Guys, thanks for the suggestions. I just managed to do it without dying. I don't understand why it seemed so hard the first few times I tried a day or two ago.

My previous post was written in the moment of anguish, and disbelief. I will, after searching the web, attempt a few times to defeat this using the methods suggested. Because I love SWTOR so much. However, all of these methods require some form of cheating the game; and that's why I'm upset: There should not be a bug like this in the game, and if it's not a bug, it's a virus implanted into the game by some form of psychopath. I cannot understand why they allow it to persist. I mean, just imagine how many subscribers/players they must have lost due to this bug, with people just instantly saying, 'ehrm, what the heck, screw this'. I bet most people who encountered this would not go to the effort of writing something about it, they'd just leave and never return.

I just encountered this bug after seeing Iokath for the first time. The funny thing is, I read about this bug a year ago, when I wasn't even playing. And they didn't fix it... I'm absolutely shocked and disgusted. I am not going to die 50 times trying to glitch-win a bugged fight. I am not going to spend hours grinding reputation to buy a buff for a bugged fight. Every other fight in story mode is about 15% of the 'difficulty' of this fight. It's a bug. It must be. How could such a repellent issue be intentional? And yet, over a year later, it's still broken. I'm so disappointed. I wanted to keep playing, I wanted to see all the story. Now I know my character can never progress further without grinding or glitching, nor any of my other characters, where is the motivation to keep playing? I've already cancelled my subscription. The whole game has been ruined by this ridiculous bug. I'm very sad - it's too late to do anything about it. I'll always remember the sheer incredulity and disgust I had when I tried to kill the sentinels, and how it has tainted the experience forever.

I'm another European (UK) player who has just come home from work and found to my surprise that I couldn't play! I accept that hotfixes are sometimes needed for MMOs, but - and maybe I just have a faulty memory - I can't remember in my four years of WoW that the servers went down for a patch at peak (European) time. It would be nice if BioWare could deploy teams, like Blizzard, to ensure that maintenance times are adjusted for time zones. But, I do understand that that would require spending (probably a lot) of money, and since we're living in unstable economic times, that might not be very desirable from a business point of view. I can also understand it's a lot simpler to deploy a patch all in one go across every server zone. Overall, I'd prefer it if we could have a team for Europe (and I guess Asia too) who deploys patches at a non-peak time... but maybe it's one for the future. I also have to say, it's a very insular view to say that; because BioWare is an North American company, no-one else outside of America has any right to be annoyed about not being able to play at a peak time. I don't think the players who are saying this would be thrilled at the prospect of not being able to play at their peak time. It's also foolish to generalise that 'all American people are stupid', or whatever. That's just basic playground idiocy, in my book. There are uninformed people and then also very wise people of all nationalities and the proportions are never that different, in my experience.