Yeah... would like to see them Sure it wont affect my day at all if the blog is released tomorrow instead, but yknow...you did kinda say it =/ Dont wanna be that guy shouting "omg BW promised a date and didnt deliver" but yeaaaah...you said it yesterday not last week or month ^^

The third party tools such as MoX Desktop Parser and SWMoniTOR are actually very easy to use, take couple of minutes to download.

The opera boss was one of the most fun I ever had just cause of the surprising nature of it. It would be nice for them to disclose some info now, but they probably wont bother, just throw it on PTS and let us see for ourselves ^^

Yeah I guess there's no way to truly know without carrying out a survey over a big sample of players. But even then I suspect most people lie. They say they will enjoy it, but the type of players these are, they will play the Ops 2-3 times and then they'll want the next one released already (again that's my opinion), so the only way to really find out would beto do it. And well, maybe they should try it, but they'd likely see it as too much of a gamble And again, its just not fair on the in between raiders. You can't split people into hardcore and casual. There are many many players who're in between. Infact there and probably thousands who don't have time to be crazy hardcore but are very good players. These are the ones that do storymode, and push themselves to try Hardmode for fun and challenge. If the difficulty gap between them is too large, therrs no way to bridge the gap. You would be restricting those players cause if they then wanted to progress onto hardmode, they would have to go back to the start, EV/KP hm and work their way up again. One thing I do agree on though is not to try and copy WoW inch for inch. There's much great things they've done, but much bad aswell. Half their success was based on the time/era they launched in. BW are trying to make a more Burning Crusade style MMO while still catering to casuals. It's tricky, but for the record if anything as ridiculous as LFR came to swtor I'd consider leaving it may get a lot of people into raids, but I think its ruined much of WoWs raiding community.

I get what you're saying, and if it were me if I didn't want the challenge of hard modes and just wanted to experience it all, I'd be happy with same loot maybe different looks etc. But I would be happier with my own gear progressing as I go through the raids. However I also understand that by keeping it the way it is, endgamers have little incentive to visit the older ops apart from with alts. However New players will always have the fun of going through them in order instead of having 6 ops rewarding the same stat gear. But! A perfect example of where I believe you're wrong regarding the gear is WoWs LFR system. I don't know if you've played it, but in a sense its similar to story mode. It is a system where the raids are made very easy, easier than story mode raids. And the purpose of it was to let all players experience the content. Now you can go in wow forums and see the everlasting arguments about it. Many believe LFR should drop no loot, or low quality loot. Others (the masses of casuals) say no, they're happy with getting some of the best gear in the game while doing easymode raids. And blizzard will never change it because in the end that's what's getting people into the raids week in week out. Bioware are taking the more old fashioned approach where even on story mode some skill is required. However like I said, EC story should be nerfed a bit, AFTER Terror from Beyond comes out.To make it more accessible to the masses. The reason I don't believe they should be dumbed down too much prior to the next set of progression is because it ruins it for the others. And by the others I don't mean the hardcore, I mean just normal competent players who are getting into raiding. They work hard to clear storymode and they then either keep raiding storymode on the next Op or they try hardmode. If you make storymode too easy (before the next Op is released at least) then the gap between story and hard will be too big. It will be too much of a challenge for the casual raiders or new raiders because of the massive increase in difficulty. Anyway I'm getting bit off-topic, but Blizzard have been through all that. Players often say they will love to do it for the experience etc, even if it dropped crap loot. But the experience only lasts so long. They need the carrot on the stick (Gear) to keep them coming in week in week out. Honestly and this applies to a lot of stuff in general, sometimes players don't always know what they want. They think they do, but when it actually happens, they realise it doesn't always work out as great as they thought it would be in their heads.

I get what you're saying, and if it were me if I didn't want the challenge of hard modes and just wanted to experience it all, I'd be happy with same loot maybe different looks etc. But I would be happier with my own gear progressing as I go through the raids. However I also understand that by keeping it the way it is, endgamers have little incentive to visit the older ops apart from with alts. However New players will always have the fun of going through them in order instead of having 6 ops rewarding the same stat gear. But! A perfect example of where I believe you're wrong regarding the gear is WoWs LFR system. I don't know if you've played it, but in a sense its similar to story mode. It is a system where the raids are made very easy, easier than story mode raids. And the purpose of it was to let all players experience the content. Now you can go in wow forums and see the everlasting arguments about it. Many believe LFR should drop no loot, or low quality loot. Others (the masses of casuals) say no, they're happy with getting some of the best gear in the game while doing easymode raids. And blizzard will never change it because in the end that's what's getting people into the raids week in week out. Bioware are taking the more old fashioned approach where even on story mode some skill is required. However like I said, EC story should be nerfed a bit, AFTER Terror from Beyond comes out.To make it more accessible to the masses. The reason I don't believe they should be dumbed down too much prior to the next set of progression is because it ruins it for the others. And by the others I don't mean the hardcore, I mean just normal competent players who are getting into raiding. They work hard to clear storymode and they then either keep raiding storymode on the next Op or they try hardmode. If you make storymode too easy (before the next Op is released at least) then the gap between story and hard will be too big. It will be too much of a challenge for the casual raiders or new raiders because of the massive increase in difficulty. Anyway I'm getting bit off-topic, but Blizzard have been through all that. Players often say they will love to do it for the experience etc, even if it dropped crap loot. But the experience only lasts so long. They need the carrot on the stick (Gear) to keep them coming in week in week out. Honestly and this applies to a lot of stuff in general, sometimes players don't always know what they want. They think they do, but when it actually happens, they realise it doesn't always work out as great as they thought it would be in their heads.

Lol touche I guess either a lot of people on your server qeue for BoI or D7, hence why you get stuck with them more often (more probable choice) or you're just having an unlucky streak, such is the nature of random >.<

Agree on some, disagree on others. 1. EC SM nerf. Yes it should be accessible by all, but you would be shocked how many people are pugging it these days. However I agree it should be made a bit easier, but not as easy as EV/KP. It should keep the rakata drops otherwise casual raiders will feel no sense of gear progression. The whole idea is that you can do all storymodes without doing any hard or nightmares. It in itself is its own easy mode progression path. Also regarding the nerf, I would say its fair enough to nerf it a bit after the next Operation is released. About nightmare mode, 1 tier difference is fine imo. I enjoyed running EV and KP a bit recently after doing EC for so long. But yes having that long break from it makes it sort of fun again, especially since much of the mechanics may be tweaked etc. Making all storymodes drop columi sure they'll always be accessible but new players will play with old players and the old ops might not be used as much as you think. Whereas as is, they got to climb the ladder. They can speed up the gear ladder using blackhole comms etc, but even still, the fastest way is still to go through the Ops. And finally about f2p, they said they are still ironing out the details. But it was suggested at Gamescom that maybe EV or something would be given free as a teaser of raiding. Likewise it wouldn't be much of a stretch to give KP free too.

The whole point is to earn the reward by doing a daily random flashpoint. This gets more people into the different flashpoints instead of grinding the same one over and over. If you want the reward you gotta be willing to do a random flashpoint.

Like others said, depending on your class. If you're a PT or Vanguard you can push Shield and Absorb quite a bit higher. Asassins, again you can push it higher but Im not sure how valuable it'll be. For a Jugg, again it can go higher, but generally speaking it would be better to stack Defense beyond the 50/50 Shield/Absorb level. It's not that you can go over 50%, its just that it's overall more valuable to stack defense. You should also take into account that it's a two roll system. First roll is Hit Miss Defend, second roll is Crit, Shield, with Absorb always absorbing the given amount if the attack is shielded. Meaning, as you stack more Defense, your overall mitigation goes higher but your Shield/Absorb technically loses value. Again this is just my opinion, but taking current Augmented Campaign gear as BiS with a few adjustments you should be aiming for like: Jugg: 30-32% Defense 50% Shield 50% Absorb Assassin: Not sure about this one Powertech: 17-20% Defense 50-55% Shield 55-60% Absorb Hope that helps 8-) But in summary, those guys on fleet were pretty much wrong. It sort of applies true to Juggs, but even then not really. Pre 1.2 it was more a case of Hit 50/50 and then stack tons of defense. But with augments and Campaign gear its very possible to push them stats a fair bit higher.

Well the world event was 'content' in a more broader term. They suggested content in August but it was people who assumed it would be the Op or WZ or HK-51. So to be fair they did give us the event. Granted it was kinda short, and I barely took part in it but that's besidea the point. They did however say next month, Terror. Again next month is not a specific date but a general timeframe. Nonethless to take it literally the next month is September so they have till Sept 30th to deliver while still being true to their word. I'm inclined to believe they're doing a lot of internal testing on this one. As I mentioned in my thread regarding Terror PTS, realistically it does require imo 3-4 weeks of testing to clean out bugs. However I'm basing that mostly on the work done on EC in PTS. However 2 things come to mind: firstly, since they're splitting content, a lot less stuff requires testing, so the testing will be more concentrated on the Operation, and all bug fixing time can be spent on the Operation etc. Secondly although there were a good few bugs that arose in ECs PTS testing, there wasn't as many as you'd think. Much of the changes were more regarding adjusting the difficulty. Now you could say the difficulty will likely be roughly equal, hopefully a little bit harder, so they're kinda already at the mark difficulty wise. Whereas last time adjusting the difficulty from KP/EV to EC. was a big job in itself. So for them reasons I could imagine that the required amount of testing time could be reduced to 2-3 weeks Maybe all the bugs won't be fixed but all the big gamebreakers hopefully. But hey, I guess well see. I really hope they get it on the PTS within the next 7 days or so.

Maybe there was a population overload so a inter galactic law was passed only one in every 100 lucky families get to have a child.

It does indeed suck, they have said 'next month' for Terror From Beyond, which pretty much means any time before Sept 30th. It could be later, stuff gets delayed, but I'm anxiously waiting for it to hit PTS.

Dont count on it - they made it pretty clear they wont be doing any real holidays, just events like we've had to do with the current ingame story. Rakghoul Virus and Gree. So if they aint doing Easter, Halloween, Xmas, I dont think theyll be doing Talk like a Pirate day

Yeah, I expected it last week tbh But its not the first time I've been wrong with my guesses lol They said next month during mid month September, but it really was just a rough estimate. And we cant really say they lied as long as its released sometime in September (but ideally before the 25th ) Still I'll keep bumping this thread and tweeting the CMs till we get word 8-) In general I'd love more information about the Operation, but I don't think we'll hear anything new until its on the PTS and we can see it all for ourselves.

What server is that that kinda sucks big-time. According to the server status Tomb is no longer one of the busiest, I guess half the PvP crowd left. But we still had 300+ on Imp fleet at 400+ on Republic.

I'm not too shocked that its doable since most guilds have to slow down dps on them to avoid wiping themselves not trying to take anything away from the accomplishment though really good job, since I don't think anyone's done it before that I've heard of. Feel like trying it now reminds me of WoTLK days 8manning Malygos for the achievement. I can imagine the other 3 bosses would be really tough to 7man, would be interesting to see

Kalfear why arnt you heading up Swtors management? And no that's not a joke I don't know if maybe its easy to state these things in hindsight but it sounds exactly right, had BW followed such a plan in the beginning the game might have turned out a bit different.

They likely will only attend them when they have big news to announce. Sending devs and whatnot to these conventions to answer questions and show off content is great and all but costs money and means they spend less time in the office. We've seen the next WZ and well soon have the next Operation on the PTS, so there isn't much new to show atm.

Yeah Terror is meant to come out in September, but realistically whenever they give a month, the release is almost always at the tail end of the month. So if it were put on PTS right now we'd have a month to test it. However ofcourse it could be delayed a week or two and end up in the first week of October. But they should be aiming for a pre 25th Sept release date. They said there's no news yet as to specifically when Terror will hit the PTS, my guess is they're doing as much internal testing as they can and will then put it on PTS when its ready for public. They've also likely underestimated how much work needed to be done on it And finally EC had a few big bugs that got ironed out on PTS such as the wall of death and whatnot. But half the job was to test its difficulty against the hardcore raiders and tune it to what they felt right. Some fights got nerfed a bit, particularly bosses HP/enrage timers. They might be more on the mark this time intending to keep the difficulty roughly similar to EC (after taking gear into account)

While I agree it is annoying, and in no way am I saying you are wrong. This only occurs if playing in Fullscreen. If you play in fullscreen (windowed) you'll be able to alt tab back and forward without the loading screen, as the game doesn't attempt to adjust anything. However Fullscreen (windowed) does apparently give worse performance, however for myself the difference has been like 1-2 fps at most, something I gladly sacrifice to use the game on dual monitor and alt-tabbing onto the other screen. If however you knew this already and were just generally complaining that the loading screen happens when in fullscreen mode, then yeah it sucks.

Yeah I think that's part of the issue. In order to keep the entire planets fluid when travelling from one area to another, it loads it all. Course when you visit a planet you can Quicktravel to anywhere so I suppose the whole planet needs to be loaded. Otherwise it would be nice if it loaded as you went along. It should definitely still be faster, at first I thought my PC was just THAT crap (it is pretty crap still), but it's just slow loading in general. I wouldn't know the specifics as to why. Though, I would say, if you have a PC with really high RAM, using RAM Drive with certain assets loaded on there has worked very well for some people. Still takes time to load, but considerably less time. Same applies to those installing on a SSD drive.

Yeah, all depends how good your DPS are. The better they are the more tanks you can afford to take. 3 tanks in EC HM makes quite a few of the fights a bit easier to deal with, but requires the dps to be doing more damage to reach the enrage timers etc.

Yeah its most likely that your dps is too high. We often have to stop/slow dps so that Fearful wears off. You may notice its usually only a problem for 1 tank, since the other tank, whenever he switches from Toth to Zorn it will be after his bezerk phase, where the dps have to slow down to let the Yellow Circle turn purple and throw the Baradium Heave before switching. Hope that makes sense. In general, have your tank keep an eye out if they have fearful or not a few seconds before a tank switch (i.e when the bosses are at like 73% or 53% etc etc) If your tank DOES have Fearful when Toth leaps, and switches onto Zorn, I recommend not using force leap/jet charge, and simply running to Zorn asap, using taunt and just dont use any attacks. You'll still take extra damage from Fearful, but atleast you wont be hitting yourself for 4k per attack.

I've heard of this happening before but it's never happened to me personally. The only thing that would make sense (apart from just being buggy) is if the second tank was running about 30m away behind you. Arcing slash is a cone attack with a very long range, so generally speaking if the tank was 30m away but within the cone, he could have been hit from it and with the debuff been 1-shot. If that's not happening (if the second tank is running at the back somewhere), then yeah it's likely a bug. There's quite a few bugs in that fight just some of them are a bit more uncommon such as the extra bomber spawning during last burn phase (due to only just about killing the 3rd bomber in time), and there's the bug where a 3rd bomber simply doesn't spawn, leaving Kephess and the Walker up, making the fight impossible to finish.