Lost Island, ***...

I do appreciate the input, but in this case it wasn't the Satchel Charge damage that was causing the issues. The tank managed to avoid most of them, but even when he didn't I had no problem healing through (on one unfortunate occasion he picked up three charges just before a kolto tank DPS phase, and keeping him up wasn't particularly hard).

It's simply between breaking a kolto tank and before the next Satchel Charge phase that I was struggling tremendously to keep the tank up. Lorrick's regular attack rotation just burns him down at an amazing rate.

Mind you, the tank had about 16k health buffed... less than our full Columi DPS. *shrug*

Just a note, expecting this to be done in only full Tionese or worse isn't really fair, since the last boss does drop Rakata. That's like saying all other HMs should be doable in level 50 modded gear, and having any Tionese makes you overgeared for it.

16k buffed is extremely low for a tank, regardless of what difficulty.

It's much more reasonable to expect people to be in a mix of Tionese/Columi, and considering the last boss does drop Rakata, it should be just as hard, if not harder, than HM Operations.

The first day we tried hard mode, we kept wiping for about 3 hours on the first boss (droid) before we gave up.

Now that we have learnt the mechanics, we can run through the entire hard mode flashpoint in 35 mins (skipping bonus boss). And we aren't anything special, just a regular team. 1 tank, 1 melee-dps, 1 ranged-dps, and 1 healer. We have been farming it by rotating in a different dps every run, so far we have found 1 agent, 3 warrior, and 2 inquisitor rakata chests.

Hang in there, it does get really easy once you understand the mechanics.

mechanics or not i refuse to go in there. i can run ops with my guild and have a much easier time getting my gear. already got a rakata chest anyway, so for me, this is useless. Black Hole coms... ill run NM KP and do Denova with my weekly on Corellia

I really don't understand the issue people are having with this FP. I just ran this for the first time on Friday with some guildies and cleared it with only 2 deaths.

We had 2 sorcs (one DPS, one heals), a Jugg tank and me (sniper). All of us are full Rakata.

The sorc healer and myself had never been there before Friday night when we ran it for the first time. The other sorc and the jugg had run it once before.

We died once to the droid learning the mechanics and downed him the second time. We died once to Lorrick learning the mechanics there (and bad positioning on the healer) then downed him the second time.

This is not a difficult FP, but I can see this being somewhat difficult to PUG, especially if someone in the group has never done it before.

In my opinion it's tuned just right. Like the new op, it's all about coordination and mechanics. When you get those down, the bosses aren't any harder than anything we've seen before. Will definitely be farming this on the weekly for the comms. About 1.5 hours for Kaon and LI isn't bad for the 8 comms (and the Aratech Ice which I got on Friday).

Lorrick's "Flurry of Bolts" ability does a ton of damage. It's got a really fast channel, but I found it helped a -ton- to at least make an attempt to interrupt it.

^^ This also... if you can heal through 3 satchel charges then the healing in-between fights shouldn't be a problem. The ability mentioned above is the only one I can even think of that might cause a problem.

So you went in with a group in full Rakata, completely outgearing the flashpoint, every person in your group could interupt, and all your dps was ranged dps. I'm surprised you found it easy....

A) This is a FP that has a weekly for BH comms. They clearly intended this to be a progression FP. Sure the gear drops are crap and it only drops Tionese crystals and Tionese comms (not even Columi), but that's an itemization issue and not indicative of the difficulty of the FP.

B) Every class can interrupt - some have better interrupts than others (BH, crap interrupt on too long a CD, but whatever). Your group should have a least 1 other along with the tank that can interrupt. That's all you ever need. You just need to interrupt the right spells (not every spell) and not have a scrub healer.

C) Yes, this game is not very friendly to melee DPS, but it's not exactly friendly to a sniper either whose DPS depends on being stationary (especially the droid fight and Lorrick).

This FP is not gear dependent at all - it's about mechanics and coordination. Gear makes it slightly easier in that you can out-DPS a poor healer or tank, but it's only a very small portion of the success. I hate to say it, and usually don't, but this is L2P time - if you are consistently failing at this FP, check what you are doing and what your group is doing - clearly something is wrong there.

This. And if you have 2 melee DPS, even full Columi is doubtful.

If you really think it's your skill that did the job, try it again after downgrading half your pieces to say Tionese level, and bring 2 melee DPS, then come back and tell me how easy it was.