New BB - Please balance/fix

I really don't mind the raid performance. They're not great, but I can max tier 5 (R7) runs with 2-4 attempts most times now, and I only remod Hunter/Wrecker. I am more angry that they're borderline useless in PvP.

I am a F2P player. So I can get an R7 five person team every two months or so, if they require kyros, zetas, and omis? Along with 30 solid mods. And to do all this to find they're a broken team by design is crappy.

As a totally separate thing, I don't think BB have to be frustrating. 

I think they are without specific modding and a detailed understanding of how to exploit their kit. And I think there's too many teams with too many unique mechanics to expect the average player to learn the intricacies of modding and playing nuBB when they could use that time and brain power and learning to optimize GLAhsoka or some other, more powerful squad. So I think it's inevitable that a large % of the player base is going to find them incredibly frustrating without being able to use Marked. 

But it's worth noting that it is possible to mod them the right way and then exploit their abilities in such a way that it's easy for them to win. I don't think I've had to restart a raid run with nuBB anytime recently. My memory could be failing me, but I know for sure that if I did have to restart it wouldn't have been often, nor would it have been a frustrating number of restarts, because I would remember that. 

Nope, most of the time, maybe all of the time, I just slap on the mod sets, go in, crush the enemies, rescue the Jedi, and then kick back with a death stick and some Lothal spicebrew. 

For both ZanirN7S​ and gnlarsson​ I want to make clear that I think that BB's raid performance is frustrating and that I think if they wanted to make them a marginal team they should have used other means than nerfing the Marked mechanics. Right here on these forums (somewhere) I wrote a whole thing about how nerfing Marked doesn't just increase difficulty, it kills a key mechanic that affects how the BB squad is supposed to function. It takes away what they do that is different and cool. 

I think that creating difficulty by killing the ability of toons to do the things that they are specifically designed to do and we specifically upgraded abilities to make possible is the wrong way to go about creating difficulty. My whole essay is about how this is inherently bad game design. 

THAT SAID, even though I think they messed up from the get go, and that their entire approach to challenging BB in this raid was flawed, they haven't modified anything. In fact, they fixed the bug that allowed us to use BB as intended. They literally changed the raid after release to make sure we couldn't use Marked.

Given that backstory, I think it's clear that they - for reasons I believe are entirely wrong and will **bleep** them to heck in some future life - are nonetheless happy with a BB team that can't do BB stuff AND ALSO with them being frustrating to run for most people in the O66 raid. 

My argument is not that BB should be this difficult and frustrating and not-fun. My argument is that CG clearly intends for them to be this difficult and frustrating and if they were to give us marked back they would have to invent entirely new ways to make BB no fun to play in order to preserve the overall environment conducive to the frustration they clearly want us, as players, to feel. 

Since we're already frustrated and unhappy, why fixed mark to make us less unhappy only to develop a new mechanic to make us unhappy again. Easier for them to just wait until the raid expires and hope that we're so discouraged we never play with BB again -- but if we aren't, at that point they only need to fix Marked, not fix it AND rebalance the raid. 

That's my argument. 

Fair - but true to Zanir's point below, they're pretty underwhelming in raid as well under R9. For a team that was introduced for the raid, that's another mark against them. I'd argue a locked mark would fix both issues. But if not, make the enemies in the raid unmarkable below R9 tier. It's useless below R9 at this point anyways.

I think OP made a good suggestion. Having rushed BB2, I am frankly rather salty at how much they struggle in O66. Mark is a key part of how the team works and it's tough as nails to actually be able to exploit it. They should be better in the raid below Tier 7. BB2 has been a disappointment for me. CG messed this one up. I'm not out here whining about ancient JVs not being able to score well in the latest raid, BB2 is one of the premium new teams. I've been able to max score Tier 5 every time, but it's a frustrating run. 

Just FYI, a locked Marked debuff would change entirely how they perform in the raid. Although I certainly wouldn't mind seeing it become locked, it's difficult to imagine them making this change before the next raid hits bc otherwise they'd have to rebalance things over there, and that's not easy. 

Again, not arguing against you. I think you're speaking reasonably. But the raid implications probably keep them from doing this for about 10 more months, even if they do want to do it.