SWTOR Shadow of Revan

[Don]

This expansion makes me wonder why SWTOR even bothers to have a multiplayer game because the single player aspect is way more interesting than trying to coordinate a bunch of guys and hope nobody (or yourself) is going to screw up. There's 2 flashpoints and a raid and they can all be done in solo mode. The group FPs you get this uber droid that can beat the FP by himself but it's not as easy as it sounds because otherwise you wouldn't even come close to beating them despite their designation as tactical (e.g. faceroll) mode. Then again I'm not sure what kind of players you have when you got Torch who has this move that seems to hit everyone for 90% of their max (not current) HP if you got like 3 seconds to run the length of the screen to avoid it while snared, or the Mandolarian Champions that hit as if they expect you to have a healer when all you got is 4 DPS and they knock you off the cliff when you try to get a kolto tank to heal which are all on the edge. And then you got the solo raid which is like what happens if every iconic Star Wars character joined up to do a raid, though despite your allies having some of the scale stats it's quite possible to lose to it if you don't do enough damage to Revan because he will go after Satele Shan first (the healer) and you need to do enough damage to pull aggro off her so she wouldn't die, and no there's no way you're going to keep yourself alive without her because Revan does like 100% of your expected HP on a DPS, but Satele Shan has a 200% HP buff on everyone and Darth Marr will put guard on you (reduce damage taken by 50%). I mean, it's basically a raid where everyone in the raid is good and knows what they're doing.

The main story is pretty standard stuff, but at least it's not fighting Hutts. There's also an additional mission based on your class story. So far it was pretty good for Trooper just because you finally get some payback on Garza but for Bounty Hunter it's like 'I need someone to take out 10 Exchange gangs' and I guess they just weren't trying when they got to the BH. I wonder if the Imperial Agent lets you exact vengeance on The Keeper. You can pick the "I'll hunt you down when this is all over" but of course nothing happens to him which kind of sucks.

[kali o.]

I'm not interested in revisiting SWTOR any time soon...but I will say I have *never* liked PvE raids. I blame WoW (and somewhat, EQ) for this lame mechanic. All raids do is encourage grinding and memorization. It's about as robotic as it gets.

In fact, the only raids I've done post-WoW have been in DDO...and in that case, I liked them because I'd figure out how to solo group content. That was a little interesting. So part of me is at least a little interested in solo FPs, but I realize if they designed it to be solo'd, it is probably still lame.

Now group/mass pvp I really like. But it takes one hell of a great dev to pull off correctly (Bioware is not that dev).

[Don]

The solo raid/group is more for a cinematic experience and they're not designed to be something you can lose, but the non solo version is actually quite hard. I don't think it's particularly worth $20 if you're not interested in SWTOR. I think there's always this argument of raids supposed to yield best loot because the logistics of finding a large number of people that wouldn't end up killing each other is hard. The final fight against Raven works out pretty well since all but you are controlled by player so your allies actually attack in some kind of coordinated effort as opposed to a large amount of people spamming sparkles in the general direction of the boss.

EQ originally isn't about repetition but more like controlled chaos. The earliest raid bosses will generally kill everyone in under a minute so you're just trying to do as much damage as you possibly can before you run out of HP and it's closer to a Final Fantasy boss than a modern MMORPG. Now having the right gear and knowing your class might be able to push your expected time of survival from 1 minute to 90 seconds and if you got enough people who can survive for 90 seconds you almost always won. But I guess if fights are so short you have to worry about what if people just got lucky and accidentally won because that'd be err... bad... or something, so now you've the modern raid that's designed to eliminate any possibility of getting lucky and requires robotic perfection.

And I think it's funny because people talk about raids being a big deal in lore or whatever, but the Revan fight was basically like you can either take a raid to attack the Temple of Sacrifice, or you can call up Darth Marr and have him bomb the temple to the ground if you do 6 dailys because you're supposed to be an Imperial legend and the fate of the galaxy kind of depends on defeating Revan. And raiding with Darth Marr is certainly a lot more epic compared to running a raid with 7-15 nobodies and usually a couple guys who would never shut up on voice chat.

[Shrinweck]

I was kind of interested in them expanding the story as I liked the last expansion, but every change they made to the game just persuaded me not to go back. Didn't they scrap the talent trees and almost completely remove any choice in what build you were making other than your group role?

I could see checking things out some day if the game is still going in a year or two. As I understand it, the way they're running it now it's actually profitable for Bioware/EA.

[Don]

WoW did the same thing and the fact is that talent tree means there's 3 ways to build a character correctly, 1 way the devs didn't intend that'll be nerfed later, and millions of ways to build your character wrong so they might as well just give you the three. The only advantage is if you're ahead of the devs with something they didn't think about ahead of time. Otherwise whenever you've anything that remotely looks like a choice eventually people will complain enough about it so that it isn't a choice anymore becase you'd just be able to get both options.