I was asked by a friend what was raiding like in Swtor. He’s currently raiding in WoW and tried swtor some but gave up after a while like many other to run back to WoW. Simply put, he missed many of the features of WoW.
Since I know this is something a few others might be wondering about, I thought I’d write a quick post to talk about Swtor raiding and compare it WoW some. This is my view on things so if you feel I’m missing something feel free to add it in the comments.
General style
On the whole, Swtor raiding is pretty similar to WoW. You have to gather gear, read up on strategy, the holy trinity of healer, tank and dps is still present and most bosses strategy involve not standing in bad coupled with some gimmick.
The big difference I feel is that swtor endgame is a lot less mapped out and intuitive. In WoW, there was no doubt in my mind of where I needed to go and what I needed to raid. Swtor has the player work more to make the switch into raiding and I feel this has hurt it a lot. I know quite a few players who gave up at endgame because they weren’t sure of how to progress at endgame and simply didn’t want to bother with it.
Difficulty
On the difficulty side I’m finding that its pretty similar to WoW too. We have story mode which is normal mode, not too hard but not too easy either as the new raid Explosive Conflict is proving to us. In short, you still need gear and you still need to be able to execute a strategy, rushing in blindly will get you killed.
Swtor hard mode is a bit weird. Most fights are not that much harder than story mode but may have one or two added elements to them and the boss might hit a bit harder. The jump between story and hard mode has more to do with gear than raider skill. And then there’s nightmare mode which would be equivalent to WoW hard mode.
Boss fights style
At first I would be tempted to say pretty similar to WoW but the more I raid in Swtor and the more I’m finding out it has it own style. The big difference between the two games boss fights is that Swtor loves to mix up the roles and tasks during the same fight. Dps might have to tank, healers might have to operate mechanism while a tank might have to run to press on switches.
Not all roles have do something out of the ordinary every fight but there’s pretty much always someone who needs to do something unusual. Then you add in the puzzle bosses (1 per raid so far) and these add another type of encounter we haven’t seen often in other games. Simply put, your ability to kill the boss will depend on if you can solve a puzzle fast enough. It’s not easy at first but it definitively add some more originality to the mix.
In fact originality is how I would define Swtor raiding. The ability to mix in classic style fights with special fights and puzzle bosses in the same raid keeps not only raiding fresh but it also makes thing more interesting for people who might be getting tired of always doing the same dps rotation for the past 5 years.
So, that’s pretty much what I can think of right now. I want to close by saying that Swtor raiding is pretty fun and it’s worth a try. I’ll also add that Snark side is currently looking for a tank.
There is something about group content in swtor that sets it apart from WoW (other than the puzzle-type mechanics), but I can’t quite put my finger on it. The easiest way for me to describe it is that it feels more dynamic. I think that stems from the difference in tanking style that the game goes for. WoW is “tank all the things.” In swtor, DPS can survive a couple normal mobs or a Strong mob, so the tank pics up the big guys, slows down the little guys, and the DPS clears out the little guys, either single target or AoE. In WoW a good tank always kept aggro on everything, leaving nothing for DPS to do but channel AoE or execute their rotations. In swtor, DPS have to be much more aware of what they are attacking and how much hate they can handle.
Another example, we did the Directive 7 Flashpoint (dungeon) last night. Many of the trash pulls would have 2-3 guys standing around. When you engage them, three more Boba Fett wannabes would jet in and some turrets would pop up. It’s chaos, but it’s a lot of fun. The final boss was a mainframe computer and its insane defense system (two big turrets, a giant robot, a flying robot that tracks one player at all times, and little turrets that pop up by the objectives you need to destroy). It was a ton of fun.
Interesting point about the general style, because I would have described it the opposite way. Since SWTOR has quests for all the operations, I always know where I’m going and why. In WoW these days you go to the new raid… because it’s the new raid. They stopped giving much context for it in WotLK, and by Cata you pretty much go to do Z purely because in the latest book X and Y happened. When I died in the raid finder and I initially didn’t even know where I was.
As for what makes SWTOR raiding interesting… hard to say. I like the fights best that have you interacting with the environment in some manner beyond “not standing in the fire”. And as a healer I love that AoE healing spells aren’t so powerful that it just comes down to who can spam the most AoE the fastest. I feel a lot more engaged in what I’m doing.
Hmm… I echo what Shintar says about raids in Cataclysm not having context for raids (DS was a big yawn and I really struggled to make an interesting movie of it beyond WOW ASSPLODING DEATHWING).
But I would disagree that this started in WotLK. Quite the opposite. ToC aside (which was filler), the quest lead-in to Ulduar was phenomenal… “I remember you, from the mountains”, the corruption of the Watchers, the whole zone led into Ulduar and the constructs. Similarly, for me at least, the lead-in to ICC could hardly have been better. The three ICC 5-mans were far better than the DS 5-mans, we tackled the Lich King’s forge, we went after Frostmourne, were pursued by the LK through the Halls of Reflection, and then returned to siege the LK in his own Citadel. I really thought that WotLK was the PINNACLE of story-led raiding.
So, in short, yeah, I agree that WoW raiding in Cata turned into an un-anchored mess whereby the only reason you knew where to go is that it only involved clicking LFR, and I can well believe that SWTOR does it better. But don’t accuse WotLK of starting the rot, it had many flaws, but I never, ever doubted why I was in Northrend raiding, it was to kill the Lich King!
Incidentally, I threw all my WoW Magazines away so I don’t have it any more, but in one of them there was a really interesting article about dungeon design, where the dev stated explicitly that in the original WoW model, the dungeons were designed by the art and story teams, and then populated with mobs by the gameplay team, but that nowadays in WoW the dungeons are designed from the ground up by the gameplay devs, and the artists are allowed to design the art assets. I think this is just terrible and a fascinating insight into WHY we saw dungeons morph from deep, complex and interesting instances like Scholo and BRD into 30 minute AoE zergs like Well of Infinity.
Maybe in SWTOR the process is still less refined and there are more cooks stirring the broth. That lack of streamlining and design for relentless efficiency that WoW certainly has these days may be why it feels different, perhaps less cohesive in some respects, but more rewarding as a result.
/boxerdogs
The Lich King himself was done well, but why did we have to kill Sartharion again? Why, as a Horde player, was my first goal after hitting 80 to help an Alliance Keep besieged by a lich? Why, in 1.1, did conquering Ulduar become a priority over the undead? (Oh, because of a video on the official website…) WotLK was where they phased out actual raid quests (not counting the weekly), and IMO that definitely made the endgame a lot less intuitive than it was before. I’m by no means saying it was bad, just that it wasn’t all that obvious where you should be going at max level unless you looked it up somewhere.
Yeah I agree here. I do feel too that the sotryline became more disconnected around wotlk. I mean, Ulduar was fine but the way they inserted it in the story was weird,
Urgh, lacks an edit button, I mean I think this may be why SWTOR raiding feels less cohesive in some respects with many elements to it, but more rewarding as a result (contrasting it with the WoW model of relentless efficiency in dungeon design).
[…] lonomonkey discusses SWTOR raiding in more detail and concludes that this type of originality is something that is increasingly marking out Bioware boss encounters. I think I agree with him, although SWTOR raiding has a lot in common with WoW, the encounters are different enough in style to make it more fun in many ways. The comments on that post also raise interesting points because dps have a slightly different focus in SWTOR fights because you don’t always expect the tank to be able to grab all of the mobs. The tank needs to get and hold the elites, but the dps initially focus on getting the lower health mobs down first. So the initial stages of a fight tend to involve everyone busily doing their separate thing, rather than waiting for the tank to get things under control. Although obviously if dps can co-ordinate kill order, adds go down very fast indeed, which makes a big difference. […]
I guess sometimes people just have to agree to disagree, but I have a hard time understanding why anyone would think that the links between the story and the raiding became more disconnected in WotLK. Sartharion had no link to the game, that is true, but Ulduar had an entire zone dedicated to it (with events in the Storm Peaks being echoed in the raid, also the Freya lines in Sholazar provided lead-in), the LK in ICC was the theme of the whole expac, Naxxramas floated above Dragonblight and there were other Undead floating ziggurats we sieged in two other zones I can think of. It wasn’t THAT hard to understand that we sailed to Northrend to fight the LK and all his undead minions, and that our first raid might be on… a floating citadel of undead minions of the LK! Plus my character visited Naxxramas before it moved to Northrend. I knew that Naxxramas was bad in-game.
Compared to TBC? Mount Hyjal made no sense to the story aside from getting a vial from KZ (why not zone out after that and go fight Illidan in BT?). Karazhan had a very small breadcrumb chain from Shatt which had no relevance at all to the main storyline of Illidan. Sunwell Plateau was a tack-on in a daily hub, after the boss of TBC had already been killed. ZA was utterly unrelated to the main storyline of TBC, so far as I can remember. SSC and TK had vague relations to their 5 mans, but I would say SSC bosses were far less referenced in Zangamarsh than Ulduar bosses were referenced in Storm Peaks. Same for TK bosses and lore in Netherstorm.
For me, TBC (BT aside) was the low point of raids being connected to the flow and lore of the game. It was a big let-down after the War Effort leading to AQ40, MC and BWL leading on from UBRS and LBRS, and Naxx being above Stratholme. I was happy when WotLK had raids that seemed more related to the zones they were in. Compare that to TBC or Cata (DS lol, teleporting around the place with no context at all, Firelands being slapped into a portal hidden in Mt Hyjal, BoT, the worst geographic representation of an instance ever, where the hell was the dungeon on the other side of that damn portal on top of the tower?).
Apologies for the defence of WotLK. I know it predominantly has detractors, and on many issues I would not care to defend it (even though I enjoyed it myself), but I must insist that I knew *exactly* why I was in Northrend, in a way that wasn’t true in Outland, or Cataclysm.
To each their own though, I don’t play either SWTOR or WOW any more :) heh.