Are you playing sentinel/mara? It's a little old but was done on a level 70 watchman sentinel with ilevel 237 (no augments) and an influence 1 Vette. Basically it's to keep her on that podium and stay within range most times, try to keep the others off her so she can heal you. No hiding needed.

this just in, I remember tanking a GF op last expansion with a skank jugg who signed up as dps. The other dps were nothing too special and since his gear rating was 258 and he seemed to know what he was doing I assumed we'd be all right. But no, so here's what happened: things died really slowly and for all the ****** dps he was doing he kept ripping aggro due to the passive high threat that being in tank spec generates. I had to triple taunt every single thing or he melted because he wasn't wearing tank gear. put 2 and 2 together after a failed check at the minefield after seeing his set bonus and 0 accuracy and booted the guy. 0/10 would not tank beside a skank dps again.

ironically that laptop is better at reliably rendering the bulls on Red than his usual potato

We get it, you don't play sins.

Somebody probably bought all of the listed refined isotopes and re-listed them to turn a larger profit margin. It's not a nice move, but profitable. It happened to the augment mk-10 kits a while back too.

I see loads of players like this. They don't discuss their rotation or raw dps but it's always their gear rating that's the game breaker according to them, never mind actual crit/alacrity balance or accuracy, let alone anything about the current alacrity threshold meta. Or they just run crit and don't care for anything else. A marauder running shield/absorb. Deception Assassins who don't even have Discharge on their bar. 'I don't see Discharge on your bar?' 'Oh I'm not full 248 yet just a couple more pieces' I try to help guildies like this but it's often like banging your head against a brick wall.

Personally I think operative is more difficult requiring an upkeep of HOTs and anticipating incoming damage - sorcs are primarily reactive healers and thus better for people with less experience. Look at the new healing parse leaderboards. Roughly speaking, here's how the classes rank in terms of single target/AOE healing from best to worst - Single target - Op, sorc, merc 4 targets - Op, merc, sorc 8 targets - Op, merc, sorc Single target as an operative during a boss fight however is a little less viable than sorc especially for unscripted spike damage going out. This is because it's unviable to keep probes on every single raid member so one would have to apply probes first before bursting them up. As a sorc healer main, I feel like AOE healing is like pulling teeth with relatively weak AOE abilities - if a whole group takes raidwide damage, I can pick them up... in 1.7 seconds without any Surge buffs, and it's not an instant heal - it's a HoT ability. I've been able to heal best when pre-empting scripted damage and precasting accordingly, like watching boss casts and parse timers - a bit like the Operative but at least it doesn't involve a constant upkeep of kolto probes. Force management is fine as long as one knows where to spend Surge buffs from Innervate on recovering Force (like in a spare moment when everybody's gucci at 100% health) or a reduced cuddle puddle cast. I think merc healing is the easiest. It has very good AOE, although not as OP as operative AOE and is in general, a reactive/burst healer barring kolto shells which last forever. It can burst up a single target faster than a sorc can cast Dark Infusion if the Emergency Scan + Healing Scan insta proc is not on cooldown, but otherwise bringing someone up from near-death with nothing but Rapid Scan and/or Progressive Scan if you're that kind of person is going to take a while. There are also a few utilities specific to certain fights that make it more preferable like Hydraulic Overrides for Revan and reflect for, well, a lot of things.

Do some dummy parsing in both specs and compare your DPS. If you're doing something right, Serenity should parse higher on a 2.5mil dummy. It's very easy to run out of Force real quick on Serenity if you're not careful.

I think since OP is new to ops, gear will definitely be an important factor. It's of course less relevant when one is a skilled raider farming NiM mounts and timed run titles. Things like augments can make a substantial difference with regards to how the bolster works - some extra stats, a slightly larger pool of health, all provide some leeway for errors to someone learning a fight.

It's destroying my new healing parses Also affecting someone else I know.

I don't expect a group to be in voice for an MM flashpoint and as guildies and friends, we only get in for the social aspect. I used to queue for MM flashpoints and do a fair number of them; I don't do them much any more except running Foundry towards my Meatbag title. But with respect to raids: There are approaches a group whose majority of members are in voice will decide to take in voice that won't be written down in a guide. For example, the decision to stack all the DPS on one tentacle in Terror and allocation of colours and roles in Operator IX. Dread Council kill order, and so on. I did an SM Izax back in 5.8 and got in voice with some of the raid; the rest chose not to. I ended up running out of tethers in phase 3 when someone who wasn't in voice had picked up a tether (we weren't making the interrupt/DPS check). We were dead by the time I managed to type in chat 'pass me a tether', at which point I wrote 'Get in voice or don't pick up tethers'. Sorry if I seemed callous, but do you have a reason why you can't get in voice? You don't have to talk, just listen. If your game lags horribly with more than one programme in the background running, I've always run Discord/Teamspeak on a separate platform especially for 16 man raids.

If OP's just looking to get the Facing the Machines of War quest out of the way, OP only needs to knock Tyth out.

Thanks for announcing it. You will be greatly missed indeed. /s

There's no value in the Red Sphere's unique look for me. It looks quite retarded, like the cockroach wings but what can I say, it's a rare drop. I'd flaunt that. I'd show off the cockroach wings too. If I have to kill Xeno HM 100000 times to successfully win a roll for the Red Sphere, I will, and if I kill Xeno HM 100000 times and no Red Sphere drops once, no hard feelings. I'm not going to die just because I don't have a Red Sphere, but I'm not going to whine about it and demand adjustment of the goal posts either.

Xeno HM is hopelessly easy and having done it countless times and not seen it drop at all, I think a low drop rate is more than reasonable.