I finished Blood Hunt HM last night for the first time as a tank. The Jos and Valk encounter is a serious awareness check for a tank and the group as a whole. Up until both Jos and Valk join the fight the encounter is fairly easy-the adds are more difficult than either of the bosses alone. Jos's Aerial Strike hurts A LOT if you lose focus and are caught by any of it-the initial blast off, the fire DoT, or the landing. My group recommended that I tank Jos near Valk. Valk's Sweeping Blasters hits everything in front of her and she doesn't move beyond doing her leap, so the tank needs to keep her faced away from the group. Jos, being mostly melee, will follow the tank around. Since our characters can parry and dodge attacks from behind (and Jos has no backstab type of ability) your tank need not worry about turning his/her back to lead Jos back toward Valk after Aerial Strike/being knocked around. Jos also has an aggro drop-I could be wrong, but the mechanic seems tied to his wife's taunts-when you hear her talking smack to Jos, your tank needs to be ready to taunt. When they're both in the fight doing so can be difficult if RNG is against you (stuns/knockbacks). A few of our wipes happened due to RNG-either from something like the above happening, or worse, Jos stunned me while Valk was launching her rockets. That much is just unfair. The only thing the tank can do is hope the healer can keep him/her alive during spike damage. Positioning makes or breaks the last phase of the fight. During all the chaos of knocks, aggro drops, and AOEs, the group needs to move as a unit so heals don't fall behind.

I also want to hear them justify the 178 Custom quality reward the boss drops.

The first boss of Blood Hunt is simply overtuned for Flashpoint content. I never understood the logic behind creating small group content more difficult than large group content. Also, the recommended gear level should be stated as 192.

Last night I completed Depths of Manaan and I just finished Battle of Rishi on HM. Neither gave me credit toward the weekly? What's the dealie?

The author recommends preserving the old 4 piece set bonus until I acquire the new 6 piece. Does the author mean: 1-to keep my old armoring mods (140 in my case) and upgrade only the Mod and Enhancement slots and 2-withhold from equipping the new gear until I 6 pieces (in other words, do not gear piecemeal)?

Simply put, the fight bugs out and the last standing droid never drops the immunity shield.

Polish is a must for any MMO to thrive. Visuals and character customization are just as important as content. As has already been asked, what about the hood toggle? I'd like to see my Sentinel's hair for once.

I'm a fairly casual gamer with little interest in Hard Mode Ops. Having said that, my Shadow's DPS gear is mostly Tionese quality. I have the 4 piece set bonus but I'm wondering about it's worth when compared to the Black Hole gear. Does the raw stat increase from the Black Hole armor pieces outshine the Tionese set bonuses? I currently have enough comms to purchase one armor piece and am willing to wait until I can afford more to prevent any loss in DPS. Here are my stats at a glance (Balance): Crit- ~33% Accuracy - ~100% Power - 254 Crit Multiplier - ~73%

A hood up/down toggle was a feature I was really looking forward to. The misleading quotes already mentioned in this thread cause me some disappointment. I'm tired of every Robe for JKs having a hood unless you display your head piece (which is apparently a bug).

Iresso's a cool dude. I don't have a use for him in combat as a Shadow, however. If I could hook him up with Nadia Grell, I would.

There is totally a moddable techblade available from Coruscant. It's called the Prototype Battle Techblade. You can buy it with comms.

I've only used Nadia and Kira. I prefer Nadia to Kira for her AoE. Nadia can hold her own against Strong enemies once in decent gear. All force DPS companions can if you krrp them in good gear. I can't see Nadia dual wielding. It just doesn't suit her character. I also see her as more of a double-bladed user, anyway. If Sage companions were an option then I could definitely see Nadia as onr with a lightsaber. Kira, however, I could see dual wielding. I'm all for it!

You could always get her into at least Rating 124 gear and have her at your side as your mainstay companion. I ranhave with Nadia at 50 after passing her my Rating 118 DPS gear. She does great DPS once in Rating 124 gear and beyond. If my Shadow or Sage were male she would be wed.

I didn't have a need for Qyzen on my Shadow. I initially tanked. I DPSed as Infiltration from 35 to 50 and my DPS output trumped Qyzen's threat. I'm going to stick with Qyzen primarily on my Telekinetic Sage. She booms hard enough to annihilate standard and weak targets before Force Shield fades from Qyzen. Qyzen's finicky behavior irks me. He often backpedals when an attack command is issued. His Flush Prey also has poor range. It's an annoying trade-off for the convenience of remaining relatively free of spell pushback. It also cuts back on "downtime" of using Meditation to regen Force (less Force Shields vs. using another companion).

There has to be a grind in MMOs. The Daily Missions really aren't bad at all. In about 10 days time you'll have both of your relics. You can also get 6 Black Hole Commendations a week. That is VERY lenient in the current implementation. Adding additional Commendations to HM dungeons makes getting your gear even easier. Some people consistently clear HMs on a daily basis. Take an extra hour or so with your Group Mates to stomp through the Planetary Dailies and you'll be done with the Daily grind in record time.

I had that little guilt trip when making my Sith Assassin Dark. I switched over to Light Side early and used Diplomacy to farm extra Light Points. Flashpoints helped, too. I was able to get her to Light III when she hit 35. I quit the character, though. My second 50 is a Dark Jedi Sentinel. It's actually a mirror image of my Assassin. I made a few Light Sides early on then eventually learned to detach and enjoy the Dark Side choices. It definitely helped build her character. She's currently Dark IV and wearing the Agile Judgement's Vest. She looks cold and sinister. I have a level 16 Gunslinger that I'm making pure Dark. Some of the choices on Ord Mantell were a bit stingy but I got over it quick. She's supposed to be a stone cold Steven Segal/Bruce Willis type. The voice acting makes being sinister on a Smuggler really entertaining.

Leave. I'm leveling a 3rd character. I'll have no interest in the game after that if I'm stuck on an ultralight server (Shien).

I don't know where you and the other multitude of posters are getting this concept that a cross server LFG tool "ruins game communities." I played WoW from initial launch in Nov 2004 until Oct 2010. In that time span the game's population blew up in a way that no MMO has ever seen. WoW became an easier game to digest as time went on. This attracted millions of players. When you have a pool of players that large you're going to run into more...less intelligent and less mature people. You'll also run into more respectful players. In my personal experiences, I've had many, many more successful dungeon runs than conflicts due to irrational players. In fact, I've seen more disruptive players when running public raids across the servers I played on (purposely pulling a boss prematurely, utilizing encounter specific mechanics to cause wipes, leaving group, spamming raid chat) than when running 5 man dungeons using the cross server LFG tool. Trolls and ill mannered players existed before a LFG system was put into place. A cross server system pulls from a larger pool of players; you'll run into more trolls as well as more mild mannered people. You folks really need to get off of the train of fear and realize that a cross server tool is the next best thing to massive server mergers. As was already mentioned, a cross server tool will not remove your ability to form groups locally. You aren't forced to use it. Screaming that the rest of us can't have our cake because you don't like it is beyond selfish.

World PVP in WoW started to diminish once the first two Battlegrounds were released (Alterac Valley and Warsong Gulch). It died when players were able to queue for Battlegrounds inside of capitol cities. This feature was introduced in Vanilla WoW. The devs made an attempt at revitalizing world PVP in the first expansion by introducing a few nodes throughout some zones that would give bonuses to the victor (more experience, access to special vendors, etc). It wasn't long before these objectives became ghost towns. The only way you'll see an influx in planet population and world PVP is if: 1-Warzones are removed 2-Players are required to travel to specific locations to access dungeons You know as well as the rest of us that no developer in his/her right mind will do this. Warhammer Online had at least one section in each zone called "PVP Lakes" with fortresses that could be sieged and nodes that could be captured for bonuses. Successfully taking a fortress yielded a chance for high quality loot and no one walked away empty handed. At the worst you got a sack of coins and could choose between some crafting mats or blue/green gear (more cash if you didn't need to gear and vendored it). In summation, the planets in this game need to have noteworthy things to do if you want to see an increase in planet population and world PVP. As it is, the planets are simply "stages," like you would see in a single player game. A cross server LFG system won't subtract from the planet populations because they're non-existent to begin with.

I stopped paying attention to the little green text below items stating the percentage chance of a schematic. For all I know the percentage has always been the same, but now there's a tooltip.. Anywho, it's completely random as has been stated. I crafted two level 47 orange crystals and one level 47 yellow crystal last night. RE'ing the yellow crystal gave me the Advanced schematic on the first try. The orange only took two. On the other hand, I've crafted innumerable belts/bracers on my Synthweaver at times and learned nothing within the first 10 or so attempts. Random, random, random.

Project is the bread and butter single target ability. I understand that. You can't simply cast aside -5% damage and accuracy because of Double Strike/Project spam. It really doesn't make sense to put these debuffs on AOE abilities for a tank.

Both Slow Time and Force Breach need some tweaking. A tank's key abilities should NEVER have an AOE effect that breaks crowd control. It severely limits a Shadow's utility when crowd control is needed. I have two solutions: 1-These abilities ignore the effects of crowd control 2-These abilities ignore targets that are incapacitated. In either case, a Kinetic Combat Shadow can make use of the powerful debuffs from these abilities all the time, every time.

Once you reach crafting level 340 the amount of trainable Enhancements explodes-however, scrolling down the list reveals that all of these patterns have 1 to 2 duplicates under different names. There's no stat difference between these. Was this left over from an earlier version of the game, where perhaps Enhancements also carried Alignment requirements?

I have very good keyboard coordination. I came up with a general formula that I try to follow: 1-Defensive cooldowns are Shift binds (Shift+whateverbutton) 2-Main attacks are 1-7 4-Utility attacks (snares, knockbacks, etc) are mouse bound. I use a Logitech gaming mouse (exact model escapes me atm; I'm at work) 5-Spammable AOE is bound to F 6-Activated Relics are Shift bound to 1 and 2 7-I unbind game menus to make room for additional keybinds and re-map cosmetic binds (Sit, Sheath Weapon) 8-CC binds depend on the CC type 9-Interrupt is Middle Mouse click

It's an all around badly designed quest. I'm not sure how else to explain it.