Even if they make a new raid that SLKR can't solo, he will still be able to do an impressive amount of damage, and it's likely SLKR owners will always be the rank 1 raid contributor in your guild
Right now, SLKR remains the best investment in the game.
Oh yeah that's indisputable. But if we limited the attempts each person can make and had a mechanic that somehow made it impossible (or at least highly unlikely) that anyone could take a full phase + some on the next using a single team, then solo-ing the entire raid won't be possible for any one person until relics get out of control, and reward distribution will be fixed as such. Obviously an SLKR team could probably still take a full phase+ under this system, but that's why I suggested (jokingly at first but I kind of like it the more I say it) a mechanic where the boss targets higher power characters first. This would lead to better theorycrafting of either 5 person squads focused on supports or a 4 person squad with someone to take the hit. An SLKR squad without SLKR can't solo a raid, especially not one tuned to a higher standard than HSTR where most of his squad is dead behind him by the end anyway.
Alternatively they could make it so there are more than five phases so that no one needs to lower their attempts to avoid someone solo-ing the whole thing. A six phase raid would be wild
I don't see anything there that would give any of the other heros in the game an edge over SLKR
Sure you can make the Rancor target the highest power hero on your team but that means he will also target Rey, JML, SEE, etc. And the amount of time from start of battle to the time the GL is eaten, SLKR would still put out a lot more damage than the others.
So yeah making the raid not able to be solo'd is easy, but i still think SLKR teams would do the most damage.
Unless they add mechanics that are actually anti-SLKR and visibly/obvious anti-SLKR. But idk if they would do that.
No I meant just make the Rancor have a preloaded first turn where he eats the highest power person you have. That way all GL's die, but GL's with better teams would be advantaged, like Rey and JML with titans, or teams that rely more on the support squad anyway like Padme losing a high powered GK or something. Even the 501st can do tons of damage without GAS taunting for them, it just makes a solo team virtually impossible unless someone theorycrafts the perfect 4 person squad to beat a raid tuned even higher than HSTR. Which I don't see happening until they release even more relic and mod levels since we've pretty much hit the cap of character power.
Basically it wouldn't be about giving any specific *heroes* an advantage over SLKR, but all the more well-rounded *teams* would be advantaged in a raid where on high powered toon is immediately removed from the equation.
Even if they make a new raid that SLKR can't solo, he will still be able to do an impressive amount of damage, and it's likely SLKR owners will always be the rank 1 raid contributor in your guild
Right now, SLKR remains the best investment in the game.
That is not true, they can easily make mechanics that would keep him in line.
Yeah they could... Like anti first order synergy or something. Idk if they would do that though. Doesn't make sense lore-wise with the rancor.
SLKR is only good due to stacking mastery, base the mastery of the boss on the mastery of the team.
All teams with a fixed mastery will be fine, Kylo will get smacked as he stacks more.
There are other ways too, and they dont have to be specifically anti Kylo to have a major effect on his ability to solo the raid.
That being said, there is no reason to make any specific anti Kylo thing in the raid, a GL being good in a raid is not a bad thing. After all they are GLs for a reason.
Even if they make a new raid that SLKR can't solo, he will still be able to do an impressive amount of damage, and it's likely SLKR owners will always be the rank 1 raid contributor in your guild
Right now, SLKR remains the best investment in the game.
Oh yeah that's indisputable. But if we limited the attempts each person can make and had a mechanic that somehow made it impossible (or at least highly unlikely) that anyone could take a full phase + some on the next using a single team, then solo-ing the entire raid won't be possible for any one person until relics get out of control, and reward distribution will be fixed as such. Obviously an SLKR team could probably still take a full phase+ under this system, but that's why I suggested (jokingly at first but I kind of like it the more I say it) a mechanic where the boss targets higher power characters first. This would lead to better theorycrafting of either 5 person squads focused on supports or a 4 person squad with someone to take the hit. An SLKR squad without SLKR can't solo a raid, especially not one tuned to a higher standard than HSTR where most of his squad is dead behind him by the end anyway.
Alternatively they could make it so there are more than five phases so that no one needs to lower their attempts to avoid someone solo-ing the whole thing. A six phase raid would be wild
Don't the Raids already have A Limited Attempts?
I meant limit them more. Go from 5 to 3 or something. But the easier methods would include a boss tuned to higher levels (the most likely option to be implemented), a boss with mastery stacking based on your teams mastery, an instant destruction method to cut solo characters from the lineup, a shortened enrage cooldown, more phases to cut the likelihood that one team can get through all of it, or one that I thought of just now like a Boss Rush where your guild has to beat the heroic tiers of all three raids in a row tuned to a higher level so that the Rancor is likely to mess up any GL's team with devours and the entire guild has to work together at it just to finish within the time limit.
Technically, yes, "raids" plural have a limited number of attempts.
However not all raids do: Heroic raids are unlimited and heroic raids are the only ones that matter. If you're soloing a lower tier of rancor or HAAT or even HSTR no one cares, because your guild can just more up a tier until the problem is taken care of ... or you hit Heroic. There's no going up from there and there are no limited attempts.
So the "raids" that have limited attempts exist, but they're not the problem we're talking about.
Technically, yes, "raids" plural have a limited number of attempts.
However not all raids do: Heroic raids are unlimited and heroic raids are the only ones that matter. If you're soloing a lower tier of rancor or HAAT or even HSTR no one cares, because your guild can just more up a tier until the problem is taken care of ... or you hit Heroic. There's no going up from there and there are no limited attempts.
So the "raids" that have limited attempts exist, but they're not the problem we're talking about.
Yeah but for a new raid, lower content might be the first thing people hit if it's tuned really high, so it may be worthwhile to consider that lower raid tiers should have fewer attempts.
With this new Rancor tier though, it might be worth mentioning that since it isn't heroic, a good way they might keep difficulty and avoid solo's is by limiting attempts and making it hard to solo more than a single phase. Like using 3 attempt limits on a four phase raid so unless you can perfectly solo two phases, no one person can take the whole raid.
I still think that on a single attempt with a single squad, the Enrage timer should be shared across all raid bosses. That ought to do it, even without changing anything else.
Phase limits, damage caps, etc. These are all things that SOUND like they would make the game better, but are ultimately just controls that would only reduce the fun and competitive drive in a guild and the overall game. Why improve your characters and come up with better strategies when you know your roster is going to be only so effective no matter what you do? Half of the fun of participating in the raid is seeing where you stack up against your guildmates and climbing the scoreboard as you power up your roster. That fun requires that players are all allowed to do as much damage as they possibly can to a raid boss or series of bosses.
If you wanna talk about whales who are always at the top of the scoreboard, I'm sorry to say that's never going to change given the nature of the game. As far as F2P goes, rather than demand that higher-performing and better-planned players have their performance restricted, demand that CG makes content that creates new challenges for players to tackle and new opportunities for you to outperform your guildmates. Such a system might involve players being categorized into similar levels of power, as in GA tiering. That way there's still an opportunity to compete and less risk of being completely blown out of the water.
Half of the fun of participating in the raid is seeing where you stack up against your guildmates and climbing the scoreboard as you power up your roster.
Not necessarily. I've had much more fun when the raids were cooperative events. When HSTR was first introduced, we needed everyone in my guild to complete it. Our first attempt we didn't even finish. We completed every heroic raid after that, but we had the memory of what happened when we weren't working well together. It made us bond together as a guild and ultimately made us better friends.
Sure, I get it that for some people scoring 100 million damage is more important & more fun than making friends, but it would be nice if the people who think measuring the size of their damage scores is the best part of a raid would at least acknowledge that there are plenty of other hyper competitive modes, and that people who enjoy cooperation & friendship exist and are part of the player base that deserves as much attention as the people who think that competition is the only main source of fun.
That fun requires that players are all allowed to do as much damage as they possibly can to a raid boss or series of bosses.
Obviously it doesn't since they already have a damage cap for every single raid implemented, and even a per-phase damage cap for every single raid.
Why improve your characters and come up with better strategies when you know your roster is going to be only so effective no matter what you do?
But there's already a limit to how effective your roster is going to be. And do people stop improving their rosters as soon as they can solo a raid? Or do they keep going after more & better characters even though they've conquered the raid?
I know how to solve this: if all the people who have Ultimate SLKR gave up on improving their rosters once they could solo HSTR, then you're right. If a lot of them but not nearly all stopped improving their rosters after soloing HSTR then you're not technically right, but your point is still very valid.
However, if none or nearly none of the people with U-SLKR gave up on improving their rosters as soon as they could solo HSTR then you're completely wrong and don't even have a valid point here.
Shall we take guesses on whether or not you're right about people giving up on improving their rosters once they hit the limit of how well they can do in a raid?
There is a good amount of solutions being thrown around, I also thing messing with the enrage mechanic can be used to achieve a similar goal as my idea i post #1.
Some of the solutions do miss my point though: how to stop a single OP team from domination the raids. It has nothing to so with whales or not-whales as those with the best roster always end up on top (that is the nature of the game).
I think to your point combined with my own beliefs, it's about an overpowered team (or one character) trivializing the raid quickly. I'm disappointed that my 5 squads can't earn top 10 rewards, but that's my fault for not being better at getting a Galactic Legend. So I'm fine with all the SLKR GLs competing for top 10, I just want a chance to spend 10 minutes in each phase, and not see the 30-minute raid "skip" phase three for me, and just be over. My $0.11: make a phase timer, since the fallacy of public or common goods is always going to be in play, and time zones exist.
For those saying part of the fun is seeing how much damage you can do, what part of a phase timer or an enraged boss is going to take that away? The higher level of challenge is just going to make it look even better when you deal 10 million more damage than a guildmate, right? Are you worried that an enraged boss taking your GL away isn't going to be fun? Then in that case you're undermining your point that the damage is what makes it fun right?
For outdated raids, I would prefer to just let guilds turn an option on that allows people to run the raid themselves. Give it 24 hours or so for people to do their runs
Sure, but the OP was specifically about future raids, not current/outdated raids.
But you were talking about outdated raids, and you are who I was replying to, so I don't really understand your complaint here.
Which characters would remotely hit this?
SLKR.
Uh
Finn doesn't have damage on his mastery, so he'd be unaffected.
It would cap out Deathstorm/etc. team comps as well - Max chars out at something like 1-2M/hit, and suddenly most teams completely compete with GLs, while not making the GLs "useless".
This also removes most needs to tune raids for other cheesy damage stacking strats, like deathstorm.
The previous raid teams of JTR, JKR, etc. would be back to "incredibly good", but the new teams would still be "better". But if someone has SLKR, but doesn't have JTR + JKR, and someone else has say, R7 JTR/JKR/CLS/NS, they'd probably still beat the person that JUST has SLKR.
This would also leave room for other chars to potentially shine, such as that one GL Rey team (if you know, you know.) that currently solos P1/2 of HSTR.
It's incredibly easy to implement (Rey's Ult already limits damage, so it's obviously possible to implement) and universally prevents teams from soloing, without actually making the fight more ridiculous for other teams/etc.
This also doesn't touch things like phase bridging, which will once again be super important for most guilds, if not all if the raid IS actually unsoloable at launch.
All that said, HSTR-tuned Pit would already be unsoloable by SLKR. By Phase 3 there'd be no other chars to get RNG eaten most likely and Rancor would just eat Kylo before he finished the entire raid. You'd be able to RNG it with 3-4 SLKR teams, but it would completely prevent a single person clearing the entire raid with 1 team... and the only change needed is making Rancor immune to TM reduction.
IMHO an “easy” fix to prevent SLKR type interaction in raids would be to implement a global debuff that reduces all damage dealt by 20-25% per missing team member. Once SLKR’s team dies off his damage goes to zero or close to it. No other team comp excels with team members missing/dead.
I'd like to see a raid that had multiple parts. Make each part have the same damage to complete and everyone gets to do one phase in a 24 hour period. The individual rankings can be done for currency and shard rewards, while the gear/material box is based on the combined score of the guild.
Everyone needs to participate to get good rewards for the guild, but individuals who contribute more can still be rewarded as well. Builds the guild atmosphere and provides some bragging rights. Plus the 24 hours allows the entire guild to participate without the current problem of people not being available when the raid starts.
I'd like to see a raid that had multiple parts. Make each part have the same damage to complete and everyone gets to do one phase in a 24 hour period. The individual rankings can be done for currency and shard rewards, while the gear/material box is based on the combined score of the guild.
Everyone needs to participate to get good rewards for the guild, but individuals who contribute more can still be rewarded as well. Builds the guild atmosphere and provides some bragging rights. Plus the 24 hours allows the entire guild to participate without the current problem of people not being available when the raid starts.
Oh something more like TB phases? That might be interesting. Especially if each phase during that 24 hours could be tuned to be equal to a raid on its own at like, the Heroic Tier. So like the Heroic Tier of this raid has phase one equal strength to the Rancor raid so that even among individual phases someone isn't likely to solo without earning it. But other players can still contribute heavily to each phase. This way there also isn't too low of a ceiling for guilds with 50+ GL's and they can still earn proportional rewards.
I don’t think I’d want to see a multiple day raid again. I could see allowing people to hit all the parts of the raid with separate teams. Again because of the two types of scoring, the rewards can be scaled for either way.
Really though, they should focus on more flexibility for the guilds. Try to create a raid that allows different types of guilds to customize it more for their needs and wants. Things like timers for phase completion or multi-part raids. More options for the rewards. Even rewards for guilds that want to split, even boxes and tiered currency for more competitive guilds and HSTR cliff type rewards for the most competitive.
Right now raids can be guild killers. I’m not sure why CG wants to introduce that type of divisiveness in an area of the game meant to be a way to build people’s commitment to the game through friendships.
It's still possible to solo a raid with a 1 phase = 1 team system if after the phase is beaten, it's back to team selection screen for the next phase. This way you could still solo the raid, but with 4 squads (or 3 squads 1 fleet), in a tag team kinda way. This way it's not possible to take advantage of a single kit/kit interaction to break the raid, still reward great raid theorycrafting and give players a reason to gear more toons.
Replies
No I meant just make the Rancor have a preloaded first turn where he eats the highest power person you have. That way all GL's die, but GL's with better teams would be advantaged, like Rey and JML with titans, or teams that rely more on the support squad anyway like Padme losing a high powered GK or something. Even the 501st can do tons of damage without GAS taunting for them, it just makes a solo team virtually impossible unless someone theorycrafts the perfect 4 person squad to beat a raid tuned even higher than HSTR. Which I don't see happening until they release even more relic and mod levels since we've pretty much hit the cap of character power.
Basically it wouldn't be about giving any specific *heroes* an advantage over SLKR, but all the more well-rounded *teams* would be advantaged in a raid where on high powered toon is immediately removed from the equation.
SLKR is only good due to stacking mastery, base the mastery of the boss on the mastery of the team.
All teams with a fixed mastery will be fine, Kylo will get smacked as he stacks more.
There are other ways too, and they dont have to be specifically anti Kylo to have a major effect on his ability to solo the raid.
That being said, there is no reason to make any specific anti Kylo thing in the raid, a GL being good in a raid is not a bad thing. After all they are GLs for a reason.
I meant limit them more. Go from 5 to 3 or something. But the easier methods would include a boss tuned to higher levels (the most likely option to be implemented), a boss with mastery stacking based on your teams mastery, an instant destruction method to cut solo characters from the lineup, a shortened enrage cooldown, more phases to cut the likelihood that one team can get through all of it, or one that I thought of just now like a Boss Rush where your guild has to beat the heroic tiers of all three raids in a row tuned to a higher level so that the Rancor is likely to mess up any GL's team with devours and the entire guild has to work together at it just to finish within the time limit.
Technically, yes, "raids" plural have a limited number of attempts.
However not all raids do: Heroic raids are unlimited and heroic raids are the only ones that matter. If you're soloing a lower tier of rancor or HAAT or even HSTR no one cares, because your guild can just more up a tier until the problem is taken care of ... or you hit Heroic. There's no going up from there and there are no limited attempts.
So the "raids" that have limited attempts exist, but they're not the problem we're talking about.
Yeah but for a new raid, lower content might be the first thing people hit if it's tuned really high, so it may be worthwhile to consider that lower raid tiers should have fewer attempts.
With this new Rancor tier though, it might be worth mentioning that since it isn't heroic, a good way they might keep difficulty and avoid solo's is by limiting attempts and making it hard to solo more than a single phase. Like using 3 attempt limits on a four phase raid so unless you can perfectly solo two phases, no one person can take the whole raid.
I still think that on a single attempt with a single squad, the Enrage timer should be shared across all raid bosses. That ought to do it, even without changing anything else.
If you wanna talk about whales who are always at the top of the scoreboard, I'm sorry to say that's never going to change given the nature of the game. As far as F2P goes, rather than demand that higher-performing and better-planned players have their performance restricted, demand that CG makes content that creates new challenges for players to tackle and new opportunities for you to outperform your guildmates. Such a system might involve players being categorized into similar levels of power, as in GA tiering. That way there's still an opportunity to compete and less risk of being completely blown out of the water.
One like the old (round-based) the other one is damage-based. Done half of the damage of the phase -> Enrage.
Not necessarily. I've had much more fun when the raids were cooperative events. When HSTR was first introduced, we needed everyone in my guild to complete it. Our first attempt we didn't even finish. We completed every heroic raid after that, but we had the memory of what happened when we weren't working well together. It made us bond together as a guild and ultimately made us better friends.
Sure, I get it that for some people scoring 100 million damage is more important & more fun than making friends, but it would be nice if the people who think measuring the size of their damage scores is the best part of a raid would at least acknowledge that there are plenty of other hyper competitive modes, and that people who enjoy cooperation & friendship exist and are part of the player base that deserves as much attention as the people who think that competition is the only main source of fun.
Obviously it doesn't since they already have a damage cap for every single raid implemented, and even a per-phase damage cap for every single raid.
But there's already a limit to how effective your roster is going to be. And do people stop improving their rosters as soon as they can solo a raid? Or do they keep going after more & better characters even though they've conquered the raid?
I know how to solve this: if all the people who have Ultimate SLKR gave up on improving their rosters once they could solo HSTR, then you're right. If a lot of them but not nearly all stopped improving their rosters after soloing HSTR then you're not technically right, but your point is still very valid.
However, if none or nearly none of the people with U-SLKR gave up on improving their rosters as soon as they could solo HSTR then you're completely wrong and don't even have a valid point here.
Shall we take guesses on whether or not you're right about people giving up on improving their rosters once they hit the limit of how well they can do in a raid?
Some of the solutions do miss my point though: how to stop a single OP team from domination the raids. It has nothing to so with whales or not-whales as those with the best roster always end up on top (that is the nature of the game).
Thats a bit extreme. Mastery shouldn't be able to be increased past a certain amount (150%?)
But you were talking about outdated raids, and you are who I was replying to, so I don't really understand your complaint here.
1-hit damage cap.
Which characters would remotely hit this?
SLKR.
Uh
Finn doesn't have damage on his mastery, so he'd be unaffected.
It would cap out Deathstorm/etc. team comps as well - Max chars out at something like 1-2M/hit, and suddenly most teams completely compete with GLs, while not making the GLs "useless".
This also removes most needs to tune raids for other cheesy damage stacking strats, like deathstorm.
The previous raid teams of JTR, JKR, etc. would be back to "incredibly good", but the new teams would still be "better". But if someone has SLKR, but doesn't have JTR + JKR, and someone else has say, R7 JTR/JKR/CLS/NS, they'd probably still beat the person that JUST has SLKR.
This would also leave room for other chars to potentially shine, such as that one GL Rey team (if you know, you know.) that currently solos P1/2 of HSTR.
It's incredibly easy to implement (Rey's Ult already limits damage, so it's obviously possible to implement) and universally prevents teams from soloing, without actually making the fight more ridiculous for other teams/etc.
This also doesn't touch things like phase bridging, which will once again be super important for most guilds, if not all if the raid IS actually unsoloable at launch.
All that said, HSTR-tuned Pit would already be unsoloable by SLKR. By Phase 3 there'd be no other chars to get RNG eaten most likely and Rancor would just eat Kylo before he finished the entire raid. You'd be able to RNG it with 3-4 SLKR teams, but it would completely prevent a single person clearing the entire raid with 1 team... and the only change needed is making Rancor immune to TM reduction.
Everyone needs to participate to get good rewards for the guild, but individuals who contribute more can still be rewarded as well. Builds the guild atmosphere and provides some bragging rights. Plus the 24 hours allows the entire guild to participate without the current problem of people not being available when the raid starts.
Oh something more like TB phases? That might be interesting. Especially if each phase during that 24 hours could be tuned to be equal to a raid on its own at like, the Heroic Tier. So like the Heroic Tier of this raid has phase one equal strength to the Rancor raid so that even among individual phases someone isn't likely to solo without earning it. But other players can still contribute heavily to each phase. This way there also isn't too low of a ceiling for guilds with 50+ GL's and they can still earn proportional rewards.
Really though, they should focus on more flexibility for the guilds. Try to create a raid that allows different types of guilds to customize it more for their needs and wants. Things like timers for phase completion or multi-part raids. More options for the rewards. Even rewards for guilds that want to split, even boxes and tiered currency for more competitive guilds and HSTR cliff type rewards for the most competitive.
Right now raids can be guild killers. I’m not sure why CG wants to introduce that type of divisiveness in an area of the game meant to be a way to build people’s commitment to the game through friendships.