Honestly the penalties to target swaps for Pyro or AP depend so much on the exact encounter, that it's hard to say one is worse than the other universaly. If you look at a fight like Revanite Commanders the targets die so fast and swaps are so frequent, that you can't use retractable blade at all on the adds and therefore miss out on the heat vent every 6 seconds for the majority of the fight (although it's the irrelevant part of it). Pyro on the other hand can continue it's rotation just normal (as much as that's even possible on that fight) and with great positioning (from you and the tanks) can even keep the dots alive through target swaps. If you look at the droid Phase for Brontes, Pyro suddenly can't use scorch or incendary missile effectivly and you would need to flame burst before you can use Railshot when you might still be > 12m away (as other dot classes often don't put there dot's up as well). AP can handle the heat issues by using both heat cooldowns in this rather short Phase and be more effective than Pyro that might have to use suboptimal Abilities like Jet charge or Incendary missile frequently to keep it's dmg rolling. This is one of the few situations where a DPS PT really benefits from Jet charge, even if it's only Pyro. YAY Looking at swapping to the kephess clones both suffer minimal losses, but I would put AP higher, as you can maintain the dot on Brontes easyly with explosive dart when leaving and a Railshot/explosive dart when Kephess jumps and would be immune anyway. Pyro can keep scorch up on Brontes, but has a harder time doing dmg while closing in on Kephess and therefore often has to resort to jet charge to not delay Flamethrower/Flaming fist by more than 1 GCD, which is much more important than delaying Rocket punch a bit. Still both suffer only minimal losses and AP can even keep up with most ranged speccs here.

they nerfed the dps check on cora into the ground (1 min left on rugar enrage, cora + bird down after 3 min) and the dots/mice do way less dmg. don't remember the tank dmg, but I didn't feel very threatened at any point

M&B seems to be the hardest hm boss atm. We pushed him before the 6th laser though, so before the 3rd red zones. Final burn Phasse is tuned quite tight as well. He easyly competes with most nim bosses for difficulty. Sadly Coratani is quite the joke compared to 3.0

Keep in mind that this comes mostly from experience from early access week in half to near full 220 gear (depending on instance), so it might feel diferent now in 224s. Also this is for 8man. But almost all of the fights are absolutely not tuned so you have to execute perfectly with great DPS like you would expect from nim encounters. Asation: 1st Boss: DPS check is quite ok if you have no stealth cheese, but incoming dmg is a bit low 2nd Boss: feels very good all around, enrage is not too much of a concern though, epecially compared to it's initiall incarnation. 3rd Boss: little adds deal no dmg at all making clean transitions unneccessary, DPS check is a bit low during both phases. Rest seems fine (random Boss hit might be a bit high, but I like that you don't auto win when you reached phase 2 anymore) 4th Boss: a complete joke in all aspects. Incoming dmg is like nonexistant aside from the jump, and DPS requirements are balanced as if there was no Buff to dmg dealt (and even then it would likely be on the light side) We had a terrible pull where everything went wrong and around 15% we had like 1 healer and 2 DPS alive. We wiped at 3% ??? 5th Boss: very tight DPS check, feels pretty good all around. tentacles could maybe do a bit more dmg outside of enrage (but not while enraged). DPS check inside is not as hard, but still demanding. S&V: 1st Boss: DPS check feels somewhat ok for a 1st Boss (still could be a bit tougher), incoming dmg is quite low though 2nd Boss: DPS check is non existant, incoming dmg seems a little low 3rd Boss: double his health and we are back to old tuning. only thing that is a bit difficult is the 50% spawn. 4th Boss: feels good overall, but could use a tiny bit of added difficulty at the chief himself, could have used sometighter tuning 5th Boss: DPS requirements felt like a joke, incomingdmg is pretty low. not even close to its former self 6th Boss: incoming dmg is spiky and deadly as always, enrage timer seems ok tuned, but not really that challenging. 7th Boss: very tight DPS check on manifestation, incoming dmg from dragon feels pretty good, but styrak could do way more. still well tuned fight EC: 1st Boss: feels pretty good all around for 1st Boss. Maybe buff red circles a bit 2nd Boss: very tight DPS check, good incoming dmg, good punish for failing. very well tuned 3rd Boss: still a rather easy Boss in both incoming dmg and DPS required considering you have beaten tanks before it, but I like that they fixed the canon cheeses. they could do more dmg though so that tanks actually try to keep aggro on them. 4th Boss: DPS requirements seem very low on everything (maybe excluding the walker). incoming dmg is really low on trandoshans, bomb droids. Kephess still butchers everyone though. could use some more difficulty throughout the encounter untill you engage kephess. DP: 1st Boss: DPS requirements were a bit low, incoming dmg as well after phase 1. but a retuning to make the 1st boss not as hard seems ok. 2nd Boss: very well tuned on all sides 3rd Boss: different portals are tuned stupidly inconsistent. 1st portals: left side you only need 1 DPS to make it and you can't die to anyting, right side has a good DPS check, but affliction is healable with major cds 2nd portals: left side has crazy burst check, right side could use some more DPS/HPS required final Phase could use some more DPS required, as you can almost kill him in 1 go (likely can in full 224s) 4th Boss: felt more like a HM. DPS needed und incoming dmg could use some buffs. was a comlete pushover after caplh and tyrans 5th Boss: incoming dmg during the 1st and 3rd phase felt good, but there is no DPS check in this entire encounter that even resembles something worthy of a nim encounter, let alone a final boss. Tyrans thundering blast could maybe be buffed a little as well. Final Burm phase only tickles as well (we killed the first 2 simultaniously and only then felt some pressure). DF: 1st Boss: easy as always, so no surprise, but could have used some buffs regardless to make it inline with the other 1st Bosses Boss 2-4 were done in 16man and seemed very easy there.

well the answer to power vs endurance depends on your raid and the boss you are attemting. Looking at the nim bosses, there are a lot of bosses that don't really spike too hard, so you can do them with ~70k hp without much of a problem, and a lot of them don't even stress the healers too much. Some of them however have brutal DPS requirements in comparison. Other ones are all about tanks taking huge spikes though. A small example: during the early access week my guild did nim EC tanks. The only time any tank could die (barring some **** ups) is the one tanking the right one at the end of each of the transition phases (and during enrage ofc). endurance has very little value for only this purpose, as every tank can devote a major cd for each of theese occasions without much trouble. The DPS requirements of ~28k raid dps however were so intense for my group in almost full 220 gear that I had to swap out all of my defense mods (as defense is 100% useless on the right side tank) for DPS mods and use DPS stims/adrenals to push another 600-800 DPS. In comparison to that nim Kephess in denova has trivial DPS requirements in all phases (only DPS check is the walker has to die in 4 bombs) and does no dmg up untill the last 2 phases when Kephess joins the party. In that fight you basicly can't have enough mitigation and endurance, as he really likes to anihilate any tank that dares to not have cds rolling for more than a few seconds.

Soa is so horribly undertuned that it stopped being funny anymore. You can 5 man 16m HM Soa with basic gear! He could at least have a meaningful enrage or maybe an enrage on phase 2 added? Compare that to Styrak who requires ~25k Raid DPS to beat the enrage in 8m and you know that tuning is all over the place. Well at least you now have so many different difficulty levels on the HM bosses from EV to Ravagers that you have a training ground for almost all levels of players. The main Problem is though, that there is (and can't exist) no guideline that shows you in what order to progress up the difficulty scale, as that varies a lot even within the same operation. No matter what the intent behind the tuning was, I'm sure BW will have to do a lot of retuning to evenget close to their goals.

From my experience so far 80k seems like a good target for the more spike-oriented bosses like raptus, blaster, underlurker in hm as well. For nim fights: denova Kephess, Bestia, tyrans, Cartel Warlords, TFB, Operator IX transition Phase, Brontes, Styraks Dragon and probably a few I forgot atm all have quite some huge spikes, that sometimes coiincide with medium to heavy raiddamage which might also require attention from your healers. I felt quite in danger on several of theese fights even at 80k hp and sometimes even through a defensive cd, so even above 80k seems very reasonable to me, although bosses are killable with less. This means that the use of b Mods and several(or all) mid-endurance enhancements and random drop ears/implants is the way to go, unless you want to build 2 sets: 1 for spike bosses, 1 for the rest, where you can use token enhancements and token ear/implants. On Juggs endurance augments might be the way to go with token enhancements. not sure about their desired defense vs shield/absorb balance point.

was the same for us. on top of that all 8m nim bosses (or at least 19/26) drop only 2 220 tokens, so 224 gear is very hard to come by atm.

I know, I was refering to bosses we have not pulled yet from the current ones.

we had one of our members craft 1 and use it to gauge its effect. unfortunately we did not think it through enough in the outrage about its existance to perform a good test. He went into the op solo and used some abilities untill he died. but a glance at the verly limited data we gathered sugests about 20-25% increase in HP and dmg. even if it's only 10% it would already be the equivalent of going from full 216 to full 224 gear.

Well some nim dps checks atm are really borderline impossible, if doable at all in almost full optimised 220 gear. And there might be some even tougher ones yet to come which require the use of this item to even consider beating them. However using this item downgrades the bosses to a point, where you can make lots of mistakes and only require good dps instead of near perfect dps, so basicly a hm Boss with a few different mechanics. Sounds kind of stupid to me that you could use this item and clear nim in sm gear easyly. Cost doesn't matter so much, it only limits the amount of nim runs you can do in a given time frame, but does not remove the ability to clear stuff you otherwise could not.

If the wording in dulfys Q&A summary is correct, they want to start development after the expac released, so I think summer next year would be about reasonable to expect.

They obviously don't care about their most loyal veteran pve players anymore who have done all the ops/fps when they were current or at least somewhat relevant content. Before SoR they said they never wanted to have another tier of operations last 13 months (like DP and DF and called that an annomaly) and now with exactly the next tier of operations the same thing happens again already. This rehash of old and very old content is nothing but a slap to the face to players like me. How long am I expected to rerun the same stuff again? By their 11 week content cycles the earliest we can hope for a new ops would be in january and I start to seriously doubt that we would get something by then as they sell this as "New challenges" and likely think that this keepspeople busy for at least the same duration as a new ops would. So the next chance would be in April then right? I might be wrong but I would bet money that there is a strong positive correaltion between money spend in the CM and the amount of months subscibed/playing a lot. So they are likely pissing on the most paying demografic as well. Instead they give us this bandaid where new(or newer) players and players that took longer breaks can exerience the raids they missed at level again. That's cool and all, but giving your most loyal customers nothing at all is just infuriating to me. I have payed since day 1 of early access without a break and I played about every aspect the game has to offer to a reasonable degree: I raid at least a couple of days every week (10/10 hm), played over 2k warzones and over 500 GSF matches, I have played through all class stories, have done countless flashpoints, participated in conquest, decorated my stronghold a bit, played the old railshooter space missions a lot, hunted over 35k Achievement points, etc This blog post however made me question my subscription for the first time in over 3.5 years and I'm not sure what to do yet. It feelslike a throwback to launch for me.

New Operations on a regular schedule are not only important for the ones that cleared everything already. Every group that raids on a constant basis will eventually get bored of doing the same operations over and over again. It doesn't make much of a difference if that means sm, hm or nim. most groups will eventually hit a wall (or clear everything) and from then on it's a steady repeat every week for months upon months untill new stuff gets released. From my experience every person has a limit of how many times you can do the same thing over and over again, especially if there are no meaningful rewards anymore (which will eventually happen because you have gotten everything in your reach). So the question in fact is: how long does the average group keep playing the same thing after hitting their personal wall? by the time that wall is hit, there should be at least an anoucement of when new stuff will be released so they have something to hang on to instead of leaving the game. And I'm pretty sure that 1 year or a minimum of 10 months this time around is in fact way too long for a lot of people. As soon as too many people start leaving the game and their raid groups theese groups often get into big trouble trying to maintain enough people to raid and risk disbanding. Disbanding raidgroups often lead to chain reactions where more people stop playing because they don't want to go through the hassles of finding a new team or their friends left. On top of that the remainders often try to merge with other guilds which as well often leads to a lot of drama. The only way you can extend the lifespan of old content would be to make sure that everybody keeps seeing some progress for mulitple months instead of hitting a brick wall (well that wouldn't help the players that cleared everything already, but they are still few and far between). This would need some targetet nerfs at bosses/mechanics that a lot of people have trouble with combined with some meaningful power creap on the players side. unfortuantely there is not happening much in this direction as monolith is too difficult for a lot of groups and gearing up in swtor is pretty fast, yet the itemlvl increases only marginally improve the players power. There has only been 1 wave of nerfs (besides some 16m tuning fixes) that didn't even touch some of the huge wall bosses (Mater&Blaster, Coratanni in hm)

A good rule of thumb for energy management is not to use any filler Magnetic Blasts (so only use it for PPA procs) once you have 2 stacks for Energy Burst. Obvious exceptions to this rule are of course if your heat dropped below 10 for the GCD in question or if you want to use one of your resorce cooldowns soon. Another reason this would not work would be a ton of close and personal procs that refund a lot of heat from taking AOE damage (most notable example would be Underlurker), in which case you can almost comletely ignore rapid shots for the entire fight.