For us the important thing was to drag the boss a little bit away from his starting point, so that the adds didn't spawn right on top of us. The few seconds the adds spent moving to us gave us time to cast a CC on them without getting wrecked instantly by all the damage.

You haven't played a raid before, have you? People figure out the optimal strategy to beat a raid boss by dying over and over, trying out various strategies until they home in on a working one. Deaths while trying out alternate strategies have nothing to do with whether a group is good or not. Only the lazy players who come in a month or two after content is new and use secondhand strategies can clear it with only a few deaths across the group and then come back and post on a forum about how having to farm hours of dailies to cover your repair bills is a good idea. God forbid the hours and hours spent preparing for the raid by crafting consumables and gearing up in hard modes, and the hours more spent attempting and killing the boss, count as enough to justify getting loot out of it. No, you have to spend tons of credits on repair bills for a kill that might not even drop loot anybody can use, if it drops any loot at all.

Hard mode HK's working great, I don't know what you're talking ab- http://i.imgur.com/YvNSX.jpg Oh. Yeah, I guess he's bugged.

Just an FYI, I pugged this zone earlier and HK-47 enraged around like 5%. When he enrages, he does the stealth ambushes almost back-to-back, making it more likely that he's going to actually kill someone. So if you're getting wiped out by his stealth stuff, that might mean that you don't have enough DPS and you've hit his enrage. (If so, you'll probably have trouble with the next two bosses in this zone, since they have similar enrage thresholds.)

Yeah, this change just made things universally worse. Especially as a healer.

Out of 10 warzones I played today (waiting 5-10 minutes in the queue for most of them), here are the results: 2 warzones ended within 5 seconds of me entering the warzone (victory, defeat, respectively) Another 3 warzones ended within 1 minute of me entering the warzone (victory, defeat, defeat) Another 2 warzones ended due to insufficient player count. These were from Bioware's broken matchmaking system putting too many players on one team. 2 warzones were actual matches where a premade rolled a PUG on the other team. (I won one of them, so not ************ about those...) 1 warzone was a match with a premade in it. One of the players in the premade used a speed hack to capture all the void star doors in rapid succession. The warzone system needs to be fixed. Here are some suggestions: If a warzone's teams become wildly out of balance, don't bother trying to refill them. Having 4+ players all leave a warzone at once cripples the team and gives the other team the advantage. By the time new players load in and the timed entry door lets them out, the other team will have a sizable advantage. There's no point in bringing those players in, the match is already over. Likewise, if a warzone's timer is about to expire - let's say 2 minutes away from ending or less - don't add new players to the warzone. There's no point. They'll have no opportunity to participate (due to the time-locked doors), no opportunity to earn medals, and no real value in the match. You're just eating up their time and giving them a bunch of valor and commendations for no effort. Fix the stupid race condition in your matchmaking system that puts more than 8 people on a team. Alternately, if one team ends up with 12 players because the underpaid interns you have writing the matchmaking code can't get it working, just balance the other team up to 12 players. You've got around two minutes to do that before the match actually gets going, which should be sufficient time to even up the teams. Then the match will at least be even, despite 24 people being too much for some maps (huttball, for example). Add at least a slight deserter penalty for quitting out of warzones. At present, I often see players quit out of a WZ, then come back in 1-2 minutes later from re-entering the queue... and then they quit out again. This further compounds the team disadvantage caused by the first time they quit and the game does *nothing* to prevent it. A 5-10 minute lockout from the warzone queue would be sufficient to at least slightly discourage quitting out of warzones. When loading one or more premades into a match, try to match them against other premades. I can see how this might be difficult due to low server populations and long queues, but when the queues are short due to a high number of players, there's absolutely no excuse for matching a pair of premades up against a full 8-person PUG, especially because you know the premades are going to be wearing top-end gear and rolling around with double the HP and expertise of a regular player. Don't apply the deserter detection debuff until a player has finished loading and closed the cutscene. Players with slow computers can end up being kicked for being AFK before they've even loaded into the match (I've watched it happen). Since this takes a while to happen, it ensures that the teams will be unbalanced right as the match starts. Fix cheating. If you can't fix the numerous bugs in your game code, make it easier for players to report cheating in-game and have GMs take quick action against players to stop them from messing up warzones.

People need to shut up about healing done in warzones. Anyone with a pulse can top the healing done in a warzone; I've been able to do it on my Operative since unlocking talented Surgical Probe. It's not hard. The problem is that healing done in warzones has NO BEARING WHATSOEVER on your success in an objective-based PvP match (i.e. all 3 PvP matches). This isn't deathmatch or team deathmatch. If you can't keep the ball carrier alive in Huttball or keep him free of CC long enough to pass, you lose. Operatives are at a disadvantage for the former and basically useless at the latter (this could be fixed by reworking our dispel). If you can't keep your group alive during Voidstar (either on attack or defense), eventually the other team is going to get kills and whittle your numbers down. The Operative's piss-poor AoE healing capability and the need to constantly refresh Kolto Probe makes it difficult to keep up in large engagements like this without help from a better healing class. In Civil War... actually, operatives are pretty okay in civil war. All of our class problems still hold up, but the teams end up split up enough that your inability to group heal isn't a problem, and you get to solo capture points with sleep dart. So that's okay, I guess! If your goal is to farm medals for commendations in PvP, operatives are great. Keep racking up 500k healing dealt and snagging kill credit with AoEs, it's cool. If your goal is to actually win matches and contribute to victory by being useful, operatives are pretty mediocre. I haven't even touched on survivability for healing specced operatives. Let's just say that it's bad and leave it at that.

You can move with WASD? Why the hell doesn't the game tell you that? No wonder this mission was such a pain in the rear if they expected you to use hidden mechanics... Part of the problem with Sullust/Drexel is that the Electronic Warfare Pod's attack immunity doesn't kick in immediately. If you trigger it after the enemies on screen have fired lasers/torpedoes at you, those shots will still hit you. So you have to time it such that you trigger it before the enemies fire if you really want to mitigate damage. The big group of enemies that comes at you in Sullust starts firing *really* early - while they're still tiny on the screen - so if you don't realize that you'll trigger the EWP too late and still lose half of your HP to their attacks. One other unclear thing that's important for Sullust is that the power converter's shield regeneration mechanics are a little funny. Essentially, if you swap the power converter into regeneration mode (2 by default, I think?), and stop firing, you'll be able to tank a lot more damage with your shield, because as long as your shield has at least one point of absorption left, it'll stop an attack. I didn't know this until I saw a guide that pointed it out, and it's kind of counter-intuitive because nothing else in the game works that way. I think the mission would be fine if the description said it required grade 5 (or MAYBE grade 4) ship upgrades. Even if you play perfectly, with grade 3 you're going to barely survive it most attempts because of the amount of incoming damage.

Are you saying the damage is manageable in a flashpoint with a level requirement of 45 because you can heal through it with raid gear on? Operatives don't have any AoE heals that can do anything about the boss's AoE. Maybe D7 is an operative-free zone until you have raid gear. Anyway, my question was about that other AoE damage that comes without a cast bar, and about the damage that comes with an interrupted smash. Are there things that can be done to mitigate those other than wearing raid gear?

I have no problem beating the turret section, but the OP is still correct that it's a terribly designed encounter to put into a normal mode group flashpoint, let alone at the beginning of the instance. The turrets are buggy and have bad responsiveness, and the minigame has horrible feedback such that the first time I did Colicoid it took my group maybe 4 attempts to finally figure out how the hell the damn things worked. The actual tactical parts of it are dull and repetitive and both turret sections drag on far too long to be interesting (especially if you've had to retry because you're new players learning the instance). On the other hand, when you bring experienced players who know how it works, it's a snoozefest with no challenge whatsoever. I don't know anyone who's the least bit interested in doing Colicoid. Everyone I know who's done it hates the turret section because you can count on it to waste your time, and if you have to PUG you can be guaranteed that your new players will take multiple wipes to figure out the stupid minigame. The little shield puzzle later on is equally tedious in that the enemies provide little real challenge (every group I've run it with just punts them off the ledge without fighting them) and it just forces you to spend time running around dropping shields. Between the turret section and the shield puzzle you spend a distressingly large amount of time in Colicoid War Games doing things that have nothing to do with your character class, play style, talent spec, equipment, or skill level.

Can someone explain the source of the AoE party damage that Bulwark produces without a cast bar? It's not Bulwark Blast or Smash or from someone walking through his green shield. He just randomly decides to hit the entire party for 4k 1 or more times, sometimes he does it twice back to back. It seems like maybe it happens if you don't have a melee DPS within melee range of him during the fight, but I'm not sure - there are no cues to suggest that as the cause. Most overviews of this fight don't even mention the AoE, which makes me think most people must be doing it with melee DPS... Also, is Smash supposed to deal tons of damage even if you interrupt it? We were interrupting it every time but it still hit the tank for 8-10k. I don't know how you're supposed to heal through that while also healing through his random 4k AoEs.

This is awful. Wasted like 10k credits buying Grade 4 Armor before realizing it was bugged. I'd feel like a moron, except what person in their right mind would expect the level 4 upgrade to be worse than the level 2?