Thoughts on the Sith Raid

Hello everyone. I'd like to share a few thoughts about the new Sith raid with all of you today, since playing this raid is such a globally frustrating experience. As you may know, the difficulty level of the raid took most guilds by surprise. We were no exception. As a result, we scaled back our ambitiousness and began again from the first raid tier. After completing T1 in short order, we moved up to T2, which was also fairly easy to complete. Now, we've moved up to T3, and the consequential uptick in difficulty is obvious. The last thing anyone wants is for our guild members to become frustrated by a guild event and give up, so let me tell you a story that may put this new raid in perspective. It's about a guild called Heroes Errant and how they suffered through NAAT for a very long time.

Long ago, in a galaxy so seemingly far away, I was the GL of small guild. Before the days of CLS, Heroes Errant powered up enough to run NAAT. At first, it was brutal. To grind our way to the end took over a week. Much of that grind, by the way, took place in P1 against Grievous. Because the Tank Takedown was NAAT and not HAAT, characters like Zylo and Zavage did little good. We had no choice but to send wave after wave of squads into P1, day after day, to chip away at Grievous while he loaded us down with a screenful of debuffs and promptly murdered us all. What's worse, the bastard laughed at us while he did so.

The NAAT grind, however, taught us about raid mechanics and effective squad formations. It pushed players to gear their characters and figure out new ways to put the hurt on not only Grievous, but also on the other opponents in P2-P4. Eventually, we began to suffer through NAAT in under a week. Then, the day came when Heroes Errant moved en masse to cNoss and joined other groups of capable players. After our initial HAAT training, we were left to build towards HAAT on our own. Today, we have NAAT on farm. We burn through NAAT so quickly that, oftentimes, I don't have the opportunity to test my HAAT squads in a given phase.

My experience of this new Sith raid reminds me of my initial experience with NAAT. Man, it is brutal. Darth Nihilus is just as nasty as Grievous, if not more so. And the following phases aren't a walk through a Coruscant park, either. What works in NAAT and, in turn, what works in HAAT will not necessarily work in this new Sith raid. As clever grinders, it's on our shoulders to learn the new raid mechanics and develop effective squads for each phase. Will this happen overnight? That's a big nope. Not at all.

Ryer once reminded me that the one thing gamers tend to lack is patience. He is as right today as he was back then. That said, no matter how frustrated we all become with this new Sith raid -- and, trust me, I've been ready to snap my phone in half on more than one occasion -- the raid's extreme difficulty will teach us not just how to play it, but, more to the point, how to beat it. As we're all aware, the rewards for T2 of this raid are junk. If you visit the forums, you'll readily hear that all the tiers, save for Heroic, drop junk. Which is as much to point out that this new Sith raid isn't going to drop desirable rewards for us any time soon. At this point, the real rewards arrive when we finally solve the puzzles presented to us by this new Sith raid.

And by we, I mean we. Nobody's alone in this. In fact, I encourage everyone not only to post questions and comments on the cNoss channels, but also to engage with other members of the larger TORTC community. There's no magic bullet for this raid, so the other guilds are grinding, too. We're all in this Sithstorm together, ladies and Gungans, so let's work together and figure out how to beat Nihilus, Sion, and Traya into the ground. Good hunting.

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