merc is fine in pve, and has the best 'toolkit' imo of all healers (better burst response than sorc or op, and acceptable mobile aoe) playing merc in pvp is a bad time, though

the real problem is the huge gulf in difficulty between HM FPs; if they were all as easy as black talon/mando raiders/boarding party/etc, it'd be no problem for people to queue up in whatevergear. Instead, some are dead easy, a handful are moderately difficult, and a handful are tougher than most operations (lost island, blood hunt, last boss of rishi.) If they were all similar difficulty, bad/new players would get the hint and just do tacticals if they couldn't hack it in HMs. But since some HMs are basically no more difficult than tacticals, these folks keep jumping into the queue.

Does your sunday raid need people? I have a commando I'd love to find a slot for.

watching the dialogue vs. spacing through it is the difference of maybe a minute or two in FPs that have a lot of dialogue (black talon/esseles, basically.) It's nowhere near worth the level of whining that goes on about it.

well If you are the ML, obviously you know whether or not you will behave appropriately. That's not really a help to the rest of the raid, though. if another pub tries to take gear they're not entitled to roll on, in need/greed I can at least roll against them. If the ML takes stuff they're not entitled to I have no recourse.

while that could happen, the odds are quite low, especially since lots of people will (foolishly imo) hold out for a mainhand (or other final boss loot.) The same thing is possible with a ML anyway; the RL could just take all the loot from the first boss and vanish in a puff of smoke. It's not a perfect system, but in a pub no system is perfect / invulnerable to jerks. Sticking with need/greed minimizes risk (since everyone gets a chance to roll) and makes fault clear if somebody does behave like a jerk.

I'm not sure everybody realizes how many models are available as green craftables for <1k credits I haven't verified this entirely of course, but I'm pretty confident that any model that was on a planetary vendor before is a craftable item now available dirt cheap. (might take little GTN searching though.) A lot of models that weren't moddable before are now available appearance options too.

the best way (in pubs) is just to leave it to need/greed rolls, and if somebody needs on a bit they're not supposed to then you kick'em. It's unfortunate that people can be ninjas but at least this way, everybody has a shot. Was in an HM EV last time it was the target and had a wonderful individual 'save all the loot until the end' and then walk off with all the 224 bits. Found him on the fleet the other day, still wearing all the gear. Learned the hard way that customer support won't do anything about it (the guy even paid for a namechange, but you can't hide from the friends list.) that said, imo people should be limited to winning one 220 piece and one 224 piece; that minimizes the chance of folks bailing early, since they'll still have a shot at winning an additional upgrade.

it's good that people have a chance at getting some better gear from HMs; it'll keep people interested in running them and they're much more accessible than NMs. It's good for the scene as a whole if people people are raiding, in pubs and in org groups. It's not good if people plateau or feel like story modes are all they can do because they can't get good enough gear to do higher level stuff. if we're being honest the difference between 216/220/224 isn't large enough to really be worth caring about. If the carrot of getting the top gear from HMs keeps people around or makes them more likely to form org groups, that's well worth a week of easy HM EV every couple months or however long the rotation is.

would love to heal for you, but that saturday timeslot would be kinda hard for me to make. Interested in starting a bit later, or only running sunday?

which day(s) of the week would this team be raiding?

there are some people out there who enjoy getting mad about things and just obviously look for any excuse to do so; those people (ex: the 'elitist' in the OP) can safely be ignored that being said, most of these issues arise due to lack of communication; I couldn't tell you how many times I've been in a group, had everyone say they knew what was up and click ready, only to wipe due to obvious lack of knowledge. Nothing in this game is complicated enough that it can't be explained in a couple lines of text; if you don't know how a fight works, just say so and spare everybody the grief. I was in a pub SM TFB the other day where one tank obviously didn't know what was going on. The first boss was easy since the adds don't really need to be tanked anyway, and we were able to kinda fumble through the second boss by battle res-ing the competent tank after he died with like 30 debuff stacks. So on the way to operator we were trying to confirm with this guy that he knew what to do, or even get him to respond in chat. He was tanking the trash (well, sort of) but just not responding, despite chat requests, emotes, etc. Finally we concluded that we'd just have to replace him, and as someone was leaving to spam fleet general for a replacement the guy just dropped the group. He'd apparently been reading the whole time, but saying 'hey guys can you explain the fights' was a bridge too far. Being new is fine; not knowing something is fine. Being actively ignorant is not fine. ed: I mean, I join pug HM groups sometimes, and if I haven't already cleared on HM (and so don't have the achievement) I'll just say hey, I'll heal but I've only done 2/5 (or whatever) on HM. Almost always the group winds up deciding to invite me, and 10 seconds of explanation beforehand is enough to prevent obvious wipes. You have to be real determined to be incompetent to screw up story modes.

My assumption is that it's intentional, and they just want to give everybody access to a 208 mainhand to start out with.

On Balmorra, after being warned about the dangers of colichoids, the inquisitor can respond 'Maybe I'm a colichoid', and the imp giving you the mission is just like '...what.' It's so delightfully crazy. Any time imps fake a pub accent it's the best: 'Nameless, faceless... possibly lifeless grunts' (jaessa you the real mvp)

Zakuul isn't 'worse' than the sith empire; it's almost as if they were run by the same dude or something They're the current 'villains' because Arcann invaded the empire/republic and because the whole thing appears to be some kind of murky plot by valkorian to accomplish some unknown goal. For all we know atm he might have three or four more empires floating around out there.