for the record, your explanation there was far better from a how you would picture it in your head standpoint. The previous version was literally just "boss isn't where I can hit him" which is not really something I can understand with any depth. I'm not trying to discount the possibility of a broken fight, I just wanted a further explanation. I don't view it patronizing that you would explain it in more depth, because (no offense) you have no idea how many people have told me that Underlurker is bugged for them and I watch their referenced failure and it is literally them not doing the mechanic correctly or, the bug in question is not the bug that makes the fight unkillable, but a server sync insta-cross that IS in the correct place server and client side and is just "harder" to get to in time. That's sort of why I asked you. Because for every person who does know the fight and understands concepts, there are just as many people who sit around saying BULO 16 IS BUGGED OMG THOSE LOAD LIFTERS when you literally just say HEY BUDDY HOW BOUT YOU KITE ZIG ZAG AND YOU FIND OUT THAT THE LOAD LIFTERS STAGGER AND YOU HAVE EFFECTIVELY ABOUT A GLOBAL TO HEAL BETWEEN EACH LIFTER. But yeah. I guess my bad for putting that bias on you, but I assure you I read full posts when you make them.

I read more than half of the post. The way you word that you "can not be hit from there" is not clear to me at all. Is it "he is too far away for us to get to the cross" or "he is in a place that does not exist for us to be able to get to" That is the part that is not clear to me at all. I read the whole post. Or you can be a douche and assume otherwise.

If the bug is that it's an instacross, if thats the fix to the problem with crosses not updating, doesnt that mean you just have to plan for which rock to take and the path to get back to the boss fastest? From how you describe this, I don't take that as a bug. Or maybe you're describing it poorly.

So my PT Tank is basically RPing as a King of an African country, and I would really appreciate if you made a chest piece that had a Lion Head pelt across the breastplate of a chest. Something royal, regal. BUT NO ROBES. NO TAILS ON THE CHEST. I need to be the King of Zamunda, not the King of clipping through my speeder. Also, I need a voice modulator on the Crest of the Dread Master that gives me a voice as deep as James Earl Jones. Don't ask why, just trust me on this.

delete

Well, the issue is that PTS has changes for 3.0.2 and for 3.1, so basically.... Are final bosses in TOS and Rav being nerfed on Tuesday? Or is this a "3.1" part of the PTS? Because guilds that are working on final bosses probably deserve to know when they're going to have the final fight nerfed. PS plsdontnerfyet<3

It's so stupid. and the range being specifically 10 meters is one of those "screw you if you are a mara/jugg" moves. I mean, it's not a hard fight to heal through, but it just seems pointless to make it like that. No need to apologize. My point wasn't to say that you shouldn't put your threat rotation into adds, because I do that. It's just that regardless of that, a melee will take damage that he/she can not avoid whereas a ranged can avoid it entirely. It's just an odd method of punishing melee. Torque is another example of this. I have seen logs of MDPS that are intelligent, get out of floor vents effectively and still take 900-1100 DTPS. Meanwhile, the RDPS takes literally less than 200 DTPS because of how the room is set up and how you can spread out positioning far more effectively with ranged, whereas melee has to be in proximity. This, coupled with the fact that fire devices spawn by the boss, in addition to the fact that the adds that spawn on the sides aggro via proximity just gives exponential damage profile punishment to melee that ranged DPS do not have to deal with. And the other hilarious byproduct of having more melee is that you end up having more fire for the Tank on boss to navigate around/through/away from, which usually means he/she will take more floor vent damage. This is not to say you don't run melee. It's not even to say you only run 1 melee. It's just to say that you are categorically making your raid harder with each melee DPS that you add to your group. Which, one could argue, existed in previous content, but it's just MAGNIFIED in this new set of operations.

LOL in HM with the health they have, the slow they place down via AOE and the speed in which you're supposed to kill them before the collapse mechanic? trolololol Bioware is hilarious if that's the case. When I tank Underlurker in HM we use AOE taunts, I put every single GCD during add spawn into the adds instead of boss (outside of literally a taunt just before spawn) and I have seen an add with me maintaining aggro melee a DPS multiple times. It's not just a "they're supposed to be tanked" situation under that reality. I mean, I'm not saying it's a hard fight, or that it's a mechanic that's hard to deal with, but it's just another situation in these raids where being melee is punished and being ranged is considerably easier. Just seems funny to me.

Most of the comments about the 1.5 mill dummy being a better standard than the 1 mill dummy that is currently the meta for parsing are comments I can agree with.... Except here's the thing. What I am about to say may have been true before, but now I find it even more so- the current PVE content for raids has a DPS profile that (IMHO) support parsing for an extreme amount of time. Not when the target is stationary. Almost every fight has either prolonged downtime that is a secret benefit for allowing you to push your resources further than a parse would allow, giving you time to recover, or the fight is so short that the burst classes don't level out and sustained are just getting their ramp. More and more these fights are about mechanics. Far more than previous raids. I wasn't always against parsing, and I'm surely not against it as a concept, but I think the idea of the leaderboards may be somewhat stale. Instead of a leaderboard for the best individual getting a crit line or the best individual getting a top 3 parses in a row list.... I think it may be more beneficial to the community if the leaderboard was done slightly differently. Just by class. All top parses averaged out, and a sub set for average parses by top parsers over 10 parses total per person on the list per class per discipline. And through that, I feel like the community could use that tool to see where the basic meta of the game is beyond just a hyperbolic parsec signature where the parse heroes notice the extreme crit line that gave the parse, all-the-while the average player just assumes that's what's the day-in-day-out parse... which is nowhere near the truth. On that alone, outside of a "get your rotation down to the point where you can do it with closed eyes or alt+Z'd UI or on the move while you're getting yelled at, I don't think dummy parses will hold the same weight that they used to, or more accurately the same weight that people hoped they would. Hell, a raid DPS leaderboard would be just as colored with bias by the fact that without the rest of your raid's DPS to give context, in addition to strategy, whatever you pulled on a fight is basically just a case of "right strat right comp". This was somewhat true in the past, but these new raids just feel significantly different, especially in HM , from a standpoint of what is expected of you as a raider. That, coupled with the hilarity of OP abilities (force storm, suppressive fire, saber reflect, close and personal) makes the entire process a weird e-peen situation where you find people going one spec for a fight that's 7 minutes long because for 5 minutes they get to AOE pad more effectively, even though the only thing that matters is that last 1:30 or so of the fight when you have to single target burst down the bosses. I used to be all about DPS leaderboards. I submitted parses to them in the past. But with this new content, I just don't see a huge reason for their existence, at least in the current format that they've been in. I'm not saying I have a better alternative, but I just think that regardless of a 1 mill dummy, 1.5 mill dummy, 1 parse, 3 parses, it would basically be out of touch. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against parsing on a dummy, I'm one of those weirdos that has parsed out Tank mutliple times and have spent entire days sitting on a dummy trying to beat personal bests. Just food for thought

LOL thread didn't last until the first official patch (3.1) for the thread leader to quit the game and be sick of the participants. GG WP Harb

I don't think they hate melee, but they sure don't seem to understand just how many mechanics they make that greatly punish melee and are trivial as all hell for ranged.

The PT Tank guide Milas wrote for Dulfy is fantastic with quite a bit you can learn from.

whenever you don't have exotech, get that sweet hot rakata absorb reusable. Next best thing

Mason is an amazing guy and I'm proud to say he's my friend. He's always down to help people and is incredibly humble. Few would know that he's one of the best DPS Vanguards and DPS Scoundrels on Harbinger. He's a fantastic player and is just as helpful as he is talented.

DTPS on HM Revanite Commanders is, outside of add damage outliers, based on: Who tanked Kurse more in the fight. That's the main thing. If, when Kurse is down solo, you have one tank on him the entire fight, and the only time the other tank deals with him on burn phase between swaps? Then the tank with more Kurse tanking will be higher DTPS by hundreds. It was fun for me to not realize that at first until I went through logs and then it was like DUH THIS IS WHY. At one point there was a comment that i was a sponge on that fight, but then we flipped who tanked Kurse more in the fight and then their DTPS was just as high as mine. Then it was like "OHHHHH KURSE HITS LIKE A TRUCK" and I'm all MMMMMMMMMHMMMMMMMMMM *hairflip*

Milas is the Cormac McCarthy of the swtor forums. His command of the language is supreme. <3

You're right, it's not a wipe, it's just an inconvenience where someone in our raid complains about Thrica moving freely for just over 1 GCD. The night we killed it in HM it was our second attempt (admittedly we wiped on it for a while the night before) so that 2 seconds isn't the game changer, it's just a thing. Thanks for the input

The 16 man loot table is joke-town mc-****-this-ville

Don't improve them. Tank gear is better than it has ever been on comm vendors. Tank gear with no accuracy? Tank gear with no alacrity? LEGGOOOOOOO As for DPS/heal gear? We've been clearing the SMs with characters that have no set bonuses, aren't accuracy capped, and are using 100% comm gear in some cases. It's not a problem. And if you're doing HMs and when it gets to NiM, you won't be in poop gear. Why improve the comm gear. It's not meant to be BIS. It's not meant to be anywhere near BIS. Because even the TOKEN gear isn't min-maxed when you put all the tokens together.

I'm not implying it's ideal. I'm just saying in 8man gear is dropping like it's free taco day at jack in the box.

With taunts, yes, you are absolutely right. I was mentioning without a taunt, then proceeded to mention that issue is fixed with a taunt. Basically tanks are just unhappy to use taunts to hold threat in certain situations. I admit that at one point I was like that. At the end of the day though, you're right, proper rotation with management of taunts no opener is just going to poop on your cheerios. Smugglin, what are your thoughts on whether or not the new 4 piece that reduces cooldown of taunts 'matters' at all. I can think of one situation in Revanite Commanders HM where I am 2 seconds from having a taunt when my cotank is kicked by Thrica, but outside of that one situation I'm not seeing a reason where that reduction of cooldown on taunts is all that important. ATM I'm running a new 2 piece with the old 4 piece on my PT Tank. Now, I'm sure I'll most likely just rock the new 6 piece, but at the moment that 4 piece basically matters for a 2 second window in the burn phase of one fight in the new HM ops for me

belt and bracers are dropping like friggen hotcakes in every one of our runs and we farm the raids A LOT. Like....We did 3 SM TOS and 3 SM Ravager runs last night and we got 3 bracers in one of those runs alone. One of six. They drop like hotcakes. We also had EXTRA relic drops. In addition to the relic drops on the regular place where they drop.

I'll be subscribing to this thread to see how many people who do flashpoints and SM ops talk about how guards don't matter or do matter for various reasons that are "I can't hold threat/don't play my tank with the optimal APM" and "Our DPS are too good and pull through guards" but are referencing DPS numbers that aren't anywhere near the top end. There are a few specs that have an opener that is higher than the optimal single target threat rotation for a tank. That's without a taunt. With a taunt, you overcome that issue. However, implying guards are pointless and shouldn't be there and only serve to make tanks lazy? That's bull. I like being able to guard the person most likely to generate threat. You can guard someone while not being lazy. You can do your snap threat opener AND guard someone if it's needed. Now, if you're in a FP or an OP and there's literally no reason to guard someone because you're rocking out with Timmy's? Then don't guard. But you must not know about a few specs that have openers higher than 10k DPS over like 8 seconds. I'm not complaining about this. I'm just saying that when people say whether or not guards matter or they should or should not exist in the game, they usually submit information that relies on people being bad at the game or being lazy or blaming DPS. I can say that there are a few HM fights where I start my guard on one player and in a different phase I change my guard to someone else. This occured in the last tier of NiM ops. Some tanks don't need to guard their DPS or healers. I would imagine as a tank you never pulled pre-nerf NiM Bestia, because when a Merc healer that heals the tank soaking double monsters and the raid with Kolto shells ticking, you'd be shocked at how much threat your healer can generate in that window. You will guard that healer, and if you don't he will pull off of you regardless of whatever sweet opener you have. There are similar situations depending on the fight that I could list, but you get the idea. TLDR: this thread is funny to me

Well you mentioned that one of the options was 16 man guilds not reporting things. Intrepid said that that particular mechanic has "Been broken and reported for some time now" So basically I was just saying that one of your possibilities was not an option in this case.

Spoiler alert, Bioware may make mistakes but they aren't stupid. 16 man content was tested. 0% chance that Bioware would just forget to test an entire mode. And I wouldn't go around blaming 16 man guilds for bugs showing up on live. Read between the lines on the intrepid post with the video. Read and interpret.