OK, thanks for the pro tip!

On Tuesday after the patch, formed a complete ops group with guild members, queued, got into EV, finished it, got the 5 BH commendations. Will be doing this more. I understand that other groups did not receive their BH commendations even though they did the same thing.

Can somebody enlighten me as to what causes a lightning bubble to appear on stormcaller between the start of 'defensive systems activate' and the actual shield popping/folks getting blown off the tank? With our ops group, this happens semi-randomly -- sometimes never, sometimes 2-3 times during an op (causes a wipe occasionally as people don't jump off stormcaller fast enough). We always use the same players, and we do the same thing every fight. The other night, I went with a different ops group as a fill-in, and they were having trouble with this as well. If it is a bug, is the best way to avoid it to simply jump off the stormcaller once defensive systems audio prompt occurs and wait on the ground for the shield to pop? Thanks in advance.

Bioware is trying to speed up access to this gear tier. My best guess is that their metrics is showing not enough folks completing HM LI, EC SM, EC HM and so by giving people easier/faster access to better gear, perhaps more people can complete this content. This also prepares people for the next tier content that they will release. Anyway, just my speculation. I am about half BH myself, and complete HM LI, EC SM regularly, so it does not affect me that much -- will just mean that I will get my remaining BH pieces faster. It will also allow you to buy redundant pieces of BH gear faster so that you can get the exact mods that you want.

Try getting rid of any other flashpoint quests that you already have.

Bioware has made the decision to speed up acquisition to this gear tier -- they have their reasons of which the details are unclear, just let it play out and don't worry about it.

Yeah, agreed.

I noticed this as well the other day -- thought it was strange -- ops lockouts do not show when you are not in group.

So, I am a sage healer, and have run this several times with all different combinations of ranged/melee. I agree that moving the droid is difficult on all melee groups as interrupting incinerate becomes more difficult. So, I have quit doing that and just use the following strategy (I will give it for an all melee group, but I also use it with one ranged/one melee). I only use the 'drag-the-droid' around strategy with an all-melee group if the following approach fails more than 2-3 times. The droid always stays in the center, so the tank can interrupt it. The ranged healer stands out from the melee, in the spot where you want the bubble to drop. The melee dps for about 8 seconds, then run to join the healer. Once the blue bubble of death is put down, the melee jump/run back to the droid, and the healer moves to the next bubble spot. The melee dps for 8 seconds, then join the healer again -- if any adds are around, dps those until bubble drops, then go back to droid in center. Keeping doing this until the droid is dead. It usually takes about 1.25 times around the room, dropping two bubbles on each side. At about 1.5 times around the room, you will hit the enrage timer. This approach can fail if the melee can't judge when to run back to the healer and dps the droid too long, then a bubble can drop in the center. Generally, if the tank is smart, the tank can move the droid to avoid the one of these, but if more than one is dropped in the center it becomes difficult. The other problem is that if the melee dps is low, then you can run into the enrage timer since you lose dps running back to the healer. The advantages of this approach is that it is easy on the healer, so the healer can throw in some dps, and easy on interrupts, as the droid is not moving and the tank can catch all of the incinerate armors. Good luck!

I agree that EC Story Mode ops definitely needs to be in a different tier from EV/KP story mode ops.

Grats! The ops group I run with is still clearing EC story, we hope to get to EC HM soon.

My speculation on why Bioware is making it dramatically easier to accumulate Black Hole comms in 1.3 is that a lot of players cannot complete either LI HM or EC Story mode, making the weekly in Black Hole the only way for them to get Black Hole comms, which is a very slow process. So, by making black hole comms much easier to get, they want to raise the players' gear level so that this can help them over the LI HM and EC story mode hump. I guess the choice is either improve players' gear level, or nerf the difficulty of LI HM and EC story mode (which personally, I definitely do not want). Just my speculation....

First, I understand the OP's reasoning that you will be able to get BiS gear for some classes without doing EC HM. However, I do not agree that it will kill EC HM raiding (and on a personal level, it does not bother me at all, I am happy others will be able to get good gear, more folks to recruit from). 1. You will still need to get the mainhand from EC HM. 2. The epeen factor of doing EC HM will still be there, as well as having the 'look' of campaign gear if you want that. For the ops group that I run with, that is enough reason right there. 3. When EC NiM comes out, it will have unique rewards that make EC NiM worth doing as stated by developers. To do EC NiM, you will probably need to practice some on EC HM in order to get ready for EC NiM.

I am excited about the new operations (heck, I am just excited about any new content). I have no idea what the new level cap will be -- that really surprised me. My personal opinion would be a only a small level cap increase to 52-55, as only one new operation could not support a massive level cap increase. A small level cap increase would also make Denova more accessible to folks, while still not making it totally irrelevant. But, who knows, my idle speculation until more details are released. The E3 announcements, especially the Op, definitely got me excited!!!!

Thank you for fixing this as per the patch notes; restores my faith a bit!!!!

Ah, ok cool -- thanks for the info!

My ops group has just started reliably clearing Story EC, so have a ways to go before boredom. My question for those clearing HM EC and nightmare pilgram -- what do you expect with Nightmare EC in terms of rewards? My understanding that is that it will not drop any new gear, but I could be wrong. Would you be satisfied with just a title as with the previous nightmare operations?

Excellent post!

This needs to be fixed ASAP, as in, the very next patch if not sooner. If not, my personal conclusion would be that you don't care that much about your ops community, as I can't see that this would be a hard bug to fix requiring multiple weeks of effort.

Had something similar happen to us tonight, a first for me, and I have done a lot of ops. Was helping a group complete last three boss on KP normal, had some folks in ops that had done the first two bosses, some had not. When zoning in, some members would be automatically kicked out of the instance. Tried re-logging, tried re-forming ops, tried different leaders. Did not try the new character creation thing. Finally had to call the ops as we could not get everybody into the ops at the same time. Submitted a bug report.

I don't know if you are tank swapping or not. We were having some enrage issues, and stopped tank swapping to get a bit more dps and got through it (yes, we know tank swapping is needed in hard mode, will deal with that when we get there).

Update on my previous post: Took an 'A' grade DPS to replace our previous sub-par DPS member that we had used for the first three bosses and which we had trouble getting down the third bomber, and promptly one-shot Kephess. The mechanics are not too bad once you know them. My original 'TL;DR' stands -- if you have the gear/skill to do the first three EC story mode bosses, you may still not have what is needed for Kephess, so beware of that. Also, a more accurate minimum requirement of gear+skill would be that if you can easily clear hard mode EV/KP, then you can do story mode EC.

You somehow think it is a player's responsibility to prop up dying servers by staying there? Haha, good attempt at trying to lay a guilt trip on somebody. Players pay for the game, they can choose to roll on whatever server they want to roll on.

You know, its funny - you make it sound like my grandma and a three year could do this. Do you think our tanks and healers were sitting around reading books while the DPS were working on killing these guys? They were DPS'ing as well, and it was tight. By the time you locate the bomber, get to the bomber, cast your first spell -- you don't have 20 seconds any more. And yep, we do know what stims are, believe it or not! Sheesh. The real problem is the third bomber, when at least one tank is missing. I am sure we will be able to do it, but it is not the cakewalk you make it sound like it should be. Anyway, I am sure there is a group of players out there that could do this in tionese, much less Columi. However, I am betting that many groups, if they are only columi geared, will have a tough time.

TL;DR: Just because you have the DPS needed to get past the first three bosses in EC story mode, you may not have the needed DPS for the last fight. I would like to give one more specific data point on EC story mode and DPS/gearing. I am in a large casual guild that has 10+ ops teams. The team I am with has been struggling with EC story mode, but the other night we went and finally had a good run where we beat the first three bosses. The team had a ranged DPS fill-in with a mixture of Columni/Rakata, and I would grade this person as a 'C' grade dps (first time in EC). We had an alternate melee DPS who had recently moved from a tank role to a DPS role, and so was a 'B' grade dps, and mostly rakata. Everybody else was standard team, all 'A' grade, all full Rakata with 1 or 2 pieces of black hole gear. I will call 'A' grade as full rakata, 1 or 2 pieces of BH gear, and nominally skilled players that have done HM KP/EV with no problems. So, the next night, we took on Kephess with the same team, except our 'B' grade melee dps could not make it, but the 'A' grade melee dps (full rakata) that had been missing the night before joined us. We were fully expecting to beat Kephess, we had watched vids, knew the mechanics. At least four other ops teams in our guild have cleared Story mode EC, and we were expecting to be another team with that accomplishment. We failed to take him down and we tried for three hours, because we kept failing on the 3rd bomber, where we just did not have the DPS to kill it when one of our tanks had to deal with Kephess and we lost his DPS on the bomber (we would also occasionally fail on one of the first two bombers as well, like if we had to move slightly because of AOE fire from the walker). So, we had three 'A' grade DPS (two ranged, one melee), two 'A' grade healers, two 'A' grade tanks, and one 'C' grade ranged DPS -- actually slightly better DPS than what we had for the first three EC story bosses, but still not good enough for Kephess. I am certain that if we had our other 'A' grade DPS normal ops member we would have succeeded. This is just a data point on how tight the DPS check is on the bombers in the Kephess fight. In our particular ops team case, we need everybody (at least the dps) in full Rakata.