Ataraxia is a PvE republic guild looking for a few mature, dedicated players to fill out its two raid groups. Group 1 is 2/5 HM TFB and Group 2 is working on HMEC. We are actively recruiting all classes and roles and are willing to work with you to get gear and learn fights as long as you are willing to show up and listen. If you are interested feel free to check out our website ataraxiagaming.com or send an in game message to Gaddock.

I started posting this before the forum was active lol :x.

Ataraxia is an end game PvE guild looking to add a few members to round out its second 8 man team. Ataraxia was formed in the early days of prelaunch on the Anchorhead server. We have the unyielding and infernal titles, are 4/4 hmec and are currently 2/5 hm tfb. Our second group is working on gearing up in hmec before starting tfb. Players who prove that they are competent and reliable may be moved into the main group as a fill in or a regular member depending on the specific player. If you are interested you can apply at ataraxiagaming.com or by sending an in game message to Gaddock.

My gunslinger can use medpacks, can I queue as heals?

From the dev tracker: Sounds similar to the plan I had for story mode except one tier higher than I proposed.

Reading this makes me think you don't really get the whole concept of what I am saying. Yes, I think a group of fresh 50s (with some hard mode flashpoint gear) should be able to experience every operation that is released. I did not say that mechanics had to be removed or anything like that, mechanics can just be tuned down damage and health wise. In accordance with this scale down the gear rewarded should be scaled down as well.

KP=Karaga's Palace EV=Eternity Vault EC=Explosive Conflict BH=Black Hole Any others you're not sure about?

I don't think the bh system in it of itself is extremely damaging either. I think it's good to have some level of progression is for someone who barely does anything. BH gear is higher item level, but is often times just straight worse than rakata or even columi in some cases. I think the real problem would be if a new higher level currency is created with Terror from Beyond and replaces bh coms for things like dailies, much like how valor points work in WoW when a new teir comes out. I would actually be very interested in a dev response to that. What is the plan for commendations once Terror from Beyond is released? Will daily heroics drop the next tier of coms or is black hole the highest com that will be obtainable without raiding TB?

This is something I will 100% agree with you on. The more difficulty levels the better, but I think this can be achieved by not obsoleting content. EV/KP is a great introductory to hardmodes operations. EC is a step up in difficulty. When Terror from Beyond is released I would be okay if they increased some of the enrage timers a bit in EC just to make the gap between EV/KP and EC a little less drastic. I would hope TB is a little bit more complex than EC and the operation after TB is another step up. This step ladder is it's own difficulty setting in my eyes. People can see all the content they would like in story mode, but have to follow a difficulty progression in order to do "true" raiding content. If you are good enough to do EV/KP HM you can step up to EC HM then TB HM and so on. This is very similar to levels in a more traditional game. Each level builds on the last to be more challenging. Story mode lets you run through every level with little resistance so you can see all the neat stuff, but hard modes will test your abilities on each level before you can pass to the next.

This is the main reason why I said silent majority. I think the "casuals" you are referring to, blowing up WoW forums, are actually in the minority and benefit by being really loud. I think this scares a lot of devs into thinking that more people feel this way than actually do. I think most people play the game to play the game and loot is just a nice bonus; a means to an end. I think a great example of this is Blizzard's DIablo III. At launch the game was the best selling ever and everyone was excited to get their loot and get their dungeon crawl on. But people soon realized once you played through the game once or twice you've basically done the whole game. You can spend hours and hours grinding up the best gear, but a ton of people just didn't care too. Active players in Diablo dropped off accordingly. If people had the urge to get shinnies as bad as the WoW forums make it seem I think Diablo would be way more active than it currently is. I will be honest, I came up with these ideas while hoping that Bioware would not make the same mistakes that drove me out of WoW. The old republic is not wow and it never has to be. WoW had the luxury of being the first of its kind (and no forum trolls I am not saying wow was the first mmo). People have years and years of ties build in to WoW. Doing exactly what WoW does is not the answer. The answer is make this game its own thing and say the hell with what WoW did. Innovation is bred by learning from other's mistakes while not imitating their successes. Developing swtor with the same principles as WoW has not worked as well as people had hoped this far, why keep trying to copy them now.

You mentioned this in my 5 points thread, but I guess I'll respond here since you made the thread to discuss. I think with the current infrastructure in the game there is not a good enough way to communicate cross-faction to facilitate grouping between the two.

In my opinion the silent majority of casual raiders are less interested in doing operations for gear progression, they want to see the bosses, see the scenery, get a feel for the story. I am basing this just on what I hear from people around me so I clearly could be wrong, but I think casual raiders like the challenge of learning and seeing something new more than the gear grind. Maybe the story modes could drop gear that is cosmetically similar to the tier from which the operation came so there is something different to get in each one, but I would say it still should be columi level.

My guild has actually only done it where the tanks stay in the same spots the whole time and the bosses switch where they are standing. We find it's much easier to stay at the very exacting distances required in the fight. The ranged group is always on zorn and the melee group is always on toth. We found that the drouks end up with less stacks this way too.

As someone who has stuck with this game since launch I have become slightly concerned with the direction of PvE content going forward. I have come up with the 5 biggest things that I think would vastly improve the operations in this game. To avoid this becoming a wall of text I added the spoiler tags to hide my explanations of each point. Please read these before going to the comments because I believe some of them need context to understand what I am really saying. 1a. Nerf story mode Explosive Conflict down to the levels of story mode EV/KP. 1b. Change story mode Explosive Conflict to drop columi gear. 2. Make sure all story modes going forward follow 1a and 1b. 3. Do not obsolete old operations. 4. Wait two tiers to release nightmare modes. 5. Let F2P characters have access to story mode KP/EV and EC. So those are my 5 points to preserve and improve PvE content for the future. Let me know what you guys think/

Are there any plans to give more advances classes unique ops buffs so that classes who seem to do lower dps or have lower utility are more desirable in ops settings?