My raid team finally finished the Story Mode versions of the two raid instances in Shadow of Revan in TOR. We were stuck on the third boss of Temple of Sacrifice, the Underlurker, for several weeks. We finally beat it by having tank switch to a DPS character, as well as having geared up more.
It's interesting, because this fight fails for a very simple reason: target-switching is a lot harder for lower-skill groups than you would predict.
During Underlurker, three adds will spawn and do an AOE attack. After a few seconds, rocks will drop from the ceiling and the raid has to hide behind the rocks. Then there's a mechanic where the boss has a cross telegraph appear under him, and the raid needs to put a certain number of people in each arm of the cross (1 in front, 1 in back, 3 on each side) before it activates. This cycle repeats about 5 times before enrage.
When you first do the fight, you think the cross mechanic is the difficult part. But--save when it was very buggy upon first release--the cross isn't the hard part. The hard part is getting down the three adds while still dealing enough damage to the boss that you can kill it before enrage.
That is entirely about target-switching and bursting the adds down. Which is something that lower-skill groups have a lot of troubles with, resulting in a fight which is unusually difficult for its placement.
The best solution is to reduce the health of the adds and boss in Story Mode, to give more leeway for time lost to switching targets.
I agree, the Underlurker is indeed too demanding for a SM boss. For us, when we have some less experienced people with us, the main problem too is that they are slower at things like target switching and apm. And staying too long on a target when it is apparent that it'll die from dots soon. On this fight I respec (shadow) DPS from tanking. As an extra bonus, when the other melee DPS is slow with switching, I take enormous amounts of damage with my squishy light armour and the healers can barely keep up. I cannot hold back either, though, because then the adds won't die in time. There are evenings on which we *just* don't make it for an hour or so and that isn't fun for anyone. However, I feel most for the more casual players who won't be able to see the rest of the Temple of Sacrifice raid.
ReplyDeleteBtw, I had no idea you were playing swtor as well. I thought this blog was WoW-only. :)
I'm currently raiding in SWTOR, and playing WoW and FFXIV casually.
ReplyDeleteThis started as a WoW blog, but over the years has kind of morphed into a general MMO blog.
Oh dear, now I'm torn between putting you in the SWTOR box or under my general gaming blogs. ^^
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