So let me get this straight. The point of the quest is that there are a bunch of droids about to destroy an apartment complex by blowing themselves up. You have to stop them from blowing themselves up. Then they all run at you and blow themselves up. Then you succeed at the mission. I.... ....wat.

There is a reason WoW did away with that sort of requirement for raiding and moved to freely craftable and tradeable consumption items as the out-of-raid "requirement" for raiding.

Soa in EV may be harder, but the other four are very doable. In fact, the first boss in EV is probably the only one that will remotely challenge you the first time if you know the fight mechanics going into it. The middle 3 bosses are so trivially easy they may as well just be higher-HP trash packs (hell, they're probably easier than some trash packs). What my ops group usually does is run 4/5 EV for some quick and easy upgrades, then heads to KP, and finishes up with Soa if we have time. And really, just skip hardmode for the middle three bosses in EV and do nightmare; it's barely a step up in difficulty. One of our members did perfectly fine on his nightmare duel in Council....wearing questing blues and custom gear.

I have no idea what causes balls to multi-tick on people. I've run through balls head-on with their movement and at an angle; I've run through balls with force speed and at normal run speed; I've run through them with and without Force Armor... I've even tried jumping on them just on the off chance that it would do something. For all the things I've tried, I've seen both multi-ticks and expected behavior out of them in every condition. My best guess is that they have a rate at which they AE pulse and if you're unlucky enough to run through one while it's pulsing it has a chance to go haywire and hit you upwards of 3-4 times depending. How you're supposed to tell that it's between AE pulses so you can safely detonate it? Hell if I know.

To add to the list: On Bonethrasher this week, he randomly reset on us after KB'ing someone. Said person didn't even fly into the acid and die, he just....reset immediately afterward. No idea what caused it; haven't seen it before; only happened one time. edit: Anymore, Bonethrasher's butt cleave is just funny to me rather than frustrating. I can't wait to get target-of-target to see if he really does swap targets like an ADD squirrel on cocaine or if it's just a graphics thing.

The main problems I've seen with Soa that are outside of the raid's control to a point where it warrants complaining until they get fixed are: 1)Lightning balls multi-ticking their intended target. 2)Soa resets in P3. 3)Pylons not taking out Soa's shield. These are the things that I think actually suck so much fun out of the fight that it's a chore even if you manage to work through them. In addition to them, there are some bugs that by rights should be fixed, although there's a work around for them: 4)Missing pieces of floor (reset the instance every time you wipe) 5)Gripped person during P2->P3 transition being sent to the Twilight Zone (just don't push the phase during grip) 6)Lightning Balls going invisible. (Use nameplates) 7)Shield staying up after transition despite killing all the energy node things. (Make sure first energy node thing dies first) 8)People being unable to see spell effects during P1 (applies to other bosses, too; just call out over vent/mumble for them to move). And then there are just some things that I personally think are stupid mechanics for a raid boss, despite being probably intended: 9)Person focused with lightning ball being targeted by grip in P2 10)Tank able to be mindtrapped during P3 11)Soa moving slow as **** in P3, despite unpredictable Pylon impact locations. 12)Lack of ground effect showing Pylon impact site. There are definitely ways to deal with these. For example, you can mitigate (10) by running two tanks or having a DPS with a tank CD taunt. That said, I think they just kinda take fun out of what would otherwise be a pretty fun fight. As Paragon's Lazei said, there's no such thing as "RNG," there's only people failing to respond to something (http://www.paragon.fi/blogs/rng-not-excuse). On the other hand, the things above, except (12), start to stretch the RNG factor to the point where it becomes frustrating innately rather than frustrating when you fail at it (compare to the RNG of lightning ball targets - an interesting and possibly fun mechanic innately; frustrating when your raiders can't handle it). (12) I think is just kind of dumb given the fact that pylons typically hover at a height where you have to specifically contort your camera to see them and it seems like every other time this has been the case in any MMO I've played, you're given visual warning on the ground so that you don't have to play camera acrobatics. Admittedly, this is largely a point of aesthetics rather than a point of difficulty. If you're failing at (1)-(3), I think you're rightfully indignant at the developers. If you're failing to (4)-(8), yeah, it's probably still on the developers but c'mon you can work around those. If you're failing at anything else, it's probably an issue somewhere in your raid's performance (disclaimer: there are some things mentioned in this thread, like pylons killing someone nowhere near them, that I've never seen, so I can't really comment on them).

First, How is that boring for the tank? Even with a threat meter telling you where you stand, the onus is still on you to do as much threat as you can since not only does that increase the damage threshold for your DPS, your damage still contributes to killing the boss. Second, I can definitely understand how people would prefer not having a threat meter where the discussion boils down to "Hey, you pulled threat, stop sucking" "What? You didn't generate enough threat, stop sucking." "no you" "no you" rather than one where an objective metric to gauge performance by makes the discussion short, to the point, and fixed the next pull. We don't even treat each other like that in my guild, but if you're playing with other people on an MMO expect to see someone acting like a ******* over performance - the question is just how arbitrary or objective that performance can be demonstrated. Hell, I've seen it in FPs I've pugged. Back before I was Op-geared, some guy got mad at me for being unable to heal through Interrogator's bugged spawns (10 or so adds up at once) even though I kept the group up for a solid minute or so despite no one using CC, killing anything, or effectively tanking them. Slightly different situation than threat meters, but if I had had an objective healing meter I could have linked it and told him to shut up; instead, I got to deal with his ******tery the rest of the FP because I had nothing to objectively back myself up with. How does a threat meter make for lazier players or easier fights? You still have to watch threat. You still have to generate threat. If anything, lack of information and an easily trivialized threat mechanic via off-the-gcd threat dumps dumb the game down far more than a threat meter ever will. Alright, I'll own up to not knowing that. I'm a healer, so the only real times I've ever had to use a threat dump are on trash and while spam healing Foreman Crusher's first jump (i.e. I don't have to use it with any regularity). If that's true, though, outside of a couple DPS in our raid getting talked to next raid night, I'm wondering why people are arguing so vehemently against putting in a threat meter. "Hit GCD-less threat dump on CD; blame tanks if you pull aggro" is a far more mindless way of dealing with the threat mechanic than having it be a meaningful decision point for DPS and giving them information about it. In fact, it trivializes the entire point behind the mechanic in the first place, really.

I'm not sure you understand how threat meters work. See, despite your asinine insinuations to the contrary, a threat meter doesn't generate threat for you, so adding a threat meter isn't going to let a tank stand there doing nothing and isn't going to remove the risk of stealing threat from a DPS. All a threat meter does is give everyone an actual indication of where they stand on threat, meaning both tanks and DPS can ultimately be held to a higher standard of play than the current situation where you can't exactly punish someone for not generating enough threat or generating too much threat because you have no objective metric by which to measure how much threat they're generating. This is important when you don't suck at DPS and want to help your raid the most. The best DPS isn't a paranoid guy hitting his threat dump on CD, but that's what all raid-conscious DPS are reduced to under TOR's present system. Yeah, I have a lot of fun failing at fights because DPS trying to maximize themselves to beat an enrage timer repeatedly get one-shot for stealing threat after being given no indication whatsoever that they were near the aggro threshold at all. I also have a lot of fun failing at fights because of enrage timers since our best DPS are now (rightfully)paranoid lunatics wasting GCDs on unnecessary threat dumps and we have no objective metric to determine who among the DPS core needs to pick it up and by how much. I don't know how anyone is actually happy with the lack of information given about player performance in TOR. If you're sitting there trying to get your raid group to improve themselves and down a boss, the best you can do in TOR is an ineffectual "PLAY BETTER" with no specifics because the only thing you know about your raid group is who your best DPS players are.....because they're the ones who keep pulling threat.

Pretty much. Asking a DPS to maximize DPS output on a fight without pulling threat presently in TOR is like asking someone to throw darts at a dartboard blindfolded while a guy moves it around.

fastest way to level biochem: gather stuff; craft using stuff. TOR professions are really pretty quick and easy to level, even if you're going into it blind. As for the resuable schematics, they're purchasable from the trainer when you hit 400 Biochem skill. Nothing really stands out to me as worthwhile at 50 besides the recipes that you get from your trainer and RE'ing. Then again, I power leveled it, so I didn't get many RE recipes while leveling.

I...what? WoW subs dropped by 1.8 million last year, which roughly corresponds to the release of Cataclysm in December '10. A lot of those were from China, granted, but I'm pretty sure the numbers don't favor your argument that making Cataclysm hard and grindy like pre-Wrath era got more subs for WoW. Or get this: If 8 and 16 are on par with each other per difficulty level, then the casual players can play normal/hard in the group format they want and the hardcore players can play hard/nightmare in the group format they want. No point arbitrarily declaring 8 mans for "casuals/bads" and 16 mans for "hardcore" when a metric already exists to differentiate the two.

Put one person on each console. Solving the puzzle faster is more important than having more DPS time for the people doing the puzzle. There are two general strats for who you put on the puzzle, usually it's a healer and two DPS (8 man). In 16 we have two healers up top and the second one acts as a fill-in to take care of the debuff. regardless, the two different strats are: 1)have ranged do the puzzle, throw DPS on him while he has 0 stacks or 2)have melee do the puzzle and just stay at their consoles solving it instead of DPS'ing in between solves. We've done it both ways in our 16, and for us, at least, we have an easier time doing the melee-on-the-consoles-continually-solving strategy.

So there is actually a debuff? I didn't notice one (hardly surprising with that short of time window and how terrible raid frames are for seeing them), so I just tried to see the HP drop and throw a shield on the person. I'll try to get cleanses off next week, thanks.

WoW's raiding model in Vanillia and BC was functionally terrible. It may have felt cool if you were lucky enough to get picked up by a guild willing to redo attunements and gear farming for you (or if you were selfish enough to ditch your guild for one a higher up on progression), but for most people it wound up like this: Step 1: Farm resist gear and/or attunements for everyone in your raid. Step 2: Attempt higher tier raid. Step 3: While undergoing learning process in new raid, have half your raiders poached by guild farther in progression than you. Step 4: Farm resist gear and/or attunements for new recruits by redoing raid no one wants to run anymore. Step 5: Attempt higher tier raid. Step 6: While trying to teach new recruits fights in new raid, have raid members poached by guild farther in progression than you. Step 7: Farm resist gear and/or attunements for new recruits by redoing raid no one wants to run anymore. Step 8: Weep quietly because you're stuck doing Kara/MC for an entire expansion with occasional forays into SS/TK/BWL, since your only real options are jumping ship to a guild farther in progression than you or repeatedly doing a raid no one wants to do in vain hope that maybe this time you'll get some loyal people in your group that don't suck at raiding. On the other hand, you could be part of the top 10% or so that, usually for arbitrary reasons, belonged to a good progression guild from the get go. Congratulations! You're now able to run raids beyond the first tier of endga- oh wait, what's that? Your buddy wants to play? One of your healers ran into real-life issues and has to quit? Anything else happened to throw a minor perturbance into the raiding availability of your members? Your options are now: 1)poach new raid member from lower tier guild like *******es 2)Farm resist gear and/or attunements for new recruits by redoing raid no one wants to run anymore. Man, that was such a fun era of raiding.

I cannot for the life of me figure out one of the mechanics in Jarg and Sorno. Near the end of the fight, they have the same mechanic in both 8 and 16: One announces "Your turn!" and hits a random player with some sort of instant attack. About a full GCD later, the other announces "My turn!" and hits that same player with another instant attack. On 8 man, the damage from this one-two combo is barely even noticeable. On 16 man? Last night it two-shot someone, from full health, even though I managed to get a shield on them between the first and second hits (My sage is in a mix of rakata and columi gear). I cannot fathom the point of this mechanic, and even moreso, the inane difference between 8-man and 16-man. What is the point of this mechanic? Is it supposed to be healable? If so, why does the 16-man version two-shot someone at full health through a sage shield? Is it supposed to act as a soft enrage? If so, why does the 8-man version barely scratch a person? I understand the idea of the mechanic archetype where players slowly get picked off one by one, and I also understand mechanics where a single person might get hit heavy with a follow up on the way, forcing healers to respond quickly. What I don't understand is why there's this weird dissociation between 8 and 16 man and why, in one version, you can almost ignore it while in the other version you may as well ignore it because you're helpless to do anything anyway.

ah. must not have updated the crafting UI yet. I thought I had read that in the notes, but I kept seeing it listed as one in the UI.

pretty much. 4 epic-quality materials for a single adrenal is just insane.

I can't help but think that everyone who rants about how awesome it was to raid with large groups either a)didn't have to organize them and/or b)has totally forgotten about the obscene amount of downtime you had to deal with when you got that many people together to do something. 40 man raids in WoW were bad enough, but I remember being apart of my server's Sleeper kill in Everquest (a couple hundred people). There was probably more time spent trying to get enough people together than was spent actually fighting the boss (and killing the sleeper literally took hours to do). Not only that, but the one thing I absolutely hated about large-group raiding is how little I mattered. Get an 8 man group together, I'm one of two healers keeping everyone alive - I wind up with more responsibility, more chances to display my ability as a healer, and feel a lot more important to the group. 16 mans, I'm one of four. 40mans? Multi-hundred raid groups? I always felt like I could afk, alt tab, or watch TV and hit a button occasionally on most bosses. The only bosses that I couldn't do that on were bosses we never killed because it was bloody impossible to motivate 40+ people to give a damn unless you were the top of the top in your server's hierarchy and could actually threaten to sit people for sucking. Even worse for me, it always felt like success was completely out of my ability to affect. It didn't matter how hard or skillfully I played, if the collective mind of the group wasn't in it, I couldn't swing our performance either for good or ill. There were no awesome displays of individual skill (or at least, they were very rare), there were no game-changing efforts by individual people (or again, very rare)... Either the hive mind of your raid team was on their game or it wasn't, and you were largely unable to affect that in any way. This is still true to an extent even in TOR's easy encounters, but at least now I feel like if I play my absolute best, I can make a significant difference in a win or loss. Face it, large groups may feel epic the first couple of times you're in them because they're new, they're exciting, and you're probably not in command so you can sit back and go along for the ride. Realistically, though, they're a nightmare to organize, a nightmare to keep coordinated and motivated, and whenever a true choice has been given between large group and small group format, player bases (on average) have inevitably and overwhelmingly chosen the latter.

.... rofl.

Yes, in Hyjal you would have to clear trash again after wiping to a boss. It was also clearly intended because it happened every time you wiped. Pylons? You only have to re-clear trash because you have to reset the instance. If you wipe without the fight bugging (i.e. if you run out of time doing NSSN for some wild reason, get overwhelmed by arklays, but the wheels don't go inactive), you won't have to reset the instance and you won't have to redo trash. Only when the wheels go inactive because you didn't use NSSN do you have to reset the instance and redo the trash. This is very obviously the behavior of a bugged fight and it baffles me that people see it as anything else. Do you consider it an intended mechanic that mobs at the end of the Quesh republic questline will evade bug if you knock them back, forcing you to exit the area, reset the quest, and re-clear all of the trash before them? If clearing trash were an intended consequence of wiping on pylons, it would happen every time you wiped on pylons, not just when the wheels go inactive. How could either of those mechanics be considered a bug? Those situations might be unfortunate and possibly even unfair (I won't argue that, personally), but they don't force you to reset the instance when they happen, so any comparison between them and the Pylons bug is rather inane.

Or you can be a rational individual, figure how to deal with problems, and yet still note that they are problems to be fixed rather than letting the status quo stand, acting like an elitist ******* towards people who want to improve the situation, and doing nothing productive with your oh-so-incredible talents. Go ahead, ask me how many times my guild has failed at pylons since we started operations. (The answer is 3 - twice the first night we ever tried it and once when even NSSN failed us.)

Well, there's been some sort of work around for every bug in game that I've encountered or heard of so far. I suppose that means the devs just get to sit there sipping champaigne and congratulating themselves on having nothing to work on besides deciding what emotes should and shouldn't be allowed on speeders, right?

Are you Bill O'Reilly's secret TOR account or something?

It's like talking to a brick wall. Okay, lets try this again. Intended fight mechanics punish you with death when you fail at them. Intended fight mechanics wipe your raid when you fail at them. Intended fight mechanics give you a repair bill when you fail at them. Intended fight mechanics do not force you to reset the instance and re-clear trash before every boss attempt when you fail at them. What is so hard about this? No one is saying that the fight isn't possible, we're just saying it's got a dumb bug in it that needs to be looked at.

Yes, because it's clearly intended that you have to soft reset an instance for failing at a fight mechanic, and we should simply ignore how inane this is because there exists a work around for the problem. Further, NSSN isn't even guaranteed to work; it just has a much higher probability of not bugging when you do it that way. You can roll in here with your elitist verbal vomit all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that the fight is bugged and should be fixed.