Sith Triumvirate Raid Feedback Thread
Hello Holotable Heroes, We have received a wide range of feedback about the newest raid, The Sith Triumvirate and we would like to hear more about your experience. Please include the following inf...
Forum Discussion
- What tier or tiers did you play? mostly T5, some T6 and monthly heroic attempts to gauge guild progress (currently wiping towards the end of p2)
- What GP is your Guild that is attempting the raid? currently 130m, just under 125m during most recent heroic attempt
- What teams you did you attempt the raid with?
I now have most of the standard recommended teams (JTR, Boba lead Wampa, First Order, Nightsisters, Troopers, chex mix)
- What part of the raid motivated or demotivated you to continue trying?
Not much positive motivating factors present at the moment, other than sheer bloody-mindedness. We're a relatively casual guild who aren't quite able to clear heroic yet, although that will hopefully change soon. Very disappointed to see that the lessons of AAT have not been learned in terms of balancing the non-heroic modes, T6 in particular has way too much health meaning it's a miserably long grind - the fact that many guilds have reported that the point at which it can be completed faster than the required tickets to relaunch it is the point at which you are probably ready to complete heroic is a horrible situation. T6 should have damage output close enough to heroic that it's a viable practice environment, but shouldn't have so much health that it needs to be always up for any guild remotely near heroic. At the moment we're doing T5 in a little over two refreshes, that's way below our potential as a guild but a significant proportion of our membership have given up spending their time on it at all, and to be honest the officer group don't really feel like we can blame them for that. In addition, as many others have mentioned the rewards are not on a par with the effort involved, although reducing the health of the raid (and thus time spent to earn them) may fix this just as well as increasing the rewards. I was actually happy when the announcement was made that reward loot was going to be equalised for all members, and then massively let down when it transpired what this actually meant - the initial announcement suggested to me that the loot per person would be roughly equal to somewhere between what top 10 and top 20 currently get, but as it turned out it was way worse, so everyone in the top half of each guild who worked hardest to down the raid got penalised.
- What about the raid did you enjoy? What did you dislike about the raid?
The best part of new raids is discovering what tactics work and how to use new mechanics introduced, and the sith raid has some good features in this area. Both Sion's and Traya's mechanics are interesting and lend themselves to building teams to take advantage of.
The worst parts of the raid are unfortunatlely the parts that have either directly or indirectly been inherited from previous raids and for some reason we're still stuck with every time:
Firstly setting up raids which consistently eliminate groups of characters or team builds from being viable at any point, in this case by means of the excessive tenacity bonuses granted to the bosses. In a single phase this wouldnt be a problem, and in fact is probably a good thing to add a unique feel to a phase and encourage distinct team builds and tactics to be used, but when applied to the whole raid simply frustrates players as a chunk of their roster becomes irrelevant.
Secondly, and possibly as a result of the above, being totally dependant on a single team build to efficiently manage one or more phases of the raid, in this case JTR resistance for phase 1, made particularly offensive because of the requirement for use of a recent legendary character which causes massive friction within guilds as players who dont have the required character/team are pressured to either get it as soon as possible, find other ways of contributing competent damage, or worst kicked out of the guild.
Finally, and probably the worst problem is the RNG factor. This was also a significant issue in AAT before that raid became farmable, and it's clearly back here. The massive variance between attempts on a phase with the same team means that particularly for heroic, guilds who are only just able to complete the raid require their members to spend several hours re-running their attempts until they get a favourable run with high damage. There are two elements to this, one is bosses having abilites with a random element to them, which Nihilus is probably the worst example of in a raid to date - in order to get an efficient run you frequently have to guess whether he's going to attack a buffed character, how many people drain force will manage to affect, and whether he will actually choose to use annihilate when it's available.
The other major factor that causes RNG is the 50% chance heroic bosses have to take a third attack. This is one of the worst design choices in the entire game and somehow it has survived through all three raids, because it means that in order to get a 'good' run you're frequently making large numbers of attempts until you get one where the extra attack happens significantly less than half the time. While it makes perfect sense to up the bosses threat level in heroic, this is a terrible way to accomplish that - simply upping the damage on the attacks would achieve the same ends but without the random factor. In the sith raid this is made even worse as when combined with Nihilus basic being able to reduce his other cooldowns it becomes even more influential.
Apologies for the long post, thanks for listening. In short my wish list would be:
Reduce the health pool of T5 and T6 (but not their damage outputs as was done with AAT, they need to be balanced not trivialised)
Revisit the concept of levelling out gear rewards - the principle was good, the application was flawed
For future raid design, please please please consider how to minimise the negative experience for players - reduce the RNG factor, and don't include mechanics that eliminate large groups of characters from viable use or mandate the use of specific teams
- What GP is your Guild that is attempting the raid? currently 130m, just under 125m during most recent heroic attempt
- What teams you did you attempt the raid with?
I now have most of the standard recommended teams (JTR, Boba lead Wampa, First Order, Nightsisters, Troopers, chex mix)
- What part of the raid motivated or demotivated you to continue trying?
Not much positive motivating factors present at the moment, other than sheer bloody-mindedness. We're a relatively casual guild who aren't quite able to clear heroic yet, although that will hopefully change soon. Very disappointed to see that the lessons of AAT have not been learned in terms of balancing the non-heroic modes, T6 in particular has way too much health meaning it's a miserably long grind - the fact that many guilds have reported that the point at which it can be completed faster than the required tickets to relaunch it is the point at which you are probably ready to complete heroic is a horrible situation. T6 should have damage output close enough to heroic that it's a viable practice environment, but shouldn't have so much health that it needs to be always up for any guild remotely near heroic. At the moment we're doing T5 in a little over two refreshes, that's way below our potential as a guild but a significant proportion of our membership have given up spending their time on it at all, and to be honest the officer group don't really feel like we can blame them for that. In addition, as many others have mentioned the rewards are not on a par with the effort involved, although reducing the health of the raid (and thus time spent to earn them) may fix this just as well as increasing the rewards. I was actually happy when the announcement was made that reward loot was going to be equalised for all members, and then massively let down when it transpired what this actually meant - the initial announcement suggested to me that the loot per person would be roughly equal to somewhere between what top 10 and top 20 currently get, but as it turned out it was way worse, so everyone in the top half of each guild who worked hardest to down the raid got penalised.
- What about the raid did you enjoy? What did you dislike about the raid?
The best part of new raids is discovering what tactics work and how to use new mechanics introduced, and the sith raid has some good features in this area. Both Sion's and Traya's mechanics are interesting and lend themselves to building teams to take advantage of.
The worst parts of the raid are unfortunatlely the parts that have either directly or indirectly been inherited from previous raids and for some reason we're still stuck with every time:
Firstly setting up raids which consistently eliminate groups of characters or team builds from being viable at any point, in this case by means of the excessive tenacity bonuses granted to the bosses. In a single phase this wouldnt be a problem, and in fact is probably a good thing to add a unique feel to a phase and encourage distinct team builds and tactics to be used, but when applied to the whole raid simply frustrates players as a chunk of their roster becomes irrelevant.
Secondly, and possibly as a result of the above, being totally dependant on a single team build to efficiently manage one or more phases of the raid, in this case JTR resistance for phase 1, made particularly offensive because of the requirement for use of a recent legendary character which causes massive friction within guilds as players who dont have the required character/team are pressured to either get it as soon as possible, find other ways of contributing competent damage, or worst kicked out of the guild.
Finally, and probably the worst problem is the RNG factor. This was also a significant issue in AAT before that raid became farmable, and it's clearly back here. The massive variance between attempts on a phase with the same team means that particularly for heroic, guilds who are only just able to complete the raid require their members to spend several hours re-running their attempts until they get a favourable run with high damage. There are two elements to this, one is bosses having abilites with a random element to them, which Nihilus is probably the worst example of in a raid to date - in order to get an efficient run you frequently have to guess whether he's going to attack a buffed character, how many people drain force will manage to affect, and whether he will actually choose to use annihilate when it's available.
The other major factor that causes RNG is the 50% chance heroic bosses have to take a third attack. This is one of the worst design choices in the entire game and somehow it has survived through all three raids, because it means that in order to get a 'good' run you're frequently making large numbers of attempts until you get one where the extra attack happens significantly less than half the time. While it makes perfect sense to up the bosses threat level in heroic, this is a terrible way to accomplish that - simply upping the damage on the attacks would achieve the same ends but without the random factor. In the sith raid this is made even worse as when combined with Nihilus basic being able to reduce his other cooldowns it becomes even more influential.
Apologies for the long post, thanks for listening. In short my wish list would be:
Reduce the health pool of T5 and T6 (but not their damage outputs as was done with AAT, they need to be balanced not trivialised)
Revisit the concept of levelling out gear rewards - the principle was good, the application was flawed
For future raid design, please please please consider how to minimise the negative experience for players - reduce the RNG factor, and don't include mechanics that eliminate large groups of characters from viable use or mandate the use of specific teams
