(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.
Just to clarify a question I've received directly a couple times already. The AAT Reward Box is the same across all raids so changes it in STR will also impact AAT
Seems like a good start on positive changes. Could we get more information on how Annihilate will be adjusted to make it "less random"? Does that mean he can only use it if it is NOT on cooldown at the start of his next turn? I believe that would be the best fix.
I really hope so because right it’s nearly impossible to know when it’s ready.
This seems great.
Im very curious to see how CG will fail this one as usual, because this does seem like a superb plan. (Its just a copy from the forums idea, not CG's, but thats completely fine by me.)
This seems great.
Im very curious to see how CG will fail this one as usual, because this does seem like a superb plan. (Its just a copy from the forums idea, not CG's, but thats completely fine by me.)
Its simple. People still stuck doing tiers 1-5 are going to realize that the changes are not helping them progress at all while heoric gets even more rewards to help widen the power gap even further.
LOL why do the noobs gets easier p3 ? .It will come as a chock to them when reaching Heroic. We are 126mill guild who farmed for heroic sith for months and p3 takes many hours as most of us gotta reload 30-40-50 times to get perfect start on the sabres. I am usually very positive to cg changes but this is realy bad.
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 even if u restarted p3 a million times on anything below t5, ur chexmix will not work because traya's speed is different.
(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.
Just to clarify a question I've received directly a couple times already. The AAT Reward Box is the same across all raids so changes it in STR will also impact AAT
look at T5-01 box, its missing AAT rewards at all, T5-02 has it though
also mod slicing parts should be added to every tier, every player will need them, not only whales doing heroic
We do really need to get the Mod update out, as being unable to upgrade new mods is making it hard to progress, and with the upcoming changes, upgrading green/blue/purple mods to lvl 15 seems wasteful.
However that bit of personal frustration aside, the STR changes are most welcome, and it is excellent to hear that we are finally getting some balance work for the STR lower tiers. Kudos!
@CG_SBCrumb do you have plans to make it so the salvage type we receive as a reward is actually the salvage type we need to gear characters to move up to higher tiers? All of these changes mean NOTHING if I'm not getting the type of salvage required to get my gear 10 characters I'm using in tier 5 up to the recommended gear 11 for tier 6. This is the #1 reason people are having such a hard time, it's because this raid doesn't reward the players with the gear they actually need to advance and they instead need to rely entirely on outside gear souces to better their teams.
I get what you are going for and the changes listed will help.... but the thing you are missing that makes it unenjoyable for me is Nihilus regeneration of protection from basic attacks.
That right there makes me not want to play phase 1. Learning the timing is a pain but its doable... its the fact that i get stuck regenerating his shield on counters and basics that keeps my score low and my enjoyment in the dirt.
Just give him more health and limit his protection regen to that summon he does
(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.
Just to clarify a question I've received directly a couple times already. The AAT Reward Box is the same across all raids so changes it in STR will also impact AAT
Very well done. Thank you for the update and I know we all look forward to this update when ready.
I would also ask that you increase the G12 salvage (no the g12+) for heroic tiers only because if you don’t finish in the top 10 you have absolutely zero chance of getting any full crafted gear.
I always thought a good idea would be to make the Unbreakable Will special buff freeze the turn meter of the character using it until Nihilus used his Annihilate on them - that way you could just pop the buff and not be surprised.
You'd lose a few turns (maybe) with that character, but you'd be guaranteed Annihilate won't ... annihilate someone randomly and risk losing ALL their turns.
Either way, I'm looking forward to seeing how this is reworked - this raid really is prohibitively difficult, and that's speaking as someone who accepted the brutality of it as advertised. But the increased rewards is going to be the best part. However difficult it is, the rewards for accomplishing it should be a pathway towards improving your characters for the next tier, and eventually the Heroic.
It was, with the general and constant outcry, inevitable they'd change this - but the cynic in me thinks MAYBE it's also because the initial financial gains have slowed to the point where it's time to adjust and milk that next tier of paying players? Whatever, so long as they're making money.
The other thing I would add, just as a note is perhaps expanding the full gear piece to top 15-20 as well. The different in dmg done is usually 100k between 5-20 in most thr of the raids I run but the effort is not rewarded as primarily 20 people carry the rest ... not always but most guilds . It would be nice to have those extra 10 be included in some type of chance for the amount of tw
On the mod front. Hopefully you can give us another chance to make changes for free; like the weekend of free mod changes early on when they first came out.
Let us build up mod sets, load outs and try auto assignment without cost for a weekend or a week before having to use credits; that would be most appreciated. Thank you.
@cg_sbcrumb do the smart thing with mod salvage and don't tie them to rank. A lot of people are starting to finish traya and in order for a guild to grow and continue to move forward those people need to be allowed to place lower without penalty of losing rewards.
The current g12+ reward structure promotes resentment . The Sith was built to require guilds to work together yet the rewards do not reflect that.
I believe these changes will be inadequate for several reasons:
1) The health reduction will need to be significant for this to have any noticeable effect. I'm talking about AT LEAST 50%.
2) Modifying the behaviour of the raid should always be universal over all tiers. Otherwise the lower tier no longer serves as practice for higher tiers. Frustration caused by raid design should be removed for all tiers and replaced with superior design instead.
3) Simply removing challenge gear is not sufficient. I have had several times when on T5 when I was first and got all "useful" drops, and it still was insignificant simply because of the tier of gear and the amount that dropped. This has to be addressed, and only removing challenge gear is not going to be enough.
4) By adding a new reward to T6, you make T6 the new T5. Right now, people that do T5 only do it for the GEC. In the future, that'll just become T6. Therefore, by making this change, you likely are going to keep frustration levels the same, or make them even higher.
5) The randomness of Traya's lightsabers has NEVER been even remotely an issue for me in all the months of playing the raid. At least not on T4-5
In short, I think all proposed changes are just overthinking the problem and finding issues that never
Awesome awesome changes!!! I hope the health reduction is actually significant for t1-6. Like 25%+ significant. If it's 5% or so, it's not even gonna be noticeable. And hopefully the buffed rewards also make it feel worth it.
My guild recently started doing heroic, so most of this doesn't even effect me, but this is one of the most necessary changes for the health of the game.
My guild could barely even complete t5 raids without maxing tickets right before we switched to heroic, just because there was zero motivation.
My question though is why does P3 still get to be random on heroic?
In Phase 3 you fight Traya solo and we felt removing the RNG would make this too straightforward of a fight. In general we saw phases 1 and 4 were the largest pain points for Guilds working up to Heroic.
Maybe I need to rephrase my question. Why are you removing/reducing the RNG in Tiers 1-6 but not on heroic? Everything you said above applies equally to all tiers.
Main RNG change I'd like to see is if, in the instant Hermit Yoda's allies die, that he escapes. The description says "when there are no active allies, Yoda escapes from battle" .. but really it behaves like: when there are no active allies and the enemy finishes their turn,...then yoda escapes from battle. Great job responding to the players! Looking forward to the AAT changes especially. While it doesn't impact me, I agree 100% that making tiers 1-6 more manageable is important for the growth and sustain interest of newer players that are coming up in the game today and in the future.
When reading the part about reducing the randomness, I can only come to one conclusion: in Tier 1-6, you feel like the randomness is bad in phase 3, in Tier 7 is okay/good. This change will run counter to your declared goal for people to try for higher tiers. We already tried and failed miserably at Heroic, now we'll get an even worse sense of security while practicing Tier 6 until we try and fail again miserably at Heroic.
One important point which is completely missing is how the Sith raid breaks guild cohesion. We've had a succession of players ready for Heroic leave us for guilds farming Traya because they didn't want to wait for the rest of the guild to get ready, setting the guild back on the path towards Heroic leading to more departures and so on and on. Basically you've designed a big dividing tool and nothing of the changes you plan to implement will fundamentally change that.
My question though is why does P3 still get to be random on heroic?
In Phase 3 you fight Traya solo and we felt removing the RNG would make this too straightforward of a fight. In general we saw phases 1 and 4 were the largest pain points for Guilds working up to Heroic.
Maybe I need to rephrase my question. Why are you removing/reducing the RNG in Tiers 1-6 but not on heroic? Everything you said above applies equally to all tiers.
Cuz heroic is end game content and t1-6 isn't. Heroic is already the perfect difficulty once your guild collectively has the right teams for it.
Man this is hard. I really like these changes, and I really want to be happy that they are being made... but this is exactly what has been suggested almost since the raid launched, how could it have taken this many months to finally see that the raid was way to hard and rewards too low?
I'll withhold my judgemetn until I see the actual changes. As it stands now, you know the lower tiers suck the fun out of everything and take way, way, way, WAY too long for such meh rewards. Nihilus while fun to play with, is a freaking TERRIBLE RNGfest of a character to raid against.
That being said, as much as I'd like all these changes yesterday, please make sure you test them well before you move forward.
80M GP guild here. We do tier 4 and an occasional tier 5. It takes us around 3 days to complete tier 4. Although we usually have more than 45 players in our roster, we don't have a lot of well geared players.
I like the proposed changes, but to really help they have to go far enough. Boss's HP reduction needs to be really significant to make a difference. Keep in mind that % health attacks will loose their effectiveness.
Gear drops should be significantly increased as well. I'm not asking for full GL12 pieces here - those should be reserved for Heroic only, *maybe* tier 6, but GL9/10/11 salvage should be really abundant. Tier 4 rewards should not be worse than Rancor Heroic rewards that a lot of us can solo on auto. Right now we basically do Heroic Rancor / HAAT to get gear to progress to the next tier of STR. It doesn't feel right.
As others have mentioned, it may be a good idea to split the proposed changes into stages. Adding better rewards can't possibly be complicated, and so it should be done ASAP. You can then reduce bosses' HP to makes things go faster as you test whatever other changes you have planned.
Replies
I really hope so because right it’s nearly impossible to know when it’s ready.
Im very curious to see how CG will fail this one as usual, because this does seem like a superb plan. (Its just a copy from the forums idea, not CG's, but thats completely fine by me.)
This.
Its simple. People still stuck doing tiers 1-5 are going to realize that the changes are not helping them progress at all while heoric gets even more rewards to help widen the power gap even further.
Because even if u restarted p3 a million times on anything below t5, ur chexmix will not work because traya's speed is different.
D'oh.
Please take your time don't rush this. It better it come out with very few bug or non at all.
look at T5-01 box, its missing AAT rewards at all, T5-02 has it though
also mod slicing parts should be added to every tier, every player will need them, not only whales doing heroic
We do really need to get the Mod update out, as being unable to upgrade new mods is making it hard to progress, and with the upcoming changes, upgrading green/blue/purple mods to lvl 15 seems wasteful.
However that bit of personal frustration aside, the STR changes are most welcome, and it is excellent to hear that we are finally getting some balance work for the STR lower tiers. Kudos!
That right there makes me not want to play phase 1. Learning the timing is a pain but its doable... its the fact that i get stuck regenerating his shield on counters and basics that keeps my score low and my enjoyment in the dirt.
Just give him more health and limit his protection regen to that summon he does
Very well done. Thank you for the update and I know we all look forward to this update when ready.
I would also ask that you increase the G12 salvage (no the g12+) for heroic tiers only because if you don’t finish in the top 10 you have absolutely zero chance of getting any full crafted gear.
You'd lose a few turns (maybe) with that character, but you'd be guaranteed Annihilate won't ... annihilate someone randomly and risk losing ALL their turns.
Either way, I'm looking forward to seeing how this is reworked - this raid really is prohibitively difficult, and that's speaking as someone who accepted the brutality of it as advertised. But the increased rewards is going to be the best part. However difficult it is, the rewards for accomplishing it should be a pathway towards improving your characters for the next tier, and eventually the Heroic.
It was, with the general and constant outcry, inevitable they'd change this - but the cynic in me thinks MAYBE it's also because the initial financial gains have slowed to the point where it's time to adjust and milk that next tier of paying players? Whatever, so long as they're making money.
I love this game, and thank you devs!!
On the mod front. Hopefully you can give us another chance to make changes for free; like the weekend of free mod changes early on when they first came out.
Let us build up mod sets, load outs and try auto assignment without cost for a weekend or a week before having to use credits; that would be most appreciated. Thank you.
The current g12+ reward structure promotes resentment . The Sith was built to require guilds to work together yet the rewards do not reflect that.
1) The health reduction will need to be significant for this to have any noticeable effect. I'm talking about AT LEAST 50%.
2) Modifying the behaviour of the raid should always be universal over all tiers. Otherwise the lower tier no longer serves as practice for higher tiers. Frustration caused by raid design should be removed for all tiers and replaced with superior design instead.
3) Simply removing challenge gear is not sufficient. I have had several times when on T5 when I was first and got all "useful" drops, and it still was insignificant simply because of the tier of gear and the amount that dropped. This has to be addressed, and only removing challenge gear is not going to be enough.
4) By adding a new reward to T6, you make T6 the new T5. Right now, people that do T5 only do it for the GEC. In the future, that'll just become T6. Therefore, by making this change, you likely are going to keep frustration levels the same, or make them even higher.
5) The randomness of Traya's lightsabers has NEVER been even remotely an issue for me in all the months of playing the raid. At least not on T4-5
In short, I think all proposed changes are just overthinking the problem and finding issues that never
My guild recently started doing heroic, so most of this doesn't even effect me, but this is one of the most necessary changes for the health of the game.
My guild could barely even complete t5 raids without maxing tickets right before we switched to heroic, just because there was zero motivation.
Maybe I need to rephrase my question. Why are you removing/reducing the RNG in Tiers 1-6 but not on heroic? Everything you said above applies equally to all tiers.
One important point which is completely missing is how the Sith raid breaks guild cohesion. We've had a succession of players ready for Heroic leave us for guilds farming Traya because they didn't want to wait for the rest of the guild to get ready, setting the guild back on the path towards Heroic leading to more departures and so on and on. Basically you've designed a big dividing tool and nothing of the changes you plan to implement will fundamentally change that.
Cuz heroic is end game content and t1-6 isn't. Heroic is already the perfect difficulty once your guild collectively has the right teams for it.
That being said, as much as I'd like all these changes yesterday, please make sure you test them well before you move forward.
I like the proposed changes, but to really help they have to go far enough. Boss's HP reduction needs to be really significant to make a difference. Keep in mind that % health attacks will loose their effectiveness.
Gear drops should be significantly increased as well. I'm not asking for full GL12 pieces here - those should be reserved for Heroic only, *maybe* tier 6, but GL9/10/11 salvage should be really abundant. Tier 4 rewards should not be worse than Rancor Heroic rewards that a lot of us can solo on auto. Right now we basically do Heroic Rancor / HAAT to get gear to progress to the next tier of STR. It doesn't feel right.
As others have mentioned, it may be a good idea to split the proposed changes into stages. Adding better rewards can't possibly be complicated, and so it should be done ASAP. You can then reduce bosses' HP to makes things go faster as you test whatever other changes you have planned.