The pants work perfectly! Thank you! The gloves look good too. Of course it can't be purchased for an Imperial character.. I'll have to keep the hunt going then, perhaps.

Hey y'all - trying to put together a Coratanni lookalike outfit, and I can't seem to find anywhere on the internet showing where anyone's put a list together before. Assuming I'm just going for looks, not a perfect color-match, I have this so far: Head: Enforcer's Eyeguard Chest: Remnant Underworld Smuggler's Jacket Belt: Renmant Underworld Smuggler's Belt Boots: Remnant Arkanian Smuggler's Boots I can't quite figure out her gloves or pants. Anyone know the answer?

Do you feel your group was able to progress in power through the Operation? No; IP-CPT is a ridiculously, inappropriately difficult boss for the first boss of a Veteran mode operation. Especially since there was no way whatsoever to obtain gear to best him outside of obtaining lockouts from others, which we have been forced to do. Do you think improvements could be made to make it easier to progress as a group? If so, what do these improvements look like? The fights should be balanced for the gear you're expected to have when entering - the whole operation should be clearable with a team of 330-geared players. It currently requires essentially full 340 for the first and last bosses, while the middle two are far easier. Did you want to upgrade your Hazardous gear? Yes; it is a good interim reward while we worked on clearing bosses for the Virulent gear. How quickly were you able to upgrade your Hazardous gear? We are still working on it, but we are farming Watchdog to do so because the operation is itself so unapproachable in the normal fashion. Was Hazardous gear helpful in completing The R-4 Anomaly? It's essential. The operation is not functionally clearable without it. Do you like the look of these armor sets? The appearance? No, but cosmetics are now mostly something I look elsewhere for. Did you attempt to clear The R-4 Anomaly to earn these armor sets? Well, yeah, the dual goal of clearing the new content and getting the better gear is its own reward. Is there anything you’d like to see from future Operations armors? I suppose having armors that actually look good would be a nice change. Do you like the look of this mount? Haven't seen it. Did you attempt to clear The R-4 Anomaly to earn this mount? Someday maybe. Not yet. Is there anything you’d like to see from future Operations mounts? Yes - more vanity items should be rewards for completing difficult content. Cartel Market items are fun, but we should be able to take some pride in our accomplishments by having unique and rare cosmetic items as rewards for difficult content. Brontes' wings are a great example.

Gotta go with Elara Dorne here. She's well-educated, got a lot of strength of character and a good head on her shoulders. All without the crazy baggage that force users bring. Also she's really fun to tease about how uptight she is about regulations.

I agree that R-4 Anomaly needs a nerf. I believe my perspective on this might be particularly useful to the community and dev team, which I'll explain below. I apologize for any appearance of arrogance on my part. My raid team is a nightmare raid team, by any objective metric. We've cleared DF, EC, and TFB on nightmare, have cleared all of SnV except for Styrak on nightmare, cleared ToS and Ravager on VM, and cleared Dxun on VM. I imagine this puts us well into the top 10% of active raiding guilds in the game. Our best DPS is competitive with the best DPS who upload to Parsely, and the rest of our DPS pull strong, capable numbers. There are no dead weight members. However, and this is why I believe my perspective is useful here, we are NOT a top 1% guild; the type who was able to test R-4 on the PTS with 340 gear. We do not have a full roster of maximum-optimized alts to pull from to run a meta-team for every boss fight. If I may be presumptuous, we are exactly the sort of team Bioware should be attempting to balance the most difficult content for. We gear our characters carefully, we practice on dummies to get our rotations down, and then we go into operations and work consistently on practice the fight mechanics. It is a reasonable expectation that our group, if anyone, should be able to make progress and kill a new boss every few weeks. However, we haven't been able to get IP-CPT down on Veteran mode. We are also not consistently able to get Dominique down on Story Mode. The tuning is simply too high. And again, we are not failing on mechanics; while we were learning Dominique, we wiped plenty due to that, but now we know the fight well, and cannot consistently kill her, because the tuning is simply too high. Too much damage is dealt by the boss and adds, and the DPS check is simply too high, particularly for a SM operation. In my estimation, there are two related but separate problems to solve here: 1. Difficulty expectations are not set properly. When a group enters an operation on Story Mode, the difficulty is wildly different depending on the operation. Dread Fortress, Scum and Villainy, or Temple of Sacrifice, for example, can be reasonably completed by a random assortment of people gathered from the Fleet in one or two tries per boss at most. This is simply not the case for Nature of Progress or R-4 Anomaly. Even discounting the learning curve of a new operation; even once mechanics are understood, these operations are significantly harder, and that is not signaled to players in any way. The same is true of Veteran mode - ToS and Ravagers are well understood as "Hardmare" because their difficulty is way out of line with other Veteran mode operations, and more comparable to Master mode for some bosses. This disconnect means that, despite R-4 Story Mode being on par with Veteran mode operations in its difficulty, it offers no gear upgrades to a progression team whatsoever - because the tuning is so high that it unreasonable to expect that every member will not be in full 330 gear already. 2. Encounters are forcing team composition It is my belief that an encounter in any MMO raid should be reasonably completable by any assortment of classes (and I don't mean "we took 4 of the current worst DPS"). This is not presently the case with R-4, which not only nearly forces bringing meta-classes (looking at Pyrotech), but has a first boss with a DPS check so high that you have to replace your tanks with DPS? This is not a reasonable balance standard. Bioware, while I cannot presume to know your balances processes, the appearance to this outside observer is that you balance encounter difficulty around whether the absolute best-of-the-best raiders in top-of-the-line gear can barely clear it. This is silly. It should be plainly obvious that Veteran Mode, which you can enter in 330 gear maximum, should be balanced around wearing 330 gear, not 340 gear. And the top 1% of players are, you know, 1%ers. They will never stop complaining that a game is "too easy"; they, by definition, are the ones who find it the "easiest".

Would like to bump this - I was able to finish the fight by using Hydraulic Overrides to not get pulled in, but before I did that I would get killed by falling through the floor - it even happened during the cutscene after the fight itself.

You’re correct, there’s no sound effect. I’ve bug reported it ingame recently. We shall see if they fix it.

Annihilation/Watchman is the most common in my experience, but I’d argue it’s also harder to play effectively than Fury/Concentration while also doing less damage in most situations due to burst specs being generally better for solo and flashpoint content. Fury/Conc has a fixed rotation that is easy to learn, easy to recover if messed up, seamlessly switches to AOE, and does high damage in all situations. Anni/Watch is strong in most situations, but has to ramp up its rotation and has to be constantly applying, spreading, or reapplying DOTs, which can be tedious in solo or flashpoint situations. It’s excellent against single boss engagements or major add phases like in Dxun 2 and 3. So in short, if you’re a relatively new Mara/Sent player, I recommend Fury/Concentration.

Arsenal Mercenary / Gunnery Commando is presently the objectively worst DPS spec in the game, so you’re not technically wrong to be disappointed in it. That said, it’s far more likely that the problem is not the discipline itself, but your proficiency at it. If an excellent player can get 22k DPS with a more competitive spec, Arsenal can still get 20.5 to 21k. It’s the worst damage spec for single target DPS, but “worst” is still more than capable of clearing all content in the game in 6.X. Arsenal has a few unique problems that make it hard to get the most of the spec. For one, it has unique Alacrity requirements only shared with the Carnage discipline, which is also an unpopular PVE spec, and thus is more challenging to gear properly. Two, it is the hardest spec in the game to get the BIS DPS set for, being that Apex Predator is not purchasable. But these problems don’t address the ability to simply become proficient with the rotation, of which Arsenal is arguably the easiest in the game - with either a very simple priority system or a very short repeatable rotation available to use, both of which are highly effective.

Emphasis added. You answered your own argument and defeated your own request. The tier 7 missions are the top-end content in that game space; thus, if you don’t practice them to learn and execute them, you will fail, just like any other high-difficulty content available in the game. The only barrier to acquiring the gear you need to complete them is patience and some Cybertech ability or credits to purchase the three crafted gear items. The point of a high-difficulty rail shooter is the memorization and practice. If you could just wing it and win, it wouldn’t be difficult, would it?

I’d be all for rolling Brooding into the basic function of Marauders given how essential it is for them; particularly Fury. That said, the problem isn’t that they fixed the semi-exploit of utility swapping. No one can honestly say that it’s intended design or fair that Sent/Maras essentially had the benefit of ten utilities instead of nine. The problem is that you feel that Sents/Maras effectively have eight utilities instead of 9 since Brooding has no in-combat effect. I’d mostly agree with you on that, hence my first paragraph. But this was a bug and/or design oversight that needed fixing. Rather than demand it be reverted, I’d rather a more proper fix be made to the class and have out of combat Fury generation be the default.

BioWare, I don’t think you ran the math on this. For the sake of argument, let’s use 8-man NiM EC as our baseline - in order to gear out the full team with 14 augments each, you need (14*15*8) = 1680 OEM-37s. The whole operation drops 6. Now granted, crafters have two opportunities to crit for extra augments here, so let’s generously assume a 50% crit rate; thus each 15 OEMs produce 2.25 augments instead of 1. You’d still need to clear NiM EC 125 times to do this. one hundred and twenty five times. Even if you’re able to do NiM Dxun, which drops 16, you would need to CLEAR NIM DXUN 47 TIMES to gear up the team. And that’s not even starting on needing to do ranked PVP, which you now have to win to get mats! Please strongly reconsider how you approach this, BioWare.

Qyzen is quite easy. There are plenty of Worthy Jagganath Targets on Hoth. If you’re Republic, there’s a few near the shield generator in the northwest of the map, and if you’re Empire, there’s a number of them on the mountain just north of the QT in Highmount Ridge. For either faction, there’s a few in the corners of the Starship Graveyard. It’s a little tedious, but the spawns are quick enough to have respawns if you do a circuit of two map areas. Loken and Forex/Pierce are probably the worst; Loken because he requires farming of inconvenient crafting mats and[/] having to wait for an event to roll around, and the others because having to PVP a full 10-20 rounds per character is kind of a nightmarish requirement. If the premise of their recruitment is relieving the need for them to provide recruitment/morale, I’d rather craft expensive Invasion Forces or whatever to contribute to the war effort. Requiring PvP for a companion with no alternatives is frustrating.

Take a look at Powertech/Vanguard as well. They lack a 30m ability other than their basic attack and their pull, but nearly all of their attacks are 10m range, and plenty of them are AOE.

If you’re not doing hardmode operation content, every single class is well above adequate to complete the content. In that case, you should play the class you enjoy playing, and don’t be concerned about what some other class is parsing on the bleeding edge. If you are doing hardmode operations, you and your hardmode team are likely to be considering your options and composition in a way that we here on the forums can’t answer for you. Marauder has Bloodthirst, but Jugg has the armor sunder. So this is more a question for your team than for the general public. Basically, unless you’re an advanced player, what class is “better” than another is not going to materially make a difference compared to you simply playing your character well. If you are an advanced player, you’d know we can’t answer this question on your behalf.

Thank you!

Greetings, I'm starting to look at min/maxing my Arsenal merc and Gunnery commando, and it seems going for the 1.3s Alacrity threshold is considered desirable along with the 3% bonus of the spec. Has anyone found a combination of enhancements and augments to hit as close to the 2374 target number without going over too much? Appreciate the input.

The answer to your question is no. You'll have to continue the SoR story to see it. If you're uninterested in the story, just space at through all the conversations.

There's no juxtaposition. All three are things people on MMO forums mindlessly parrot because it makes them feel important or smart, while de facto creating the opposite effect; seeing someone trot out a tired and overused phrase like these three is apt to make one think less of the intelligence, creativity, or relevance of the OP.

I just got two yesterday from normal quest killing. Dunno what to tell you.

Where did the buzzphrase "mass exodus" come from anyway? It's right up there with "slap in the face" and "paid beta" as phrases MMO forumgoers regurgitate whenever they're unhappy. Doesn't an Exodus already imply a mass of people?

I suspect they were "tactical" for some time before last patch. I seem to recall getting a group of 3 DPS for it once. They just switched categories in group finder. That said, will it be easier? Probably not. 10-15 is too small a window and too quickly out leveled; people often just don't bother to queue for it.

I think you're overusing the italics lately, LA.

Canderous and Mission are wearing jackets, though. We could also use shorts in the game. You know, something between pants and bikinis.

You would do well not to assume yourself. I AM a crafter. You have no business or right telling me I am not one or that I have no idea of the state of the market. I have made plenty of money this expansion selling crafted crystals, because I saw an opportunity in the fact that none of these weapons came with one. I made cheap ones to sell at the lowest price, because all the people who don't care about the color in their shield generators they won't see. I've made rare colors like magenta. You don't speak for me or for any other crafter, and shame on you for doing the exact sort of assuming you rail against in the same post you decry it.