another thread of this old saw but the last boss is a mechanics check. if you don't learn the mechanics you die. of the 3 mechanics, turning the boss is the most important and falls on the tanks shoulders. second is add pickup, this fall to dps. third is avoiding the mines. after you learn these 3 its easy to manage.

don't see a particular issue with you starting ops in that gear. Thou who you are raiding with matters. in a cordinated guild run you will be good. pug runs on thother hand may give you some flack.

the red circles on toth and zorn are remarkably like the red circles during the storm protocol phase on first boss of EV. Each raid member gets a certain number of circle the need to evade. fixed patterns from each raid member help minimize splash. ranged players can simply run forwards and back relative to their boss. Melee can bunch up and circle strafe their boss since they can swing on the move pretty easily. if your having alot of trouble go spend some time using annihilator as a dummy. Have someone set aside his/her attention to watch who is eating circles too much or droping circle on other raiders. chances are these same folks do it on thoth and zorn.

its a smidgen of rpg design leaking through. Anything vaguely off the beaten path gets a pointer quest or 2 to try and shove the player to go look at some pretty thing they made. actually pretty common in other rpg developers too. And if you made a quest it has to give xp cause if it didn't the universe would implode or something. Honestly i think the xp value some how determines legacy xp. so the value needs to exist for the legacy calcualtion to fire correctly. Additionally from the game design side xp is often used as base or check for all sorts of things because xp always exists on everything rpg since the dawn of rpg time

MORE HM YES PLS. Though i do see the point of it being more difficult to increase the mechanics on some encounters. Imagine another layer on the last boss of hammer. That would be adds, conal attacks of doom, ground aoes, invulnerability phases, random threat drops, and a hard enrage. would be worth his nickname of "baby denova" then

Did some data hunting on torhead and swtorspy and it seems that the ultratech is spread from D7 to FE. Now i dont think this information is entirely accurate given the alterations to the last few FPs loot tables in recent patches. D7 how ever was not affected so far as i know by the changes to the endgame gearup. You may try focusing on SM D7 runs

a mirror match like that would be pretty awesome. drop that in the suggestion box

@ OP it is very difficult to get a sense of who you may be grouped with before you start a FP. However you can get some clue by how they respond in chat. Say you put out a call for Hammer Station. One person responds with "merc dps 17" this terse but informative person tends to be someone who has been around awhile likely playing an alt and therefore reasonably decent at the game. Another responds with " Awesome heals here" Definite ego in this response the ego may or may not be deserved. Yet another " im a level 16 Powertech can i come?" Enthusiasm and lack of abbreviations could mean a relatively young or new player. While it is by no means perfect paying close attention to how and what a person says back to you can tell you something about them.

okay a fair number of responses so far. However none of the replies seem to fit the situation i saw. I shall elaborate on what i saw. We kill the third bomber with 5ish seconds to spare, bomb carrier goes up and gets pulled back, burn commences. Walker is somewhere between 30% and 20% at start of this final burn. Kephess comes down tank picks him up. About halfway through the burn the additional bomber pops up and 2-3 shots the healer he picks. Total time between the kill of previous bomber and the new one somewhere in the 20-40 sec range. Now i know the bombers come out pretty quick at the end if you miss one entirely but we are getting the bombers pretty quickly unless its the way far away door for the spawn even then it doesn't time out usually.

So ran EC story mode today. Took 5 attempts to down kephess due to additional bombers spawning during the third and final burn on the walker. Each time the additional bomber appeared it went right for the nearest healer and consequently wiped the raid. I would like to know if anyone else has seen this happen, and what the cause of it might be? I did try more then one search on the subject and came up empty. thank you for your time.

you do have a point on the quality. my answer was bent in favor of rapid improvement. A brand new 50 after the 25 comms get handed out needs one HM flash point to the bh implant/ear vs 120 daily comms starting from zero.

We are imperials and your foolish republic will fall because of this. Muaahhhh. Seriously i find it odd as well.

i think its a nice boost 25 comms per toon. while it doesn't buy anything it does let you run a single finder hm before you get a characters first piece of bh gear. I recommend getting earpieces or implants as they are hard to find in tier one raids and hard modes.

overall I've had a positive experience with the finder. Probably the worst ive had was a derpy dps in full campaign that was just doing auto attacks in a kp run. one votekick later run back on track. also one rage quit before a SM false emp run had even gotten in gear. fellow thought we couldn't manage it with coulmni or better gear.

I would raise this point for those having difficultly with the last boss. The sweeping gunfire aoe centers on whoever has aggro at the start of the cast and is a big cone. If the tank initiates and can maintain aggro it is possible to turn the boss so only hit the tank is within the cone. It much the same thing as turning the turrets of stormcaller and firebrand in EC. What i tend to do at level for the fight is have the tank go to the right of the console while the other party members go left. This way you have party members near both add spawn points as well more room to avoid the red circle bombs and keep the gunfire aoe on one person. Fighting the boss straight on form the corridor is a death sentence because the gunfire cone covers the entire hallway at 20-30m from the boss. guess where most people stop and hang out during a boss fight. Cheers all and hope i helped.

At least in the case of operations, there is from my experience a significant weighting towards whichever player toon is the least equipped relative to the content. When i ended up in an EC SM run with my mostly colmni sniper both the first 2 bosses loot was 90% agent drops. I was the only agent present. Later in that same run when i had taken the time during a wipe recovery to trade in my tokens the loot evened out considerably more towards the groups actual makeup. That run was probably the most extreme case but I've seen the tendency in other ops as well. I would not be surprised if the same effect applied in flash points. Although the small number of drops compared to raids would somewhat conceal the trend. Additionally since this "quality check" occurs as far as i can tell when boss loot is generated, raids and flashpoints render somewhat different data because of the types of drops. Tokens are often not traded in until after the raid is completed and as such do not affect the "quality check" of later bosses. Ready to wear gear on the other hand would have an immediate effect if used immediately. (often the case in leveling flash points) Also if such a check occurs those of us that spend time making sure our gear is the best it can always be, upgrading through planet comms and the GTN, would be closer to the quality checks threshold then other players. We would therefore receive fewer drops then straight probability would seem imply. As yet i do not have hard statistical evidence for my theory due to lack of sufficient data. I only have my personal toons. While i would like to have more data on the subject i doubt i will every get it do the nature of the required tests. I would not force a severely undergeared toon on a raid many times purely for data gathering. Although if anyone does wish to volunteer for such testing please do let me know.

I can second the hinkyness when coupled with natural cover. The tool tip and what it actually does also seem to not line up.

No pvp experience, pure pve, currently 31/7/3 1. Functional if slightly clunky dps is the perception i receive. Lethality is preferred in most cases for raids. EC is the exception because the many many target swaps. Kephess is the main culprit of this but the other fights have it to. So please change spec when we do EC is the message i see. But raid will take dps sorcs and mercs over us given equivalent gear. 2. Personally i think all the specs have something to offer. MM offers long term high dps with burst but is pretty much a fixed emplacement. Any phase of random aoes drop dps by 80-90% for the duration. It is also very high skill cap i mess up even a smidgen energy drys up and dps with it . Engineering. Almost zero energy management needed. Strong aoe for trash clearing and multi add moments. Some single target effectiveness but burst is limited and aoe centric. This spec has it shiny moments but EC is not it. The spec does have improved mobility over MM. Lethality. Highest dps with aoe ability that does not suck energy wise for being aimed at single mob due to the way the specs parts function together. However this interdependency is a fatal flaw in any fight that you do not have timed down to the second. Breaks in the rotation from stuns kockkbacks or quick switches hit your dps very hard. Kehpess is at present undoable for a lethality sniper. Overall issues: COVER is clunky at times and uber pointless in end game content. even the seige bunker is insufficient to mitgate raid/party wide burn phases which are for the most part move or die no matter the class or spec. The plus 20% ranged defense component rarely matters, raid mobs hardly miss at all far as i can tell. Above and beyond that just a single raid mob pointed directly at anything but a tank generally means death if left for more then a few seconds. Hard cover blocking ranged damage component comes up NEVER. Raids either lack available hard cover or the mob should not be pointed at me in any circumstance. Cover post 49 is me rooting myself for better dps output. That is what it does. Channels while in cover are also an issue. We can not use alacrity to reduce these cast times. we do not have the resource gain tools to counter any amount of alacrity. Something happens during the cast=wasted energy=reduced dps output=fail at role. Many times you have zero control over these irruptions. The MM spec suffers from severe singular dmg type even in pve. Any mob with a lightsaber=reduced dps. Given the volume of saberites, it gets pretty irritating at times. Overall i can live with snipers as the are. While we have gotten some improvements the biggest points of relative failure remain unaltered from public beta. I will continue to play but only for the fact of my real life friends in my guild and that i have yet to finish leveling through all possible storylines and there permutations of romances and stuff. yes im a smidgen ocd. But snipers are all that attract mechanically to your game Bioware unfortunately they don't work as envisioned.

No warnings of any kind on harbinger.

I too think it overtuned for its level. On first pass it chewed me up and spit me out so i left it alone and came back later with better gear some levels and a buddy. better progress but eventual failure. Came back at 50 with orange gear with rank 51 mods a guildy in colmni and still had issues. My first encounter i was overleveled for belsavis. Second pass after fnishing corelia. 3rd pass after my first weeks worth of dailys and HMs. Up till that point had been able to solo pretty much everything. Not that i mind the challange but this was a big spike compared to the rest of belsav and most the last third of the game period. perhaps one or 2 fewer mobs in the packs in the hallways?

ill second this.

while i do disagree with how intact the endar ended up i can understand its exsistance in it current form from a game play perspective. The game needs nods to the Kotor series. Taris is large portion of the first game so it makes alot of sense to put a major nod on the world. Point to note is that the quest in question is republic side, an emp exclusive player would never get that nod. The wreckage also serves a quest design feature if a sufficiently large portion didn't survive you would end up looking for black boxes of impervium in some cave or scattered all over the planet. Which would you rather do press a few buttons or go spelunking/ sifting through the planet wide wreckage field ?

Running about today filling in my codex and noticed another broken one. Operation: Silverplate (Agent) should have been added when completing agent story line on Alderaan. Nope not for my agent anyway. Can any other agents confirm? or am i just bugged apologies if this was already mentioned in the 20 pgs of this thread.

I think they function fairly well for what seems to have been the intent of the items(making lvling alts easier). For example the lvl 33 sniper rifle(birthright?) very nearly exceeds my orange moded rifle with rank 38 blues in it. Overall the items seem a fair margin more powerful then equivalent lvl gear. obtained via normal methods. overall i am happy with what is available. My bone with the system is the availability of the tokens. I have yet to see any since 1.2 went live aside from the weapon freebie also i dont think this belongs in CS forum

about 2+ years from now would be my guess.