Yes it is based off the Ops leader selection. Only the Ops leader will be able to change the difficulty.

The helm has Accuracy/Absorb so I'll probably try to get another helm at least and swap the mods into something else. I still havent obtained the bracers so that should help too. Working on crafting a relic with an augment slot on it so I can throw an absorb augment in that too. Hopefully this will bring my absorb back up to something respectable. The only Rakata pieces I dont have are the gloves and bracers, earpiece, and 1 implant. Everything else is Rakata set.

Yup seems like PEBKAC to me.

Yes that is correct. Karagga drops the Rakata MH and Soa drops Rakata Chest. Got both on my Assassin when my guild raided on Tuesday. Only need the hands now!

Hey all, This question is primarily for geared end gamers, specifically tanks. I have pretty much finished out my Rakata set and I have been contemplating what can be done to make it better because as it is now it is fail. I like all the defense on the gear, have almost 30% defense chance is cool and all, but I cant justify losing tons of absorb in the process. I noticed that none of the Rakata gear comes with any mods/enhancements with absorb. I have been keeping an eye out in Hard Mode Ops for absorb mods but havent had much luck yet. So my question is how is everyone else handling the Rakata gear? Are you pulling Columi mods and swapping them in? I have considered it, and it looks like I'll only lose a little willpower and some endurance which isnt a big deal. My absorb is way too low for my comfort, its not even 30% anymore with my current Rakata gear, but my shield chance is still over 50%. Thoughts?

lolz I'm sure I have stories like this from when I leveled my Assassin, but I just cant remember any now. Thank god my guild have grown so much that we have an abundance of people to run with.... now when they screw up I can rage at them in vent, lol jk.

Hate to burst anyone's bubble but..... Force Speed is not going anywhere. This spell is pivotal for the other AC for inquisitors. It is the Assassins only gap closer and if they removed it Assassins will be broken. So I wouldnt keep asking for that to change, maybe giving something similar to other healing specs would be okay, but you cannot take it away from Inquisitors because it will seriously hurt Assassins and Bioware I'm sure is aware of that.

This whole thread is hilarious. I used to have an Op healer in our guild but he doesnt come online very much anymore. He wasn't terrible, but maybe he is the exception. I do hear a lot about this class being weak healers. Personally I bring a 1 Sorc and 1 Merc for our HM Ops.

lol Space Obama..... He actually looks more like Mike Tyson with that face tatoo from his standard customization. And yes, when I specced Darkness at around lvl 30 I used Andronikus to level the rest of the way to 50, he is definintely the best DPS and you really dont need Talos to heal except for maybe 1 or 2 encounters, but they are probably doable without heals.

On Hard Mode: Right side: is the flame and applies the high damage debuff on the boss and removes the armor stacks, but it also gives him a stacking damage buff Middle: Sucks in all of the droids from the lower level and destroys them. This usually isnt necessary, but it can come in handy if you have raid members that are experiencing video lag due to the number of droids on their screen. Left: is the Ice and it removes all of the bosses armor stacks and his stacking damage buff. We usually go right -->left and repeat, but once in a while go middle instead of left then back to right then left etc...

For 8man Operations, the typical group is: 1 MT 1 OT 4 DPS 2 Healers If you have good healers and a good MT most fights can be done without an OT. Some still require an OT, but some guilds will just bring a DPS Specced tank class and have them throw on tank gear or just use their tanking CD's when they are needed.

1. Operations can take as little as 45min-1hour. Obviously this depends on how well everyone is geared and how well they execute the fights. 2. Yes, I think that most operations are run by guilds, but I do occasionally see people looking for PUG's for Operations, my guess is they dont have enough guildies to fill all the spots in an Operation. Normal Mode ops are not very difficult and can probably be ran with a full group of PUG's 3. Yes, Operations are end game content, you must be level 50 to do operations.

There are plenty of threads explaining the differences of all the different tanking classes in this game in the tanking class forums. I would recommend you go check those out. My personal opinion is that Assassin tanking is freaking awesome. I am MT for my guild and we have cleared 10/10 Hard Mode Ops bosses and are currently working on NiM. There are only slight differences in the overall mitigation for all 3 tank classes so I wouldnt make this your deciding factor. I think it is really all just down to playstyle. Dont take any one person's opinion as truth because from what I have seen on these forums you can look one place and find one answer and look elsewhere and find the exact opposite viewpoint. For example, the tanking forums have a lot of threads saying that Sith Warrior tanking is a pain in the neck and they are terrible. Earlier in this thread I saw a post about how great they are. Everyone has their own opinion. Take a look at all the tank classes abilities and decide which one suits your playstyle. I originally rolled Assassin because I wanted to be the stealthy stabby type, but then realized that wasnt as fun as I had hoped and switched to tanking(I have lots of tanking experience from other MMO's) I freaking love tanking on my assassin. We have great utility as a tank and can tank anything in this game, but there are some fights where we just outshine the rest because of some of our great utility. Soa comes to mind for those of you wondering what I'm talking about. Force Shroud is amazing for tanking Soa.

The intent of my post wasnt to flame you guys for saying it isnt bugged. Not to mention I did say FOR THOSE OF YOU THAT..... meaning if you think it isnt bugged. If you dont fall into that category then the post was not intended for you. And I'm pretty sure I have read more than a couple of posts saying it isnt bugged, which is why I made my post.

My guild doesnt use tanks to click the switches at all. We have our 2 Merc DPS clicking switches up top. On normal mode we go right, middle, right, middle, etc. On Hard Mode the fight is a bit different so we go right, left, right, left, right, middle, right, left etc... Only one of clickers switches to DPS the boss after the fire. Once the boss is pulled away from him he moves back to clicking and its rinse and repeat from there. I normally MT(Darkness Assassin) this fight and we have our Powertech OT. He taunts off of me the first time when I have 4 or 5 stacks of the debuff. From then on we just taunt off each other when our stacks fall off. This eases the stress on the healers. Make sure you're melee is killing stun droids, but only when the boss isnt on fire. Its important not to miss out on any DPS when the boss has the debuff. In our 2nd group I respecced to DPS to run normal and help them get gear, when we did that I was up top clicking switches and had a merc DPS up there with me helping out. I was would just keep clicking switches the entire fight and never went down to DPS the boss. Our Merc was helping DPS a little bit. If I fell off for some reason we just had our Sorc Healer pull me back up. Worked out well we cleared on the 2nd or 3rd attempt and it was my first time actually being a clicker.

For those of you saying it is not bugged I think you have just been very fortunate. My guild has been clearing this for like 5 weeks now and we never had an issue with it. Then we were helping out a 2nd guild group with Normal EV last weekend and sure enough we had a 1 click solution for the final wheel on North side and it was unclickable. We reset and did it again with no problems. I had not see any bugs prior this one time and didnt run into any last night when our main group cleared Hard Mode. I was also starting to wonder if it was bugged at all because we had never had issues. It is definintely a luck of the draw situation, but its supposed to be fixed in patch 1.1.5 so hopefully it will be corrected and working as intended next week.

haha! I see what you did there. I approve. lol

I'm sure the stategies listed here work. Here is how my guild handles the encounter: We keep our Powertech tank in his tank gear and I switch to my DPS gear, I'm normally MT, but I have the most DPS gear between us. Ranged stays spread out around the circle and melee tries to stay on the bosses back. We do our best to call out who has aggro from the boss. I know a lot of people say to have that person move away from the group, but my guild does the exact opposite. The person that has aggro on the boss stays right where they are and eats the damage, everyone else in the raid repositions to prevent getting swiped. The reason we do it this way is because when we were trying it the other way we always had the person tanking the boss accidentally run the same direction as other people and ended up dragging the boss over multiple people and causing him to swipe 2 or 3 people at once. While this probably requires more movement from our raid it also eases the strain on the healers because we usually only have 1 person get hit by the boss at a time. Before we adopted this strat we were having issues with people running the boss through healers and causing healers to take unnecessary swipe damage and then not being able to catch up on heals. Eventually this would cause us to lose 1 or 2 DPS or even one of those healers. On a side note, when the big cats spawn, we just have our Powertech tank offtank while everyone else continues to DPS the boss, they dont hit very hard so its doesn't cause any issues. On NiM mode we might try CC'ing the adds instead because I'm sure we will need every last bit of DPS. The key to this fight is positioning and good DPS. I bring 2 marauders in my guild to our raids because they have that bloodthirst buff that gives their group 15% increased dmg for 15 secs. Since we have 2 they just chain them together for 30 secs at a time. In Hard Mode you should have enough time to use it at the start and then again towards the end. Keep in mind it only affects the 4 players in the marauders group. I try to keep all my DPS in that group. If you are hitting enrage at 30% in HM then you probably need some more DPS, perhaps you can consider having your tanks repsec DPS and then just CC the cats. They will have to respec back after this fight though because Jarg&Sorno require at least 1 tank, preferably 2. And dont forget to have your whole group use stims before the fight and if you need even more DPS have them pick up some adrenals to go along with their DPS cooldowns.

The change was implemented to prevent medal farming in Warzones instead of actually helping your team win in warzones. I for one am happy for the change, I'm sick of losing Huttball because my team decides to just farm damage and kills instead of actually participating in the game. This combined with vote to kick (to prevent people from stealth afk after they get their medals) that they said they are implementing in 1.2 and it makes people actually have to work with their team instead of being a 1 man show in warzones.

Good catch. I corrected my post. I'm at work at the moment so I didnt have a way to double check. I just assumed it was elemental because you know, its lightning, lol. Thanks!

What others are saying about Accuracy is correct, however someone mentioned that accuracy effects block (which is really shield in this game) and that is not correct. Attacks in this game each get 2 rolls. The first roll to determine if the attack hits and a 2nd roll to determine if the attack that hit will be a normal hit, a critical hit, or a shielded hit. Accuracy will only effect the first roll of the attack. So it will help negate the opponents chance to miss/dodge/parry the attack. Once it is determined that the attack will hit then the 2nd roll takes place to determine how hard it will hit. Crit takes pecendence so in theory if someone has 100% crit chance and their opponent has a 100% shield chance, the attack will still crit. This is why shield can be pretty useless in PVP because a lot of classes have procs that guarantee abilities will crit. On the topic of the Armor Pen from Surging Charge: Kinetic and Energy damage are mitigated by armor. Internal and Elemental are not. With that said, I think you misread the tooltip for Charge Mastery. It states that WHILE SURGING CHARGE IS ACTIVE, you will have 9% armor penetration on your attacks. Meaning as long as you have surging charge turned on you have the buff. This basically has no benefit for the attacks that do internal/elemental damage, but it will buff the damage for any attacks you have that are Kinetic/Energy damage. So the discharge from Surging Charge is unaffected, but the damage from Voltaic Slash will be affected and so will the damage from Sabre Strike, Shock and anything else labeled as Kinetic or Energy damage. I didnt mean to write a wall of text, but I hope this helps. Edit: Corrected info about Shock being affected by Armor Pen.

The Patch 1.1.5 Notes say this is getting fixed. Guess we will see if it works next week!

Like others said its after he does his knockback. I dont think its on a precise timer. For our Ops he seems to do it more at the beginning and then once he goes under 50% or so he replaces salvo's with Storm Protocol every once in a while. I could be completely wrong, but it seems like there is a long break in between salvo's after the first couple times.

16man Ops are available in all the difficulties - Normal, Hard, and Nightmare. You can do 16man without a full 16 people but how well you do will depend on how much gear you guys have. Mobs in 16man hit much harder than 8man obviously because it is intended for more people. A typical Ops group for 16man will be something like this: 2 tanks 4 healers 10 DPS Keep in mind that 16man and 8man share a lockout so you cant do both on the same week on normal mode. Same thing applies to 8man Hard/NiM and 16man Hard/NiM they share a lockout. There are Youtube videos around of people doing 16man normal with only 8 people, but this was a group of people that was fully Rakata geared.

Normally, we just kill Alon(healer) then kill Commander Jorland with his bubble up, and finally we switch to Massey. Jorland's shield is not that bad and it prevents him from doing uber damage with his grenades. You can even throw the tank on Alon for interrupts and have everyone kill Jorland first, this also works pretty well.