Eternity Vault: SOA

[Khadroth]

(02-03-2012 11:14 PM)Petrus Wrote:  So we downed this last night on nightmare with a new strat, and despite what I said in my last post, this worked very well. Believe someone in this thread mentioned that the balls spawn only between the NE and SE sides, so I formed a pretty simple strat around it.


Everyone but melee stacked west. When the balls spawned, I called out two people, first one went NW, second went SW. The balls would split, avoid melee, and the people would still be in heal range. We timed the pickup and throw, and never popped balls if it was about to happen, avoiding the "RNG" factor of the fight.

If melee got picked, they'd also run NW or SW, staying in range of healers, and pulling the balls away from the rest of the melee.

The only reason we didn't 1 shot this last night was because soa bugged when our tank got trapped, but other than that the difference in this strat was night and day. SO EASY.


I'll also say, yes, p2 is by far the hardest. We hit enrage at 3% on p3, but that was easy enough to recover from. With only 2 ranged the fight was harder than if we'd had more ranged, but certainly doable.


Lastly.... if pylons bug, you DON'T receive the speed run title, (finished in 1hour 25min, but had to reset on pylons) which sucks quite a bit. You do receive the extra loot chest though. (just a mount) We've got a ticket in about it, but I don't have much hope. Just expect a "run again next week and hope it doesn't bug" response.

Only question I have then is what do you do for mind traps? If you're all cloistered on one side of the room will he still mindtrap people over to the far side? Causing you to run across the room and screwing up the ball strat. It just seems hard to stay in one place on this fight.

[Petrus]

(02-04-2012 01:54 AM)Khadroth Wrote:  Only question I have then is what do you do for mind traps? If you're all cloistered on one side of the room will he still mindtrap people over to the far side? Causing you to run across the room and screwing up the ball strat. It just seems hard to stay in one place on this fight.

It was about 50/50 between west side, and east side. West side was super easy to down. East side we occasionally had to wait a few for the balls to clear out, but we still had the Mind traps down within 6 seconds of attacking one, and it just wasn't even an issue.

This WHOLE phase is 95% about controlling the orbs, anything else you do is pretty easy.

I think the best thin we did though, besides the positioning, was timing the throw so that it always happened BEFORE people popped a ball. eliminated any RNG factor that could kill people easily.

[Krauzer]

Has anyone else had issues with the lightning balls 1 shotting people on NM? I'm pretty sure it' just server lag because it seems to be random, but unfortunately happened to us on multiple occasions when we tried it.

As for Petrus's strategy, we came up with almost the same strategy and it works extremely well. As long as everyone is fairly close to Soa (slightly to the west), the mind traps can be DPS's down fast no matter where they spawn.

[Malacoda]

(02-05-2012 04:28 AM)Krauzer Wrote:  Has anyone else had issues with the lightning balls 1 shotting people on NM? I'm pretty sure it' just server lag because it seems to be random, but unfortunately happened to us on multiple occasions when we tried it.

I had this problem two nights ago. My poor Sorc was shielding, sprinting into balls, and blowing up an awful lot. Other people were having double pops a lot as well, so we thought just server lag was registering the explosion twice.

[Krauzer]

(02-05-2012 04:39 AM)Malacoda Wrote:  

(02-05-2012 04:28 AM)Krauzer Wrote:  Has anyone else had issues with the lightning balls 1 shotting people on NM? I'm pretty sure it' just server lag because it seems to be random, but unfortunately happened to us on multiple occasions when we tried it.

I had this problem two nights ago. My poor Sorc was shielding, sprinting into balls, and blowing up an awful lot. Other people were having double pops a lot as well, so we thought just server lag was registering the explosion twice.

If by sprint you mean Force Speed or whatever the Sorc equivalent is called, I would advise against it. Even on Normal/Hard Force speed tends to bug out the balls when you run into them

[Hollywood]

(02-02-2012 01:00 AM)Cosmic Osmo Wrote:  

(02-01-2012 08:33 AM)Hollywood Wrote:  because the free sphere wanders off to a new target and it doesn't tell you. So everybody(whom previously was standing in the right place and doing the right thing) now has to scramble, spread out and lose touch with all their markers so we can figure out who has that new threat from the sphere.

You can target the sphere and assist it to see who's being targeted.

Yes you can, though that's not the main issue -maybe I've worded it wrong.

Let's take stock of things that are wrong with SOA:


-The throw and the mindtraps have no smart logic to which characters it picks. So you can easily and often find a healer in the air and a healer in the trap.
-People targeted by the sphere can be thrown or mind trapped before they reach their sphere. Magnifying the first issue mentioned above, one of those healers might have been en route to blowing up a sphere, only to be then sucked away. So that sphere is wandering to the middle, where it HAS NOT retargeted someone and is just going by zapping people it gets near. Since no one can claim it everyone has to run away. Then the healer in the air conveniently lands right on it and gets DoT to death.
-The location of mindtraps cannot be manipulated or strategized.

These two first aspects really kill the encounter.
The third is more of a convenience issue but can cause massive complications.


Someone made a very poignant comment on the SWTOR forums.
They said, if you don't have enough hitpoints to eat a sphere on nightmare, then you're never going to finish the boss. How do you get those hitpoints? New gear. And what piece of gear are you missing? Chestpiece. And where does that drop? Soa hardmode. And why haven't you gotten it yet? Because Soa HM is far too 'RNG' and inconsistent(on top of having a skewed loot AI that leans towards A) Cloth classed and B) Cloth classes that ALREADY have the item).

So what he really described was the archaeic MMO loot system that is the bane of all modern MMOS.

Until they sort it out, they should put the loot table of Soa and spread it around the other bosses.


Other than that, we like the fight much more than it was pre 1.1

[Darlantan]

I wanted to briefly mention about the stacks on the boss and killing the ancient power sources while falling down.

We were having issues with the stacks not completely resetting - mostly we got stuck with two. For us this seemed to happen only when someone damaged (and possibly got a killing blow on) a power source while not on the same platform. Either dpsing one on another platform or falling down from the previous one.

Can anyone confirm this?

[Antario]

what we've found happens if that if you dont kill them in order top > bottom and make sure SOA is actually in range...yeah then it bugs out

just take p2 and p4 slowly, there is no hurry

[Petrus]

(02-06-2012 04:29 PM)Antario Wrote:  what we've found happens if that if you dont kill them in order top > bottom and make sure SOA is actually in range...yeah then it bugs out

just take p2 and p4 slowly, there is no hurry

Aye. Once we ALL stayed on the top platform and killed the first supply, then all jumped and killed the second, etc etc, we have never had this bug. Kill them in order, and stay on the platform they're on until they are dead.

[frmorrison]

I can confirm that force speed makes you take double ball hits.