Bonds of Weakness Change Followup (MEGA)

Sorry for the long post but this is intended to be constructive so please if it’s in the wrong place, move rather than delete.

So, it can come as no surprise that there’s a lot of frustration over the changes. After ST Han, Clones/Baze and Expose adjustments, the change to Bonds will count as the 4th nerf the Sith raid has seen, amongst controversy over raid rewards too.
It is presumably a source of embarrassment to the CG team that you have failed to understand, test or predict the consequences of your own game mechanics.

I believe most sound minded players will accept the need to implement a nerf to the Criolyte team. Sure there’d have been a bit of push back, but, it would have been accepted.
The Bonds cap, and the consequences of that change, are a little disappointing but I at least accept that NS will still achieve high scores.
I feel there could have been an easier nerf to how Isolate works against raid bosses which was less targeted at the NS faction but there we go.

Personally I hope the bonds cap can be doubled to 40. This gives us a great reason to keep that Daka Zeta. Do you really want players feeling like a Zeta has no function? Because honestly, at 20 stacks, no-one will bother with it. Yes, NS will still score highly, maybe more so than you might like, but that ship sailed so long ago and people have had no reason to believe the more traditional Asajj,MT,Daka,Talia,Zombie team would be nerfed - and have invested accordingly.

The fallout is that a lot of players have invested a lot of time, gear, zetas etc not just in Daka, but the entire faction. I doubt many people would have geared up Talia if not for the mechanics which facilitated such high scores.

Anyway, we are where we are and there are Zombie changes coming.
I have been a beneficiary of the ‘weak’ zombie approach (mine is G8), and I accept that it isn’t ideal to disincentives upgrading her (no matter how inventive the concept of a paper zombie was) and actually for those players who upgraded her before realising the potential of a paper zombie, they’re kind of stuck with a less than optimal one now.

I only hope that this isn’t rushed through and that you throw us a bit of a bone and add some further utility to her.

The very best way I can imagine incentivising people to gear up their zombies is to offer some NS ally bonuses while Zombie is taunting.
This encourages us to gear her up so that she doesn’t die quite so easily.
I have ideas but I am sure there are better ones.
If I had the opportunity I’d add to her Unique description:
“While taunting, NS allies are immune to ‘something’ and gain x% bonus Offense”
That ‘something’ might be Daze, it might be turn meter reduction, or perhaps something radical like Zombie absorbs any debuffs applies to NS allies while taunting.
I suspect that the nerf to Zombie will involve actually nerfing Asajj, so that she can’t be powered up quite so highly by Zombie deaths. Perhaps there’ll be a cap on how many times she can benefit from - single character’s death (maybe change it to 20% per death but only 5 times per character?) or just a hard cap in general so she can never go above a certain % offence.
So the bonus Offense to all NS allies while zombie is taunting again gives everyone on the team a bit of love and gives another reason to gear her up.
These are just musings, frankly they sound Zeta-worthy so they’re probably too big an ask but this nerf could well be faction-breaking and I’d rather see it saved than lost.

Please consider ideas from the community on this, don’t can the faction just because you didn’t like the paper zombie or failed to predict player behaviour/ingenuity. If you’d nerfed zombie within days of her release we’d have long since forgotten about the paper approach (if ever even conceived of it) but the community have come to accept it as normal now and put significant investment into the faction, so please be fair about this!

Also on a very off-topic point, but on the note of fairness, isn’t it about time the HAAT raid had junk removed from the loot table? I’m sure some raid gear upgrades were promised months ago! Now would be a very good time to throw some love out there!