Agree with the OP. My guild cleared all content on Nightmare 16-man and then most (10-12) just quit the game (dunno what the others are doing, I rerolled Imperial on another server so there'd be more than 50 people on Fleet at peak times). It wasn't challenging, and the bugs are numerous and not getting fixed.

Encounter will reset if any person fails to kill their mob in time (you have until a few seconds after the mob enrages). If one person in the group dies, it is still possible for another person to pick up that person's mob and kill it, and you can still complete the encounter this way.

HK-47 in Foundry has no enrage. The locks/switches on the core are just incredibly buggy and don't always register as having been destroyed. Best advice I can give is make sure you're standing still and wait for the full 1.0 second cast to go off when you destroy them, without moving. If it doesn't register all 4 locks as being destroyed, the core will not immediately rise, and HK-47 will gain his Power of the Core buff and kill everyone.

It's also possible to 2-man Foundry and False Emperor. Foundry was definitely the easier of the two. Foundry summary: Up to HK-47 was absolutely fine, pure tank and spank. Took some time for us to get past HK simply because of the buggy core locks, which seemed to bug out if we were too quick to click them or moved before the channel had finished. Pets have a tendancy to run next to HK when the core is coming down, so you have to put them on passive temporarily (or they get squished). You can use 2 healers for the HK fight because he doesn't seem to have an enrage. Revan was pretty straightforward as well, just had to interrupt the relevant abilities and put the pets on passive to get them out of lightning storm. They don't seem to get targeted by the purple aoe circles so they can happily DPS or heal while you dodge around. False Emperor summary: Worst part was HK-47. We saw his enrage many many times because our gear is pretty bad still (orange with level 50 mods). We did manage to get past him though, took every trick in the book though (tank using DPS stim, blowing all cooldowns including relics and adrenals). We didn't manage to kill the Sith Entity bonus boss, though we only gave it a couple of tries. The healer pet really seemed to struggle with the damage, and the enrage on that fight is pretty tight as well so we passed it up for now. Malgus was comparitively easy, killed him first time. We used 2 healer pets, and even though he enraged at around 20-25% his damage was still low enough for me to survive until we could knock him off (had to use all my cooldowns though). Going to try Boarding Party next - last boss might cause issues but we shall see.

The trash was the hardest part about it for us. A lot of droid packs, making the assassin sap not very useful. My assassin is still pretty squishy and melts pretty fast - used cooldowns liberally to keep myself alive and even then we wiped a few times . Bosses themselves weren't that bad. 1st boss: Semi-kiting or fighting with back to wall, running out during the whirlwind slash attack. Went down easily first time. 2nd boss: Used 2 healer pets simply because he doesn't enrage and spends a lot of time with shield up. Range tank him if possible, and interrupt Flame Sweep (which he doesn't tend to use if you stay at range). Shoot the ship as soon as it comes forward or it bugs and you die horribly. Bit of a snorefest. 3rd boss: The two droids. You need to pull the droids far apart, that way you are out of the attacak range of the one with the blue circle. Damage is too much for the pets to heal through otherwise, so just pull them apart and move between them when they go immune (so only the tank will be taking damage). They don't enrage so you can even use 2 healer pets if you're concerned (put pets on passive when you need to move so they follow you). 4th boss: HK-47. We were close to killing him, but really we went in quite undergeared (was just curious to see how far we'd get). The companions don't seem to get targeted by the circle mechanic or the stealth attack, so if one person is tanking the other person should expect to be the recipient of everything. Healing seemed fine, just our dps was lacking to meet the 2 minute timer.

BT hard mode is fairly easy to 2-man with companions. Did it today with my Sith Assassin who's pretty much a fresh 50 (orange gear with lvl 50 mods and a couple 51 armour platings from daily commendations). My friend was playing Sorceror DPS and has similar gear. We were using a ranged DPS companion and healer companion with a mix of green and orange gear (from voss/corellia commendations). Things to note: 1. Went dark side for first boss. The probes seem to ignore the companions, fight was quite easy. 2. 2nd boss is easy, interrupt the probe attacks and it's tank and spank. You can easily kite him once he enrages; he doesn't really do anything. 3. Optional boss has a short enrage but you can glitch him out quite easily by LOSing behind a box (he'll just stand there and do nothing). 4. Last boss's pull in AoE attack doesn't affect the companions (though I seem to remember it targeting them in normal mode so not sure what's up). Overall, easily doable for 2 people + pets. We attempted False Emperor HM as well, got to HK but couldn't quite kill him (6% best try). With a bit more gear he'll go down. Not sure if we'll have the healing for Malgus but I'm looking forward to trying (considering double healer). Honestly, I've been quite impressed with Andronikos Revel's DPS.

Make your Ops group, right click your character portrait and you should be able to set Operations difficulty.

The quest for completing Eternity Vault obtained from the NPC outside the instance can only be completed once.

To do Foundry you will need to have done Boarding Party to advance the story quest. For Republic side, you need to have completed Taral V in order to do Maelstrom Prison. These are the only restrictions - you do not need to complete a flashpoint on normal before you can do it on hard - you simply need access to the [GROUP] Flashpoint quest (having done the necessary story dialogues to obtain them). At this stage you can abandon the [GROUP] quest and pick up the [HARD MODE] version from the NPC outside the instance. For example, on Republic side you get the story quest "Jedi Prisoner". This is the storyline quest for Taral V (level 33) and Maelstrom Prison (level 37) flashpoints (Empire side has a similar quest for BP/Foundry but I can't remember the name). If you have not done Taral V before and are level 50, you need to get this quest and then talk to the NPC inside the group phase. He will give you the quest [GROUP] Flashpoint: Taral V. At this stage, you should abandon this [GROUP] quest and keep Jedi Prisoner. Then talk to the NPC outside the Taral V instance and opt to start the flashpoint in Hard Mode. After completing Taral V on either normal or hard mode you will advance the Jedi Prisoner quest and be able to access Maelstrom Prison. A similar trick also works for Directive 7. Get the story quest, talk to the NPC inside the group phase. He gives you [GROUP] Flashpoint: Directive 7. Abandon this, take the hard mode version from the NPC outside the instance. Hope this makes sense!

We are the best tank healers in the game - we can heal all day with no resource problems and have excellent flexibility in dealing with spike damage. That being said, Sage AoE healing is pretty much a necessity in raids. My guild's healing setup was 1 Commando healer and 3 Sages, and we cleared everything on Nightmare 16. Healing flashpoints as a Commando is fine from my experience, though you may be stretched with group healing at times. As RuQu alluded to, Scoundrel is probably the weakest healer currently. I have one myself at level 50 and have raided on it several times. Scoundrel is very good at outputting a constant stream of healing, but requires a very strict rotation to manage Upper Hand, HoT stacks and Energy levels. It can't burst heal at all and you will energy starve yourself very quickly if you attempt to do so.

Exactly. Rift had achievements for zone exploration, artifact hunting, zone puzzles, finding cairns, jumping from high locations, rare mob hunting, zone events and rifts, and other miscellaneous activities that varied from zone to zone. This was a huge timesink for any collectors or completionists, and provided some incentive for exploring and revisiting lower level areas. SWTOR has none of this... just some daily quests on Belsalvis and Ilum, and some world bosses that aren't worth the effort.

This. SWTOR features no dynamic content, no real solo achievement hunting apart from datacrons, no combat log, and pretty much nothing to do at level 50 apart from reroll and do 90% of the same quests again with a different character.

New cooldown effect is absolutely atrocious, needs reverting ASAP. Who on earth thought that having 40 skill icons flash bright blue every 1.5 seconds was a good idea?

You have to finish the next story mission the game gives you, and then you'll get the title. So while you may have just been promoted, you don't get your title until you've done a bit more work.

When I mention "mechanics" I'm not really talking about the puzzles. But we can use the Fabricator encounter as an example. This boss throws a grenade at a random member of the raid, which will explode after a few seconds, doing AoE damage and knocking down anyone in the blast radius. This is one of the boss's mechanics and is an individual skill check - you need to spot that you've been hit with the grenade, and react by moving away from other raid members. You may be able to ignore the damage from this grenade on normal and hard difficulties, but it's still there. Switching to nightmare mode doesn't add this ability in, just makes it hurt a lot more. Does this mean that nightmare requires more skill? I guess, but only because you can't just ignore this ability if you're running a melee-heavy raid. I can see your point in that if you're raiding at a higher level, people need to be able to play their class better, but my main point is that there's nothing new apart from a steeper healing/dps requirement.

The cannon has stats (power/surge) that are very useful for both healing and dps.

Nightmare mode doesn't add new mechanics either, just ramps up the damage and boss HP some more. I guess this means you can't flat-out ignore/heal through most of the mechanics anymore, but that doesn't really make it a "test of skill".

Master loot works fine apart from in normal difficulty operations. Sometimes (especially with chests) you'll assign loot to someone but they won't receive it, and it will stay in the chest. What you have to do to work around this is pass ML to that person, and then they should be able to take the item (or successfully assign it to themself again and loot it).

The enrage timers in this game are just substitutes for any meaningful mechanics that could have been implemented instead. Enrage timers are fine in general, but in this game they're just lazily shoveled into hard modes as an excuse for not making the fight any more difficult.

Same with our guild. Every week, same bugs, same headache. Badly designed loot tables, with some bosses deciding that this week they don't feel like dropping any loot so here's a synthweaving schematic enjoy. Oh wait you mean you don't have any synthweavers? Sorry guys, your raid of 16 players is SOL 'cuz we really don't feel like dropping anything else. Bosses in KP that respawn after you kill them. Just in case you feel like fighting them again and getting no loot because everyone likes not getting loot. Trash that spawns directly in front of the speeder dropoff location in KP if you're forced to reset after the puzzle boss, meaning if you take more than 5 steps forward it's probably a raid wipe. You know what would funny? If the trash BEHIND the dropoff point respawned as w- OH WAIT IT DOES. Exotech gear comprising the majority of the loot table in Nightmare 16-man KP, because why not drop loot that is completely useless to everyone. Crafting schematics to make BoP non-set items, because being able to make stuff that might be useful for other players in the raid/guild is a waste of time. MUST. GEAR. PETS. Over half of Glory is planning to leave to return to other games in the next couple of weeks (WoW and Rift, mostly). The raiding experience of SWTOR and end-game in general has been terrible.

Nice, another feature not fixed from beta. I've already been dealing with headaches with customer support about another separate issue (and having no luck getting them respond with a shred of intelligence), which is why I'm not expecting to ever see those items again. I guess I can live in hope that someone sees this thread and avoids making the same unintentional mistake that I did.

As per the title. Don't cancel the crafting of items that require Rakata Energy Nodes or you might lose them. Story: I finally managed to get some Rakata Energy Nodes from Karagga (have been raiding since maybe a week after launch and have not had them drop before) and assigned my companion Aric Jorgan to craft an Exotech Supercommando's Helmet. A few seconds later I realised I should really be crafting it with Tanno Vic because of his bonus to Armormech critical, so I clicked to cancel the crafting of the item. However when I cancelled crafting the item, the Rakata Energy Nodes were not refunded to me. Poof go 2 of the 3 RENs I have received in my entire time playing this game. I have opened a support ticket, of course, but I don't expect to hear anything until after my subscription runs out in 2-3 weeks. Just making this thread as a heads up to any other people crafting with rare materials - be careful! I've not noticed this happen before, but then again I don't keep close tabs on more common materials that I do my day-to-day crafting with.

I don't think you understand. If you kill Karagga on 16-man Nightmare you get ~6 pieces of Exotech armor (columi rating, no set bonus) and ~2 Rakata weapon tokens - weapons that currently have the equivalent of Tionese stats. For 16 people. The last boss in game on the hardest difficulty drops worse loot than 4-man hard modes. This loot is absolute garbage for anyone raiding Nightmare content and should not be in the drop table whatsoever. There is definitely a problem here.

You'll get Elara Dorne at the end of Taris (around level 20 or so). Alteratively, you can use your ship's protocol droid.

Just a pointer about losing the ability to use Charged Bolts - this skill is spammable when you activate Supercharge Cells, as the ammo cost is reduced to 1. It's a decent burst of damage in situations where your healing isn't required (e.g. when soloing or fighting instance trash). As others have pointed out, you'll also lose some damage on a few offensive abilities. You -can- heal just fine with a rifle, if that is your primary concern. You'll be losing some flexibility and DPS potential though.