Dear Diary: 16-man Ops

One of the things that I still haven't gotten used to, is managing 16 people in one group.  Now it was fun when we were doing PvP to have a full Ops group - but then people kind of knew what the goal was (kill the other people) and there wasn't any tricky mechanic stuff to watch for.

Not so with Ops.

Getting ready for an Operation

Even just getting 16 people together at the same time in the same place can be time consuming.  Here we are (already 10 minutes late) waiting for the last person to arrive.  I think we ended up starting 1/2 hour late because of final instructions even after everyone had arrived.

I know a lot of people have the impression that only "bigger" is better - I definitely don't feel that way, I just think that bigger = more trouble.  I suppose if we were measuring organization skills instead of game skills I'd have to tip my hat to the bigger raid, but that isn't what it's about ... is it?

There aren't any new mechanics to look for in 16-man - from what I can tell after doing a few runs, things just hit harder and there is more of a chance of someone dying instantly who wasn't healed up properly.  The healing part seems to become trivial with four healers, and even with DPS dying I've rarely seen a problem finishing off a boss.

Posing for the Camera

I still feel that 8-man ops are far more challenging, everyone has to be on their game - because even little mistakes by one person can destroy the whole group.  Of course in 1.3 they're changing everything to make it easier, so I guess that won't hold true any longer ... even now when running 8 man ops I think back to running NiM pre-1.2 before they "fixed" everything and can't help but see all the mistakes people are making that don't matter anymore.

So for the Ops - we really didn't run in to any problems.  The Annihlator droid went down without difficulty. Thanks to the awesome tanks of course.

16-man kill of Annihlator

We burned through the rest of the content relatively quickly.  Some of the trash gave us more problems than the bosses.  We had a minor hiccup at the council since some people were undergeared.  I was actually impressed with Ganoo who was specc'd as a healer, but went back and specc'd DPS then took out the 16-man boss target basically solo.

For those of you who don't know, in 16-man the Council has an assassin with more HP than the Marauders.  You'd think it was a DPS target, but it has to be taken by a healer class because of the damage output it has.  Normally at the end when everyone has killed their target they need to slide over and beat on this guy to help finish him off.  Then stick around and hit the interrupts so the healer can dish out damage without having to worry so much about healing themselves.  Apparently it's also possible for a sage DPS spec to solo - go figure.

One of the things (that has gotten better) that drives me nuts, is the "line up for the phat lewt" that happens every time we kill something.  I actually got in trouble for looking in a body the other night - which almost made me leave the raid altogether.  I actually am still a little put off by that and  I am consistently surprised that it takes so long to hand out gear.

I had a lot written here, but I realize at this point I'm ranting, so I'll move on.  It isn't really in me to just be negative about something for no reason - since I can't change it.  What do the rest of you do for loot?  Do you have a system in place, or do you just have your members determine how to roll for themselves?

Dog pile on Soa for a picture!

In the end we downed Soa without any problem.  I actually find Soa to be much MUCH easier than he used to be.  The lightning ball damage is toned down.  They don't tick as fast.  Soa doesn't do as much damage, the mind traps are easier to kill, the pylons dropping on your head don't do as much damage.  You don't die after flying through the air because you get put down nicely instead of being dropped on top of a lightning ball.

The list goes on with the fixes that were implemented.  Are they fixes?  Yes.  They make the fight almost trivial.  So, what was making it difficult before?  Bugs.  Apparently the only way to make challenging content last is to leave the bugs in it and force players to think outside the box and overcome them to progress.

Am I happy the bugs are gone?  Of course - how else would we gear everyone in Rakata so quickly and get back to EC.