No, it happens. I personally haven't seen any of those issues in the last few weeks, but prior to that I've saw them quite frequently. It's kinda the same with Coratanni, lots of people have no issues there either, but others have her randomly reset, attack the pod, etc. Both fights are (were) incredibly buggy but mostly stable now (at least from my experience).

Pretty much this. Although I would not nerf SM Underlurker without a bump up in difficulty on Revanite Commanders and Revan. What I want is some of the difficulty of Underlurker distributed to the final two bosses of TOS.

I've always supported 4 tiers of difficulty for OPS. Unfortunately, it's just not gonna happen. BW can't even give us NiM within 4 months of SM / HM. How long would it be if we added another tier?

Difference is in those mechanics, if an individual fails then the entire raid doesn't take a huge amount of damage. At most, the person who fails dies. The exception being DD from Stormcaller. That could kill the tank, but then the tank can control that somewhat by moving himself behind the dps / heals. IMO, Ravagers SM is fine as is. ToS SM needs tweeked. Specifically the Underlurker adds health need to be reduced 10 - 15%. As for the cross mechanic, I'd make it so that as long as 1 person is in each quadrant you pass. Keep the equal numbers on left / right and 1 on front / back in HM. That way the basic mechanic is still there but is much more forgiving. That is how you make mechanics progressively harder in OPS. Then I would buff Revanite Commanders and Revan. They are both way too freaking easy. Edit: Also Brontes stand by your finger mechanic is HM / NiM. As is OP IX, absorb your color. You can ignore those mechanics in SM.

It's my understanding that only OPS / World bosses have a 10% defense bonus, which is the primary driver for accuracy in a PvE setting. I believe Golds and possibly Silvers got a 5% defense bonus in 2.0. Since companions can't take part in OPS or world bosses, they should only need to hit 5% bonus accuracy. That being said, If you want to augment companions, I'd just throw overkill on them even if they are a tank.

Personally, I raid with an AP PT. Every core ability is instant so you are mobile 100% of the time, have great burst, and have very good sustained. They also have some ranged abilities like thermal det, explosive dart, and basic attack if you need them. Most of the melee abilities are 15m when you pick up the utility. Also, they have the same knockback immunity as mercs and can shield team mates with the AOE taunt. That being said, you really need to find a class and discipline that you click with. I myself am a much better melee dps'er than ranged. Only ranged I'm decent with is my virulence sniper, but put me on my PT or Mara and I can pull very good numbers.

Bioware: For creating cunning gear with defense / shield / absorb.

I suspect that experience was different based on server. I don't remember there being that much over-gearing on PUG runs on Jedi Covenant. I know for a long time, PUGs had a hard time downing Draxus because of the bugs and it was nearly impossible to down 16M Council for a long time because DPS was short. In any case, DF / DP release really isn't a good comparison to today because they were released mid expansions. It's kind of expected that people would be over-geared when there were two other operations available that dropped the same kind of gear that SM DF / DP was. A better comparison to today would be ROTHC which had a level increase as well as a gear reset. The DF / DP release really didn't have a gear reset per se, just tier expansions. Sadly, I don't remember how PUG runs were when that dropped. I'm getting too old to remember that far back.

Those HOTs (Heal over time) are from operatives. They look like little green spray painters and they are called kolto probes. I personally think all three healers are viable. I know some don't like operatives since their burst healing is fairly poor, but they all have their strengths and weaknesses. My experience is that merc healing takes longer to master, but when you do, you are a monster healer.

I've seen and experienced the bug myself. My GM's Juggernaut never gets flagged when entering PvP zones. Whether it is outlaw's den or when we do commanders. All his other toons flag normally. It's happened to me as well, but not nearly as consistently. Buggy game is buggy. /shrug

If you are aoe'ing and flagged people are around, the only way you'll get flagged is if you actually target them. My suggestion, make sure you turn auto target next enemy off in preferences. If you have that turned on and a mob dies, you could auto target the flagged player and boom, now you are flagged.

I would agree with this, especially with the new lvl 60 content. The endgame progression in 1.X was better in this regard. HM FPs prepared you for SM OPS which prepared you for HM OPS. Even 2.X was pretty close to that design. Now there really is very little margin for error in the lvl 60 HM FPs. And in some cases, they are harder than lvl 60 SM OPS. That seems a little wrong IMO. I think casuals for the most part will never go beyond SM OPs. And as such everything at that level and below (I include lvl 60 HM FPs as lower content) should be relatively easy for casuals and PUGS which I don't believe they are at the moment. From an OPS perspective, I think the HM and NiM versions should be targeted towards the raiders with NiM modes only being able to be cleared by the top 1 - 2%. Now I also advocate for NiM level FPs that are very unforgiving in terms of DPS / Heal checks and mechanics. Overall, I just don't think there is a very good or logical way to progress through end-game content. We have super easy and then difficult with varying levels of bugginess and / or annoyance.

Guard doesn't work that way. Attacking an NPC that is guarded by a flagged opposite faction character will not get you flagged. You must have gotten flagged some other way. My advice, first disable auto-target closest enemy. 9/10, people get flagged because they have this turned on and you auto-target the flagged person. AOEs also won't flag you if the flagged person enters the AOE UNLESS you target them. This is why you need to disable auto-target. If you got an AOE going and a mob dies, you can auto-target the flagged person and suddenly, you are flagged. As for battlemasters, most of them can be pulled out of the PvP zone. It helps to have an assassin tank to stealth in, pull and phase walk out to avoid the flag. Barring that, bring a couple sage / sorcs and pull them out the flagging zone after they pull.

I run on cellular, so I was very concerned with data usage until I got a 30GB / month plan. Just doing solo stuff on planets is typically somewhere between 10 - 20MB / hour. Doing a 16m OPS is typically around 100MB / hour. I'm not sure what GSF or PvP does. I never really measured it.

I assume this is related to the people who manually started SoR completing Rishi and Yavin before fully completing the Forged Alliances storyline and then going back to finish the FA story and getting the bugged quest to "Talk to a local". What exactly happens to the characters that are currently stuck with the bugged quest? Is that mission going to be automatically removed from our log?

Until you get to lvl 50 - 55, you don't even need to worry about relics. But if you have an alignment, just pick up some from the light / dark vendors on fleet. I think they are in the GTN area. At 60, if you are a DPS (damage per second) or a healer, just pick up a Ruussan Serendipitous Assault and a Ruussan Focused Retribution from the GTN if you don't have an artificer. Those will be fine for 99% of the time. DR (Diminishing Returns) is a mechanism to punish stacking of stats. What it does is that the more of a stat you get, the less benefit you get by getting more. In a simplistic sense, when you have 100 crit an increase of 50 crit equals 30 dps. When you are at 300 crit, an increase of 50 crit equals 20 dps. Periodic effects are those that do damage over time (DOT). Like weaken mind, it doesn't do all of its damage in one shot, but does it over x amount of seconds. The ticks of damage occurs either every second or several seconds depending on the ability and your alacrity. Alacrity speeds up the ticks. So if you have 0 alacrity, you might do 4 ticks of damage over 9 s. If you have 10% Alacrity, you'll do 4 ticks of damage over 8.1 s. The ratio thing is just that, a ratio of the stat in your pieces. So if it says 3:2 Surge : Alacrity, it means for every 3 pieces that have Surge, you should have 2 pieces with Alacrity. The second name is most likely the name of the utility of the imperial mirror.

Different people have different opinions about what matters to them. Just because you aren't bothered by the nerf, doesn't mean others aren't. The forums are a great way for the players to voice their opinions on the game and BW's management of the game. We shouldn't be attempting to squelch peoples opinions on those matters, even if we disagree with those opinions. BW needs that feedback to make better decisions.

The best answer is the one you are best at playing. IMO, they are all in good shape relative to each other. I don't think there is one that you absolutely have to bring hands down. Now I do think that you should bring a balanced healing team to a raid. So for 8m, try to avoid double scoundrel, double sage, or double commando. Can you run double sage? Sure, I've done it. But if I know my co-healer is gonna be a sage, I'll usually bring a scoundrel or a commando if I can. With 3.0, BW intentionally put in class specific utilities and buffs to reward diversity. I think you should consider those buffs / utilities when building your team - if and when you can.

That was the underlying issue with the slot machines pre-nerf. It essentially gave mats out at or below the cost of crew missions at a much faster rate. The funny thing is "free" mats were introduced with strongholds with the gathering nodes, yet they didn't have any impact on the cost of mats. Why? Because BW put a rate limit mechanic on them - after a few uses you are locked out from using any gathering node for 4 hours. What BW should have done is put a similar mechanic on the slot machines. After every 10 clicks or so, you get a stack of Unlucky, dropping your win chance by 50% that lasts for 4 hours with a maximum of 5 stacks. BW could adjust the number of clicks, the maximum number of stacks and the falloff time to whatever they felt was necessary to balance the system. That way you can limit the impact of the slot machine, address the macroers and keep most everybody happy. Sadly though, BW doesn't seem to have the capacity to think creatively when addressing issues and immediately goes to "just adjust the numbers".

I'd say the average for my guild is somewhere around 3 - 5 million. A lot of those players skipped the planet / side quests when leveling alts and spend it as soon as they get it. Me, I'm anal about doing every mission I can. That combined with some dailies and crafting / playing the GTN, I got about 530 Million. It does help to be frugal and only buy what you need and only occasionally buy something for fun.

Slot machine running can't provide the quantity of materials that an army of alts can. Especially now that you can send out 6 companions. I spent almost 5 hours running slots on my Surface while watching TV. I got maybe 3 - 4 stacks of green jawa junk and about the same for blue / purple. That's maybe enough for 50 war supplies. Depending on the week and your bonus, that's 2 toons to personal. That's not nearly enough to do much on my server. Can the slot machines provide materials for cheaper than missions? Yes. Does it provide enough mats to make any difference in conquests? Not really.

I'm gonna guess, their answer was "Working as Intended". The only thing it is going to do is incentivize running 8m. Why run 16m, when the loot doesn't scale? Yes, the comms are greater, but comm gear sucks balls. Yes, there is a drop for a Transubstantiator, but it's much easier to just down the content and win a roll in 8m. I think BW has been infected by brain eating mind worms.

In 2.X, the comms gear for dps/heals had Unlettered mods which had the most mainstat & power/crit. In 3.0, the comms gear has A mods, more main stat, less secondary, more endurance. For the most part, an Unlettered mod == a Tier + 1 A mod ( 186 Deft == 192A Deft). So in this case, a move from 180 unlettered to a 192A is probably and upgrade especially if your AC can utilize crit because more mainstat == more crit. In 2.X, the enhancements for dps / heals where all the endurance heavy stuff with the exception of the low endurance / high power / alacrity Quick Savant on the warrior pants. Healers loved those pants. For tanks, it's a different story. In 2.X, tanks had access to Bastion / Bulwark (which from a stat budget was shield, end, absorb / defense) from token gear or Vigilant / Steadfast (stats go end, shield, absorb / defense) from comms. So you really only could get the medium mitigation enhancements from drops. Same goes for mods, only the B mods were on the comm gear, while unlettered was on token gear. Now in 3.0, you can get the really high mitigation enhancement (Immunity / Sturdiness). You can also get the high mitigation mods from tokens. But if you go high mitigation for everything, you lose HP. Some of the ops are really spikey, so survivability wise you might want some more HP. From a stat trade perspective, the B mods are the best trade of mitigation stats for HP. So, I would craft myself 186 Sturdiness / Immunity Enhancements and then use the B mods from the comms belts and bracers. If you don't have the old set bonus, I'd probably just buy a full set of comm gear and replace the enhancements with crafted 186 Immunity / Sturdiness.

While I think the realignment of comm rewards based on level is good, I fear that the nerfs are too much. The comm gear itself has already been nerfed with 3.0 in that the DPS / Heal mods are now A's. So for DPS / Heals, the 198As are fairly equal to 192 unlettered. And the comm enhancements are most definitely a downgrade from a lower tier low-endurance enhancement (a 192 adept is leaps and bounds better than a 198 efficient). So excluding tanks, which could use the B mods, farming Ultimates to get 198 comm gear is far less efficient than actually running SM ops and getting the 192 tokens. And a big part of me is fine with that, but I also wonder whether it is wise. There are a lot of "comm gear warriors" out there that drive the queues. By reducing the rewards I fear you'll reduce participation in the nerfed content without increasing participation in the newer operations / content. And for what, to further prolong the gear grind of inferior gear? I also wish there was something to actually spend Elites/Ultimates on except companion gear or just buying it to sell it back when the timer expires.

Are you sure you aren't mixing it up with the quote about people putting crafted items learned via RE'ing ops gear into orange shells, pulling them out and then learning the schematic from a crafted item? I remember them saying that that scenario was unintended but not an exploit and thus not actionable.