@Keyboardninja- thank you for the heads up on this. We will look into this next ops night. Appreciate the input. As always your a positive force on these forums. /salute

Our Ops team has just started venturing into 8 man HM territory. Last night we took our first night of real attempts on Sparky 8 man HM. Just wanted to add my voice to the growing chorus of threads here about a wonderful "bug" we encountered which is apparently not new and has gone unfixed since 3.0 launch. We had lots of fun with the Instant Brutalize bug last night. Sometimes the first brutalize would go off without a hitch around 45%ish. No problem break out the pinned ops teammate continue on. Second brutalize at 25ish% insta-gib. Sometimes it was the first brutalize that would be an insta-gib. No channel just bang your dead, We tried resetting the phase and the bug would not go away. For giggles and we tried disbanding and reforming and going back in. No luck. We literally did not see him channel as intended consistently the entire night. Cannot be working as intended. I wonder about the priorities over at Bioware central with the pelthora of bugs from Underlurker to Sparky to SS and Bulo. Guess the slot machines were more important than providing playable ops for the playerbase. Not my first rodeo all mmo's have bugs have patience I keep telling myself.......

old school here grew up with and still love Iron Maiden Judas Priest Black Sabbath Ronnie James Dio. Any and all.

I generally do not bother with these forums as they are a cesspool I merely came here to provide feedback to this game's developers. As such I did not/have not read the other 10 threads you speak of.

So doing HM DF we experienced NM mechanics on Gatekeeper and Grob-thok. Then we went to HM DP and experienced more NM mode mechanics on Tyrans. Grob-thok's pipe smash pathing was the NM version. The NM mechanic on Tyrans was present in HM people getting marked for death and having to jump off the platform and click to clear the debuff on simplification. On Gatekeeper one of the mobs was "healing to full" lol... just a trip down memory lane there for you sorcs/sages. Apparently nobody bothered to test hm content on the pts and why would they I guess. Anyway either the merge with the live build is broken or the code was not properly tested I dunno.... FYI for the devs. Oh and MMG's dropping off every boss. Im guessing thats a nightmare mode thing to and not supposed to be in HM. Oh but look there are those new tactical flashpoints...... wait.

The content cycle has felt downright glacial in SWTOR for a good stretch now. They have yet to grasp a fundamental rule that is that elder game content and plenty of it is what keeps games thriving long term. Swtor is a revenue success for EA atm that much is true. Go take a look at where the lion's share of the revenue is coming from now and more specifically from what part of the playerbase. Then ask yourself whether subscribers and/or raiders fit into that economic priority list. NIM DF NIM DP should have been launched the day that the SM and HM versions were launched not at some as yet undetermined time months and months after the fact. Everytime this happens from content cycle to content cycle more of the raider base (and pvp base) goes away. You know the people who want to test the new ops on the pts and see how they work help with feedback etc etc. The community dwindles but the ftp base skyrockets. And all you are left with eventually is a server filled with General Chat that makes your IQ go down just looking at it.

Last night we experienced some very strange issues with the Thrasher fight on HM. Firstly Parsec was registering very bizarre threat measurements for all our raiders. For dps TPS was nearly 4-5 times DPS and for heals it was even higher. In addition to the above with the ping issues that a couple of our raiders experienced while Mumble remained unaffected I can only assume the server could not keep up? The Harbinger btw. The snipers were hitting for nearly 4.5-5k a pop. People were getting thrown up on the wall only to immediately find themselves right back on the ground. We have never experienced these sorts of things before in there? I can only wonder if something was bugged or if when the launcher was updated something happened??? I just wonder if anyone else saw this happen yesterday?

/bump Still looking for that great healer to round out our second raid group!! We have cake, pie, cookies, waffes, and bacon. Good times to be had. Join us.. it is your destiny! Omegasix

Dagobah Exiles is recruiting one raid geared Sage healer for its 2nd ops team for 2.4 and beyond. An ideal candidate would be a raid aware competent healer with command of his/her class skills with some experience in HM Ops and wearing at least Arkanian lvl gear fully augmented. Preferably some Underworld/Verpine. Our guild is an adult guild filled mostly with working professionals. As such we ask that all interested parties be at least 21. While debuachery and foul language are tolerated inmaturity and general douchebaggery are not. Candidate should be willing to help us progress into 2.4 and become part of our 2nd HM ops group. We are a tight knit group that likes to have fun and at the same time get it done. We are probably classified as casualcore raiding on a two day a week raid schedule Tues/Thurs 9cst-11cst or a bit later depending on progression. Our primary ops group has cleared all HM content and is currently ventured into NM terrirtory. Our secondary ops group (the ops group you would be joining has cleared HM TFB and is currently half way through HM S&V.) Interested candidates may contact Omegasix. We look forward to filling our spot with a great sage. Thank you for your consideration.

With lots of talk and theorycrafting swirling on the forums and an allegedly imminent fix to relic stacking incoming for 2.1.1 next week it seems that some clarification is required by the devs. Your position is that two like relics (Underworld Relic Of Serendipitous Assault and Partisan Relic of Serendipitous Assault) as an example should not be stacking procs as they currently are. There also seems to be some issue with relics interfering with each other that should in theory not do so. I was getting some strange results while parsing with an Underworld Relic Of Serendipitous Assault combined with an Arkanian Relic Of Cerulean Nova as a Gunnery Commando. One procs 510 power the other procs energy damage. Both with separate proc intervals. My point is that the devs really need to provide some clarity with the upcoming patch "fix" with respect to what can work with what. While I enjoy parsing and theorycraft as much as the next guy/gal there seems to be enough confusion and mixed or conflicting results by posters on the forums to warrant a proper explanation from the devs. If you agree say so. PS. I would like for this thread to remain civil in the hopes that a CM might actually read it and we can get a clear response. Regards. Me

/teabag

Zara: Take this for what value it has to you. Former WOW raider here five plus years: in vanilla did c'thun did the original naxx... BT HYjal Sunwell... etc etc etc. On our server we were a top 5 Horde guild in every xpac for what that's worth. WOW and SWTOR two different experiences. IMHO the differences lie in the fun factor. Blizz, by allowing mods, essentially backed themselves into a corner over time. To keep up with the hardcore raid base they had to create more complicated mutl-phase multi-mechancic fights largely because they allowed mods like DBM and Healbot and others. The game went from an exultant cry of victory in the beginning when you beat that progression boss to a weary affirmation of accomplishment at the end. Stress levels, short fuses, the margin for error all pushed to their absolute limits because encounter designers had to keep up with mods. Again my humble opinion feel free to vehemently disagree. Some of the other poster comments nailed the difference well. In this game you dont need mods. Are the encounters less complicated. To an extent yes. Less phases, a few core mechanics but a level of teamwork, communication, and awareness that feel altogether different than wow. In the end that adds up to more fun and to me that's what an mmo is supposed to be. If that makes it a more casual game then so be it. I prefer it immensely.

I think I get the general consensus. For the record if your re-read my post it was theorycrafting question for the community. You could conceivably swap out the Advanced Inititative Enhancements for Advanced Asaault Enhancements. The question is whether giving up the potentially 150 points of accuracy assuming (3) is worth the crit gain. And I see that the general consensus from the community is no. Didn't come here to start a flame war simply posing a theorycrafting question to the community.

Everything I have ever read on the subject, guides, conventional wisdom, community consensus suggest that we should be at or as close to 100% accuracy (ranged) and therefore 110% tech accuracy so as to deal with boss mitigation which has been puported to be 10%. I have very diligently balanced my spec around this principle with all other factors being considered. Within the crit threshold, at the surge diminshing returns cap etc. Recently however I have become concerned that this accuracy cap assertion may not be correct in practice and am therefore polling the gunnery community for their input. I have a fellow gunnery guildie who sits at 90% accuracy (ranged) and swears he never misses. In place of that accuracy he is stacking additional crit and power. He is parsing exceptionally well in HM TFB roughly 150 dps better than our other commandos in the other raid groups who are accuracy capped in equivalent gear. Just looking for the thoughts of the community here with respect to this seemingly contrarian finding.

Bioware nailed the difficulty lots of fun and very challenging. The real problem and the true shame of it however is that in all likelihood it may become the least played FP on HM of them all. Why? Simply put if you have to be in full Columi or near full Columi to have a reasonable chance at success then the rewards do not match the difficulty. People will run it once or twice to say they did it and then it will collect dust. I am not suggesting that Bioware add Rakata drops on every boss but there probably needs to be a reason for people to go back in there more than once or twice. You can now crit craft a better MH than the Columi one that drops in there and after you have the Rakata chest there is no reason to go back save for helping guildies/friends get theirs. (Assuming of course you do not already have yours from SOA) So why not spice it up with random non-set boss drops that are somewhere between Columi and Rakata or perhaps have the bosses drop Black Hole comms? Its a great FP ( I want them tough like this) but with the preponderance of Columi floating around atm the place may not see much replay time. Just sayin.