Simple Answer: Join a proper raiding guild Long answer: You got the gear for EC hm, but people don't like taking undergeared pugs. Hence why you should join a guild. It happens to me on my alts all the time, but people refuse to take me, despite having all Rakata and a few Blackhole. As for TfB HM, truth is you do need full Campaign/Blackhole and a couple of augments. First 2 bosses can be done without augments (or augmented rakata), but 3rd 4th and 5th have much higher dps requirements.

For the last bit, is there a raid wide aoe? I dunno I never paid attention, too busy handling taunts. If there is, obviously you cant stop all the damage, but from a tank PoV you need to be taking advantage of the taunt and aoe taunt. From waht I've seen, taunt says it will last 6 seconds, however it's not an aggro drop that's happening but a random aggro phase, similar to say Bonethrasher but happening a lot quicker! i.e I think a taunt is being applied on a random member every few seconds. For example: 0 sec: Tank 1 uses Taunt 4 sec: Tank 2 uses Taunt 8 sec: Tank 1 uses AOE Taunt 12 sec: Tank 2 uses AOE Taunt 16 sec: Tank 1 uses Taunt 20 sec: Tank 2 uses Taunt After which point, if he aint dead you'll start dying soon. You could space the taunts out more to try and make them last longer, but it should be enough to burn the remaining 12% hp.

Welcome

Possible, probably. But wise, not really. I find not moving the robot keeps things nice and simple for those at the bottom, they kill the same spawning droids etc and nuking the boss. In particular in HM/Nightmare you usually don't wanna bother with the 'other' buffs and just use the extreme damage boost one. But I'd always have 2 people up top controlling things to keep things moving as quick as possible. People fail to realise the quicker you can get the puzzle done and repeated over and over again, the quicker you will kill the boss. It does make me laugh, that puzzle is not really that hard (in terms of the actual puzzle, its a pretty simple game, Hanoi tower or whatever it's called), but then put in front of an 8man team, it causes so much chaos for PuG groups.

Yep, if it makes money which eventually gets spent towards making more content (which includes more items in the store) then I'm all for it.

Are you certain the arm attacks can by mitigated? I never paid much attention but last night clearing up storymode I noticed I was being hit for 4.5k by both the spit and the normal attack. And yeah I try to do exactly what you suggest with the tanking him on his sides (between the 2 tentacle spawn points) and jumping back a couple of seconds before I 'expect' a spit. Nice to know the timing, I can plan that a bit better now, but I was taking the same amount of damage on both the upper and lower platform. However this was SM, so maybe it's different in HM. Worth confirming though.

What he said To be honest, you could have done Storymode EV/KP ages ago but no matter lol. I'd say jump straight into HM EV/KP and then SM EC. HM EV/KP, there's more damage to deal with than Storymode EC, but Storymode EC has a lot more mechanics to deal with.

Why can't you saber throw and charge? I can't remember at as PT if I could jet charge but I could use all my melee and ranged attacks? Or is it something to do with a minimum range requirement?

We're now 4/5 TfB HM on 8man. Kephess was probably the most fun fight so far. We've also decided to halt our 16man effort until both TfB HM and EC Nightmare (once its released) has been cleared on 8man. After that we'll see how much interest there is in pushing ourselves back to being a 16man raiding guild again.

<Element Zero> are now 4/5 8man HM: http://imageshack.us/a/img210/4739/screenshot2012102121511.jpg Havn't got a screenshot for 3rd boss, but killed him on Thursday 18th Oct at around 9.45 BST. Obviously you cant count the kill as verified. I'll try see if anyone else has a screenshot but doubt it.

<Element Zero> are now 4/5 TfB HM 8man. Time cleared would be about 9.50 BST.

That thread is still going. There's some info there but nothing specific about the actual New mechanics, only the difficulty they provide. As far as I know, there's only about 4 guilds actively testing it, its so soon after 1.4 that lots are still trying to gear up on live instead of testing on pts. Especially when the said testing is a struggle without proper transfers. I'm expecting it to go live by end of Oct or early November tbh. So not really long to wait. I don't know if BW specifically told testers not to give out in-depth guides on stuff, the lack of info almost suggests it. But I'm not entirely against the idea of everyone going in there blindly as long as they've done enough testing to keep it bug free. (which tbh, I can't complain about TfB, there was very few bugs on there on PTS to find.)

Well the MMO market is still on the rise. Market research from Superdata and Newzoo confirms this. However P2P MMOs have been pretty much at a standstill for the past 3 years. They havn't dropped but they havn't risen either. The obvious difference being however, is that there are now more big name P2P MMOs out there, so the population is spread thinner. The market research also shows large growth in F2P MMOs, again lots and lots of new F2P MMOs coming out to cater to this growth, but at the same time, no doubt some P2P players are now playing F2P games, which may be one of the contributing factors to the standstill of the P2P MMO market.

I'm levelling my sorc through just flashpoints and WZs

Sweet thanks. We've been using it every raid for months and months now, and its rarely let us down. So thank you v much for that ^^

So like interesting achievements maybe? An achievement system more advanced than the current codex system wouldbe good. I havnt played WoW in recent years and some say their achievement system was a pain as guilds and pugs asked for proof of achievements before inviting. However when I was playing doing some of the fun achievements and earning new titles and mounts was also extremely fun. E.g. 8manning Malygos and several others So yeah I'd definitely be up for something like that. There was also a mention a while back that legendary items will be coming to swtor. But they probably will be very rare like wow, as in just 1 or 2 that can only be obtained from the very last tiers of raiding. Like the warglaives etc

The thing is, gear is often used a a extra little 'carrot' to keep people busy for longer. It's also used as a gate, forcing people to gear up before they can beat a certain boss, again spending more time. That's how sub based MMOs make a good portion of their money afterall. I think the 1st reply guy has it right really. But, and I know everyone says this but often don't mean it, lots of us do actually raid for raiding, the gear being an extra. That being said, not so much in this game cause gear is...or atleast was easy to get. In WoW some of the most awesome moments was when we finally beat a really tough boss and he dropped the mace I been wanting ^^

Resist the temptation! you dont need it!

I kinda get what you mean, but I think they're doign good so far to keep it fun for tanks without being voerly challenging compared to a DPS's job. Currently I'd no doubt say healers have the hardest job on most fights. There's a lot of tank switches for tanks, a lot of taunting mobs/adds etc, and a lot of movement based stuff. e.g. Toth and Zorn, or Kephess (both in EC and TfB) requires plenty tank switching. Same for several other bosses, too many to list. Then you have movement based stuff, The terror in TFB sort of is, as is last phase of Kephess in EC and a few others. We've had gauntlet esque moments with Kephess in EC and in a way Operator IX too. Operator IX is very much one of them quick reaction fights in both Phase 1 and 2. What I would like to see more of, is boosting situational survivability, and requirements to dodge stuff. What i mean by this is; - Mechanics that make bosses have small 'bursts' of damage, or one heavy hitting attack, where cooldowns must be managed well. Not just phases of bursts like Frenzy (which we have a few of) but a bit 22+k hit which requires consequtive use of several cooldowns to manage at a moments notice. We don't quite have the tools for what I'm trying to describe yet, so this may be one for the future, as to be fair, there are plenty of frenzy phases that bosses have atm. - The whoel dodging stuff. This can mena a lot of things, which may affect everyone or just the tank. e.g. Walls of fire coming at you with gaps in the middle to dodge (Yeah Sartharion). This cna sort of be seen with the little adds on the Terror from Beyond that you must dodge. But that's too easy, they need to be quicker, and other stuff needs to be going on at the same time to actually make it fun maybe that's one for NiM mode. Another type of dodging, would be for example a 2 second cast from the boss where he does a 90 degree swipe, which cant be interrupted and requires the tank (and some dps possibly) to move to dodge it. Just throwing out ideas for what I'd like to see in future, much of which is based on mechanics from that other game no doubt But in general, I'm more thna happy with the state of tanking in this game.

Don't know if this is relevant at all since I can't remember Malgus saying that, even though I did the FP yesterday. But Otherwise I would have guessed it's just him mind-f**kin you

See I'm the opposite. I genuinely hate the 'face' of MoP, yknow pandas and all that. And although the talent system is interesting, it's too simple for my preference. But behind the mask, there is a lot of good in MoP, a lot of stuff to do when not doing the competitive stuff. It may seem like boring old stuff, but it kills time and it keeps people in the game. I like the direction swtor is going with, and if my RL friends quit WoW and joined SWTOR id probably be loving it so much more. It'd also kill some of my WoW temptation I was inches away from buying MoP the other night. But absolutely swtor could learn a lot from WoW. They've taken a lot from a old WoW, and brought in some of the new. And as someone mentioned, ironically, WoW has adopted a few of swtors ideas too, like the loot distribution (which swtor later scrapped in 1.2 i think). I guess I should say, I'm lucky I'm so busy with Uni that I only have time for 1 MMO, which will be swtor.

Welcome back And yes, dreadtooth grows massive black hair in his final difficulty and a tail

You can buy other stuff with the coins too though, such as pets, speeders and custom armour, lockboxes etc. So it's a bonus for subscribers we can get quite a few once it launches Old subscribers will still have a pile of coins too I guess, if they resub before f2p launches to receive them. I get what you mean though, lots are waiting for f2p to return, only to find they wont get half their coins because they wern't actively subbed when it launches.

Yeah, I too suspect 1.5 will go live either at the very end of October or early November.

I get what you mean, but from another perspective, it can be very useful for raiding guilds. Okay sure, when youre gearing up new recruits its easy enough to just buy the Blackhole gear and put stuff into Rakata/Columi shells to get the bonus. However now they have the freedom of wearing whatever they want and buying the required armourings. So overall, it will have very little impact. Anyone get get almost BiS gear using Blackhole gear and columi/rakata shells. So nothing has really changed. And you might say, well now non experienced players could show off their full campaign set trying to join TfB HM runs, and obviously if they're not good enough to do EC hm then they will likely let you down in TfB hm. But thats why when a player joins your guild, you ask them for extensive raiding history. Job done. So that covers the downside, as for the upside, it just means you can potentially gear yourself to 146 Gear a little bit quicker without even having to get Columi/Rakata, you can literally have guildies craft the mods and enhancements and buy the required armourings. Which although costly, would be very useful when bringing new recruits, or even a member rerolling class to help the guild, eg a dps rolling tank when you need one. I dunno, I'm mostly rambling, but it just doesn't seem like a big deal at all.