Pretty fun raid. There weren't any real surprise mechanics or a lot of bullshit rng to fight. Some trash has to be cleared though it wasn't enough to be painful. A speeder appears at the entrance to take you near the current boss in the event of a wipe. Wanted to throw out the basics of the strats used to get to the end.
Annihilation Droid XRR-3
Seemed like a basic DPS and co-ordination check. There are two turrets with power cells at their base. Kill all the cells and the turrets to get the boss to spawn. At timed intervals a mixture of ranged and melee adds will spawn that have to be killed.
Boss himself has a cleave and knock-back, so melee needs to be on his butt and tank has to aim himself appropriately. Every so often boss will go into "missile mode" with aoe that hits everyone. Raid will los around the dead turrets then resume normal functions once it ends. Rinse, repeat, win.
Gharj
Another pretty straight-foward raid check. Gharj has a point-blank aoe so melee need to be at max hit-box range. Will also to a raid-wide knock back so ranged/heals need to be ready to run out of lava and back onto platform. Boss needs to be tanked at the edge of his platform as he will periodically throw a tantrum and destroy the platform he is on. Seconds before this a rocky path appears and the raid needs to be ready to move once the boss begins his channel. As a Sentinel, I popped Transcendence for the raid-wide movement speed. Lava didn't tick for significant damage (seemed around 450 per second).
Unlock and Anti-Carry
The next two loot drops come from the story. To gain access to the final boss's area there are two locks that have to be opened simultaneously. The raid splits into two groups to accomplish this. Each lock has tumblers that have to match up, one row at a time. The center ring switches between one of six symbols. Each time you move the tumbler left or right adds will spawn, so the goal is to minimize the moves. Here's the order I found:
Yellow <=> White <=> Green <=> Red <=> Purple <=> Blue <=> (back to yellow)
So if the current row is on Green and you need Yellow, going left twice is win. It makes total sense when you see it and sadly I didn't get a picture.
The next encounter is inside the vault where you meet guardians in stasis. I can't remember the "real" name for this, so I call it "Anti-Carry." There are eight guardians that have to be defeated to gain access to the core. Each of these must be
SOLO'd. There are two mobs that tanks "should" be able to kill, four mobs DPS "should" be able to kill, and two mobs healers "should" be able to kill. And each must be dispatched individually. If any raid member affects another in any way (heals, buffs, etc.) it's a wipe. There's also a two minute time limit. You have to know your class, be geared, and get shit done. Awesome, imo. They aren't really that bad, maybe 75k health with typical strong-mob abilities. But you have to use your CDs and killing skills.
Soa
Incredibly fun fight!! Basically the boss is DPS'd whenever his shield is down. Boss will Mind Trap a raid member, porting them into another where they have a single mob to kill (think final boss in Scholomance). The Mind Traps must be DPS'd down to release the trapped player. Balls of Lightning also spawn. They pick a player and slowly chase them down, exploding after a time or upon reaching the player. The chosen player has to kite them, and not over other players as the Ball does do some aoe damage.
The boss will periodically freak out and destroy the platform the raid is on. When he start to cast this Freak, raid member need to move immediately to the outer portion of the ring. There will then be fragments of the platform to jump down upon, destroying a lantern on each, then jumping down to the next, until a fresh platform is reached. Rinse/repeat all of the above.
Once at the bottom of the vault, the boss will Mind Trap and summon Ball Lightning more often, creating a soft enrage. At the bottom the tank must now keep the boss under an inverted yellow pyramid so he remains vulnerable to attack. Burn burn burn and win.
All through-out the encounter is the most amusing form of CC I've seen in a while. A random player is picked to be stunned. This is accomplished via a force-like tether that whips the player all around the room, doing some slight damage. It can be dizzying but overall it's hilarious.
Epilogue
Very fun introduction to Ops. Nothing too demanding. Our group finished everything in about two hours. Anyone with former raiding experience and decent gear should experience the same. We actually would have been faster yet the first encounter with the guns bugged on us a few times, wasting maybe 20-30min.
Loot distribution was a little annoying. Though we tried to master loot it was always round robin. Upon opening a chest we found items that were already assigned to specific people. It never assigned anything improperly but it didn't assign it equally. That is, there were eight Jedi Knight drops and four of them went to a single player. The bop recipes were always assignable via Master Loot though.
There were also quest/codex completion problems. I did not get credit for the weekly quest nor did I get the final boss Codex entry, yet all of the bosses are on my lockout. Bug reporting this I got the generic "Thanks for reporting this bug, fuck off" response.
Quirks aside this experience bodes well for SWTOR end-game, imo. :) I managed to walk away with a T1 chest and a 136--which help.
