Always funny to see people pulling numbers out of their *** only to be proven wrong by an actual fact. The reality is, if devs provide the content, people will raid. You can see it in WoW, you can see it in FFXIV and you could see it in this game at the beginning, when they were actually releasing operations. I mean, 38% raid participation for a game that was heavily marketed as a KOTOR successor with "immersive story" and drew in a lot of single player oriented people who never played MMO before is pretty damn good. I understand that Ops were on the chopping block right after PvP, but trying to claim that raids are niche and only a fraction of player base plays them in every MMO is disingenuous and frankly ignorant and stupid. The numbers are out there, hell, they are even linked in this thread. All you have to do is look at them.

Ok, let's forget about PvP. In PvE, the skill is broken. Anyone who's done the story can probably atest to the fact that any mob that had a stun or knockback went right through Entrench. I've done EV two times since the patch and Gharj had punted me away with Entrench up almost everytime, and when he didnt, he at least knocked me down. The Infernal Council Marauder's knockbacks completely ignores it as well. In KP, the Karaga's Drill attack ignores Entrench as well, though I believe that was the case even before the expansion. I havent tried any other ops, but so far unless you take the utlity to reduce AoE damage, the skill is worthless in PvE.

If you look through his rotation you'll see some TDs replaced with rifle shot. For me, over the course of 1 mill dummy parse I usually need to do that maybe 2 times on average. All depends on crits.

Jesus this thread disgusts me. You people want examples of games with better F2P model than SWTOR? Alright, let me give you a list: TERA Rift Neverwinter Online Champinos Online Star Trek Online Do I need to go on? Alright. Lotro DDO DCUO Firefall I could probably list more, but these are just the ones I can think of from the top of my head. You know why they are all better than SWTOR? It's because SWTORs f2p model is terrible. Limiting action bars, limiting the gear you can use, limiting the number of WZs and FPs you can do per week, limiting who knows what else. "Oh but swtor lets you play the whole story for free. Except expansions of course" Guess what. All the other games listed let you do that as well (well, Lotro and DDO dont, I'll give you that, but their model is a bit different from the typical f2p). And none of them has such an abusive model as SWTOR. Also I'm a subscriber but apparently one of the few who doesn't act like a condescending ***** towards others just because I shell money on the game on monthly basis.

I'd question your reading skills as you apparently missed the part where I said I've been in multiple pugs that all cleared it without an issue. After all, that is the point of this thread, right? That pugs should be able to clear the content. Well, they can. If you believe that having 1 experienced raider in the group suddenly makes the group less of a PUG, then I don't know what to tell you. What I can tell you is that if you're doing 6k ehps on underlurker as you claimed earlier, you're on par with the best healers in the game on that boss. Which means you should be able to carry even a fail group through that boss (at least according to your logic).

If you are terrible at your class, you will not clear SM Ops. That is as it should be. That's why it's an end game content. If you want your casual fun (and I dont mean this in a derogatory sense), you've got HM FPs. The ops bosses require very little coordination on SM, most of them is just DPS/healing check that can be passed with 180/186 gear (thats what our guild cleared it at when it came out). So, if you can't do it in 190/192/198 gear, that means someone in your group is not pulling their weight. If you expect the gear to be handed out to you even though you have couple of dead weights in your group, then you will be sorely disappointed. Also, every pug I've been in in the last 2 weeks have cleared ToS. So I'm not quite sure where the sentiment that it's too hard is coming from. If YOUR pugs are constantly struggling at underlurker, maybe you should start looking at YOUR preformance instead of crying out for nerf.

If you don't plan on doing Ops, then comms gear is the best you can get when it comes to PvE. All of the people saying comms gear is trash talk about it in regards to token gear from operations, where 192 token gear is better than ultimate commendations gear (which is 198). So, if you don't plan on doing ops, grinding elite and ult comms and buying gear for them is your progression when it comes to gear. If you plan on doing ops, augmented 186 or 190 gear is enough for SM operations, and then your goal is to get token gear from the ops and filling the blanks with elite/ult comms gear that youget along the way.

Actually, they said "We're doing lots of stuff around flashpoints and operations and raid bosses and PvP and that stuff. But it's all about story this year." (http://www.polygon.com/2015/6/15/8736559/star-wars-old-republic-knights-of-the-fallen-empire-expansion) If you want to quote someone, at least have the decency to actually quote what they said. But I understand that you need to make the "quote" work for you so you can spin it into the whole "bioware hates their subscribers" thing you've got going here. Also I do enjoy the fact that somehow everyone on this forum has an insight into the development process at bioware while also being able to deduce extensive information about the expansion from a CGI trailer and couple of lines of quotes given so far. I mean, I even saw somebody posting the roadmap to the release of new ops! Truly incredible.

I feel like everybody should read this sentence before pressing the "Submit Reply" button. There would be a lot less pages in this thread if they did.

I'm just curius if we have something like this on TRE? I know I've read a while back that something like this works / worked very well on the US servers. Basicaly a channel for poeple who want to raid to have easier time forming groups, since it can reach people who are not on the fleet (or wherever you decide to post your LFG msgs). You can join the channel with your alts and have an acces to it while leveling etc., look for a specific role if your guild run is unexpectadly missing a person etc. I'd imagine a random pugger wouldn't go through the trouble of joining a custom channel for raiding so there is a good chance the people using this channel would actually understand the basics about raiding. So, does something like this exist?

Tab targetting works nicely. If you're high enough level, you should have a spammable AoE attack that can be used to grab the initial aggro and also help keeping the aggros of everything around you during the skirmish. Also remember that AoE taunt is your friend. You don't wanna use it the moment you jump in, but rather when you see mobs are starting to turn away from you. In ideal world, you wouldn't need to worry about normal / silver mobs, as they should be killed first by the dps and that shouldnt take more than couple of seconds.

Sweet, so all our group that is not stacked with BHs has to do to kill Revan is to kill Revan 7-8 times before hand to get the MHs. Nice kill, but ultimately proves nothing.

You think you could share your stats? You using any alacrity, or just the usual pre 3.0 stat distribution?

So after a very brief search I found that the OP actually created a thread 2 years ago with a qoute from the dev that stated that they are focusing on faction stories rather than individual class stories. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=570875 With that in mind, what is the actual point of this thread? The news has been out there for almost 2 years now, brought to light by the OP himself. There is no "silence" from the dev team, they very openly said they are moving forward to faction stories.

Oh definitely. On the other hand, PvErs are getting new FPs, Ops and what not while PvPers are getting.... nothing. We PvErs are gonna be leveling to do new interesting content, while PvPers are gonna be leveling to grind the new set of PvP gear (I assume there is gonna be new PvP gear for level 60) in the old warzones and arenas.

You don't understand people who don't enjoy the need to have a carrot on a stick to play the game? You should probably broaden your horizons a bit then. Believe it or not, there are people who enjoy being at the level cap with the best gear they can get and just do their thing. You know, because they enjoy the game and don't need another gear set that is 5% better that they have to grind for to keep them playing. I think it's doubly understandanble for PvP, where you need to suffer the procces of getting the gear which means being completely outclassed by anyone who played more than you. Once you get your PvP gear, that's where the real fun actually starts, because you can finally be competetive. So yes, I completely understand the OP. Unlike PvE where obtaining gear is a fun procces of beating a challange, in PvP it's a painful and unfair experience until you have enough comms to buy it. I can see why PvPers would not be that enthusiastic about the expansion.

Could you provide source for those claims? I'm actually curious about it. I certainly don't remember them saying the class stoires would get a continuation in the expansions when I played at launch. Admittedly that's almost 3 years ago, so I probably wouldn't remember even if they did say it.

Of course I like the option to queue as anything my class can fulfill. Field respec exists for a reason. When I'm on my mercernary, I'm specced for DPS but queue as both dps and healer for FPs. That way, I can continue levelling and if I get picked as the role I'm not specced for, I just respec when I get into the FP. It does seem logical that this will be the case after the update as well. What I mean by this is, if they didn't change it up until now, I see no reason why they would change it in the expansion, since the Disciplines seem to be functioning in the same way as skill trees do.

Why exactly do you think the group finder will change at all for the update? Did they mention they are reworking it? Because if they don't, I see no reason for it to not work as it works now. You will be able to queue for the roles your class can fulfill, regardless of what your active spec is.

You do realize 2200 dps check is probably on par with HM SnV and TfB, right?

What's the problem again? Couple of months back we all had to go through the process of buying recruit gear, how is it suddenly such a huge issue? Do F2P get reduced credits from quests? If they manage to get their asses to 50 with the stupid XP reduction, they should be able to get the recruit gear with no problems, no? Not defending the horrible F2P model BW and EA devised, but this really isn't an issue of being F2P, just as it wasn't an issue when everybody had to buy the gear.

I'm surprised noone is mentioning Snipers. For me as a guardian it's 1) Healers 2) Snipers 2) The rest If we leave a good snipers alone on our server, they just destroy people, it's not even close.

You have no idea how BW is getting their metrics and on what basis they are balancing the classes. Or are you telling me some BW employee actually told you how they are conducting their internal testing? Do you think they play couple of matches in their office and go like "Well Rob over there did 600k healing on his sorc, lets nerf them next patch." Are you seriously that ignorant? People like you makes me sad for this community.

The very fact that you think that guards/shadows are more durable than sents (unless specced tank obviously) shows you have no idea what you're talking about. Wearing heavy armor grants you only a few % of DR as opposed to wearing a medium armor. The defense CDs are no way near as powerful as sent's (Enure: 30% extra health for 10s, focused defense: heal for 3% max health every time you take damage for 10s but eats 1 focus everytime it procs, can procs max every second, saber ward, same as sent's, first 2s 100% range/melee defense) Now moving on to sent's, while already estabilished that the armor DR is maybe 5-6% lower for kinetic/force damage. Rebuke already makes sentinels almost as durable as tanks (20% flat damage reduction is better than any mitigation stat tanks have). 30s duration, 1m cd, so up almost at all times. Pacify is 6s 90% acc debuff, which makes any class relying on white damage useless for duration. Saber Ward, same as guards. Force camo, GbtF. Considering that except saber ward, all the Sentinels defense abilities have ridiculously low CDs (45s-1m30s) compared to any other defensive cooldowns (usually 2m-3m), you cannot possibly be serious when you're claiming Sentinels are less durable than Guards/Shadows. EDIT: Cant comment on shadows specificaly, as I havent played one, but from personal exerience unless they spec tank, they are squishy, way squishier than sentinels.

You can do whatever you want with your epeen as long as it isnt here. As I said, I doubt anyone cares about it.