Upcoming Sith Raid Changes [MEGA THREAD]
August 17, 2018 4:03PM
edited August 2018
DEV POST
DEV POST
CG_SBCrumb wrote: »
Hi Holotable Heroes,
Two weeks ago I mentioned that we were getting ready to reveal some changes coming to the Sith Raid based on extensive feedback collected from the players through the forums, Reddit, beta program, and other channels. Today, I’m pleased to be able to share the broad strokes of these changes with you and we’ll be providing more specifics as we get closer to the release.
One of the resounding points of feedback we have heard from the community is that the raid is still prohibitively difficult and not rewarding enough for players, particularly in Tiers 1-6. To top it off, on the upper end of those playthroughs, it’s taking upwards of a week for some guilds to complete, while many of the guilds who have been doing Heroic (Tier 7) for awhile are completing it a couple times a week. While we always want the top end rewards to be the greatest, because they should be commensurate of the effort it takes to play at that level, it has gotten particularly challenging as the “effort” required in the Sith Raid has been higher at the lower Tier levels.
The two areas we’ve heard repeated feedback on are: a) the randomness of some of the mechanics (thus forcing retries) and b) the balance of effort versus rewards. In order to address randomness and make the experience feel less frustrating while climbing the ranks to Heroic, we are removing some of the elements that really make it hard to judge what the AI will do next. For the rewards, we are making some improvements to the value but also focusing on decreasing the time (and frustration) it takes to get those prizes as we believe that will net in significantly more rewards over time.
Randomness
The random nature of Phases 1 and 3 can be very time consuming if you are trying to get the most out of your teams. Often times, it is likely better to restart when Darth Nihilus’ Annihilate comes off cooldown sooner or later than expected. Other times, Traya’s lightsabers’ buffs/debuffs randomize in way that can makes your run practically and strategically very difficult to plan around. All of these chances for something to go wrong, increases the time commitment and often encourages players to restart until they get the perfect run. This shouldn’t be the way that you play the raid.
We have a made a few changes to address the randomness in the Sith Raid. Note, while we are focusing primarily on Tiers 1-6, there is one change we are making to Tier 7 to reduce frustration for those players as well:
- (Tiers 1-7 in Phase 1 & 4) Nihilus' kit will be adjusted to be more predictable - Annihilate is such an important ability to strategically plan for in Phase 1 & 4. Ultimately, we want to reduce the chance you get caught unaware by Annihilate and improve the likelihood that you’ll be able to use to use Unbreakable Will at the right time.
- (Tiers 1-6 in Phase 3) Reduce Randomness on Traya’s Lightsabers - We want to reduce the feeling that you need to reset a run to get a decent score. For some teams, success against Traya is heavily dependent on which buffs (and by extension, debuffs) start on her sabers and who they decide to attack first. We have several ideas on how to solve this issue but we need to do some additional balance testing before making our final decision.
We think these changes should significantly reduce the feeling of needing to restart. On to rewards!
Rewards and Time
Another point of common feedback was that the STR wasn’t worth the time. The plan is to hit this problem from both sides: faster completions and improved rewards. Overall, we want to reduce the average time it takes to complete the STR in Tiers 1-6 and incentivize players to keep trying to reach the next tier. We have three changes that should speed things up for most teams.
- (Tiers 1-6 in All Phases) Reduce the Health of Nihilus, Sion and Traya - This simply will reduce the time to complete each stage by decreasing the boss’ health pools
Speeding things up helps the raid feel better but we also felt the rewards were still not enticing enough at this completion rate.
- (Tier 6-7) Adding Mod Salvage - With Mod Slicing coming out, we'll be introducing Mod Salvage as rewards to all ranks.
- (All Tiers) Remove some Challenge Gear from AAT Pool - We will finally be addressing the challenge gear concerns by getting rid of some of lower level gear that is stacking up in player inventories which will allow more opportunities to earn better rewards in those boxes. This removal of challenge gear also applies to AAT rewards.
Beyond Tiers 1-6
To be clear, most of these changes are not impacting Heroic. We still want this to be hard goal to strive towards and we feel the difficulty of the mechanics in Heroic match the level of rewards. Tier 6 will be the challenging stepping stone to Heroic as it will retain the harder mechanics.
We wanted to get these changes out as soon as possible but we need to take our time testing internally and find the right combination of changes to alleviate some of the difficulty at lower tiers. We think the changes outlined above will relieve some of the pain points that diminish your excitement and enthusiasm to participate in the Sith Triumvirate Raid.
Thank you all again for your feedback and your patience with these changes.
DEV POST
Post edited by TyloRen on
18
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Replies
Bad sentence imho
For the rest it seem to be excellent measures to help players, so good job
Huh? I’m confused. Are you saying the raid should be so RNG dependent and scores from individual runs of the same team should vary so much that it’s best to run the raid a dozen times to get gold RNG? That’s how it is now, and they are saying it shouldn’t be that way. I completely agree.
1. Can you give us a general idea of how much health the Raid Bosses will be losing per-tier? I think in one of the original cut backs Nihilus lost 10% of his health.
2. Since you mentioned taking out some of the challenge gear, can you give us an idea of what gear will be taken out.
Most of it, i’m Happy to see go, but will the biotech implant salvage (gold eyeballs) be removed as well? Those have become a *major* bottleneck.
I'll be able to share more specifics as we get closer to the changes.
My question though is why does P3 still get to be random on heroic?
i just said that This shouldn’t be the way that you play the raid it's a bad sentence.
I think they could use a less equivocal phrase on responsibilities of the situation.
A phrase like:
"We apologize for having conceived the raid in such a way that led these consequences and now we will remedy our design errors"
It would have been more suitable imho.
When recruiting the t5/t6 dudes who doesnt even have good teams for p3 will think they are amazing in the raid but cant even do damage in heroic haha
Because the raid is heavily unbalanced in favor of whales and vets and that in turn has caused so much outrage. Its finally nice to see them do something for the rest if the community, instead of krakens, whales and vets...6 months later but at least something.
The newer players and mid tier players needed help because this broke raid was causing guilds to collapse and people to quit the game.
Losing players=losing money.
So I am glad that they are handling some of the issues. They just need to flat out remove nahillus protection and with these other changes, this raid should be less horrible...note I didn't say more exciting just less horrible.
Its the right move and a fair move for the rest of the community, not the top 10%.
On top of that while we have NO IDEA what effect these changes will have on the lower tiers, you are now giving MORE REWARDS to the higher tiers in the form of Mod Slicing materials. Now these people who already got a huge boost from getting guaranteed gear 12 pieces for months, and who have had exclusive access to gear 12+ for the past 6ish weeks, will now have even greater access to new mod materials.
On top of this you still haven't addressed one of the biggest issues in that the raid doesn't help you gear your characters to move up to higher tiers. While reducing the amount of challenge gear will net me more harder to get gear, it doesn't matter if that harder to get gear doesn't help me get my characters up to a gear level to take on the next tier of the raid. Tier 5 recommends that I use gear 10 characters and tier 6 recommends gear 11. So if I'm doing tier 5 all my teams should be at gear 10 already... so why in the hell am I being rewarded gear that is only helping me get my characters up to gear 9-10 while I am getting nothing to actually help me get my characters up to gear 11. Rancor gives me more gear to help me reach gear 11.
Again at the end of the day challenge gear should have been taken care of months ago. The RNG and health pools should have been taken care of months ago. You don't get a pat on the back for turning in work late and it certainly doesn't mean you get a pass for further increasing rewards for higher tiers while still not rewarding the lower tiers in a way that will actually help them progress. A the end of the day I'm still going to get rewarded stun cuffs and stun guns from hitting auto on a 15 minute rancor run while I get mk 3 holos and mk 6 syringes for putting in 2 hours of work on a tier 5 Sith. You clearly haven't fixed the problem.