Ah Colicoid, the pug destroyer.

Award for greatest lack of reading comprehension i've seen on the forums goes to this guy.

Other than that, it's really not hard to get a pug to go through this. Just tell them to not touch ANYTHING but the left and right arrow key, and they'll hopefully figure it out from there. If someone is still dismounting/remounting over and over, kick him and use a companion. because someone that stupid will probably be about as useful as one.

Honestly, the turrets in this game suck. Doable? Of course, once you figure out that you don't fire them yourself, but that's annoying in itself, since attempting to fire them will often dismount you. Even after you know what you're doing, it feels unintuitive and clunky. They should have just copied mounted weapons from first-person shooters. If that's not technically possible, there are still several other possible implementations that would have been more fun and intuitive.

there are other minor issues to contend with even if you have a group of like minded players willing to take the time to die a few times while they piece together the mechanics.

the rate of the cannon fire is rather slow, and it is likely if there is any amount of lag at all, that the time you see the cannon fire and the time it actually did fire are not in line with each other.

normally, in an mmo, you adapt to the lag because you can see how the time you pressed the key translates to the time the event occured on the screen. But with this, since you have no control at all over when it is suppossed to fire, its impossible for you to gauge the lag and adapt.

i also noticed that at some angles of rotation the cannon simply doesn't draw any fire graphics at all. and there is no way to tell if it is firing and just not drawing the graphic for the shot, or it it really isn't firing anything. if we had a combat log, that would at least provide some of the missing feedback there, but we don't.

I love seeing people stand on a soap box just to realize their pants are down. I got a good chuckle out of this failhard and now people at work are staring at me.

This one wound me up quite a bit for the first 2-3 attempts, but I've actually come to like it. Have done it fine, on level, with pugs, twice. First time, all 4 of us on the cannons, facing outward. Second run, I hopped off as a healer to keep everyone at full, still facing outward. Primary the ranged droids, help sweep up after others when quite, and the "maze" bit was fine.

Havent tried this on hard mode yet, still freshly 50 and getting facerolled by Ironfist on the Esseles, so war games is a bit of a way off for me.

How does a 180 on the turrets help? just more targets in your arc of fire, or is there a defensive positioning bonus?

I can add as said above, never put the healer on the cannon, let the healer stand in the middle healing the other 3 cannons and it becomes easy.

EDIT: And it isnt not available as hard mode. Only 6 flashpoints are.

I thought about that in the first PUG I did this with, but I was the healer, and the non-healers were the ones that weren't able to hit anything with the cannons. Me getting off the cannon was like having 2 people manning the cannons even though there were 4 in the group.

Have no idea if it was lag or something else that was preventing the other player from hitting anything. The interface for those cannons, as I mentioned earlier, is not lag tolerant.

Hum its just pointing it in a direction at it will shout automatically. Its nothing to interface with except clicking it when "mounting" it.

I've never been dismounted when using my mouse to turn the cannons.

I did try to be a cool guy and pop a defensive CD though. Oops.

I've pugged this one a few times and had good luck with it. Swiftsure has a lot of decent players who generally listen to a "leader" and put things together. We had a blast with the puzzle part too.

I liked it. I wish the last bosses were more of a fight though. I felt like I could solo the droid.

CWG was honestly my favorite flashpoint so far, and at this point the only one I haven't run is Directive 7. The first time I ran it, it was with a pug group after finishing the foundry together and none of us had done it before.

The cannons were rough - we probably wiped 4-5 times before everyone got the hang of it (and I'll admit, a little warning on how they worked beforehand would have been nice). Luckily, those of us who caught on quickly were patient and were able to laugh off the defeat. I don't think I've ever laughed so hard at an MMO as the second half of the instance, when we were constantly being pushed off ledges, isolating each other on accident, etc. It really felt like the flashpoint was just being sadistic, which is definitely some compelling design.