While I can't say with certainty that this is what happens, after fighting with it bugging repeatedly we haven't had it fail once in the last 4 resets by changing one thing: Make sure there's a 1-2s gap between the two pylons solving. I'm fairly certain it doesn't matter what order you solve them in but if they finish too close together it breaks whatever shoddy scripting is running the thing. We just have one person clicking south who calls for the other side to click when his cast is half finished.

Yeah, that's not needlessly complex at all... Would you care to provide examples of these other programs that work in this manner? Keep in mind they'd have to require every player to submit to be accurate, so no pointing at wowwebstats or world of logs. I'll admit my experience with MMO's other than wow is limited. Neither of these solutions are game-breakingly hard to implement, but you're right, I'm assuming their developers are competent, are you assuming they're not? Where did I ever say a meter is absolutely needed? Given your obvious talent for spotting straw-men i'm sure you recognize your own here. Believe it or not, some people like having meters for reasons other than the egocentric chest-thumping you seem obsessed with preventing. The way bioware is (grudgingly) going about implementing them gets in the way of many of those. I imagine a lot of people seem contradictory when everything you see is either black or white.

The only hard thing to understand about it is why they've chosen such a needlessly complex route, and if they were going to go with something so halfassed why it wasn't in from the start. (1) They could have just as easily made this a client side setting "Share combat data with others? [yes/no]" Then no one would have to jump through these ridiculous hoops to get to the information. (2) Have you done the Ops content in this game? A meter would give people something to actually pay attention to, because there certainly isn't much in the way of fight mechanics to watch out for. Learn the hard way? Huh? What exactly would a meter teach me about the boss fight?

There's a slight flaw with your logic, how exactly would anyone tell if they've improved? And how exactly do meters "remove the need for players to pay attention to the game" that doesn't make any sense at all. If i have a meter I can somehow ignore everything else? huh?

I keep seeing people say things like this, and I'm genuinely curious. How would you solve this? It's a pretty simple scenario: A boss has an enrage timer and let's say your group is consistently wiping around 10%. You've been playing with these people for a while and are pretty confident none of them are terrible, also all of the DPS claim they're doing their best. Now, you as the raid leader, how do you solve this? Keep in mind you have no metrics of any kind to evaluate the performance of your group members. So really, how do you deal with it?

Right, I failed to take into account the impact of weapon slots to overall damage, when I looked at it in more detail I understood that. I also found however that you were overestimating their contribution. Is the design still as elegant if your own assumptions miss the mark? I've also enjoyed many Bioware games over the years, but it's safe to say I don't hold them in quite as high a regard as you do. I suppose this is largely a matter of perspective; while you praise them for addressing the concerns of players rapidly, I find myself questioning why they weren't able to get it right on their own the first time. They're not exactly blazing new trails here. And it may have turned out your realization of the dev intent wasn't accurate, personally that would cause me to reevaluate any conclusions I'd drawn from it. I think the remainder of your comment here is just where we diverge on what tanking should be. I believe that threat should matter, but it shouldn't be the endall of playing a tank, I don't want to just be a DPS class with a threat modifier, the current tuning on threat gen steers it in that direction. I think tanking should offer a unique role in encounters, just like healing should also(hopefully) offer a unique experience separate from DPS. I also think the large amount of threat drops present in the current end game content is evidence of poor design, I don't find any compelling gameplay value in seeing how quickly the tank can press the taunt button(although I do enjoy mission critical interrupts, go figure). To sum up your thoughts here, criticisms leveled at Bioware are explained away in four distinct forms: The 'whiners' are ignorant of Bioware's divine intent. Bugs. Relatively trivial things you're willing to accept some small fault in. Bioware knows best(even if you can't explain why). At the risk of getting completely off topic I'd love to hear your justification for the messy state of Crew Skill perks. They've been for me one of the clearest examples of design lacking foresight, could you shed some light on what I'm missing?

You're right, when looking for a simple way to demonstrate this issue I didn't take into account how significant the MH and OH slots were to overall damage. However, I think your numbers are off as well. Your 66/33 breakdown of damage seems reasonable enough for tanks but it doesn't hold up so well for dps. I did as you suggested and looked at the breakdown on the character sheet of my marauder, it occurred to me that just looking at damage isn't very accurate, since of course it doesn't reflect all of the secondary stats. So to get a better picture I compared all of the offensive ratings. I totaled up the stats, and pretended they were all just straight power, and converted them to damage. When I did that I found the breakdown to be almost exactly 50/50 or 50/25/25 when you split primary and secondary stats like you suggested, not much of a surprise since damage just mirrors item budget at that point. If I've done my math correctly(and there's every chance I haven't, it never was a subject I cared greatly for) it would seem that we're actually sacrificing 50% of our 50%, not 33%. Your revised equation should then be as follows: Tanks will generate 112.5% "standard" threat: 1.5 (threat mod) * (.5 (weapon and offhand) + .5 * .5 (everything else)). A DPS will generate 100% "standard" threat: 1.0 (threat mod) * (.5 (MH and OH) + .5 (everything else)). I'll be honest, the idea of 123.75% was already feeling pretty tight to me, though you seem comfortable with it. How would 112.5% feel to you? Snug at all? You really were correct though, it may not be a scaling issue so much as just poorly(IMHO of course) designed. When I wrote my first post it was more of knee-jerk reaction to the trend I'd been seeing in Ops. I can think of more than one time in that other MMO where tanks had run into issues with DPS threat zooming right past them, and despite all it's flaws I really do enjoy this game and want it to succeed. The prospect of tanking with a heavy reliance on the taunt button sours that somewhat though. Perhaps I'll finally have to learn-to-play. No doubt many songs will be sung about your triumphant banishment of yet another ignorant troll. But I would like to ask you something, why are you so eager to give the developers the benefit of the doubt? It's not hard to find aspects of this game that were either poorly designed, or poorly executed, what makes you so sure this isn't just another example? Where does your faith come from?

I've noticed this myself, and seen others talking about it as well, there seems to be a problem with the scaling of threat generation for tanks. As it stands now there is no way for the threat generated by tanks to keep up with well geared DPS classes. The root of the problem is a lack of scaling for tanks from stats other than their primary. Here's a greatly simplified example: Of course this example is *extremely* simple, and there are a ton of other factors involved such as talents, threat reducing skills, relative stat totals, etc. The point is even if you take all of those extra things into account the tank is still going to see a significantly smaller increase to threat output than the DPS for the same increase in item power. The results make it easy to conclude that no matter how well the tank plays at some gearing level any competently played DPS is going to outstrip the threat generation of that tank. When that gearing level is reached is up for debate, and depends heavily on player skill and class, I've found myself that when I was fresh to 50 and just starting HM FPs that the balance felt fairly good, and if I played well I was able to have good control over the encounters. Now, I'm doing mostly HM Ops and finding that our better geared DPS are able to pull single target aggro quite regularly. I can only assume this will only worsen in the next tier of content. Some might say that these are problems that can be countered with better play, such as: DPS holding back and giving tanks a lead at the start, suggesting tanks wear some DPS gear to help offset it, or even implying that the tank must be doing something wrong for this to be an issue. Unfortunately though, I don't see those as solutions. The UI gives so little feedback to players that short of just standing there doing nothing, they have no way of knowing when they need to do something about it. DPS gear isn't an option on hard/nightmare modes, and no matter how well the tank plays they'll eventually fall behind at some point due to the lack of scaling. I think a proper solution would be to give tanks a way to scale their threat output through the accumulation of defensive stats. An easy way to do this would be to allow the 50% threat modifier built into every tanking stance/aura to scale with the total of their defense, shield, and absorb. Primary stats already scale threat for everyone and Endurance for no one. Scaling that modifier would allow tanks to keep up with DPS, without sacrificing survivability, and without affecting things like PVP balance.

I've noticed this myself, and seen others talking about it as well, there seems to be a problem with the scaling of threat generation for tanks. As it stands now there is no way for the threat generated by tanks to keep up with well geared DPS classes. The root of the problem is a lack of scaling for tanks from stats other than their primary. Here's a greatly simplified example: Of course this example is *extremely* simple, and there are a ton of other factors involved such as talents, threat reducing skills, relative stat totals, etc. The point is even if you take all of those extra things into account the tank is still going to see a significantly smaller increase to threat output than the DPS for the same increase in item power. The results make it easy to conclude that no matter how well the tank plays at some gearing level any competently played DPS is going to outstrip the threat generation of that tank. When that gearing level is reached is up for debate, and depends heavily on player skill and class, I've found myself that when I was fresh to 50 and just starting HM FPs that the balance felt fairly good, and if I played well I was able to have good control over the encounters. Now, I'm doing mostly HM Ops and finding that our better geared DPS are able to pull single target aggro quite regularly. I can only assume this will only worsen in the next tier of content. Some might say that these are problems that can be countered with better play, such as: DPS holding back and giving tanks a lead at the start, suggesting tanks wear some DPS gear to help offset it, or even implying that the tank must be doing something wrong for this to be an issue. Unfortunately though, I don't see those as solutions. The UI gives so little feedback to players that short of just standing there doing nothing, they have no way of knowing when they need to do something about it. DPS gear isn't an option on hard/nightmare modes, and no matter how well the tank plays they'll eventually fall behind at some point due to the lack of scaling. I think a proper solution would be to give tanks a way to scale their threat output through the accumulation of defensive stats. An easy way to do this would be to allow the 50% threat modifier built into every tanking stance/aura to scale with the total of their defense, shield, and absorb. Primary stats already scale threat for everyone and Endurance for no one. Scaling that modifier would allow tanks to keep up with DPS, without sacrificing survivability, and without affecting things like PVP balance.

Every time I tank this I find myself questioning BW's development process; how they could have done any testing with this encounter and decided this was a good mechanic is completely beyond my understanding. The limited camera options combined with the size of the boss and the resulting height of the pylon makes this way more frustrating than it needs to be.* Rants aside this is how I deal with it: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=205633 The TLDR is there's a setting in your _account.ini you can change to increase how far you can zoom your camera out. The default max is 25, changing it to 50 allows you to actually see the pylon above the boss which makes lining it up about 100x easier. * A couple weeks ago we had someone get the 'if you're caught in a whirlwind thing during a transition it sticks you under the floor at the bottom' bug, and he claimed there was actually a graphic on the ground corresponding to the pylon's location, so it may be that BW doesn't just hate us they just screwed up implementing it.

Yes, I'm not suggesting that Bioware copy directly from WoW, just that they should be aware that the manner in which they've been handling crew skill balance currently has been very poor. They seem to want to avoid the flavor of the month swapping but their heavy-handedness and lack of planning is actually causing it rather than correcting it. Which crafting skill you've chosen should be neutral when measuring character capabilities, I just laid out two simple ways to achieve that, I have no doubt there are many solutions that would address this issue satisfactorily. I enjoy the game immensely, but this and other similar issues do have me doubting the capabilities of the designers. I'm really hoping they can get a handle on things without having to repeat all of Blizzard's mistakes, their track record thus far is not very inspiring though.

The problem is that from a min/max* perspective biochem is inferior to the other crafting skills now, prior to today's patch it was way too good. As for slicing, I was only able to play near the end of beta but it was already widely known that the earning potential of that skill was way out of line with the others, especially while leveling. That it required emergency action shortly after launch speaks volumes to how much they were listening to the feedback in beta. The kind of changes Bioware is making make me wonder if they actually have any sort of plan for crew skills, the adjustments so far have been heavy handed and poorly thought out. *min/max at this point is actually to level each relevant crafting skill and make crit versions of their BoP Rakata items before moving on to the next profession. That they haven't had the foresight to slap a profession requirement on those items is just more evidence that they haven't got a clue what they're doing.

Why is it that Bioware seems to be starting from scratch when it comes to balancing crew skills? I realize referencing WoW on these forums can be dangerous, but frankly it's the 800lb Gorrila of MMOs and ignoring the mistakes it has made would be foolish. So it's pretty disheartening to see Bioware making the exact same mistakes with crew skills that Blizzard did with professions. I'm annoyed that the devs didn't see this problem coming from a mile away, but apparently they still haven't figured it out, so here it is very simply: If you make one crew skill offer a significantly bigger perk than others, people will flock to it. There are two very simple ways to deal with this, either: A. Have no perks associated with crafting at all. B. Give everyone an equivalent perk from crafting. Both solutions would work just fine. I personally think B results in a healthier economy since it encourages people to have crafting skills, but really, no perks at all would be superior to the musical patch changes we're getting now, where the devs seem to be doing little more than fumbling around in the dark. Here's a brief history lesson for those who may not have played WoW or have forgotten. Early in the game professions offered little in the way of bonuses, and there was little incentive to leveling them beyond trying to make money on the auction house. A couple years in though Blizzard decided this should change, so they started to implement profession specific perks to encourage their use. Unfortunately the early perks ranged from near useless to incredibly overpowered, and players were often put into the position of needing to reroll their professions to optimize their characters. After a few years of this though they settled into a balance where crafting professions offer roughly equal, worthwhile benefits. The results certainly aren't perfect, but they're pretty good. There's no good reason Bioware couldn't have learned from this process and jumped straight to the end result, if anyone can offer one I'd really be interested to hear it. Issues like this really make me wonder, did the people making the decisions for this game spend any significant time playing the competitor they chose to model so much of their design after?

The best(worst) part of this is that the flashing animation doesn't even start until after the GCD has fully expired. People better just get good at anticipating what they'll be able to use, because if you're waiting for any meaningful feedback from the UI, you can expect to delay everything you do by an additional half a second. It really is startling that a designer came up with these changes, actually believed they were good, and that they made it though any sort of QA process.

Bioware doesn't seem real keen on learning from the mistakes Blizzard has made, they seem quite content to repeat them. I wouldn't expect this to change anytime soon.