#1 Know your class. Knowing your class well makes up for low level equipment #2 Read a guide about the operation before you do it. And/or watch a vid #3 Do Eternity Vault and Karraga's Palace first #4 Say it is your first time in the op. Pay attention to the instructions you will be given #5 Don't stand in stupid #6 Follow the rest of the team. Run where they run. Don't wander off As for equipment, you never need to buy from the cartel market. Once you reach level 70, get your set bonus armor as quickly as possible. This can drop from the command crates you start getting at level 70 if you are lucky, or you can buy it on fleet using the command tokens you get from each crate. Buy some legacy gear (you may still have some if you didn't throw away the set you got when you created a character). Pull the armorings, mods and augments from the set bonus gear and stick them in the legacy gear (this makes upgrading easy and you can transfer legacy gear between characters) Then, augment that legacy gear with 228 augments. You will need to buy these, or craft them yourself. They are not too expensive.

Field respec is extremely useful and valuable for switching between tank and dps with taunt in raid activity (though you need to carry both armor sets with you) assuming you play a shadow, guardian or vanguard. Being able to switch between heals and dps tends to be less important, but it still means you can fill more roles when queueing for stuff.. But yeah, resetting your abilities is a pain. I keep a little cheat sheet nearby to help me remember which abilities I want and where all the keys go.

Yes, they work. I've picked up a few as a tank or a healer. Queueing for in progress increases your chances, but also increases the odds you will hit a group doing preset lockouts and thus get kicked. Role in need can be misleading. As far as I can tell, it defaults to tank. Then, if a tank gets in gueue, it moves to healer. If both tanks and healers are in queue, only then is dps the needed role. Now, this can get strange when groups are queueing. If a tank and dps queue together (for a HM FP), the role in need will become healer. If a tank and healer then queue, the role in need stays at healer, even though one is in queue, because that queuing healer can't be matched to the first group. However, the second group is like to get a pop first, because random dps will queue up before a healer does. Easiest way to get into an op (other than joining a guild) remains hanging out on fleet and responding when people put out calls to form a group.

If you plan to switch between healing and dps specs, you should take biochem as the optimal stims and adrenals are different for the two specs and it would much cheaper to have the reusables

The barrels in Umbara also count towards this achievement.

Abilities function identically on Imp Side an Pub Side, but they have different names. Cull, on Imp side is Wounding Shots on Pub side. The guide has everything you need to set up and run a Dirty Fighting gunslinger, but you have to translate the abilities from its Imp Side mirror (Virulence aka Lethality Sniper). That second link leads to a slightly out date but still extremely helpful spreadsheet that gives the names of most abilities on both sides. But, if you are a true beginner, the poster above who said you should start with Sharpshooter (Marksman on Imp side) is correct. It is a much easier rotation to learn and you can clear all solo content with it with no problem.

http://dulfy.net/2016/12/24/swtor-5-0-virulence-sniper-pve-guide-by-veldix/ It's written for Imp side, so you will have to translate it into Pub terminology, but this will help with about 90% of the translation: http://dulfy.net/2012/02/10/empirerepublic-abilities-translation/

I don't remember this boss in particular, but one of the major differences between veteran mode and master mode is that mechanics you can ignore in veteran will one shot you in master. This includes interrupts (Battle of Ilum last boss, False Emperor last boss) and cleanses (Hammer Station first boss, Athis last boss)

After our two compatriots died, a Sentinel (might have been a Guardian DPS) and I (sharpshooter gunslinger) downed Otuno between the two of us. The Sentinel just kited everyone, running from kolto to kolto while I killed them from afar. I was only an average player at the time and that Sentinel was amazing, but it is certainly possible.

Ask and ye shall receive. Sometimes

I like the cxp system.

So, perhaps what is needed is not a individual character based threshold, but a total group level threshold. Limit for Umbara is, oh, 200 maybe. Though I think party mix is more important. My Umbara group would have been a lot more difficult without a healer, or with all melee dps.

Eh, I just did veteran Umbara with 3 level 70s (granted 2 gunslingers and a healer) and a level 17 shadow who had never seen the flashpoint before. He asked for guidance. Followed it faithfully. We wiped once on the bonus boss due to getting trapped by poison, but other than that, we cleared with very little problem. As for veteran Bloodhunt, I've found that I can get almost any group through it as a geared tank. As a sentinel, not so much.