Darth Hater

Hey, I'm the guild leader of a small guild that has just started to dabble in 8 man Operations.  Our guild is new, starting with TOR.  We don't have prior experience raiding together in other games.We went into EV Tuesday with 4 guildies in voice chat and 4 pugs.  Our comp was Shadow/Vanguard Tanks, 2 Shadow, 1 Guardian, 1 Gunslinger DPS, and 2 Sage Healers.  The healers, guardian, and gunslinger were pugs.  It was everyone's first time in EV.  We cleared every boss/event up to Soa, and got him down to 3k hp.  But we hit enrage timers on every boss, (just barely hit it on Annihilation Droid).  It was difficult to coordinate with the entire raid, when half of them weren't in voice chat.

Basically what I'm wondering is how I can improve our raid's performance?  How can I improve our overall DPS, other than just finding guides for each of their classes and pointing them in the right direction?  I'm not going to go on a rant about meters and combat logs, but how can I evaluate who is playing their classes well.  I'm new to raid leading as well.  I gave out warnings when lightning was incoming and to attack mind traps and such, so I understand it isn't about who is straight up doing the most DPS.  How can I make my guild more raid aware?

I'm just looking for advice as to how I can evaluate my raiders, and help to make them better, not replace them.  We started this guild with the idea that we can help new players learn, and have a friendly, fun atmosphere.  We aren't aiming for Server First kills, but we do want to improve.

Everyone on the forums says how easy the Operations are, and I agree, but it's frustrating when the only thing holding us back are enrage timers...  (And please don't rage on me or give me the L2P.  Constructive feedback is greatly appreciated. :D )

Well the number one thing you can do is get your pug players in voice chat with you.

Sometimes you need to cordinate things while in the middle of fighting and voice chat makes that possible

The number 2 thing you can do is try to get more guild members at max level so you don't have to pug so many people. You need a solid core group of players who can fill every core role.

Another issue I'm seeing with your comp is that you don't have any troopers. No troopers means no trooper buff. That trooper buff is an extra 5% Endurance for the whole Raid. Doesn't sound like much, but it can take the edge off your healers and make their job at least a little easier.

Other than, just run some Heroic Flashpoints for Gear.

Honestly, once you've built up a decent set of gear, and you've learned your rotation well enough, beating the enrage timer can come down to simply how many people you can keep alive until the boss hits enrage.

Also a small trip on Soa: Anytime during the 3rd phase where Soa can be damaged, ignore any mind traps that are up and just throw all the dps you can at Soa, even healers if necessary. Soa's enrage isn't based on Time. He enrages after the 4th time his shield breaks in the last phase.

Thanks for the feedback strongarm85!

We decided to try to pug EV because we have a couple playes at max level who were starting to get antsy.  The gunglsinger and one of the healers has since joined our guild, and we have several more players who are about level 40 that we're waiting on to fill out our ops team.

We did have the 5% endurance buff from our Vanguard tank, but Thursday we didn't take the originaly Guardian DPS (he couldn't avoid lightning, fell off platforms, etc...) and took a Commando DPS.  So we were missing the Knight's 5% bonus damage buff, but we managed to down Soa.

Quote from strongarm85 »

Also a small trip on Soa: Anytime during the 3rd phase where Soa can be damaged, ignore any mind traps that are up and just throw all the dps you can at Soa, even healers if necessary.

That is exactly what we told the DPS to do, I didn't think of mentioning to the healers that they should DPS him at that point as well.

I'm guessing that most of the guilds that are saying how easy the Operations are have been imported from other games and have been raiding for a long time together.  So is it just a matter of getting a full guild run and some experience before we are cruising through the Normal Modes easily?

Thanks for all the help!

yup, most guilds that are running hardmodes/nigthmares and clearing them already are usually "pre-mades" and do not need to recruit too much and already know each other's playstyle sorta. 

I think one of the first things you need to do is face the fact that nothing in the current content, be it normal-hardmode-nightmare, needs 2 tanks. One exception might be the 2nd boss in Karagga's Palace - Jorg/Sorna - where you might wanna have some ranged person or an offtank taunting and tanking one of them to take some of the heat at times. I can almost solotank it (as Sith Assasin), but the damage spikes are hard, so I need to be lucky on using all my CD's.

I've done 7/10 Nightmare mode (rest in hard, ofc) as solotank and that is just a bit sad to see, when you love playing a tank and know that there's a lot of us out there. Giving that offtankspot to one that's dps spec, dps-geared and who knows how to pewpew means you go from 4.25 dps to 5 dps and that can be felt!

Next up is the individual gear/optimization of each and every player that you have the ability to affect. Are they running around with the wrong items (eg. Did the Jedi Shadow dps choose ForceMaster items, giving him useless Alacrity). Are each and every one of them doing their own little bit of homework in reading up on theorycrafting and using their characters to the fullest potential? Do they have 2 Rakata Implants/ 1 Rakta Earpiece? No, then they'd better get crackin' on Belsavis Bonus Series/Ilum and unlock the dailies. 5 days worth of dailies is 1 implant/earpiece+1 million creds+5 of each armor/mod/enh mods (rating 50/rank 22 epic = same as the best that standard crewskills can make) for peoples orange gear or the GTN for even more creds.

On that note - Most recently dinged 50's will have orange weapons. Doing the abovementioned dailies gives Daily Commendations. For 8 daily commendations, you can buy a barrel/hilt mod for your type that raises the overall rating of the weapon to 128. They're Epic(51) or Rank 23 barrel/hilt mods. Yes, that's one more than players per standard can craft with crewskills. And you can buy 3 of them with 1 days worth of commendations. Raising the rating means more base dps for weapons = fastest way to gain more dps. Likewise, there's also rank 23 armor mods that raise the ratings of orange armor pieces and give a higher base armor rating (something for tanks to consider!). All these mods are 8 commendations a pop.

During raids - does everyone have stims and adrenals? It doesn't need to be Rakata (but it should, if they want to raid, tbh) but if you know you're maybe going to wipe, buying prototype/blue stims that persist through death is a decent investment.

Also having a Marauder/Sentinel dps'er would mean you have access to a massive dps burst buff (Bloodthirst/whatever it's called on Rep side) that can really mean the difference if it's used 1s before he gets unshielded in P3.. and ofc right after he unshields in P1 to get it moving :)

Any one of these tips could have given you 5% more over the course of a fight.

The Soa fight also gives some easy benchmarks early on on how your dps is - Do you get 2,3 or maybe even more Mindtraps in Phase 2? You will get 2 mindtraps, that's almost impossible to avoid. If you're on par with dps, you should send him into the transition inbetween 2nd and 3rd (for all you elitists out there, this is "only" on normal and yes, it's fully possible to only get two mindtraps in P2 if you have pro pewpew). If you're just waiting for dps to break the 3rd mindtrap and the person sent flying to land before taking him below 30%, then that's just fine also. 4 Mindtraps means Phase 3 will take a long time and you will get enrage. However, it's fairly easy for a tank to kite an Enraged Soa around and if the healers are on the ball and you have a little luck, you can get minimum 1 weakened phase after enrage. I've had up to 3 before he killed the last people off.

Quote from asharudk »

Next up is the individual gear/optimization of each and every player that you have the ability to affect. Are they running around with the wrong items (eg. Did the Jedi Shadow dps choose ForceMaster items, giving him useless Alacrity). Are each and every one of them doing their own little bit of homework in reading up on theorycrafting and using their characters to the fullest potential? Do they have 2 Rakata Implants/ 1 Rakta Earpiece? No, then they'd better get crackin' on Belsavis Bonus Series/Ilum and unlock the dailies. 5 days worth of dailies is 1 implant/earpiece+1 million creds+5 of each armor/mod/enh mods (rating 50/rank 22 epic = same as the best that standard crewskills can make) for peoples orange gear or the GTN for even more creds.

This is the point that worries me the most.  I've added links to both videos and text walkthroughs of each fight.  I've explained to everyone how important it is to complete the dailies because of the awesome mods/gear that you can turn commendations in for.  I've also told everyone to check out how their specs and itemization for the best performance.  I feel like I've given them all the information they need, and it's up to them how they utilize it.

I'm almost afraid that my guild members hate me from harping on this stuff so much.  If we don't have a significantly smoother experience this time, I might have to start inspecting my team's gear and calling people out individually.  If they're still sitting in level 48 greens, they're not helping and they're actually wasting other players' time.

I've been in this situation many times and if there's one lesson I want to pass on to you it's this : You cannot play FOR other people. As leader you can try to motivate and encourage them, but in the end it's their own responsibility. If they'd rather spend game time on vrooming around the fleet station or playing PVP, then yeah, maybe going for Operations is the wrong move right now.

Having an open and honest discussion about these things amongst your player base means they either get what they need to do or they tap out. Or as a responsible leader, you tap them (or yourself) out.

I've spent many months trying to transform people who weren't really up for putting in the effort needed and in the end, they'll end up resenting you. It's a fine line between good leadership and people feeling pushed/stressed.

This might seem a bit overdramatic, I know, it's "only" normal mode and so on, but if your raiders are in lvl 48 greens and none of them are running HM FP's or anything else to improve themselves, then you need to take long hard look at what YOU want and decide whether it's time to find likeminded players or not.

Best of luck :)

Make sure everyone is stimmed up if they aren't already Bio fiends.  And yeah, dailies.

UPDATE:

Hey, my guild ran EV Normal Mode last night and we just crushed it.  We only had 1 pug (heals) because our healer was sick.  We even had a fresh level 50 Commando who levelled as a healer respec DPS, in pretty bad gear that was rewarded from 1 day's worth of dailies and gear from the GTN, and we didn't hit a single enrage this time.  That was very refreshing considering our issues from last week.

Ironically, our only problem we had was with the pylons.  (Yes, the pylons.)  I think we were taking too many turns to solve the puzzle or getting too far out of sync with the groups because 4 Acklays would spawn out of nowhere.  Once we looked up the order of the colors and kept within 1 step of each other, it went fine.

So thanks for everyone who commented on this thread.  I really appreciate it!  I know normal mode is ezmode and those leet hardcore guilds out there really don't care about it, but for our new guild of players who haven't raided together before (heck a couple of them had 0 raid experience prior), I feel really confident going forward.  Thanks again all!

(Now if we could just set Master Looter in Normal Mode I would be thrilled...)

Big gz on you and your guilds success :) 

As for the pylons here's some hints :

Ring symbol order - Blue Green Red Purple White Yellow.
White being the icon with a dot in the middle and a dot on each corner
Blue being the icon with just the blue swirl in the middle.

Before you start the encounter, after killing the 3 guys by the pylon, look at the rings current state and the symbols you need to get. Then you can easily make a gameplan ahead of time for south and north camp.

Eg. You have green on the side and the ring shows White = doesn't matter, 3 steps to each side will be white.

Eg. Yellow on the sides, Green on the ring = Hit the right console twice to make the wheel click left twice = lock achieved.

It could look like this : South - L,L,R,L / North R,R,R,R. This means that south keep pushing left until lock, north pushes right until lock. Ring 2, same. Ring 3 - both teams push right

If there's one knowledgeable person on each pylon, they can suss out their order and write it in /s , but otherwise it doesn't take long for the RL to run down and give the orders.

Note : On hard and NM mode, clicking a console gets you a debuff where a little cube is showing on top of your head. This lasts for ~ 1½-2 clicks and means you can't operate a console. So everyone at the camps needs to pitch in with the clicking.