Since I had heard that both of them contained at least one very hard boss, I made sure to get a full guild run together for each one. I'm glad I did it that way, because things got pretty rough at points in both flashpoints.
Commander Mokan in Battle of Rishi is probably the most elaborately designed bonus boss I've seen in the game so far, even more so than the droid boss in Depths of Manaan. He has a whole room to himself that is unused in the tactical version, with clickable things on the tables, and his mechanics are fiddly and extremely unforgiving. The short of it is that there's a stacking debuff going around that needs to be at 3-4 stacks at just the right time or you will die... yet if the debuff ever reaches five stacks, you also die instantly. I don't think it's hard to see how that can be quite difficult to get just right. He's pretty much a mini version of an operations boss, and even with a group that knew the tactics, communicated on voice chat and was way overgeared for the encounter (everyone was in a mix of 192/198 gear), we still wiped many times until we got him down.
I would say that he's overtuned, especially considering that it also seems to be pretty important to have a second dispeller in addition to the healer, but then again, he's "just" a bonus boss. If you're in there with a random pug, you can just skip him and it's no skin off anyone's nose.
The really scary fight was Jos and Valk Beroya in Blood Hunt's hardmode. Specifically we found that during the phase when you fight both of them at once, one of them casts a stacking debuff on the tank that increases damage taken, while the other one spams a high damage ability every now and then, with the result that even in our highly overgeared group I was unable to outheal the incoming damage from that combination. The only way we eventually managed to beat the encounter was by having one of the dps players off-heal whenever another high damage phase came around. I would imagine that you could also work around it with a dps that can taunt off the tank on occasion, but neither an off-healer nor an off-tank are guaranteed in a four-person group, so having that as a requirement to successfully complete the flashpoint just seems wrong.
All in all I was very much reminded of the discussion surrounding the difficulty of level 50 hardmodes at launch, and then again when Lost Island was released. Comparatively speaking, the level 55 hardmodes were relatively easy on release. I never wrote a post about the hardmode flashpoints that came with 3.0, but I thought that they were about on par with the level 55 ones, except for a couple of tough bonus bosses.
Blood Hunt and Battle of Rishi feel more like a throwback to an earlier time, and I'm not against high difficulty in small group content... but I do feel that it's a bit of a problem in this particular case. In a post group-finder world you are expected to frequently run instances with random strangers, which is not at all compatible with high difficulty, and unlike Lost Island back in the day, Battle of Rishi and Blood Hunt don't have a separate category in the group finder, which makes running a random hardmode flashpoint a lot less appealing now, considering that it's complete luck of the draw whether you get something relatively easy or an absolute killer.
Also, at least level 50 HM flashpoints gave tier gier equal to what you could get in normal mode operations back in the day. In Shadow of Revan, Bioware decided for some reason that flashpoints could not be allowed to drop anything worthwhile at all. It's not really a big deal to me personally since I mostly gear up in operations, but it does strike me as incredibly bizarre that the default drop from a hardmode flashpoint boss is a piece of blue 184 gear. I mean, you can buy gear better than that from the basic comm vendor pretty much the instant you hit level 60 - using basic comms which you received while levelling. The effort/reward ratio is just completely out of whack here.
Have you successfully completed these hardmodes yet? What did you think of the difficulty? Would you dare to brave them with a random group?
I completed Blood Hunt HM in the first week of its release, although I have nothing to show for it as the achievements promptly un-granted, and I want to say they would have done for Rishi as well.
ReplyDeleteI haven't seen it since, and I haven't even entered Rishi Hard Mode yet. I have heard horror stories from the Mokan fight, but nothing else.
How did you find Blood Hunt that first time in terms of difficulty?
DeleteReally very difficult; it took our guild-group (nearly all of which were full Resurrected with some Deceiver/Revanite pieces) three tries to down the first boss. Jos and Valk Beroya saw us dying five or six times until we finally killed them. Shae Vizla died on the first encounter.
DeleteDefinitely the hardest flashpoint I've seen since Hard Mode Lost Island pre-2.0.
That sounds a lot like my first run. :)
DeleteDon't know if you listen to Corellian Run Radio, but they gave this post a shout out on their latest episode. Jason said he would link it in the shownnotes so you may see a well-deserved rise in viewers over the next week or so!
ReplyDeleteAlso, my guild has not even gotten passed the first boss on Blood Hunt hard mode. I have been working on the gear grind to deck myself in 186's with my Redoubt augments to tank it. Hard to mop up all those adds with their electric nets!
I'm aware of CRR, but there are so many good SWTOR podcasts out there these days that I find it impossible to actually listen to them all. But if you say they've given me a shoutout, I'll have to make sure to listen to that particular episode at least! I "only" knew that they'd given me a mention in their most recent Holonet Links (and noticed an immediate traffic spike from it ^^).
DeleteIt wasn't a big story or anything, but Jason raved on this post a little on air. Toward the end of the cast.
ReplyDeleteI'm currently exploring the world of master-mode flashpoints, with my sage-healer main.
ReplyDeleteI was lucky to find a very good tank and very good dps. Over a couple of weeks we ran quite a few flashpoints together. Bloodhunt was no problem at all. We rushed through the flashpoint a couple of times over the weeks.
In an other composition, we wiped at Jos and Valk. A dps left, and the tank/groupleader wasn't looking for a replacement. With a companion we had no problems whatsoever. On the final fight the companion died early on in the flames. Nonetheless we got Shae Vizla under 5%, but i placed my phasewalk not far enough outside the center, still standing in her maelstrom attack. My reaction time was way to slow for my force speed, i died, team died, but this was by far my best healing performance i've ever done. I was so exhausted after the try, that the other two attemps failed early on. I still don't know, why our tank didn't queue us again.
Master-Mode Battle of Rishi i saw only once. At the endboss one dps died on both attemps early on, his movement skills, weren't the best, group fall apart. Yet to finish this one.
I haven't really had any issues with Blood Hunt hardmode since 4.0; I think that patch ironed out the worst of the difficulty. It's veteran mode that suddenly became hard with level sync, as it exposes level 30 players to mechanics that were designed for someone with full utilities and multiple survival cooldowns. Though to be fair, I haven't been back to that since 5.0 either, so it might have been rebalanced as well in the meantime.
Delete