I agree. I think that it is important that the devs acknowledge that this a very low effort attempt to avoid talking about something embarrassing. They promised some content by a certain date, which has come and gone. While that alone is frustrating, and not all together surprising, I think their damage control plan of "head in the sand and ban people for mentioning it" makes things 100x worse. Even if they don't have a plan internally for if/when it is going to release, they should be able to do better than ignoring the community completely. eg. "We know people are eager to hear about Master Mode R4, and as soon as we have a plan we're ready to share you'll be the first to know". Something that is essentially nothing is better than punishing the community for asking questions.

Is anyone else having an issue with the launcher (steam edition) not even opening? I've uninstalled and installed it several times. I even tried to create a new user on my PC and install it on their account, figuring something might be off in my AppData folder. But alas, no luck. It looks like it is trying to launch, and then immediately acts as if nothing happened and I can click the "Play" button in steam again. Please help!

Based on this from their post: The way combat styles will work is that every few levels, players will have one of the following occur: Receive a new ability Choose from 1 of 3 abilities Choose from 1 of 3 passives Choose from 1 of 3 passives or abilities It doesn't seem that way. You just get to select 1.

Pretty sure you need to talk to the droid twice in order to be granted all of your expected abilities.

Not sure about this, but when I was on the PTS someone was letting people know that you need to talk to the droid that gives you your pre-selected leveling options TWICE in order to actually have all of the intended abilities.

You wont regret it if you do! This server has a great community, active PvE crowd and from as far as I can tell, a semi active PvP crowd. Give it a shot

Not unplayable. All you need to do is routinely look at the ceiling and then back down. The platforms will then be there. (also on Garj, the rocks wont show up till you do the fun ceiling look trick as well) In all honesty it makes me think that this would be a really cool mechanic they could add in to an operation down the road. We've got character facing mechanics on Revan, how about some camera controlled ones? Annoying, yes. Unplayable, by no means.

I assume you're talking about SM? Gosh it would have been nice to have all these mechanics changes mentioned in the patch notes somewhere...

Don't forget about the ladies mate!

Update from raiding last night (these thoughts are from the perpective of a sage healer with 198 armorings, 216/220 mods/enhancements): A quick note on gearing. In SM, each boss drops a piece of 216 MK-X assembled gear, as well as an assigned piece of 216 MK-2 gear (BiS enhancement, lettered mod) to one person per boss. This is regardless of if you are using group finder. EV SM is enjoyable. Hard enough that people will die if they totally ignore mechanics are the healers aren't actually trying. For those of you that don't know, they added several things to EV SM. 1. Soa now has a blue circle on the floor where the pylon will drop, so just keep him in the blue. 2. After the puzzle boss, you teleport to the lootbox as soon as the puzzle is finished. 3. They added an invisible wall across where we usually jump the lava to skip adds on the puzzle boss. HA. Jerks... KP SM is slightly harder than EV. The final boss puts out a decent amount of damage. Things that changed in KP SM. 1. No longer is there a puzzle. As soon as you start the fight, and periodically throughout, you get a full stack on all three of the screens and just have to click the fire. 2. (not sure if the was a thing before) The rocks that the big dude throws, no longer leave an accuracy reducing cloud behind. EV HM is more fun, all the mechanics are there as you'd expect them. Damage output is such that I wasn't ever bored as a healer, but I wasn't ever really worried either. The first boss was enjoyable, the damage on Garj is pretty intense when the adds come out and he's doing frenzy. (side note, on our run the rocks and soa platforms are still invisible until you look up at the ceiling and back down.) KP HM is essentially the same as EV HM. Fun to heal, things die far more slowly, and all the mechanics are back. ToS HM was... hard. We were working with some rando from allies that barely parsed above the tanks, and cleared Malaphar with 15 seconds to spare on the enrage. Healing was tight, really really fun. Expect a well tuned group to pull about 12-13k DTPS on that boss. Sword Squadron. Um, the ground burst missiles do 50-60k in 198 armorings, so that hurts. All in all, I'm excited for the coming months. I didn't get into progression raiding until Oricon, so having an entire swath of operations that i've never done on tier is exciting.

I wonder about the difference between NiM and HM. For instance, is are they new HMs that we had from SoR still on teir with NiM level content? Or is NiM Council and Brontes way harder comparatively? Excited to try them myself, but thought I'd see if anyone had any first hand experience.

I've heard that the bolster in SM is... 60K HP ridiculous, and makes running story mode operations fairly easy. Has anyone had a chance to run some of the Hard Mode operations? I know it's probably too early to ask, but I wonder what the difficulty ranking is between HM SOA and HM Revan for instance. Anyone that has had any HM raiding experience post 4.0 I'd love to hear what's changed. Thanks guys!

Haha, noice m8. You had me worried that you could pwn the new ops wits a Flashpoint group

Aren't you at all excited to be able to gain meaningful experience points from helping your lower leveled friend do heroics, missions, and flashpoints? Sure it wont be you carrying them through and them running to catch up. It might actually end up being you two playing the game together. And remember, you'll still be mega overpowered, but you wont faceroll everything with one force wave.

It does. But they raised it higher than the current cap for affection because they want people with max affection to be able to participate