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.

Well, they framed it as a "you never know" sort of thing, but yeah, nothing coming in the foreseeable future. Coupled with 1.2 coming out sometime in April, late April probably, and with that no major healer fixes will be seen for quite some time... Well, I will confess that between the response we got in the second developer Q&A and now the dismissal of in-combat res as a necessity for every healing class... well, I guess I don't have a great deal of hope that the changes will be what is needed. It is quite the enthusiasm dampener to know that for another two months there will remain only one 'proper' healer. And, momentum being the unforgiving beast that it is, such will likely carry forward long past that even if the changes do end up being amazing. Aw well, I shouldn't get down about it, Mass Effect 3 is out tomorrow, so hooray for imminent distraction.

People keep saying that we are the best on-the-run healers. It simply isn't true. I know you applied caveats about our damage penalty Trimanir, so don't think I'm focusing the following on you; I just want to remind general passers-by that the Sage's Force Armour is the strongest instant cast heal in the game. I won't bother repeating the numbers; go to the Healer Forum, and check out RuQu's wonderful thread on the topic. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=332481 Back to the OP topic; it is unfair for Sawbones to be called *bad* at healing. Up to 4 person groups, we are difficult but manageable healers. (As opposed to Sages, which are not only comparatively easier to play but are also a paragon of effective healer design.) Our design suffers from some major problems, though, which we are very hopeful will be addressed in 1.2. Likewise most of us really, really don't want to see Sage nerfed. The Healer Request Compilation, also at the Healer forum, shows what many of us think are weaknesses in the various mechanics and classes. You'll note the list for Sawbones / Ops is... fairly substantial: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=283200 Which isn't to say we can't be played at all. But the issues with the class really reveal themselves once you reach 8 person operations. Current encounter designs, particularly in Eternity Vault, mandate that whole-party damage will occur regularly. Sages have the ability to simultaneously heal a whole 8 person group and can also provide damage mitigation and reduction to a tank. Commandos have even worse group healing then Sawbones do, but in their favour they do have a powerful tank heal. The only thing unique to Sawbones in such encounters is our potential to use Out-Of-Combat-Res while In-Combat thanks to Disappearing Act, and our knockback immunity while crouched. I am fond of my Sawbones, don't get me wrong. I haven't shelved him like many others have theirs. But it is undeniable that while better then nothing, I am fundamentally a liability in an Operation compared to if a second Sage were present, or even a Commando. We serve no role 'properly', which makes our position in a group tenuous. This state of affairs isn't good for the players, isn't good for the game, and is something we really hope gets addressed in 1.2...

There are no recipes that can be RE'd for Scatterguns or Vibroknives. You'll only get a portion of the materials back, nothing else. It is a well known thing on the forums, spoken of in many threads, but there is no mention of it in the game directly, which is kinda where such information should be in the first place, so you certainly have my sympathy. 1.2 is supposed to have a bunch of crafting tweaks. Here's hoping a fix to this is among them...

I've had it work recently. Out of 4 attempts, I got one critical success, and so have a shiny orange blaster with augment slot. So I can confirm it does work. I look forward to when I can take the barrel out of my Rakata gun and transfer it over... So yeah, it works, but is as slaved to the random number gods as any other craft check, and takes a whole heck of a lot of Biometric Crystal Alloy to do. Three per gun... painful. Having the skill serve a purpose beyond feeding gear to alts was a rare and refreshing change of pace. Here's hoping for the 1.2 changes...

Actually I've heard far more DPS only players complain about the difficulty then I have healers or tanks. The prime factor is that since everyone gets a pet, a healer or a tank can take their opposite, while the DPS have to choose. Take their Tank companion out, and worry about longevity, or take their healer, and get hit with a lot of attacks they'd rather not take. A healer player with tank companion can just heal through a lot of the content while a tank player with healer companion has a nice amount of breathing room in their encounters. I've got a lvl 50 Sawbones and a lvl 35 Healer Sage and I've had fun with both. At least for solo PVE content, I've had the most fun playing a healer here then in any other comparable game I've played.

Yeah, Assassin isn't so bad. Their low HP and high attack power is easy enough to heal through while maintaining damage against them, such that they aren't much of a problem. Stressful, sure, but not bad. Group dynamics with the folks I run with mean there's been a tendency to give the Assassins to others while bumping me up to the Juggernauts, which are laughably easy to heal through but the DPS required feels tight, as mentioned. It just strikes me as odd that Scoundrel / Ops, a Healer / DPS spec, feels so constrained when leaning on the DPS side of things. I can understand I'm not focused at it... my skill tree is loaded for heals after all. But that so much of their "vanilla" damage is built around the scattergun / vibroknife, when facing an encounter explicitly designed to prohibit their use... well, it feels a touch unfair to a class that's already struggling, comparatively.

It is one of the worst feelings for a healer (one who could be argued plays fundamentally to help people) to be thought of, or to be, a liability. My guild has been good about keeping my Sawbones around for the Hard Mode Ops, where I still do alright, but only because of the strength of our Sage. Short of the potential for extra res through Stealth and the knock-back immunity from Crouch, I don't bring much to the table besides a limited Slow Release rotation with punctuated Underworld Medicine and Emergency Medpacks. Hopes for 1.2 indeed. Out of curiosity, any advice for the Infernal Council fight? I find that while my survivability is just fine, my DPS leaves me often the last person to finish off their duel... I haven't hit the time limit yet, so no resets because of me thankfully, but I feel it gets a little too close. The boss immunities really hamper a lot of the Scoundrel / Op damage a pure Healer spec can do... can't get behind them to backstab / shotgun, can't stealth except for the opener. It seems my best rotation has me maintaining a bleed, applying a demo charge when available, and otherwise just slapping 'em with my gun. What's your trick?

This is why I get concerned when talk of nerfing Sage / sorc gets brought up. They aren't Over-Powered healers, they are Properly-Powered. They have everything a healer should have to fill their role properly in the current game. The other healers miss varying parts of the Sage / Sorc toolset, with alternate class features that more or less don't make up for it. Which really just means the other healers need some design love, not that the paragon ideal needs to be hit with the ugly stick. Here's hoping for 1.2...

There is also an Untyped debuff that can't be removed at all. While most of these makes sense that they have to simply count down (like the In-Combat Res cooldown debuff) some Boss or Mob attacks can't be removed even though they share an icon with another effect that can. Many of the Bleed effects in Karagga's Palace come to mind. Unless you check the tooltip, it can be hard to tell just by looking at the icon whether a given debuff can be removed or not. As mentioned in the Healer Request Compilation, some manner of UI highlighting of this would be helpful.

We've done several Eternity Vault and Karraga's Palace runs, and the guild has harvested many a schematic in the process. The percentages seem rather lopsided, though. My very rough estimate seems to be, for schematics: 50% Biochem 25% Synthweaving 25% ArmourTech I have yet to see any Armtech, CyberTech, or Artifice schematics drop. At all. Have we just been terribly unlucky, or are those the only things on the loot table for those encounters?