I am also a returning player from a few years back. I main jugg tank and did some MM fp's over the weekend with green 324's. The difficulty of the bosses is fine, the far more challenging bit is the group. The majority of difficulty is from the apparent lack of knowledge of group roles in the current player base. in the 4 runs I did over the weekend ive seen healers pulling, dps completely ignore adds, no cleansing on associated mechanics, completely ignoring insta-death mechanics etc. Though its not always those people's fault, if my experience playing a sniper a few years back is anything to go by, most "tanks" are not tanks now-a-days so they probably dont expect me to want to pull first, or want to keep the boss in a suitable place instead of running around after adds that should already be dead. I am pretty sure you already know this as you say you are an old player returning, and this used to be common knowledge, but just in case, outside of the obvious group roles: DPS: attack adds, interrupts, kill order (go weak to strong) Healer: cleansing Tank: pulling, positioning, stacking enemies up, turning boss away from group (for cleaves or dps that do more damage from behind).  

On a lowbie characters Shae as dps is the only way to go for me too. Some classes are horrible at low levels, you don't have enough abilities, and the ones you have have long cooldowns or eat up all your energy because no resource management yet so that you can only use basic attack most of the time. Shae will fix that. Or any other companion on dps. When progressing to higher levels and planets and I get more power, I will change companion to heals so I don't have to stop all the time, like Toraak said.

We don't need new currency for that. We can just use FP-1, the current FP currency. I like the idea of vendor selling stuff that got removed though. The problem with MM FPs is that it takes forever for a dps to get a pop. When it eventually pops, after an hour or so, it will be hammer station, and it's being farmed by people who don't even know the basic mechanics (such as which one of the three stooges you need to kill first). It's a not really even group finder, it's a hammer station finder.  I'd like to run more MM FPs, but as long as I don't get the weekly rewards when I unselect the stupid station, I'm not gonna bother. Not sure if adding rewards would make it better of worse if they don't fix the HS farming problem first. And how to fix that? Get rid of the option to select/deselect certain flashpoints. If someone wants to farm nothing but HS, they can just walk in to the instance instead of ruining the group finder for everyone else.

I'm sure there's something between "extreme" difficulty as you called it and no difficulty at all. Right now, the only way to die in this game is to take damage from falling from a great height 🤣

After pinging 80 and buying some 324 greens I queued my jugg tank for some gf stuff. Get a pop for master athiss. The 2 dps were a sniper and a sin Throughout the entire run, the sniper was pulling and to make sure he could always pull first he would run off to the next pull while there were still 1 or 2 enemies left on the current one. On rare occasions the sniper would not pull. These would be the pulls where a stealth CC would allow the fight to be skipped. On these ones, the sin would stealth, run up to the enemy, then attack rather than CC. Final boss sniper ends up dead from fire and complains the healer was no good. ___________________________________________________________ Got a master mode blood hunt after. everything went mostly well, until the second fight where I had been hit with slow by the red guy and the white lady had put the red circles on everyone. Both the other dps were melee. They both decided to run towards me while I was slowed so couldn't get out the way. With 3 red circles stacked on me I died. Got c-ressed and finished the fight. Then at final boss both dps didnt run to the edge when the droid appeared in the middle. It then occurred to me these 2 may have never done this before. After the 3rd time one of them died, and while lying dead complained at the healer. Luckily the boss has been heavily nerfed, the orange circle seems a whole lot weaker so we beat it eventually. At the end I say "please mention if you are new to the mission, we can explain the fights" The jugg dps then says "do you think your better than us?" healer: "no, just that you might be new to this mission" me: "never mind, I give up" He (and the other dps) caused my death in the second fight, then died to mechanics in the 3rd, but the polite offering of advice gets anger back. ___________________________________________________________ Then I got a vet foundry pop with my tank and 3 dps. During the run, a sorc dps at one point says "I like your level number" Me, with me immature sense of humour said "I dont see any level 69's here" Sorc then tells me "quiet, nobody is talking to you" me: "someones abit tetchy" The sorc then going on a long rant about having played since beta, the most pro gamer ever, everybody else should follow him etc. By now we are at hk fight, the sorc and a sin dps both got killed by the central thing coming down. The sin complains that nobody warned them of an insta-kill mechanic, while the sorc tells me I didnt tank properly if other people are taking damage. We wipe and running back I give an explanation of the fight, and the sin survives, the sorc doesnt join the fight for most of it as he is busy pressing the 4 generators for bonus boss. Once he does join he gets killed by the central console again. I reckon the sorc and sin have not done this before so on the way to bonus boss I explain not to stand in green puddles. The sorc tells me to stop telling him what to do, hes played since beta, hes a pro, we should all listen to him, etc. Get to bonus boss and the merc dps get spat at, moves out of it. sorc get spat at, stays in it but it doesnt do as much damage as it used to so survived. Sin gets spat at, moves out of it. After the sorc has a go at me for not tanking properly as he was taking damage. On the way to final boss, I do the jumps on the boxes/walls to skip what I can, the sin and merc follow, the sorc runs around the columns so pulls some skippable stuff. I dont really care, it doesnt take long to kill things, but the annoying bit is the sorc keeps flaming the 3 of us for running around the enemies instead of killing them. At the final boss, as I still think some people are new I say "hes got a knockback, stay away from the edges." By the time I have written it the merc has pulled and stayed at the starting spot so I dont bother explaining anything else (not that it matters, its been nerfed so much all the mechanics can be ignored). Sorc gets knocked over the edge and killed, the 3 of us finish up. _________________________________________________________ Master boarding party. Things are abit difficult tanking as I have 324 greens and when looking at the dps to see who to guard, both are 343 gear rating. However one is range and one is melee so I guard ranged (if melee rips he will likely be closer to me). Not that it mattered. Whenever I pulled a group, the healer would run through the fight, pull the next group then find somewhere to los them to. Once done, they would sit in whatever los spot they found spam healing themselves so they didnt die. They, seemed to have an issue with my tanking, the fact they were getting hit all the time and I didn't seem to make any effort to peel off the stuff they just pulled and los'd. me: "your right, im not trying to do that. stop pulling and stop dragging things around unnecessarily. I will tank, but I will not baby sit" It made no difference, they continued to run ahead on every pull to get the next group, then backtrack to an los spot, while occasionally complaining I am not leaping in and doing aoe taunt (which has 45s cooldown, I am not going to wait that long between each pull just to protect someone who pulls first). ______________________________________________________ Then there was a call for a tank for TFB SM. I joined, we got started and once we got to second boss I asked the other tank "what stacks do you want to swap at" The other tank, who was also raid lead, said not to bother, its just a burn in SM. I asked "no doom, tank swap, interrupt?" he reiterated its just a dps check and asks me to kite kel. I just kite kel around abit while everybody else kills the other 2, but funnily enough the raid lead is sometimes writing instructions in chat like "interrupt" or "move out of green." Seems doom and interrupt do matter, but we make it through no deaths so w/e Complete the op, completely different to how I was used to. At kephless we even ignore nanites. ______________________________________________________ Seems its not just fp's that have been simplified, its the ops too. I can see why though, of the 3 fp runs I did, only 1 of the dps, the sin from the vet foundry run, followed kill order, all the others just tunnel-vision strongest enemy now, even in boss fights with adds, dps ignore all adds and just attack boss.