Played the daily area once on pub side. The regular missions are of a good difficulty for the regular player. For the kill trench droid objective there could be a few more of those droids. There were 4 people on the PTS server and while I played and I had to really search for them. When more players are around this might get nasty. The Heroic 2+ missions are manageable alone with stealth when you know your dps rotation. So casual player will have to group up if they want to do them, as it should be. I tried the Heroic 4 alone and got wiped. It probably is possible to solo with a self heal shadow, but hard. After grouping up with one other player we managed. All in all I liked the fight. I did not read the missions text, but there was a clear story progression visible in the dailies. I like that. I missed "Schematic Aspirations" completely. I found some of the lava caves which probably have something to do with it and died there. I thought they had something to do with the story you have locked behind development doors. Only now by reading the original post I realize I missed something. It is not showing up on the minimap for me. So unless you you create some missions where you have to go past the mission console people will miss it and not even try to solve it. Going back to it now.

I have mixed feelings about some GTN changes. First of all I dislike that a fee is added to the listed price. That has probably something to do with being from Europe. In European stores the prices tags have to include tax, in US stores the tax is added on checkout only. From a pure buyers perspective I clearly prefer the fee included in the listed price. From a sellers perspective I find this fee model annoying as well. As a seller I want to know how much the buyer will pay and how much I will get from it. This has nothing to do with how high the fee is. I am not really buying or selling bulk items on the GTN at the moment, but I agree with some earlier posters that there might be an extreme undercutting from mass crafters and new players will have little to no chance to sell mats for example. From a buyers perspective though this is a dream come true. Finally you can buy only the amount you want. Does this remove the possibility for sellers to give a "discount" on bulk sales? This is what you can do know by selling single items more expansive at the moment. I like the idea if having a minimum, maximum and median sales price available.

I personally never use the sort option for the inventory. For me currently every time I open the inventory on PTS it gets sorted. Please make sure you can disable auto sorting and maybe keep an option for everyone who likes auto sorting. For me it makes juggling items and actually sorting items really annoying.

A X-Mas / Life Day themed Shelly Pet. Or even better a X-Mas / Life Day themed Shelly (in the ops).

To give a perspective of the player skill level in Patch 6.x we did regular HM operations and were working on Duxn HM. Do you feel your group was able to progress in power through the Operation? Not at all. After 3 month we are not able to finish Lady Dominique in story mode yet and did not even approach hard mode. Do you think improvements could be made to make it easier to progress as a group? If so, what do these improvements look like? Fix all the bugs that are already mentioned above. Make sure that story mode operations are story mode operations and not hard mode in disguise. Did you want to upgrade your Hazardous gear? Almost certainly, but it is not possible. How quickly were you able to upgrade your Hazardous gear? Not at all Was Hazardous gear helpful in completing The R-4 Anomaly? No, since we cannot get it. Do you like the look of these armor sets? I personally do not really care. Did you attempt to clear The R-4 Anomaly to earn these armor sets? No The R-4 Anomaly also came with a new mount, the Wings of Nihrot. This mount has a small chance to be rewarded when defeating Lord Kanoth. Do you like the look of this mount? Looks quite impressive. Did you attempt to clear The R-4 Anomaly to earn this mount? No As seen by the comments above, for the semi regular player it is not really possible to get a gear progression after hitting IR330. Since story mode lockout is reset every day it is not easily possible to learn the tactics for the later bosses. We are usually planing for a 2 hour session. So you have to spend like an hour and a half to get to Lady Dominique and have about half an hour left to learn the fight. So in my opinion the difficulty level for a story mode operation is missed completely. A regular operation group with voice chat should be able to clear any story mode operation without too much trouble. It currently feels like R4 SM should be HM. From what I read above HM feels more like NiM.

I can agree Communication is one of the key ingredients to solving this. Speaking for myself I am one of the players who is explaining the mechanics if someone does not know and tell everyone if I am not certain of the mechanics. I have to admit though my starting though is everyone knows the mechanics. But you only change yourself, so there is pretty much nothing you can do against elitism. Question is would you have liked if the vet fps include the mm mechanics where possible? Maybe not as hard as in master mode, but still punishing.

I have to correct myself somewhat on the above post. The problem is a bit more complex, than just players doing bad dps or bad heal, but you are right Ergercs that is a big part of the Problem. Above I mentioned my experience from the Lost Island and everyone did good DPS and HPS and everyone tried to do the mechanics properly. So there are some really harsh flashpoints, which in my opinion need some more balancing. Then there are Flashpoints like Spirit of Vengance. I had one utterly terrible experience where somebody did not understand the mechanics of the first boss and we wiped constantly. Yesterday I did it with some guild mates everyone knew the mechanics. We had good healing and not so good DPS, but it was a good difficulty. Maybe the damage output or the healer output should be adjusted slightly, but I can not really tell from this one experience. Hammer Station is another example I actually like. If you ignore the mechanics there you a likely to wipe. If you do your cleanses, interrupts, taunts and proper positioning it is actually quite easy, but still in a good difficulty range. So I have to say looking at the exchanged gear, changed skill system, new levels etc. The devs did actually a pretty good job to balancing things. Getting 100% right the first time is simply impossible (Please let them know they did a good job, since devs usually get only negative feedback). What we are missing is a way for people to understand that there are mechanics and learn them. Having to learn that there are mechanics in master mode is a pain. I have no idea how that could be done, but the current implementation if veteran mode flashpoints does not help in teaching people game mechanincs. I am not even sure if it is possible with veteran mode, since the role restrictions are lifted. Some mechanics require cleans, taunt and you cannot be sure they are available in a veterean mode flashpoint. One suggestion I have which could help: Allow players to disable 1 flashpoint (or 10% of the available flashpoints) and still get the weekly and groupfinder bonus. I for one do not want to see hammer station anymore, did it a bit too much.

I cannot agree more, that the GF MM is in a sad state. First of all I like what Bioware is trying to do with the random FP. This results in people playing more different flashpoints. I also like that you tried to make MM FPs harder. But the balancing is terrible. The veteran flashpoints do not help people learn mechanics which are required for master mode. The difficulty of verteran fps is on par with Heroics maybe slightly harder. So far so good. I have no idea where the mm flashpoint difficulty is aimed at, but since they are available from GF in my opinion they should be aimed at Stroy Mode Operation level or a bit more difficult (like ignoring mechanics is punishing) and below Hard Mode Operations. They are clearly not in that range or at least the newer flashpoints are not. Ignoring a mechanic once is basically a wipe. This would be fine if mm fp are aimed to be like nightmare operations, but then they should not be in the group finder. Healing feels totally unbalanced. Doing like 17k hps (slightly below average if you take a look at parsley) is barely enough to keep a group alive in the newer FPs. There needs to be a serious rebalance of master mode flashpoint difficulty.