It would be great as long as you get Hesker as a commanding officer in the story.

Agreed entirely. PVP in its current state is more carebear than PVE. You engage in entirely concensual PVP to grind points that you use to get gear. In PvP I feel like I'm playing some generic Korean PVE MMO for crying out loud. The only redeeming instances are pulling people into fire or acid, and dominating an exploiting opponent in voidstar because they're terrible.

Implying grinding warzones is challenging in any way. Yes, time is spent, but working hard? Please.

Meanwhile no mention of valor 20 peeps walking around in full champion gear because the RNG gods smiled upon them. Oh the irony

It can. The only way you can get knocked off is if you: A. are terrible B. knowingly put yourself in the position to be knocked off. (see A) I was knocked off while kiting him to place once, learned from it and was never knocked off again. Bad play can fly for any of the first hard modes but by the time you get to FE you should have some knowledge of positioning. If there's a bottomless pit its just smart not to stand between it and anything in case of knockback. I applaud bioware for punishing sloppy play even if it means I may get careless in the future and miss out on a drop.

Just FYI, no one should ever be behind him.

I'd make our top PVP and PVE gear look good.

Isn't that the intent of changing things?

I really wish BW would give all companions self heal abilities. It would make any companion viable and not just healers. If I could use T7 all the way to 50 I would, but heals make it just so much less of a headache.

It's random, you all just have bad luck. Here's the thing, you are not the only person running them. Looking at the total number in D7 or FE, or anything, there are 4-8 groups running it at any one time. They're probably picking up the drops you never see. 15 FE runs with 12 BH bodies and 3 IA bodies is anecdotal, coincidental, and just plain bad luck. I with I had your luck because I've only seen SW and IA bodies drop, yet lots of people I know have picked their BH or SI body up from FE. Just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean it doesn't exist, it just means again you have terrible luck.

It might indeed be a gear issue if your tank is being one shot and you're doing everything correctly. Yes his bash hurts a bit, but I've never been in danger of being one shot by it.

You actually remove the turret shields by having one of his bombardments hit said turret.

I wish every MMO would borrow ideas from both Aion and DCUO. Either let us customize gear appearance as aion allows, or just let us lock in appearances as DCUO allows. I get that orange gear was an attempt at this, but it doesn't carry over entirely to the BiS items, and most orange gear looks entirely unremarkable.

For player choice just make it the thermal detonator of the AP tree. Single target, instant cast high damage version of flamethrower that shares a cooldown with flamethrower. Change the bonuses and ability procs around so that immolate == flamethrower. This gives the player the choice as to go with a sure thing against a single target, or risk channeling flamethrower for damage on multiple targets.

You're very close to the typical 31/8/2 build. For reference this is my PVE tanking build: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#301GRMrdorogzZMsbZb.1 Ironfist/CP are PVP specs. 31/8/2 is a PVE spec. You can PVE in PVP specs, but only for solo dailies really. On hard modes you'll suffer from the lack of shield chance. You won't get a good spec that can tank hard modes AND pvp as well as a pure spec of either. Here's hoping for the inclusion of dual speccing relatively soon.

Vanguard/powertech DPS is good in a tanking stance with one caveat. The predominant DPS abilities we have are dependent entirely on shield procs.

Least played: Used to be powertech/vanguard As more and more discover them, Most played: Soon to be powertech/vanguard

Agreed with that point then. Although it becomes a tightrope to walk. Add in too many new mechanics and people are running everywhere, LOS gets messed up, things just go crazy. It's especially difficult with the non existant interface customization and relatively limited maximum camera distance. Some things like target of my target are also very clunky, targeting outside of the group and tab targeting are also abysmal. I'm sure future flashpoints and ops will have more mechanics like this, but as it is the interface and user interaction just feels too spartan to properly allow this. Also I commend your reasoned response and not what some would do on the forums "LOL WAT R U STOOPID" type response. The dynamics between hard/nightmare right now are more of a farming hard mode for good endgame gear, run nightmare mode for better endgame gear. At some point I'm sure they'll add something beyond nightmare. And if the kaon bonus boss in any indication, future hard modes will be harder.

I'm regretting picking up eliminators because now I want to try Taugrim's iron fist build with combat tech.

They do say that cheating is encouraged. Since this is cheating within the mechanics of the game and not speedhacking or wallhacking it's fine.

You just wait for the next one to continue the story.

Sure it does. A healer that doesn't know how to maximize healing efficiency is going to cause wipes in nightmare mode. DPS that can't tailor and maximize their rotations to new situations as they pop up are going to force enrage timers which force wipes. The difficulty is ramped up considerably on nightmare mode, meaning along with having gear, everyone needs to be genuinely good at their role. But its also unfair to say hard modes are directly above normal modes. If anything they're misnamed. Hard modes are the baseline of end game content, meaning they're really level 50 normal modes. Nightmare modes are true hard modes. Your definition of skill is clearly different than mine though. I define skill as being able to play a class to its fullest in quickly changing situations and recognizing when situations are about to change again, reacting in advance to that change, and communicating that change to inform others if they haven't noticed it. You seem to think skill is clicking on puzzle boxes to produce a desired result on a boss, similar to the fabricator boss in Karagga's. That fight requires coordination, yes, but it's not difficult at all with good players and a coordinated duo manning the consoles. It's annoying, and a time sink, but not difficult.

That's because they wanted to make hardmodes still pugable without voice comms, so they're gear dependent. Nightmare modes are the true measures of skill, and coordination over voice comms.

Task manager > SWTOR > End process.

Clumping is the best solution. The only FE runs where I've had someone die on HK-47 have been runs where people don't clump up when he stealths.