Because MM Flashpoints are the best way to gear up atm, there are tons of people running them who are not in any way prepared for the content - especially if they queue for all of them for the daily bonus. I've had two pretty bad ones just this weekend. The first was Hammer Station, of all things. First boss. Healing had been low all flashpoint, if I look back on it, but I didn't notice it at the time - was running Watchman spec Sent. We reach first boss - no-one asks about mechanics, so I assume everyone knows. Bad move on my part. As soon as the droid does his first channel, the tank goes down like a long. He was not cleansed - I can see that on my UI. Boss switches aggro to me as soon as tank goes down. Beam channel comes up - I am not cleansed, and have to force camo it. The second time the beam comes up, I pop GbtF, but that only last for four seconds of the channel. I am not cleansed, and I die. Other DPS dies shortly after, and the healer tries to run out the tunnel to the next part of the FP, but doesn't make it. The healer tells us the reason we wiiped was because we didn't pull the boss to the back of the room to avoid the adds, implying the tank stood in the red (which I did not see him do). Most even vaguely competent groups don't need to do this since it makes so little difference. I'm pretty sure that's not the problem, but the healer insists it is, so we try it. Healer does not cleanse tank or me once again, so it's a wipe. I ask the healer if they're new to the class or the Flashpoint. S/he inform me, rather rudely, that they've farmed this flashpoint every day for six weeks (wut?). I drop group, because that means that the heals is either lying, or intentionally not cleansing (weird to think, but I've had a guy on the same boss tell the tank that s/he didn't feel like cleansing). I'll happily explain the mechanics to new players, or how to cleanse somebody, but I have zero tolerance - in Master Mode Flashpoints - for people who aren't willing to put in the effort to clear that level of content. I also had a Kaon Under Siege MM where the tank hadn't a clue what he was doing. Never used anything but basic attack that I saw, and couldn't keep aggro for anything. He didn't respond when I asked if he knew the Rak Behemoth fight, but instantly pulled it. He tried to pull it down into the middle for some reason, so I ended up having to tank that on a Sent to do the mechanics properly. He also repeatedly chain pulled mobs that he couldn't keep aggro on, which ended up killing the healer. I didn't initiate a votekick, but it was a close thing. New players: if you are reading this, PLEASE let your group know if you are new to your role, class, or the fight. Most groups I've played with have been more than happy to explain the fights, or give you a lot more latitude.in performance. I don't think I've ever seen a player who said something along those lines kicked or insulted. But if you do not, it WILL come out, and it is very likely that you WILL be kicked, because you didn't do your group the courtesy of informing them.

Pretty content with the Ossus gearing, honestly, though I would have preferred it if we had stuck with 248's for the remainder of the expansion. The dailies and weeklies are tolerable - maybe even good - and allow players access to most endgame gear, while still locking some to endgame content. Only things I might change would be: 1. Introduce lettered gear options to the vendors, and reverse slot locking. 2. Maybe make crystals a legacy currency. 3. Drop unassembled gear pieces for the left side, or have them in their own boxes to slightly reduce RNG. 4. Maybe add Masterwork Crystals as a drop from the final bosses of NiM ops, or slightly increase their drops rates in Tier 4 crates. 5. Allow access to dailies and weeklies without doing the story missions.

I cannot clear NiM Brontes for the Wings of the Architect. This has a detrimental effect on my role-playing experience. Please allow me to gain them though solo content /s.

Same-sex romances become available after the vanilla class stories, but with new NPC's or companions.

Reading comprehension needs work. I said it's more broken. Crush grants immunity for 6 sec, shroud for 3 secs (baseline). Unless used perfectly and/or specc'ed into, shroud crush and will not protect the user from interrupts/stuns for the full duration of the deactivate channel. Entrench, lasting longer, allows for a much greater margin of error, and less player skill. It's also on a relatively low cd. That's why it's more broken.

It's not a hack, and it's not a passive. Most likely, it's good use of Deflection with CC immunity utility and Force Shroud. Trust me, other things in Odessen are a lot more broken, like Entrench and Force Barrier. These issues have never been fixed, and are the reason (in conjunction with the heavy RNG present in the WZ) so many people will leave OPG upon entering.

2/10 Troll needs work.

The DoT spread was changed from Noxious Knives to Toxic Haze. Unless you are trying to spam some quick (and bad) AoE damage or stop a cap, I don't think there is a reason to use Noxious Knives.

Assassins all have fair to great AoE capability. Hatred, with it's DoT spread through the AoE spin attack or whatever, has better AoE potential than Deception. Darkness (the tank spec) has pretty good AoE - better than Deception. I still find it makes a worse stank tank that either PT or Juggernaut. Juggernaut's vast array of DCD's make it slightly more useful in PvP, and PT's can pull absolutely insane AoE damage. I think a large part of it is that Sin rotation is highly dependent on Depredating Volts , which is a channeled single target attack., and Shock, which is a powerful single target attack. Your other AoE attacks are Wither and Discharge, which are pretty good, but don't have the sheer ~20k+ on 8 targets damage of Juggernaut's Crushing Blow with stacks of Pooled Hatred, or Vanguard's Ion Storm under Battle Focus. Much of that is probably based on player skill, though. I have no doubt Assassins more skilled at skank-tanking are pulling higher numbers. Differences between tank AoE DPS are a lot smaller than straight DPS. Assassin is certainly a harder tank to master, especially in PvP, because much of it is based on mitigating damage through maintaining stacks, refreshing them at the last possible second, and using extremely powerful DCD's that only last for a few seconds to avoid high-damage abilities. Straight-up, skilled Assassin tanks (no skanking) offer the best damage mitigation. Bad ones are the worse tanks in the game. If you are new to the game, or to tanking, I would highly suggest using a Immortal Juggernaut tank in DPS gear and tank set bonus (skank tanking).

Vengeance Juggernauts for DPS. Skanktank Shield Specialist Vanguard/PT for Tank.

AFAIK, the highest DPS required in SM ops is 6k or so. Fury has the highest parse right now, at 10789. You should be good with a soft rotation, and Fury is the easiest of the three specs - no clipping or DoT management. The high DPS parse referred to above has something of rotation here: http://parsely.io/parser/view/318658/0

Arsenal Mercenary/Gunnery Commando. DPS got a nerf, but even with the upcoming defensive nerfs, it will be the go-to FOTM class. One defensive will heal you to 60%, another gives 40% heals, another reflects and heals on hit. Has self/off heals. Alternatively, Fury Marauder. Will have the highest DPS in the game after the next update. Powerful damage reduction DCD's, but little self heals and no off heals. Simple rotation.

I found the most important things to learn are the rotational positioning/rage required for applying Deadly Saber, and because we get Rage from bleed effects (RNG), estimating on the fly how many Vicious Slashes you can use without expending too much rage to be unable to use Rupture/ before you need to reapply Rupture, Deadly Saber, or Annihilate.

So far: False Advertising Failure to Provide Services with Reasonable Care Any lawyers with specializations in cybersecurity/cyberlaw have any comments to make on this? Liability? Lying by omission, Mr. Kanneg, is no different from normal lying. I took out a 90 day sub in good faith; namely, that BioWare/EA would provide reasonable services as agreed. You shall get nothing more. Good day, sir!

Not gonna happen. Tell you what. Go to Group Finder VM FP's, deselect all but Depths of Manaan, and see how long it takes to pop. Then toggle all of the options and see how long it takes to pop. I'm fairly certain the second option will be faster. But remember, too - WZ's are composed of two teams of 8 players. The only other content that uses 8 or 16 man teams are operations. And you can queue for SM ops in GF all day, and they are never going to pop. Frankly, I'd simply be satisfied if they got rid of 1 v. 4 arenas (yes, they are a thing) and 4 v. 8 WZ's. The very fact that WZ's like that exist means BW can't afford to decrease total queue pop by splitting it into different WZ's.

Honestly, I probably could live with most of what I feel is a severe lack of meaningful choices in the story. (Though I should have very much liked it had there been an option to truly ally with or serve Valkorion). What I had a much, much bigger problem with is that the Outlander was repeatedly faced with several near-identical scenarios whose outcomes were identical and I feel did not represent lore or game mechanics well. The most glaring instance of this is, to me, the fact that my player was getting ragdolled constantly and beaten constantly by people who really had no right to be stronger than both I and Valkorion combined; i.e., Vaylin and Arcann. It was frustrating to fight Arcann or Vaylin (the two are generally interchangeable) time after time after time, best him/her every time, and yet go into a cutscene where I am losing and forced to flee (or, rarely, my opponent fled before I could kill him/her). It's annoying as all hell, and it makes me feel as though I'm not really in control of the Player-Character. It could have been handled better as portraying him/her as so far beyond us as to be invincible, or to avoid conflict until the end of the campaign. Otherwise, it just makes victory feel empty.

You can say that, but it doesn't necessarily make it true. I know of several guilds that run reg PvP groups in TS or Discord. Indeed, I would argue the only significant advantage premades offer (apart from players that are familiar with one another, which is skill) are voice comms. Voice comms offer incredible benefits by allowing well-coordinated hardswaps, CC'es, stealth caps, and call-outs. They are, of course, impossible to police, and so there's not much advantage in banning premades or whatever people are suggesting to moderate it.

True. However, the point is that a good merc can still force 12 sec of target switch with energy shield, and 5(?) with reflect, and at some point he will be freecasting while untouchable. Soft cc's last 8 sec (and basically assume DoT classes aren't present), hards last four - only just equal to the full duration of Energy shield, and using both will completely fill the resolve bar. No other class can do that while freecasting. Sniper can be burst through. Sorc bubble is channeled. Juggernaut/PT defensives are a joke. Operative/Assassins can stealth out and heal to full, but this mandates no aggressive action. Maras can go for maaaybe 12 secs with Obfuscate w/utility and Undying Rage w/utility, and even then it's damage resistance, not heals + damage resistance. No other class in the game has such defensives while maintaining high offensive potential.

I honestly think there is little that a RP instance will do. Dedicated trolls (who you seem to be worrying about) will simply switch to that instance to troll RP'ers further, and genchat is shared between all instances of a planet, IIRC. It won't really be any different than the current situation. As I said before, you will still be relying on convention (and the laziness of trolls) for protection. As of right now, on Ebon Hawk, there is nothing preventing someone from switching from Harby and trolling. It'll be no different on the new server, which is why I don't think this argument has any merit whatsoever. Ignoring will only go so far, and it's already available. Ignoring an account or legacy might work. Squelching would turn into an absolute disaster as soon as the trolls figured out they could just as easily use it to squelch RP'ers. It's been tried before, and didn't work. There is little BioWare can do to protect RP'ing to the extent that the RP'ers on this forum seem to expect - apart from hiring full-time mods or creating player moderators, which is rather unreasonable to expect. Ranked PvP'ers can't really do anything about trolls throwing matches. I wouldn't expect RP'ers to get a solution to trolling that is (arguably) less materially harmful (though I know you will not see it this way). A great many roleplayers will be transferring to Star Forge from Ebon Hawk - probably enough, in conjunction with the awareness of the matter that has been raised on the forums - to make the community relatively safe for them. There is both safety in numbers and community perception. Which, incidentally, is the system already in place.

The problem with this is that the merc - if he is any good - will pop Energy Shield proactively when whitebarred, or has a breaker up. If you aren't able to cc him, he will be freecasting while you can't hit him without healing him. If you try to burst through it, he will click the buff off for the instaheals. It's also very difficult - at least in most 8v8's , given latency, channels, and all - to ensure no-one hits a merc when reflect is popped. Even with the damage nerfs to merc, many classes will have trouble eating freecast damage while doing little damage of your own. And even then, the merc still has a heal-to-70%. That's more defensives than some tank classes.

So basically , RPer's will be going from a server where their roleplaying on Fleet is protected by nothing but convention, to a server where their roleplaying on Fleet will be protected by nothing but convention. And they're complaining about it.

As others have said, it's mostly about skill rather than gear. If I'm a tank, I can make up for substandard heals. If I'm DPS, I can make up for a substandard DPS. If I'm a heals, I can make up for a substandard tank. But I cannot do it when we are missing one of those roles entirely. Thus, I would very much like it if the devs locked roles in MM GF to spec rather than just advanced class. There's nothing worse than getting to Sav-Rak and finding out that your heals is not, in fact, a heals - they just forgot to uncheck the box in GF. And then they refuse to respec. A lot of people since 4.0 (and the advent of koltos) don't seem to understand that yes, you do need a trinity to do MM FP's.

Mercenaries are the meta right now. They have a ridiculous number of over-tuned defenses which the developers refuse to change, allowing them to facetank anything but a concerted effort. You should be fine. Spec into Adrenaline Rush and Trauma Regulators, and the class can carry anyone.

I don't know if it should be at the level it is now (as good as doing group content), but I agree it's been great for the population of the daily areas. Just the other day, we had an 8v8 or so going in the Oricon PvP instance. OWPvP, with no scheduling or anything. It was great, and something I haven't really seen since 3.0. This is what is needed to make daily areas succeed- rewards that, while maybe not as good as Flashpoints, are better for CXP or XP than Heroics.

Powertechs have great passive mitigation, but no skills that allow them to completely ignore attacks or take massive amounts of damage (Saber Reflect, Mad Dash, Force Shroud, Force Speed). There are some bosses in operations that deal such damage on a regular basis. Because PT's lack good DCD's, some choose to give up the mitigation that tank gear offers, and instead use DPS gear (Lethal B mods, IIRC, for example) because they offer more endurance. That large health pool (sometimes up to 150k) serves as a substitute for DCD's. Almost everyone 'skanks' in PvP. This means that they run Tank armorings, DPS mods/enhancements/augs and crafted DPS relics. Shield/Absorb/Defense only affect a small amount of damage in PvP, because most of it is Force/Tech, and a great many hits are auto procc'ed criticals. Having a larger health pool and far higher DPS output by skank tanking is infinitely preferable, and the difference in survivability is negligible.