Skadge, of course... Seriously, I'm not sure how much "The Republic won't like it" matters, I assume that member planets choose Senators as they like, and it's just too bad if "The Republic" doesn't like it. Obviously it would make diplomacy that much harder. For the most "What the heck, but still not necessarily unreasonable" option, I'd go for Sana-Rae. Imagine the Galactic Hero, leader of a new Republic world, coming up to the podium with a Sith as their right-hand woman, and announcing a Voss as their Senator.

Turret mission is a lot worse, but it is possible. It's gone from just pressing the "1" key until completed to something that really requires use of missiles and shields at the right times. Does need some tuning, but it was probably way too simple previously. The other problem I had was with the H2+ Shiny New Toy. I used to be able to solo this, and was still able to do so up until the walker. "Shock and Awe" is a 100% kill if you don't move out of the red, I used to get around this with companions by using a ranged companion and not moving near them, so they'd stay put. Today, they would randomly decide to teleport to me next to the walker, even though I was well in range of their heals, so I don't know if this is something that was put in to try and fix some of the companion problems in late 5.0 or what. (maybe 20-25m away plus any sort of server lag means an instant jump?) But in this case, this is an H2, meaning at worst I should be able to duo with companions, and companions plus a death circle means I need to be able to reliably keep companions at a known location.

And did you miss my direct response where my first point is that the devs themselves have gotten confused over the years (as it's almost certainly not the same devs now...) Tell me this, if H4s have always been 2+2, what influence level do I need on my companion to press the right buttons on the H4 Macrobinocular quest? (and I believe the original Section X H4 was the same way, before changes) There isn't, of course, which means that those H4s cannot be 2+2s. It cannot get any clearer than that. And where does this leave H2s? Are you claiming H2s have really always been meant to be 1+1s? But that makes no sense, because nothing else is done like that. Other than starter planets, you're always assumed to have a companion out for solo content--some random guy gives you a quest on Tatooine to kill 10 Tusken Raiders, it's not a "Quest 2" it's just a quest, why would a solo heroic suddenly start counting companions? As I recall, Esseles was originally listed as a "Group 2" and hopefully we can all agree that this was not something intended to be soloed at launch--so "Group 2" means two players, but "Heroic 2" means one player? It seems to me that your best-case scenario is that Heroic missions suddenly take on a completely different numbering system from the rest of the game, where "2" means solo, and 4 sometimes means 2 players, or sometimes 4 players, but you don't know which one it is unless you play through it or have read spoilers beforehand. My argument is that H2/H4 has been confusing terminology for years now, we've finally gotten rid of it other than a couple historical artifacts, and we should not go back to the bad old days where everyone is having the same argument we're having now. This is a dev team that changed the name "Tactical" to "Veteran" because they thought "Tactical" was too confusing for players, yet they're OK with H4s that sometimes mean 2+2, sometimes require 4?

I guess I'm not understanding the significant difference between the "feels" of a H4 and instance if it's done correctly. My original suggestion was to set it up like the CZ-198 stuff. Is there really that much of a different "feel" between running into the purple instance wall there and the green instance wall of a Heroic area? I guess there's an additional loading screen in the former case, but I just can't see that being much more of a difference. And as I understood the later Dev post, there's not actually any gain in the armor tokens for doing the H4, you hit your target just as well by doing the solo heroics. And while there might be some edge cases where full guild groups can clear the H4 faster than a solo mission, I suspect for most of us, solo is probably going to be faster than getting a group together, even if it's only a couple minutes of standing around getting organized. Maybe it give a better rep token, maybe it's slightly better CXP, but I just can't see that being a big factor for any length of time.

Heroics were originally designated as multiplayer content. Within that class, there were H2s and H4s. If Heroics are multiplayer and H2s exist, then clearly that means H2s are for 2+2 groups, as nobody is going to leave their companion behind. So if an H2 is 2+2, then you're claiming a H4 is also 2+2? That makes no sense. Now, if you, on your first character, was playing a Jedi Knight, had Kira as a companion, decked out in whatever green quest rewards you had gotten, grouped up with another Knight/Kira combo, and managed to clear H4 content without problems, congrats, you're certainly a better player than I was, but I don't think that's what it was balanced for.

No, H4s were balanced for 4 players. Anyone doing them 2+2 was like someone doing flashpoints now--possible in the right situations, but not how they were designed. But thanks for providing further evidence that "Heroic" designations have been confusing terminology that nobody has ever fully been able to agree upon. LFG messages are not in any way encouraging chat. If I may be allowed a Monty Python reference, they "encourage" chat in much the same way that mindless contradiction is an "argument." If you yourself are not looking for a group, there really is no meaningful distinction between an empty chat and a chat of nothing but LFG messages. As for the idea of H4s being a "bridge" of some type between solo and flashpoints, we already have that, they are called Uprisings. Uprisings already have a group finder framework and give reasons for people to do that content who may not need those specific planetary rewards. Now, arguably, Uprisings aren't the most successful things Bioware has done, but if so, what, exactly, is this H4 doing that would make it more successful than Uprisings, and why does it need to be done in a H4 format? H4s failed because nobody wanted to bother doing them after a short-term flurry of people who have to progress through everything ASAP. So far, I have not seen any actual solutions to that problem listed. If you remove a mechanic because it wasn't working well, you shouldn't add that mechanic back in until there is an actual fix for it.

This seems a bad idea, for a couple of different reasons. First, the concept of "Heroics" has a long history of misinterpretation, one which seems to still be in the above. H4s were never 2 + 2 companions, H2s were 2+2, H4s were a full 4-man trinity group, no companions (at least at level with average skill and gear). Then, when planetary Heroics were all modified with 4.0, there was still confusion because Star Fortresses were way out of whack, as I recall, even Eric was confused, finally coming back and saying something along the lines of Star Fortresses were just more Heroic than normal Heroics (which to me suggests that devs got their wires crossed somewhere). Now we finally got to a place where, for the most part, Heroics are pretty normalized one way or another, and you want to go back and re-confuse things? Because clearly people are very confused. If you change nothing else, please change the terminology to something other than "Heroic," because we've finally reached a point where everyone left knows that Heroic means "harder than normal single player content." Secondly, what's the end plan for something like this? Because it's not just--or even primarily--the planetary Heroic changes that doomed all of the other daily H4s out there. Daily area H4s fail because of the lifecycle of daily areas--you start out with tons of people all running the new content. Then a month or two later, people max out on rep or don't need the rewards, so there's no reason to run the H4 anymore, and the people that still need it start to get more and more frustrated by the annoyance of having to get a group together. Then eventually either you need to redesign it to be soloable anyway (most of the old daily H4s), or you just ignore it and the content ends up mostly wasted (macrobinoculars/seeker droid). What, exactly, are you actually gaining by making this an H4? It seems like there's already a decent template for group content attached to a daily area in the way you did CZ-198 by attaching flashpoints to it--and since then you've added Uprisings as a way to do content that's maybe 4-player, doable as 2+2, maybe solo if you're good and/or geared. Those options give you group finders and reasons for people to join in even when they don't need that one specific mission. H4s end up with lonely people spamming "LFG" messages on instances with 5 people in them.

Since this thread was bumped recently, I finally got around to completing it (only took what, 4 years?). Sithspawn was the major roadblock for me when soloing as a Combat Sent, as it meant I needed a healer companion, and my stunbreaker is on a long cooldown. Note that the method listed above of just not killing the tentacles does not work at this time, he comes down regardless of if you've cleared them all or not, that may have changed since the earlier post was made. However, what I did find is that if you leave the room when the tentacles are there and the Sithspawn is not, the fight will not reset, so you can hang out and wait for your cooldowns to all finish (if you leave the room with the Sithspawn there, everything will reset, however). Put companion on passive as you leave so they follow, and then back to normal as you go back. This does cause some odd things--when you jump back in, the Sithspawn will often jump down to a random point in the room not targeting anyone, and then jump right back up, and your companion will often hang out in the doorway of the room. Not sure if it's because the companion was in the door or if I got lucky, but it consistently targeted me for coming down when the companion was in the door, which made getting him to barrels easier (as getting a companion to stand on a barrel is very difficult). The Sithspawn still does sometimes heal twice in a given cycle, and I couldn't stop the second one, but it ultimately wasn't able to out-heal the DPS I was able to do the rest of the time.

Woo Hoo! It's taken a year and a half of running the Nar Shadda Star Fortress to get Verona Deez up to 31 influence at 325 per Star Fortress Bonus mission, I might actually get her to 50 now before I die of old age!

I haven't run a lower rank mission lately, did they remove it from those? I know that additional tiers added after launch didn't have the flavor text, if the lower tiers are gone now too, my assumption is that it was just a matter of normalization. Easier to make everything uniform to try and prevent some strange bug/behavior if they make a future change and the back-end coding is slightly different for different tiers.

There are two problems with that proposal (three if you count the fact that this isn't the Suggestions forum ) 1) Most of the items from the event are available via some other method--you can get the broken down speeder now, you can get bowcasters, and I'm not sure offhand about the Tusken set, but if not, there are several similar Tusken sets out there. 2) The event itself was pretty terrible, with all of the bad things about open world events present. Yes, shooting things from a turret for a minute was fun. What was not fun was that only one person got to be on the turret at a time, so everyone else had to wait, standing in an orderly line, and getting upset when some jerk ran forward and spam-clicked to jump in first. And I seem to recall the DK portion having a laser/mirror puzzle where anyone could click on the mirrors to change orientation, leading to much trolling and frustration (I got lucky and found an instance with only 9 people in it, so I was able to get it done by myself while everyone else was screaming at each other in chat). So the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia may tell you that you want this, but what you really probably want is it to be completely reworked with better-done missions and new rewards, at which point what you're wanting is a completely new event.

It looks like the current problem is that in the last patch they changed something on how self-destructing mobs work--I was able to kill one of the probes without it going into self-destruct mode and got the quest item/loot/CXP. But that's very difficult to do on even the normal elite ones (having to take out more than 10% health in one shot), pretty much impossible for the champion rare ones. Presumably this is an unintended consequence of trying to prevent some exploitable situation somewhere else in the game. They may just need to take out the self-destruct sequence entirely, which would not make me sad as it wasn't exactly a threat, just something that made me wait a few seconds longer to get the loot.

Do the math. It takes a influence 50 companion 7.5 minutes to run a bountiful/rich mission. For slicing, there are 2 rich and 2 bountiful missions, rich gives 3 signal disruptors on a crit, bountiful gives 2. Crit rate for a 50 influence compation is 40% (15% base + 25% bonus). So on average you can get 4 signal disruptors every 7.5 minutes, or 32 per hour. If you have 20 characters and want to spend your time flipping between characters, you start hitting 640 per hour. That's extreme, of course, but it's a good example on how fast the numbers start adding up. And while there almost certainly is some automation going on by some players to constantly log in and reset crafting missions (which is why the oft-requested offline app to control missions was always a bad idea...), simply having one guy sitting on fleet waiting for warzones to pop and getting his 32/hour is going to add up quickly.

Heroics aren't weekly currently, I've run Coruscant pretty much every day since I hit 70 and started the CXP grind. And credits may not be an issue to you, but I suspect they are one of the core reasons for the current situation. 4.0 caused massive inflation, I believe they're trying to control it both by reducing the incoming supply (nerfing grouped heroics, probably why we don't have grade 10 slicing lockbox missions) and by increasing money sinks. Grade 10 crew skill missions are, what, 4750 credits each to run? So if someone is running 42 of them every 7-8 minutes, that's almost 200K being yanked out of the economy every 8 minutes by one person. Enough people over enough time, and that's a lot of money vanishing.

From purely grinding mobs? I'm not sure about that. We've seen far too many problems relating to trash mob grinding recently. However, back in the day, I used to be able to get companion influence up by running the old Belsavis dailies since they all had conversations. As a modern version, I see no problem with gaining some influence via running planetary heroics and such. Also, note that there is something you can do now that is very similar--in the Star Fortress instances, there will always be a bonus mission of some sort. When you complete it, the reward is 325 influence for the companion tied to the Star Fortress you're doing (so the Sith apprentice gets it if you're doing the Nar Shadda SF, for example) and whichever companion you have out gets 650 influence. So if you're really wanting to grind it as an option, you should be able to run it to that bonus, exit, reset, and start again.