Got my first 5 components in about 7 or 8 boxes. The sixth took me near 30 over a couple hours of ever-increasing frustration. It did not fill me with happy feelings. Having played the Guild Wars 2 beta, where all loot and resource nodes and what not are individually looted and crowds never deny you fun, playing this part of the event where seeing another player in the same map makes you want to yell "GO AWAY!" does little but make me appreciate the design philosophy of one and gnash my teeth at the philosophy of the other. I shouldn't loathe the sight of other players in PVE! I shouldn't be wishing desperately I could instance myself into an entirely empty map so that I could get through the tedium without interference! Argh, I say!

I'm just glad my Armstech actually has something to do! Between trying for crits on the lvl 20 orange recipes to gain the slot and building the category 22 augments to fit therein, I actually have something to contribute to the Guild. As opposed to before, where every few weeks I *might* have enough Biometric Crystal Alloy to try for a crit. And then fail. And there was nothing else I could do except provide temporary gear to speed up Alt levelling. It was rather frustrating. So I'm happy with the changes. I'm still sad that there appear to be absolutely *no* Armstech schematics that drop in any Operation anywhere... but small steps, I guess.

A pity; there was such hope poured into this thread. It is sad to see it go, but the reasons are understandable. Thanks again for all the work you put into this thread and others like it RuQu!

I've personally succeeded. Low level ones weren't bad, later level ones a frustrating waste of time and resources (like the RE mechanic always is). The random number generator is... blargh. In 1.2 supposedly the rate of return improves. I'm not even bothering with RE any more until then, personally.

Keep the giggle! Or at least give us an Options menu item to enable / disable it!

+1 Giggling like a mad-man is half the charm of playing a Smuggler!

We already had this ability. I've done it, I can confirm it. It is just the Armor crafters that did not have the ability to crit to add an augment slot. What bothers me most is the statement that Biometric Crystal Alloy is now going to be rarer (but tradeable). It was already plenty rare, for the love of Pete! When we need 3 of them to do an Orange weapon, and the weapon only matters if we crit... well, answer to making us valuable *isn't* to make that material we need to gamble in mass quantities *rarer*! *Sigh*. Oh well, I guess we'll see how much it'll end up setting us back on the market. An a separate note, if we actually get a recipe that uses those Alien Data Cubes, so we aren't restricted to only getting our materials from HM FPs and Normal Ops, that would be nice, I guess?

I was on the fence until 1.2 notes came out. I feel your pain, and have already done so myself. My Unsubscribe message behind the Spoiler, in case anyone is curious. I hope it doesn't come off sounding too unreasonable.

Well, if you have any Gunslingers or Shadows in the group, they could stealth and conventionally res the Sage for you, I suppose? Seriously, though I don't play one, I have great sympathy for the lack of Res on the Commando side. I don't understand why it isn't understood by the Devs to be a necessary component in any viable healer class.

Heck, not only don't a lot of them not work, our Stealth is actually a detriment, as the Stealth Breaker ability many of the Heroic / FP / OP champions and bosses possess has a larger detection radius then conventional agro. It is a touch embarrassing to cloak (in the hope of CCing the rare non-immune trash mob) only to pull it *and* the next group over because you triggered a stealth break! The teasing from the guild has pretty much died down by now, at least.

It is true, but that doesn't mean a re-roll is strictly necessary. I had great fun levelling my Smuggler (Republic equivalent to the Operative) to the end game. The 4 man Flashpoints, even in Hard Mode, were challenging but manageable. But the 8-man Operations were... depressing. The two we've got so far are designed explicitly around Sage / Sorc capabilities and the other healers do suffer in comparison. I am hopeful 1.2 will send some love to the non Sage / Sorc healers of the game. But we know very few exact details yet. So I'd suggest, if you are having fun with your Operative, sure keep playing! I had a blast on my end! But if you are feeling risk-averse and are particularly pre-occupied on the end game, rolling a Sorc would be the path of least resistance.

I have found two things my Sawbones can do that the Sage and Commando can't do. 1) We can provide extra in-combat resurrection through use of Disappearing Act to go "out of combat" and use the conventional revive. At least presuming we can do so without getting hit. My personal record is bringing up three party members (one from the in-combat, two from out-of-combat) from a disastrous knockback swipe at the first boss in Kragga's Palace. We actually did manage to win that fight, though by the slimmest of enrage timer margins. Still, it is a rare thing and a good chunk of the time the Disappearing Act gets wasted by an AOE from the boss. Plus if people are dying often enough to need this, it kinda implies we aren't filling our role properly in the first place? 2) Many of the bosses love knock-back, particularly Gharj in Eternity Vault. If crouched, we get knocked over rather then knocked back, which saves us from a trip into the lava. A small boon, but it does help. Other than that, though. when filling the healing role, if I were a Sage, I'd be far more helpful to the group. Even if judging us a class meant to be a hybrid healing / damage role rather then pure dedicated healing, we fall short in Ops. Our liabilities are fundamentally: 1) Inability to CC any bosses / champions. We get a fair bit of CCs and they simply don't matter. 2) In the Eternity Vault council duel where everyone has to beat their 1 on 1 boss, no CC means no Scattergun / Vibroknife, so our damage potential gets rather heavily hammered. 3) Many trash mobs in Ops have a stealth breaker ability that triggers at double the normal Agro radius. Going into stealth means you can pull mobs before the group is ready. This isn't an exclusive problem to us, Shadows face the same grief, but still. That doesn't even take into account the ranged VS melee difficulties, but as we at least have the *option* to do ranged, even if many of our abilities demand melee, I won't go into it here. Long story short: yes, we *can* do Ops, and no, there is no particular reason to choose us over a Sage. Hoping for 1.2 love.

I will presume you have picked 3 skills already in the Fleet and are just asking how to perform their individual missions? Hit the "N" key (or the diamond icon on your top menu bar) to bring up the Crew Mission window. By each companion you have (one to start) you'll see three crew skill icons corresponding to what you've had trained. Click the icon of the crew skill you want to perform to bring up a mission selection window for that crew member. Select the mission you want them to do, hit accept, and wait for them to return. Crafting missions will require the listed materials on the recipe before you can perform them, and Gathering missions will require enough credits to pay the fee. And there you go!

My reaction was to sigh sadly while rubbing my pained temples, but I can empathize with your impulse too.

My biggest issue is not so much seeing whether debuffs are present but rather knowing if they can be cleared in the first place. Unless you take the time to pull up the individual tooltips to see what type the debuffs are assigned (Force, Tech, and so on) it is impossible to judge whether a cleanse will do anything but waste a cooldown. Not to mention that Operations seem quite fond of putting untyped debuffs on players that can't be cleared, period. And they'll often use the same icon as another effect (like Bleed) that you normally *could* clear. It ends up that I almost never actually use Cleanse except during trash mob sections, as those are the only times where the debuffs have a reasonable chance of being removable.