Naboo raid more difficult not less?

Excellent suggestions on your part. We should be able to see benefits of improving our roster even when we don't have everything maxed out. I wouldn't even mind not being able to auto a tier, so long as I am at least able to complete it at the first or at most the second attempt if something goes wrong, not having to attempt the same battle a dozen times because the entire raid is overtuned or too RNG-dependent. In the case of the Naboo raid, as we improve our teams and are able to move to the next tier, we should be able to see some kind of progress, be it because of relic levels or modifiers. Instead, it's like we're being punished for having the teams at anything below R9, the highest tier/relic level, which as I said is even now still hard to reach. If we take a Lumi team, or any for that matter, from R3 to R5 and are able to move up a tier because of that, the new tier should indeed be more challenging but also manageable, as in, not something that leaves you disheartened and makes you want to go back to the previous tier.

The downside is that at higher relics it isn't actually easier. 

Quality of life is important, and I want to see a way to achieve that. one way to do that is to increase the difficulty of achieving max score as you go up difficulty tiers from 0-3, then decrease the difficulty as you go above Tier 4. Or just make Omis available that allow for auto'ing more teams. There has to be some way for a person to spend their way out of having the raid be a pain in the burro. 

I think this raid is less popular than others, but even if it isn't every raid should be set up this way b/c you can't skip it without hurting others. With TW or GAC you can skip and only hurt yourself, but skipping the raid penalizes people who aren't you. This can create good motivations ("I want to help my guild mates! Let's win this together!") but also negative pressure ("I need to do X in real life, but my guild suffers unless I max out my score, which is going to take multiple restarts and 90 minutes"). 

Being able to buy your way into an easy raid through Omis or high relics is a way that you can do both -- help your guild win AND have a life where you get things done. 

Sure, not everyone will be able to afford the relics or omis, but at least it would be an option. 

Well, you'll be glad to know your guild isn't the only one complaining about the raid. I'm farming for GLAT, and aside from that I also now have more time to devote to the raid. I'm using the teams Scrybe suggests - Lumi, KB, Maul, Gungans, QAmidala. Only my QA is below relic levels. I'm planning on gearing/relicing all the teams so I can reach the max individual crate, if only for a sense of achievement. Right now, however, I'm respectively at tiers R3, R5, R7, R5, G12 (I'm using relic-level droids instead of QA), and it's torture. The enemies get stronger with each tier, yet the player bonuses do almost nothing to compensate and balance things out.

And yeah, if you're at high enough relics and have an easy time getting a good score, good for you, but that doesn't invalidate other players' concerns/opinions about the difficulty. I'm at just a little below 5M in the raid, but it doesn't negate the feeling I have that the raid has been in someway or another more difficult these last few weeks. And it wouldn't exactly be unbelievable that CG may have made the raid harder, intentionally or otherwise. I mean, look at how many times we end up with something broken after an update - Fulcrum's omi, Starkiller being able to use his "ultimate" twice in one battle, the invincible Grievous bug, just to name a few. 

Imo exactly. There is no noticeable pickup to dropping a tier this raid, and previous raids there were. So if you couldn’t get max at tier 5 and dropped to 4, you could usually beat the raid on Endor, at least score higher. This raid, if you drop a tier there typically isn’t any gain, that I can see.

props to you DarjeloSalas for being able to ace the raid, I mean it, I give you credit if this is just a walk in the park for you. For the people that I am in a guild with seem to all agree that this raid isn’t particularly fun, or mechanically sound in the terms of getting a consistent score, very RNG driven and toons like B2 cause little damage and dramatically increase rage so are almost not even worth using. Only the handful of people with relic Gungans are able to auto and are consistently scoring over 2 million/raid. 

At this point I’m looking forward to being able to put Lumi back on the shelf so I never have to use her again.

100% agree with your analysis Tenebrae

Respectfully, I disagree with every claim you’ve made about the raid getting more difficult. Nothing has changed, regardless of how you feel. 

I don't get max with QA, but I do with Lumi and Gungans quite easily. Lumi I play by hand, and maybe some players don't want that, but I still get max pretty much every run. QA can be finicky and take many runs or require you to accept a lesser score. Gungans have been able to auto the r7 tier for me, though that's probably mod dependent. 

I agree.

Compare it to any raid, new-system or legacy, the Naboo battle is just a nightmare. With the legacy raids, you could use any team you want and theory craft all day. And regardless of what team you use, the difficulty levels were realistic and manageable. Example, you go in the Heroic Sith raid with a G11 JTR team, you'll get a decent score, you go in with a R5 JTR team, you notice significant improvement in your performance. The reason, there were no absurdly overtuned and/or bugged enemy modifiers that made attempts even with a reliced team a pain.

Compare it to the previous two raids, you only get a sinking feeling as to where the game is heading. The Krayt raid was new, had interesting mechanics, various difficulty levels based on gear/relic levels. As you move on to higher tiers, you notice the dragon being tougher, but you also have enough bonuses on your side, decent ones at that, that everything is balanced out. I would go in with G10-11 Jawas (one of them R3 or whatever because of GL farming), yes I often had to restart because my team was undergeared, but the faction bonus was enough that I could get the max score for that tier. With the Endor raid, it had bizzare mechanics/stats, but they were easy to manage, so you could go in with R5 Rebels in the R5 tier and still get the max score or at least do quite well.

The Naboo raid, meanwhile? Ridiculous amounts of enemies (I can at least understand it's supposed to be thematic) who have ridiculous speed, health and mechanics even in the lower tiers. Bonus modifiers, tier and hero alike, that are so embarrassingly underwhelming they do almost nothing to balance out the difficulty. It's only at the very highest tier that the player bonuses actually mean something (this I will admit I am basing on the tier descriptions and several walkthroughs I have seen). Said highest tier requires R9, and aside from POW and MQG, I doubt a lot of players are going to suddenly go on a farming spree to get multiple toons to what is still a hard relic level to reach, considering the raid is only going to become obsolete in 6-7 months. Look at the Lumi team, it requires having both HoT and PotUp to function, yet the droids have so much speed, assist so much, gain so much TM, and even gain constant bonus turns with the Charge modifier that before you know it the enemies are halfway to enrage while still at the second wave, you've lost at least one toon, and/or are stuck behind a DI DDK and a Command Droid that constantly heals and cleanses the team while dispelling all your buffs. That's WITHOUT listing all the bugs that are still present, among them Protection Disruption still being inflicted on Gungans.

And I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel like the lower tiers are somehow stealth buffed. A few weeks ago, I didn't have to restart that often, yet this and last week, I had to run the Lumi team over a dozen times. The droids, DDK in particular, seem to hit a lot harder than they used to (they gain DI and therefore the assist chance, another droid uses an ability, DDKs assist twice, one hit being manageable, the second one being twice as strong), DDKs, even the other droids, definitely dodge a lot more than they used to (yesterday one DDK had DI, Po used his basic, the DDK still dodged), my toons seem to be counter-attacking a lot less.

And you know what? I just know the next raid is going to be so badly designed/bugged/RNG-dependent, even our already horrendously low expectations won't be able to save us from disappointment.

I’ve got max score with Lumi’s team on every Naboo raid after the first 3. I also get max score with Queen Amidala team, Beq team, Gungans without dropping down a tier. 

You’re entitled to dread the raid, but claims about needing to run lower tiers and B1s going quicker just aren’t true. 

Comparing this raid to any of the others, Naboo is complete garbage, and here's why.  In the last (several) raids, if you had a Relic 8 Team, you ran them at the Relic 8 tier, Tier 6.  Sometimes you would take a Relic 8 toon and drop them down into Tier 5 because of a bonus mechanic like Imp Troopers on Endor, but for the most part Relic 8 toons could compete at the Relic 8 level and get a decent score.  This new raid you almost HAVE to drop down a tier to get a decent score, and this new round of raids, even the Discord Bots are saying that your R5 zLumi Team (and we all only put a Zeta on Lumi because of this raid) isn't going to auto run Tier 4 anymore.  The B1s are hitting faster, and enrage goes up so quick now that you can't get into the 3rd stage before the shield wall comes down with an intact 5-player team.  I appreciate a challenge in any game, but when you make a pure cash-grab raid that has mechanics only for a whale team just released and then ratchet up the difficulty on the few teams that most players do have, you're just upsetting the fan base.  At this point I run a low tier auto, put my points in and dread the new raid launch in a few days.  Can't wait for this one to go away.

"I like money!" - EA