Hey guys, thanks for both of your replies! We'll have to talk this over in the guild and I'll send each of you a response then.

Hello all Passion is a small guild on Republic side with about 7 members remaining (and one 'honorary' member who raids with us but isn't in the guild, so that makes 8). We've never been a big guild, but because a couple of people have dropped out of the game by now we're finding it hard/impossible to keep our raiding schedule up. There's not much of a schedule to speak of, we play very casually and have one raid per week on Sunday evening. Despite that casual schedule though, we still enjoy a challenge and up till October we were able to push on and cleared up to 2/5 TfB HM. After that we were never able to get a full guild group going and using pick-up members didn't prove particularly successful. We are now on the lookout for other people who want to join us for these weekly operation runs. You don't even have to join the guild (in fact, there is very little activity in our guild during the week so if you're in an active guild but just want to raid with us that's fine). Alternatively we're also open to the idea of teaming up with another guild if there are any guilds out there in a similar situation or who need some extra bodies to fill a group. Drop me a line on here or come visit our website at http://passionswtor.enjin.com if you're interested.

Passion took down the Dread Guard trio on hard mode tonight (21/10)

Are you using stims? If you are, you could try going without stims for your dps, that helped for us.

Passion killed The Writhing Horror on hard mode tonight (14/10)

Hello there, we are a small guild called Passion (republic) which only raids "occasionally" (usually once a week but sometimes we can't manage if we don't have the people for it ^^) but might as well post some progress anyway! I can't give you the time stamps but since we're not really in this to be competitive it doesn't matter. 8 man story mode: cleared all on 30/09/12 haven't attempted hard mode yet news post made the day after (well it was made after midnight anyway) can be found at http://passionswtor.enjin.com/home/m/3926065/article/1034614

There's also a very specific sound effect for when he puts the oil down, of course that still won't let you see it but it'll give you some indication at least

the lightning spikes dropping inside the shield on stormcaller's side happened to us during the first couple of pulls on these guys, I was the tank running outside At the time I thought it could be two things: either one of the melee had more aggro on the boss than me right before the defensive phase OR it was because I was actually running too far from the boss (the first couple of pulls I was running straight to the entrance door to make a nice long lap, but I think I outranged the spikes this way and that's why he dropped them on my group in the bubble?) I haven't really verified any of this so could be wrong but I'm guessing it's one of those two - either way I stopped running far away and I made sure to keep aggro at all times after that so didn't happen again

out of curiosity, what MMO were you playing 30 years ago? I suppose it's plausible with MUDs and whatnot but it's a bit of a stretch

As other people have said, normal mode EV takes less than an hour once you know how the encounters work. We're a very casual guild and only do operations once a week and outside of that I'm barely even in game any more atm because I have other stuff to do, but it's very easy to do normal mode operations and doesn't really take any extra time at all. I could get away with only logging in for the operations if I wanted to, so it's not like it requires any extra time investment from you at all. Heck, EV pretty much starts with a boss encounter right out of the gate so you don't even have to do any trash to start trying it.

I couldn't find this in the first page so sorry if this has already been asked or if it's just something obvious but I was wondering how important accuracy is as a Vanguard tank. Are our important skills (e.g. stockstrike, hib, etc) affected by the normal accuracy or by the special attack accuracy? Do we need 100% on the 'normal' accuracy for threat gen?

I couldn't find this in the first page so sorry if this has already been asked or if it's just something obvious but I was wondering how important accuracy is as a Vanguard tank. Are our important skills (e.g. stockstrike, hib, etc) affected by the normal accuracy or by the special attack accuracy? Do we need 100% on the 'normal' accuracy for threat gen?

I did some hard modes shortly after hitting 50 (15k hp buffed) with guildies who had been 50 a bit longer than me and did fine, mostly because the dps was pretty well geared which seemed to be more important than my gear

I levelled all the way with a shield spec (31 points even, then some damage talents in the other two trees) and elara - since it was my first char I obviously can't compare but I know I could handle anything the game threw at me easily and I didn't really consider my damage to be too low