Darth Hater

Loot bags will still meen we will only have a small chance to get what we are chasing, it just takes the loot drama out of the game, I just hope they give guilds a way to reward extra effort by their members as this system makes DKP obsolete

About loot bags, it will just end up with you having the same chance at gear as in other mmo's, take wow for example you hax x% of getting your drop at a boss but will always get a badge/points/comendation/token, the same will happen here, only difference is no nonja looting and the gear that does proc will always be usable by the person who gets it (no more useless drops that no one can equip, no more ele shammy drop but no ele in the raid moments)

The only real problem I have with it is from a high end guild perspective, DKP works because it rewards those that put the time and effort in, those that put more time in earn more DKP and therefore get prio on gear, with the loot bag system, there is no reward for the extra effort, which may cause guilds to have to reward members in new ways, other than that I think this is a great idea tbh

How ell lootbags work isn't in the concept itself, it all boils down to the specifics. What tokens/commendations/badges can and can't buy, how many it takes for any one given purchase etc etc.

That said... it does eliminate a number of issues we've had to put up with for quite some time now. The hunter spending DKP on an item not really suited for him, the raidleader giving his girlfriend healer precedent, ninjas that may well join a guild taking a chance and ninjaing when a very rare item drops. Politics affecting distribution... and so forth.

And last but not least allows for SOME reward to those who are chronically unlucky in the form of commendations. Doesn't have to come close to those who are lucky, but should still make them feel like their time is throughly wasted.

Woe seriously Dover you wanna be able to stun all bosses? No way man. Like sleeper said the harder the better :)

Being able, or say, required to stun bosses correctly to survive doesn't neccesarily make things any easier.

An interesting twist on things it might be, perhaps. Kinda the same as interrupting them though, assuming you have to stun them to prevent or delay some ability.

Perhaps just stun-able as a way to reduce damage? Kinda boring though I guess, just another thing you'd spam whenever its off cooldown.

i agree with this. i don't like mechanics that artificially nullify any class abilities. they should design encounters factoring in all of the abilities available to the classes.

Give bosses the CC nullifying gauge from PvP (gradually become immune to CC for a short time) and I could get behind having every boss able to be stunned. Otherwise, I agree with Sleeper that it would diminish their difficulty.

Dover, when you mentioned smaller sizes being better for harder content, because the devs could allow a failure due to a single person doing a single thing wrong, you were wrong. For a relatively long time in WoW that has alredy been the case for the big raid too. One little mistake by a single person out of 25 is enough. Sometimes not, but in those cases the battles are generally not considered the hardest.

Smaller IS easier for several reason, such as space (unless you can somehow differentiate the rooms), coordination and the basic limitation of having fewer people. There are simply mechanics you can't do with few people. A Lady Vashj encounter would be impossible with 8 and mindnumbingly insane with 16. And that was all about coordination.

A few cases of smaller = harder has been experienced. Sartharion with 3 drakes in 10 was crazy hard but that was because of the mechanics set up. Basically the encounter required more tanks than you could allow, and thus also more healers, and at the same time a lot more DPS. In the end only few groups actually did it like it was supposed to be done, most just zerged Sartharion after they got their gear up.

By the way, 10 and 25 grants the same gear in WoW. Just 25 grants more.

The less people in the raid, the crucial it becomes when one fails. Simple enough. 25 man raids in WoW could bear 4-5 noobs, or lowgeared people, or even more, it depended on the setup. But in 10 man the game was not so forgiving. I remember times with 40 man raids, where the autoshot hunter term became famous, ofc not without reason. There were people who actually gone afk while doing the bossfight due to the mechanics, or because there was allways someone else who could do your job.

Again, I gave voice before about this: I'm quite happy about this decision, because I prefer fewer good men, and it feels good, kinda familiar to have a smaller raid force. Less drama, less afk, less noobishness. 8 or 16 man raids sound hi5 to me!

They were specifically talking about hard content. There the bigger raids are just as unforgiving for a single death. Quite simply, the hardest encounter will be a 16 man, no doubt. Because that is how hard they can be (one death = wipe). You can't make the smaller encounters harder than that. And since they are trying to be a serious contender, they need cutting edge encounters, thus the hardest encounters will be completely unforgiving.

I finished several 10 man bosses two man. One healer and one tank. Are those encounters indicative? So don't even begin talking about MC and the fact that it could be done by 15 competent raiders. That's 6 years ago, it no longer holdn't any truth worth talkign about. Unless BioWare wan't to go through all the same mistakes Blizzard did.

I have to agree more with Dover here than you Kraxis.

When your only experience with this is wow, it colours your every conclusion. For one, 3 drakes10 was killed by plenty of guilds. Your assertion that "most" just zerged it later could be said about every single hardmode encounter in wow. The minority kill it when it is challenging content, and the majority go back to get the achievement later. That is just the same for both 10 and 25man.

It will entirely depend on how SWTOR is going to design encounters. I am sure there will be similar stuff to wow, and I am sure it may take Bioware to find their feet with regards to some of this stuff.

Saying one will be easy and one will be hard is probably premature at this stage. We already know that they both have a difficulty setting. At the end of the day, we probably wont find out until we try it!

Easier, not easy, everything is relative as you sort of noted.

The 45 min Strat run is not unique in WoW, and neither was it the hardest. I never ran it myself as I entered at BC. However I did experience Zul'aman and the mount run there, and did so with people who had played since beta. They had little more than scoffs for Strat 45min compared to the bearrun. Now that was a 10 man.

But why does the bigger run need more leeway? That makes no sense. What you can demand of a smaller raid you can't demand of a bigger, and add more layers of difficulty on top of the danger of 1 dead = wipe situations. I simply can't see how you can argue that in the small group it is ok to demand perfection, but not the bigger group. It has already been done. The law of averages does not apply as those failures in big groups will also be present in the smaller ones. You can naturally weed them out of the groups, but how is getting rid of two guys in two 8mans any more difficult than two in a 16man? It is not. The same average.

Dover you yourself note that smaller groups can't perform the same actions the bigger ones can. So you assert they can instead go another route (let's ignore timed runs like Strat and the Bear for the moment). Yes, something else is required to make the encounter hard, but what can smaller groups do that bigger ones can't be expected to do as well? Where are the technical limitations? Nowhere I can see. You just invent some arbitrary cutoff and say the bigger groups require a sort of handholding.

If you maintain that the bigger groups need ot be easier due to the population and X percentages etc. then I will just say that more small runs are performed than big ones. It is almost exponentially easier to get a small run going, so by making the smaller groups harder you make Operations considerably less attractive to a much larger portion of the population. Perkunas is right, more small runs are able to be performed, so it makes no sense that those have the .5% wall. You just piss more people off that way.

The problem is trying to balance both and I'm sorry, but Warcraft has done a terrible job of this. Encounters are not equal in 10 and 25 many are much more difficult on one or the other. You can't make them equal so it's a better idea to focus on one version being harder and that should be the larger raid. You are already having to coordinate more people so it makes sense for that also to be the more difficult raid. 8-man content should be the realm of the casual guild and the competitive guilds should all focus on 16's.