Get in any weekly group for EV HM, kill Gharj, get the knight / smuggler offhand token and get yourself a shiny new crystal !

What do you need the credits for ? Anything below EC / TFB HM can be done in Recruit, which is free. So you don't have any remodding and augmentation costs / stim cost / death tax anyways. If you PvP, you don't have to deal with repair costs anyways. PvP WZs also reward decent amount of credits. Do a few more WZs.

Exactly. Nerf the credit rewards. You see, sinks are required only if sources are present. Nerf the credit rewards, drastically reduce the repair cost / gtn spread / item extraction cost / etc. Both supply and demand curves are shifted. You can even make HM FPs / OPs give more credits to incentivize people to run harder content. Leaving aside the fact that I am arguing for the exact opposite of increased credit sinks, why should the above happen? Show me one instance where an asset price has increased in a deflationary economy. I am really curious to see such an example .

The GTN is not a credit source. It does not create credits, only transfer them. If anything, the GTN spread should be reduced to 5 - 10 bps from the current 6% cap to facilitate freer transfer of goods. If anything, the game has too much credit sinks. Recent hike in repair costs is an example of credit sinks going out of hand. If you read my original post, the suggestion is actually to attack the credit source, the supply side of the problem, by cutting down credit rewards from dailies / monster drops by 80 - 90%.

Problem is the frankly insane costs of repair, which discourage people from attempting harder content. So people run dailies instead of HM EC / TFB. No one wants to PUG LI HM, or teach a new group tactics for EV HM. I believe if both credit sinks and sources were toned down, it will actually encourage people to attempt Ops / FPS, instead of mindless daily grinding. Basically, the whole idea is that you should gear up to 63 by doing TFB HM / EC NiM, not by grinding dailies and buying mods off GTN. Right now the game is set up to discourage wiping in Ops. Instead, the game should encourage you to try EC / TFB HM and remove / reduce penalties that prevent you from doing it.

I understand that there needs to be credit sinks in the game to prevent runaway inflation. In any real economy inflation has both supply side and demand side factors. So far BW has just tinkered with the demand side, causing this mass uproar. So why not tinker with the supply side for a change ? Here is what I suggest: Drastically reduce credit drops in the game. Reduce credit drops from dailies by 80 - 90%. This includes credit drops from NPCs. Increase credit drops from FPs / OPs. The best way to earn credits should be the actual content, not grinding dailies. Higher the difficulty, more the credits. TFB was a right step in this direction, Reduce GTN trading cost. Currently it is capped 6% of list price, reduce it to 5 to 10 bps of list price. Freer movement of goods in an economy benefits all. If I may make 1 demand side suggestion , reduce / remove death penalty from HM Tier 2 FPs / Ops. This will encourage people to attempt the HM content. This will solve the entire inflation problem while not alienating the player base over repair costs and also encourage people to actually run FPs / Ops.

Or you could google a bit and read up the theory behind it and solve the puzzle: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/LightsOutPuzzle.html One thing the page does not mention is matrix algebra is valid over any field, not just R. And a set of integers modulo prime (2 in this case) is a field. Also, let dead threads lie

Have both tanks taunt after the shield goes down, and one of them will take the hit. I don't think this has anything to do with running into other people's color.

Thanks again for your detailed reply . I will get our tanks to upload their logs and comb them to see what I can come up with.

We only recently finally killed Kephess HM with a group very similar to yours (replace you Sorc and Merc DPS with Shadow and Gunslinger). What we found was Kephess pulls us in as soon as his health bar hits 59%. My suggestion to you is the following (very close to what we had done): 1> At 75 - 78% Kephess will do his last Mighty Leap and drop a red circle. One tank would pick him up and drag him to the position along the entrance wall (so LOS is possible). The sniper and healers position themselves near the entrance. 2> 2nd tank taunts as soon as Savage Wounding goes out, and holds Kephess till Gift is cast. Ensure everybody is fully healed at this point. Only the tanks should be taking any damage, so thats relatively easy. 3> At 61%, sniper pop entrench and shield, healers and merc DPS hide. Everybody else (2 tanks, sorc dps and mara) bunches up around the boss at this point, so they will have very little distance to travel once pull happens and they can run out faster. Sorc healer drops a healing circle on the Sniper. 4> At 60%, mara pops predation. It lasts 10 seconds, so you can pop it a bit early. Sorc DPS bubbles himself. 5> At 59% pull happens, tanks pop shroud and speed, sorc dps pops speed, mara pops camo (forget the imperial name for this) and runs out towards the healing circle. Sorc can use his self heal while running out. The only problem we had with this strat was our tank got no heals during the 61% to 59% phase, and his health was very low. He didn't die, but he was just barely alive. Maybe your sorc healer can stay out and force speed away from the Gift. Just remember to bunch around the boss before the pull. After the pull, have the tank with higher health (should the the one not tanking Kephess before gift) pick Kephess up. The last 60% of Kephess is really fast and furious and we wiped countless times on that phase . Have fun

Thanks for your detailed reply. I should have been clearer. It's actually 2 separate questions – a) Is the attack AOE? and b) Is the attack M/R/F/T ? The logs only list the damage type of the attack, not the attack type. It’s important to know so that we can spec for certain DR talents accordingly. Sometimes its obvious – Toth’s smash and Kephess’s Gift is obviously AOE. But for things like Zorn’s Baradium toss, it’s not clear. We did this phase by all DPS and healers stacking inside the droids, and the 2 tanks standing outside. The tanks got hit by railshots, but DPS didn’t. The problem was that sometimes the RDPS or healers got hit while we were switching droids, and we wanted to avoid that and go into Kephess fight with healers’ energy bars full, so for the last transition, I would leap to the droid and pacify it. What you are saying is that if the tanks also stand inside the droids, nobody will get hit with railshot. We will try it out next time . If a boss is marked ops boss, the pacify button is disabled and you get a red flytext error message if you try to use it. In my experience, pacify can be used freely on any adds, just not on the boss itself. Common places where it is useful is turrets at start of EV (not strictly a boss), Jealous Male / critters in TFB and Imperial siege droids / Trandoshian warriors in Kephess. I also use it on Baradium bombers, but very likely pacify has no effect on their attacks and is wasted. IIRC, pacify can be even used on the 4th boss in EV, but sadly not on the Regulators / Rectifier in Operator IX fight. Since regulators / rectifiers are strictly adds, not sure whether this is intentional or not, but it is definitely inconsistent. Thanks for clearing this up. Thanks for your explanation. Of course I don’t attack after popping camo. The way it happens is as follows: 61% - Healers hide, GS pops entrench and shield 60% - Transdence activated 59% - Kephess pulls, Camo / Resilience activated, run for your life Will try to pop rebuke as well now. Thanks for the tip. Will try this the next time and see if it works out better for us or not.

Our super casual guild cleared EC HM for the first time this week after a looooong series of wipes on Kephess. We had the Kephess encounter till Gift of the Masters cast down pat within the first hour, but the last 60% of Kephess's health proved quite challenging . I had a few queries on the mechanics/tactics involved: 1> Is there a way to find out which boss attacks are melee / ranged or which are AOE ? Torhead turns up nothing. My guess is Toth’s smash / Kephess’s Gift of the Master are AOE, but Zorn’s baradium toss is not (though everyone within 25m of Zorn takes damage). Basically, should we spec for AOE damage reduction talents or not? 2> Similarly, is the railshot from the 2 giant Kephess droids ranged or tech? I used pacify on them, not sure if it helps or not . 3> We used the strategy of gunslingers popping entrench and shield at 61% of Kephess’s health and the healers hiding. Kephess pulled us in at exactly 59% health. I used transcendence at 60%, our tanks and melee dps popped resilience / force speed and force camo and ran out. The problem was that the tank tanking Kephess almost dies in the 5 – 6 seconds between 61% to 59%, since he is getting no heals. He survives, but with barely 5% - 10% of his health left. For the groups that use this strategy, and I have read strategies that recommend hiding at 62%, how do you manage this cleanly? 4> I am not clear on the difference between Kephess's knockback and this Breath cast. Knockback applies the Touch, causing the tank to turn black and start dropping circles, so why cast the Breath ? Seems redundant . 5> And finally, does damage reduction stack? So if I take the sentinel talent defensive roll, plus pop both camo and rebuke during Gift of the Masters, I should take 0.7 * 0.5 * 0.8 = 0.28 of the damage from the Gift AOE. A couple of things we observed: If we failed to kill the 2nd bomber in time in time and he explodes, we don’t get another bomber in that phase. The 2 giant droids spawn and it’s an almost certain wipe. Not sure if this is a bug or not. Also, a couple of times while killing the 3rd bomber, Kephess decided to put up his red circle on top of the bomber, which again wiped the raid since we weren’t able to move the bomber away fast enough, leading to him exploding and putting too much strain on our already stretched healers. We noticed a significant delay between Kephess’s jump and the red circle showing up. If the red circle appeared immediately, we would have more time move the bomber away. Not complaining about it too much since this was a rare occurrence, but this introduces an unnecessary RNG element into an already long and tough fight. Thanks for your help.

Ensure your healers dont have any bubbles / HOTs on people and your offtanks are not guarding anyone at start. It took us a lot of wipes to understand this . What we found happens is that a healer places a bubble on tank, tank pulls and takes damage which is absorbed by the bubble. This counts as healing, but the healer hasn't got the drouk hunter buff yet. So healer gets debuffed and dies. Same for scoundrel HOTs. Basically, stay close to the boss at pull, and don't perform ANY offensive / defensive action till you get the drouk hunter buff.

There is too much emphasis on gear in this game. Its unfortunate, but understandable. Gear is something you can see upfront whereas player skill can only be judged ex-post. That said, the gear requirements are quite low in this game. Everything upto EC and TFB SM can be done in recruit gear. I have healed EV HM in full recruit (freshly dinged 50 alt) and KP HM with a couple of pieces for Rakata / Columi gear I got from the EV HM run. It was not even hard to heal too. A guildmate has tanked EC SM in recruit too, all through Kephess. We have even run TFB HM with a PUG healer in Columi / Rakata mixed (our guild is perennially healer short ).

So how soon can we expect Dread Guard and EWH gear to be available on the Cartel market ?

Completely agree with the above. Only thing I want to buy from the Cartel market is the Account wide Cargo Bay and Inventory Slot unlocks, since the last levels are awfully expensive. But right now I am disinclined to do so, since on any alt I create, the unlocks will apply to the cheapest bays / slots, and I still have to buy cargo bays for 1 or 2 million credits. This is a really suboptimal outcome for someone who has plans to make several alts in the future. The Cartel Market / Inventory slot unlocks should be changed that using these to unlock Cargo Bay / Inventory Slots do not increase the credit cost of subsequent upgrades. This will effectively make these unlocks apply to the most expensive upgrades.