My Experience with the New Lair Boss on the PTS

I wrote at the start of this month that I wasn't sure whether I wanted to try the new lair boss on the PTS or not. Wanting to earn the associated special titles was a point in favour, but my general preference for "going in blind" and being surprised once the content hits the live servers was also a strong argument against it.

In the end an opportunity arose for me to join Swtorista's Team Disco today to have a go at the boss and I decided to take it. (I guess I have Galaxiya to thank for being unable to make it, meaning I could take her spot. Thanks, Galaxiya!) I was glad I did, too, for three reasons:

1. We did get the boss down on both difficulties, earning me the associated titles on the live game.
2. I now know what to expect and have a better idea how to tackle the fight with my guildies once it goes live.
3. It was honestly just good fun, too! The fight had clearly come a long way from that first iteration of the PTS where people couldn't even tell what was supposed to be going on most of the time.
   

Primarily, I was relieved to find that story mode seemed to be at an appropriate difficulty for a story mode, which is to say: easy enough that an inexperienced pick-up group should be able to do it. Several members of our group (including me) had never done the fight before and nobody gave any explanations pre-pull either, but it worked out fine anyway. All the mechanics do fairly low damage, so you can learn as you go and it takes quite a bit of messing up for anyone to take enough damage to die.

If I had to pick anything to criticise here it's that the fight still felt like it took pretty long for a story mode with a group that had quite solid dps output, but that may just have been subjective, and I didn't actually time it. Plus we went in with the standard group setup of two tanks, two healers and four dps - on story mode you could easily swap out a tank and a healer for two more damage dealers to speed things up a bit.

Veteran mode was another pleasant surprise after all the unpleasantness that was my experience with R-4 Anomaly, in the sense that it actually felt like what I'd call a "proper" vet mode, not something bordering on NiM, just trying to please the top 1%. As a healer, there was enough damage going out to give me something to do, but it wasn't so high that I couldn't also throw a few damage abilities into the mix at various points. There was stuff on the floor to dodge, adds and different boss mechanics to watch out for, but at no point did the number of things going on feel overwhelming.

We got the encounter down on what I think was only our third try, though I wouldn't read too much into that as a sign of it being too easy, as several people had worked on it before and could tell the rest of us what to do. The biggest challenge was actually the hard enrage, which kicks in at around the ten minute mark, and was what killed us on our penultimate attempt. We hit it again on the actual kill but managed to get the boss down just before it had the chance to kill us.

I checked to see what feedback others had given on the official forum thread, and winced at several comments along the lines of "I went in with my NiM team, using only one tank and healer, and we thought it was too easy". I just hope the devs don't use that as an excuse to do any last-minute upward-tuning before releasing the patch, because I don't agree that the fight was too easy at all. A vet mode ops boss isn't supposed to be something that's hard for NiM raiders! I did think that some of the suggestions that were given for how to make things harder might actually make for a good master mode version of the encounter later on, if Broadsword ever decides to add that.

However, vet mode struck me as fine as it is. If anything, the fight still seemed quite long and the dps check pretty tight for a group of raiders that aren't at the extreme cutting edge, but I'll assume for now that with more experience and better understanding of the mechanics, groups will be able to improve their damage output and general performance over time, to the point where the enrage timer won't feel quite so challenging anymore.

In general I was pretty happy with everything I saw, and assuming what we experienced is going to be close enough to what will go live in a couple of weeks, I'm actually looking forward to tackling the new boss on the live servers. It will be nice to work on farming materials and schematics for the new augments in a story mode that should be accessible enough to actually do on my guild's social nights, and a vet mode that will pose a bit of a challenge for my regular ops team without making it feel like we're just bashing our heads against a wall.