I love the difficulty. Its extraordinarily hard. First boss took my group (3 guildies, 1 pug) about 10 pulls to kill. A lot of that was getting used to the mechanics - and the fact that he is VERY unfriendly to a melee dps in the group. 2nd boss took 3 pulls to get the mechanics down, no sweat. 3rd boss (bonus boss) took 2pulls, was cake. Last boss was horrifically difficult for us. I don't know if we just were missing a mechanic or what, but we wiped a good 20 times before FINALLY downing him. I was tanking as Jugg and my health was just getting crushed. Interrupting his Flurry of Bolts is tough when your interrupt is on 12seconds and he casts it every 8 while you are also trying to avoid all his poison as a melee. The rest of the fight up until the burn phase was fine - but we wiped twice during the final burn phase (im guessing thanks to us not being prepared for the mechanic of the blowbacks and stuns.) Whatever. The first and last boss would be fine if they both gave Rakata. The difficulty involved in both of them is easily equall to if not more than Soa on HM/NiM. Since the last boss gave T3 Chest, I have no qualms with that. But the first boss? Dropping a Columi token? Nobody who NEEDS Tionese and/or Columi tokens will EVER kill that boss on hardmode. I love hard content, but I want to also be rewarded for it. The HM version of this is so overtuned that the only people who CAN do it will likely be people who only need the drop from the last boss, which doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Overall - super thumbs up on the difficulty and enjoyment of the fights. I wish I had more hands, so I could give the itemization 4 thumbs down. (other than the final boss.)

^^ I agreed with you up until you said damage meters will destroy the aspect of figuring out what abilities optimize your character. How do you know how well you are doing, if you don't have any sort of basis for performance? Watching the numbers float by on the screen above the boss's head? If you are paying attention to that, you are doing it wrong. Some sort of meter is required. Im happy with the offline meter. It makes it a little less convinent, but it's better than nothing.

Maybe we just got lucky, but we killed the last 2 mobs up top (didnt knock them off and everyone's KBs were on CD) and we got out of combat after the last one was killed. Maybe coincidence, but something to try.

My time is valuable. Wiping on HM and Nightmare mode encounters is not fun. I enjoy a challenge, and part of that challenge is pushing my toon to his mathematical limits. In order to do that, I need a quantitative basis for reviewing my performance. It's a pretty simple concept. Those that want to have fun get to play Story Mode, that's what it's there for. This is not wow. Nobody is going to care if you are suboptimal in story mode. If you want to run HM and Nightmare, you need to pull your weight, not make 7 (or 15) other people carry you because you 'just want to have fun.' HM and Nightmare encounters are tuned to a point where people NEED to be performing to beat them. Wiping for 2 hours is not fun for anyone. This isn't WoW, but you can't expect to beat end-game Hard Mode content without having to put any effort into your toons damage, healing, or tanking output. The gear doesn't make the content viable, the player hitting the buttons does. When 7 other people are depending on you, it's selfish to sit there and say "let's not have meter so people who don't feel like trying can hide among people who do, so they can still get HM and Nightmare loot!" Saying you don't want meters is basically equivalent to saying you either don't want to do Hard Mode/Nightmare content, or you want to do it without pulling your weight.

We had heard of this, but didn't try it until this week. OF course all our Inquis spammed their knockback at once and missed like 5 of them... lol fail, but it was still faster than normal clearing. You can also climb up the left side of the mountain right after you exit the Gharj area and get to the pylons without pulling a single trash pack. Saves another 15minutes or so of useless trash.

Im not sure what you mean by free loot. Story mode should gear people up enough to do HardModes, but not be so overpowering that they can walk into Nightmare and sleep through the raid and only hit 2 buttons to beat all the bosses. Obviously story mode allows you to enjoy the story, without having the encounters tuned so difficult that you NEED meters and perfect rotations to beat them. Im guessing that last part is sarcasm. What you are suggesting is a raid leader, while Main Tanking, or DPSing, or Healing, should also be watching every single member of their raid while also paying attention to boss mechanics, to figure out who is suboptimally spec'd and not following their rotation? You must be joking. DPS and Healing meters give end-game progression raiding groups the ability to evaluate THEMSELVES along with their raiders-in-crime. I WILL concede the fact that people spamming meters in any chat is super annoying. But saying 'no meters' isn't the only option. I'd love to see a Ops Leader Panel which the ops leader can start/stop/reset and only share in the ops channel. Problem solved.

There's a few issues here. Very often, his animations are not sync'd with his attacks. So if he is moving/turning and then swipes, the direction of the attack may actuallly be his PREVIOUS position. Very often he turns around, and swipes behind him because of this. It's a total PIA. There is also an issue with standing to one of his sides. If you are standing behind him and he turns a little and a swipe goes off just right, you wind up (i am assuming) getting hit twice. In HM this equates to about 25-30k damage and an insta kill. We havn't pinpointed how to duplicate it, but when someone gets insta-shot they are almost ALWAYS hit by a cleave from the side. As for dying clear across the room - his cleave is NOT that big. If he's cleaving people across the room, something is VERY wrong. More than likely you were standing on a corner and it killed you somehow. There seems to be some very unusual behavior depending on if you are standing against a wall or on an edge during encounters. Anyways, if you are dying from 10-15k hits, you are probably undergeared for HM. Im guessing you are running normals, in which case it's not his cleave at all since it only hits for 6-8k (as far as I can remember) in normal mode. Try standing in the center circle at all times and see if that helps.

18K would be fine if you have high defensive stats. HP in this game doesn't actually mean much end game. I've remodded most of my Rakata gear and now I sit at 20,5, which is just slightly higher than you. However, my defensive stats are pretty high (24%defense, 42%shield, 42%absorb off the top of my head.) That helps me survive burst damage way more than my +2k health (over you) does. Get yoursellf some Veracity Implants and ear with augments and start jacking up your defense/shield/absorb.. Endurance comes naturally with all of your gear so you can effectively ignore it as a stat.

You can already accomplish this by setting up Remote Desktop via one of the many apps available on iPhone and Android. I realize a good portion of people aren't technically savvy enough to do it, but this is a good reason to learn (which I am all for. Can never have enough techy people in the world.) As for BioWare creating an app for use instead - that'd be great.. But I am fairly certain they have more than enough other things on their plate than to worry about this. If/When an API is released for add-ons, it's possible we'll get some mobile functionality and someone can create one. (The person who said it would be difficult doesn't know what they are talking about.) This would basically be a graphics-light button pressing app. Insanely easy with an interface provided to BioWare login servers. Anyways - I wouldn't hold your breath for it anytime soon, but i'd be 99% sure that this will EVENTUALLY happen. BioWare is all about quality-of-life improvements, and this falls in that category.

As an Immortal Tank, here are my thoughts (although I have not used it yet.) Very situational skill. Basically only useable when 1) You are taking a LOT of incoming damage and really need the heal, and 2) When you are getting attacked but you know a threat drop is incoming. An example would you foreman crusher. He's enraged and smashing you. After the enrage, he's going to drop aggro. So you pop the skill during his enrage along with endure pain to survive, then taunt him as soon as it ends to pick him back up. Of course, being rage starved afterwards really sucks. But then again the entire rage generation for Immortal spec'd Juggs is poorly designed, so this just shines a light on that entire problem. As Vengeance or Rage (PvE) i can see it useful. Rage generation is much better, and it only consumes rage when you are hit - so fights where random AoE occasionally hits you (Gharj, for instance) would be a nice thing to use for the entire fight to help healers a little bit. The fact that it reduces threat also is great for any DPSers, as long as they aren't taking enough damage to eat through their rage generation.

I was about to write up my guilds strategy for both normal (Which we havnt run in weeks) and HM.. but then I realized if you took more than zero effort and used a google search, you'd find a ton of videos (youTube etc) on the strategy and it's very easy to follow. Stop being lazy. I'm not trying to be rude, but if you are hitting enrage at 40% you are eitehr doing something fundamentally wrong or you are raiding HM in level 45 greens.

The problem will likely be their internal testing players "Don't feel the rage system is flawed in any way." Of course their internal testers are probably part of the same people who designed it, which inherently makes them biased. It'd be great just to have a dev say that they will bring it up in some sort of design meeting and/or at least 'take a look' at the way rage is generated for the tanking spec. Actually if they just came into the thread and passed gas, i'd be happy since I'd know that they (might) have read it.

Spectacular post. We have many issues, but the rage generation (and therefore the requirement of so many boring talents) is a major design flaw. Of course, I don't think any developers even enter this forums so they will probably never see it - but great post anyways. Bump for great justice (And the Emperor!)

You dont HAVE to use it, you can always throw in something else (assault for rage, or vicious strike to dump rage) instead of Ravage. I don't use it at all, and move those talents to something else. As for people saying "QQ All the other classes do more damage".. You people are out of your minds. First, without damage meters, you can't know that for sure. And lets compare apples to apples. I'll concede that many classes out DPS us with AoE damage - we have smash and sweeping slash or whatever it's called... so yea, our AoE sucks... Who cares? I think we are near the top on single target DPS over the course of a fight, if you are using a proper rotation. To the OP: Your gear is terrible. If you havn't started running HM FPs yet for Columni and Tionese, you need to get it. Level 49 Oranges don't compare. (At least, not till patch.) Make sure you are using a Power Generator and not a shield, also. Jugg DPS on single targets it excellent. People saying Rage is better either mean in PvP (which they would be right), or are failing on end-game ops. Veng is the DPS spec for PvE because it's sustained DPS - there are only 1 or 2fights where burst MIGHT out perform due to the mechanics, and those fights aren't DPS races. Gear your toon properly before you give up on her, and learn the proper rotation over at sithwarrior.com - you are losing a ton of DPS by not having a proper veng rotation. EDIT: And once again, im not the only DPS Veng in the entire game that is able to run HM/NiM Ops. If I can do it, so can you. They are viable. We'll see how viable when the target dummies are out and a parser for the combat log is made, but all of saying we are bad will be surprised.

I was full Veng spec for a long while (until our MT quit and I took over duties.) Our DPS is more than viable, and as a matter of fact is probably better than good. We might be highly dependant on gear (I was in full Rakata), but my DPS was a huge boost to the raid - and I can say this because once I stopped DPSing and switched to MTing we started hitting enrage timers in HM KP which we had NEVER hit before. I went back to DPS for one boss after wiping to enrage 3 times in a row, and we destroyed him. People who cry about Jugg DPS either don't know how to play the class or seem to think we should be TOP DPS. Quit QQing. We are totally viable. If you are losing threat as Immortal that means you aren't using your taunts correctly. You should be using your taunts on CD for the first minute+ of the fight, and you will NEVER lose aggro, period - thanks to how the taunt mechanic works in this game. Now if you were having issues with AoE threat, I could concede the point. Everything else is fine. Im not saying once we get damage meters we won't show to be lacking in DPS or Threat department, but saying it's not viable is a farce. I, and others who do HM+ ops, are proof of that.