If you honestly believe that someone would intentionally program a fight mechanic that requires an instance reset after you fail at it, and that this is perfectly fine, intended gameplay and people just need to learn to play... I am actually speechless over your mental deficiency. Yes, the NSSN or SSSS work arounds work, but the fight is still clearly bugged and suggesting that it isn't is just asinine.

Ditto on Soa, really.

the problem is this: combined with the part where I like to think of my smuggler as not being mentally deficient enough to walk straight up to merciless sith/ruthless imperial officer/whatever that he knows is about to try taking his head off. How many conversation ambushes are defined by finding yourself in a tight spot and how many conversation ambushes are defined by stupidly walking up to a guy you know is going to try to kill you?

I can add another voice to the bugginess of this encounter since the patch. We've downed it on hardmode twice prior to tonight with no issue at all; tonight the wheels bugged out and became un-clickable after the second round every time we tried the fight.

"Hey, lets put in another conversation ambush on this next elite mob with his 2 buddies and no decent cover within 30 yards of the conversation point. Might as well throw in a 10s 'no cover! trollface.jpg' debuff just for kicks too." Because nothing says "immersion" like having my quick-witted, street-smart, self-interested, vest-wearing smuggler walk up to a Sith Lord that everyone KNOWS is about to try to take his head off and throwing around some witty banter instead of....you know... finding some good cover, shooting the guy, and talking later.

Vanilla and BC WoW's raid systems were terrible. Sure they created a "sense of wonder" towards the raids farther up the progression ladder than you, but that, if it's even a positive, is the only positive about the system. The problem with the Vanilla and BC raid systems was that you wound up with a very small handful of guilds on any server that got to run the higher tier raids (if that; my first server had only one guild that could run Naxx in Vanilla), and quite literally every other guild on the server was never going to run them. Why? Because of guild poaching. You have to farm resist gear the first go around for your whole raid. You have to get your entire raid attuned the first time. Okay, that's not so bad. Oh wait, what's that? Someone in your 40/25 man group of people decided to be selfish and quit your guild to move to a more progressed one? Guess what, you get to do all that resist gear and attunement farming again for your new recruit! Another person leaves after that? You get to do it again a third time!!! Isn't that fun? Making your senior members disgruntled, and thus more likely to jump ship on you, just because you can't catch a new person up to speed on current content without going back and re-running old raids that everyone has seen 30 times before? If you want to differentiate between the talented and devoted members of your game and the more casual and/or less skilled members of your game, do it by providing challenging content that only the talented and devoted have the skill and patience to defeat. Don't do it by creating some asinine barrier to entry that does nothing but add tedium to trying to get into endgame.

So I've gotten the opportunity to heal both 16 and 8 man Eternity Vault, and I have to say that the difference between the two is hilarious. The second and third bosses in EV are easy on both difficulties, but the first and fourth are almost laughable in how inanely skewed the balancing is between the two formats. I don't have exact numbers, but on 8 man normal, the first boss' random-target rocket seems to hit for around 40-50% of a person's health, with plenty of time to heal them before the resulting DoT kills them. On 16 man? It nukes a random raid member to within 5-10% of death, giving you roughly 1 DoT tick to cleanse or heal them before they die. And I'm not talking about a random PuG in greens; I'm talking this is the damage output against a Sage geared in Columi or better. Council has a similar surreal moment going from 8 man to 16 man difficulties: Kahesh the Reborn. What is the purpose of Kahesh the Reborn? Why is he present in a 16 man normal and not an 8 man normal, when the entire idea of the fight is that everything comes down to 1v1? Are 16 mans supposed to confer some personal advantage to individual players in a 1v1 situation that 8 mans don't have? How is it that on Hardmode 8 man, Kahesh still isn't present, making 16 man normal effectively more difficult than 8 man hardmode? And further on Council, in 8 man, there are 2 tank mobs, 2 healer mobs, and 4 DPS mobs. On 16 man, there are 4 tank mobs, 3 healer mobs, 8 DPS mobs, and Kahesh. This isn't too much of an issue since DPS and healers can handle the tank mobs without too much incident, but what exactly prompted you to design a fight that expects 4 tanks and 3 healers in a 16 man raid with two previous bosses that are effectively 1-tank, 4-healer fights? I just don't know. I'm not exactly complaining about difficulty persea; we still killed bosses. It just baffles me how inanely unbalanced the two formats are, despite being on the exact same difficulty setting.

Be careful with HoT'ing non-tanks. At very least, you should be hitting rejuv on your tank every other CD so you keep the armor buff up on them.

I find it kinda odd that you can get social points for getting one other person and doing a quest, but gather 7/15 other people to down Operations bosses and nada. Is that just me?

Post of the year.

It seems like Snap Shot's effect randomly cancels itself on me all the time. One of my favorite openers is to roll into cover, start an Aimed Shot, and follow immediately with a Charged Burst. Sometimes, however, I roll into cover, see the Snap Shot buff go up, start my Aimed Shot, and watch as Snap Shot immediately falls off for seemingly no reason. It only seems to happen in natural cover, rather than the personal shield you can throw up when no cover is available. Anyone else having issues like this?

Oh you're right, my bad. I forgot about the ones in the area with the excavators. You tend to rip through those with Ops gear, so their cast only tries to go off once; easily interruptable. No, I'm referring more to all of the mobs while leveling that have AE spells that deal similar damage for their level, but have CDs short enough that you can't interrupt or stun all of them.

All mobs with heavy damage AE spells are controlled by a single person and it's a woman? How do you know this, are you a wizard?

I'd missed you guys since getting my main to 50 and not seeing any of you in solo daily content! What's that? You want to nuke my alt's companion to hell and back with your AoE damage? Well go right ahead, good buddy, I'll just stand here yelling at him ineffectually while he stares blindly back at me dumbfounded that I would put him on passive during a fight! Would you like to go for tea later? Maybe talk about the drool stain ol' Corso left trying to figure out how to navigate out of your Lightning Storm?

You don't need mouseovers to be good, but they do raise the skill ceiling on what you're able to accomplish as a healer. I would draw a comparison here to Keybinding + mouse turning vs Clicking action bars + keyboard turning for tanks/DPS. A clicker can be good, better even than most bad players who keybind, but will not be as good as a similarly talented player who keybinds. It's just a simple consequence of one method being more efficient and effective than the other*. The fractions of a second you save by using mouseover instead of hard targeting may not individually be the difference between life and death, but they certainly add up across a fight. edit: *Just to cover my bases: There are other ways to boost healing efficiency too (e.g. click-healing), so it's not just method 1 vs method 2 like clicking vs keybinding is, but you take my meaning on the general idea of efficient method vs inefficient method.

I agree that you can differentiate bad from good regardless of the toolbox each player is given. Hell, even if the toolbox was a single button that you just spammed repeatedly, there would probably still be nuances that good players would figure out and bad players wouldn't. That said, I do think that the more well designed the toolbox you give healers, the higher you can push the skill ceiling. The higher you can push the skill ceiling, the more you can allow the truly talented to display their abilities and the more you can meet them at their skill level with the challenges you give them. There aren't just "good" and "bad" healers. There are world first healers. There are regional top 100 healers. There are average-heroic-raid-guild healers. There are healers that don't see heroic modes, but dominate normals. You get the idea. I think the notion that WoW eventually got to the state of "required" addons demonstrates this rather eloquently, honestly. Vanilla WoW healing was about on par to what we have now in TOR (perhaps with less interesting individual class mechanics), and not too much of a step above CH chains and battle rez zerging in terms of its complexity. However, the player base itself (aided by the fact that Blizzard allowed customization in the form of macros and addons) pushed the skill ceiling higher of its own accord and Blizzard allowed this instead of stymieing it. So, the good players figured out macros and created addons, among other things like establishing an impressive knowledge base of game information on the internet, to help them capitalize on their latent abilities, play more efficiently, etc; the developers created challenges to match the higher skill ceiling; and eventually through a long process and multiple expansions we go from a Ragnaros fight with, by best recall, 3-4 unique mechanics (melee knockback, caster knockback, adds, possibly something I'm forgetting) to a Ragnaros fight that has somewhere around 20. The players were the ones who drove the game in that direction by raising the skill ceiling of the game. Now, I almost share the queasiness over mandatory third party addons, but I think if things get to that point, it demonstrates something about the current state of the game. Mandatory third party addons indicate that players have figured out a boost to efficiency so profound that one of two things is happening: Sometimes an addon or macro is just clearly overstepping its bounds - mostly when an addon begins to flat out making decisions for the player (recall the AVR fiasco at the end of Wrath of the Lich King). This is a significant issue because it raises the skill floor . I.e. in addition to allowing talented players more opportunity to excel, it literally plays the game for bad players and prevents them from failing. As much as trolls bemoan things like macros, addons like WoW's Grid, mouseovers, etc. they most assuredly do not fall into this category because they don't make decisions for the player. Addons like AVR start to tread in the territory of making decisions for the player and I agree with shutting them down. Other times, I think that it simply demonstrates how limiting, or possibly incomplete, the fundamentals built into the game are. In this case, whatever tool we're talking about isn't raising the skill floor and literally preventing failure, but is an undeniable boost to efficiency for those who know how to use it. If anything, I think the onus here is on the developer to then create a first-party version of it. For that second category, essentially, it's not the addon's fault it's mandatory; it's more the developers' fault for not including it in the first place. Side note, I know I'm laying a lot of this at the feet of what is probably an already overstressed development team, but this is the kind of stuff that just has to be taken care of if you're going to compete with a behemoth like WoW and believe me when I say that I want TOR to be able to compete with a behemoth like WoW. .....But seriously. "Grapple" on those trash mobs in Eternity Vault. What the ****, man?

Because that doesn't tell me who a mob is targeting beyond a blind guess based on where it turns to or a horribly clunky series of keystrokes to see who's on the guy's **** list. Take an example: All good healers are preventative healers rather than reactionary healers. Lets say a DPS gets overzealous in a tank and spank fight and pulls threat. This is how various healers respond to the situation: Bad or Inexperienced healer Healer has tank targetted -> Boss targets DPS -> DPS takes damage -> Healer targets DPS -> Healer begins to cast heal on DPS. Best possible response from TOR healer Healer has tank targetted -> Boss targets DPS -> Healer sees boss turn, swaps tank with focus, assists target -> DPS has probably already taken damage -> Healer begins to cast heal on DPS. Good healer in other games (i.e. with mouseovers, good UI) Healer has boss targetted healing tank with mouseovers -> Boss targets DPS, aggro warning shows up on target-of-target or raid frames -> Healer begins casting heal or instantly uses mitigation ability on DPS -> DPS takes damage -> Healer already halfway through cast of heal and/or damage was mitigated. Which of the other two healers is the best healer in TOR closer to? Yes, that's an example of someone screwing up, which ideally doesn't happen. It's also an example of what a good, preventative healer is capable of when they're given tools that don't suck. Even further, it's a pre-emptive counter example to people who are going to come in here and try to tell me I'm asking for EZmoad or say the things healers are asking for dumb down the game; look at a game that is capable of differentiating between healers 1 and 3 up there. Then look at TOR, which is capable of differentiating between healers 1 and 2. Tell me in which game are good healers more differentiated from bad ones and in which game the developers can actually create encounter mechanics to challenge healers more thoroughly.

Pretty much. Challenge is good. I'm all for challenge, just challenge me with encounter mechanics, not the fact that I have to play with a UI from the 90s.

Translated: "My experience healing in a remotely-challenging, large-group environment in a present generation MMO is woefully inadequate."

So my guild finally scrounged together enough 50s to run some Ops over the weekend. I had tried to withhold judgment on healing in TOR until I had experienced Ops in some form and now that I have seen an Op, I have only one positive thing to say about it: It is doable. Yes, it is a grating, frustrating experience that feels like you're playing with a horribly incomplete toolkit and half the time feels like you're fighting the UI more than the boss' damage output, but it is doable. It is doable enough that we tackled both Eternity Vault and Karagga's palace without much incident, albeit on Normal, in mostly questing/daily gear with a smattering of HM Flashpoint gear. Beyond that, I can only level criticisms at healing in TOR. I know the UI is a tired subject, but it must be addressed. It feels like I'm healing in a game from 10 years ago with spruced up graphics. No mouseover healing, No target of target, No aggro warnings on other raid members, Ops frames that display only the first 4 de/buffs on any given target with like 10x10 pixel icons in a world where trash debuffs are thrown out like candy (what is "Grapple," and why are there 16 copies of it on every raid member preventing me from seeing Force Imbalance when this "Grapple" does seemingly nothing?)... The ui is flat out, undeniably terrible. Really, if there is a member of the RPG trinity that UIs should be tailor made for, it should by all rights be healing. Tanks and DPS have their rotations and their procs to manage, but by and large the group that spends the most time wrestling with the UI are the healers and the TOR developers have failed us miserably in this. In addition to the UI, though, healing in TOR is just horribly unresponsive. Ability delays and what I can only assume to be shoddy coding in Ops environments add up to the point where sometimes I have a 1.5s cast heal and there is almost 3-4 seconds between me pressing the button and my heal going off. I'm not entirely sure what the hell is up with TOR's engine, but my computer and connection, a setup that can run 25-player WoW raids at 50ms and 40-50fps, gets reduced to mush randomly in an 8-player Op in some areas and plays perfectly in others (notably, the blasted room wherein you fight the first boss of Karagga's palace forced me to play top-down and zoomed in, but I had no other latency/FPS issues in the instance). TOR's system of having animations trump cast bars exacerbates the issue. It made me rage every time during leveling when I would have a heal queued on my companion or a party mate, the cast bar would finish, and my target would die between the finish of my cast and my heal actually hitting them. It's moderately rare in an Op - usually only happens when someone screws up - but it's no less rage-inducing when it happens there, too. I'm already fighting a horribly-designed UI in addition to the boss, I shouldn't have to fight my own cast bars by having to account for an extra .2-.5 seconds depending on which heal I'm planning to cast. That's just stupid. edit to say here: The 1.5s GCD also exacerbates the issue of feeling unresponsive. It may be that I'm still just used to WoW's 1s GCD, but that extra .5s feels like an eternity when there's burst damage from the boss going out. Something has to give here. Either the devs need to fix their bloody UI (and game engine), give us the tools to do it for them, or accept that as more people get to 50 and start hitting up content that isn't a level 30 Heroic 4 quest, healers are going to be a scarce commodity, because I can't imagine that the general population playing this game is going to be as willing as I am to put up with this crap in the name of getting something done for my team.

I used Nadia for that fight as a full-Seer Sage and did not have much difficulty. Abuse the Conveyance bug and your companion of choice should stay up relatively well. I'd stun him when you can and just interrupt his giant nuke. Use your CD's when available and just keep your healing up on your companion. Actually, I'd put these two as the hardest class bosses for Consulars: They nerfed the former, however, so I'd wager the latter is now the most difficult class boss to fight anymore. edit: I did die once fighting the boss in the OP, but that was because the stupid strong enemies near the ladder respawned during the pre-fight conversation and no matter how I tried to reposition Nadia with passive and Rescue, she just kept getting knocked straight towards them. Eventually pulled them and then we both went down pretty fast.

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There are no missions defined for the crew skill 'Artifice'. There are no missions defined for the crew skill 'Artifice'. There are no missions defined for the crew skill 'Artifice'. There are no missions defined for the crew skill 'Artifice'. The ice stone has melted. (There are no missions defined for the crew skill 'Artifice'.)

That's what I'm saying, though. It's a light side choice to let that guy live. So what should be the "correct" choice, or even remotely intelligent choice, is a light side option. And that seems to happen all the time in dark/light side choices for the Empire storyline in general. I just had to switch over from dark to light early in my warrior's life because I couldn't stand making retarded decisions just to keep my dark points up. At least the light side options that aren't at face value tactically sound come off as either honorable or cleverly conniving.

I'm just impressed that the Star Wars universe has morality down to such a science that we can determine someone's moral standing to such an impressive amount of significant figures.