I'm going to talk about OP's specific issue with the wrong people queueing in: I run lockouts all the time for conquest. It saves time getting those points without having to kill all the earlier bosses. If I had to do a full run on every single toon I had I'd probably lose my mind. Or not if they gave out huge conquest bonuses for full ops runs (which would suck for people who have to leave in the middle of a full run and do a lockout later). It does suck when the wrong person queues in. Sometimes due to the arbitrary nature of role queueing we get someone filling a role we are not looking for (e.g. we're looking for a tank queueing in a dps since we have 2 fanks in the group already for some reason, and a DPS queues in). No question about that: the random backfiller has to be removed. I try to whisper them before removing them just for the sake of communication; occasionally they are understanding and polite, the rest of the time I get insulted so I've stopped whispering people we have to remove. Other times someone random comes in filling the role we are looking for although we have someone queueing in as that role anyway. What happens is that these randoms snag a lockout spot from someone who has taken the time and effort to secure my guild the lockout, relog and queue in on different toons numerous times. It hasn't been my decision but usually we end up removing them anyway. Again, I've tried whispering them and got insulted anyway so I've stopped doing that. Basically a nice, easy solution to this problem would be to allow invites to group finder groups instead of all this dodgy queueing business, and that's it.

I don't have an issue if an ops group isn't in voice and everyone knows what they're doing. Sometimes I get in voice with friends and it's purely for the social aspect. But I do take issue when someone doesn't know the fights, doesn't have discord/TS, doesn't want to download discord/TS, and therefore has to be spoon-fed mechanics in ops chat. (Grats if they read a guide, however.) I'm not about to type novellas in chat for them, but if someone else is willing to do it I don't mind. Otherwise they're going to get carried which, actually, I don't mind either as long as they don't do something silly and cause a wipe. Even with newbies not in voice who have been given an explanation of mechanics, they often end up not reading whatever's being typed specifically for them in ops chat. Resulted in a wipe on SM Izax yesterday when I ran out of tethers to use on the conductor droids, and the last person holding on to one was tunnelling the boss. Grudgingly or otherwise, the last stragglers got in voice (I did offer the non-voice alternative of avoiding tethers) and we were awesome enough to clear it.

No time required, first to post is world first? That's awfully convenient for you, buster. Edit: Did you just congratulate yourself?

Thing about Nightmare Pilgrim is that after you kill it, you get a debuff that doesn't allow you to kill it again for the next 5 (7?) days or so. I've seen several unsuspecting pugs who group up and go at it thinking it can be cheesed like any other world boss and God forbid there be anything such as a mechanic, or even a tank swap (there are 2). Celestial Argonauts ran them not too long ago weekly. I don't know of any other guilds who have done this.

It happens to other specific end cutscenes as well, e.g. Battle of Rishi. Set your graphics to potato and it will run just fine. I doubt they'll be fixing it any time soon though.

Found the Londoner!

There's a fair amount of HM/NiM progression going on at Star Forge, both guild-based and non-guild-based (if you don't want to leave your current guild). Some of them recruit from the Star Forge forum; go take a look. There are also some smaller guilds and teams that don't advertise publicly so you have to know the right people - or, they have to know you.

Focus on the little one!

I don't think Static Barrier is useless at all. Also, it has a really short cooldown and can be applied to other players - something like that obviously shouldn't be as powerful as Deflection (You do have your god bubble, after all). If a utility isn't working for you, don't try to bend the game to fit your choice of utility; spec into something else. As a PvE player: I find the healing effects to be minuscule and so choose to spec into something else; when I'm tanking, I find Static Barrier making a good difference; so when I'm healing, I try to refresh the tank's Static Barrier as often as possible. Plus a perk of the Corruption spec means that the player gets healed after Static Barrier ends.

There's just been too many people lately on Star Forge who think they can waltz into the daily raid, sign up as a tank and state 'I've never been here before'. Or worse, say nothing. I highly doubt any of them is going to read this but please, if you've never done a specific operation before, the last thing you want to do is tank it.. Just yesterday on Dread Palace I had both tanks having trouble holding aggro on just about everything, cleaving the entire raid on Tyrans, and it didn't help that my co-healer simply stood there for most of the fight, cast about 4 heals and managed to run out of mana in the process. Don't forget about some specific very egotistical, very vocal healers in particular (so many people going on my ignore list; I think I've been traumatised out of pugs for the next month). There was one who claimed he could heal NiM Nefra with just a mainhand and totally botched it by not cleansing anything. There was another who claimed he could and had solo healed Scyva (no achievement), that he was in HM prog (might have trusted him if he said NiM), easy peasy, also botched it. Met that same healer again in Terror on an alt (should have learned my lesson), combined with one of those first-timer tanks. Said healer took the lead and gave the new tank absolutely minimal information (I mean, informing him we're going to trippy space heaven in phase 2 of the last boss would have been good, ignore all these mechanics, we can heal through it, and insisted that tanks and healers channel on Operator IX. Wipes, wipes and more wipes. There was a distinct lack of healing going on, 'I can't heal when I'm channeling!' was the response, so bloody well let the DPS channel then. Thank goodness I was not 70 and so saved on repairs. Shoutout to the awesome chap in KP HM who let me have Karagga's pimp hat he won in a roll. I love my new aesthetic.

You can't go into an operation instance without being in an ops group, and you can't be in an ops group with a companion. Most Master mode flashpoints can probably be cleared with 3 players and 1 companion, and everything in Vet mode can be cleared with less, including Copero. I haven't really explored doing world bosses with small groups but I have 3-manned some of the easier ones like R4-GL without companions (1T, 1D, 1H). World bosses also have the Terrifying buff which basically renders your companion useless so really, the only reason to have it around is for Heroic Moment, so make sure whoever has their companion out has the most abilities.

I'm a squirrel and I lovenuts

I think I've cleared the full op 3 times with PUGs since the update. The third time was probably exemplar of a PUG since the others had advertised for players with Nahut clears, but this time about half the raid had never cleared Nahut before. It probably took 6 pulls but everyone wanted to see the new boss and stuck around. We even had a rather less than ideal composition of 4 commandos, 2 guardians, 1 slinger, and 1 shadow (me tanking). Apparently the main issue after getting mechanics down was falling off.

Never heard of anything getting fixed before until now! Thanks for letting me know. I'm reminded of this tank I met in a flashpoint earlier this week who had this dubious RW relic. Guess when the scoundrel healer dropped and a sage healer replaced him, I was telling him to swap out that silly thing. (He probably didn't think my opinion was worth anything since I was in a dps spec.)

With regards to Reactive Warding if you want to take it along: it's going to be even less helpful than an empty slot if you have a sorc/sage healer bubbling you, as the two absorb shields negate each other, so do check with your healers before you jump in or else you might shoot yourself in the foot.

Hey, as others said you could tank veteran and master flashpoints in less gear, even at sub-70 (except probably LI). (Recent events: I've tanked Manaan almost butt naked because I forgot to get my legacy gear before zoning in ) Gear matters very little in what you're looking at due to the generous bolster, and you don't need to start nitpicking unless you want to start raiding at HM and NiM. Set bonus pieces from Unassembled vendors and Galactic Command will do just fine. I'm still gearing and it's all over the place, hunting down 248 set bonus pieces and high endurance mods especially but here are my numbers since you like them so much (ilvl 248): Health: 133084 Armour rating: 11000 Damage Reduction: 42.46% Defence Chance: 38.96% Shield Chance: 45.90% Shield Absorption: 47.90% That being said, every tank is a special snowflake and finds different ways to make their gear work. However, Shadow and assassin tanks are especially dependent on the proper usage of defensive cooldowns so if you can't make that work, being geared isn't going to help you. If you are 'still getting hit kinda hard' then there's definitely something you're missing out on in terms of rotation. More so than other tank classes you need to know fights very well, especially since you don't have so much passive mitigation so you will need to know occasions on which you could use a specific DCD. You could get even more DCDs with some clicky relics and utilities but since you're adamant on not talking about that, I'll stop there.

Really what the guy above said. Please please say if you haven't done an op before, stick to your role and follow instructions. If you were in my group I'd be totally fine with that. Read up on tactics before going in; it'll make life a lot easier. Too many people I meet in pugs think they can show up without saying anything, and end up making mistakes that could have been very easily avoided and wipe the raid.

Ask the Terror from Beyond nicely to spit in pear shapes and it might do the trick

they're probably still looking.

This thread should be renamed 'The jerks you meet in group finder'. I've never been kicked for being a tank before... but lately I've started seeing less point of tanking in pug vet FPs, especially when everybody knows what to do so I've been queueing and playing as dps. Sometimes a flashpoint requiring a little more brainpower - namely Czerka Core Meltdown - comes up and I offer to switch to tank just to keep things from being a headache.

But but but I wanna put him on the lift...

If I ever hit second strike, there's a third strike. So yeah. At least it's fun to watch them run for the stations when they get really low. Even more schadenfreude when they actually die.

As a healer I get insulted when someone hits kolto the moment they stub their toe. If I'm especially grumpy I'll spend the next few seconds as the kolto ticks for all group members telling them exactly what I think about them; second strike I refrain from healing everyone named Mr Kolto Fetish; third strike I respec to DPS. It implies that they don't trust me to be pre-empting who to heal and when to heal especially if everyone is sitting at 40% because they're squishy standing in stupid. I solo healed Bonethrasher (no aggro table) once and I guess people had no choice but to trust me to heal them when half the raid was running around at 10% health and I was out of mana Healer companions are so overtuned that they'd sooner replace an actual healer rather than supplement them. So yes, tremendous insult taken. It's such a thankless task anyway, so that's why I've quit healing.

I've just done it again with a companion at influence 1 set to heal (C2-N2) on Infiltration spec (Deception parallel) and I don't think my or my companion's health fell below 95% throughout the fights. (I did have a shield in my offhand but was otherwise in pure dps gear.) If you're taking a lot of damage it's possible that you're standing in a lot of red/yellow. The fire in particular - a conal attack telegraphed in red - can do a lot of damage. Stay out of them. If you're concerned that your companion is taking a lot of damage or drawing aggro, put a guard on her, and use AOE taunt. Otherwise if you still have issues with health, you should have access to the kolto stations. Go for them at or below 50% health, 60 if you want to be safe. If you don't know the fight.. ignore the tank droids. They respawn if you kill them, and anyway they do an insignificant amount of damage so don't waste your time on them. Kill the security droids the moment they show up however. For Syndic, with Raina you can probably just ignore all the adds and focus on the boss. Hit the kolto stations ad libitum, proceed upstairs when the boss goes upstairs and vice versa - though you may have a problem getting healed if your companion decides to stay downstairs (or upstairs if you're downstairs) and get smothered by the adds. Just put them on passive, wait 2 seconds, turn off and they'll be next to you, healing you. For Valss, stay out of ominous looking circles as well. On solo mode you could as well ignore mechanics including that silly Whirlwind things that show up, but if you do have a great deal of difficulty with the fight especially with regard to health levels, you can kite Valss from kolto to kolto (they're in the corners) like I do when pugging on vet mode without a healer. N.B. If you do it properly, you won't even need to run for the kolto with a healing companion.

I just soloed it to see what you were on about - 'skank' Shadow, no companion, no trouble at all. Can you elaborate on your issues? Being vaguely frustrated isn't going to help anyone.