It looks like everybody got something new in the customization department except for cathars. The dreadlock haircuts would have fitted the species perfectly, but there is absolutely nothing.

I'll tell you another story of woe and gnashing of teeth. I farmed HM False Emperor for the consular chest for a month. 75% of the time it was the smuggler chest that dropped whether we had a smuggler with us or not. Finally I had enough commendations to just buy the columi chest because whenever it dropped in operations it went to the other consulars or even a consular that already had it! So I bought the chest and guess what... the consular chest token dropped from Malgus on the very next run. It's a bloody disgrace and a slap to the face!

This issue of crippled melee tanks is further exacerbated when you run the same flashpoint with a vanguard tank. Seriously, vanguards make certain boss fights absolutely trivial. The second boss of Maelstrom Prison is a good example here. He has a move where he applies a DoT on anyone in melee, this dot hits pretty hard so it has to be cleansed. Now, with a team of a melee tank and a melee dps this actually means that I have to both heal the tank from high damage and also cleanse and heal anyone else that might get the hard-hitting DoT. But a vanguard can just stand 5 metres away from the boss and pew pew without fear of getting the DoT. Another example? Krel Thak in Battle of Ilum, a major pain for melee tanks because if you're not careful, you will pwn yourself against his shield and probe combo. Vanguards? Again, stand at range and pew pew. I play a healer, with competent guildies. But while our vanguard tank makes all fights a major faceroll, when I run with our guardian tank I sometimes want to tear my hair out.

There are only two remotely challenging bosses in all hardmodes: that's the bonus boss in Kaon Under Siege because the fight can be difficult to heal, as the adds hit quite hard, and Krel Thak in Battle of Ilum, and that's only if you have a melee tank. Most other bosses are just a faceroll.

It's been happening to me since the very beginning. I either end up in a completely black space, dead in a completely black space, on a flickering grey-and-white chessboard, or dead on a flickering grey-and-white chessboard. This is happening to me each time I DC in a flashpoint.

Yes, Battyone, thank you. On the following day I noticed that grouping up for the aoe phase on Ironfist kept wiping us and I had no way of outhealing the damage (I don't know why it had worked before). Having people spread around really makes healing the bombing much easier.

Yesterday was the day when my healer, grouped with some friends, completed hardmode Esseles for the first time. It was a grueling experience, to say the least, mostly because we wiped around 25 times (half of which was on Vokk due to bad RNG and someone getting slapped with thrown lightsaber twice or not reacting quickly enough to lightning). However, here are my observations for the boss fights, I hope they help some people: 1) The first boss is all about positioning. We stayed at the very beginning of the area on the right, behind a protrusion of the wall. My healing aggro ensured that adds would come our way and dps quickly got rid of them. Since the boss hits pretty hard it's preferable that dps don't get too much damage on themselves. It's very difficult to keep the tank up and some overzealous dps on top of him. 2) Mandalorian boss - Ironfist. This fight is all about the healer and keeping everyone up. I think this fight was specifically designed to stress healers with all the aoe damage. However, we quickly noticed that running like headless chickens during the aoe stage didn't help and only made healing harder. So we bunched up during that part so I could heal with my aoe. Also, it's advisable that everyone stack up near the boss to prevent him from jumping around and spreading unnecessary damage on distant party members. He still sometimes turns and oneshots a party member for no reason but I'm hearing you can interrupt his attacks. 3) Robot bosses in the engine room - very easy, nothing special to do here. Just run away from the bonus boss as usual when he gets the aoe around him. 4) Vokk. Very hard if you're unlucky and someone gets their face melted with the lightsaber throw twice in a row or your client has some delay in rendering the aoe. Even if I moved immediately when the aoe spawned on me and I was 10 meters away when the lightning hit I would still get damaged. Those two issues kept wiping us all the time here. We finally went around the lightning issue by having me be constantly on the move and only stop to heal when the lightning appeared somewhere. This boss does little damage to the tank and his only move to look out for is the force choke which can be dispelled. The problem comes from the lightsaber throw which pretty much kills on the spot if someone gets it twice in a row. There is no time to heal the first damage before the second hit comes so there is a bit of luck involved in this fight. It would certainly help if people used their medpacks after getting hit by the lightsaber, just in case they are about to be hit again. Still, even though we managed to complete the flashpoint, all bosses enraged on us so dps needs to be really tight with their buttons and dish out their best from the very beginning.

That's pretty much my rotation: Force Armour, HoT, Deliverance, Healing Trance, HoT. But I'm wondering whether the bubble has any viability at all in hardmodes, especially on bosses that hit so hard that the bubble can't even absorb a single hit. Wouldn't the gcd be used better on just casting heals.

Or just put the popup window into the "Pending" area so we can open it at our leisure?

I ended up with gear containing alacrity mods because that's what these items had in them when they dropped and I never bothered to switch them out for something else. That's why I made this thread: to get some input about what stats I should be focusing on. I started doing the Ilum/Belsavis dailies and already replaced some of the mods with ones obtained from commendations. I realised that alacrity isn't doing much for me because it barely shaves off 0.1 second from the 1.5 second casts so I'll be trying to switch it out for power/crit/surge as soon as I can.

Where do I check the gear rating? I don't remember there being a stat like this on item tooltips.

So, is there a difficulty ranking of hard modes somewhere?

Yesterday I set foot in hard mode Esseles for the first time and my party (vanguard and two shadows, me healing as sage) got completely destroyed by the first boss. There was too much party damage from the endless adds for me to keep everyone up. I couldn't even make use of procced force regen because each gcd had to be dedicated to casting a heal. So I'm guessing it must have been my gear that was lacking but it's blue lvl 50 stuff with most other items being orange moddables in the 47-50 range. My Willpower is around 1030. Should I rework the mods in my gear and perhaps remove alacrity in favour of power/force power? Or was the party composition at fault here? Any input would be welcome.

I found levelling to be generally pretty easy and up to mid 30s I could even solo heroic 2-man content. But from Hoth upwards I noticed that my damage wasn't scaling very well and taking down enemies started taking longer. Still, I changed my approach to Sending Qyzen in, using Forcequake on as many mobs as possible and then just mopping up. Getting Nadia helped a little up until Corellia where the downsides of healer spec questing really began to show: again damage doesn't scale well to enemy HP and strongs hit way harder than they used to on Voss. As such, Corellia really dragged on. And after a couple of quests on Ilum I decided to look for a questing partner because it's simply taking too long to down a group of enemies. This one quest that had Sith Apprentices (strong) constantly CC my companion really was the last straw.

I can relate to this problem. I'm on EU Shaltin Tunnels and it's all but impossible to get groups for heroic quests. At peak times there are 20 people on Balmorra. I still have 7 or 8 4man quests to do there. As far as flashpoints are concerned, there seems to be a DPS shortage on the server, of all things. I play a healer, I made several tank friends but it took us 4 days to get a team together for Colicoid War Games. People in the correct level range just seem not to be interested in running flashpoints at all! With my experiences from WoW and Rift I expected dps to jump at the chance of being invited to a group that already had a tank and a healer but no such luck here. Spamming in the Fleet's general chat yields no results. Whispering people gets either no responses or declines.