Oh, I remembered another time, this time with me as the one with egg on my face, so to speak.

This was shortly after the start of the cartel market. I had taken a break from the game for a while, and came back to see if the CM had brought any new life to the game. I qued as healer, and got a HM, forget witch one. The tank had on that covert chest thing, but I was unaware of it's existence, having not picked up any of the packs. Now, it feels like the guy is going down really quickly to me (turns put it was in my head, said tank was geared), and I'm getting increasingly annoyed at what appears to be a tank that can't even put his shirt on. Eventually, I get fed up, and call him out on his shirt. That's when the tank, who seemed to be only mildly amused, linked the invis shirt in chat. suffice it to say I was profusely apologizing for the rest of the fp

Similar thing happened to my RED Twi'lek (an Assassin-Tank): Some where at the darkly lit FP one of the DDs told me, I should get a trouser. I had to answer: I'm wearing one, it's just RED!

Was hard to recognize the trouser, if you didn't check.

I was on Balmorra (NOTE: No cross factions on that planet)

Rarely, I have seen - yes, I think I have seen a member of the other faction, but I'm not sure of that anymore (it's long since I've left that dreaded planet).

So, I don't believe that it is impossible to meet members of the other faction there ...

Rarely, I have seen - yes, I think I have seen a member of the other faction, but I'm not sure of that anymore (it's long since I've left that dreaded planet).

 

So, I don't believe that it is impossible to meet members of the other faction there ...

Like the above poster mentioned, Balmorra and Taris are unique in that they are "phased" for each faction, and swap places in terms of storyline progression.

For Imperials, Balmorra is a pre-20 planet with their main base in Sobrik. Parts of the southwest portion of the planet map are missing, and I believe Bugtown is part of the bonus series. For Republic, the planet is a mid 30s (?) questing zone with Sobrik being a class quest region.

Similarly for Taris, the planet is a pre-20 planet for the Republic with very little Imperial presence. For the Imperials, the planet is a mid 30s questing zone which finishes by destroying what would be the Republic main base.

I'm not entirely sure why they did this, since it creates a bit of a continuity issue with the storyline, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Not really, sounds to me like he was blaming you for his death because you messed up, not him. I'd have left too. Course, I have 0% idiot tolerance most days. I give them one chance, and a comment like he said, that was their chance, they didn't take it. I quit (or vote kick if I think the other players would agree)

Ah for some reason I was feeling very generous and I went through my combat log to get the name of the people in the FP and sent them ingame mail to explain why I did what I did. The 2 DPSes replied saying "don't worry". Didn't get a reply from the tank ...

Got HM Czerka Labs today. Not very social and the melee DPSes couldn't get out of the charged water quick enough for the first boss. Had to put out lots of heals. And then we wiped on the security chief because of lag and the red AOEs. After that the tank said we needed to hurry up as he had to leave for work in 8 minutes. So the group started running ahead without full health and I had to keep up to heal them. Didn't even have enough time to recharge my force in between pulls. I can't believe no one died during this stage.

Looking back, it was actually ... fun. I was on my toes all the time as a healer due to the group rushing in to every mob towards the end. Not something I would want for every PUG but not bad to have every now and then to keep things abit hairy.

Got Hammer Station later today and the tank said "Nice heals" after the first boss. We managed to kill the last boss despite not having a tank for the final quarter of the fight. I think the tank got knocked off the platform as it was an insta-kill for the tank.

I agree with chuixupu, people have been kick for any and everything. I once had someone try to kick me on my infiltration shadow for using double strkie on a weak as the killing move. I did not use it in my rotation, but just hit it at the end because force breach only took him to 2%, when I thought it would kill him.

 

I have seen someone kicked for a bug in HM FE when they used force leap on the bridge where you should not use force leap, but how would someone new to the instance know that? They lost their healer too, because I quit the group when they kicked.

Can you explain the reasoning to kick you out in first example. And can you explain the force leap bug on the bridge ? I don't think that I ever seen that one.

Can you explain the reasoning to kick you out in first example. And can you explain the force leap bug on the bridge ? I don't think that I ever seen that one.

Might have meant Esseles HM. If you Force Leap to the ISS droid you fall through the ramp and have to exit area and come back.

So I tried to run a FP on my 35 Healer merc last night, and got an instant q for Cadiminu.* Get going and see that the other three are all from the same guild so I figure this should be decent, as long as they aren’t a bunch of loot ninjas.* Tank slaps his guard on me and we get going.* Do the first pull and the tank loses agro Repeatedly to the Marauder that he brought with him.* Make it to the second pull and the same thing happens, now I can easily heal them through it but figure why bother, just have him switch the guard to the mara. *I type in chat “I am not one of those healers who requires a guard, switch it to the Mara if you want”.* I immediately get smacked in the face with “you get the guard cause as healer you generate the most threat.”* I probably should of just shut up but, I respond with, “I only generate more threat than anyone else on anything that no one is attacking, and those are just week adds that the dps should be burning”.* The tank responds with “You’re and idiot.* I am in soresu form, which generates agro on everything”.* At this point I realize that this argument is a lost cause so I say, “Look I don’t really care, it’s not a big deal and not worth arguing over.”* They immediately vote kick me for the reason of “Idiot”.* I had a good chuckle explained to him that “I was only trying to be nice, and make his job easier by having him guard the marauder who he couldn’t hold agro over, but hey it’s better that I know you’re a bad tank now, who can’t hold agro over his dps, then halfway through the FP when a boss is face ****** the marauder.”

 

I get out of the FP, slap em all on my ignore list, and then q back up. *I get another instant q on The Foundry, with a level 36 tank 40 sniper and 45 marauder.* The tank slaps his guard on me, and I am just like jesus.* This flashpoint actually has some hard hitting fights, and that marauder is gonna pull and I am bare minimum level so this may be tough to heal. *I quickly type in chat “Would you mind switching your guard to the marauder? *He is nine levels higher than you and will pull agro.”* The tank quickly swaps his guard and the marauder quickly typed in chat “glad to see you’re not one of those dumb *** healers who thinks a guard does anything for them.”* I wanted to explain what had just happened to me, but figured it wasn’t worth it. So we proceed to have like one of the straight up smoothest FP’s I have ever had, you know like tank holding agro, dps killing adds and for the most part no one standing in ****.* The only time anyone died was when the tank stood in the spit from the bonus boss, which he typed out in chat after he died “sorry forgot that, that boss spit at you”.*

Oh damn, I've had a healer drop group because I refused to guard him. Was rather amusing too. Hammer Station heroic mode. Next to nothing was touching him but he kept on demanding guard then upped and left because I ignored his demands.

The real irony is. If the dps killed the weaker mobs first, like they are supposed to. And the tank spreads his threat around instead of tunnel visioning. Healer tps is greatly reduced. Less damage in and fewer mobs up equals less threat generated. Throw in some CCs and interups and you're cooking with gas.

 

Tank-yo, sniper, why are you doing not using cover?

Sniper-What? I'm in cover right now!

Tank-Not you! The other sniper!

Me-You mean me?

Tank-Yes!

Me-er.....I'm an operative, not a sniper.

Tank-oh....my bad

 

everyone had a good chuckle after that.

I had an issue similar to that before with my powertech, in czerka labs on the droid the tank thought I was ranged and should be shooting from the sides complaining at the fact I was standing at the robots legs. Unfortunately the other powertech in the group listened to him meaning I was the only one doing any meaningful dps...

Apart from that a mostly uneventful night, except having the rare fantastic group just now. 3 same-guild (v. good geared tank + jugg dps, newly dinged healer) and me, on my mara this time. Czerka Meltdown HM

 

Off the bat, everyone said their hellos (as you may know, this is an important starter for me )

And then explained that the healer had just hit 55 and they were gearing (23k operative). Everyone was fantastic, polite, fun. They even asked whether we should need or greed on the blue czerka rep drops.

Cleared instance in about 15 mins, bosses went down without a single hitch and very rapidly. (I miss using my mara, and with a great jugg dps things died in seconds)

 

Just all round, the opposite of what this thread asks for But I thought I should mention the great groups as well.

Think you were with us. ^^ (I'm the tank.) Glad to hear you enjoyed the run! And I'm happy to report that the healer in question is on a fast track on becoming one of our best raid healers. We do like to help out newly dinged people and gear them up to get into raiding with us (since most of us are raid junkies, raiding pretty much every day).

So, my own experiences then... I've been lately levelling my baby powertech as a tank. This happened a while ago... Get into Hammer Station and immediately notice our merc healer is not using his healing cylinder (and from his level I know he already should have it). Even though it's clear he's a DPS queued up as a healer, I'm not too worried, since the instance can be healed by a DPS if they bother trying. I do ask him if he has field respec, but he doesn't understand. We go through trash to the first boss and there's virtually no heals so I decide I'm not going to pull the boss unless he at least changes to his healing cylinder so he can heal with his rapid shots as well — so I sit down and explain I'm not moving before that happens and tell the merc what the cylinder looks like. After a few minutes he changes it. I pull the boss, my health is going dangerously slow, I have to beg for heals, but this merc is just standing DPSing and healing himself. We wipe and I initiate kick on the merc and no surprise it passes. We get another healer that's actually healing specked and we finish the instance without problems.

Another instance with my PT. I'm only queuing up as a tank since I do not have field respec yet (wasn't sure if I was going to stick with it or not). Athiss pops, I'm the tank, but there's also this assassin DPS who's on tank stance. I tell him to switch to DPS. After that it's a taunting competition with me and the assassin. Everytime I jump on a pack, get aggro, I soon notice the taunt debuff on the mob. I taunt it back. I tell the assassin to stop taunting. First boss, he continues to taunt the boss everytime it's out of CD. The healer and the other DPS don't seem to mind since they're not saying anything so I thought to stick with it, just to get the daily done. Dog boss. I go into position against the wall and taunt the boss. Assassin is behind it and taunts, gets tossed around. I shout in chat that if he insists on taunting, at least be at the right position to do so. He continues taunting the boss and being tossed around. Nobody dies though, thanks to the healer. After a few more trash packs like this I give up and switch to DPS cylinder and pretend to be DPS in my tanking speck and we finish the instance.

A few days ago i was queuing on group finder on my sorc, queue popped, and it was hard mode lost island.

Since it was lost island i asked everyone if they had done it before, all of them said no, i had a vision of everyone dropping out one by one but i still continued on anyway.

First boss was a breeze through, at the sak smash boss i started explaining, everyone seems to understand and we started it.

Impressing enough. Everyone did everything nicely, grabbed the pillar controls, crawled under him and tanked him in the middle of the platform.

And nobody touched the yellow observation droid.

At lorrick i briefly explained the fight and everyone got through it nicely, healer cleansed every bit even when i forgot to mention that cleansing will be helpful.

It was not weird or anything but overall i was very impressed with the team. They were all under 55 and using orange and green eqs but were able to coordinate very well with the fights.

 

What is with Healers and Guards anyway? I honestly thought guarding the healer was a trick in lowbies for tanks that weren't fully capable of holding aggro on multiple mobs, or to idiotproof yourself against DPS that tunnel-vision the strongest mobs.

It is, and unfortunately as a healer much of the time, I find myself dead way too often... then I get yelled at cause I'm not healing the tank... I'm dead. Cause you couldn't keep aggro. So, guard on the healer may be a a "trick for tanks not capable of holding aggro on many mobs" but unfortunately that's not limited to lowbie FPs.

 

I'm not entirely sure why they did this, since it creates a bit of a continuity issue with the storyline, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Not a continuity issue at all. Each group is undoing/messing with what the other did 10-15 levels before.

Good example is the heroic Fathers of Taris (heroic for Imperials) where Republic side there is a normal diff side quest you are looking for this secret archive where the last governors of Taris hid the most important thing to helping rebuild Taris in the future. You get there and find it's not documents, it's a frickin' carbonite tomb. The most important thing for them to preserve was themselves! So, then you are told once they get things more stable they will thaw them out and let them help.

But, now the Empire shows up... in their many efforts to destroy Taris they go to that very place too. When they get there, the vault is already open because the Republic opened it. The droid that was friendly to the Republic and like "Thanks, I'll stay here and guard them" is a champion boss. You kill him and set explosives on the carbonite governors to kill them.

Same with Balmorra (although everyone using the same outposts on Balmorra was always a bit odd to me, not sure how that aspect works) when the Republic gets there, the Empire has taken over and now the Republic needs to liberate the planet again.

It is, and unfortunately as a healer much of the time, I find myself dead way too often... then I get yelled at cause I'm not healing the tank... I'm dead. Cause you couldn't keep aggro. So, guard on the healer may be a a "trick for tanks not capable of holding aggro on many mobs" but unfortunately that's not limited to lowbie FPs.

Yeah, unfortunately there are situations even at 55 where the healer ends up in way more trouble than they ever should be. One of my guildmates often asks for a guard about halfway through a FP because of similar problems. When he's on his Commando healer and I'm playing a DPS, we end up struggling to keep him alive half the time. It's gotten to the point where I'll just switch to my tank when he wants to use his Commando... it's just not worth the headache. I don't even really understand what the problem is; I throw my guard on a DPS and we get through the run just fine. All it takes is a little situational awareness to keep aggro off him, but somehow we seem to end up with GF tanks who can't be bothered.

Yeah, unfortunately there are situations even at 55 where the healer ends up in way more trouble than they ever should be. One of my guildmates often asks for a guard about halfway through a FP because of similar problems. When he's on his Commando healer and I'm playing a DPS, we end up struggling to keep him alive half the time. It's gotten to the point where I'll just switch to my tank when he wants to use his Commando... it's just not worth the headache. I don't even really understand what the problem is; I throw my guard on a DPS and we get through the run just fine. All it takes is a little situational awareness to keep aggro off him, but somehow we seem to end up with GF tanks who can't be bothered.

I almost always have my guildie tank so I don't have to watch this happen to the healer.

The few times he doesn't tank, I just cross my fingers.

Not a continuity issue at all. Each group is undoing/messing with what the other did 10-15 levels before.

 

Good example is the heroic Fathers of Taris (heroic for Imperials) where Republic side there is a normal diff side quest you are looking for this secret archive where the last governors of Taris hid the most important thing to helping rebuild Taris in the future. You get there and find it's not documents, it's a frickin' carbonite tomb. The most important thing for them to preserve was themselves! So, then you are told once they get things more stable they will thaw them out and let them help.

 

But, now the Empire shows up... in their many efforts to destroy Taris they go to that very place too. When they get there, the vault is already open because the Republic opened it. The droid that was friendly to the Republic and like "Thanks, I'll stay here and guard them" is a champion boss. You kill him and set explosives on the carbonite governors to kill them.

 

Same with Balmorra (although everyone using the same outposts on Balmorra was always a bit odd to me, not sure how that aspect works) when the Republic gets there, the Empire has taken over and now the Republic needs to liberate the planet again.

You can suppose in what could be a cannon version that imp taris and pub balmorra take place at the same time, after the initial questing of both.

Some class quest on balmorra shows it extremely well.

Agent AND consular spoiler below.

Alternatively on imp taris

Agent spoiler

So we can think that if we wish to establish a cannon, the Imperial character stabilizes balmorra by crushing the resistance, while the pub works hard at giving taris its second chance, but at the start of chapter 2, the pubs free Balmorra, but in counterpart, their reconstruction project for Taris is destroyed.

now back to thread, this thing is awesome, I've read it all in the past 2 weeks or so, page per page, and some stories are awesome (The butter and the carbonizing tank on cad as healer left made me piss laugh). Got quite a few of mine I'll make sure to put up, however in order not to have a stupidly long post, I'll write them in a way that is hopefully funny and post them later.

I'm a bit of a jack-of-all-trade player, tanking and dpsing end game, good at healing or so I've been told, altough didn't do it much end game. That gives me a decent perspective on fights.

For now there is one thing I see that keep being discussed is the "guard the healer" fanboys who forgot that guard doesnt work the sames against PvE than PvP opponents.

The issue with "guarding the healer" is thus: It won't make a difference.

In PVE the damage reduction is of exactly a huge 5%, and the main uses out of it is reducing threat by 25%.

Now a healer's tendency to get some loving comes from the fact healer build a bit of threat on EVERYTHING engaged.

But how much?

The base heal threat is 50% of the EHPS. Not just the HPS, but EHPS. Which means in no way your threat can go above 50% of the DtPS of your party, and thats assuming you are keeping everyone exactly topped off.

Now considering specs, you lower that ammount by 10% (which was a nerf to the trees, but not a big one) so you do 0,5-(0,1*0,5)= 45% threat of EHPS.

Now I have not healed HM 55 yet, so I have no idea what the EHPS is, but lets say everyone takes damage and party's health is going down at 2k DtPS.

Healing EVERYTHING will make you generate 950 TPS, and you can drop that with a guard to roughly 700 tps.

Conclusion ? Building a bit of threat on everything will ensure it never goes off after the healer, and dps that follow a correct order will be what saves the healer. If its not done, regardless of a guard or not, you'll still be pulling 700 tps (that number's off my hat again.) on mob that have exactly...0 threat. Yep. They'll be gunning for you.

In NO Shape and form will a guard ever save an healer from being shot with a bad tank and dps

So guard mechanic is mostly to hold high threat or high burst specs at fight starts (annihilation marauder (DPS + HPS) Snipers, pyro PT and Lightning sorc that have their procs align, Concealment operatives etc)

When I tank an FP, I normally throw it on healer at start, mostly to have it on SOMEONE while I see which dps can pull or seems to do the most damage. I don't care about gear. If the BH mara outdps your 72 sniper because you are crap at it, mara's getting the guard (this line is not random. Funny story will follow soon ) but after 1-2 pull, a dps gets it, unless both are truly horrible (one instance where the healer added to dps while healing me because

we'd probably have gotten an enrage otherwise, and I'm fairly sure he increased the party output by 33%.)

And small comment about the sintank with strenght stacked for "melee" and no shield since dual-blade takes 2 hand:

Ok for the shield, lets blame KOTOR, but if you stacked STRENGHT there, you were not doing it right.

BOTH game best build was stacking Dexterity. So be happy she didnt use Cunning or Aim

Like the above poster mentioned, Balmorra and Taris are unique in that they are "phased" for each faction, and swap places in terms of storyline progression.

 

For Imperials, Balmorra is a pre-20 planet with their main base in Sobrik. Parts of the southwest portion of the planet map are missing, and I believe Bugtown is part of the bonus series. For Republic, the planet is a mid 30s (?) questing zone with Sobrik being a class quest region.

 

Similarly for Taris, the planet is a pre-20 planet for the Republic with very little Imperial presence. For the Imperials, the planet is a mid 30s questing zone which finishes by destroying what would be the Republic main base.

 

I'm not entirely sure why they did this, since it creates a bit of a continuity issue with the storyline, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Ah, okay, thank you.

I have only 1 imperial character yet, an early-level Bounty Hunter (and I don't plan to play more of that faction).

But, now the Empire shows up... in their many efforts to destroy Taris they go to that very place too. When they get there, the vault is already open because the Republic opened it. The droid that was friendly to the Republic and like "Thanks, I'll stay here and guard them" is a champion boss. You kill him and set explosives on the carbonite governors to kill them.

 

Same with Balmorra (although everyone using the same outposts on Balmorra was always a bit odd to me, not sure how that aspect works) when the Republic gets there, the Empire has taken over and now the Republic needs to liberate the planet again.

That sounds bad to me. So, the Empire is destroying everything the Republic has ? It sounds to me like a boy destroying freshly built castels in the sand ...

What I don't like about this is that in SWTOR there is never any progress to be seen ... And now I know why ... From a story perspective ...

(Of course, SWTOR isn't instanced, so there just cannot be any progress because other players would want to play in that same area as well ... Ridicuilous that i have to write this down ...)

And what I also don't like is that the Republic can do nothing but react towards things the Empire did in the first place ...

Yeah, unfortunately there are situations even at 55 where the healer ends up in way more trouble than they ever should be. One of my guildmates often asks for a guard about halfway through a FP because of similar problems. When he's on his Commando healer and I'm playing a DPS, we end up struggling to keep him alive half the time. It's gotten to the point where I'll just switch to my tank when he wants to use his Commando... it's just not worth the headache. I don't even really understand what the problem is; I throw my guard on a DPS and we get through the run just fine. All it takes is a little situational awareness to keep aggro off him, but somehow we seem to end up with GF tanks who can't be bothered.

Commandos giving healing aggro problems ? I heal with a commando and a sorc and I haven't noticed any difference in that regard tbh...

I do notice it with operatives, but that's on them. They seem too fond of HoT'ing everybody on the run at all times, between pulls, so as soon the fight starts, they immediately generate a lot of unnecessary aggro. When I'm tanking or dpsing even, I usually click the HoT off of me if we're out of combat and heading towards the next pull...

I do notice it with operatives, but that's on them. They seem too fond of HoT'ing everybody on the run at all times, between pulls, so as soon the fight starts, they immediately generate a lot of unnecessary aggro. When I'm tanking or dpsing even, I usually click the HoT off of me if we're out of combat and heading towards the next pull...

Guilty as charged. XD

I did this a lot on my operative to build up a few stacks of tactical advantage (or whatever the english client calls that secondary resource thing) before combat begins. Funnily enough, I never had aggro trouble with this until somehwere around level 45, when I tried to use more CC to help the tanks...who kept pulling before I could send some creature to sleep...

Well, lesson learned: put some points into Unexpected Surgery instead of Adrenalin Probe, have 2 stacks TA ready when I start healing out of stealth and be done with it.

This wasn't a flashpoint or anything, but it was group content, so I figured it qualified. Apologies in advance for the wall of text, but hopefully you can get a few laughs out of it - and a few "what the hell happened there" headshakes, too.

So I'm leveling my Sniper on Tatooine, doing the Bonus Series there. I have a sort of compulsive completionism that leads me to finish basically every quest on every planet, which often means I run into snags getting heroics done, and I don't want to leave a planet with things left unfinished. This is doubly a problem here, because it's devilishly hard to get groups for Bonus Series heroics. So I figure I'll jump on the first LFGs I see in general chat. I'm pretty happy when I catch the last slot for a group doing [HEROIC 4] Blood and Sand and find that this group actually has a healer. I've done all the heroics in the game what seems like a skillion times; the Tatooine Bonus Series ones are pretty simple if you've got non-idiot players and a decent healer.

It goes downhill from there. The healer - a competent, properly specced Sorcerer - is leveled and geared appropriately for Tatooine, but the other two players aren't. We have one underleveled and badly undergeared Operative, and an overleveled but somehow undergeared Marauder. The Marauder is particularly weird, because he's apparently just finished Taris at level 31 yet is on Tatooine to do the Bonus Series with his new toy Jaesa. His gear is decidedly mediocre for Tatooine; for level 31, let alone Taris, it's pretty awful. I round out the group with my Sniper, who is level 33 (lol completionism) with mostly 26-32 mods; not great gear, but significantly better than Tatooine quests require.

I get to the instance entrance pretty quickly, and the Sorc and Marauder show up shortly thereafter. But the Operative is nowhere to be found - he's still changing instances, even though he started switching a few minutes before. Okay: bad connection, I guess. Hardly a reason to get pissed off. We settle down to wait. Our Marauder promptly gets involved in a fairly angry argument in general chat about something innocuous, then declares in group chat that he's bored and wants to go finish other quests. So he travels halfway across the map and starts farting around over there, leaving me and the Sorc whispering to each other about impatience and anger issues.

Eventually we see that the Operative's finally switched instances, but unfortunately he's all the way back in Mos Ila, with a long speeder ride before he even gets close to the heroic area. And he doesn't have the heroic quest. This is also where I notice how bad his gear is, from looking at his health. So I share the quest, politely tell him in group chat to get a move on, then go back to the newspaper Sudoku I'm doing to pass the time. Several more minutes pass before we notice that he still hasn't moved - he's on top of the Mos Ila taxi stop, but is apparently going nowhere. Now, if you're on the taxi between stops, the map shows you as being still at the place where you started, but that was five minutes ago! He explains it by invoking a bad CPU and a worse connection. Sure, whatever.

The Sorc, who's the group leader, is a pretty permissive and laid-back guy. In my opinion, he's too laid-back: he's willing to let this Operative and Marauder screw around and waste all our time, and chooses not to assert himself and force anybody to do anything by threatening to withhold heals or kick them from the group or whatever. But, you know, it's hard to get pissed off at somebody who's just being a nice person. I don't want to act like a jerk, so I don't ask him to boot the two nitwits and look for somebody with a shred of sense. So long as we finish the heroic, it's all good. As it turns out, this is a fairly serious error on my part.

After another several minutes - something like twenty-five minutes have passed since the group first got together - the Operative finally shows up in the Jundland Wastes (although naturally he went to the wrong taxi stop and has to hike even further), the Marauder notices, and they both slowly make their way back over to the instance. Along the way, the Operative gets into several fights somehow (shouldn't he be stealthing past mobs?), dies at least once, and takes a wrong turn. But never mind all that.

We all pile into the instance and start working our way through the enemies in the cave, when I notice a few other things about the Marauder and the Operative. The Marauder, as our only real melee option, should've been standing in as a faux tank, starting pulls and generating lots of aggro. The dude even has a taunt. But although he starts every pull - invariably without waiting for people to mark CCs or anything - he loses aggro to me very quickly, even when I use my aggro dump and do my best to only target enemies that he himself is attacking (or that are attacking our Sorcerer). And he doesn't taunt enemies back, resulting in the delightful scenario of me sitting in cover with three or four Sand People goring me with their gaffi sticks, while the Marauder merrily chops away at a single one of them without generating an iota of aggro.

His gear is part of the problem; he's using a green mainhand, among other things, and so he doesn't do very much damage. The other part seems to be his rotation. I'm not a Marauder/Sentinel player (the two lightsabers just look so goofy to me), but the moves he's using don't look to me like the ones I've seen loads of other such players use. At one point in the quest, he accidentally brings up the chat window during a fight, so we see his rotation. It's just 12112 over and over and over again. Jeez.

So the Marauder is one problem. The Operative is the other. Apparently he's specced for heals and fancies himself a junior tactician. Unfortunately, his heals are crap due to his awful gear (a few Strength pieces, and bizarrely, even a Willpower earpiece). Having him heal is like trying to use a

In all fairness, he sometimes recognizes this and switches to dps, but his target selection is bizarre. He'll attack an enemy that nobody's going after, instantly drawing aggro and making the poor Sorcerer's job infinitely more difficult, while not actually doing a whole lot of damage because, again, his gear sucks. He spends something like a third of every fight in stealth, trying to drop aggro, but I guess he doesn't get why he's drawing aggro, because as soon as he stealths he immediately goes back to attacking his lone enemy target and once again has his own personal Tusken to fight. Hooray.

Each individual pull is like a carnival of strange gameplay, except that if you win, you get some useless credits and trash gear instead of a kewpie doll. On some pulls, the Operative stealths out and disappears, eventually showing up behind the enemies, which will supposedly lower his aggro because they won't be looking at him. So he spends the first few seconds of the fight hanging out back there with his thumb up his butt before he aggros a Tusken, as usual, and then gets hit with a knockback that sends him flying into a group that we haven't pulled yet. And he does this twice. On other pulls, the Marauder will use his stealth and waltz past. Now, the quest objective is to kill 50 Tuskens in this cave, with a bonus for defeating a champion boss at the end, Chieftain Bloodgouge. Skipping groups makes no sense - unless you've already done a fifth of the heroic before giving up, like our Marauder apparently has. Never mind that this is group content and that you're there so that the group finishes, not just you.

Now, let it never be said that I am mean to noobish players. I don't like people who just cackle "l2p" whenever somebody asks a question (even a stupid question), and I don't like people who talk as though nobody who hasn't full-cleared HM TFB (or whatever) knows anything about playing the game. When I was part of a guild, I was the Answers Girl in guild chat, explaining anything about mechanics or lore to anybody who asked, and I still do the same thing in general chat often enough. In flashpoints, I'm usually the one who lays out the boss mechanics and who tries to keep a handle on how the group is doing tactically. I don't just hit it and quit it.

So I try to be helpful here, too. I mention the poor state of the Marauder's and Operative's gear in group chat and suggest ways to gear up properly. I talk to the Marauder about keeping aggro away from everybody else and figuring out a better rotation. I bring up crowd control and positioning and target selection. The Operative mostly just says "okay" or "uh-huh" to my suggestions and then ignores them. And the Marauder either fails to respond to my comments outright or shoves them back in my face by implying that I don't know anything about how the game works. After a few of these conversations, I just decide to grin and bear it, and hope that I can just slaughter everything in any given group quickly enough to make healing and aggro irrelevant.

So we stumble through the cave, slowly attriting the Sand People down to nothing. Since we skip several groups, we're still 14 kills shy of the quest objective when we reach the back of the cave, where Bloodgouge is lurking (except for the Marauder, who's only four shy). Bloodgouge is a little interesting; he's got a few simple mechanics, so he's a tiny bit tougher than your average low-level champion. He uses Spinning Strikes, an interruptible AoE melee move, and halfway through the fight he calls in two strong adds. A moderate amount of self-awareness and skill should make this fight pretty trivial, especially if we have a single melee player who can keep aggro and make sure the boss stays away from our ranged healer and ranged dps in case somebody misses an interrupt.

Or not so much. Our Operative buddy is stricken with a disconnect about ten seconds into the pull - not that we notice the loss of his dps or heals, but still. The Marauder has one job, and one job only: keep the boss away from the rest of the group. He immediately fails at it, despite my best efforts to keep my own aggro as low as possible while still maintaining reasonable DPS. In addition, he never uses his interrupt, even though I only gave two instructions before the fight started (keep the boss away from the group and interrupt Spinning Strikes). Invariably, my interrupt is on cooldown for half of them. And since Bloodgouge is on me and the Marauder has to stay in melee range, every Spinning Strikes that I can't interrupt cuts into both our health, and the poor healer gets overwhelmed.

There are few things in this game more annoying than getting smacked upside the head with Bloodgouge's gaffi stick as your health gets dangerously low, while a full-health Marauder uselessly batters away at his back without a) doing any damage, b) bothering to taunt the stupid Tusken away, or c) interrupting his moves. Apparently, our Marauder doesn't even know what his interrupt even is, and when I confront him about using it, he claims that he doesn't have one. Even though I know that's completely wrong, I don't remember the name of the Warrior's interrupt ability off the top of my head, so I let it slide.

Oh, and forget about attacking the adds; he doesn't bother to switch off the boss even when I give him a heads-up. So the Sorc absorbs some damage from them, and then I absorb damage from them, and throughout I keep getting hit by Bloodgouge because even when I'm not attacking him and even though I'm using my aggro dump on cooldown, the Marauder isn't doing enough damage to get aggro. The Sorc runs out of Force when Bloodgouge is at about 25% health, and I die shortly thereafter. The Marauder manages to get the chieftain down to 22% before eating a gaffi stick, and then the Sorc gets killed for the wipe.

Since the Operative is still disconnected when we rez, I manage to convince our Sorc to kick him and to allow me to replace him with an actual tank: my companion Kaliyo, who's geared better than anybody there except me. Then we end up waiting another three minutes for the Marauder, who gets so impatient that he releases back to a med droid before anybody has an opportunity to rez him. But finally, the three of us assemble at the back of the cave, Kaliyo goes in first, and we down Bloodgouge in textbook fashion. She keeps aggro, keeps him away from everybody but the Marauder, and has enough health to eat a few Spinning Strikes - the ones I can't interrupt - without batting an eye. Easy peasy.

Our Marauder is now finished with the quest, since Bloodgouge's adds count toward the Sand People kills total. Even though me and the Sorc still need ten more kills, he lights out for the territories. Good riddance. With Kaliyo keeping aggro, the Sorc and I wipe out the rest of the Tuskens in workmanlike fashion. It would've been even easier if he'd remembered to bring out his own companion, but whatever, it worked. Finally, an hour and a half after I first saw the general chat advertisement for the quest, we're finished. As soon as the last Tusken is down, I commiserate with the Sorc in group chat about how annoying the other two group members were and how very glad I am that they're gone, then I say my goodbyes, turn in my quests, and get the hell off that dirtball.

I generally try to avoid using my ignore list, because most of my toons are DPS and I can't afford to give up spots in the notoriously long DPS group finder queue. But sometimes, people just go above and beyond to get themselves on it, and that's what happened with that heroic.

Guilty as charged. XD

You are guilty of nothing. If healer is getting aggro from HoTs then that is on Tank and DPS, they should be following kill order. Healer having HoTs up is just fundmentally sound healing. Keeping upperhand/tactical advantage up is more important. With gear I have become a lazy healer in HM FPs because they have become too easy, but I use to keep HoTs up all the time and if someone removes them, I would either kick or quit. I don't tell them how to tank or dps, they better not tell me how to heal.

That said, I don't have to worry about that right now, too lazy to use HoTs in a HMFP or even a HM Ops.

We all pile into the instance and start working our way through the enemies in the cave, when I notice a few other things about the Marauder and the Operative. The Marauder, as our only real melee option, should've been standing in as a faux tank, starting pulls and generating lots of aggro. The dude even has a taunt. But although he starts every pull - invariably without waiting for people to mark CCs or anything - he loses aggro to me very quickly, even when I use my aggro dump and do my best to only target enemies that he himself is attacking (or that are attacking our Sorcerer). And he doesn't taunt enemies back, resulting in the delightful scenario of me sitting in cover with three or four Sand People goring me with their gaffi sticks, while the Marauder merrily chops away at a single one of them without generating an iota of aggro.

 

His gear is part of the problem; he's using a green mainhand, among other things, and so he doesn't do very much damage. The other part seems to be his rotation. I'm not a Marauder/Sentinel player (the two lightsabers just look so goofy to me), but the moves he's using don't look to me like the ones I've seen loads of other such players use. At one point in the quest, he accidentally brings up the chat window during a fight, so we see his rotation. It's just 12112 over and over and over again. Jeez.

Granted any dps should be capable of keeping aggro off a healer if they have enough situational awareness and are familiar with their skills and by the sounds of it the mara is pretty bad but maras don't have any taunts or high aggro abilities as, like your sniper, they are a pure dps class. As such there's no reason he'd be able to keep aggro off of you, a higher levelled and better geared sniper even if he knew the class well. As I say he sounds like a fairly bad player but to be honest you should have expected to be the main aggro holder from the start. Just because maras are melee doesn't make them tanks, there's a reason half the posts in this thread (exaggerated a bit but you get the idea) are complaining about maras/sents who think they're tanks.

That came out as a bit of a rant but it's meant to be informative, just thought you might be interested in learning a bit.

The Marauder, as our only real melee option, should've been standing in as a faux tank, starting pulls and generating lots of aggro. The dude even has a taunt. But although he starts every pull - invariably without waiting for people to mark CCs or anything - he loses aggro to me very quickly, even when I use my aggro dump and do my best to only target enemies that he himself is attacking (or that are attacking our Sorcerer). And he doesn't taunt enemies back, resulting in the delightful scenario of me sitting in cover with three or four Sand People goring me with their gaffi sticks, while the Marauder merrily chops away at a single one of them without generating an iota of aggro.

Uhm, marauders don't have taunts. So the rest of the failure in that story is pretty much yours. You went in with 3 DPS, and a DPS (you) tanked. It isn't surprising.

You should have replaced either him or the operative with an actual tank, or even just used a tank pet.