usually, we'd be looking forward to new operations content but no one is excited for R-4.

I've said it many times before (Rav/ToS, Gods, Dxun): Don't put MM mechanics into VM. The busiest raiding period was during Oricon—not because operations were the only way to acquire BiS gear (like now with 7.0) but because DF/DP VM were beatable by an above-average group. You could even find PuG groups to run VM, and it led to a very exciting MM progression race with so many competing raid groups.

Don't worry about the MM raiders—they will wait until MM is released, no need to tune VM for them.

Edited June 4, 2022 by Jerba

Hazardous Pummeler's Offhand Saber (rating 332) incorrectly has Critical Rating instead of Alacrity like every other offhand.

I like aspects of the new system you've created. The biggest issue is that there isn't any reward for doing legacy content, particularly NiM.

 

Old content doesn't have to drop the best stuff, but maybe you can get the generic Story and Veteran Tokens from old bosses, perhaps for SM have it drop a green tier instead of blue. Alternatively, create a different token and vendor that can be used exclusively to purchase the new armor sets you created. This concept could even be expanded to the legacy NiM gear like Kell Dragon, Dread Master, Revanite, Gemini, and Masterwork where you could turn these tokens in for Replica versions of those sets just like the ranked PvP vendor. I would only do a single currency for all though, keep it simple. I would personally be okay with even putting the NiM mounts on those vendors for a signficant amount of tokens, but I don't know how everyone else would feel about that.

in my opinion the gearing system is not consistant as an enjoyable experience. it entirely ignores old content, and forces people to funnel into one specific raid repeatedly. this will cause severe gatekeeping until such time main raid groups complete their gearing process. at least reward players with one token of VM gear at the end of a story mode R4 (a primary or secondary weapon token). this way they can at least have something for even bothering with the operation itself.

 

the amount of content provided will satiate veteran players for maybe a week or two. maybe a month. but at the end of the day, the amount of content is too little too late. this should have been released back when 7.0 was announced. instead, we as players have had to put up with the illogical and many times regressive combat styles system which has nerfed some classes into the 'never play this in a raid' category, while making others wildly more powerful to the point where they are almost exclusively used in any raid. your own metrics should show that i am right if you look at the most common raid group compositions, and then filter by damage per second.

 

in order for a raid and raid gearing to be successful, there needs to be a variety of raids and gear to gain. one single raid will not be enough to keep the playerbase running for the next 8 months much less past 1 year from now. my recommendation is to focus on raid content, and adjusting the worst hit specializations from 7.0. i'm glad you're fixing arsenal spec. but there's absolutely no talk of marksman spec in any way other than 'let's fix their pvp avoidance skill'. some people want to RAID with marksman, but it's damage per second is almost half of a marauder. this is a severe power difference that causes most marksman snipers to be relegated to 'only if we are extremely desperate for a dps' category.

 

 

 

In the end 7.0 as it was on release should never have been given the green light. if it were up to me, i'd revert 'combat styles' back to the old system and then just implement the ability to switch classes on the fly. it would have made for a far better set-up than what we have currently. i do not mean this to denegrate the effort and time it took to make this, but you also need to remember this is a 10+ year old game that has already had 2 separate and complete changes to it's skill trees for all classes.

 

the revamp to the previous class skill tree required a LOT of patching, adjusting, tweaking and development (it took about 6 months for it to have been perfected to a playable degree from what i remember). all of these adjustment are still programmed into the game. which means for every class, there's 2 separate skill trees that it had to anounce and then recognize that one was the priority. now we have 3. big changes like this, while a great idea.. should have been kept as simple as humanly possible to prevent future headaches. because of the new combat style system. several classes have been severely hindered to the point of unplayability. if bioware and the developers are trying to make the game accessable to all classes and playstyles... i'd first work on revamping the 'combat style system' for marksmanship, as it was the worst designed out of them all, and focused heavily on nerfing damage while also minimizing utility.

My group noticed the hazardous pieces we purchased cost veteran tokens to upgrade instead of the story mode tokens.

Where are the mods and moddable gear that we were promised would come out with R4?

If you have not read the R-4 gearing post yet, I encourage you to do so!

 

Please leave general feedback here on how the gearing process feels as you complete R-4.

 

can we get the new gear pieces on a vendor so we can actually test the new gears effectiveness ?

If you have not read the R-4 gearing post yet, I encourage you to do so!

 

Please leave general feedback here on how the gearing process feels as you complete R-4.

 

My feedback would be to add the Blue gear that can be upgraded to 340 to all current nim bosses. This will allow those that cannot clear R4 in HM to at least make it to the blue 340 level. This will also eliminate a large amount of complaining that you will see on the forums at launch of the raid. Still require the SM tokens to upgrade said pieces.

As many others have pointed out, legacy ops have been completely ignored in this system. All operations should be included in progression based on their actual difficulty to complete. For example, completion of Gods or Dxun on master mode should reward significantly better gear than completion of EC or DF. All legacy raid rewards should be rebalanced to grant 330-338 artifact gear based on difficulty. EC Master Mode should grant 330, TFB and SV 332, DF and DP 334, TOS and Rav Veteran 336, Dxun and Gods 338, R4 340, or something similar to this progression. Higher difficulty should grant higher rewards, period, and that's just not at all the case currently. It's literally impossible to find anyone running Gods these days, which is a real shame since that is one of the most fun ops I've played in this game. Incentivize players to play all the content, not just the same mind-numbingly boring EV/KP/DF runs over and over and over. With the new gear system, it'll just be constant R4 runs over and over and over until everyone gets sick of it and stops playing because there's no variety for progression raiding.