My guild is currently working on Heroic, but until now we moved between T5 and T4, the former for the rewards, the latter for a slight reprieve from the raid. We found that T6 simply wasn’t worth the additional time investment relative to the rewards received. Tier 4 takes less than 24 hours, T5 about 3 or 4 days, and T6 about 5 to 6 days depending on player fatigue.
We are at 127 mil GP.
For the non-heroic tiers, there is a lot of flexibility. We all practice with our RJT teams, Night Sisters, Imperial Troopers, Phoenix, and First Order teams, but we also play around with different combinations just for the fun of it like Nihilus-led Sith, Clones, and others (I especially like Boba lead with Thrawn, Wampa, Ezra, and Sabine, especially in Phase 2). For Heroic, though, there is much less flexibility. Phase 1 is RJT only. We have tried a number of different teams, but many cannot take down Nihilus’s protection, and those that do can barely break 0.5%. For the rest of the phases, we use the teams recommended in the guide that has been circulating, so little to no variation there.
Overall, beating the raid, improving our rosters, and earning Traya shards are all great motivating factors, and those are major parts of why we keep pushing forward. We do enjoy the game tremendously and don’t mind challenges being thrown our way. The difficulty is that this raid seems to go against much of what you have raised recently about quality of life for players and about your unspoken encouragement for us to have a broad and developed roster of characters (I am thinking about TBs and platoons and TWs here).
The variance in time to completion for the lower tiers of the raid, factoring in the rewards received, just make tiers 5 and 6 a chore. Though not as severe as the original AAT raid (it took some guilds a month to clear it if I remember correctly), it simply isn’t enjoyable to spend days trying to take a phase down. And while there is variety in the teams that can be effective in the non-heroic tiers, it is still not enough for a majority of guild members to keep them interested.
The frustration with heroic comes from the damage differential between the unique teams and all other teams for Phases 1 and 3. For example, as you know most average RJT teams (G12, but not the best mods) can do, roughly, 5-6% in an attack. Any other team struggles to get one-tenth of that. So, unless you have RJT, there really isn’t a point attacking in Phase 1, which excludes a fair number of players from a major guild event. And it is the same for Phase 3. This also means that people with RJT teams (or Chex Mix) feel greater pressure to maximize damage done, not because you want to be the top scorer in the raid (positive motivation), but because you don’t want to let your guild mates down (negative motivation), hence the number of re-tries to get good RNG.
Like I said, my guild is motivated to keep moving forward, to growing, to developing, to tackling the challenges that you throw our way, and we are mostly happy to do so. But it does feel like this raid is antithetical to your recent quality of life updates and your push for players not to neglect their rosters to develop just a few strong teams. We enjoy the strategy needed to attack in each phase of the Sith Raid, like using the specials at the right times and in the right ways, but portions of the raid seem to exclude members (because of time requirements or not having the only viable team for a phase), which makes some much less interested in participating.
Capital Games Team
