Congrats on the kill! Only gets better with 16M!

It's possible to do it, just difficult. On my first run in story mode we did it on accident and still downed it (we thought that was what was supposed to happen). Tried it once on HM for larfs but was way to hard on the healers. For guilds just starting Kephess I agree with the OP that this fight was not intended to kill the walker in two phases.

A guildy of mine RE'd two pieces of campaign, removed all the mods and put in a lvl 10 armoring and the % RE chance of 20% stayed the same. Didn't learn the schematics for either so he just put the mods in Critted War Hero but I think the 20% chance is ridiculous. If people can just buy the War Hero Schematics for 50k why not at least give Campaign a 100% RE chance? Or does Bioware just want me to get ~5 pieces of campaign to be able to critcraft one. Seems like Bioware didn't think it through.

Just a note, my guild had the Praxon Bloodline drop from HM Warlord Kephess last night. Haven't been able to find where the other three Praxon's drop. I'll try and get the winner of it to post a pic tonight.

For Crux we run two progression 8Man's, one got 3/4 other got 4/4 so we'll see how the 16M goes this week. Undoubtedly 8M is going to be easier for a lot of guilds because it's easier to field that size with decent players. However, assuming the skill of your players remains constant when you go up to 16M from what Gabe said I'd imagine 16M would be easier. Certainly instances like the final phase on Kephess might be harder due to positioning with more players and I think 16M should definitely be where "real" competitive progression happens but due to Bioware's adjustments with 1.2 I'm not sure 16M is actually harder. That said we definitely don't have the experience with world progression or even 1.2 content like you guys do but I'd imagine us doing fairly well on 16M this week because we aren't pulling in casuals or PvPers to fill out the other 8 slots. Maybe the content will prove harder then it appears (that wouldn't be such a bad thing IMO).

As a very new guild who didn't even make it onto the PTS 1.2 beta, we're pretty proud with how fast we were able to clear out HM EC. Our Kephess kill went down last night 17 seconds before the servers went down (didn't even get to distribute loot). Here's a gallery of screenshots. http://cruxguild.com/gallery/m/4018703/album/58853 We spent about 8-10 hours on Kephess Sunday/Monday with many group comps, perfecting our strategy as much as we could. As you can see from the screenshot, we haven't quite got the last phase down although everything was perfect till ~30%. As we look towards this new week we hope to get 4/4 HM 16M as well! Loving the new challenge over past content.

Nice, my guild <Crux> on The Bastion downed him at about 7:45 PM PST yesterday. Took us about 2 hours because we're pretty new and didn't get copied to PTS so we had to learn everything, definitely a fun fight though and a nice change from KP/EV. We didn't really have problems with enrage (we use lots of marauders), just keeping our DPS balanced as they swap between the mobs took a few solid attempts to get a feel for.

Deception is perfectly valid for pvp if you don't go around thinking you're a tank. People that complain about the terrible survivability of the spec make me laugh. I only use Champ gear for 200 expertise on my Assassin then pack on Rakata for more damage. Obviously as Darkness you might be fine running into a largeish fight not even bothering to stealth at all because you can take the hits and do decent aoe damage. Deception does the best when you can properly gauge when/where to engage an enemy or two. People tend to think of survivability in terms of "how much damage can I take before I die", which if you examine both specs with that narrow of vision you'd be correct. However, with Deception, you play hit-n-run alot, your burst damage is so good you can literally pop into combat long enough to burst somebody down then sprint/vanish/walk away perfectly intact. If the notion of running from combat repeatedly does not appeal to you then Deception is not the spec for you. However, it's completely viable and can easily demolish WZ's if the player understands his/her role. Darkness is a fine spec if mainly if you wanna play Huttball all the time and run balls/pull people into fire. As for me, I like to kill people, and Deception is hands down the best spec for that as an Assassin imo.

I'm the primary melee DPS/offtank for my guild (10/10 Nightmare working on timed runs) and personally I find no problems with Assassin damage. Our guilds dps always have competitions to see who can pull aggro from our tank with just damage and it's almost always a powertech or myself. I do a pretty good job at maximizing Deception rotation (IMO is pretty easy to play but with all the QQ about how underpowered it is other people might not think so) The bloodlust buff from Mauraders is very nice though and we do generally have one in the raid. Maybe our Maurader isn't pulling aggro because he's bad? I haven't played one so I cannot speak to the difficulty of their rotation but in all my experience with SWTOR I've always been underwhelmed with the damage of the class (PVP and PVE). This isn't necessarily to say that one class is the "better" melee dps and should be given preference in raid spots. What I'm trying to get at is that Bioware did a pretty good job balancing the DPS of all the classes and that if played competently, Assassin can make a great damage dealer in PVE. Also we make great backup tanks in a clutch

I have a valor 54 Deception Assassin and quite honestly it's the only spec I can have fun PvPing in. That's not to say Darkness isn't a viable spec for PvP, I've tried it and done pretty well, it's just kinda dull to play tank IMO (I do that enough in PvE). For people saying Deception survivability is awful, it's probably because you're playing like a tank in the middle of the fray instead of a hit and run paintrain. While I have full champion gear, I actually use 4/5 Rakata set + weapon so I generally have about 200 expertise 18k hp. Using standard rotation and switching between relics, adrenal, and recklessness I have no trouble bursting down any dps/healer before they even realize what hit them. I don't even have to try to get top damage (generally 325-400k) in most warzones. Now this is coming from someone who played a certain stabby stealth class in that other MMO for many years so I'm very used to getting in and out of combat and gauging when/where to engage. Deception is a very valid PvP spec if played right, while some people might prefer the Darkness playstyle more, to completely dismiss Deception as a viable spec just shows how little time you've actually spent with it or that you failed to adjust your playstyle to coincide with your spec.