I hate to do this… I really do but I feel I would be a hypocrite if I did not comment honestly on hardmode Flashpoints in Swtor. I often said about WoW that broken designs needs to be called for what they are and the same will apply to Swtor. So let’s get right to it. Hardmodes Flashpoints are one of the worst designs I have ever seen in any MMO. It’s so bad that I could see them become a game killer for many people. Think I’m harsh? I am but it’s truly that bad. Why? Not only because of bugs but because of obvious poorly thought out design combined with said bugs. Is the game doomed? Not necessarily because the fix is very easy to do. Fair warning, wall of text incoming.
The heart of the issue: Enrage timers
In essence, all the problems in hardmodes boils down to enrage timers. In essence, hardmodes are pretty much the exact same flashpoints as the normal modes with level 50 mobs. Bosses are nearly identical in mechanics with very little differences. They hit harder, rarely one of them gain one new ability but for the most part… same thing. Except for one important detail wich are the enrage timers.
I won’t guess at the reason why Bioware chose to do it they way they did but the end result is that every boss in hardmode gains a very very tight enrage timer. Most people attempting hardmodes report seeing the enrage timers on nearly every boss. The most frequent reported numbers seem to over at around 40 to 50%. For the record, my group seems to hit them at around 20%. If you’re wondering, these attemps were made in post 50 pre-raid gair. Meaning people who have completed the normal modes flashpoints, have worked on their gear and are mostly fitted in level 50 blues and purples. Gear I would expect to be sufficient for hardmodes since it’s sufficient to start raiding with.
The end result is that a lazy design decision, enrage timers, is not working out and it leads to a lot of other issues which make hardmode flashpoints horrible at this moment. I’ll go into details with the following points to really illustrate the effects of lazy design.
Different requirements for different roles
I stumbled into an unexpected experiment that ended up showing me one of the most insidious effects of bad enrage timers. The night we first attempted hardmodes I was playing on an offspec for the fun of it. I’m normaly playing as a dps but I wanted to try out healing for one night to see how I would fare. It turned out that night was the one we decided to try out hardmodes and I figured a hardmode would be the best way to test me as a healer.
So, just to set the scene. It was my first time healing a group since Karazhan in Burning Crusade. I had not researched my spec or even changed my gear. I was going in with a spec I made myself, and with my dps gear equipped. I did a quick Heroic 2+ quest to get some rust off but that was it. I was going to heal a hardmode within a grand total of 2 hours of being a healer.
And you know what? I pulled it off. What killed us was the enrage timers, not my lack of healing. So the next time we head in, I am back on my dps spec. The one I’ve been practicing and researching. Same gear, same skill but a different spec. What happened?? We hit the enrage timers! We did manage to finish the flashpoint eventually but our bosses kills were made during the boss enrage, sometimes with only one person barely alive.
So what did that tells me? It tells me that the gear requirements for different roles are insanely different. My gear and skill is sufficient for healing but not for dps. If this was well designed, my gear and skill would be insufficient for both roles. What this tells me instead is that the enrage timers are badly designed. They set it way too short and demand out of dps that they gear up way better than their tank or healer friends.
When timers and bugs collide
Another other insidious effect of the bad enrage timers are when you combine them with bugs. The easiest way to illustrate it is with the last boss of the Esseles flashpoint. That boss has a mechanic where he puts a mark on the ground and you have to get out within 3 seconds or get hit for huge damage. Right now, this mechanic is bugged. It’s been often reported that the timer is often shorter than 3 seconds and sometimes it even hits instantly. Also, the severs don’t always seem to register the player moving away resulting in players being far away still getting hit. I have a few theories on what exactly causes this bug but that’s not the point here.
The point is that under normal circumstance that bug is manageable. If players don’t get hit too often, a skilled healer can compensate and prevent a wipe. It’s not easy, but it’s doable. However when you combine with a crazy short enrage timer you get into certain death scenario anytime you encounter the bug. Simply put, once he enrage if you get hit by lightning, whether on your own or because of the bug, you’re dead. The end result is that once he hits enrage, it become near impossible to survive even with the most skilled players around. It’s also incredibly frustrating to be hit by the double whammy of bad design (enrage) and bugs.
Let’s screw up progression too while we’re at it
The last insidious effect is that the gear requirements and difficulty simply screw up what we have come to expect as normal progression in endgame. In most people mind, you do normal mode flashpoint, the hardmodes and the raids. Turns out that because raids seems to be better tuned, it’s actually recommended now to start raiding before doing hardmodes. Or farm random drops in pvp for a really long time.
Now you could argue that Swtor uses a different progression model but if that’s the case it would mean that endgame is even more badly designed than I thought. I’m putting myself in the shoes of someone who has no interest in raiding or pvp and just enjoy small group content and they are screwed. We are telling them, do 4 man stuff, then 8 man stuff you don’t want to do in order to do harder 4 man stuff… If that’s not broken design I don’t know what is.
Conclusions
Not all hope is gone. In fact the fix to this whole mess is pretty easy. Remove enrage timers or if they really don’t want to, double or triple the timer. Swtor has shown me moments of true brilliance in its design and I’m hopeful that they will correct this mistake soon. However I won’t mince words either. Endgame so far in Swtor has been a mess. Illum is broken, hardmodes are broken, pvp is not working great, crafting is bugged (reverse engineer bug) and there’s way too much grinding involved. I can’t comment on raids yet but let’s be honest. While I may be a big fanboi of Star Wars, not all the people I play with are. And sooner and later this kind of awful design will drive people away, and when they move away and it gets to the point where I can’t do anything… chances are I’ll be leaving too.
Screaming monkeys 
Well, at least I’m not alone in my frustration this morning. I think part of the problem is that work has gotten progressively more stressful, and we’re approaching a go-live date here at the end of the month so things are just insane this week. So, when I had expected a 45 to 60 minute fun flashpoint run last night and instead got a two hour wipefest that ended with us not even finishing the final encounter, it left me both disappointed and getting too little sleep before coming into work today. I’d like to say it was maybe an isolated thing, but I have to admit that my experience since making level 50 has been dominated by bugs and poor game design decisions; the exact opposite of my enjoyable 1-50 leveling experience. I’m feeling pretty negative about it this morning, so maybe I just need to take a step back and find other distractions from work stress this week.
Hopefully, things feel better as we head into our first operations attempts.
I hope the people at BW read this, because there are a lot of excellent thoughts here.
I was gearing up both my tanking and my DPS spec pretty much equally, but leaning towards the tank gear, since conventional wisdom has always said that having a well-geared tank, and to some extent healer, is the key to success. Now I am focusing primarily on my DPS set, since it looks like that is where the difference will be made.
Yes, we struggled with hard modes and I mostly alt now. I’d assumed it was a judgement on me for not having PvP gear (I just did enough dailies to get the purple armouring/hilt mods) but yeah, it could be poor design. Those enrage timers seem rough, or else were designed around optimal dps classes.
I agree with a lot of what you have written. I find it ironic that playing a DPS at the moment is almost more difficult than playing a tank or healer.
I believe a lot of this has to do with the way BioWare developed the leveling process. All AC’s have been tweaked to make solo leveling possible. This means tanks and healers do a fair amount of damage. The DPS gap between classes isn’t enormous unless the characters are equipped with really good gear.
There’s definitely some tuning to be done, but overall I see this as a good trend.
Why does DPS need to be easier than tanking or healing?
It’s interesting to see a complaint about the enrage timers. For me it’s a nice change having some responsibility on the DPS to perform well. I Tank.
Normal mode FPs can, generally, be completed by a skilled duo playing healer and tank. Hard modes require greater skill and less downtime plus a bit of gear from the DPS.
The alternative to making the DPS requirement tougher in FPs is add more dance to the game making it so that people need encyclopaedic knowledge of each encounter.
We’re currently working on hard mode Ops and the enrage timers there are brutal. We’re loving it. You have to take risks and put stresses on the healers there to maximise DPS time. We cleared the first 5 bosses in EV HM last night.
Pid – Tank classes, at least at level 50, do massively less damage than DPS specs once you get into fully specialised gear and use your tank ‘stance’ ability. Holding threat against well-geared DPS classes is, at times, a real challenge. Not that you know when you have aggro – the UI is utterly pants.
Firstly, to quote a bit of history, Blizzard’s Burning Crusade expansion introduced Heroic modes to WoW. Heroic Mode Instances however, were *harder* than clearing Karazhan (first raid instance) for all but a few of the various dungeons. This was similarly quoted as ‘bad design’, but it was better than Wrath’s “Steamroll the boss I just want my badgers” approach.
Secondly, without enrage timers, DPS have no requirements. If they can use their basic attack all day and the tank and healer stress out surviving long enough the boss will die. Healing and Tanking are more skill based than gear based, so a decent player in ok gear will do alright. DPS is relatively mindless in SWTOR and without a quantative measure, you’d have all day to do 1 DPS and kill the boss.
Boss Enrage Timers are the only quantative measure that’s needed. Sure, they might be a bit tight, but Hard Mode is meant to be a challenge, so enrage timers make people step up. If you’re just managing to scrape through with “I just hit 50” gear, then its tuned well because you’ve skipped all the Normal mode gearing.
As to raids, the issue isn’t that Hardmodes are overtuned. Its that Raids are undertuned and probably need some boosting to provide the same challenge. Remember when WoW content wasn’t cleared in the first week… or the first month… or even the 2nd month after it was released? That’s what raiding should be, with maybe a clear timed boss nerfing like Dragon Soul so that everyone can see the content eventually and know the story, before new content appears.
Everyone these days expects that the hardest challenges on the game should be achieveable by everyone. But if that’s the case, why is the “Hard Mode” called “Hard”? It’d be better labelled as “Slightly more difficult than when you waltzed through, but still a pushover.” given what everyone wants from it.
@all of those saying hard mode should be hard and that DPS has no responsability, etc…
Do they have the right to make it hard? Of course.
Could it be that raids are undertuned? Absolutely
Does DPS need to be held responsible for group success or failure? Yes!
However, currently, the expected performance out of the three roles is not the same.I’ll take you back to my first point where I proved all by myself that there was less requirements out of healers and tanks than the dps. That is a problem. DPS should be held accountable for success but in the same measure that the other classes. If my gear is not sufficient to dps down the boss, it should not be sufficient to heal or tank either.
I proved, as well as others, that this is not the case. That right there, is not good design.
Second, right now hardmodes are not hard but for one element, enrage timers. The trash is a joke, the bosses themselves are a joke, the only thing that make it hard is the incredibly short enrage timer. So again, lazy design.
Let’s not confuse intended difficulty with bad design. If a game is difficult because of bad controls, bad design, bugs… then it’s not a good difficulty.
Thanks for this interesting post!
And I chuckled a bit at Perrin’s comment, I’m glad I’m not the only one who had flashbacks to the complaints about the Karazhan/heroic five-man disparity in BC.
I do think enrage timers make sense in TOR because there is no “natural” enrage of running the healer out of mana, as they all seem to be tuned to be able to keeping going forever as long as they use the right abilities at the right time.
Do the current enrage timers need to be retuned? Maybe, but I think it’s too early to make absolutely damning judgements about it. We know from other games that there can be a huge difference in damage output depending on which abilities you use and when, and with no combat logs nobody really knows how much dps they are doing; we can only make educated guesses. Whether the devs end up giving us a combat log after all or whether people discover better rotations and the like simply through trial and error, average dps will only go up over time.
As for having different gear/skill requirements for different roles, how is that different from WoW? It varies by type of content of course, but how many tanks and healers have geared up in dungeons by playing dps first because as damage dealers they could “get away” with being worse? Having this much more pressure on the damage dealers is certainly unusual and I’m not even saying it’s good, but I also don’t see how it’s outrageously fail when compared to other games.
I think the difference is probably in the tuning. Your right in saying wow suffered from the same issue to a certain degree but I never felt it was this accute. Like I said, the issue can be easily solved simply by allowing a bit more breathing room with the timers.
That said, if it was bad in WoW, it’s still bad in Swtor 🙂
Good comment!
I disagree that it’s too hard.
When I first stepped into Heroic Esseles, we got destroyed by the second boss, who has a very harsh enrage timer. But after a series of attempts, we were putting out more damage, and finally beat it due to playing better instead of just dealing half-assed damage.
There is a difficulty hierarchy, like WoW had in BC. Some are easy, and some are hard. Work your way up, starting with the easier ones, before throwing up your hands and saying it’s too hard, or tuned too tight.
It’s nice that the enrage timers actually require you to work at it. It usually means that you have to minimize movement and poor decisions, and that’s wonderful. Healers should be able to toss out some damage during the lighter parts of the fight. Tanks should be worrying about their damage as well as their health. I’m a fan.
Some heroics are very difficult, like Esseles. Others are very easy, like Taral V, or dps forgiving like Fallen Emperor – I think our tank was dead for over 50% of 3 different fights in FE, and we still came out on top, in a pug, before I had significant gear.
To summarize: I like that some of the stuff is hard. Pick and choose carefully, work your way up, and use each wipe as motivation to improve. Use stims. Use all your relevant abilities – if I can absorb a hit, or reduce damage on everyone for a while, that’s more dmg the healer can do.
I find swtor HM FPs much more interesting than WoW heroics, because my dps matters past simply “dps hard so we get out of here faster.” It’s nice to actually matter.
Perrin and Shintar, surely you’re joking about Karazhan versus Heroics? Some heroics were harder than others, certainly, but aside from Shattered Halls, Durnholde Keep and Black Morass, I don’t believe any of them were comparable in difficulty to Kara. Our guild were running heroics to gear up long before we conquered Kara.
Gerry, were you tanking in TBC? Because I was and the gear requirements for heroics were higher than Karazhan (definitely for tanks, not sure about anyone else), BUT it depended a lot on which class you were playing.
Druid tanks in particular could gear up for heroics using crafted gear and I remember as a warrior in heroic slave pens being slated because I was much harder to heal than ‘the druid in someone’s guild’ which was grossly unfair because I hadn’t been gifted a perfectly statted set of craftable gear to tank in.
We did clear the heroics before we cleared Karazhan, but we had a lot of gear from the earlier Kara bosses to be able to do it.
No, I was a mage. And I was fortunate in having some solid tank and healer friends, even when my gear was relatively low. But I am sure I also did many heroics with tanks that could never have managed in Kara!
However, as a DPS I am perhaps not the best judge, so I will say no more.
There was a bit of a divide though with Heroics. Initially Kara was easier because no tanks besides a Paladin had the AOE pickup abilities. Thunderclap and Cleave weren’t usable in Defensive Stance and Shockwave didn’t exist, and Bears weren’t really considered decent tanks at that point due to their health being the only benefit, and healers going OOM or pulling aggro from extra mobs keeping them alive.
We cleared Kara fairly early on, I think within the first month or two, and at that stage, Heroics hadn’t been tweaked, and the tanking classes hadn’t been re-balanced, so Heroics were much harder than anything but the dragon on the balcony. Malch still had his bug where you’d do the entire fight hiding in the doorway and never have to deal with adds, so he was simple. Shade of Aran was the only really dangerous fight we encountered. We didn’t do the dragon on the balcony since we hadn’t completed the Heroics required for it.
It may be a slightly uncharacteristic dungeon, but I remember doing Auchenai Crypts Heroic once with a tank and healer who were both half green and half blue. I and a hunter were pretty much all in epics by that stage; the third DPS was also half green.
It took two or three wipes, but we cleared it.
I think it was the daily heroic, but hardly anyone went to Crypts so choice was limited. Anyway the tank and healer seemed to know their stuff and I was always up for a run with undergeared players who played well.
Interesting. Me and my 2 friends 3 manned Black Talon hard mode with a companion. I as a tank was 50 for about 2 weeks and with casual play had some decent gear but no Tionese, column or rakata aside from a crafted belt. My healer sorceror healer wife had just dinged 50 and had not even started Corellia storywise do her gear was a mix if normal mode Red Reaper and Directive 7. The 3rd player was a sniper and similarly geared having also hit 50 the same time.
It was tough, and we hit enrage on all bosses (we did have to skip the bonus droid because he was too tough with enrage). But the bottom line is that if a hardmose can be 3 manned with undergeared new 50s than the enrage timer us not the issue with flashpoint difficulty.
You don’t go into detail other than you and the healer swapped roles. A lot of things can change between runs.
Black Talon is, by far, the easiest HM FP. The pulls are small, spaced out, and have plenty of line of sight. The second easiest HM FP is still significantly harder than Black Talon.
Most people would agree that you can divide the HM FPs into roughly 3 difficulty tiers. Some fights just won’t work well with your 4 man comp – the last boss in HM Esseles with 2 ranged dps is harder than anything you’ll find in an Operation, even on Nightmare difficulty. Just make sure to pace yourself, and work your way up instead of starting off with the hardest ones. Don’t get discouraged.
Not directly on topic, but to help gear up:
PvP is a great way to fill in a few gaps in gear as you start off life at 50. If you have a 50% win rate in WZs, and do the daily every day, you’ll get 14 bags by the end of the week, enough for 6 pieces of gear on par with what you’ll get out of the HM FPs. If you just the daily 3 times instead, to do enough for the weekly, you’ll still end up with 4 pieces.
Normal mode EV (one of the Operations/raids) is easier than many of the HM FPs. Don’t be afraid to jump in before you think you’re ready and give it a shot.
Oh wow, I would kill for a 50% warzone win-rate. It regularly takes me an entire week to get enough wins to turn in one daily.
[…] commented yesterday that he feels the hard mode flashpoints in SWTOR are overtuned, with the ‘hard’ part relying mostly on boss enrage timers. What this means in practice is that […]
[…] don’t have motivation to play knowing the end game is what it is (which is summed up nicely here). That leaves me fiddling with Skyrim (I mean to do the Rogue, Assassin and Stormcloak quest […]
Don’t you think that maybe the enraged timer is designed with the idea that healer and tank should also do their part of the damage ? If tanking and healing are not hard in Hardmodes, maybe the tank could gear toward more damage instead of avoidance and maybe the healer could manage his ressource better so that he can do some damage during downtime ?
I’m not 50 yet so I don’t know how it is to be a healer in a hardmode flashpoint. But I play healers since many years now. As a healer you can just heal heal heal, or if you want to be more useful for your group you’ll heal only when needed and do some damage whenever you can. In SWToR especially I did many Heroic 4 and flashpoints with a tank + me as a healer + our companions, and sometimes you can just heal, but sometimes it’s more useful to do more damage (or even to use your cooldowns for burst damage instead of more heals).
Trust me, there is little to no opportunity for a healer to do significant damage in these HM boss encounters. Any time that you have as downtime is much better spent simply allowing your resources to regenerate rather than wasting them trying to do damage. It can be helpful to toss your DOTs on a boss target (for example, Mind Crush and Weaken Mind, as a Consular) but you have neither the time nor the resources to keep them constantly refreshed. And this is healing only as needed, which is extremely dangerous in many encounters because there are many abilities that do enough damage to one-shot-kill a player who is at 75% health or lower. Some of these can be interrupted, but many cannot (and typically, the ones that cannot be interrupted are also instant cast and randomly targeted, so you can’t even start pre-casting a heal as the ability gets used).
I haven’t read the comments here but I think you have to realise that raiding dosne’t necessarily come second to hardmodes in this games. “normal” raids and hardmod instances have the same drops for a reason. They are at the same level of gameplay. I can agree in a way..because I think there should be an easier way to see what hardmodes are the “starting” hardmodes (taral V etc) and the more difficult ones were you HAVE to have gear to a certain level. (Directive 7 comes to mind).
Other then that I love hardmodes in this games. A hardmode instance should be challening. And I would hate it if every pug out there had an easy time clearing the hardmodes using proper tactics and teamplay. If there is no challenge to do an instance it’s just farming.
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DO YOUR DAILYS on Belsavis. Once you get mostly orange gear with full epic mods you will have a much easier time. I don’t think BW ever intended players to waltz into HMs in blues and dominate. It is that type of give away mentality that has ruined WOW, especially Dragon Soul.
[…] since if you can’t generate threat your DPS will be capped in their output potential, and with tight enrage timers you don’t want to throttle DPS anymore than you have to. However the first priority for […]