Eternal championship is not fully required for the companion. You can go halfway, or even just first phase, then go back to Bowdaar, and get some influence for it. Repeat a few times, and you got the companion.

 

That's good to know, and now that you say it, so obvious in hindsight. Thanks for pointing it out.

What I get from reading these threads, is that it's no big deal if you're running around with 306 gear. That's great. I'm in 274 gear, I play regularly, and it's been awhile since the update. Unless one makes it a determined effort to grind and gear up, the progression isn't as fast as some have convinced themselves. Which comes back to the fact that 6.0 is crap for casual players. At least these threads are great for feeding my ignore list, which relatively speaking, this is a good one as I've only had to do that once.

 

I guess part of the difference is that some players finished everything that they want to do years ago, and if they go back to revisit some of the content, it's just that, a revisit to something they are already familiar with. That in of itself makes it easier for someone who is experienced. I'm not even going to try to solo the SF post 6.0. I'm sure I could probably beat it, but not without paying a ton in armor repair not to mention lost time due to repeating fights just to finally slog through it. That doesn't leave me with a sense of accomplishment, rather, I feel like I've wasted my time when I could be doing something else. So yeah, actually, I do plan on leaving the game as a subscriber. I'll continue to play, but it won't be end game anymore.

 

I'm not saying that there aren't examples of game play pre 6.0 that were too "easy." I hope that this is a two steps forward and one step back sort of thing to find a better balance. Right now, we need to take one step back and fix some of the content that is harder than what I believe was intended. I feel for any newbies trying to tackle Friends of Old (DK heroic) for the first time... for example, as it currently stands, Devs need to relabel it as a heroic 4+ after the 6.0 changes. Sure, it's soloable if you have a full heroic moment bar and a high influence companion, but this is a heroic on a starter planet.

This entire thread makes me want to run both hard mode Star Fortresses & Eternal Championship again just to see what all the new the fuss is about. I used to run them both a lot before 6.0 with my lightning sorcerer. With the changes to companion healing I can see how they might need a bit more time & thought to complete them successfully but I'm not sure they will have made anything in them "harder". I will report back.

 

EDITED TO ADD:

 

Eternal Championship:

I could not get past Nocturno and Drake Revan which I used to with no problem. I couldn't get Drake to half health each time I tried. Drake now spawns adds when he is about a 1/4 health down which is a change because he used to spawn them only when he was under half health. I got overwhelmed by his adds, as he spams his stun on top of them but they can only be damaged within melee range (similar to vaylin) or you end up killing yourself. It used to be that you could easily kill the strong add and the others would die, but I couldn't. Fortunately I don't need anything from this anymore so I can ignore it (you need the full thing for conquest but there are so many other easier ways to get 50K conquest points for solo so I can ignore it). I recommend a group if you want to kill Zotar. I used my Sith Inq (lightning) with 295 gear and 50 influence Z0-0M as healer (my self heals were rendered useless in 6.0 so had little to no effect). Something has changed with this boss.

 

Veteran Star Fortresses:

These are fine; no problems whatsoever. Doable solo with and without the Alliance specialist rep perks and with or without the extra Alliance specialist gadgets you can pick up. Did them with the same Sith Inq as above and Z0-0M again. There is a very minor issue where in the last phase, the first set of mobs no longer drop the dampening field item you need to cross the heat line so you get mildly stunned crossing it. The remainder of the mobs do drop them though. The normal level Star Fortresses are as easy as they always have been.

Edited December 11, 2019 by Sarova

So in the patch notes it says they scaled SF properly and when it comes to EC, well its still doable, so I guess the discussion is over

Both of them should just scale to the player’s level, with a difficulty relative to that level that makes them challenging. It shouldn’t be THAT hard to just complete one of the companion missions.

Well i just wanted to run EC for weekly conquest and i didnt realize I had not gear on my sage. Even though my rating was 0 i was still able to kill the first boss..... so if you claim this is hard then you are doing it wrong

Well i just wanted to run EC for weekly conquest and i didnt realize I had not gear on my sage. Even though my rating was 0 i was still able to kill the first boss..... so if you claim this is hard then you are doing it wrong

 

Not even going to bother with all the logical fallacies here...

The championship has been tweaked since this thread was started, it's pretty easy now in comparison to what it was, especially with 30 bolster stacks. It's scaled to 65 I believe. Edited January 21, 2020 by Krazhez

The championship has been tweaked since this thread was started, it's pretty easy now in comparison to what it was, especially with 30 bolster stacks. It's scaled to 65 I believe.

 

Ah ok, never mind then, did seem too easy.