I've since capped out, so I can't go back and test it again with the same circumstances, but I didn't get the feeling that many of my attacks were missing at the time. I didn't pay any attention to the boss's level either, but wouldn't be at all surprised to find it was also 68 due to dynamic scaling. Even if it wasn't, a two-level difference wouldn't be enough, I'd think, to make a significant difference to DPS due to missed attacks. Also, if the level difference was enough to impact my DPS, wouldn't it also significantly boost the damage I took (e.g. the boss would have a higher than normal hit and crit chance against me)? This was in no way evident: as I'd said, with my companion on healing mode and my character backed into a corner, I could safely AFK without risking death. The incoming damage was entirely healable. To be clear: my toon's miserable DPS appears to have been entirely due to the boss's 90% damage reduction thanks to its stacking buff. As for my level: you get about 900k XP for finishing a chapter, even without XP boosts. I leveled 65-68 (and then on to 70) purely by doing chapters, nothing else. I'd say it's impossible to get to that fight without being at least 68, and given boosts and a bit of effort, I'd suspect that you could hit 70 by that point without leaving the chapters.

I hope you're wrong, I fear you're right. Making the fight last ten times as long while still being trivial is hardly intelligent encounter design.

You're still missing my point, I think. I'm not saying that the fight is impossible, just that I can't work out the mechanic for removing the stacking armor buff, and as a result the fight takes much, much longer than it should. When I completed it, it took me around 25 minutes and I destroyed the power cells at least 3 times, maybe 4. I've seen a in which a marauder takes: around 1m45 to kill the boss 22s to remove 5 stacks of the buff and do about 25% damage takes another 30% of the boss's health off before the first set of power cells appear appears to take the next 5 stacks of armour off of the boss in a single attack (at 34:54) kills the power cells a second time takes 3 stacks off with his next attack (at 35:24) removes the remaining 2 stacks by 35:34 Going by the boss's health pool (121,920 HP), that's on Story mode, not Veteran, but my best guess is that the stacks drop off every time the boss's health drops by 5%, rather than being triggered by some particular action (e.g. an interrupt, stun, etc.). If this is correct, then it explains why it takes so damned long for a tank character with a healer companion to get anywhere. I've not done the fight in Story mode or in DPS spec yet.

There are two phases: in the first he has the stacking armour buff, which is what I assume makes him immune to 90% of my DPS; in the second he's totally immune until you destroy the power cells. My problem is with phase 1, not phase 2. I didn't think BW would be able to produce a worse fight than the solo-mode Revan fight. I was wrong. At least it's not just me who can't see how to speed it up. Does anyone know how to remove the armour stacks?

I'm a 68 Guardian tank, gear level about 216, with a L21 healer companion, in Veteran mode. I can see that Aries has a stack of 5 armour, which has to be removed in order to get him to transition to his invulnerable phase where you have to destroy the power cells. I can't tell what causes the stacks of armour to drop off: it doesn't seem to be in response to anything I'm doing, unless it's down to the total amount of damage done to the boss, in which case I'm screwed, given that I appear to be doing less than 10% of what my abilities say I should be doing (like about 250-500 per special ability, instead of 5000-6000), and it's taking forever to grind him down. I've tried interrupting all of his channelled abilities, letting some/all of them hit me, avoiding some/all of them, dropping his AoE on him/parts of the environment, letting him channel to completion, everything I can think of. I've seen a vid on YouTube where a DPS toon got him down to about 40% before the first invulnerability stage, so I'm pretty sure the armour stacks aren't linked directly to DPS, but even so I don't understand how he managed to get the armor stacks to disappear so quickly. I have found that I can back myself into a corner so that his knockback doesn't throw me anywhere: he's then too close to use his lasers on me, so with the companion on heals and me tanking, I've even tried just waiting the fight out AFK while the companion occasionally hits him. I think the fight will last about 45 minutes that way. Best guess is that it'll take at least 30 doing it "properly" unless I can get his damned armour stacks down. Please help.

My view on all this: I've got 10 toons, 8 currently at 65 and chapter 9, two that I was intending to play to chapter 9 (and inadvertently to 65). That's one of each advanced class, plus a couple more for various reasons. I had no intention to level any more toons (I don't think there's enough replayability in the class stories to justify it, nor do I do enough with the ones I've got to need a second Trooper, third Knight or third Inquisitor), regardless of whatever new content arrives, I was just going to focus on at most two of those toons, leaving the others as crafting/mission alts (needless to say they all have 550 crew skills, some of which have been reset over time). Now this new content with its "increasingly more epic rewards" would require me to roll 8 more toons, spend hours levelling them through content I had no intention to repeat, spend hours and thousands or millions of credits levelling crafting skills I don't need, get at least one of those toons to Valor 5 doing PVP which I hate (and I really objected to its inclusion in picking up M1-4X), max out light and dark alignment at least once each (probably through grinding crew skills so that it doesn't take forever or a billion Esseles runs), do all of the hard mode flashpoints and who knows what else. For all of that effort, I'll get a set of armour with XP boosting, which I will never need since I still have no intention of levelling another toon, a bunch of crates which will inevitably be mostly filled with vendor trash, another companion which, if I really wanted to use, I'd then have to grind influence on, and some other cosmetic rewards, some of which will be (may be?) lost when I delete those toons that I only created for the sake of this event. No. Purely and simply, as this event stands, I will take no part in it at all. I will not put all that time and effort into tedious grinding of old content on disposable toons. If there's no new content and/or no way to do this event on my existing toons (and no, I'm not going to reroll any of them just for the sake of this), then I will not take any part and I will, pretty much certainly, unsub until there is new content. Swing and a miss, Bioware. 5/10 for effort, 1/10 for achievement.

I don't think it's about restricting access to this gear or about restricting access to legacy gear. Let's face it, once they separated the way characters look from the gear that they are wearing, they made it pointless to get more than one set of legacy gear unless you happen to like the visuals of another set (or want an off-spec set, or a PVP set, or whatever). Most people playing this game have probably got at least one set of legacy gear appearing every time they create a new toon: if not, then it's not exactly hard to get one. If the devs thought it was game-breaking to allow the swapping of mods between alts, then they wouldn't have put legacy gear in the game. Since they have, and since they've put so much of it in, then clearly it's pointless to restrict access to any more of it, unless it's some unique skin that they want to keep rare. For the start-at-60 gear: had there not been server-side issues with all the creating and deleting of toons, I doubt they'd have made this change at all. The "solution" seems to me to be just lazy: some of the gear that's now available is somewhat similar to what's been removed, but not identical, so it looks very much like they just couldn't be bothered to copy and paste the SA60 gear into the requisite database table. Making some of the gear craftable is better, but since no-one seems to be able to find the schems, and BW don't seem to be willing to tell us, then how is that a solution at all? Making some sets only accessible via alliance crate RNG would be an insane choice in my opinion - at least, it would if they'd actually done that deliberately instead of just saying "hey, we've got some stuff that looks almost like it already. Let's just point it out and then we can go for an early lunch". Seriously, BW: you need to put exact copies of this gear somewhere that people can find and allow them to get the pieces that they need instead of gambling for it. Has anyone in the dev team worked out the probability of picking one particular piece of gear out of a crate and the likely number of crates you'd need to open to complete a particular set? Five different sets from the crates, eight classes, seven items per set: 280 different items that can drop. Do you really think that it's fair to make people fight against a 1-in-280 chance of dropping that last item they're after? How much time do you really want to make people spend grinding crates in order to get something that's purely cosmetic and that you explicitly told people they'd be able to get with a minimum of effort by rolling and deleting a toon? It's about time BW admitted that they'd made another error with this gear and just put it on a vendor or something.

I'd say he's mistaken about what an Alliance crate is. As far as I can tell, none of this stuff is available from cartel market crates. I'm still waiting for someone in the know to tell us exactly where we find the schematics, though.

And yet still we don't know: where are these schematics from?

"Less frustrating" is such a qualitative value for me. Maybe takes it down from a 9 ("I'd rather stab myself in the eye with a rusty fork" to "maybe I'll clean the fork first". Anyway, back on topic: how/where/from whom do I get these schematics?

Of the 220+ crates I've opened, I've found two pieces of Remnant Underworld Knight gear (yes, I'm that fussy that I've kept track...). That said, I've completed an Arkanian Inquisitor set, I've got four more pieces in stock and I think I've vendored a few too. So I guess what we can take from BW's "they're available in game" is "you can get them, but you'd better get grinding and don't hold your breath". Nice. Edit: Actually, it looks like the Underworld Knight set is hood-up, while the set the knight is wearing in all of BW's trailers is hood-down, so it's not an exact match, I think. Am I wrong? Edit 2: Yep, confirmed that the SA60 gear is hood-down. Also, the SA60 Inquisitor gear has extra embellishments (e.g. spiky shoulder pads) that the Remnant Arkanian gear from the supply crates does not. I'm wondering how many of the other sets differ from what's available to us now.

The solo mode of that fight was a joke. I tested it once, taking an undergeared healer toon in there and doing almost nothing, followed by a decently geared DPS toon and hitting him as hard as possible: first fight took about 8 minutes, IIRC, second fight was only about a minute shorter. Thanks to the "spend 60% of the fight stunned or unable to damage Revan while he's immune" mechanic, you were frankly better off AFKing for the duration 'cos you couldn't really influence the fight and you'd rarely even die. Terrible fight. Don't know about the group version, never actually tried it. I can only assume it was less frustrating by virtue of spreading the stuns around between players.

Not personally, but others have been asking the same sorts of questions and I'm watching the thread for responses.

Been wondering the same thing myself. It would be nice if someone could tell us exactly where to get the schems and what they're called. I looked on my 550 synth and she certainly can't make anything that looks like the Consular gear, having learned everything offered by the trainer. Nor can I see any example schematics on the GTN, so I'm guessing they're not dropping from lockboxes or world mobs either.

Musco did. According to that list, the Consular set should be craftable by (I assume) synthweavers. Hmm, wasn't aware that you could RE any comms gear for shell schematics. I thought it was just for modifications. Must be some way, or Musco has been misinformed. If that's the amount of hassle it'll take, then I won't bother. I'm not that much of a completist. However, it would be nice to have some categorical confirmation of the source of the schems. I assume that the mix of craftable and "hope I get the 7 pieces I want without having to grind out 700 alliance crates to get them" is because the visuals were always available from somewhere, even before the sets were chosen for the start at 60 gear. If they were added after the 60s were pulled, then why not just make them all available in the same way? Alliance crates are a painful way to get a specific set. By my reckoning I've opened around 220-230 crates so far and I've completed a grand total of four sets of remnant gear. If the 60 gear has been added to this pool, rather than simply existing within it already, then that's just going to make it even more ridiculously grindy to get any one set out of crates.