I enjoy a good challenge, especially in 4 mans, just as much as anyone, and my group was able to clear the place on patch day without getting hung up too long on any of the bosses, but you really have to think "would I want to pug this place? can I really trust to not have to be in here for hours with a few randoms?" As it is right now, although I don't run 4 mans anymore, I wouldn't be comfortable forming a group for Lost Island HM random people from trade channel, specifically because of the 2nd boss. It's off-putting to go into a boss with a group of strangers and know a wipe-fest is imminent. 4 mans need to be accessible and tuned so that any group can go in and not wipe more than a couple times on each boss, and that 2nd boss is tuned to be far more difficult than the rest of the fights, effectively blocking people from even seeing the others. It's bosses like this that make people flat out leave a group, screwing over the other 3 people and you can't have that in a piece of content that people need in order to obtain the gear you should have in order to start Ops. tl;dr, 4 mans should be pug-able, Lost Island HM as is, is a bit too tall of an order for "just throwing a group together" for. I think the 2nd boss should straight up have a mechanic completely removed, and I think the last boss could use nerfs to satchel charge and maybe the effective enrage in the last phase.

"effective enrage" timers are fine and all but when the game is as young as it is now, it's better to not let players find work-arounds and just out-raid composition an encounter like, by bringing an extra tank or a couple extra healers you trivialize the enrage and it means your dps is irrelevant. Hard enrages are fine. If you're meant to complete the encounter in X amount of time, that's just another criteria. It's not your decision which criteria of an encounter you want fulfill or not. They're not lazy, and it's whiny posts from people like you that want everything handed to them on a platter and want the game tailored to your liking even if it means completely ruining it for others that take all the fun out of an mmo. If you're undergeared and too lazy to figure out how you can be doing more damage, that's your problem. Not ours. Go back to farming heroics, start googling your class's spec/rotation, and then come back and do current content. EVERYONE else did.

quite a bit of trolling and lack of understanding of the word "viable" in here. we've been farming hard mode kephess and we've always had multiple melee dps. We've cleared the place with me as PVE Vig and as PVP Focus spec (for last 2 bosses, I always tank the first 2). If guilds are easily clearing content without hitting enrages, with melee in their group, we are therefore, completely "viable".

if you spam click the brez button you're gonna port out because you have the "ACCEPT REZ IN 5..4.3.2.1." button and the "RETURN TO MEDCENTER" buttons, and when the timer hits 0, for a second, only the "RETURN TO MEDCENTER " button is in the middle of the rez window, before the "ACCEPT REZ" button reappears, so if you're spam clicking the countdown button, you wind up clicking the graveyard rez. Just need to not spam click, and wait up the actual Accept Rez button appears. I'm sure they'll fix this in the future.

known bug, but still survivable with raid wide use of consumables and cooldowns. we were able to kill him through this on tuesday on our 2nd go, wiping the first time from not anticipating everyone taking ticks despite being all the way at a wall. As a guardian, I popped Enure, one of those front loaded + hot medpacks, and guardian leapt at a sage that had sprinted out, which didn't stop my ticks, but helped reduce theirs. raid survived at like 10-15%, healers just focused on getting the tank back up and occasionally threw an aoe heal down on the ranged group. As a melee I pretty stayed at low hp the remainder of the fight, which is ok because theres no more raid damage.

as soon as you can't hit the minelayer anymore, there'll be one streaking from left to right across your screen in distance by itself (i think 2 normal fighters spawn in the area too), you need to spam missiles at it asap and follow it, and you should kill it as it runs off the right side of your screen. when it does that another one will spawn from the right and fly to about mid-way in your screen and then head towards you. you'll need to spam missiles on it as soon it spawns if you want to kill that one too. and as soon as that one runs off your screen, the 1st one makes another pass at you from head on at the top of your screen. and yes you'll need full upgrade (obviously sans the useless photon torpedoes. )

This actually happens more often than it doesn't on Hard Mode. We'd just have the raid move towards the cave to out range them until the near set spawns, and then everyone pops defensive cd's / medpacs and just out heal it.

have the raid stack on the boss right before he does the aoe pull (he does this at 60% after he's done doing whatever atction he's doing, so it might be 60% it might be 59/8/7%), so there's less air travel time and people can start running earlier. also, everyone should be saving their medpacs for this. consulars/inquisitors should speed boost and pull people out of it, jk's / warriors should leap to whoever is speed boosting out and popping their health boost, (if focus specced, save a zealous leap to use on the boss right before the pull so you have a speed boost), and sentinels/marauders should use their raid-wide speed boost. this only occurs once, so everyone should have their cd's and medpacs saved specifically for this moment. there's no more aoe damage for the rest of the fight following this, so just, survive this and healers can focus on the tanks.

we used 2 sage healers

I've tanked kills of the first 2 Denova Bosses on Hard Mode as a Guardian in a mix of Rakata, Columi, a couple pieces of Campaign, and using Vindicator Earpieces and Implants, aka, way less than optimal gear. Healing on me hasn't been an issue at all, my counterpart is a full rakata vanguard tank and he's definitely been harder to heal than I am in this Ops. Post patch; aoe threat is a little better, but I still wind up only hold aggro on a couple of mobs whereas our Vanguard has most of the group under control. Cyclone smash NEEDS to cost less. Force sweep and a couple cleaves eats up our whole focus bar in return for very little threat/damage, and then if I don't have my combat focus up, i gotta trade 1 sundering strike for 1 cleave. It's pretty awful. Strike really should grant 2 focus. It's silly that in my rotation I can come across a period where all my abilities have 3 seconds left on their cd and all I have is strike, and it does little to nothing. If they won't allow it to grant 2 focus, then Sundering Strike's CD should be removed. It doesn't hit for very much and would make 0 difference in PVP balance. Also I don't know if it's just me, but so far this patch, I've yet to proc Riposte during the first minute or so of the first Denova fights. I'm specced and enhanced full avoidance, it's very odd that with how much I avoid and get hit in this time period Riposte never procs. I've found its proc rate to drop pretty significantly post-patch overall, I use it maybe only 5 or 6 times per these 5+ minute fights. I hope this is just a bug and not intended. edit: I'm using 31/8/2 build.

Slicing will net you the easiest gold. You choose between either Augment fetching missions and straight up Credit fetching missions. The credit fetching ones don't always return as many credits as the cost of the mission, but more often than not they will and when you get to the upper levels, you'll crit for 2-5x the cost and you'll get alot of Mission discoveries and schematics to sell on the AH. The best part is not having to constantly make runs to the auction house in order to make money. You can combine this with another crafting / mission combo so you can build gear to see and make steady credits on the side, although without the second complimentary mission prof for the craft, you won't be able to fetch all the required materials for most of the blue-quality and better items, but you'll be able to just buy them with all the money you make from Slicing.