Quote Originally Posted by MiRai View Post
Weird that you say it was a grind because I had heard that it was too easy for people to level up and then there was no end game content; or where there was end game content it was really buggy. I can't exactly comment on this myself because I didn't actually play SW:TOR.
MiRai has it spot on. I run a small guild on Dreshdae Cantina server. We had 1 person hit 50 in just under 3 days of the early release. We had 3 more hit 50 about a day later. Then several more within a few days. Those of us that hit 50 wanted to see what Eternity Vault was like, so we asked the other couple of 50s on our server if they were interested and proceeded to clear all of EV up to SOA in a few hours. There were tons of bugs. We went back the next night to kill Soa and found out that the bugs we had experienced up to that point were trivial compared to what we found in the Soa encounter.

Here are some of the bugs we saw:

After wiping on Gharj:
Once your revived outside the instance and ran back, you would run back and somewhere along the way everyone would start dying from lava damage.
We had the instance locked on us because it said there was an encounter in progress. All 8 of us were outside the instance. It took over 20 minutes for the instance to reset and allow us back in.

Ancient Pylons:
The consoles stopped responding.
Double spawns of the big bugs.
Bugged chest unlootable

Soa:
After a wipe, the platforms would not respawn correctly and would be missing sections. This made it impossible to complete without wiping again to reset the encounter.
Killing the small pylons on the way down did not remove Soa's spheres as it should have.
If a lightning ball was up when you pushed Soa over to the next phase were you start descending the "stairs," the ball would follow you. During this phase the entire raid is grouped up on a small section of the platform. 1 ball can wipe the raid during this phase.
People would sometimes be removed from the instance when you broke them out of a mind trap.
If someone died during one of the descent phases, their corpse was sometimes not rezzable.


There were quite a few more bugs with the Soa encounter. You also had to deal with several loot issues throughout the entire raid. If you used master looter, you got no crafting materials. The normal loot was not the best at assigning loot. Some people got more than one item while other did not get any.

We cleared EV on Dec 31st. At the time we had four people who were level 50 and we used four "pickups" to fill out the raid. The following week we cleared EV again and a few of the pickups decided to join us. Within 2 weeks we were able to clear everything but Soa in a little over an hour. We would then go kill Bonethrasher. Then we would come back the next night and struggle with Soa and his bugs all night unless we got lucky. For our first couple of clears, we had 2 or 3 people who were geared pretty well from doing the dailies for a week getting the armor, enhancements, and mods. We did EV the day after I hit 50. I was in mostly greens as a sage healer. Our tank was the first to hit 50 on the server and was fairly well geared from the dailies.

So out timeline looks something like this:

Dec 16th or 17th - first 50
Dec 20ish - 2 more 50s
Dec 29th - 1 more 50
Dec 30 - cleared up to Soa in normal mode
Dec 31st - downed Soa
Jan 7th - full clear
Jan 9th - cleared up to Soa in hard mode
Jan 30th - cleared up to Soa in nightmare mode
From the Jan 9th on, we cleared normal and hard/nightmare EV every week, usually in 1 night. We cleared Karraga's Palace the first weekend it was released and then switched to hard mode shortly thereafter.

4 of our core guys were bored and/or burnt out by the end of February from doing the same stuff every week. By March, many of only logged in on raid day where we would proceed to clear everything in 1 night and then cancel the 2nd night of raiding. A week or two after that, say mid to late March, 3 of our 9ish raid roster quit. We managed to fill raids and had a few more people hit 50 to fill some spots. I remember 1 week, we were short and one of our vanguards had just hit 50. We asked him if he would like to raid that night. He was really concerned about not knowing the fights and not having any gear. On top of that, he had soloed up to 50, (like most of us had), so he was very worried about being able to actually tank. It turned out to be a joke. He came in in greens and tanked almost every encounter with no problems. Our other tank DPS'd on a few encounters and died during Soa leaving the green vanguard who had never seen the encounter to tank Soa. Soa is one of the harder encounters in SWtoR. The final phase requires the tank to be able to spot a falling object and position Soa under it to make him vulnerable. It is very challenging with the limited camera positioning to spot these things. Anyway, the vanguard was a good tank in WoW and was able to pull it off rather well. The thing we all thought was impressive or broken depending on your point of view was how survivable he was in green gear versus our jedi knight tank who was in full Columi with several pieces of Rakata gear by that point.

As of today, we have 6 raiders are are discussing merging with another guild or recruiting. Recruiting is a tough road though with the dwindling number of players.