After clearing EV and KP on normal mode, it was time to move on to the next challenge, Hard Mode Operations. We started working on EV HM. The first night my guild went there I couldn't participate. They managed to get to the last boss and I joined the following night to keep working on him. The second time I was there from the start and we got to the 4th boss. So I got to experience all the fights.
HM is basically a very similar experience with the bosses getting some type of advantage over normal. It can be more health, more damage, shorter enrage timer or a slightly different or buffed mechanic. Nothing too exciting to have to describe the fights again. Another change I didn't really like is that they use the old WOW master looter option, which is actually working with the latest patch 1.5 (previously the master looter option was bugged and caused fewer drops). This can potentially cause drama, mistakes and disagreement which I think is unnecessary, not to mention the time to /roll (another addition to 1.5) or whatever loot system your group is using and the time to distribute the loot. You also get Rataka level loot, the highest you can currently get. So you basically get a bigger challenge and better loot, nothing surprising there.
I'll describe our experience according to the boss order, even though personally I tried the last boss first and the first 4 later, but it doesn't really matter and I did experience all of them. I'll describe our own experience without getting too deep into the fight mechanics, these are already described in my previous EV post. I aim to give you an idea of what to expect and the level of challenge.
1st boss: we downed him on the 2nd try, nothing too exciting there, I definitely had much more work as a healer and the last 8% frenzy mode really needed everyone to be at their top performance to get him down ASAP and keep everyone up while damage is very high all around.
2nd boss: Also nothing too exciting there, on our first try the tank lost agro to a over zealous DPS and we wiped, the second try worked fine and he went down. Very similar to normal mode.
3rd boss: The slightly different mechanic here is that everyone at the group needs to work the puzzle buttons, so you can't have people who are completely clueless about it. However the puzzle is so trivial, basically press the left or right button, so I doubt many people will have a problem with this. The really annoying part was that we hit a bug when the buttons became unclickable at some point during the fight. This was really annoying, to wipe 5 or 6 times because of a bug, fix it Bioware! cost us a lot of time needlessly. We tried everything, clicking left instead of right, clicking faster, clicking slower, changing the order people click it. Since I wasn't at the group who got the bug I'm not sure what made it work exactly, in fact the other group aren't sure themselves, it just eventually worked and we finished it. Very annoying.
4th boss: Very similar to normal mode, only the bad guys get more HP so you need higher DPS to get them down, even the healers of course, because this fight is all 1on1 fights for each group member. If you read my last post you know this is my favorite encounter, it's fun, it feels like a solo challenge and it make sure every single one of your group members can perform. The exact reason that I like this boss is also the reason we failed. Out of 8 people, 1 was simply not good enough to take his mob down in time. We continuously managed to get 7 down and wipe because the last one was standing when time was up. I'm sure he felt bad about it. Nothing we tried worked, everyone helping him when they are done, changing the type of mob he's fighting, we just kept wiping, I can't blame the fight, it was obvious that we couldn't do it because 1 member was not ready for this. However, like I mentioned, I joined another guild run who got to the last boss, so I got to fight him as well.
5th boss: Here is where we really hit a wall, we simply couldn't handle him on P3. We had 7-8 tries and we weren't even close on any of them. It really felt like a huge difficulty increase compared to everything we had before. We just failed on every possible aspect of the fight, the lightning hitting too many people, the tank died while a healer was mind trapped, not enough DPS because people were either trapped or had to run to avoid mechanics. I wasn't a fan of the fact this boss is so much harder than the previous ones, but hey, I can't complain that we weren't good enough to kill him. I guess we need more practice, more gear and better skill to be able to take him down, that's a reasonable design, the last boss being the hardest.
Next week we'll go for HM KP as well as work a bit more on EV, I'll keep you posted.
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