From the perspective of Nightmare mode raid main tank: First of all, if any spec is missing Sonic Barrier, they are doing it wrong. This absorbs a really good amount of damage over the course of a fight. I can think of a hundred times where not having it in a low health situation would have gotten me very, VERY dead. Plus our 4-piece is entirely useless without it. Secondly, some of the hybrid specs put forth so far are HIGHLY situational. Especially the ones where they want to have you Interceding and Force Charging to keep defensive buffs up. Good luck keeping the boss positioned how you want it while trying some BS stunt like that. I think the problem here is that most people are still doing flashpoints and haven't touched a raid, let alone Nightmare mode. If you want to mess with your spec and do odd things for flashpoint trash, that's fine. But for raid bosses threat is largely a non-issue, and giving up survivability for it is a big, big mistake. Tanks need to be reliable, not situational. I think people are losing sight of the big picture because they haven't tanked Hard and Nightmare raid bosses that are tank-centric.

As with anything that isn't easy to objectively measure, there's going to be a significant level of placebo effect where people think something is fixed simply because the patch notes say it was fixed. Personally I don't notice any difference, but I also don't experience low framerate situations which the fix seems to focus on.

Just level cap the planet. You have no business being on Ilum before 47 or 48.

No one was ever more wrong in their speculation about how this game was going to be than Spymaster. I'm honestly surprised he's here given that the game is the polar opposite of what he was whining so hard for pre-release.

While Juggernaut is certainly the weakest of the tank classes, it isn't an inhibitor to progression. I tank for my guild as a Jugg and we will be finishing our remaining Nightmare content tonight. Current content is not really about the threat or damage the tank can put out, and Jugg survivability is actually really good. I've never been a liability to my guild, nor would our progression have gone any faster were I an Assassin or Powertech. We never found ourselves going "Gee, why is the tank dying??" or "Why can't the tank hold aggro??" once we got past doing HM Flashpoints.

Companions cannot be summoned in raid groups, but in normal mode you should be fine with just 14 people provided your people know what they are doing and you aren't saddled with a lot of baddies.

Dive into the lightnings. I don't see why your healers should be having a problem. If people are quickly diving their lightning balls, there shouldn't be any significant raid damage going out from incidental zaps, and this boss hits me as a tank like a baby. The invisible ball lightning is a bit of a bug, but I've never had them be completely invisible. Either their nameplate is showing, or the ball itself. Usually both. Make sure everyone has enemy nameplates enabled for this fight.

Our guild still has a couple nightmare kills left to get in our 8-man mode and many of our members are already getting bored, including the other half of our 16-man who are still gearing up for Hard and Nightmare gear checks. The content is simply too easy. We've never had to try very hard to get a boss down. At least not by most peoples standards. The only reason we haven't full cleared everything is because we only do progression 2 nights a week. Coming from games where I spent weeks, or even months to get a new raid on farm, this is pretty disappointing.

16-man is definitely harder than 8, but with no real advantage in terms of loot. If you're not looking for 16-man progression bragging rights, two 8-man teams is the smarter move. That said, 16-man gives you more flexibility in your raid comp, so logistically it might be easier, even if the content execution itself is harder. We're almost done with 8-man Nightmare content and we're currently mulling over whether we want to do two 8-mans or a 16-man for our guild, now that the other half of our raid group is getting geared up.

Spacebar

So, I got into testing back in June. One of the most annoying bugs was my UI randomly becoming unresponsive to clicks until I hit CTRL-U twice to reload the UI. I have a high tolerance for annoying, but after 7 months it's starting to hit the limit of sanity. Why has this bug evaded fixing for 7 months? ITT: Rage about CTRL-U

You may have a point there, now that I think about it. The couple times I've been mind-trapped I was a little bit away. I think it's a two factor thing. You have to be #1 on the threat table, and inside of melee range to avoid mind traps. At least in phase 2. In phase 3, I think you just have to keep aggro. I'm far away from him all the time dragging him around, and I don't seem to get trapped.

This has to do with threat. I've only ever been mind-trapped when some fluke caused someone to pull aggro off me at the exact wrong time.

Why would you care about a title if you are quitting the game? The whole point of the title is to throw some token reward at people for being loyal customers. It doesn't mean anything to me, and I don't care either way, but it would be pretty stupid to give a loyalty-based title to a bunch of people half of whom will never play again.

Is it really so hard to comprehend? Half the things in this game are broken. Because there are no indications or hints as to the solution to Hard and Nightmare pylons, assuming it is a bug is not unreasonable. It's wrong, but it's still a reasonable first assumption to make given the facts in hand. Chill out.

Given that we used accuracy debuffs to survive Nightmare Droid Salvos, I'm pretty sure I have a clue. What I'm saying is that they aren't all 90%, and even if you have several, you still need to use them strategically. And they don't do ANYTHING for you on fights where the damage doesn't come from normal boss abilities. Try obfuscating Ball Lightnings. Doesn't really need a nerf IMHO.

Obfuscate rotation? It's 6 seconds on a minute cooldown. If you want to stack 10 Marauders go ahead, otherwise you're going to have to pick and choose carefully when you want your Obfuscate up.

Collision detection in the game can be a bit spotty. I've found myself bouncing off the side of a building, or getting caught on some tiny object protruding from a wall. Fortunately there aren't that many datacrons or other situations where it's particularly troublesome. Most give you fair latitude on making the jump.

I was the first on my server to choose a legacy name. I could have picked anything I wanted. Instead, I ended up picking something generic and lame. Big regret. Meanwhile cool people have legacy names like "Sandwich" which lend themselves really well to hilarious memorable themed names. I'd pay $25 to change my legacy name.

Combat log was disabled in beta supposedly for performance reasons. If that's true, it makes sense that it's not running in the background somewhere. In theory you could probably pull the scrolling combat text from memory, but it's hard to know precisely what information is relayed back to the client. It could be that all you get is the number and there is nothing else to be read, such as ability name. Regardless, combat log will be back eventually, hopefully soon, and there'll be a working parser inside of a week.

I think you're confused. All people want is information. Is it fair that Derp J. Derpington is in the raid with his 400 dps while you and everyone else are doing 800? Isn't he wasting your time, and lowering your chances of success? There's nothing the rest of you can do except scratch your heads and wonder which of you is Derp J. Derpington. As I said earlier, I love challenge. I want nothing handed to me. I fully admit the current raid content doesn't pose enough of a challenge. But I also want the challenge to come from interesting mechanics, not finding Derp J. Derpington when I have no Derp Detector.

Yup. You can do it for a little while after a server restart, but then it gets broken somehow. Anyway, great list. Thanks for putting this together. It's super important that you do what you can outside of raids to gear up in Columi level gear. Because the enrage timers on Hard and Nightmare can be very tight, and even just one undergeared person can bollocks the whole thing.

I'm pretty sure there aren't a million people doing Hard and Nightmare mode raids, which are what I am talking about. I don't care about your level 30 flashpoints or whatever you're doing with your time. I'm talking about the current Hard and Nightmare endgame content. On the contrary, I'd love for them to create some actual challenging endgame. But if they are just going to throw DPS check after DPS check at us, then they should give us some better information about exactly how much DPS each of us are doing. I don't care if its an addon, a combat log we can parse, or a built in raid metrics tool. But if the only challenge is going to be DPS, then we should be able to see what that DPS is. That sounds reasonable does it not? Of course not. I want challenges. Preferably challenges that aren't just meeting some arbitrary DPS minimum. Easy is boring. But currently that's the only challenge in the game, so I'm asking why it is inappropriate for me to know how my raiders are going in meeting that challenge.

Yes, the current content is surprisingly easy, aside from the enrage timers. But what I want the ability to make informed decisions about who needs to improve their DPS and who is performing well in my raid group. I fail to understand why you and others like you feel that I should be obligated to carry poorly performing players.

This thread cracks me up when I consider that its probably filled with a bunch of level 30s who haven't done anything outside of a couple flashpoints. Here's my viewpoint from the perspective of someone who's successfully cleared all but one Hard Mode encounter and half the Nightmare ones: Disappointing news for some of you, the endgame is almost entirely based on enrage timers. DPS is king in the endgame. Tanking is extremely easy, healing a little less so. Actual fight mechanics are laughable compared even to Cataclysm WoW raids. Virtually every encounter has some kind of enrage timer. Most are tuned so tightly that your healers are going to want to spend any spare moment they have to throw out some extra DPS. It makes all the difference. The Infernal Council encounter where every character chooses an NPC to "duel" is even more demanding. If even one of you fails to beat the enrage timer, everyone has to start over. One or two overgeared DPS cannot carry you quite so easily here, since you can only attack another persons mob once every 8 seconds, and that's being nerfed to one minute in 1.1 The problem with tight enrage timer tuning is that it means a single DPS not carrying their own weight means you aren't killing that boss for another week or two until you get more gear so that your better DPS can carry the poor fool. All the DPS in my raid group get checked out in a best case scenario stop-watch powered DPS meter whenever they've changed their spec or had significant gear upgrades. We go to a 50 Champion mob with a generous health pool. We check my tanking DPS average, and then I tank it while a DPS beats on it. We subtract my DPS and arrive at their DPS. Its a tank and spank best case scenario against something that isn't quite a raid boss, but it allowed us to come up with a minimum DPS needed to beat Hard Mode enrage timers. (1100 DPS) Some sort of damage metrics, whether it be a combat log we can parse, or an in-game parser like Recount, will improve our quality-of-life significantly. The comment I see most often is "Herp derp, if teh boss is dead, you have enough DPS, if the boss is alive, you don't." Obviously this sort of comment, while technically true, doesn't address the issue. The focus should be on the times the boss isn't dying. It's easy to say "We don't have enough DPS." but that doesn't offer any potential solutions. How do we know which player isn't performing up to par? Most of us have seen first hand that two people in equivalent gear aren't necessarily going to put out equivalent DPS, so it's not simply a matter of booting the least geared player until they get more gear. I'm sorry for anyone who is upset by it, but damage metrics are coming in one form or another, and well they should. Bioware has chosen to balance their endgame almost solely around hard DPS checks, as you'll find out when you get there. This means that DPS will be under even more pressure to perform optimally. If you thought TOR was going to be the MMO where you could go into the endgame with your Special Flower three-tree hybrid spec and perform well, you were wrong. You will cause your raid group to miss enrage timers and will waste everyones time.