Considering that while we were all level 55, my guild cleared the storymode versions of DF/DP/S&V (operator IX NEEDS 8 people) with a 4-man team, I'd say that it's very doable. HM probably less so because some bosses require a tank swap and hit hard enough to actually need a tank.

They wanted to make DP / DF NIM an alternate gear path, not SM S&V. There's no good reason AT ALL that 55 SM ops should give better comm rewards than 60 SM ops.

Does anyone have a good appreciation for why the level 55 SM ops continue to award ultimate comms in 16m? I can understand 55 Nightmare operations continuing to award them, since the mechanical difficulty is worth rewarding, but showering people in 198 gear for clearing content that is a complete joke to clear seems unjustified. There's a good reason that Eternity Vault & Karagga's Palace didn't drop ultimate comms when 55 was the level cap, what's the logic between the current situation?

Plausible Deniability might very well be interested in either the operative healer or sniper for NiM progression, please feel free to send me a PM on the forums or in-game mail on TEH to discuss it further.

<Plausible Deniability> is currently right where you are as far as progression goes; we've actually been held up a fair bit by the departure from the game by our long-time merc healer, haven't found someone to fill his shoes yet. If you're after a progression guild that's still working through those fights, please throw an app on our website (linked in my sig) or mail one of my characters in game. We raid regularly on imp-side and have healer openings on our main progression team and would desperately love to have you along.

After a bit of experimentation with the teleport functionality of phasewalk, I've discovered some weirdness about how it interacts with fall damage. I had always assumed that the teleport animation involved zeroing your velocity (i.e. if you're moving before the teleport, you're not moving afterwards) but that only happens sometimes. Scenario 1: Phasewalk planted on the upper part of the VIP lounge. 1. Jump off the edge. 2. Reach terminal velocity while falling. 3. Activate phasewalk after falling about halfway to the ground. 4. Re-appear on the upper level, zero movement, zero fall damage. Scenario 2: Phasewalk planted in the cantina below VIP lounge 1. Jump off the edge. 2. Reach terminal velocity while falling. 3. Activate phasewalk after falling about halfway to the ground. 4. Appear on the ground, dead, having taken full fall damage despite. In one scenario phasewalk serves to kill my momentum (thus no fall damage) in the other it does not. Either there's something wrong with the way fall damage is calculated (most likely) or phasewalk does not behave consistently in all circumstances.

1. Callette 2. <Plausible Deniability> 3. Operative 4. Corellia Square 5. Ranked 4v4 HPS 6. http://postimg.org/image/t21ine667/

Does it count if I got my Rancor for free because Giradda the Hutt is a wonderful sugar-daddy?

Do wish that Bioware could be a little more transparent when it came to their development roadmap, it's bad even compared to other MMOs; EVE online released an expansion two weeks ago, and the next release got put on the test server one week later for us to play with, along with about a dozen dev posts per day discussing feedback / implementing changes based upon it. Bioware's effective gagging of most of the dev team makes for a rather strong disconnect between where the players feel the game should go and where the devs are taking it.

What I love is how they originally assigned 16m ops greater rewards (ultimates) because they were more challenging content, then turn around and say that they're doing 16m group finder because it's an easier entry for new players to the world of ops. On paper, 16m group finder ops aren't a bad idea, but the reward system needs to be straightened out a bit I think.

Were you perchance in that Ebon Hawk run that I ended up leading on Alliare? Even I was a little surprised at how smoothly it went; I'm just glad that I randomly got picked as ops leader since it made life a lot easier than if I'd been trying to lead while unable to re-arrange raid frames & use announcements. Can also confirm that bolster will improve the stats on tanks, even in full 180/186 gear. Haven't done one as a dps yet, so no comments other than to agree with the OP that things died a lot faster than usual.

You know what really makes them a joke? The tank bolstering is quite silly in how powerful it is. My assassin tank got an extra 7% absorb on top of full 180/186 gear. I can't see why even the worst pugs would need a tank with 57% base absorb (it got up to 75% with procs). There's no reason to bolster someone in NiM-ready optimized gear in a SM environment. Sure, go ahead and ensure that anyone in tank spec has defensive stats equivalent to optimized 158 or even 162 gear, but don't simply add a modifier to every tank regardless of gear level.

You like PvP? Warm up your spreadsheets, get into market PvP and make millions.

One thing which buy orders do is tend to provide long-term market stability; it's hard for the price of an item to stabilize when orders are up for two days at a time, and you can't sell portions of a stack, leading to lots of redundant item listings of one unit each. Having buy / sell orders in terms of unit prices would lead to a more competitive and interesting market, especially for crafting commodities or common unlocks like ops passes. Extending the time to something more reasonable like a month would be fantastic. My dream of course would be to simply steal EVE online's market interface / system, but swtor's economy is too small & simplistic to need something like that.

You forget that the entire reason why Tactical Flashpoints were implemented was so that we could have role-neutral content; the trinity design is nice on paper, but in reality there aren't enough tanks to go around. Sticking with the traditional flashpoint design makes for a fun instance, but when you have say, five DPS for every one tank (the ratio is probably worse given how hard it is to find tanks for even 16m ops) in the flashpoint queue, the number of players who get to participate in content for a given time frame is rather limited. Having played through these FPs a fair few times myself, I certainly found that four-dps groups saw more deaths than where even one support role was present, but there's really no way around it short of balancing it around four poorly geared dps, in which case it would be even more of a faceroll exercise when a support class is present.

Callette, Empire, Dread Forged Field Medic's Mk-X Package, 950k + mats

Interesting. Somehow I managed to make it all the way through SM, HM & NiM without ever learning about that particular mechanic, good to know. I figured the higher damage was just due to Thrasher's consistent attacks helping my energy management and tweaking my ability priorities a bit. My normal parses are indeed around 1500 on most of the tank & spank fights.

That was all single target damage to Thrasher; it was an SM pug and the group didn't want to deal with sending people up after the snipers. Just parked myself in front of her handler and put out damage. @swtor_display_name: By "BiS" I meant "Best-in-Slot" (well, sort of. Haven't scored any DF NiM drops yet) Fully optimized dread forged tank gear, though I did have a Resolve instead of Force Wielder hilt, prefer that tiny bit of damage to another 100 hp.

Considering that I managed to pull 2036 dps against SM Thrasher the other night in full tank gear & Darkness spec, with 1500 dps or so being plenty to clear SM content, I would posit that in an actual dps spec, you should be able to pull your own weight. (Gear was full BiS tank stuff w/ MH). You certainly won't carry anyone, but in most SM boss fights I can pull the bare minimum dps numbers while tanking, so don't worry if you know the dps spec well.

Progression update for Plausible Deniability: 5/5 NiM TFB. Screenshot: http://postimg.org/image/prfvkddrp/ 6/7 NiM S&V. Screenshot: http://postimg.org/image/vngiigkh7/ Unlike everyone else on the server, we found it easiest to kill Sunder last for Warlords, simply rotating through Force Shroud / Saber Reflect / Energy Shield to keep his target alive while we burned him down. We did get a hyperpod drop as well, which brings the number on this server up to two I think?

Have you seen what wrack hybrid builds have historically inflicted upon PvP balance? Bioware has been working very hard to make certain imbalanced combinations of talent trees inaccessible, promoting a wide variety of hybrids should be the last thing on the agenda. Clearly you've never gone up against an arena team consisting of two or three AP powertechs in ion cell, or deal with sorc heal-hybrids in 4x "dps" ranked arenas.

When it comes to minimizing the damage taken over a two-minute interval, I won't argue with your math, it's solid; the Reactive Warding relic is best in slot for reducing damage taken. When it comes to practical tanking however, i find myself disliking it for a very simple reason: the other relics, with shorter internal cooldowns, present a more even (and therefore more manageable) damage profile to your healers. I view the 1350 damage mitigated as being equivalent to one or two ticks from a HoT, and as some who heals a lot in addition to tanking, I'd tell the tank to give me a smoother damage profile that made me cast an extra HoT every 40 seconds any day.

You sir, do not think like a game designer who is trying to create an experience that is fun for as many people as possible.

Okay, I'll take a stab at explaining why Bolster is necessary in PvP but not PvE content. Premise One: Expertise (or a similar mechanic) must exist. This is to prevent the end-game NiM raid teams from being the only ones with access to top-tier gear. If there was no differentiation between PvE & PvP gear, end-game PvE content would become a prerequisite for competitive PvP because your gear could not be competitive otherwise. I've played an MMO (Star Trek Online) where gear was the same in PvP & PvE, and the requirement for PvE gear grind to be competitive within the PvP arena had a massive negative effect on pvp participation numbers. Consequence: We're going to have separate PvE & PvP gear, each obtainable by playing their associated content. Premise 2: Gear progression exists in PvE, does not exist in unranked PvP. Someone who has just hit 55 & completed the Oricon quest series to get a set of 66 gear, with a mainhand from the makeb reputation would get eaten alive if dropped in Nightmare Dread Guards or HM Raptus; this is why SM operations exist, and such gear is adequate to run them. Our hypothetical newbie has content appropriate to both his gear & experience level. In the world of Unranked Warzones, the same newbie can get placed against pre-made teams with 2100 rating in ranked (and commensurate gear) as easily and frequently as they're placed against average players. Given that he's just hit 55 and has no pvp gear yet, if Bolster did not exist, his Expertise would be zero, resulting in a demoralizing slaughter by better geared players, regardless of our newbie's actual skill. There would literally be no way for him to fight back effectively. Many people are unwilling to face a one-sided slaughter where they are helpless to fight back effectively against an overwhelming gear advantage for the couple weeks required to get their own set of gear and begin to compete upon a skill basis, not a gear basis. If bashing your face against a wall and dying repeatedly for a period of time, regardless of skill level, is a prerequisite for effectively competing then we're looking at a piss-poor game design. Consequence: Bolster is required for Unranked PvP to be fun and accessible to as large a portion of the playerbase as possible. Ranked PvP is, I feel, a different matter when concerns of accessibility are discussed, but rather than create a separate bolster-free environment (which would be confusing to people trying Ranked for the first time), Bioware has chosen for ranked & unraked warzones to operate under the same basic gameplay rules, which is a perfectly defensible choice from a design perspective. When asking for PvP bolster to go away, you need to look at how it would impact the entire game, not just your particular niche. Is Bolster as implemented problematic when it results in PvE gear being BiS for ranked PvP? Heck yes, which is why the next patch has a fix for it. PS: Before anyone goes calling me a PvP or PvE apologist, I've got a 1518 rating, and every HM (plus a portion of the NiMs) boss clear under my belt. So yes, I have a fair bit of experience with both gameplay types.

Effectively the same thing as on Draxxus; since the mechanics of the instance preclude doing it with four people, we got some random folks to come in, stand in the middle, die, and get a free weekly.