I can see that queueing as tank and acting like this would optimize for getting things done as quickly as possible. (You might want to inspect achievements in addition to gear, though.) That said, it both seems obnoxious and sounds pretty boring. HM Flashpoints can actually be entertaining sub 70. For DvL, in addition to pvp, on tanks & healers I tended to go 50 to 65 through random party group finder HM FP's. No, it wasn't the fastest way to level, but it had actual entertainment value. I think I only remember one out of the many FP's that wasn't completed, including many with other players sub 65 or in poor gear. If you can play, bolster is more than enough. For an actual challenge, start taking the bolster penalty by removing gear. Naked sage/sorc healer (no mainhand) is especially amusing.

I remember and various all-guardian-raid-group shenanigans from a while back. Welcome back!

Only certain flashpoints have a story mode (which used to be called solo mode). See this community news post for a list. To read that list effectively, know that with 5.0 there was a change in the naming of difficulty modes. For flashpoints, they adjusted as follows: Solo became Story Tactical became Veteran Hard became Master (Note that this is confusing because operations [aka raids] were treated differently: Story became Story, Hard became Veteran, and Nightmare became Master. The old names were more aligned between flashpoints & operations.) Depending on your gear, companion affection level, and skill, you may be able to solo some of the flashpoints in Veteran mode The following flashpoints never had a solo mode: Those which used to have a Tactical (now Veteran): Hammer Station Athiss Mandalorian Raiders Cademimu Red Reaper Kuat Drive Yards Czerka Labs Czerka Core Meltdown Those which never had a Tactical either: (they had an old style Story mode without level sync; no idea what's become of that now) Colicoid War Game Kaon Under Siege Lost Island

Two points: 1. There's a wide range of difficulties in HM FP's. For example Blood Hunt, Battle of Rishi, Lost Island, and Manaan have boss fights that are much more difficult than most other HM FP's. 2. The difference between augmented 216 and augmented 220 is much smaller than typical variations in player skill. There's even a thread discussing soloing HM FP's, a hatred assassin having soloed the vast majority of them. That thread has a good list of HM FP's ranked by difficulty as well. I'd recommend starting with the gear you have and tanking the easier HM FP's and working out for yourself where your current limit is.

The trash in Red Reaper HM hits much harder than the bosses. Especially that group at the very beginning with the second wave of adds and the group right after the first elevator. Don't be afraid to CC some and use your stuns (and interrupt the marauders in those rooms). Wiping in those rooms and then 1-shotting the rest of the instance is pretty common in pugs. Bolster works in HM FP's, but it does bolster you to a slightly lower gear rating than in SM Ops. I doubt you're getting much bolster in your 208 gear. That said, 208 augmented should be more than fine for most HM FP's, especially because, as you note, you can even do them 50+ with bolster (though I'd recommend waiting until level 65 for a new player). People can be irrationally biased against PVP gear. As for getting hit harder than in SM Ops, that sounds right. HM FP's are typically tougher numbers-wise (in terms of mitigation, dps, and ehps required) than SM Ops, though they require less coordination. There's also more personal responsibility as there are only 4 players.

Your parse seems quite good. At this level, there's a lot of luck in terms of crits or building stacks, and small mistakes can make the difference as well (you were 12 seconds = about 7 GCD's behind). Without going through it line by line, what I notice is that the parse you're comparing with had very lucky Maul crits, gaining more than 200 dps over you simply from Maul crit percentage. Discounting that leaves you only about 100 dps behind, which is just a couple GCD's off. Other than that, you used Voltaic Slashes slightly more often (without looking in detail, this might be luck with building stacks or it could be you overusing it) and got one fewer Assassinate in.

The timing of the second adrenal is not going to make much of a difference. Getting the rotation down and clean and getting your APM up is going to make more of a difference. A nice thing to do is to compare your parse with one of the top parses. Look at APM, at the damage pie chart, and then look both in the "Ability Usage" tab and in the "Rotation" tab on Parsely. For example, compare yours to the top hatred parse: 1. APM. Yours is 43.41 compared to 44.65 for the top parse. Yours isn't that bad, but it is lower. Becoming really comfortable with the rotation to make sure you're not hesitating will help here. (And of course queue your actions, but you're probably doing that already.) It's also possible small APM discrepancies are due to a different alacrity choice or due to some irrelevant off-gcd ability being used or not, but most people have very similar alacrity these days. 2. Damage pie chart. The big thing I notice here is that Thrash is a higher % and Death Field is a lower % of your damage compared to the top parse. We'll see why in a moment . . . 3. Look at Ability Usage. Here we see why Death Field was so low a %. You're using it every 17.86 seconds on average, compared to every 14.15 seconds for the top parse. This is a rotation issue: You need to use Death Field on cooldown, not aligned with your dots. Ignoring alacrity, Death Field has a (base) 15 second cooldown and your dots last for (base) 18 seconds. So in terms of your dots, you have a 18/1.5 = 12 GCD rotation, but your Death Field needs to be used every 10 GCD's, so it floats compared to your dots. 4. If you want more specifics, look through the Rotation tab and figure out what's different for you & the top parse. Or if you need really fine detail, look at the actual combat log.

My raid group does occasionally get multi-bombs with nobody dead, but it seems rather less common than others in this thread say they see them. I hadn't thought about causes much because it's just a rare annoyance for our group, but here's a theory that occurs to me (just a guess really, but should be easy to test): Perhaps bombs only go out to players within 30m (or some range, maybe 40m as that's also a common range for boss abilities in more recent ops). This would mean that if bombs go out when a tank gets knocked back, you'll get a double, and if someone else in addition takes a knockback or is just really far out (e.g. coming out of rain of pain, or someone on master who's moved out far) you might get a triple. Also, my group has a guardian tank who I think uses unremitting on most knockbacks and a vanguard who I think uses hold the line on about half, so this may explain why my group doesn't see quite as many as well.

That's not how it works. You can place the center up to 30m away, and when you double click it tries to place it at the center of what you've targeted. But your distance-to-target is listed as your distance to the edge of the target, which for fat targets is much closer to you than the center (and normal targeted abilities have their range based on this distance, not distance to center). So you'll be able to double click in exactly the same situations as before, but now with ground targeting the closest enemy you can hit is just under 35m away (to the edge of the enemy) instead of just under 38m away (to the edge of the enemy). See this guide by theho on dulfy.

I didn't register for this contest, but in support of those who did, I find this to be a terrible policy. PVE players regularly /stuck to finish failed attempts faster. This is essentially universal and in no way an exploit. It's highly unfortunate, given that there was an actual /stuck exploit, that you couldn't or wouldn't separate the exploitative use from the normal use.

That sounds entertaining but I'm not quite sure how the numbers work out. First boss has 14 million health on 16 man and enrage on 16 man is 7 min, so that's 8.3k dps for each of the 4 people. Are you living through enrage for a while somehow on this boss? Pylons and Soa sound totally doable with 4. Gharj I guess you can cheese (or perhaps even without? I don't know numbers/enrage for Gharj). Council looks like about 7k dps for the 2.5 min for each person, with no group buffs and only self debuffs, which sounds like quite a fun, strict check to try! (The requirement might be slightly higher as you can't split them exactly evenly.)

IANAL and you should double-check this, but I'm pretty sure "gaming transactions" refers to gambling.

in coeptus conlide [Hacked together with a latin dictionary and my rusty latin grammar. Conlido = crush/batter. Coeptus = beginning [4th decl]. Conlide is the imperative form. Not the best, but it sort of works.]

It's certainly possible; you just have to know what you're doing. I typically queue for HM FP's starting at 50 when I'm leveling a class with a tank or healer spec (I do occasionally as dps too, but the queue is long) and only very rarely have a problem where me being underleveled is the issue. For example, in the pug Battle of Rishi HM where I was tanking at level 50-something a while ago, on the last boss my poor survivability was a bit too much for the otherwise well-geared pug group. [Though I've tanked this boss for guildies with tank + 2 dps under 65 with no issues, but our healer was ace.] On the other hand, just this week I tanked Lost Island at level 62 in a pug (everyone else was 65, but they all only had 208 gear). We wiped a good amount, but that's what you'd expect from a Lost Island pug, and wasn't all that related to my being underleveled [we'd have wiped a few less times, but most were to people not doing mechanics], and we made it through.

Can now get in, as others have posted.

I got the achievement on a run in which from starting to zone in until end of combat on the last boss (which is when the achievement pops) it took me 15:17. From start of combat to end of combat was 14:35. I also have a guildmate who had 14:42 from start of combat on boss 1 to end of combat on boss 10 and got the achievement on that run. Use this information (which I have no desire to provide proof of, but perhaps you can scour youtube videos for similar info if you are skeptical) as you will. Just trying to provide a bit of helpful info.

For the achievement, you only need to beat 15 minutes from the start of the 1st fight (after the first convo ends) to the end of the 10th fight. So it includes all 9 transitions, but no loading screen. Source: My run was more than 15 min terminal to terminal but I got the speed achieve. Further details worked out by comparing various times guildies & I had and whether we got the achieve. For the contest, they're saying it's different, and is terminal to terminal. Now that sort of sucks because loading screen time matters, but if you're just shooting for the achieve, feel free to mosey on down and just get ready by the time the first conversation is ending. And best of luck!

To address the math problem: The 220 and 224 pieces are independent in your setup. Since you say everyone rolls if they're allowed to, 5 random players get a 220 and 5 random players get a 224. The probability that you (one specific player) don't get a piece = (the probability you don't get a 220) * (the probability you don't get a 224) = 3/8 * 3/8 = 9/64, or approximately 14% The probability that somebody (not a specific person) doesn't get anything: Imagine the 224's being distributed first. 5 players get one, and 3 don't. Your setup has the 220's randomly distributed as well. For everyone to get one, we need all 3 who don't have a 224 plus 2 of the 5 who do to get a 220. There are "5 choose 2" = 5 * 4 / 2 = 10 ways to do this, ignoring who gets what piece. The total number of ways to distribute the 220's is "8 choose 5" = 8 * 7 * 6 / (3 * 2) = 56 (again ignoring who gets what piece). So the probability that everyone gets something is a mere 10/56, or roughly 18%. So the probability that someone doesn't get anything is roughly 82%. TLDR: With your rules (everyone rolling when they can etc): Probability one specific person gets nothing is 14%. Probability that at least someone in the raid gets nothing is 82%.

Ah cool, thanks guys. Makes sense, I'll have to try it out. I guess you have to make sure you're not mid gcd say.

I don't think avoiding push/pull with entrench is what was being referred to. You can keep doing dps during the aberrations/"clock mechanic" without lining things up carefully by constantly moving (e.g. strafing side to side or even just moving front to back) while facing the right direction. It sounded like sevenfaced was referring to a way to keep doing dps as a sniper during aberrations that uses cover somehow instead of strafing/movement. I'd be interested to know how this works. Or just what the best way to use cover during floor 3 is.

How does this "cover positioning" work? (I understand the strafing technique on core.)

I haven't seen this happen in Assault on Tython (or even at all recently) but there were similar bugs in other flashpoints a long time ago. The quick fix back then was to tab out of the game when the conversation was starting. This avoided a graphics-related crash, I believe. I'm not sure if your issue is similar, but maybe it will help.

Please leave us the few HM's that are actually a decent challenge. There are so many HM FP's now and it makes sense for some to be easier and some to be harder. It's really only Battle of Rishi, Blood Hunt, one boss on Manaan, and maybe the mechanics on Lost Island (damage is low now) that present a challenge beyond that of most group finder pugs. There are 17 other options in group finder. Leave something for newer players to work up to and that actually is an enjoyable run for veteran players.

Sage doesn't even need mainhand, you can go completely naked, with no items of any sort equipped. (You miss out on bubbles, mental alacrity, and force potency for some reason, but nothing else important.) I don't remember what the bolster is with no items, but it's something, just less than having even crappy gear. Solo healing with it is possible if your teammates don't do anything too stupid. I haven't done this in an op for a few months, but just recently did a hm fp with nothing on and had 51k health (compared to like 20k health before entering). For comparison I think you have closer to 60k health if you have a full set of low level gear on in a hm fp. (These numbers are lower than for an op, as you get bolstered higher in sm ops than hm fps.)

I agree in general that mk-2 is likely better in more fights, and they do have a bit more shield/abs but the major stat gain is defense. This is all in the silly hypothetical that defense is worthless, in which case you'd likely be happy giving away 8 (I think) shield/abs for ~50 end.