At the moment the hard mode flashpoints quests auto complete on killing the final boss of that hard flashpoint. This is frustrating in that it prevents the acquiring of any LS/DS and social points acquired during that run. That the quest auto complete can also cause issues with some situations. For instance tonight on doing Hard False Emperor, we had a player new to the fight with us when we reached him, during the end he dueled malgus but got knocked off the edge and the game instantly booted him out the instance. As such when we killed the boss, unaware he'd been booted, the quest completed for all of us bar the kicked member who could not enter the flashpoint afterwards. The normal flashpoint quests reach a sensible end. Black talon has you do the final splurge, everything else has a portal or the exit area bit. When you exit you get your quest completion window there. I strongly believe for the hard mode flashpoints this system should be retained rather than what it is currently. Its a shame to miss social points, LS/DS point choices and potentially open up issues like what occured to my group tonight and our unfortunate member maintainng how it is currently. At the best of times, when your forfeiting your social and LS/DS points, it can only be described as 'meh'. At the worst of times it can screw someone over.

Currently the 'hard' flashpoint concludes on the killing of the final boss within a flashpoint. But even on completing the flashpoint as a matter of course the normal quest you get within it does not reward LS/DS points or (and this is my main bone of contention personally) social points. It'd be nice if that could be fixed in some way.

I concur. I feel its very very strange that columi gear tokens drop from final bosses in flashpoints. Shoudl be tionese gear. The intake of tionese commendatinos from flashpoints alone is hideously slow. Even with bad RNG on your side you will easily have more columi loot from hard flashpoints than tionese stuff (this i can personally attest to). I figure that part of the reason the reawrds are low in the hard flashpoints is to encourage the normal operations. But considering thats meant to be 'entry' level and for people who want minimum of fuss I think thats kind of pointless. They should basically have the minibosses in flashpoints grant tionese crystals (as they already do but buff the amount slightly) and have bosses in the hard flashpoints drop tionese commendations but not crystals. Change the columi gear tokens to tionese gear tokens and itll balance out as I see it. Would still be slow enough to encourage the normal mode operations but not silly as it is right now. And lets face it... columi gear in hard flashpoints... is just pointless. Dont mind the columi tokens from the daily/weekly quests but gear tokens from the final bosses just stand out to me as subverting the tionese tier from the ground up. Especially as columi gear tokens don't drop in normal mode operations (or do they? Going to pay attention to the drops in future >.<).

I would have thought the whole 'different gear sets' thing would have been enough of an incentive. I mean while there isnt any means currently to seriously measure the effect of secondary stats some things are certainly better. You seem mainly focused on healer/dps difference as the primary issue here, that of switching roles rather than also factoring in the changing of dps skill points. A healing sorcerer for example, in my view, would view gear with alracity as a stat far more favourably than a madness sorcerer. Without that other gearset (of which if your talking endgame its unlikely for a good long while unless you get stupidly lucky with drops and group composition) you are effectively taking that effectiveness nerf you desire. The same for tanking. A tank respeccing to dps without the gear would still be using defence/shield statted gear. Again an effectiveness nerf. Likewise people who tend to sit in one spec all the time (mostly dps though over time we may or may not see variances in this game depending on endgame activities and companions place in them) benefit from a single gearset, and in the dps case they can bank on the effectiveness of sitting in one spec over a person who heals or tanks and would be comparatively gimped in their ability to handle content speedily. Plus the consideration of solo activities, if a player desires to swap between roles to benefit a group then considering the above I dont feel prohibitive credit costs need be a factor because the game is already set up in a way that minimum fuss is exhibitied by sitting in a single spec. In my view the gear penalty is enough without the credit penalty, at least invert the cost as I suggsted above to equal it out because there is severe benefits to sitting in a single spec at this point in time in terms of ease of gameplay.

I like the idea. But some of the choices are a bit annoying I wish you could trade items within the raid. Like tonight on killing the first boss our dps juggernaut got the tank helm (myself being a juggernaut tank). He never tanks, sod tried to trade it to me before remembering that you cant do that . Functionally its practically the same as a need/greed system only without the option for players to choose what items that they want to roll on. Im loathe to suggest changing it to intuitively check what spec you are as the option for offspec gear should exist. But lacking an ingame roll command (seriously wth there) makes master looting that stuff to try and resolve it a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuge pain. The system should be looked at and reassessed in my view. Next major patch they are resolving the pvp bag random toss ups for instance, it seems an oversight in my view to cite random items being useless for you as a problem in pvp but not on the pve content side of things with the auto-assign system working in practically the same manner.

No it wont. Only thing that will kill WOW at this point is WOW. And unless there is a directly massive decline in subs in WOW followed by a near identical rise in TOR subs (which would have to number in the millions) TOR wont 'beat' WOW. So lets stop the pathetic 'my game is better than that other one' chest thumping please >.<

I can understand why they took it off. Most helms would have massive clippage issues. That said I think itd be better to just enable it, let it clip for people who use massive helms (who will complain as no doubt they do already), but let people with small helms that are basically the same size as the players head fit the hoods over their heads.

They should invert the costs really. Make it more expensive the less you do it. That way if your a frequent respeccer chances are youll still be spending more than the person who comfortably makes use of one spec for long periods of time, but it still encourages rather than deters experimentation and is a viable credit sink for everyone rather than a nonissue for some people and a massive black hole of a sink for others.

Aye, this happened to our group today as well. We had to resort to an instance reset and reclear trash (which sadly lead to us not having time to move onto pylons). Very annoying when it happens after only one pull which was a 4% enrage wipe >.<. Im not sure what causes it, when we recleared and went back in I tunnel visioned standing on the edge ignoring the lava dot stacking as i stood right on the edge. Sat dead to make sure he reset rather than releasing right away and it worked fine going back in. Very strange stuff going on with the flashpoints/operations atm.

Even if only one person says no, arguably if its an item the other members of the group cant use/companions cant really use then their noncompliance is not really relevent. I personally couldnt countenance taking something over someone else personally for something that will only recieve a portion of its relative use in my case. By basically ignorning the one person whose loot pool it may be designed for it could conversly be argued your only asking in a cynical bid to achieve a 'moral high ground' by calling the other person out as greedy while acting in the same manner.

This pretty much sums it up. Since players use that gear and cant just 'swap themselves out' like you do for your specific needs between companions its always nice to just pass for other players main toons with companions as secondary. I think the only real grey area on that is if its an offspec for your main character. Unless its an offspec you use a lot of the time (like if you group a lot and heal in the group but dps in the open world) it might even out more if the upgrade is for a companion you use a large amount of the time. But main spec player loot that players will be using most, if not all, of the time should have priority.

I have to disagree there with regards to the replay value. If you completely changed faction its new once, but my own personal opinion is that the abundance of world quests compared to the tiny amount of class content is whats detering me from a lot of rerolling. Funny because I was one of those people that really saw what was happening coming, and that there wouldnt be 200 hours of class story content per class. That said even I was kind of shocked, being generous I'd say theres at best 10 hours of class story content per class. The world quests actually bog it down and make it less interesting and hurts the replay value in no small way. Again this is kind of ironic considering my more traditional MMO stance approach to gameplay design but since you level solo anyway it should have been largely based around class story stuff. For the world story arcs they should have done what they claimed in the first place, make the group quests part of a story line (but one which exist as multiple quests, repeatable, so you cna hop in and out of the middle for more convenient group finding). Then have story options affect the heroic quest line further down but make it random if you havnt done those quests and just skipped to a quest down the line. Class story contnet shoudl have been the primary driver because of the replay value bit, even if the level time would have been halved. People who want endgame wouldnt be terribly fussed, other people who like to reroll could enjoy more repeatable class story lines without the 90% filler. Though this should have been contingent on class stories being more multiplayer friendly. Its really dissapointing how segregated the class stories are that theres no cross over. Minor spoilers here but its like the start of the war would have been an AMAZING setting to get all the classes, even story wise, together in the same area even doing different things about how the war started. Thus far all ive seen is 'WAR' on the login screen. Making the class stories more multiplayer friendly in that scenario would do much so we could add cool things like different classes and maybe even cross faction events if they join on certain parts. For instance, no spoilers here, but the JK and SW stories for example in the end give an AMAZING reason for thsoe two to come head ot head. But considering the segregated nature of the design that will obviously never happen without a complete reversal in the game design. Its a bit too late now, but the design is antiquated and a real missed opportunity. Certainly not as replayable as I had hoped for, and I was one of the more conservative people on that front.

Agreed, as I said things like soft enrages have their place and I woudl definitely prefer something more than things enraging two minutes in. But realistically that doesnt underline dps responsibility. A solution that just increases the burden on the other roles but still doesnt underline dps responsibility is not appropriate as a replacement of a hard enrage mechanic across content.

The fundamental issue is how alternatives to enrage dont just shift the responsibilities further onto the healers and tanks. In both cases in your case in no small part you shifted the 'difficulty' (for want of a better word) onto the other roles in the group. By no means could this not be a case 100% of the time, but the argument here is about drawing a concrete line below dps responsibility. Arguably tanks and healers have the greater responsibility with the cases made on both sides that a good tank and healer can carry dps in some cases but vice versa is a less common occurance. Strict enrage timers, while unimaginative, do not immediately increase the burden on the tanking or healing side instead offering a bar for the dps to perform to. An enrage hit wiping the group quickly does not stick a massive burden on the tanking and healing side, but underlines the dps responsibility. A more replacement 'solution' shoudl bear this in mind. If there are alternatives it needs to be very heavily weighted towards putting the onus back on the dps. Strict enrage timers may be simplistic but the fault in most cases can very clearly be placed on dps underperformance the same way as when a tank allows stray adds to beat on the healer or the healer fails to keep people alive the responsibility can often be traced back to these roles. Proposing 'solutions' that do not fundentally deal with the dps responsibility angle, instead just shifting more of it onto the tank and healer as a matter of course, is not really a solution.

You obviously havnt got further than 30 then. Taris being a possible exception (and that only scrapes by with the bonus series really), planets past 30 become absolutely massive with only about half the quest content fo earlier planets. Hoth especially is rather bad, it has maybe about a dozen quests on it. You do two quests then travel a distance equal to your capital planet to get to the next two quests. Planet size is ok, and I wouldnt expect the same quest content to geographical size, in fact with the laters planets I do like the idea of being able to travel a bit without stumbling on a quest. But especially with hoth and belsavis its more than a little silly just how little content there is. 4 level planets (as in supposed to be able to get you up four levels) but unless you do the heroics and all the bonus stuff youll MAYBE scrape by one level.