Killing a Disco Ball

The last post I made about Legacy of the Sith's new operation, R-4 Anomaly, was back in September last year. Since then I haven't really mentioned it other than to shine a bit more light on just how badly my frustrations with it have been affecting me in my year-in-review post from December.

This may have been giving the impression that I haven't spent any more time in the place, but that would be a misconception. My break from progression ops ended after only a month and I soon rejoined my team to farm the second and third boss in R-4 veteran mode with them. This wasn't exactly the most satisfying thing ever, but people raid for a number of different reasons (to see the content, to challenge themselves, for gear, or as a way of socialising) and it scratched at least a number of these itches, preventing us from having to worry about "what to do next" for the next few months.

However, eventually we reached the point where we had pretty much everything those two bosses could give us and we had to face the question of what to focus on next: some old master mode operation we hadn't cleared recently, or IP-CPT, the first boss in R-4 that we had been skipping with lockouts, commonly referred to as "disco ball" (because it's literally an orb that hangs from the ceiling and the fight involves a lot of flashing lights). We held a vote among the members of my ops team and IP came out ahead.

Now, I mentioned before that this boss was considered horribly overtuned relative to the rest of the fights in R-4, however the dps requirements had been nerfed ever so slightly since launch, and some people in the guild had in fact killed it with other ops teams at this point, so the idea of trying to take it on didn't seem entirely crazy anymore (especially with all the extra gear we had acquired). There were still problems though, most notably that the fight requires zero tanks, and tanking is the only role Mr Commando likes to play nowadays, which meant that leading progression nights on IP suddenly fell to me. This wasn't actually too bad in terms of what it required from me, since we had several group members who knew the fight and I could delegate most tasks and call-outs to them, but it also sucked because running ops is also a way for Mr Commando and me to spend time together, and this meant that we weren't.

I will say that the fight did grow on me over time though. When we'd first checked it out briefly last year, just to see what it was like, it seemed horrible to me. There is so much going on in story mode already - it's a recipe for massive visual overload - and on veteran mode all those mechanics are actually deadly. I kept dying to standing in fire and knew that I was being bad; I just couldn't manage to pay attention to everything that was going on and keep my eyes on people's health bars at the same time.

Once we started attempting the boss in earnest at the start of this year though, I began to see an odd kind of beauty in it. I watched videos of other people killing it successfully and admired how easy they made it look, avoiding all the fire and lasers with the absolute minimum amount of movement required and dancing around each other's red circles beautifully. And while our own progression was comparatively slow, we did also get better at dealing with the various mechanics over time, including me.

Even so, stress levels in general were amping up. We suffered turnover for real life reasons, due to personality conflicts, and one guy just plain deciding that we weren't good enough for him anymore and that he wanted to play with better players. This would set us back some nights, which then in turn frustrated the people who remained, and I was the one who got to hear all about it. There was one night when I already felt stressed out due to other factors, and when I sat down to raid I just burst into tears at the thought of having to deal with all the same nonsense for yet another evening. Mr Commando was kind of shocked and shuffled me off to bed while quickly looking for someone to replace me.

When we decided to tackle IP once again this past Sunday I was almost apologetic towards the group, telling them that we could always go do something else if things didn't go well and we ended up having a bad time. However, things did not go badly this time. They went exceedingly well as we managed to get to the last phase over and over again. Then we had one wipe at two percent. And then we killed it.

I won't deny that this felt really nice. It's been a while since I felt a rush to upload a video of a new boss kill while all fired up from adrenaline. It felt like the sort of win that my team sorely needed, and suddenly the future looked brighter again, with other goals not feeling quite so out of reach anymore either.

And yet... I think back to other frustrating bosses that had us emerge triumphant in the end, such as master mode Dread Master Styrak two years ago. That was a hard time too, but it kinda felt worth it in the end. With R-4, I'm still not quite sure, as it does feel like that operation has been too much of a drain on my happiness for a quick burst of joy to just make up for it all. We'll see how things in there go over the next few months I guess.

R-4 Hoop Jumping

One of the things I've learned at my current place of work is that when resources to fix problems are very limited, small issues that can be worked around in some way can go unfixed for a very, very long time. After a while you pretty much consider the workaround the new "normal" way to do things without even thinking about it anymore, until you have to explain the workflow to a new starter one day, and suddenly realise that it's rather odd that whenever you want to perform a search in application A, you actually perform the search in application B and then copy and paste part of the URL string into application A, because the actual search function in application A itself has been broken for as long as you can remember and just causes the whole thing to crash. To use a totally made-up example.

What does this have to do with SWTOR? Well... I've been taking a break from progression ops in recent weeks. The frustration with the whole ops situation had just become too much for me to want to deal with. The rest of my team however, including Mr Commando, has largely soldiered on, and I haven't exactly been "away" either. I've still been chatting with my team, and once or twice I did attend an op to help out when they were a person short.

On Friday I was called upon once again and got to kill the second boss in R-4 veteran mode for the first time. I had a good time overall, but it really struck me how thoroughly broken the ops experience in R-4 is at the moment. That's to say in the sort of way I described at the start of this post, meaning that people have to apply half a dozen workarounds on a daily basis to be able to do anything at all.

First off there is the obstacle of the first boss being massively overtuned on veteran mode. Even people who've successfully killed it seem to agree, especially since the second and third boss are so much easier in comparison. This has led to the few who are actually capable of killing the first boss bartering their lockouts away to the slightly less capable, so that the latter can gear up from the second and third boss without ever having killed the first one.

My guild has also chosen to go this route, so even though none of our raiders have ever killed the first boss as far as I'm aware, some teams have been farming bosses two and three for a few weeks now. Someone just needs to have a connection to a team that can kill the first boss and then needs to organise a lockout handover before ops time every time.

Then follows the next complication: When you start the operation with the first boss dead, the second boss isn't accessible by normal means as a door that should be open bugs out and remains closed. However, someone figured out that there is a certain location on top of a crate where it's possible to have a duel, and someone with a knockback can then throw their opponent across a giant chasm if the person to be thrown also jumps into the air at just the right time. You want to choose a stealther for this manoeuvre, as once they've successfully landed on the other side, they can then stealth past the trash mobs there and unlock the train to the second boss. So this is another whole ritual that has to be performed at the start of every ops.

It's a good thing that you're able to duel inside of R-4, because generally this is disabled inside instances. It's unclear whether the fact that it's possible in R-4 is yet another bug that just happens to work in the players' favour for a change or something that Bioware intentionally enabled to make this and other workarounds possible, though I'd be very surprised if it was the latter.

Wait, I just spoke of "other workarounds" related to duelling, what else is there? Well, for a few months now there's been a bug whereby after a wipe and respawn, one or more members of the group will look dead to one or more other members of the raid, even though everyone is alive. This bug has been in the game since before 7.1, but at that point it didn't happen that frequently. Honestly, initially I thought it was just very funny - jokes were made about so-and-so being "undead" etc. - and if you're not a healer, it's not necessarily a deal-breaker that someone shows as dead in your ops frames when they're actually alive.

However, in R-4 this bug happens all the time, and it's quite annoying to deal with during progression, especially when it keeps affecting the healers (who obviously need to be able to see people's health bars accurately). Good thing there are more workarounds!

For one thing, it seems that it's possible to avoid the issue occurring if you're the last person to release and respawn. Now, obviously someone has to go first, but if the healers make sure to revive last, they'll generally be able to see everyone alive even if the bug affects other members of the ops group.

The other workaround involves duels once again - because if someone who can see the "undead" person's health normally duels them and hits them with a hard stun, they'll suddenly come back to life for everyone else in the group as well. I mean, I do enjoy being able to make sincere requests such as "someone kick Aregelle in the nuts please, he's dead to me again" but it's still a hassle.

If you make it to the third boss on veteran mode, apparently everyone has to Alt+F4 at the start and reload the game, or else they won't be able to see an important visual cue during the fight. When you exit the operation at the end, it's best to drop group before doing so, or else you'll have a high likelihood of getting stuck on an infinite loading screen. The list goes on and on...

It feels like every night in R-4 requires an obstacle course of following all the right steps to be able to raid at all, before you even get to having to learn the boss fights. I'm honestly kind of in awe of the people who have persevered in the face of all that just to get that purple 340 gear, but I've got to admit that with a bit of distance and perspective, it looks like a very weird experience.

Difficult Decisions

Blaugust has come and gone, and has left me feeling rather down. I've never been into the whole "daily posting" aspect of the event, but the badges on my sidebar (only visible on desktop, sorry) are a testament to my consistency when it comes to participation, as I've been able to proudly show off my silver award (earned by making 15+ posts throughout the month, in my case spread out across multiple blogs) four years in a row.

I thought it was going to be a given that I'd earn it again this year, but I stalled out at thirteen posts. During the last days of the month I kept trying to think of ways in which I could still squeeze in another couple of posts to hit my usual milestone, but in the end I just couldn't muster the enthusiasm for it.

I expected the month of August to provide a lot of positive inspiration for posts in the form of SWTOR's patch 7.1, but that didn't really pan out the way I expected either. The story update and new daily area were okay, but the new operation was honestly just a shock for me.

Back in March I actually gave the new tuning for operations introduced with Legacy of the Sith a thumbs-up. Things seemed a bit on the tough side, but Bioware had been clear about their long-term gearing plan for this expansion and I had faith that they would come through and eventually give us access to better gear that would make things easier.

However, the more 7.1 got pushed back, the more we started to feel the squeeze. I wrote about class imbalances and how my ops team was increasingly running up against a wall, unable to find any more bosses that we could kill with our skill and gear level. I was looking more and more towards patch 7.1 as the source of our salvation, seeing how it was supposed to both give us our first new operation in almost three years as well as give us access to better gear. Unfortunately, the reality of that has turned out to be nothing like I imagined.

I've expressed some of my annoyances with R-4 Anomaly already, but really, it's not just the new operation itself, but also the fact that Bioware back-pedalled on the whole gear upgrades thing at the last minute - on the PTS, Rakata gear was upgradeable beyond 330, giving raiders a chance to improve their gear even if they couldn't immediately kill anything in the new operation on veteran mode, but for some reason they decided not to go with that for live, only allowing daily and flashpoint runners to increase their item level to 330 but not letting raiders have any progress outside R-4 veteran mode.

So my ops team is basically no better off than it was before 7.1, just that we now also have a new and horribly overtuned operation to wipe in.

I don't like writing posts like this because it's a game and I generally try to focus on the positive aspects of the hobby - if I don't like something, I prefer to just avoid that part of the game instead of whinging too much about it. The problem is that running operations has been such an integral part of my SWTOR experience for over a decade now that it's impossible to ignore all this. My ops team consists of people I've known and played with for years, and since we hang out multiple times a week they're one of my primary social circles.

And here we are, stuck with nowhere to go in terms of progression, basically because Bioware has decided that after ten years of raiding some of us are not good enough for their game anymore. This stinks! We've been trying to find some sort of solution, but it's difficult because outside of our shared interest in progression raiding, people have very different gameplay preferences. I eventually had to say last week that I need to step down and at least take a break from all that progression stuff because it was just depressing me. That's not how a game should make you feel.

Because of how integral running ops is to my experience, it's been a long time since I felt so down on SWTOR as a whole. The last time I wrote about hitting a wall in operations to this degree was proabably back during Shadow of Revan - but that was a different time, with much faster patches, and we got the announcement that the Knights of the Fallen Empire expansion was coming up only two months after I wrote that post. There is no such relief in sight right now.

I also find myself thinking back to the early days of Galactic Command and how it made me not want to play. That one didn't have anything to do with difficulty, but instead was tied to a bad gearing system that made a lot of our efforts feel futile, which again sounds somewhat familiar - but again, at least there was some relief in sight back then as Bioware was already working on tweaking the system.

This time I'm finding it much harder to be optimistic. The other day there was a dev post that said that they "continue to look at Operation difficulty. The team continues to tweak and adjust R4 and other Operations to ensure a fair balance", but I'm not hopeful that this may result in useful action any time soon. Even if Bioware does end up nerfing the operation or changing the way gearing works in a few months, things have already been out of whack for so long that any changes may well end up coming too late for my ops team.

A Non-angry R-4 Post

I haven't really felt like posting for a week since real life has been stressful, and at the same time my continued inability to clear the new ops on story mode really put a damper on my enjoyment of the game. Naturally, when my team finally did get the kill last week, it was on the night when I was sitting out. So when it was finally my turn today - halfway through week three of the new operation being out - I didn't even feel jubilant, just relieved that it was finally over. Plus as our tank commented (the other person in the run who hadn't got his achievement yet): Ultimately it felt kind of random that we survived the last phase on our first try tonight when we had continuously wiped to it during the previous weeks, so I can't say that I got to feel a great deal of satisfaction for overcoming a challenge.

However, as much as I think that the difficulty tuning has been god-awful and has really overshadowed everything else about R-4 (and my enjoyment of the game in general), there were some other things that I found noteworthy about the new operation. Now that I've actually seen the end, I want to talk about them all.

First off, the environmental and cinematic work is top notch as usual, but Bioware has never really let me down in those areas. Mr Commando was a bit thrown off by the fact that there was no short intro cinematic the first time we entered the operation while on the story mission, but the cinematics before and after the last boss were very cool.

The ops as a whole uses space very well, alternating between giant, cavernous rooms that make you feel really small and tight corridors in which you get overwhelmed by enemies and traps, both of which really play up the horror theme that the designers chose to go for in this operation. The closest thing already in the game that it reminded me of is Kaon Under Siege, though that obviously has a very different setting with its urban landscape.

The trapped corridors are a bit of a mixed bag mechanically - I guess some of our early struggles with them have been due to not doing the mechanics entirely correctly, but some of it is also just unfriendliness towards groups not being super tightly organised or mechanics simply being a bit buggy. During my first visit to the ops it took us ages just to get to the first boss as those force fields that go up in the hallway with the fire ended up separating people, then we exited area, came back in and were trapped with no way to advance, had to exit again and reset the whole phase... and so on.

The first boss or giant disco ball is reasonably fun I guess. The mechanic requiring you to press the buttons with different symbols is kind of interesting and different, but everything else about the fight is basically trying not to stand in five different kinds of fire and just makes me feel kind of old. I don't mind having a bit of that sort of thing, but the degree to which this fight takes it just stresses me out (though at least on story mode it's reasonably forgiving and you can survive quite a few mess-ups). Apparently veteran mode requires you to memorise a complicated dance pattern for the whole fight just so you can stay out of everything and... yeah, no.

Also, without wanting to touch too much on tuning issues again, the dps check for the final burn on that boss is kind of whack. My first kill on it was actually a draw as it blew up and killed the raid at the exact same moment as we killed it. That was certainly funny, but it was only afterwards that we learned that it was beneficial to ditch one tank for the whole operation and take a fifth damage dealer instead, in order to be able to beat dps checks like this one more reliably.

The second boss, Watchdog, is again reasonably fun mechanically and probably the most complex of the bosses in a non-obvious way. There's a lot going on with colours and bombs and stuff that doesn't immediately make sense, though it's quite fun once you understand what's happening. Apparently my ops team misunderstood the mechanics so badly the first night (while going in blind, without having looked at any guides) that their instructions to us on the second night were to "intentionally blow up the grenades" which led to all kinds of hilarity. We only wised up when a member of another team listened in on us and kind of went "WTF are you doing".

Lord Kanoth is probably my favourite boss of the operation, and not just because he shares a name with an old WoW buddy of mine whom I could amuse a bit by telling him that he's now a raid boss in SWTOR. The room just before the boss gives sufficient explanation of how to handle the Nihrot spread and it's a fairly intuitive mechanic that allows everyone to contribute to keeping the battlefield clean. There's also a lot more going on with the details of how Nihrot spreads that we didn't really pick up on and that I only learned from looking at a guide later on because it's not really essential to fully understand on story mode, and I actually appreciate that.

Finally, we have Lady Dominique, my personal nemesis, but aside from the annoyances of her burn phase, she's a pretty decent fight. On an intellectual level I like the attempt at using verticality in an environment that isn't circular like Soa's room or the machine in Temple of Sacrifice, but I also main a Commando so I can't claim that it's super fun to be knocked down at regular intervals and then having to slowly leg it back up to the boss while everyone around me insta-leaps to her. (Tonight I played as Scoundrel and having Trick Move made that part so much more bearable.)

Which just leaves the story of the operation, and to be honest that's something that's not great either. I've always loved it when SWTOR's ops convey a little narrative, but when they mess it up it's pretty awkward. The first time I remember feeling that way was in Ravagers, where there's this big twist happening in the middle of the last boss fight which is only conveyed through a voice-over that is easy to miss over the sounds of battle and it was just so confusing the first time. However, the worst example to this day remains Gods from the Machine, the ending of which is just a big ball of confusion, what with you killing Scyva but then she's immediately alive again and on your side now, somehow.

I had high hopes for R-4 in that regard since Dxun's story was so good and funny and this one was supposed to be a sort of follow-up, but something clearly went a bit awry somewhere. Cal has a much more detailed post about it on his blog, but in a nutshell, you start with ARIA speaking in a deep voice pretending to be someone else, then speaking in yet another voice pretending to be a third person (I think?), then suddenly being back to being her usual chirpy self, and then going "yes, it's me" and none of it is really tied together narratively. It's not as big of a deal as in Gods, because at least the dead don't come alive again and switch sides randomly, it's just this low-key itch of confusion that follows you through the whole instance. I'm fine with a bit of mystery and not knowing everything, such as ARIA's motivations or who exactly EVE is, but that part felt like it was supposed to tell us something but then just didn't make sense.

While trying to research whether I was missing something, I learned that apparently there was evidence of a fifth boss called Lord Valeo on the PTS, whose fight was supposed to take place on a train (similar to the first boss in Crisis on Umbara), and I wonder whether his inclusion would have shed any more light on what's going on with ARIA, but I could only find some deleted voice lines for the boss himself, not any potentially cut intermission content. I guess this is just going to be one of those "what could have been" mysteries of SWTOR.

All-in-all, I've got to admit that I've found R-4 somewhat disappointing. There's some good stuff in there and it might still have a chance to redeem itself if they do some re-tuning soon, but at the current rate I suspect it's just going to be one of those places that people avoid most of the time because the fun parts just aren't worth the required hassle.

A History of Story Mode Ops Difficulty

One of the downsides of playing the same MMO for a really, really long time is that you're likely to see certain bad ideas get repeated after a while. I'm guessing this happens because by a certain point you've probably been playing longer than some devs have been working on the game, so that they don't have the same context and experiences with the whole of the game's history as you do.

If you're a content creator like me, you also have the "bonus" of having receipts, meaning you can refer back to old blog posts and go "yep, this was already a bad idea back in 2012, and we said so at the time too". This might sound like it should be satisfying, but in practice it's honestly just deflating to constantly have to repeat yourself and wrestle with the same issues over and over again.

The specific subject that has made me think about this in the past two weeks is the difficulty of story mode operations. When SWTOR came out back in 2011, many people burned through the available raid content really quickly, complaining that it was both too easy and that there was too little of it. This was not my own experience, since I took my time levelling and didn't step foot into an operation until February 2012. And when I did, I loved it. We didn't kill Soa on our first night because everything was so new to us, but even then I noted that he was "still not too bad" and two weeks later I reported that my guild had cleared both EV and KP on story mode.

Explosive Conflict released in April, and I didn't write about clearing it on story mode until the beginning of June, noting that "story mode feels considerably overtuned". For people who weren't around back then this might sound a bit weird if you only know the operation in its current iteration, but back then, a lot of the mechanics that now only exist in veteran and master mode were also part of story mode, plus the gear requirements were pretty tight. Still, I didn't mind too much at the time and I had fun. It was a different time, and we were all still figuring things out - including Bioware. (I'll just say that my complaint from that post that "with 1.3 not containing any new raid content, PvE endgame will be a bit dry for the next couple of months" seems hilariously quaint in hindsight.)

My first experience with Terror from Beyond was a bit messy since it came out around the time that my first guild fell apart, meaning that my first visit there was a semi-pug and we only got two bosses down, but even then I noted, "the people who had told me that Terror from Beyond was a return to easier story modes were not wrong."

When I got to run Scum and Villainy for the first time in April 2013, I once again loved it. We only killed five out of the seven bosses during my first night, but that seemed to be down to the unusual length of the ops more than anything else.

When the two Oricon operations were released in October 2013, my first runs of them, into which we mostly went blind to allow ourselves to be surprised, were amazingly fun. I wrote about my first trip to story mode Dread Fortress (which we cleared in one evening) in this post and commemorated my first trip to Dread Palace with a short video called "Dread Palace in less than 100 seconds" which mostly involves a lot of giggling and squealing and finishes with one of my guildies going "best op ever".

It was as if Bioware was incapable of creating an operation that I didn't love at first sight - until the Shadow of Revan expansion that is. My post about Ravagers and Temple of Sacrifice was called "New Ops: Good Stuff, Needs Some Work" and primarily for one reason: the difficulty. "Sword Squad and the Underlurker in Temple of Sacrifice were probably the worst in terms of requiring both a high damage output as well as flawless coordination. These are not bad things... for a hardmode. But for story mode, which is meant to be the easy way of seeing the content, easy enough that you can do it in a moderately competent pug, this is an absolute killer."

I also still recall my first night in Temple of Sacrifice very vividly, because I still remembered the fun we'd had clearing the Dread ops for the first time and started recording our run initially... However, after several wipes on Sword Squadron I turned the recording off because fun levels were plummeting through the floor and I didn't really want to create any lasting negative memories of that night (as it turns out, that didn't entirely work). Underlurker was eventually nerfed, and significantly at that, though Sword Squadron can remain a bit of a pain in terms of damage output.

This is when the dark times of no new group content additions for several years began, and I later wondered whether it was a coincidence that this came about after these two operations. When we finally got our first new operations boss in the form of Tyth in April 2017, I noted while looking back: "I still think less of Ravagers and Temple of Sacrifice to this day due to their awful initial tuning, which hasn't actually been adjusted all that much even now, not to mention their propensity for pointless red circle syndrome. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if those two operations were at least partially to blame for Bioware's decision to not add any more of that type of content for a long time - raids that unfriendly towards both casual players and mid-level guilds can't have boasted particularly high participation numbers."

As for Tyth himself though, I was once again in love, and why? "When I first went in with my guildies to kill him on story mode, he absolutely melted. [...] "That was way too easy," I heard some guildies mutter, but I was wide-eyed with delight. That's exactly how story mode should be to an over-geared, organised and well-practiced group, or else it will be a killer to pugs. In fact, I'm sure there are pug groups wiping on him even now. And that's okay, because this game isn't about always succeeding at everything on the first attempt. But he should be well within reach of even casual players sticking their noses into a story mode for the first time, and that's how it should be."

The piecemeal releases of later bosses in the same operation had me a bit more sceptical in terms of their difficulty tuning, but Izax was pretty cool. I particularly gave Bioware credit for managing to create a fight that was both very involved but still casual-friendly by employing a little trick: "My favourite part of Bioware trying to make this ridiculously long and initially somewhat complicated fight more casual-friendly without neutering the basic mechanics is that while the encounter is active, the cooldown of all combat resurrections - which is usually five minutes - is reduced to thirty seconds. What this means is that the devs could allow certain mechanics to kill people without frustrating the whole group by enforcing a wipe. As long as you still have control of the fight overall and your healers/res-capable damage dealers are on the ball, you can allow people to fall over and get them up again a ridiculous amount of times. The death still teaches a lesson, leaving the victim with another repair bill and probably feeling slightly sheepish, but things keep rolling and remain fun for the group as a whole." Sadly this mechanic broke at some point and has remained unfixed for years as far as I'm aware, which has made the fight considerably less casual-friendly in later patches.

With the release of Onslaught we got the Nature of Progress operation, for which I had a lot of praise again, though there were a few criticisms too... one of them once again - surprise, surprise - the story mode tuning: "Story mode is no Gods of the Machine for sure (thankfully!), but fights like the two gauntlet bosses still require an amount of co-ordination that I wouldn't expect to find in your average pug. This strikes me as a shame as it once again means that the content will remain inaccessible to many more casual players even on what's supposed to be the easiest difficulty, which is particularly sad considering what a fun operation this is."

There is a very clear theme in all of this: I like my story mode operations to be easy. I think the name story mode more than implies that it should be easy, with its primary purpose being to allow people to see the story. It's okay to have some mechanics that can kill people, and there's nothing wrong with some wiping while you're still figuring out basic mechanics and/or if you're in a pug, but a co-ordinated group of guildies on voice chat should surely be able to breeze through without any major issues and while having a good laugh.

I understand there are incentives for devs to make even story mode somewhat more difficult, for example to prevent people from rushing through the content too quickly, or because it's much easier to sell people on the idea of nerfing something that's initially too hard than the other way round. Though honestly, I've never ever felt bad about an operation supposedly being too easy on story mode. Easy is fun and inclusive and allows for a bit of silliness.

Also, first impressions are important, and if an operation gets a bad reputation early on, it can put people off for a looong time. Ravagers and Temple of Sacrifice aren't viewed as particularly tough after some nerfs and almost eight years after their introduction, but Gods and Dxun are still places that people avoid due to them feeling like too much of a hassle even on story mode. Dxun story mode was actually nerfed pretty considerably with the launch of 7.0, but it took months until people even started to notice because they just reflexively didn't even want to spend as much time there.

Why am I telling you all this? Because by this point, ten days after 7.1, I would have expected to give a brief summary post of what the new operation "R-4 Anomaly" is like, but my regular ops team - used to raiding veteran and master modes - still hasn't been able to kill the last boss on story mode after five nights. We obviously get the mechanics by this point, but we just can't meet the dps check and get overwhelmed by adds at the end. As the fight takes about ten minutes, it's particularly "fun" to go through all that over and over again, just to then wipe with the boss at 0.3% health. It simply overshadows everything else I might have had to say about this new operation.

I'm sure we'll get there eventually, even if it's by sheer luck, but either way it hasn't been something I would call a fun experience. Plus for me it's extra frustrating that I've basically been telling Bioware to not make freaking story mode ops so hard for a freaking decade, and yet here they are doing it again, worse than ever. I just don't understand.