^^^QFE No matter where you come down on the OP's level of angst, the devs handled the name issue mind-blowingly poorly. Everquest 2 had a much better system in place before their first merges in 2007. Why didn't the devs at least take a look at how other games had dealt with the problem?

Thanks very much for the responses. If it's working as intended, I'll be skipping further attempts for the foreseeable future!

So a ragtag group and I tried to take on Easy Mode KR-82 Expulser in Kaon Under Siege last night. Unlike the Hard Mode version, the mob stayed rooted to its starting point. There was no way to move it away, making it trickier to kill the 3 adds at 66 and 33 percent. Second (and much worse for us), at 66% it gave itself a new buff that increased its damage output by 200 percent. I've never seen either of these things happen in Hard Mode! Has anybody else encountered this? I wonder why they'd add significant challenges to the EM version that aren't present in HM.

Before SWTOR, I played Everquest 2 and always had a combat parser running. I was a regular raider and took my DPS role very seriously. I expected to be at the top of the damage parse and considered it a subpar effort on my part if someone beat me. I vote "No." Don't tell me I only want to play Story Mode. I want to play HM/NM. I want to be the absolute best at whatever class I'm playing at the time. I don't need full combat logs of everybody else to accomplish that, at most I need my own combat log, which apparently is coming with GU 1.2. If I end up raiding with a hardcore guild at some point, I'll probably have to provide those logs to the raid leader so that a comprehensive parse can be compiled, which is fine. If Bioware doesn't want to "pull back the curtain" to the extent that players see all the behind-the-scenes combat data for every player, it's fine with me. It makes it more of a game and less of a statistical exercise. And if it's possible to compile the data anyway by obtaining it from separate players, it's not necessary.

Nice! Looking forward to more.