@CG_SBCrumb good job guys for nail the right issues on str raid. not many dev took time to research and feedback to improve their game,much so communicating with their clients as much as u guys do. Much respect to u guys for knowing where to apologize and where to stand on addresing issues from customer feedback.
put aside some wording and nitpicking by some of the users here, u guys should held your head up in pride for taking this game seriously and attending to the RIGHT issues and needs to make this game better.
hopefully this positive effort keeps going on, and also influence your colleagues in higher position in EA to do a better engagement with SW fans in general.
So let's get to the real question when are you going to allow us again to place our characters wherever we want? Instead of order by height which does not work and even if it did it doesn't matter I should be able to put my characters wherever I want?
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.
This is really great to hear. Making Nihilus less tedious in particular will go a long, long way to helping, as will improving the speed in which it can be completed. And cutting out the useless gear drops will be really good too. I suspect that the quantity of the gear will need an increase too, currently if you get lucky and get all useful gear, it's still only a few pieces of salvage. A few pieces of salvage isn't enough to get people invested.
Does this also mean that every HAAT capable guild is expected to be running T5/6 now? If so, great. If not, then the quality of gear in the lower levels needs improvement too. T4 for example states that a <40 guild with level 70, G8 and no to few omegas in their best teams is expected to be able to do it in a reasonable timeframe. And the rewards are for people in that bracket. Currently, such a guild would take several weeks at best to beat it. Will they be able to clear it before overflowing on tickets after the change?
Final 2 cents from me on this for now, flatten the gear rewards as was originally intended. Yes, people didn't like it when it was implemented before, but it wasn't the flattening that people didn't like, it was that it was floored when we were told it wouldn't be, and that the token rewards were nowhere near enough to make up for anything like we were told they would. Everyone felt like they got rank 41, which makes everyone feel ripped off (especially on a raid where non-heroic was already so poorly rewarded). People shouldn't be penalised for running heavy on P1 which the guild needed, but missing out of P2/3 where all the big damage numbers can be posted quickly. Make the box 2 the baseline for everyone, scale the tokens heavier, and reintroduce the GET with the heavier scaling.
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.
I have no clue which raids you were watching or what you saw.
I'm right at the momnent in my 3rd guild trying to get them to heroic tier. And right at this minute, im in the 5th hour of trying to get a good P3 run (granted i skipped a few solid runs).
You make change to the raid trying to reduce RNG and frustration and yet you skip the most annoying phase by far?
And not only that, you skip it for heroic tier only? **** who even restarts P3 on T1-T6? ChexMix/Greedo doesnt even really work on lower than heroic.
P1 and P4 are only RNG dependend if you
a) dont pay attention
b) play it the risky way betting on Nihilus taking 2 or 3 turns depending on the situation
P3 is WAY (WAY WAY WAY) more depending on good RNG than P1 and P4 together.
Sword buffs, focus attack on on toon, Isolate on Han/Greedo, Swords frekaing changing buffs mid fight, and on and on and on
PLEASE rethink your stance on P3. Even if swords to not change their buffs infight would help.
right now, you missed your goal to make the (H)SR a better experience in my opinion.
The thing about this post is: WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG?!
I understand developing, testing game improvements take time, and thats absolutely fine. However, this post is not a development, its simply a short letter on what you're going to develop. Why couldnt you write this message like 5 months ago?
The announced changes sound good of course!
My question is about health pool reduction: it must be a relevant percentage to be significant! (50%? 30%? 20%?..... I don't know but please don't come to us with a 0,1%-1% health pool reduction!!!!!!!)
I just hope they do realise that now people have high expectations, they expect drastically easier to kill pre-heroic tiers, and increased rewards, if CG underdelivers, their going to see massive rage quit.
The changes sound good, though the devil is in the unknown details. If T6 now plays like a T5, and everyone doing non-herioc jumps up a tier, then I think the health changes would be effective. We've done T6 once and have never redone it because it's 5d vs a 2d T5 for marginally better rewards.
Hopefully the gear removed is the gold medpac, gold clipboard, and purple neurobinoc salvage. Those seem to be the worst offenders. Carbs need to stay and gold orb salvage can too since it seems like there's a large group that needs them (not me though).
My only real criticism is that the date on the post says August, not May. This festered for waaaay too long.
THE P1 problem: Nihilus recovery of protection on basic. Why is that THE problem? Simple, many, many characters and squads are built on or have major components revolving around retaliation.
THE fix needed: simple fix. Nihilus does not recover protection from a character using a basic out of turn even if they have defence down.
I know you can have tenacity up (Rex, GMY etc) to offset this. But since Nihilus debuffs 2-3 characters every time he attacks that strategy is not something you can depend on to work with any consistency. Thus removing a large number of characters from the list of usable characters for p1 and the first half of p4 (since you have to kill Nihilus first).
Another option is to remove the protection gain from Nihilus all together and add additional debuffs for each consecutive basic attack. Thus keeping a penalty for repeated use of basics but not nerfing the damage you can actually do to his health. Make them locked until the character does a non basic ability. Or give it the same cleanse button you have on P2 for support and healers. thus keeping cleanse abilities from becoming OP.
Given this will be added AFTER the mod system update, please do not use the new mod system as an excuse for little or no significant changes percentage wise. And please, don't drag this out saying you need to see the effect the new mod changes have first, we need this now. In fact it should really happen BEFORE the new mod system otherwise rumor has it the SRT changes could be another 4 to 6 months away before in house testing starts?
Only some challenge gear being removed. I see keeping it in lower tiers or normal aat. But there should be none in heroic period. By the time you have a good team for heroic you have more than enough challenge gear.
The thing about this post is: WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG?!
I understand developing, testing game improvements take time, and thats absolutely fine. However, this post is not a development, its simply a short letter on what you're going to develop. Why couldnt you write this message like 5 months ago?
Because they hoped if they ignored the issue it would go away. We didn't let it go away. We kept a STR feedback thread on the from page of general for 4 months, flooded them pings, and made EA Cains job a living hell. That is the only way you can get anything done with these people, make their job suck.
Now they have swung back. They addressed half of the issue (reduce health pools and rng) and then gave us a piece of low hanging fruit (remove challenge gear). But they haven't fixed the reward vs time commitment and they haven't changed the gear rewards in any way that is going to help me progress my team to be able to compete in a higher tier of the raid. It is a documented FACT that each tier only helps you gear characters for that specific tier. This doesn't help people progress. This needs to be addressed.
People are patting them on the back for doing the bare minimum 4 months after they should have addressed something. That doesn't fly. Everyone hear needs to start expecting better from CG.
Only some challenge gear being removed. I see keeping it in lower tiers or normal aat. But there should be none in heroic period. By the time you have a good team for heroic you have more than enough challenge gear.
Given this will be added AFTER the mod system update, please do not use the new mod system as an excuse for little or no significant changes percentage wise. And please, don't drag this out saying you need to see the effect the new mod changes have first, we need this now. In fact it should really happen BEFORE the new mod system otherwise rumor has it the SRT changes could be another 4 to 6 months away before in house testing starts?
Basically if you change the payout of heroic to top 20/25 you've solved most the guilds problems at this point. Not sure many guilds can continue to stay together and be the "team effort" you seek to create in the game. And I'm not talking about guilds breaking up to try to clear the raid , I'm referring to the amount that have people leave so they can get higher spots in lower guilds. Shouldn't have to risk lower tw and tb because you need the gear from 1 raid. You know it happens , we know it happens, your game changers know it happens, we know you dont intend to break guilds up and this is the main reason they do. Add 20/25 and the heroic is basically fixed at this point.
“Tier 6 will be the challenging stepping stone to Heroic as it will retain the harder mechanics.”
This statement has me confused. Above, the changes to Nihilus in Phases 1 & 4 are listed as applicable to all tiers and the Traya Saber changes in Phase 3 are listed as applicable to Tiers 1-6. Which harder mechanics are you referring to as remaining unchanged in Tier 6?
“Tier 6 will be the challenging stepping stone to Heroic as it will retain the harder mechanics.”
This statement has me confused. Above, the changes to Nihilus in Phases 1 & 4 are listed as applicable to all tiers and the Traya Saber changes in Phase 3 are listed as applicable to Tiers 1-6. Which harder mechanics are you referring to as remaining unchanged in Tier 6?
It will be like the events, if there are 8 tiers, 4 will be the hardest. They want it to be a stumbling block, push you to spend more to move past it, or those with time and money in working towards the same goal will be upset for having reached heroic and by comparison you just danced in with less effort.
The only thing I don’t like is not nerfing heroic. By nerfing all of the other tiers, the difficulty will be exponentially increased from T6 to Herioic. I think these changes will just continue to widen the gap. It’s becoming more p2w every day. In my arena shard, if you don’t have Traya, there is absolutely zero chance of finishing top 10.
The only thing I don’t like is not nerfing heroic. By nerfing all of the other tiers, the difficulty will be exponentially increased from T6 to Herioic. I think these changes will just continue to widen the gap. It’s becoming more p2w every day. In my arena shard, if you don’t have Traya, there is absolutely zero chance of finishing top 10.
“Tier 6 will be the challenging stepping stone to Heroic as it will retain the harder mechanics.”
This statement has me confused. Above, the changes to Nihilus in Phases 1 & 4 are listed as applicable to all tiers and the Traya Saber changes in Phase 3 are listed as applicable to Tiers 1-6. Which harder mechanics are you referring to as remaining unchanged in Tier 6?
It will be like the events, if there are 8 tiers, 4 will be the hardest. They want it to be a stumbling block, push you to spend more to move past it, or those with time and money in working towards the same goal will be upset for having reached heroic and by comparison you just danced in with less effort.
@DuneSeaFarmer - I think you missed my point entirely. My question relates to @CG_SBCrumb staying at the end that tier 6 will maintain harder mechanics which doesn’t correlate to the changes described earlier. Those changes all affect Tier 6 as described. So, either Tier 6 remains as is as a test of Heroic readiness or its being changed to make it go faster. Both can’t be true.
“Tier 6 will be the challenging stepping stone to Heroic as it will retain the harder mechanics.”
This statement has me confused. Above, the changes to Nihilus in Phases 1 & 4 are listed as applicable to all tiers and the Traya Saber changes in Phase 3 are listed as applicable to Tiers 1-6. Which harder mechanics are you referring to as remaining unchanged in Tier 6?
It will be like the events, if there are 8 tiers, 4 will be the hardest. They want it to be a stumbling block, push you to spend more to move past it, or those with time and money in working towards the same goal will be upset for having reached heroic and by comparison you just danced in with less effort.
@DuneSeaFarmer - I think you missed my point entirely. My question relates to @CG_SBCrumb staying at the end that tier 6 will maintain harder mechanics which doesn’t correlate to the changes described earlier. Those changes all affect Tier 6 as described. So, either Tier 6 remains as is as a test of Heroic readiness or its being changed to make it go faster. Both can’t be true.
I understand, but my point stands. "They want it to be a stumbling block, push you to spend more to move past it, or those with time and money in working towards the same goal will be upset for having reached heroic and by comparison you just danced in with less effort." It is not intended as you said, to be a check for readiness it would seem but more of an appeasement to those already past it. To avoid the inevitable "Hey we worked our butts off and they just waltz in.." complaints?
I want to wait and see how the changes workout before any prejudging but I do want to thank you guys for listening to us players and making posative changes to a nightmare of a raid that could be amazing
Replies
put aside some wording and nitpicking by some of the users here, u guys should held your head up in pride for taking this game seriously and attending to the RIGHT issues and needs to make this game better.
hopefully this positive effort keeps going on, and also influence your colleagues in higher position in EA to do a better engagement with SW fans in general.
thanks guys, really am.
For example : removing 0.0001% of health reduced from Sith Raid bosses can still be communicated as health reduced.
This is really great to hear. Making Nihilus less tedious in particular will go a long, long way to helping, as will improving the speed in which it can be completed. And cutting out the useless gear drops will be really good too. I suspect that the quantity of the gear will need an increase too, currently if you get lucky and get all useful gear, it's still only a few pieces of salvage. A few pieces of salvage isn't enough to get people invested.
Does this also mean that every HAAT capable guild is expected to be running T5/6 now? If so, great. If not, then the quality of gear in the lower levels needs improvement too. T4 for example states that a <40 guild with level 70, G8 and no to few omegas in their best teams is expected to be able to do it in a reasonable timeframe. And the rewards are for people in that bracket. Currently, such a guild would take several weeks at best to beat it. Will they be able to clear it before overflowing on tickets after the change?
Final 2 cents from me on this for now, flatten the gear rewards as was originally intended. Yes, people didn't like it when it was implemented before, but it wasn't the flattening that people didn't like, it was that it was floored when we were told it wouldn't be, and that the token rewards were nowhere near enough to make up for anything like we were told they would. Everyone felt like they got rank 41, which makes everyone feel ripped off (especially on a raid where non-heroic was already so poorly rewarded). People shouldn't be penalised for running heavy on P1 which the guild needed, but missing out of P2/3 where all the big damage numbers can be posted quickly. Make the box 2 the baseline for everyone, scale the tokens heavier, and reintroduce the GET with the heavier scaling.
I have no clue which raids you were watching or what you saw.
I'm right at the momnent in my 3rd guild trying to get them to heroic tier. And right at this minute, im in the 5th hour of trying to get a good P3 run (granted i skipped a few solid runs).
You make change to the raid trying to reduce RNG and frustration and yet you skip the most annoying phase by far?
And not only that, you skip it for heroic tier only? **** who even restarts P3 on T1-T6? ChexMix/Greedo doesnt even really work on lower than heroic.
P1 and P4 are only RNG dependend if you
a) dont pay attention
b) play it the risky way betting on Nihilus taking 2 or 3 turns depending on the situation
P3 is WAY (WAY WAY WAY) more depending on good RNG than P1 and P4 together.
Sword buffs, focus attack on on toon, Isolate on Han/Greedo, Swords frekaing changing buffs mid fight, and on and on and on
PLEASE rethink your stance on P3. Even if swords to not change their buffs infight would help.
right now, you missed your goal to make the (H)SR a better experience in my opinion.
I understand developing, testing game improvements take time, and thats absolutely fine. However, this post is not a development, its simply a short letter on what you're going to develop. Why couldnt you write this message like 5 months ago?
My question is about health pool reduction: it must be a relevant percentage to be significant! (50%? 30%? 20%?..... I don't know but please don't come to us with a 0,1%-1% health pool reduction!!!!!!!)
Hopefully the gear removed is the gold medpac, gold clipboard, and purple neurobinoc salvage. Those seem to be the worst offenders. Carbs need to stay and gold orb salvage can too since it seems like there's a large group that needs them (not me though).
My only real criticism is that the date on the post says August, not May. This festered for waaaay too long.
THE fix needed: simple fix. Nihilus does not recover protection from a character using a basic out of turn even if they have defence down.
I know you can have tenacity up (Rex, GMY etc) to offset this. But since Nihilus debuffs 2-3 characters every time he attacks that strategy is not something you can depend on to work with any consistency. Thus removing a large number of characters from the list of usable characters for p1 and the first half of p4 (since you have to kill Nihilus first).
Another option is to remove the protection gain from Nihilus all together and add additional debuffs for each consecutive basic attack. Thus keeping a penalty for repeated use of basics but not nerfing the damage you can actually do to his health. Make them locked until the character does a non basic ability. Or give it the same cleanse button you have on P2 for support and healers. thus keeping cleanse abilities from becoming OP.
Hope future changes will addressed earlier, especially with such large community feedback.
Because they hoped if they ignored the issue it would go away. We didn't let it go away. We kept a STR feedback thread on the from page of general for 4 months, flooded them pings, and made EA Cains job a living hell. That is the only way you can get anything done with these people, make their job suck.
Now they have swung back. They addressed half of the issue (reduce health pools and rng) and then gave us a piece of low hanging fruit (remove challenge gear). But they haven't fixed the reward vs time commitment and they haven't changed the gear rewards in any way that is going to help me progress my team to be able to compete in a higher tier of the raid. It is a documented FACT that each tier only helps you gear characters for that specific tier. This doesn't help people progress. This needs to be addressed.
People are patting them on the back for doing the bare minimum 4 months after they should have addressed something. That doesn't fly. Everyone hear needs to start expecting better from CG.
The AAT and SRT use the same loot table.
But we got more JTR's ...... lol
This statement has me confused. Above, the changes to Nihilus in Phases 1 & 4 are listed as applicable to all tiers and the Traya Saber changes in Phase 3 are listed as applicable to Tiers 1-6. Which harder mechanics are you referring to as remaining unchanged in Tier 6?
It will be like the events, if there are 8 tiers, 4 will be the hardest. They want it to be a stumbling block, push you to spend more to move past it, or those with time and money in working towards the same goal will be upset for having reached heroic and by comparison you just danced in with less effort.
WAI
@DuneSeaFarmer - I think you missed my point entirely. My question relates to @CG_SBCrumb staying at the end that tier 6 will maintain harder mechanics which doesn’t correlate to the changes described earlier. Those changes all affect Tier 6 as described. So, either Tier 6 remains as is as a test of Heroic readiness or its being changed to make it go faster. Both can’t be true.
I understand, but my point stands. "They want it to be a stumbling block, push you to spend more to move past it, or those with time and money in working towards the same goal will be upset for having reached heroic and by comparison you just danced in with less effort." It is not intended as you said, to be a check for readiness it would seem but more of an appeasement to those already past it. To avoid the inevitable "Hey we worked our butts off and they just waltz in.." complaints?