I don't think so. You have the same issue with harnessed shadow, which is a little trickier (for particle acceleration you only need to see if you got an extra buff. For harnessed shadow you need to see how many you got. Though i guess harnessed shadows is 100% so you can just count your projects, particle isn't...)

The cannon part is completely trivial. Have 3 people on cannon, and a healer who -isn't- manning the cannons. That way people, even squishies can be wacked senseless and it just doesn't really matter. The healer will outheal it, everything dies. Completely trivial. The bosses are typical tank and spanks. The buttons and gates, if you do it slowly (pulling mobs one at a time back to your group) takes forever but is foolproof. It can be done faster if your group is good, but if you have a "typical" pug, just have everyone come back everytime you pull a mob, kill it, move on. There you go. Pugging that instance like a boss.

Gear isn't the only thing when it comes to damage dealers. Having the right gear is important too =P If they're all using alacrity mods, well... (not saying its the case, but I'm sure something would stand out if we could see it). Either that, or they're not doing it correctly. When we did it, the tank and healer were pretty decked out but that doesn't change much with damage. Our damage dealers had a few interesting pieces of gears, but nothing out of this world. Didn't have any enrage timer issues. The Sith Entity did hit enrage when it was at like 5k hp (the healer won by kiting it around...). As people said, just toss AOEs to hit HK when he cloaks to get him straight out. That will shave a few seconds, might be all you need.

How do you get to Vokk and then feel he's overtuned? Ironfist is harder than anything outside of The Battle for Ilum and Directive 7 (I didn't try either yet, but I'm being told some stuff in there is rough). Vokk may as well be a normal enemy if you have gears to beat Ironfist.

Looks pretty obvious to me that the game is INITIALLY designed around the story content. They even said it during development, this was meant to be a "Massive Single Player RPG" (quoted from some interview, I forget which). With that in mind, there's a lot of bugs in the single player and story stuff that probably should be fixed asap, the rest is an afterthought, that will get fixed in time for sure, and they will put more content... but if the ONLY thing you care about is endgame raiding...you're not exactly their primary target audience for the launch of the game (though I personally do enjoy it a fair bit, you just have to only touch the content that works, and do it casually) Tionese and Centurion isn't useless...it works to mix and match to get set bonuses, and is decent in off-pieces if nothing else drops for you or show up on the GTN

Slicing got nerfed because it would ruin the game economy and makes the credit seller problem 100x worse. Biochem doesn't have that issue. I'd expect all crafts to get buffed with new recipes and stuff rather than biochem getting nerfed. I mean, right now only commendation gears have set bonuses and special effects as well as expertise. Won't be long until you see those added to crafter lists.

Well, blue stims may save you quite a chunk out of that. Probably a good start =P Also, making credits for people who do other stuff than raid is far too easy, so expect hyper-inflation on the GTN, if only for twinked leveling characters. So selling just a few random crafted pieces of gears will soon easily cover all of that as everyone will be running around with a few million. Hell, soon you can just sell purple ingredients to cover your expenses at the pace people are getting credits.

They lied, and that much should have been obvious the moment they stuck enrage timers in. Now you need a tank, a healer, 2 dps (ok, some bosses can do with less...), and for quite a few you need at least 2 melee/short range characters with interrupts. Second boss of Esseles: headshot gets cancelled, the boss will often try to do it again right after the 4 second of the interrupt elapsed. Whats that? Oh right, the interrupt has a 12 second cooldown and only 5~ seconds have elapsed. Better have a second person interrupt it. 5 seconds later? Well, you're still on a 2~ seconds cooldown. Well at least you have a 1 second window after the cooldown elapses Oh what is it? Your party is shadow/commando/scoudrel healer/gunslinger, so only you and the healer are in range and have an interupt (if the healer is even in range)? Well, that healer didn't have enough to do anyway =P I swear, those encounters aren't hard. They just need specific compositions (unless you overgear them) and play like Rockband/Guitar Hero.

The best stuff you have access to are champion/battlemaster PvP gears, the rataka ears/implants and mods from daily commendations, the armorings/mods/enhancements you get from doing the daily quests, and the occasional purple drops from those quests. Anything beyond that you need to do hard mode/operations. Just getting those make a fairly huge difference.

Thats why the DDO system is by far the best. Its not automated, but allows party leaders to advertise their group in a common interface that shows everyone who/what is in the party already, which classes are still options for the last slots, which quest the party is planning on doing, arbitrary comment, etc. Then people who want to join pushes a "join" button to send a request. The party leader can then talk with the person, decides if they want them, and accept/deny. basically, its all the convenience of the automated system, with most of the social interaction still in there. http://www.mmocrunch.com/wp-content/gallery/ddo-review/ddo-lfg.jpg

Haven't you ever played an MMO where there wasn't threat meters for a while? Tanks, damage dealers and healers very quickly learn to play it by ear, and things go pretty smooth from there. Heck, in FFXI people were eventually able to defer the entire threat system (which was rather complex) and exactly how much permanent threat and decaying threat every ability had compared to each other, without ever having any in game indication beyond "mob is on you" and "mob isn't on you". In Lineage 2 if you were a healer and not in someone's party for any reason (let say, pvp, leeching, etc), you couldn't see their hp bar at all, and good healers were able to heal people on the dot without overhealing anyway. You seriously don't need these meters. Of course, this one's an extreme case for sure (I wouldn't want them to remove health bars in TOR =P), but any good player can do it just fine. Everyone using fully automated/scripted bots to remove any possibility of human error would also make everything smoother! No more missing an interrupt or a heal, EVER!~

Lots of MMOs out there that don't allow add-ons. Some have quite the player base (not as big as WoW, but not all of em are tiny either). That scenario doesn't happen. People are still pretty good. The bads just give up pretty quick and move on to other games.

A lot of the more fun game mechanics found in games where (advanced... basic UI add-ons and stuff are fine) add-ons aren't allowed cannot possibly make it in a game where add-ons do exist, as it trivializes them. The only type of raid that can possibly be made are choreography style raids (as are pretty much 100% of raids in WoW), and that gets boring something fast. Simple enough for you?

Add-ons are not optional when fights are balanced around number crunching except of strategy and quick thinking. There's a lot of MMOs with harder fights than anything "that game" has and they're not about number crunching. And to answer your first question: Having a very well crafted bot program read the combat data and reacts to it would allow you to do every operation on the highest level perfectly and flawlessly. It would help your team, and make you vastly more efficient. Having to actually READ the dps/aggro/whatever meters still allows you to make mistakes. A bot wouldn't. So why do you actually play the game instead of using a bot? The answer is probably very similar to what people who don't want add-ons would tell you (unless your answer is "its against the eula!")

I haven't tried those yet, but bosses that constantly reset aggro and other "LOL TANK ROFL" mechanics aren't that uncommon throughout the game, so I wouldn't be surprised if that was working as intended.

of course, a large amount of "harcore" crafters (especially goldsmiths) had bought their way up burning thousands of real world $$ at it, and could make a living (in real life) out of it. That was pretty messed up.

The boss everyone is talking about is quite trivial... I had to ask the people I did it with (several) time to even be sure what everyone else was refering to, I guess maybe people rarely have tanks specced tank with actual tank gear? He barely scratched me while I was fighting him. The optional boss was another story. No, he cannot be cancelled, he pulls everyone in, slows everyone, and does an instant uncancellable storm attack that deals 1500+ damage a tick, give or take. Even with Force Speed to get out of it, you'll get hit once or twice. He does it at specific amounts of health, but its a +/- 5%, so not quite precise, making it pretty tough to anticipate. The trick is to have everyone but the tank break line of sight when you expect him to do it, OR have multiple healers OR have a commando that can AOE heal. Then its not too bad. I still wiped several time against that optional, while utterly crushing the general.

Here's a newsflash: not everyone come from the same MMOs, and looting "ethics" differ widely from one MMO to another. People who started MMO-ing on EQ, WoW, and WoW-clones probably outnumbers the rest, and they are amazingly vocal, so they make it seem like their way is the only way, but its not, and even some pretty recent and popular MMOs have had different "standard ethic", so you can't expect everyone to think like you. Here's the trick! And it works wonder! When you make a group, or join one, state clearly what you think the "rules" should be and see if everyone agrees (usually everyone will agree to whatever the first person who states the rules say, no matter what it is) TADAH! Problem solved. Geez that was hard! Instead of assuming your way is the only way and that everyone else is a moron for not thinking WoW or EQ were the holy grails of MMO communities.

The money you get from selling stuff alone, will, over a long period of time, cause pretty substantial inflation which will make being a "noob" a pretty scary proposition in a few months. Add slicing to that, and anyone who doesnt take slicing will be screwed, anyone who does will have a lot of grinding on their hand (or can just ignore the entire game's economy for months). Thats just not very fun. Fast forward 2 years, it will be a disaster.

That flashpoint is duoable with companions starting at level 17ish. 18-19 if you don't have a human healer I would guess, though I never tried. The trick is really to have people/companion on the adds at all time, and just slowly take down the boss. By the end the adds may come too fast depending on your setup, so you just ignore them and burst the boss down. Its pretty trivial honestly, but I've had issues where some players were worse than companions (thus why i started duoing it). If people are not avoiding stuff, aren't dealing with adds properly, etc, you're better off kicking them out and bringing out an extra companion. Also, at that level, armor rating aside, tanks are really not "tanks", but just "damage dealers that take a bit less healing". The difference between someone with 1000 armor and 2000 armor is 10%~ mitigation, nevermind at lower ratings where the difference is smaller. So you're better off having a beefy damage dealer then a dedicated tank, but people are having issues getting out of the mindset of other MMOs. Heck, if you have a biochem on your team with a lot of purple buffs/med, its probably doable without a healer at all (and arguably easier if the group is DPS heavy)

This is a story oriented game that just happens to let a lot of people play together. As Bioware stated before, "a massively SINGLEPLAYER game" So it kinds of make sense that the game, in its first iteration, will be focus far more on the journey, rerolling, remaking the same characters and taking different paths, doing a different set of quest (if you do all the quests you end up impossibly overleveled. You're not supposed to), trying out light/dark side, etc. Then there's a bit of extra via level 50 flashpoints/operations and PvP. Its what they were going for, and it was quite successful. If you expected to be able to rush to 50 and then just run raids non-stop WoW style, well, you were not really their initially targeted audience. Note I said initially targeted. With a game of this scope, they will eventually have content for everyone. Right now its obviously not setup to please the WoW-crowd.

If the system is to be changed, why change it to a variation of an obsolete, politic creating bull<bleep> inducing system? Better system: Loot is rolled for everyone separately, no one sees what everyone else gets, adjusting chance and numbers accordingly, and allowing you a chance to give an item up if its bind of pickup. There you go! Some games have/had this, and it made the PUG dynamic far more interesting. Pug raid groups were far more common and successful. In this day and age of MMO you would think people realise there's more MMOs than EQ/WoW and its direct clones. Some have different loot mechanics which in turn create different "loot rules". And few/no major MMO has a companion system like this one. So the rules become fuzzy, and people who think there "one true WoW-like way" is the only way are arguably causing more problems than the rest. If you don't setup rules before the group start, its free for all. (Note: I have never rolled for anything for my companion, even when duoing with my wife. Doesn't change that the above is true)