Yes, decorations still drop although only in hm. At least I have never seen a drop in a tactical (the new "sm"). And the droprate is pretty low, so farming decos in flashpoints could take a while. As to your other question: Yes, tacticals can be solo'ed. Some of them might be a bit challenging but I'm pretty sure they are all doable (I have done most of them myself). However, as I stated above, you probably won't get any deco drops there.

Yes, it is.

Well, I had to do HM Manaan 4 times. Killed it the normal way... didn't count. Killed him out of the fire... didn't count. Made sure (well, as sure as possible) to get the killing blow and it finally counted. I almost let the tank die, because I was the healer.... . And we did wipe at least once on the bonusboss and once or twice on Ortuno so wiping has nothing to do with wether it counts or not.

You can also buy one for universal prefabs from a decorations vendor on fleet

What level are you? In order to get the solo-option you must be the appropriate level for the mission. I learned that when I tried to solo Directive 7 for the event. I was around lvl 45 at that time and it did not give me a solo option. when I came back to it at lvl 47 I got the solo-option. Same for the Ilum flashpoints.

HK-55 was a subscriber reward for january (I think) so if you were not a subscriber back then, you can't get him.

You can dismiss the droid by clicking on the combat-support-droid-icon. it is among your other buffs (like class-buffs and so on) and the symbol looks like a blaster.

Well, the requirement for the LS/DS-event is to kill Titan 6.... wonder if that might had anything to do with it. Fortunatly all my pug-runs for the LS/DS-event went really well. No quiters.

I just did the hardmode version of manaan and it didn't count either. The tactical version didn't count for me as well, but weirdly enough the solo-version actually did... Pls make sure that the achievment tracker works... I don't want do everything twice or more, the grind for legendary is long enough as it is... thanks.

Is your character a higher lvl than the one of your friend? When you do heroics, the reward scales acording to your level. If you're talking about class-missions or side-quests the reward should be the same, if you both are subscribers. It doesn't matter how long you've been a sub.

Well, if you want to make your own mods/enhencments/armorings the first thing to note is, that you won't be able to craft everything with a single character (well, that is unless you want to buy every single mat from the gtn). Cybertech makes mods and enhencments for your modable gear (and earpieces as well) but you still will have to buy armorings and barrels. Or craft them with another char and send it over. However I doubt that this would be less annoying than visit a vendor once in a while and defenitly more time consuming. I took the time to craft a full set of gear for every 8 levels or so and put it all in legacy gear. Now, whenever I start a new char all I have to do is go to my stronghold once in a while and swap out my gear set because I have multiple gear sets to cover the whole leveling process. So I don't have to visit vendors and I don't have to spend any crystalls on gear.

Well, how you should do your gearing depends on what you're planing to do in the "end-game". If you want to get into ops the answer is realy simple: Ignore your gear! In storymode ops you will be bolstered so as long as you wear something you're good to go. Storymode ops are meant to be done by lvl 50+ and the gear-lvl of a lvl 50 player is something around 120 (?). In fact you don't even need that, the lowest gear I did an op with was probably lvl 40 gear with lvl 10 ear/implants/relics (the ones from the pvp introduction) and I did just fine. As soon as you start doing ops the 216 gear will automatically come. I would advise to roll on pieces with set-bonus first. However, if you're not into ops and want to gear up differently, there are a few other options. First option would be pvp. I know you said you didn't like pvp so much but keep in mind, that you can do pvp on any character and just transfer the comms to your main. I mention this because in my opinion lowbie-pvp is usually more fun especially for people new to pvp. And in addition the basic pvp gear (204 rating) is extremly cheap. If you realy don't want to pvp, you can buy gear for crystalls. However keep in mind, that vender-gear has mostly bad stats (for heal/dps). If you don't have enough crystalls I would advise you to not only farm heroics but to farm the first flashpoint as well (esseles for rep, black talon for imp). Do the tactical version (not the solo one), it's very easy, and it will give you some crystalls, but more importantly it will give you a piece of 208 gear (2 if you're on imp side) that is actually better than the crystall gear. And if you're lucky there might even drop a mainhand (which you can't get from crystalls). Once you have your 208 gear you can do hm fps to get some 216 gear (which is better than the 216 gear for crystalls), but ques for dps are very long on most servers and you're not guaranteed the 216 drop so it will take some time to get into 216 gear this way. The third option finally is crafting/buying your gear. If you have multiple alts and all or at least most of the crewskills unlocked and leveled to 550 you can craft your gear. It will take some time however. If you don't have many alts, you can buy the stuff other people crafted off the gtn. 208 gear shouldn't be too expensive but the higher rated gear will cost you a fortune.

Well, if your group wiped because one dps was in the wrong place at the last boss of TfB sm, than the rest of the group wasn't exactly shining there either. You were just the easiest target to blame so nobody else had to admitt making mistakes... When I did this fight the first time (not that long ago, maybe 3 months) I didn't know where to stand and what to attack. I basically jumped aimlesly around from one plattform to another trying to catch up with what other people were doing... And guess what, we beat the boss without the slightest issue and nobody said a word about my "performance" (it was a pug group). As to your other example and your final conclusion: well, that's right. People can wipe on any ops fight. People also can die in a KotfE chapter or doing less than 2k dps on a fully geared lvl 65 character, but that says nothing about the difficulty of a fight. I started raiding only like 3-4 months ago. I was very hesitant at the beginning. I was afraid of making stupid mistakes and wiping the group, getting yelled at, getting blamed for everything and finally beeing kicked out of the group while beeing insulted. Do you want to guess how often these things happend to me? *Spoileralert* it was exactly never... (well, the making stupid mistakes part was maybe not "never", but it never created an issue for anybody but myself ). And I was not doing my first runs with guildies, I was puging. If you hesitate to join a group because you fear that others have to carry you, I would advise you to get starparse. That might sound a bit over the top, but personally it helped me a lot. Knowing that my dps will be sufficient for a sm op helped my self-confidence and made it easier to finally make the step into my first op.

I think, I'm gonna need a hint how to deal with the trash in Kaon. How did you deal with the infected mercenarys (or whatever they are called, the ones that stun you for a minute or so)? Assuming you did not just stealth, because that's not an option for my merc Btw, I did Black Talon and the Foundry since my last post (without bonus bosses). Both were pretty interresting and I had a lot of fun

Red Reaper is done . But boy was that trash a PITA.... I died a lot. On some trash pulls I had to thin out the pack one by one untill I finally killed enough to survive the rest . The bosses were ridiculously easy in comparison. I won't be doing that again any time soon, at least not on a non-stealth class .

Very impressive. When I first saw a video of you soloing a HMFP I thought "that's probably back in 3.x. Wait, he is lvl 65. Well it's a tactical then. Wait, there are no koltotanks..." So I was like "how the hell is he doing this?" (I still am btw^^) That made me curious what I could do with my Arsenal Merc. I'm not exactly a NiM-Raider-kind-of-player (actually only just started with my first HM-Bosses outside of EV/KP) so I expected to fail. However I managed to do Hammerstation, Athiss and Boarding Party and I actually died a lot less, than I had expected. Especially when it comes to trash mobs . The only boss I had to try more than twice was the first boss of BP. I couldn't keep up my companion so I had to basically do it without one... thank god for my offheals . The only bonusboss I could kill was the one in BP, Hammerstation was to much damage and for the Athiss one the 24s cooldown on my interrupt was to long. So those 3 FP were probably the easiest ones. Which one would you advice me to try next? Directve 7 maybe?

Well, since I got it yesterday, it obviously is still achievable

I was doing the weekly "Mass Exodus" for my personal conquest goal (only to realize that it does not grant conquest points). However, once I completed the last mission for the weekly, I was granted the achievement "Hero of the Citizens of Makeb". I was curious about that and wanted to check it in my legacy achievement tab. But I could not find this achievement anywhere. So I did a google search and learned that they supposedly took this achievement out when 4.0 hit the servers. when it still is granted, why did they take it out? Since I like hunting achievements, pls put it back in the game (it obviously still works with the staged weekly beeing turned into a normal weekly, so there is no reason not to put it back in the game).

To be honest, I didn't really like the chapter story-wise (the gameplay was ok.)

I can confirm that the midnight rakling and the mount in "Lost Island" (HM) still drop. Both of them dropped from the last boss when I did the FP last week (of course I didn't win the pet... as always ).

When I was new, I often saw people looking for players to join ops-groups with an added "e + e only". I kept wondering what that might be. Later on I realized, that "e + e" stands for "equipped and experienced".

Mounts. 57.

I keep reading "lowbies don't have the necessary skills for most Fp's" and I keep asking myself, what this skills might be. Interrupts? Pretty sure you got that when you reached lvl 15. Cleanse? Not a single tactical FP requires a cleanse. It can make things easier, but it is not necessary. CC? More than 1 or at most 2 CC-abilities per trash pull are never required and you get your CC (if you get one) around lvl 25. It's highly unlikly to get a group of 4 lvl 15-20 players. I did probably around 50 FP's in january and I never got such a group. The one example people bring up is Blood Hunt. That's not a fair example, because it's by far the most difficult Fp, because the second bossfight is clearly overtuned. Many groups can't beat that boss even when all of them are 65. Every other FP isn't really a big problem, if people actually care about getting it done. I ran with lowbies through manaan, the czerka ones, BoI, FE and pretty much everything else and never did we run into something we couldn't beat besides BH. Was it facerollingly easy and we could sleepwalk through it? No. Did some people die or even the whole group wipe on occasion? Yes. So what? When I queue and a trinity group with 4 lvl 50+ players pops up, I'm allways a bit disappointed. It's not much fun to run through the instance in less than 15min and nobody ever drops bellow 75%. I like it when there is a full dps group, because then I know, I'll actually have to pay attention, use dcd's, CC's and stuns, maybe even a medpack (). So Tl:dr: I like tactical Fp's and can't really understand all the hate they get

You can get the part from the solo-mode.

Ok, since the devs wanted our feedback, here is mine: Lvl: 65 Item rating: mostly 216, a few 208 (no set bonus, no augments) Discipline: BH Merc (Arsenal) Companion: Lana Companion role: Heal Companion Influence: about 40 I tried some low lvl heroics first (hutta, DK) and as expected no trouble at all. I went up to Tatooine, still no problems. So I decided to give Corelia a try and I did not use a single DCD nor did I have to heal after combat. I went through the content pretty much as fast as before. The same goes for the Yavin and CZ dailies, which I did next. So I decided to give SF a try. Solo-mode first. I was never in trouble, but I noticed, that some of the normal elit guys hit much harder than the rest, even than the paladins. So at last I tried SF heroic mode. I expected to fail at the exarch or in one of the rooms before him, because I would consider myself a casual player and as you can read above, my gear is not high-end. I was using the aliance buff. As I went through I had no big problems with the trash, some gold ones hit very hard (same as in Solo-mode). The praetorian was no big deal even though lana was knocked off the plattform and died about half way through. I used the gun-buff from Aygo and it went fine. The first two rooms before the exarch went fine, no buffs or DCD needed. The third one went fine untill I had to click the pannel. I got pulled away and couldn't make it in time, so I had to start over and since I was already low in health I used the healing buff (from the Hutt I think) and it went fine from there. I managed to kill the exarch at my first try. I used Heroic moment, and pretty much every aliance buff. Lana came close to death 2-3 times, but we survived. So, after testing that stuff, the only thing that really bothers me about the nerf is, that I can't solo TFP's anymore (I know, they are not ment to be soloable, but still...^^) . After 4.0 it was a really nice challenge for me and it was nice to be able to finish the TFP-weekly by myself. And don't get me wrong when you read this, I liked the pre-nerf companions better than what we have now and I would vote for buffing them up again anytime. All I say is, that for my gameplay the nerf did not change as much as I expected.