Between the first two bosses, right before the elevator leading to the bridge (with the turrets, the bridge crew, and the second boss), there is a warehouse/storage area full of containers and combat droids. With no particular skill, it is possible to weave between the crates and skip every group in the room except for one: the first one. To skip that group, you need to: a) have stealth so you can just walk past; b) have Scavenging so you can activate the lift to the left of the entryway, allowing you to scale the crates and avoid the first group; or c) have body type 1 or 2 (both definitely work with fem PCs, and BT-1 definitely works with male PCs), which allows you to squeeze between two blocks of containers right next to the Scavenging skip node.

As a mostly-BT2-character player, I can do the crate skip on Red Reaper without needing stealth or Scavenging.

Some false efficiencies in this game will never die. Some people still insist on dumb crap like LoSing the Vorgan fight or ignoring the turrets to rush across the chasm. Some people insist on ditching fights early to pull the next group, forcing the dps to actually stay behind to finish the fight and then slow-run to catch up because the other fight's already started. Just...these things do not make your group faster. They make it slower. Hurry-up-and-wait crap is not actually efficient.

Rass is Influence-locked, as far as I know. The content's designed to be completed with him at low Influence. What was killing you on the Heta fight?

At one point in time, those methods led to a bug that would break your flashpoint run, so people have been understandably shy about using them in my experience.

You're right. That's not the way it works. And, based on what you're saying, it's easy for me to see why your other group members were bringing it up. Threat in this game is generated by raw damage/healing numbers. Heals generate threat on all enemies in combat, single target damage generates threat on the enemy you target, and AoE damage generates threat on all damaged enemies. If you go into tank spec, you lose many of the buffs and abilities in the DPS trees that increase your damage, but gain buffs to the threat you generate per points of damage dealt. So you become worse at killing things - significantly worse, even if you stick with DPS gear - but better at generating threat. In PvP content, skanking sometimes has a place (depending on the meta) because the threat mechanic in PvP isn't about directly controlling the actions of enemy players - who can target whomever they like - but rather about debuffing them and reducing their overall damage output. So throwing a ton of taunts around makes sense and is good. In PvE, where the enemies have a strictly defined decisionmaking mechanic and where taunts force target switches and dramatically augment threat generation, having non-tanks throwing around taunts willy-nilly is not helpful. PvE taunts don't lower boss damage output on non-tanks - they just change who the tank is. That makes the tank's job harder: controlling the boss is much harder when you don't know whether you will have control at any given moment or not. And it makes the healer's job harder, because they have to split more of their attention. And it makes the DPS's job harder, because predictability in boss positioning and activity allows them to maximize damage output while not having that predictability can cause problems. Plus, again, tank abilities don't do as much damage as DPS ones, even on players with the same stats. You may notice gems like "This ability generates a high amount of threat." in your tree. Yeah, that's to make up for the fact that it doesn't do as much raw damage as, well, a damage-dealer's abilities. If you want to do damage, the damage specs and damage gear for your class are best. If you want to tank, go full tank. Ironically, real PvE tanks actually do mix in some DPS mods at high levels because of diminishing returns for high tank stats and to keep threat generation high. And some DPS players mix in a few defense mods (not enhancements or armorings) for level-synced content because of the cap on power (although this is largely pointless and done primarily out of a search for optimization for its own sake rather than any significant in-game effect). But in PvE, you generally won't see skanking the way you're doing it. If you use taunts in the fight, you will have threat, even if you don't start the fight. And, to be blunt, if you're in tank spec with full DPS gear and you don't pull bosses away from the tank, your damage sucks.

At endgame, you need Archaeology, UT, and Slicing mats to even make your basic Bonded Attachments. Before endgame, UT mats are only necessary to make blue/purple crafted gear.

The unskippable trash mobs in Uprisings are often cited as the primary reason why practically nobody queues for them.

Depends what you mean by "skip". The segment of Maelstrom Prison before Colonel Daksh, the first boss, doesn't have any weird "run in a strange path" skips. But there are about 100 enemies in that segment, and about 75 of them are off to the side, easily avoided. There are a few other skips after Daksh. The first room with Sith and unleashed Maelstrom beasts can be skipped by going along the edge of the wall. The second big room with unleashed Maelstrom beasts has a necessary fight at the beginning (without copious amounts of stealth CC) but the rest of the room can be skipped. The final big room with unleashed beasts - the room with the bonus boss - can be skipped without any stealth CC. And then there are a few pulls right before Kilran that can be skipped with a single stealth CC. I would say that the overwhelming majority of enemies in Maelstrom Prison can be skipped, even in a non-stealth group, and that skipping them dramatically reduces the amount of time spent in FP. Conveniently, there is no achievement for killing the bonus boss of MP on Master Mode, and it is only very rarely a Conquest objective, so most groups eschew the bonus and skip most mobs. Well, that's just incompetence. If the stated goal is to avoid wasting time, they are failing to accomplish their stated goal. Incompetent players who refuse to learn from experience (or gentle, uncritical help) are bad regardless of what their bad behavior actually is. These people are in the same category as those who stand in the wrong place for Project Sav-Rak and cause wipes over and over. The problem isn't their skipping, the problem is that they're bad at it. They certainly have a right to be incompetent, but you have a similar right to put them on an ignore list and give your time to people who aren't. Incidentally, this right here is why I don't run vets. As a healer, I don't want to spend most of my time tanking and dpsing because of low vet dps output and high healer threat. It's a frustrating experience. I would much prefer to just handle what mechanics I need to handle, move quickly, and constantly keep everybody topped up. It's less taxing on my patience and much less taxing on my attention; division of labor is a Good Thing. But I can't do that in vets, so I don't heal them. When I dps, I don't like to have to spend much time keeping my health up. I consider it a loss of efficiency if I have to stop and top up without a healer to do it for me. Like I said earlier, division of labor is a Good Thing. But that's not the case in vets either, so I don't dps vets. And tanking vets is just about the acme of pointlessness.

So, this particular creature has been growing in population steadily over the lifetime of the game, but there's been a recent explosion since 6.0. I speak, of course, of the player who knows all of the skips in flashpoints without knowing any of the boss fight mechanics. I'm used to getting blank looks when I put "anybody new to this fp?" in /group at the beginning of an mm fp, but for a while, if a player knew the skips, that was often a reasonable proxy for knowing the mechanics of the fights. This is definitely not the case right now. I just ran part of an MM LI run in which the tank and dps all seemed to navigate the long trail full of skips before the first miniboss reasonably well (the tank died a few times and pulled one group erroneously, which was a warning light but not a serious one). But the tank and both dps totally ignored the very easy to kill and trivial adds on that first miniboss fight and stood in yellow circles repeatedly. I healed through that, but it sucked. The add pulls before the first boss sucked for similar reasons - lots of unnecessary damage and inefficiencies - but didn't match the actual boss pull for sheer bloody ridiculousness. The most efficient way to handle the boss is to keep it in mid and run all of the circles out. Since our dps were both Sentinels with Blade Blitz, I figured that that would still be okay, and asked/suggested as much. ("We going to keep the boss in mid?") But while the dps started out being fairly conscientious about void placement, the tank just kinda...stood in them anyway. And ate three-stack Incinerates to the face every single time. So, yeah, it was definitely a wipe. We got fairly close, and the dps did a decent job for losing a huge chunk of their uptime to the tank being a derp (although part of that was because at least one of them was tunneling pretty hard), but there was just way too much damage going out. I recommended that the group "take the fight seriously" on the next pull, and started to go over the mechanics again. I, to put it mildly, don't mind explaining fights. But before I was even in the room for the fight, the tank pulled the boss again. So I noped out. Normally, I would've given it more pulls - it's been quite a while since the last time I quit a group in progress - but I didn't have the patience to handle that tank anymore, and definitely not for the rest of that particular FP. In sharp contrast to this, the previous MM FP run I did was on a group whose tank insta-left on MM Nathema, but dps and heals cleared past the second boss by themselves, and then finished the rest of the fp with an inexperienced but enthusiastic tank with no wipes. That's the FP community that I like to see - well, not the absentee tank, but everything else.

It's worth pointing out here that the third boss of Blood Hunt MM has no enrage timer, as far as I'm aware - at least, I've never in my life seen a group hit it, and I have healed for some very low-dps BH MM groups. I believe that only the first boss has an enrage timer, and it is very forgiving at this point in the game's life cycle. High damage does help on the second boss because of how difficult it is for some tanks to handle both bosses at the same time in the final phase. If dps burn Jos before the tank and heals get overwhelmed, the fight becomes very easy. But a good tank and healer can handle that fight regardless of dps level. In reality, that fight is about positioning, as you found out. Bad positioning is, in theory, the easiest thing to fix in an FP. You're not micromanaging someone else's rotation, and you're not magically raising their item rating, you're just telling them where to stand and move. But bad positioning, in my experience, is also one of the things that weaker players are most resistant to changing. No matter how polite and nonconfrontational your advice is, a large portion of players with bad positioning just will not improve. Perhaps they lack situational awareness, or they get too overwhelmed by their rotation to think about moving when they need to, or maybe they simply don't really care. This is why Jos/Valk and Project Sav-Rak are such pug killers: they are fights that require specific movements at specific times. Don't get me wrong: that tank sounds like a jerk and leaving the group sounds like the healthy response. But, having suffered through players who could not stand in the right spots to save their lives, I am at least a little sympathetic for the annoyance the tank must have felt. Then again, if so many people were getting KBed off the edge, maybe the tank was fighting in the wrong spot. MM groups are typically more forgiving than vet groups, because vet gf has far more people who are just in it to speedrun for tech frags, but it's important to let people know that you're new at the start of the FP, so they know that they need to walk you through things. I say "more" forgiving because there are plenty of people who get aggro about speeding through MMs, too - there are just fewer of them than there are in vets.

Yeah, I've also noticed the prevalence of off-spec gear in leveling FPs. The best way to get leveling gear guaranteed to be in your spec is to choose it at the end of Heroic missions.

Always advertise as what you actually are. If you go TK, you are a DPS. When people say that the most successful tanks are skanks, what they mostly mean is that the tanks still use the tank tree and still equip themselves with shields, but some (or even "many") of their gear mods are DPS mods. This is so they can balance damage reduction, survivabililty, and threat generation/damage. This is very, very different from healing in a DPS spec. DPS healing is not very fun if you end up mostly healing (your abilities aren't very good at it and you don't get crucial cooldown and resource buffs that make Force management easier, so you spend most of your time waiting around for your Force to come back while your teammates die), and it's not very useful if you end up mostly DPSing (because why not just do more of the thing that you're actually good at and leave the healing to the real healers). Where tanks and DPS still both rely primarily on doing damage to enemies to fulfill their roles, healers...ah...do not. So if you try to heal out of TK, you end up playing a bizarre chimera that does nothing particularly well. The equivalent to skank tanking here would be healing in Seer but with DPS gear. And if that DPS gear is properly balanced, that's not...the worst thing in the world. It's certainly inefficient. Your Accuracy will be mostly useless, but at least your interrupts won't miss (lol) and your Crit and Alacrity will be helpful. You can run most content in the game as a (good) healer in heal spec with high-end DPS gear, because the heal checks aren't that hard until VM operations. But I would not recommend healing out of the TK tree, especially once you start to get your real healing abilities around level 30 or so.

Yes, this is the best way to remediate the problem, although it's not a guaranteed fix. Kilran does have a relatively fast enrage timer and he does big damage even when not enraged, so if it seems like he's bugging out, you can't waste time.

I completely agree with everything here. A positive attitude, knowledge of mechanics, knowledge of your class, and the willingness to non-judgmentally help people out can get you and your group through almost any situation that actually comes up on GF MM FPs. And yeah...vets suck and I don't queue for them either. Not worth the time.

I also want to point out that endlessly kiting (as opposed to rotating) is a valid and sometimes optimal strat for certain bosses. For example, the Eyeless is optimally solo tanked by kiting in a 30m radius circle with ranged and heals at the center. Melee get the short end of the stick, sure, but they get the short end of the stick in most versions of the Eyeless fight because of the big purple circle. This isn't the case with most or even very many bosses, but since the Eyeless fight is relevant this week I figured I'd flag it here. If you see tanks running around in a giant circle on this fight, that's why.

Not exactly, but close. Jumping is supposed to make the server update your location, which it doesn't always do correctly if you just run or use an ability. If you don't jump, even if you're in the "correct" spot on your screen, you are more likely to be assessed as being in the "wrong" spot by the server and, depending on mechanics, punished accordingly. This is useful both when you're trying to get out of an aoe/void (e.g. Gift of the Masters on Kephess) and when you're trying to stay in one specific place (e.g. cross phase on Underlurker).

I'm sorry you had to deal with that. Vets can have a very rough population, especially because of two groups that are prominent: 1) new players who aren't ready for MMs yet and 2) longtime players who just want to get their vets out of the way quickly. (This doesn't mean that those longtime players are good, but they are accustomed to running vets rapidly.) Putting those two together can be pretty toxic. Emphasis on "can" - there are plenty of chill vet runs out there. But on average, you'll see these stories coming out of vets more frequently than out of MMs.

Yeah, as far as skips go, the Ilum one is very tame. No weird jumps or bizarre angles to take. But that scoundrel was being a turd. It is a short fight.

Ah, MM Rakata. A DPS who AFKs, disconnects, comes back after 5 minutes, AFKs for another two minutes, and then drops group without ever coming into the instance. A replacement DPS who derps straight into a pull on the wrong side of the map and claims that they let their gf play for a little while as they AFKed. A tank who doesn't know why melee adds aren't LoSed and who insists on killing Arkous first...on MM...with two melee dps. I can only imagine what the poor healer thought.

Plus inattentive healers/self-healers.

These questions both have the same answer. Malgus respects two related things that are sometimes in tension: strength and cunning. He understands the limitations of sheer brute rage and xenophobia, hence his (Imp side Ilum) struggle with Grand Moff Regus and (both sides) the partly-nonhuman foundation of his New Imperial fighting forces. But he also is still Sith, and he still couches his arguments in terms of strength. His New Empire is for the strong, regardless of race or background. He wants the opposing forces to show him their strength. So he is impressed by strength and decisions that show strength of some kind, especially if that strength is intelligently applied. Hence the Arkis Wode comment; he recognizes the strength of a light-sided decision there and approves of it, because he is both about force and the intelligent application thereof. And as for the throne room, sometimes Malgus himself demonstrates his strength by using his followers, and other times he wants to show it off himself. It's not necessarily about fairness. After all, he does send a boss rush at the player(s) over the course of both flashpoints. It's probably more about exercising personal strength, finally getting to enjoy a proper fight, that sort of thing. One suspects that fighting the player(s) in tandem with a bunch of Imperial Guard would be less interesting to him than the alternative. There are some other parts of the game that might be regarded as spoilers that would support this analysis. There's also a fairly prosaic and non-lore-related answer for your first question. The False Emperor, as the end of the vanilla story's content, was meant to be a sort of Return of the Jedi moment for every class, from the space battle raging outside to the struggle inside an Emperor's throne room. So, just as Palpatine sends away his Redrobes ("Leave us."), Malgus sends away his New Imperial Guard for a more personal confrontation.

Some people use gear rating as a proxy for player skill. This is one of several reasons why they shouldn't think that way.

This wasn't a group finder thing, but I was doing pub H2s on Taris and invited a few rando lowbies to group in the [HEROIC 2+] Mutations area so they wouldn't have to try to compete with me for irradiated rakghouls. Told them to follow me and kill what I killed, because I was paying attention to what died when and how long the respawn timers in each room would be. One of the two did follow me around, but the other one wandered off too far away to get credit for our kills and instead fought against mobs that were already locked to other players. I told him that it was pointless but kept trying to get him to follow me and stick together so we could get him his kills, long after I had already finished the H2. Eventually, after the third group that he decided to ignore, I threw in the towel. No big deal, I wasn't angry or anything, but I wasn't going to spend half an hour nursing a person through a heroic if they were going to ignore me. I calmly wished him well, left group, and went off to do something else. The other lowbie - who had clicked on the clicky at the end of the heroic without paying attention to what the first guy needed - then whispered me with an amazing and ridiculous jumble of nonsense, about how I was supposedly bullying new players, dropped a homophobic slur and repeatedly called me "kid", and said that he was so heavily drugged up he didn't know which way was up.

You have successfully noticed that group content with really any difficulty at all rarely gets pugged. This is not a new state of affairs, but rather something that exists in most MMOs from start to finish. It was very difficult to find a successful Nightmare Pilgrim pug years ago, and it's still difficult now. Not impossible - one was recruiting on pub fleet earlier today on my server - but very difficult. Pugging takes time and effort for the people who want to organize it. They have to spend time recruiting, they have to be ready to explain everything, and they have to have the fortitude to deal with the inevitable errors that arise. (This is also why people are willing to run group finder MM FPs, even if some of them are objectively more difficult than world boss runs, because it takes no effort to organize them. You just use the group finder.) Guild runs, however, take significantly less time and effort to organize and are usually less painful. Thus, people who know how to do difficult group content tend to do it with their guild, to reduce stress and increase the likelihood of a payoff, and that makes it harder to find pug groups to do it. This doesn't mean that the content is "impossible". That's absurd. It's not even particularly difficult for players who understand the mechanics and have a pulse. For example, on my server, there are multiple guilds that are currently competing with each other to farm your bête noire the Coral (lots of waiting for Gargath, Snowblind, and Primal Destroyer to show up, trying to open new instances, and so on) on a weekly basis. But if you pug everything, you don't see any of that. You just fruitlessly ask into the void for groups that nobody else trusts you to perform well in, because you asked in /1 rather than in /g. Also, lots of people turn /1 off because of how toxic and brainless it can get, especially on fleet, so you're even less likely to find competent players willing to pug. I would say that your guild is the first place to go for this sort of low-/mid-tier group content. The endgame channels on each server, like Allies and, well, Endgame, would be a second stop if your guild is too small or too uninterested or too incompetent to run them. If that doesn't work either, find a better guild. Also, not gonna lie: it's weird to see somebody who complains about how hard it is to get the Coral, but not how hard it is to get the Nightscythe. The traditional group for Colossus is two.