Super congrats to AcE for the accomplishment. I honestly just wish there were more 16m guilds in SWTOR. Most of the best NA 16m guilds coincidentally all play on the same server and it has become very difficult to keep a full 16m raid going. For us, since the death of CKN, we have been trying very hard to rebuild, but unfortunately its quite hard to find enough dedicated people willing to put the time into raiding at such a level. Again, major hat tip to AcE!

Nooooooo <3

The author does bring up some relevant points, but you can't take this article at face value when the author classifies Operations as 20-man raids. Amateur mistake made by someone who does not fully understand everything about the game.

Currently in need of DPS and Healers for the upcoming EC NiM release.

Withering Terror is cast by Kel'Sara. I can't speak definitively to how many people are targeted or the number of casts that go off. It does seem like ranging Kel'Sara away from the raid as much as possible reduces the number of people who get this DoT. @Nibbon The adds that spawn will begin to cast Affliction, not Withering Terror, which comes from Kel'Sara.

The enrage is based off a timer to kill the boss, not a timer to kill tentacles. It is very possible to kill all the tentacles before enrage. The challenge comes in the burn phase. From my rough calculations, the raid has to do around 900,000 damage to the boss in this phase to drop him down to the 3% mark. Once the boss enrages during this phase, you have about 5-10 seconds longer to get the kill before too many people die. In order to get the kill without the bug, I estimate needing about 45-60 seconds of solid time spent burning the boss with all DPS still alive. Remember too that your DPS needs to spread out after killing the last tentacles, so add another 5-10 seconds to that burn time to account for movement. Again, these are rough calculations not exact figures so the actual numbers might vary.

I'm talking about the hard enrage of the boss in phase 2. Upon entering phase 2 of the fight in 16m hm you have roughly 8 minutes and 30 seconds to kill TFB. If the boss is not completely dead within that time, he will enrage, regardless of what part of the phase he is in or what tentacles are alive or dead.

Aerro is absolutely right if you are talking about 16m HM TFB. There is no way to kill the final boss TFB without the best possible itemized gear and augments. Even with the best gear going into the final boss, you will be hitting enrage every time. 8m HM TFB, specifically the last boss, seems to be tuned easier than 16m so you could probably get away with slightly less than BiS gear to get 5/5.

Congrats on the kill! Depends on your definition of overtuned. I don't think its possible to kill the TFB in full augmented BiS campaign/black hole without hitting enrage. The real question is whether it is possible to get the kill without the enrage bug. I tend to think yes, but it would probably be a very close wipe-kill.

Some of the mechanics have changed since the PTS, specifically on the 2nd and 4th boss. We'll have full guides for all the bosses hopefully in the next few days. Unfortunately Craxim has gotten really busy with work so I'll be helping him finish out the guides.

Primarily looking for skilled DPS right now, especially a Maurader or two. Apply on our website at http://www.calikillednox.com/

We are currently testing the new operation Terror From Beyond on the PTS until it is released live, however, we are still absolutely looking for skilled players to join our raid team. Apply on our website at http://calikillednox.com/

Good thing they "fixed" the probes kinda like how they "fixed" gift of the masters. After all, who needs the only piece of content keeping many guilds together to be working on lockout reset day? Clearly not Bioware because we got story and alts to level. Thank god for those lower legacy level caps that were patched in today. Bright side? At least we won't have to spend as long lagging through Denova tonight since we can't complete half the raid...

The number of people playing PTs and VGs would tend to disagree.

We've found the lag to be the worst when fighting Firebrand and Stormcaller. I don't know why this is the case, perhaps it has something to do with the specific assets the game is loading for the fight.

Not exactly the best business strategy imo.

At this point, I'm not sure what there is we can do. Not to sound like a complete jerk to the CS reps as I know they are just doing their job, but some simple research/awareness/personal experience would tell them this is not a random thing effecting only a handful of people. Here is a timeline I pulled up with about 5 minutes of forum searching: 6/12/12 - 7/1/12 Character Transfer Details Announced & Available 6/20/12 Denova and other Operations Lag 7/06/12 Server Lag killing Raid's with High instance numbers 7/10/12 Lag in Devova 7/10/12 More instances for EC 7/13/12 Denova Overfilled (Lag) 7/17/12 Denova HM Issues persist even after today... 7/21/12 Operations lag is out of hand .... 7/24/12 Thanks Bioware 7/24/12 Server Lag tonight, anyone else? This is not a coincidence and anyone who has stepped foot in EC on Tuesdays in particular would clearly see this is a server-side problem regarding an inability to handle the population load. What has become the most frustrating, however, is that not only is this issue so painfully obvious to anyone who has actually attempted to raid EC on Tuesdays, but Bioware's complete lack of communication that the problem even exists. I mean seriously, has no one who actually works at Bioware tried to raid on Tuesdays? How about the repeated and consistent complaints since transfers began? It's been over a month since server transfers were made available and we still haven't heard word one from Bioware of even an acknowledgement that they are aware of the problem.

Several months ago class balance changes were made at a smaller and more frequent rate, however, since 1.2 all class balance changes have been made within or around the major game updates (1.2 and 1.3). Will this pattern of class balance changes occurring every few months within the major game updates continue or will we see a return to some more frequent, albeit smaller, changes? Do you feel longer drawn out balance changes can have a negative impact on gameplay such as ranked Warzones when certain classes/specs seem to be out-performing others, forcing certain playstyles/compositions upon teams in order to stay competitive at the highest level?

Our lag seemed to always happen right as the shields came out of Stormcaller and Firebrand, such that we couldn't tell where they were spawning, and then they would suddenly appear. This caused at least 1 person to either die or a whole group to take significant damage. After wiping a few times, we just called it in frustration. We generally have a low tolerance to wiping due to lag on bosses we've been farming for months. Hopefully the lag is less than terrible tonight.

Just as an update/bump to this thread, the lag last night in Denova on Prophecy of the Five was even worse than last week. Obviously it was to be expected more people would be online after the release of a major patch, but it seems like nothing has been done to remedy the situation as a whole. Regardless of what instance of the operation you are in, the lag exists and is a real hassle for guilds both on farm (such as mine) and those trying to down bosses for the first time. Can we please get a dev update/response to this situation? If raiders are forced to play through these conditions week after week, including when new content comes out, I can't imagine them sticking around for very long.

I'd love to get a BW response on the lag players experienced last night, or at least acknowledgement of its existence. It's going to be very to hard to raid going forward if this is a common occurrence.

On PoT5 it was really bad at times with intermittent 5 second delays and about a 1 second consistent delay in animation and ability action. The lag made playing as a caster nearly impossible. Fortunatly my guild has everything on farm and was able to clear everything. That being said, the lag last night was boarderline unplayable, especially for guilds working on progression.

I have a question with regard to organizing transfers for guilds and communities on existing servers. You said in the blog post a full list of origin and destination servers is not available yet, and I understand and respect that. However, organizing a full guild to transfer to another server is difficult, thus my question: Will we get a list of origin and destination servers prior to transfers going live on Tuesday, June 12th such that we can organize ourselves ahead of time? Say like Friday or so? Having a list and allowing us to choose and coordinate with others on our servers before June 12th would be really really helpful.

This has happened before and is solely caused by lack of DPS. In story mode, it is possible to live through double destructive on two DPS while moving to defensive systems. In hard mode however, it is near impossible unless you have an operative healer who can heal while moving and the DPS use a cooldown or two to help mitigate the damage. If you increase your damage output, you should only get one double destructive phase in-between defensive system phases.

Hearing ranked WZs are on-track for 1.3 is probably the best news SWTOR has gotten in a long time. That being said, the overall timetable on 1.3, and more importantly, server transfers/mergers, is starting to frighten me. With several "weeks" till 1.3 is on the PTS, it's deployment to livewill most likely be 2 weeks after that at minimum (HIGHLY unlikely). If we assume a starting timetable of this week, this puts 1.3 being released at the end of June at the earliest. Given the information we have about transfers/mergers and "super servers," I think its reasonable to think these transfers/mergers will happen pre-1.3. The reason is simple. Regardless of how server transfers work, there will invariably be issues with items missing, bugs, etc etc. This is not doomsday talk, this realistic. Similarly, 1.3 will invariably have its bugs/problems once it's deployed to the live servers. I can't see Bioware compounding the two. Taking all this into account, I suspect we'll see server transfers/mergers mid-to-late June and 1.3 in mid July. Quite frankly, I'm not sure that's soon enough.