If he wan't DPSing, why did you not just kick him? And you intentionally got the other DPS killed just because the marauder was being annoying? If I was the other DPS, all three of you would be on my ignore list by now. The marauder for refusing to do his job, and you and the healer for abandoning me to die just because you are annoyed at the other guy.

You actually want those Inquisitors/Consulars to use overload/wave to knock everything away from the tank even more often?

You forgot to mention tunnel-vision on the boss. I too find that most Marauders/Sentinels fit that description perfectly. I'm always shocked on those rare occasions that I run into a good one. Hmm, maybe I should work on leveling my Marauder, just to add another decent one to the pool...

Same thing for me. I noticed it yesterday afternoon, but as I tend to switch around between characters alot, I was second guessing myself as to whether I had played that character earlier in the day or not. At least now I know I'm not imagining things.

SM Taral V. I was a healer Scoundrel. We started with a Guardian tank who, no matter how many times we told him, was certain that his current mode was his tank mode. It was not. He also didn't use any taunts at all. Which meant I was Healer-tanking the FP. We got through the first couple of bosses (the guy with the vinecats, and the the one with the big pet) without too much difficulty as I was a relatively high level healer, and well geared, so we decided to keep the tank, as we didn't want to wait for a new one. Then came the bridge. He ran up beside the first droid, and got knocked off. The rest of us finished the fight and waited for him. He ran all the way back without using his speeder, and as soon as he got to us, he left... Not a DC or something, he actually used the "leave area" button, and left the group. It's not like we where being rude to him or anything either, we were politely explaining how tanking worked, and giving him tips.

That sounds like something bugged for you. I don't know if KDY counts for the weekly or not, but I do know that you can still complete the weekly if you deselect it.

Umm, you do realize that there where two tactical FPs before this new one came out right? And that they didn't cause everyone to give up on HMs?

There is still a fair bit of time inbetween the sentinel/maruader's jumps. Enough that I think it is worth it to try to pull it back. Especially if it is attacking an especially squishy DPS/healer. Once you have the other 3 together, it's easy to keep aggro on them. Which leaves you easily able to throw taunts at the jumper when ever it jumps away. Besides, it's the tank job to aggro things, so if you can and don't, simply because you don't feel like it, you aren't really doing your job. Personally, I tend to avoid tanks who can't be bothered to aggro, regardless of whether or not it's necessary, as that makes me feel that I can't trust that tank to actually do his job if things get tough. If you are a tank, and you avoid aggroing things because you just don't want to, I WILL ignore you.

I don't care if people skip random trash mobs, but I do get frustrated when people skip half the bosses on Illum. I'm doing this because I want comms. Killing bosses gets me comms. Thus, I want to kill the bosses. If the developers where that concerned about people skipping mobs, they would make it impossible. Put things in the way so you can't go around them, or just spread the mob a bit more. Make them chase farther so that just running through them only makes you pull more mobs, without evading them.

I find that boarding party to be one of the worst fights if the group doesn't know how to do it, but fairly easy if they do. I can't count how many times my sniper has had to pull the trooper & smuggler off the healer, and ended up tanking them until the tank and other DPS finally killed both jedi. When you get a group, and especially a tank who knows the fight, there is never an issue. One thing people tend to forget, is that even ranged DPS and healers should stay right with the tank (assuming the tank knows what he is doing), that way the bouncy jedi doesn't keep going outside of the tank's AOE range.

I did a SM Foundry last night on my Sniper. Got a PT tank, a Sorc healer, and I think the other DPS was a Marauder. As we start the first convo, the tank mentions that he doesn't have a lot of time, so if we could please make it quick. So we do. Every skips in convos, we avoid unnecessary mobs, we stay together for both "run past the jedi" chances. The tank did tend to run to the next mob without healing, but we all knew what we where doing, and the healer had no problem keeping up, so hey, great. All the boss fights went smoothly. Everyone was in position to break the panels for HK, Revan got interrupted as often as possible. All in all, it was one of the best, and easiest FPs I've done in a long time. We only had one situation that wasn't so good. We hopped on our speeders for the outside run, and oddly, we manged to get close enough to pull either two or three mobs of the bugs. We assumed that we would evade them, so we just continued straight for the two elite droids at the other end of the outside bit, and went at them. Apparently that wasn't far enough away, as the bugs promptly caught up to us and piled on the healer. The PT and Marauder didn't notice right away, as they where well infront of us, so I lobbed a thermal grenade to pull some off the healer. I got them all. I popped Evasion and Shield probe right away, but I couldn't use Countermeasures because that would just send them back to the healer. The healer somehow managed to keep me alive, while at the same time healing the PT who was busy with two elites. So healer, whoever you are, very good work.

Yeah, don't take insults in Hammer Station personally. Out of curiosity, what where you playing? I find that Juggernauts/Guardians often don't get proper heavy armor until a while after they are first eligible for Hammer Station, which makes them extremely squishy tanks. Also, Operatives/Scoudrels at level 15/16 usually have a very hard time keeping up with healing. If that is the case for you, I'd suggest queing as DPS for a couple more levels, then trying the tank/healer role again. If you are DPS, nobody should care about your gear in Hammer Station. Well, unless you are using cunning gear on a Jedi, or something like that.

If it was a 50+ FP I would probably like it better. (I haven't tried it with my 55 yet) But the hardest part is that it is available from 15+. With a team of semi-experienced 55s, yeah, you can kite things, and actually use tactics depending on your team composition. You can have reasonable expectations of them (hopefully). And obviously, the same goes for soloing it. But with random low levels, chances are that most of them don't have the experience, knowledge, and powers for that to work. You can make suggestions, but they either won't listen, don't know enough to understand the plan, or don't have powers to make it work. They don't adapt to party composition. They just run in and kill things, then yell at each other when they die. Which means it really is down to just hitting the mob/boss until it dies, while frantically trying to keep the others alive. The mobs are also too close together for new players that don't know how to avoid pulling extras. A single overload/force wave and you are suddenly facing two elites, 6 strongs, and an assortment of normals. With a healer and tank who know what they are doing, that's doable. With a level 15 sage, two 30ish gunslingers, and a 26 sentinel, three of which are on their first character? Not a chance. It just wasn't designed for people new to group combat / flashpoints, unlike HS or Athiss. If it was, say, 35-54, it would work a lot better. Like I said, I can see the 55 version being decent, but as I understand it only drops basic comms, it's not very useful for endgame players, and quite frankly, there are plenty of FPs for when you first get to 50-55, and far less for after you start playing 55 HM or Ops. I'll still be doing it on whatever leveling character I am using that day, but probably just once for the extra planetary comms from GF. I like it as an idea, but I just feel they didn't implement it properly at all. I do approve of the randomized zones/bosses though. Makes it far less repetitive.

Heh, I don't tend to respond well when people are rude about skipping either. I will usually suggest it politely at the beginning of the FP. If everyone agrees, great. If not, ah well, I guess I'll watch the cutscenes again. But when someone starts screaming SPACEEEEBARRRRRR!!!!! I usually make a point to NOT spacebar, and take as long to decide my conversation choices as possible. I actually had someone cancel the convo in the new one because I wasn't skipping through it on my first time through. Amusingly enough, if he had waited even 5 seconds longer, it would have been over. He then said that he would continue to cancel it everytime until we all started skipping. A second later, he was kicked.

I'm not to terribly impressed with it either. In the 15-54 version you get horrible combinations of completely new people who have absolutely no clue what they are doing, alongside people on their 10th lv 54 who have absolutely no patience with the new players. I'm also not a fan of the whole role-neutral thing in it either. Healers either can't keep up healing when all four players are being attacked seperately, or they feel useless because all that is needed is DPS, and those scenarios depend entirely on the levels/gear of the other players. Tanks just get mobbed and dropped without a healer, and a whole team of DPS tends to involve at least one person dying on both of the zone champions unless several of them have, and use taunts to pull it off eachother when their health gets low. I even had a team of four healers, which makes for very long, slow boss fights. Speaking of the bosses, I've done five runs, and got the jedi/sith four times. He seems to be specifically designed to irritate everyone. Any attacks with long casts/channels are nearly impossible to use because of those circles he throws around, and melee fighters are constantly having to back away from him because of them. Not to mention his constant jumping around makes melee nearly impossible anyways if the players don't stick nearby. Fighting him seems to mean the ranged players slowly chip away at him with weak attacks while constantly running away from circles, while the melee player pointlessly runs back and forth trying (hopelessly) to get close enough to attack. I imagine that if it was a decent team, they would stick together to keep the boss reasonably close to the melee players, but decent teams are hard to find, especially when EVERYONE who is leveling can access the same FP. The fourth player is relegated to simply running back and forth between the medstations. It's not challenging, it's just annoying. It also doesn't help that there is no loot worth getting from it anyways. A starfighter customization. A very ugly (adaptive?) armor set. And one of those oversized speeders that get on everyone's nerves when they completely cover the mail boxes, etc. One other thing. Who decided to call it a TACTICAL FP? There is no tactics, no strategy, no roles. Just straight up DPS. Aside from running for medstations during the bosses.

Nope, Harbinger.

Sorry, the "guarding the tank" bit wasn't directed at you. I just had someone doing that for an entire FP earlier today. I lost track of how many times we told him not to. We'd tell him, he'd remove the guard, then put it back during the next fight.

As someone who mostly plays a healer, I find that I rarely get much use from guard, and almost always am guarded anyways. I usually just watch who is pulling the most aggro during the first few fights, and ask the tank to guard them instead. Occasionally, the tank even listens to me. Most of the time though, it doesn't look like guard will be doing anyone much good (either a good tank that keeps his aggro, or a lousy tank that couldn't keep it while using guard anyways) so then I don't say anything, and just let it be. One other thing I want to say: DPS should absolutely NOT be guarding the tank...

Wow, if this was SM, I would understand, but by the time you get to HM, you really should know better. I had a SM Cademimu tank (PT) once who was absolutely certain that if he stood dead center of the room for the final boss, he would be safe from the fire. The healer (Sorc) and the other DPS (Merc) decided to join him. That was a very short fight. My Sniper ended just running into the fire to get it over with.

I really don't care if someone sliced the elevator. Jumping down and healing is still faster. Even when I have slicing, I don't use it there.

Well, at least commandos get heavy armor. Better than tanking with a Scoundrel or Sage! And I'm speaking from experience here. My commando healer probably tanks approximately 50% of the flashpoints she joins... My sage, on the other hand, almost never has that problem. It's actually kind of fun, if you succeed in healer-tanking an entire flashpoint. Feels rather like when you do a Heroic 4 with just your healer and 3 really lousy DPS.

I've been looking for awhile now, but I've never been able to find a guide for what level of what crew skills you need for the FP shortcuts. Does anyone now where I could find one?

I think it would make more sense to simply require you to have finished chapter 3 before the conversation is available, regardless of level. My first character hit 55 on Voss. Which means the stuff in that conversation would have still been a spoiler when I was at 55. I'm now done the class story, but still haven't started Makeb yet, as I want to play through the planets in the order they were intended, so I am now working on Illum.

That is essentially how I play my sniper. She does what she feels is best for the empire, whether she likes what she has to do or not. I tend to decide on a personality for each of my characters, and work with that, regardless of light or dark. Sometimes that personality starts to change overtime, depending on in-game circumstances. For example, my Assassin was a bit too trusting of everyone, and trusted Zash completely. After being betrayed by Zash, and then Thanaton, he became very untrusting and skeptical of most everyone, but especially sith. My favorite to play personality wise is my Powertech. Imperial or Republic, or whatever else, means nothing to her. She takes whatever job she can find, and is interested only in what profits her. She loves violence and killing, and will take any excuse to cause destruction (what do you expect when her name is Kyramla'naast, which means fatal destroyer in mando...). However, she still has her own very strong sense of honor. She will always do what she was hired for, and would rather die trying than to fail her job. She would never betray her employer. If you want to hire her to take out her employer, you'll have to talk to her after her job for said person is complete. Trying to bribe her out of doing her job will probably result in a blaster in your face. As a result of her complete loyalty, employers who try to "clean up loose ends" by turning against her tend to die horrible deaths. I find that trying to play pure dark or light tends to make your character look like an idiot, and is rather boring.

Yeah, I remember doing that with my Juggernaut as well. I am the Wrath. Ooook, what does that mean? That at least wan't really a spoiler, as I had no clue what it meant anyways. Now I know better than to click on my holo-terminal with high level characters if I'm not done the class story yet.