Given the numerous bugs affecting the 7.0 story quests, and, for some bugs, not even going to the SH/fleet and then launch may not cut it as a solution; perhaps if these 7.0 story quests could be reset, it would help at least some people whose bugs can't be resolved otherwise.

While I was doing the quest Out of the Blue on my gunslinger, I killed the assassin droid but was unable to loot the override codes. Going to my stronghold and then back made me fight the mobs again, but the assassin droid wouldn't spawn after they die. We would like a reset button on the 7.0 story quests to be available so that we can start over should we find ourselves in situations where the story cannot be completed.

Do we need to complete KotFE Ch16, KotET Ch9 on the same character as we did Acts 1-2-3, RotHC and SoR? Or we can do the story up to SoR on one character and KotFE, KotET as well as Jedi under Siege and Onslaught on a different character?

If some solo players are planning on VM/MM KotFE/ET chapters, Eternal Championship, or VM Star Fortresses, which are IMO the primary solo content that could require a higher level of gear than 270 (currently) or 318 (in 7.0), what would they need to do then? Sure they may not be that numerous, but these could be the primary content a player that complains about 7.0 limiting solo players using gear for.

Simply removing some trash from the longest FPs (and, for Chiss and Nathema, all of it) might be a solution, as is not making a currency available in the easiest FPs...

I never understood exactly why switching characters frequently for the purpose of CQ, beyond maybe some server-side issue, was something Bioware saw fit to curb...

I would say, this game is due for separate FP queues. Hammer Station, Athiss, RR, Kuat, Esseles/BT (and maybe Mando Raiders) with a different set or amount of rewards from the others. Now it's debatable whether you need to split the remaining FPs in two separate queues based on how hard they are, but most people will feel like their difficulty varies widely.

What's obvious is that, even in the absence of exploits, FPs aren't anywhere near close to having consistent lengths, or difficulties even. Removing trash from some FPs, in whole (Chiss, Nathema) or in part (Tython, Cademimu, Directive 7, SoE, SoV, Umbara, Taral 5, Maelstrom, BP, and so on, so forth, but bonus bosses would need to have their trash requirements reduced or eliminated) would go a long way towards having a better balance of length, even though it won't necessarily make them significantly easier. For most FPs, trash is usually much less engaging than bosses, and, more often than not, is not essential to the story (And it's not just the 5.0 FPs either). Outside of the rakghoul FPs, bosses tend to drive the story, and are often the sole story drivers. Sure, removing the trash would alter bosses' characterization (for example, Zenta would instead come off as someone that would rather lull enemies into a false sense of security), or how a locale would feel, but the substance of the story would remain mostly intact most of the time. That said there are definitely FPs that are too long for their own good.

Personally I feel removing trash from those FPs with exploits (at least the trash that can actually be avoided with said exploits, and then exploits become pointless as such) would be easier to implement than separate queues with separate rewards; in fact people often complain about FPs having too much trash (outside of Blood Hunt or maybe Core).

Here are two possible solutions I could get behind: 1) Remove trash as required to balance certain FPs (and also lower the trash requirements for bonus bosses, if applicable; Ilum and Maelstrom especially could benefit from only requiring a trash pull or two extra to unlock the bonus boss, rather than clearing the trash essentially in full up to the bonus boss), especially from the longest FPs, such as Chiss or Nathema 2) Split GF into multiple sub-queues (it's widely acknowledged that FPs just aren't uniformly hard): - Express being Hammer, Athiss, Esseles/BT and RR (you could make a case for Mando Raiders to be in the express queue, or in the basic queue) - Basic being Kuat, Taral 5, Maelstrom (pub), Boarding Party, Foundry (imp), Directive 7, Ilum, False Emp (you could also make a case for Labs or Core) - Advanced being all others Each sub-queue would then have different levels or amounts of rewards. Might require more effort than increasing the aggro radius on some of the more readily skippable mobs, or removing trash from some of the longer FPs, but it may address some of the issues with rewards vs time spent. As applied to ops, this would mean splitting between the lair queue (single-boss ops) and raid queue (multi-boss ops), with rewards scaled accordingly. Which is exactly why I'd rather want a trash-free FP, but only if the story premise makes sense for it to be trash-free. However, story premises that can make a trash-free FP work are heavily dependent on either location/boss characterization or quests that take place beforehand. Here's a list of possible story premises that can make a trash-free FP work: - A diversion drew all the would-be trash away (like the last part of KotFE Ch11 but more effective) - The bosses can't keep their minions supplied (ideally, if it's supposed to be part of the main story, you'd want a preceding quest to be about cutting the bosses' supply lines) - A weapon was fired, or a curse was cast, at the location against which bosses are immune, but would-be trash isn't (if a curse, killing the boss would likely be key to breaking the curse, or hold the key to breaking it) - The bosses would prefer to lull you into a false sense of security until the player reaches a point deemed strategically important enough for the boss to fight you there (I'd rather have had the first 2/3 of Chiss play out that way over what we actually got) - The bosses deem trash useless based on prior experience (only works when you fought the boss before in a prior encounter, doesn't need to be another FP, though) - The bosses are the last survivors of some calamity - The FP takes place in some derelict (such as post-SoR Ziost or a Theoretika-like) - You wanted to save an area from an attack but the bosses killed off the residents before you arrive As for bonus bosses: have them drop recipes to retired decos or outfits (and also the return of bonus boss-based CQ objectives, with harder bonus bosses yielding more points).

I have an issue with how Galactic Seasons handle FPs and ops, as if only one difficulty was allowable (VM for FPs, and SM for ops). For conquesting, all difficulties of FPs and ops are objectives, albeit not carrying the same amount of points. It would make sense for Galactic Seasons objectives to be open to all difficulties as well, FP or op. Oh and add Objective Meridian to the coreward FP list, and SoE to the Seat of the Empire one, with Blood Hunt and Rishi also in the Outer Rim.

Disclosure: I haven't beaten Gods or Dxun in full in HM, much less NiM. I've been looking to go into HM/NiM raiding because, after watching kill videos on YouTube, as well as streamers killing bosses on Twitch, I find that sometimes, there are plot points that are flat out contradicted by mechanics, either through their presence or their absence, especially when considering SM as a narrative baseline. As a result, my raiding bucket list includes Gods HM, but why Gods makes more sense in HM than SM is because of the circumstances under which Izax dies, which differs in SM vs HM/NiM. (Hint: there's a dialogue line told in the last phase of the Izax fight, where Scyva makes a last-ditch attack on Izax, which kills him in SM, but in HM/NiM, it only weakened Izax and it falls on you to kill him) For this reason, I ceased assuming SM actually tells the story. On the other hand, whether the Dxun story is actually told in NiM or just SM/HM depends on whether you consider the Ultimate Hunter as part of the story, and the other point of contention are the consoles of Apex Vanguard that are used in HM/NiM but not in SM. Plus the anti-theft droid adds vs Apex NiM raise more questions. Are there other operations where plot holes become apparent only after running a higher difficulty, or plot points otherwise either start or stop making sense in a higher difficulty? As for KotFE/ET chapters, there are some chapters that just don't make sense in SM (such as Ch1 and 16 in KotFE, Ch8 in KotET), while other chapters seem to stop making sense in VM/MM (such as Ch13-14 in KotFE). Other instances where a certain difficulty level could make more sense for a specific chapter?

So I may be wondering about what your current needs are, and what your tentative schedule is. That said, I know that, while fresh blood that can realistically run NiM exists, it's scattered at best.

Live in timezones that may not fit traditional ops team schedules on the server? Feel more comfortable running ops during daytime? Anyone otherwise interested in running HM ops in daytime? Here's your chance! Note: Here daytime is understood as being anywhere from 10AM to 5PM EST. I understand that people could be new to content, so patience and a positive attitude are a must. Depending on interest, however, it could be either Pub-side or Imp-side, and maybe even evolve into a guild. If you have any interest in being part of a daytime HM ops team, please fill out the following: Character Name: Role (Tank, DPS, heal): Spec: Previous experience of HM/NiM ops:

Maybe a different AC could be more workable, more so than a different class. Yes, you'll run into the same balancing issues as would adding any other new spec, just that you could fit Force-sensitive black ops into the existing class stories without creating unnecessary redundancies.

Although they have a higher skill floor than even 3.0 FPs in VM, it may be a bit unfair to F2P players to be unable to run Umbara, Chiss, Nathema and Meridian in VM. That said, maybe dialing back the level restriction on these four FPs to 60 would be somewhat viable, but no more than that.

Precisely, for MM FPs to be faceroll-able, the team makeup is critical. You may have gotten lucky with DPS when you tanked Blood Hunt with a Sniper and a healer that is new to MM. With the state of pugging these days, luck counts for a lot. You usually have more leeway when your good DPS is ranged, especially in newer FPs, and all my bad experiences with Meridian and Chiss happened because of melee DPS. Also, as for WoW mythic mode dungeons, from what I can tell, M0 is about as faceroll-able as older MM FPs (especially since gear makes an even greater difference for DPS and heals in that game, and often it seems that many WoW players wait until they out-gear content to run it, especially if they out-gear it by a large margin) and how challenging M+ gets depends on the week since the extra mechanics also depend on the week.

Then again, for every player that can faceroll 5.0-era FPs in MM (they were unevenly nerfed in 6.0, but I still cleared Umbara and Nathema MM at their 5.0 difficulties with their bonus bosses, none of these clears were faceroll to me back then), there are several players who can only run Hammer and/or Red Reaper at that level. This also means there isn't a whole lot of players that can faceroll Umbara/Nathema MM, and a few extra that can clear these but for whom they pose some level of challenge. Now, to whom do 5.0-era FPs and Meridian pose a challenge? However, I still feel like older MMs (released under 1.0 outside of Kaon/LI) should get difficulty buffs to bring them to the level of 3.0-era FPs, or at least of Kaon and 2.0-era FPs, if only under the form of a tighter DPS or healing check. Blood Hunt may have been nerfed by typo, though. I may have two-manned False Emp in MM, or tanked Ilum MM with the bonus boss on a DPS devoid of taunts, but these aren't experiences I would want to repeat, since they are frustrating more than they are challenging. I knew that MM FP difficulty correlated to release date almost perfectly.

For those who raided at the mythic level in WoW, you may have realized that some raids have different cutscenes in, say, normal/heroic vs. mythic. So the story does depend on the difficulty level one is running content in. For future group content, maybe one should have different cutscenes for, say, SM FPs/ops vs. VM FPs/HM ops vs. MM FPs/NiM ops. In the FP case, also have a different ending based on whether the bonus boss was killed or not, especially if it's unlocked unconditionally. More expensive to create, sure, but sometimes I'm made to feel, especially when running FPs from 3.0 and older whose bonus bosses are available only in MM, or TfB/SnV (although I have a Dreadful Entity kill, I don't have a Hateful Entity one), that SM may not tell the same story compared to a higher difficulty level.

OK, I get that SFs should get reward buffs, Eternal Championship as well as PvP (both unranked and ranked). For SFs, buffs should include bosses dropping gear and tech frags (about as much as in SM and VM FPs respectively on a per-boss basis) and paladins dropping gear and TFs, too.

Gameplay can, and sometimes, do dictate lore. And more often than people think. Case in point: for 3.0-era and earlier FPs, MM is considered canon because bonus bosses, some of which are available only in MM, are, canonically speaking, killed. If the same logic applied to TfB and SnV, then TfB was canonically run in 16-man HM because the Dreadful Entity is assumed killed, and SnV, in 16-man NiM because the Hateful Entity is assumed killed. If we accept these two bosses as dead for canon purposes, that is. And then, if recurring bosses were fought in the same difficulty from an op to another for canonicity purposes, then DF/DP would both have been run in NiM for canon purposes, and EC, in HM. But I have some reservations with the above analysis, which does not address EV, KP, ToS, Rav, Gods, Dxun, nor the one-boss ops. Maybe detailed and elaborate enough for the actual abilities of the antagonists to be described in some detail (whether lore is detailed enough about abilities to reach the level of detail of a proper intelligence report or not is another issue) in which case mechanics do matter from a lore perspective.

The last ~10% may prove decisive in determining the answer to my question, but I feel the answer is op-dependent. And not just because some of them have no NiM, either.

I had a most unpleasant Ilum MM run, with the tank telling us to stay mounted until we get to the second boss (Drinda-Zel & Velasu) but then said tank proceeded to pull a bunch of mobs because that tank missed jumps, and we wiped multiple times because of that, and telling us in the second attempt that we should just follow a certain path and pull six mobs total. We then kicked out the tank and then it went a lot better afterward, with the new tank. I always tell my teams to heal up between pulls when I run VM anything with 4 DPS, or otherwise without a healer.

We all know that some ops bosses had mechanics removed from SM well after the release of the ops they were in, such as Calphayus and the Underlurker. However, these mechanics mostly remained in HM. Which set of mechanics is considered canon for an op boss then, the mechanics at release or the current mechanics?

OK, I acknowledge the gap between HM and NiM is currently at its widest, but how would using SM stat caps in HM (as a temporary solution; SM stat caps are lower than in HM) affect the difficulty of HM? Or even the stat caps of MM FPs, if they are lower than SM ops stat caps, in which case SM ops should also have these stat caps as well. It's far from perfect but still... Solutions to that sort of problems often come with catch-22s, and someone will be displeased without fail. But when stuff becomes impossible to balance, especially with amplifiers or set bonuses in the mix... To be fair, raiding has never been much of a selling point for this game from 4.0 onward. (It may have been in 3.0 or earlier, but I can't say for sure - I only started playing well into the 5.0 cycle) Now we know what the game is like with a raiding community that is a shadow of its former self, however.