you can also pull armourings out of drops from ops and hardmodes and RE them. warning though it could take a lot o them to learn the schematic

Right now RE'ing the advanced cybertech (420 skill requirement ) droid components is returning a "you need advanced armourmech to do this" message. All the rest of the items are able to be Re'd but not the droid components that require a crafting skill lvl of 420 or greater

one thing you're not factoring in is that all this time is that either one at any time will probably be taking some sort of aoe damage as well. i've found times as a shadow tank using, slow time and force breach, force wave (as a soft interupt) if i'm doing damage to the elite often times the strong will be almost dead just from that damage. also i've noticed that the strongs in the FP's seem to be tuned as "glass cannons" hit hard but die easily

ok lets just put this down to playstyles and that's that, i prefer to learn in game, and yes sometimes that involved dying and wiping. This way though i'm actually learning what's going on and i can apply the lessons learned to future situations. I enjoy the challenge and the discovery of figuring out what' going to happen next and how i'll have to react. The thing to that most people who 'suggest' go online is that you also spoil the encounter for people who are doing it for the first time. The thing is i think this is more of a playerbase skill issue more than a game/boss mechanic thing. As a tank i need to know only a few things, interuptable? tauntable? (that info i can get right from clicking on the boss himself) LOS damage ( ie turn the boss), aggro swap, big burst damage (blow your deffensive cd's). you give me that information myself and any other tank that knows what they're doing and is geared for the encounter should do fine. Same thing goes for healers and dps, except they should be asking different questions. like healer should be asking is there a cleanse, is there a time for group aoe heals, how hard are the mdps going to be hit by Aoe, etc. give a good healer that info and they should be fine. I think in summary what i'm trying to vent here is that the people who are trying to learn the game through playing it. When they are asking questions in game they are looking for answers in game. They are not looking for an external resource for that answer. they are seeking help from people who have actual experience in it or that may even be willing to help 'walk' them through the encounter.

i think that's most of it! they don't want to explain it and take the responsibility for the wipe if it goes wrong. The thing i'm saying is that, they're asking you to look up the fight that isn't even that complicated! I mean what's so hard about typing when the aoe, thrash, knockback etc happens go click here, or kill the adds or whatever. Im not saying if it's a super complicated fight not to do some research first, but what's wrong with peer learning? even if you've watched the tactics online it doesn't mean success the first time you actually do it in game. Watching and playing aren't the same

As the tittle states, please stop telling people to go look something up online. Almost daily I see someone ask a perfectly acceptable question over general, and there are people who take the time to try to help the person out. ie on makeb the h4 savage skies, "how do you destroy the turrets?" we've all been there. we were all confused for a second, then either figured it out or got a response from the in game community. we said, Ty, they responded Yw, and we moved on. But there's always people who's default answer is to tab out and check online! I mean are these people completely relying on outside sources to learn to play the game. I might be in the minority but i like to 'learn' how to play the game by 'playing' the game and not having it scripted to me by someone outside! it happened to last week on makeb doing the weekly [toboros courtyard] where you kill the golden fury "boss droid". The ops leader kept spamming 'oh make sure you check online for tactics blah, blah, blah' i dropped group because i can't stand that. I found another group recently that needed a tank, now my tank is in full 69 gear augmented and i've got over 38k health, and i've also tanked every boss, in every FP, Op, world boss fight there is I know how to tank. just give me the basics and i'll be fine! I don't need /want to have to tab out of a game to learn how to play it! I can learn to play the game from playing the game! (wow what a concept!) oh and btw for those that don't know how easy that fight is here let me explain it! This is not an overly complex mechanic! and definately easily explained in chat in game. If you're the type of player who wants to be given everything, doesn't like surprises and wants to have your hand held throughout the entire game (and unfortunately there are people like that) then go ahead go to the website and spoil everything for yourself. But there's no content in this game that a decent player can't figure out through playing it a couple of times or just with a few tips typed in through chat.

in some cases even that isn't even required, many times a lvl apropriately geared companion can fill the missing role, it you can only find 3 out of 4 players for an H4, or 2 out of 3or 4 for a H2+. There are also certain missions where depending on your role you can do them by yourself, stealth classes, especially heroics where it's, just terminal clicking. you won't get the bonus, or the loot drops from kills, but you'll still get the xp, creds and final reward. More to the point, the rewards are often not worth the effort to go to the trouble to find a group

see you guys are giving up way to easily, what you need to do ( and this works for all the world boss's ) is suppose youre waiting there for a group to arrive, and "out of nowere" a 55 or another faction shows up and takes the boss first! omg it's the end of the world its not fair..... yadda yadda , yadda. organize your tanks together or any other members of your group that have a taunt and just taunt the boss away from the (soloing 55, or the other faction group) until he gets far enough away to 'evade'. once he evades whoever gets to him first will get the credit for the kill. Against another group it can be a pain if they are organized, but against a single player you should have no problem holding aggro against him/her, and killing the boss. heck they may not even realize that they're locked out of the boss and might even help you out in killing it. Basically i'm saying that it's an open world event, use open world tactics to deal with it. There's more that can be done to overcome obstacle then complain about it. Oh btw if your just standing infront of a boss, mob, terminal it doesn't make it yours. It's only "yours" when your actually using it.

it's funny now it's actually pretty easy to solo most of the lvl 50 Hm and h4 combat missions. except for like Li, and KOS, aurora cannon, where mechanically you need more people to complete. At lvl 50 with 61/63 mix, 2 manning was simple (companions in 56/61 or better gear), I haven't tried them now (the rewards aren't worth it and i'm focusing on gearing now) but it should be doable.

The only gear issue problem here is with the "bonus" boss, which if you read the text is actually presented as a "challenge boss" hence the enrage timer. if your undergeared you wont necessarily die because of the damage he's putting out, you'll die because you can't kill him fast enough. The rest of the FP should be doable as long as you work together, and use your cc's, cd's, los, push, environmental items (pressurized tanks, etc), the frustration comes in when people who do not have the gear for the 'challenge" boss insist on doing it. Run it a few times gear up, then come back and do it when you can. Back to the point these have made me pledge once again my love for a good healer, and my angst against dps'ers who just don't get it.

yes it does, and yes you can, the armour, earpiece, implant etc will be able to use any augment up to the lvl of the item so if you make a lvl 47 item with an augment slot it'l be able to use any augment up to an including mk-5 augments. this also works with the orange shells you can craft. the crafted augment slots you crit are also upgradeable like any other slot

They are trying to force people out of "hybrid" specs, they work alright as a hybrid between to dps specs, but not so well from a dps/heal spec. and all the changes since 2.0 are trying to make it more benificial to you to remain largely specialized in one tree. Again at the lvl your at the skill trees aren't divergent enough to make a huge difference. but once your at lvl 25-26 you will gain access to specific healing skills that are tree specific as long as you have enough points in the tree already to open them up. I would not bother with orange gear for my companions while lvling unless your really trying to push to 55 quickly or have a lot of credits/crafting sills mats to keep them up to date. all of the planet side missions will reward you with the choice of a quest lvl green box, comms or a piece of equipment for one of your companions. most of the time those are good enough and you can backfill the rest from mob drop loot. the new way the coms are done is nice because they are no longer planet bound so if you earn a bunch from one planet where you're having an easy time you can stockpile them until you get to the next planet and buy the gear to help you with that planet. If you really insist on orange gear, you can buy empty shells on the gtn from people cartel packs, some can be quite expensive, but often are on sale for less than 100credits because they are not saleble to vendors. you may not like the look of them but for some companions (bowdar and khem ) they dont display them anyway.

The only valid reason i heard for them getting rid of the elite coms for space combat is that people are macroing the fights and getting the rewards, which is a valid point, and also against the EULA. There is a potentially easy fix for this. reward the elite comms only as part of the weekly and make the weekly consist of random missions, in random order. Example make it a 3 mission weekly, (just like the FP HM weekly) but make it randomly select which 3 missions pop (just like it does on the gf for the daily fp reward) That way it would make it impossible for people to macro the missions because they wouldn't know which 3 missions would pop at any time for the weekly.

mobs do drop reputation items but they're pretty rare and their random. you have as good a chance from an elite as from a weak or standard mob. They drop about as frequently as planetary comms so i'd say in the range of .5% of the loot drops. so kill 200 and you'll probably get one. Mostly i've seen them drop the green lvl reputation item (dog tags iirc), and very very rarely i've seen them drop the blue piece

this is done in response to the crafters saying that there is no market for their stuff now and that they have no reason to craft armour pieces anymore. Which in some respects they have a point, It does take a lot of time/effort to get the drops from the ops to pull out the armour slot for a chance to learn the schematic so you can build it for yourself. So i can see why they have done this. I don't like it but i understand why it is. Now of course we will get the qq'ing from people complaining the prices of the crafted armourings are too high and that bioware should 'price fix' the gtn lol

i think some of the problem here is also making clear that if you're marking targets as being cc'd, make sure they know what the symbol is and that they don't think that the marked target's are the ones to attack. especially as a non native english speaker it could be difficult. in some Fp's you mark targets to signal the attack order and not that they are cc'd. On my Shadow tank i just eliminate that problem by stealthing in mezzing the target, sprint out, pull the target to be hit first out from the vicinity of the mezzed target(s) and then everyone can go ahead and aoe the hell out of them, just make sure to give the rest of the mobs time to converge on the puller also there are some aoe abilities now that will only hit mezzed targets if they are being directly targeted or if they are in LOS, slow time is like that, and so is force wave, it no longer hits targets behind you, force breach however will

some do but most do not, probably because of the access to vendors and the inaccesibility of the gtn terminals, only on fleet, homeworld, narshadda, and makeb station, (personal ship too if you've bought the unlock). I think if there were more gtn terminals you might see some more greens going but even the price for blue gear on the gtn is sometimes listed for less than what you'd get from the vendor. What you'll be seeing now for a while at least is the green 26, and 28 mods/armours/hilts on gtn, as guys are trying to RE them to get the purple schems. and they're dropping like rain from the seeker droid missions

being 2 lvls under the mission lvl isn't that big of a deal, in most cases, what can be a huge difference is what lvl your gear is. So if your at lvl 28 trying to do lvl 30 missions but wearing the same gear you were wearing on Coruscant/or DK, it's not going to work out so well for you. First thing i'd suggest is that you check out your gear, and your companions gear to make sure it's at the most 5 lvls bellow your lvl if its a purple item, 3 lvls below if it's a blue, or no more than 2 lvls bellow if it's a green lvl item. most purple items will have the equivalent main stats (+end,+wiil/ +end, +aim..etc as a green lvl item 5 lvls above it, and the same as a blue item 3 lvl above. If you're armour's up to date check your companions, especially if they're doing the tanking/ or melee dps. you should be able to pick up green equipment dirt cheap from the gtn for you or your companion if need be. Also running a stim will really help as well, and ask if there are any players with multiple 50+'s that wouldn't mind passing by and giving you all the class buffs. I know when i'm standing around a terminal or trainer on the fleet i'm giving away buffs all the time. you can also look for a lvling buddy, or a guild, not only do you get help on the boss's but there's also an xp bonus to lvling in a group, even outside of flashpoints. Just make sure to respect each others loot, and if you'r the same class make sure you 'enable - share same class quests' from your social tab in the preferences menu.

I would think that operative would have the highest APM, if your using the poision tree, you have only 1 action that's channeled and that's from cover. The rest of the skill set is all instant cast, and with the alacrity boost now affecting the GCD it should be an even higher rate.

this is exactly it, if you're talking about an FP where running through it and clearing it is almost the same thing, false emperor for example where you pretty much have to kill to make it through then it makes some sense. but in an FP like Taral V which takes literally 20-25 mins, to speed run and over 1.5 hours to complete with bonus'. it's completely ridiculous, your much better xp wise running through it multiple times for the mission completed bonus and for the weekly fp bonus

they also changed it so that they can now wear the legacy armour, and the social armour as long as you have enough reputation or social rank to equip it yourself. so you can have elara dorn running around in red scalene armour, if your rep is high enough, or in the house ulgo social gear if you social rank is high enough as well. oh and you'll also like to stack their stats based on what their 'player equivelant' would be, regardless of their stance. For example if you were playing as consular you'd give qyzen or irresso, tank gear even if they were in their dps stance.

shadow - human sage - ratatakki (legacied over) sentinal- Zabrak (warrior style makes sense-plus too from the initial cinematics -deception i think it had to be him) guardian - Chiss (again legacied over) commando- mirialan no vanguards for me but i think cyborb would fit there scoundrel - cyborg, makes sense with the enhanced human base to be able to use your electronics to help you in your job (think mako ) imperial side juggernaut - sith pureblood and as ugly as you can get mercenary - chiss, i just think that the fact that chiss society is so closed it'd be a cool contrast, almost as cool as if they ever made the voss a playable race sorcerer - rakatakki as well, something about being bald makes shooting lightning out of your fingers make sense operative- human female, just i can't picture the british accent coming out of a different body than that of a human, sort of like finally my sniper -had to be a cyborg/human as well, for reasons above

i was Re'ing the lvl 54 green armour from sythweaving to get the mk9 augment pieces, and noticed that i was also getting some grade 1 arch artifacts as well, i hope this is just a bug that's confusing the names of the grade 9 artifact pieces and the grade 1 piece, as the names are similar

don't count on it, with only 1 planet where you can farm resources right now and the fact that now 3 weeks out since early access their are people who are already geared or almost geared in BIS equipment the market will still be hot for them for the forseable future. I'd stick around with the blue lvl ones for a while. you'll loose about 28 of each stat from a fully augmented set of gear but that shouldn't be the difference between defeating a boss or causing a wipe

first of all Great job on resurecting this thread, you sir are the necro king! I completely agree with these suggestions. at the very least allow us to hotkey/keybind abilities while the companion bar is minimized. with some of the characters it's not a big deal , but when you're rolling around with Hk and his assasinate stack is full it'd be nice to just tab>hotkey>kill, instead of either leaving his toolbar open all the time or having to open it up tab>hotkey>close