f13.net

Folks,

I've been starting to run the lower tier hard mode instances lately and the progressing is pretty interesting.  When we started to do the higher tier flashpoints, it seems that they are more easily accomplished with some group builds than others. I was wondering what experiences many of you have had.  

Juggernaut (DPS), Powertech (Tank), Sniper (DPS), and Merc (Healer).  

The biggest problem that we've encountered was that of heat generation in teh Merc being to great for some boss fights for the healer to keep up.  When we swap out a Sorc for the Merc, the fights become much easier.

Second, my sniper spec seems to matter on some encounters.  When bosses have special attacks that count attackers within a range window, marks spec sniper is almost mandatory.  It minimizes the occurrence of special attacks while allowing for burst dps.  This sucks because I pvp most of the time and prefer a lethality spec.  It's almost to the point that I want to respec just for some flashpoints to make them easier.  I hate this.

Any advice or issues that you've encountered?  Let's discuss.    

*crickets*  :awesome_for_real:

I am still waiting for people to hit 50!

If people feel like helping me out, I'm attempting to compile a loot list for each hardmode.  If you don't mind, could you take a screenshot, or just jot down the name of the boss and the loot they drop and either PM here or email me (Draegan@rerollz.com) I would be very grateful!

How much poopsocking do the last 10 levels entail, levelling seemed to slow up a lot in the 30s, I'm kind of expecting 40-50 to take longer than 20-40?

I didn't notice any particular slowdown, but I was grouped basically the whole time.

I only did a few of the hard mode flashpoints, looking for groups is such a pain I don't bother. A problem my groups pretty much always ran into was that the DPS was awful or the enrage timers are very unforgiving. I think I'll wait for the inevitable nerf before I go back to do them. They're pretty much like BC heroics difficulty-wise.

I've tanked a few now and the tuning is still  :uhrr:.    Esseles hard mode rarely even has 2 elites in the same pull.   Basically the whole thing is still 2 man except for the bosses.    Most of the bosses were reasonably difficult.   Then all the sudden the mandalorian captain is nutpunching my full champ gear group out of nowhere.   No combat log  :oh_i_see: has us looking up what his abilities do and a few more wipes to kill him.    So we finish him and then the second half of the instance is a cake walk in comparison.   Other flashpoints were more of the same.

TLDR:

- No combat log is full on retard.
- Wait for the patch.

Belsavis was a bit convoluted, but worked. Voss felt like a bit of a slog but mostly because I was 2 levels under the quests, so it was a planet I didn't really like the storyline for + harder than normal encounters. Last planet was a breeze.

There's a slowdown from 40-50 compared to say 20-30, but not that much. Questing keeps you leveling at a decent clip and I found the story to break things up enough to make me forget that I was killing 500 fozzles.

One of the things I've enjoyed most about this game was the evenness of the pace after level 30.  I felt that 30-40 took about the same time as 40-50.  Perhaps I was enjoying the story enough to not notice. 

What I didn't like was the excessive amount of running for the non-story quests.  Hub-to-hub-to-hub starts to grate on me after a while.

When you start managing the quick travel cooldown more closely than any other, you something is not quite right.

I am faced with the same problem.  My guild was doing hard mode flashpoint and struggling with me being a merc healer.  Switched to sorcerers and were having no problem now.  I pretty much gave up on my 50 bodyguard and am leveling an assassin.  I am really amazed at how easy it's been to kill things.  Even more amazed at how hard it's been to find a group as a dps.  I find myself really appreciating the wow group building system more every day I watch my flashpoints go from red to yellow to grey and I realize that I won't be doing that one either with my dps character.

I did a couple more HM flashpoints on my sorceress today, Directive 7 and False Emperor. I think the only two HMs I take issue with are Boarding Party and Battle of Ilum for being so schizophrenic in their boss difficulty. I hope they smooth out the difficulty as more people start hitting 50 and venturing into the HMs. They also need to be more careful about making their fights melee friendly.

What's with every single HM boss having a timed hard enrage? All this does is punish the group (and especially the healer) for underperforming DPS.

I think they put that in to punish the group for low dps.

I think I get that part  :awesome_for_real: I just think it's lazy design *especially for 4-man dungeons* (I'd be kinda-sorta-maybe OK with each operation boss having a hard enrage) and makes pugging HMs particularly notfun -- if you get sub-par dps in your group, you may as well give up and spend another 1 hour spamming lfg.

It's not so much lazy as the only way to make a damage dealer-dependent check in a game with infinite healers.  The other ways you can mix them up, like with "Must kill this new add in 25 seconds or it blows up." stuff, bring their own problems.

You can argue the merits of overall throughput "Do not pass Go.  Do not collect $200."-style mechanics (I'm weakly in support of them) or having radically different healer resource mechanics (which I think they cocked up in a rather predictably manner), but I think we're stuck with them.

These are the times when I harken back to the days spent in FFXI where fights would take literally hours, but it was the boss and no trash along the road. I may be broken, but I miss those times. Now it is one big frantic "GO GO GO!" mentality and MOAR DoTs! than anything. Feels lazy to simply put in a timer which is what your group actually ends up battling rather than the mob. Meh.

It's also problematic that they set up 2 of the 3 healing classes to be able to heal moderately indefinitely and burst heal for 10 seconds every 2 minutes and then set up practically every fight to be 2 minutes of pure burst healing.   If one thing goes wrong and my energy falls below 60 I have 2 options:

1.  Do 5-10 seconds of weak healing  with my terrible energy regen heal and hope for free heals or
2.  Pop my 2 minute cool down to fill back up.

On the flip side if the incoming damage is light or moderate I can heal literally to the end of time.  I haven't hit hardmode flashpoints yet and at level 46 my wife and I have just started encountering 4 man heroics that we have had some difficulty soloing so I don't really know how it will shake out, my only experience is form leveling dungeons.   having said that our guilds sorceror healer seems to be having a much better time of it!

Do any gear stats actually affect heat/ammo regeneration?

Not directly, there is no MP5 or Spirit equivalent or whatever.


There are talents that cause things to regen ammo, like my tanking trooper will regen ammo on a shield block. There is a cooldown for that regen though.

Then what's the point of alacrity rating for trooper healing gear again? Doesn't that mean you maybe can land clutch heals a bit easier, but you're still pretty much limited by your heat/ammo?

I can't think of a decent fix...if you made alacrity or some stat increase heat/ammo regeneration, then mudflation will render them broken as hell even faster than it would a regular "MP" style healer.

There isn't much point. It's the same with +defense on trooper tanking gear.

While not entirely useless, the benefit from shield/absorb is much greater, thanks to our talents and stuff.

Slight derail.

What the hell is "alacrity"? And why is it in my skill tree, but i cant find any such stat in my paperdoll?

Haste, under 'Activation Speed' in the Tech/Force category on your doll, you may need to use a dropdown menu if you are on ranged/melee tab.

So... some serious design flaws in these 4 mans. 

1) There are 3 healers in game: Empire side: Merc, Operative, and Sorc, Rep side: Scoundrel, Commando, Sage

- Only Sorc/Sage can heal well for the encounter duration.  Also too little AE healing available to heal other party members when the encounters do their specials.  You really need to use gimicks to beat many of the encounters in the second tier hard modes.

2) With the length of the fights and the mobility required, Snipers/Gunslingers need Marksman dps, but can't go down the tree because they need to move so much.  Some encounters require the 35 meter range for maximum effectiveness, but demand 30m skills to complete.  It's very odd.

3) Bugs bugs and more broken bugs.  Even when you do an encounter perfectly, the bosses can still bug.  I won't go into details due to spoilers.

Seems you need the right group build, good gear, AND the encounter to not bug mid fight.  It's a mess and completely stupid in a game that takes so little time to get to the endgame.

I guess crit is sort of a "mana regen stat" in that it gives you bigger heals so you don't need to cast as much - ditto with force / tech power. This is kinda "duh" though.

Sages/inqs also get a talent that allows them to use their lifetap (health->force) skill for free and without the force regeneration penalty... when they get a crit on their 3-second channeled-heal-that-has-a-shortish-cooldown. Of course there's another talent that increases the crit chance of that channel by 25% if they cast the HOT first (which makes a crit very likely as you are getting 4 ticks of the heal during the channel), but there ya go.  :awesome_for_real:

Speaking of sages/sorcs, I've been leveling one the last few days and Oh My God... Why don't all classes have power regeneration rates like these two?  I can spam spells for 5 mins straight without running out of power.  My scout uses a full power bar in 6 abilities. 

Serious balance issues.

It's pretty crazy. My sage is only level 36, but I already have almost all of the tools I need to do well: reliable mana* regen on a short cooldown (see above), a strong absorb shield, a HOT, a very efficient channeled heal, and the obligatory small heal / big heal combo. Only thing I'm missing is my AOE heal, which is going to be the 31 point tree ability so yeah. I've actually been able to DPS most of the time during leveling flashpoints (including the crazy expensive forcequake AOE to wipe out groups of weak mobs) and only using my shield/HOT/channel with the occasional big heal... only had serious mana issues during bosses with heavy AE damage.

Of course I haven't played a healing commando or scoundrel type yet (my level 13 operative doesn't count) so no idea how their regen stacks up. From the abilities / trees it looks like the operative/scoundrels at least need to be using some damage abilities in order to get decent energy regen? That sounds like it can get annoying.

* yeah yeah force whatever.  :awesome_for_real:

At level 15, my sorc is putting up over 150k damage and 60k heals in the warfronts.  At best, my champion geared sniper can do about 300k and has to manage power and a HELL of a lot more abilities.

The Sorc/Sage has been OP since very early beta.  I didn't want to play one because I knew everyone else was going to play one.

I started a BH to heal, got him to 41 and realized that his healing tools were absolutely terrible.  When I can't keep a full geared tank companion alive from two silver mobs, there is an issue.

I'm rolling an Operative right now, level 30.  I have no experience in how he plays yet healing, but we'll see.

Just like if you get a bad tank or healer. Everyone should have to contribute, I don't think that's bad design at all.

Thanks.
So its not listed as "alacrity"?. It does what exactly?

Reduces cast time and speeds up channeling. I was trying to stack alacrity earlier in the game with mods from the comm vendor. I can't recall the exact number I had, but it reduced my spell times by .2 of a second - and can be seen on the cast bar. Bene was casting @ 1.3 whereas now it is back at 1.5 with stacking power and surge. I am going back to alacrity for my lvl 49 stuff and see what happens. It also does in fact speed up your channeling. My channeled DoT (Project?) sped up by two-tenths of a second so slightly fast dps.

Would be better if that was explained somewhere in game. Thanks though. Not much use for my Operative I guess.

The could handle it by buffing up the free heal to make it do moderate healing or increase its energy regen substantially.  But then again that may make it broken.

The problem is that for all practical purposes sorcs/sages have infinite mana because it is very difficult to go through their entire mana pool over the course of a fight, especially considering that most fights are "hurry up and kill it before the enrage timer hits." 

I don't know how they fix it without toning down sorc healing along with combat difficulty.  Toning up merc/operative healing will make them the new OP class (I am saying this as an operative).

Honestly it is kind of a mess, I feel bad for them.

It is, on the mouseover for the Activation Speed, showing how much bonus you get from talents and from alacrity rating.

I did some level 50 flashpoints as a Scoundrel healer last night. First, we tried a HM Esseles. I couldn't keep the tank alive through the first boss fight. That said her armoring/mods/enhancements ranged from 44-48. Then we tried False Emporer. Most of the time I kept them up and then we got to HK-47. And you guessed it, I couldn't keep the tank alive again. She'd die in less than 30 seconds.

That's weird, single target healing is actually what scoundrels/operatives excell at:  Keep 2 hots rolling on the main tank and then alternate long heal with the free instant.  You will never run out of energy.  If the tank dips below 30% you can spam a free heal on them indefinitely (as long as you have a single TA).   Things go south when other folk start taking damage.

If the damage is so intense a scoundrel can't keep up with a single target, ugh.

Sorc/Sage has the advantage of a much larger power pool for healing.  It's the only viable healer right now.  Our Sorc went on vacation, so we tried a few hard modes and failed with an Op and a Merc healer.  It was a mess.

Reason #47 to reroll at 50: Enrage timers.

Thanks!

I can easily see the thing with BH healing, it's tough just tanking and maintaining a decent heat level, and I have a number of venting techniques. Things get the least bit hairy and I'm at the heat cap, having the dissipation on a sliding scale is so punitive, imagine if your force/energy regenerated more slowly the more you used.

Also, Rigg's point about the undergeared tank is why I haven't been pushing to do any FPs. My gear blows. Armormech really let me down after 41, which I've griped about elsewhere here. A few blues, but I'm back to mostly oranges with blue quest mods. Normally I like to stayed gear for current level, which I know isn't the fashion in 'race to the endgame' mmo, but imo leveling is way too fast in TOR...without any space combat or pvp.

Energy does in fact regenerate more slowly the more you use on smugglers/IAs. Dunno about Consular/Inquisitor force. JK/SW focus/rage is a different sort of model with its own challenges.

I only have to worry about my sorc and his force bar when Khem is tanking something particularly nasty and I am chain healing him. Other than that, the yellow bar may not even exist -- it's the health bar that is my primary concern.

The ammo/heat/energy model is more interesting to manage for sure, but most people don't want "interesting" for their healer's resource management (although I do!  :why_so_serious:). My sage rarely runs out of power (and I DO like their little mana management thing), though. Perhaps one day I will finally see what she's like in a heroic flashpoint. Hurry up, Slap in the Force.

I wonder, though, how much the issue with non-sage/sorc healing is just people having to learn the New Way. Sage/sorc healing is basically the same healing you've done in any MMO ever, so there is pretty much no adjustment to make. The other healers are pretty different. Not saying I can't see how their model makes it rough for hard fights, I just sort of suspect it's more a combination of their slightly rude for long fights mechanics and people learning how to even deal with that in the first place than 100% they're a shitty healing class.

I'm fairly confident the Commando Healing is mostly a resource/class issue at it's base, since they reworked it a fuck load just before Beta ended.

Merc healing is great for continual small use, but fucked on spike healing. Sure, you can put out a good amount of heals, then do nothing at all or very, very little while heat regens.

Commando healing's resource fixing mechanic is also less than ideal in sustained damage scenarios (basically, your slow big heal and your beam of low HoT light fuel your regen. Neither is something you want to be spamming during a boss fight, for ammo and throughput reasons)

I've found I can keep a lot of healing going on a single target (fast heal->slow heal->autoattack is a full regen cycle and ammo neutral. Slow heal->auto->auto is ammo neutral as well. Both not counting using supercharge to pull yourself out of a hole), it's when the group is all melees and the target in question is punishing against clumps of people that I run into serious problems.

PVP however? So many people taking random damage means I'll run out of ammo in seconds trying to drop normal heals on people, and there's no room for much in the way of regen phases.

This is sort of what I found. I could keep everyone pretty much maxed during normal fights. We hit that boss and he did damage faster than I could heal it. Apparently as a scoundrel healing through burst damage requires some skill I don't know about or is just not possible.

Having 3 heal specs, and only 1 can heal endgame content.  :uhrr:

If anything, the big thing Sages have over the others is a really REALLY good AE heal comparatively. Kolto Cloud is pretty lame (~300 every 3 seconds, PBAE), Kolto Bomb has a pretty low target cap (3 people, can't even AE heal a full flashpoint group) as well as being pretty low healing.

I'm pretty certain that force regenerates at a constant rate, and sorcerors/sages get a lot of it. If someone wanted to nerf something, they could look at reducing the force pool size, because as far as I know they don't have a cooldown ability to boost regen unless you are assassin/deception.

Yeah, I noticed a couple sorcs with something like 600 force...wish I could sextuple the size of my heat pool!

Base 100, +400 for being a Sorcer, +100 through bottom-tier talents.  Plus the options for a 9% reduced cost and a 10% stacking regen buff.

Agents get base 100 power + bonuses, but nothing close to that.  As a bonus, our regen rate slows as our power gets low.  The heat mechanic isn't all that different.  I've been leveling a sorc alt and it's silly how easy the class is to play compared to my agent.  Fewer things to manage and a larger power pool.  Nice balance Bioware!

It would almost be worth it if Agents could get more throughput by managing their heat better, but from what I have seen, my heals are worse than the base sorc heals  :uhrr:.

They really need to sex those two heals up to bring them up closer to the sage's level. I mean yes, the sage AE heal is the Last Talent in their tree, but still.

So is the smugglers/ia's, and its terrible!

Doubling every heal amount on the BH/IA would make the classes a lot more interesting. Allow you to really screw yourself up heatwise attacking and such. I'd be happy with 1.5 time cooldown on the heals too.  Nothing really fun about hitting little heal then big heal continuously,

I also don't get the PvP healing nerf. They need to make heals do like 2 times as much in PvP to make them worthwhile.

You can wind up in situations where healing is silly even now in pvp (I had a match where nobody died the entire goddamned game. Both sides were 6 healers deep), but I do think the healing nerf is a bit much considering that chain healing isn't really a thing in SWTOR. Most healers are going to run out of gas right quick if they need to just pump heals into someone.

Ah, I didn't realize it was the last talent for them too! The trooper/BH one is somewhere in the middle, I assumed the smuggler one was too since it also sort of sucks. They EXTRA need to buff the smuggler one, then, the consular one kicks its ass.

To start, they should do away with the "the less you have the less you regen" mechanic; it's hard enough managing a small energy pool, I don't see the sense in making it even harder.  Then, they should buff healing, if it's crappy for several classes.  Healers seem to be pretty rare, and the fact that the UI sucks doesn't help things.

I actually really like the mechanic. It lets me burst if needed, but put myself in the hole by doing so. Essentially I have a 40 energy pool, but can go negative if I think I can afford it.

The only time I curse it is pug heroic4s. Because healing everyone offtanking their own target so the damage is spread out and the targets aren't burning fast enough = god damn it. But I haven't had any complaints with the system when it's a solid group who lets someone tank and the DPS moves out of fire.

One thing I have noticd, I auto heal myself if I have noone targeted, without having to untarget the enemy. That is quite useful for soloing. Now, if it would let me do that for, say, my tank in group flashpoints I could help with interupts and stuff and be more useful.

If you have a mouse with side buttons, bind sidebutton1 to 'self target' and sidebutton2 for 'focus target'. Set your companion as the focus while soloing and tank while grouping, profit*!

Re the energy business: it actually reminds me of Guild Wars healer energy management. You'd start a fight with your regen weapon/offhand (++ regen, no mana bonus) and if you got really low and still needed to burst-heal, you switched to your high-energy weapon/offhand (no regen, ++ mana bonus). If you ran out of THAT mana as well, either the fight should be close to over or you were screwed and had to spend quite some time not casting in your regen weapon/offhand set. If you were facing enemies that burned mana, you'd switch to your low energy set (+++ regen, negative mana bonus) until it was over which allowed you to make a part of your mana pool 'untouchable'. Was a pretty decent design IMO, especially for pvp.
ed: obviously it's not working in SWTOR though... so yeah, commando/scoundrel healers need some love.

* assuming you are cool with not mounting between combats, since it kills the focus window  :oh_i_see:

Nice. Maybe I'll buy one of those crazy expensive razer mice. So focus target will be the one I autoheal when I run healing spells? I saw a setting for creating a focus target in the preferences but I couldn't find anywhere to tell me what a focus target IS.

The focus target appears to the top-right of the 'normal' target as a smaller target frame. It's pretty buggy, so buffs/debuffs will not be showing properly on the 'normal' target as long as you have a focus.

What I do is hold down the first side button if I need to heal myself while having an ally targeted (typically in pvp), and the second side button if I need to heal my focus target while I have an enemy targeted (healing the tank in groups while still being able to interrupt the boss; healing my companion while attacking the enemy).

For those interested, the new Rakghoul (sp?) instance was pretty fun.  Good atmosphere is all I'll say without spoiling it for others.  The bonus boss is also fun. 

Give it a shot if you have the time.

More or less story in it then Black Talon? Or rather, how much story is it or is it just a standard clear the dungeon.

In terms of straight "grind Social Points" it's more False Emperor (or Foundry I guess, but I haven't run that one recently) than Black Talon but it has great atmosphere and is tons of fun all around.

I did another HM BT run tonight with a BH healer.  It went very well, much better than the last 2 times with a SI healer.  Our healer had no problems keeping us all up and when I asked him how he liked healing as a BH he said he loved it.  Maybe people just have to adjust to the heat based resource that BHs have and unlearn trying to play their healer like they have a mana pool, which is probably why the SI seems like the superior healer.

The difference in healing ability has been overstated, but I think SI healers are definitely superior. It's hard just going by anecdotal evidence though.

The new flashpoint is pretty  :awesome_for_real:.  I think it's my fave out of them all.

Not to be a buzz kill, but try having them heal a different hard mode.  BT is trivially easy and can be run with 3 players and a companion with almost no trouble.  When you run into a boss that can spike multiple 5k hits on players, you'll see where the heat mechanic can't come close to a sorc/sage's 600 force power pool and AE healing ability.

The main difference I've seen is that a sorc has a larger buffer for pressure phases (meaning that they can dip farther into their mana pool on a sustained basis than the non mana healers), and a vastly superior AE Heal.

When I got the smuggler AE heal I assumed nobody but the tank ever took damage if things were going right, because what crazy fucking dev would put AE fights in a game with that as the primary AE Heal.

As for BH/Commando healing: I love it on it's face, but I've yet to play in hard modes with it. Really, I do NOT want to futz with hard modes without a combat log. I had enough of a rude surprise with Bulwark's completely random graphic-less 5K hits.

I'll just say this: One of the best players in our guild (and one of the best gamers I've played with in all my years) plays a Merc and tried healing Sector 7 hard mode.  After several attempts at one of the bosses, he respecced to dps and vowed not to heal again until they fix Merc healing.  For the record, both he and our powertech tank were reasonably well geared for the instance, used stims, adrenals, and med packs as necessary.  

Since then our sorc has healed everything and we race through hard modes without issue.

I made the same decision as your Merc player with my Operative with regards to flashpoints.

Operations are another matter thankfully (at least through normal mode) as I really feel like I can leverage my class's strengths a lot better there between Cover protecting me from certain boss mechanics and having fantastic mobility.  Even Recuperative Nanotech makes a good showing on Soa where Revivification just isn't practical during some key healing phases.

Double Sorc might still be better than a Sorc and an Op or Merc, but I'm happy enough with how my guild's doing that I'm not considering racing a Sorc to level cap like I was a few weeks ago.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16826104577

That's very nice! How programmable is it? I've respecced my scoundrel to DPS and am quite happy. Would it be possible for me to use this mouse to spec to fire off certain abilities for me that aren't on my main hotbar?

I have the M500, and beware that two of the buttons will be the wheel being able to be clicked sideways (left right).

The Logitech Intellipoint(?) software lets you create multiple profiles, and lets you assign any keys to buttons.  I think it autodetects what executable you're using for the current game and switches to the profile you assigned for it.  I haven't explored the macro functionality yet.

I've reprogrammed my buttons to function as arrow keys and the strafe keys, for movement.  You can definitely bind any toolbar key to any button, but the SWTOR UI won't let you use any abilities on a toolbar if the toolbar isn't visible on your screen.  I have abilities on the bottom center bar, and when I hide it the keybindings for the bottom center stop working altogether.

Yeah, I only bind the forward and back buttons, in most mmo for pet attack/back off. In TOR I have back bound to hutball, but I'll bind hutball to forward if we ever do VOIP because I like push-to-talk on the back button. I don't use the software, just in-game binds.

And that's one of my few gripes about the TOR UI. When companion abilities weren't persistently off, I'd keep the bar up on the left...so I couldn't use any of the hotkeys on the left bar (because it was hidden 'under' the companion bar).

I got one of the Razer Naga mice last year for my birthday with the twelve thumb buttons on the side. It took about a week to get used to it, but now I almost never use the number keys, it's awesome.

Those comfortable to use?  They look rather bulky, but I've been meaning to replace my Death Adder, which is starting to behave erratically.  I have a $75 gift card for Amazon still sitting around from Christmas.

After my experience with the razer tron mouse, I'm not sure I'm cut out for a mouse with buttons in the thumb spot. Also, I'm a sucker for logitech ergonomics, I never realized how much I love their thumb rest until I didn't have it.

I find the Razer mice to be much more responsive and accurate.  I also love me some thumb buttons.

I love my deathadder, but the side buttons were wonky on swtor until I set it (swtor) to win2000 compatibility mode.

I talked about it in one of the zillion threads. Love the technical specs of the mouse, the ergonomics suck. I also love thumb buttons, just not placed where my thumb grips the mouse. The Logitech (and most of the razer) set them at the top of the thumb cavity, which is perfect. Also, the razer mouse is angular, so it dug into my palm and index finger; I was also getting some cramping from gripping it /under/ the thumb/right side buttons.

Those Naga mice are wicked tempting, but I'd want to buy it from somewhere I can easily return it (the tron mouse was a wootoff, I'd chew up what I paid for it shipping it back, most likely).

I'm still using an old G5. The finish has never worn one bit since I bought it years ago, it's been dropped dozens of times, and it runs great. The pads on the bottom are jussst about to start being a problem however. Gonna be bummed to replace it because I can't find something of similar quality.

It came with three different things you can put on the right side of you, where your palm is. I picked the largest one and I found that to be the most comfortable. They also give you little nubs to put on the thumb buttons to assist with getting used to the buttons.

I find it a little awkward using the bottom row (10, 11 and 12) but other than that I love it. It does take a good week of use and I found it hard to adjust to a character I had already been playing. It was easier to use with a character that I actually leveled with it.

I stepped into my first HM tonight, and man.....it was rough.  I think the tank was DPS spec'd and geared, because he couldn't tank for shit.  After he got kicked, we gave a go at the last boss using the other sorc's Khem Vhal, and actually did better.  We had another person come in and tank it so we could finish, and it went much more smoothly. 

Any BC people with 50s who are still playing want to try to get a guild group together some night to knock some HMs out? 

Something to know about HM's:  Some mobs seem to have no aggro table... they can't be taunted.  This happens a lot in boss fights.  Second, companions generate more aggro, faster and do a reasonable job as tanks.  After you run an instance a few times, you'll get the system down.  We usually just have the dps burn the regular, then strong, then tough mobs in that order.  Aggro becomes less of an issue for the tank and they have an easier go of it.  

Trash wasn't a problem, really.  It was BT, which is supposed to be the easiest one.  He couldn't stay alive fighting the bosses.  We basically had to either all toss heals on him when we could, and thus hit the enrage timer, or stick to DPSing and have him either lose aggro or just get stomped into the ground.  We made it to the last boss through luck and battle rezzes, but had to replace him to finish. 

Using a G5 myself - I'd left it back in England when I emigrated here, and picked it up when I went back to see the folks for the holidays. Still by far the best mouse I've ever used. The texture, shape, weight and accuracy are fantastic.

The scroll wheel on my G5, which was never great to begin with, it flaky enough now that it's bothering me. The G500 is basically the new version of the G5 so I've got one of those on order to try.

It gets easier as you get geared and BT is a great place to start.  Just having a decently geared tank will make things much easier as aggro and healing won't be a struggle. 

I'd be willing to try BT hard mode with Komoto, but as I've said elsewhere, his gear is pretty ragged. Should probably run through the end of Ilum at least.

Playing my Shadow makes me really wish I had taken biochem, though. Permanent stims and medpac (haven't even gotten to adrenals yet) is just too awesome for tanking.

I've found I enjoy tanking for the most part, but the gear requirements mean I'll probably never do anything at the end game with it.

Might want to spend a few minutes each day running the belsavis heroics. If you are willing to take a few deaths the can be completed fairly quickly. The ilum one is fast too. That will get you an awesome enhancement and a lot of commendations might get you a mod or armor piece too. And a 50 weapon for one of your companions.

I just started hardmodes with my guildees, and I have to say I am not very impressed.  The whole thing just smacks of incredibly lazy design and over-reliance on insta-kill mechanics and gear checks.

Enrage timers:

- half the bosses have them
- In fights with movement mechanics this is punishing on even well geared melee.  I would much prefer to have an undergeared ranged than a geared melee on many of these fights.
- the timer seems too short for many of these.
- You can exploit the lol pathfinding abilities of many bosses and kite them around objects while you slowly whittle them down after they hit enrage

Trash:

-  Do I really need to wade through 15-20 pulls to get to the next boss?  I had flashbacks to the Molten core.

Instakill

- many bosses have instakill mechanics that give the player literally no time to react, punishing folks for standing in the fire is one thing, having them die instantly is quite another.  We lost the end BT fight because our tank was a second too late getting out of bubblegums ridiculuous AOE

I've been healing on my operative and I have to say it actually is not too bad.  Of course I just spam 2 heals over and over again.

Hardmodes so far have been frustrating but not difficult in the traditional sense. I agree with amiable's assessment on the trash and insta-wipe mechanics. There's very little you can do on a fight that has the insta-kill except focus on it. On the republic side, the last boss spams a quick targetting recticle on the ground and it 1.5 seconds he fires the insta-kill force storm. Where it really hurts you is when it's targetting your healer, who is constantly moving rather than healing because that's all that matters on the fight.

I just did Hard Mode Kaon yesterday. The bosses? One shots. The trash? Wiped us 11 times. It's just so many running, dark, weird pulls where shit runs in from nowhere or explodes from the ground in ambushes. Very annoying. Trash gets to 10% and explodes. Trash screams at you and knocks you 30 yards backwards. Trash has a skill that CC's a player until it's interrupted. IT'S FUCKED UP THAT THE TRASH IS WORSE THAN THE BOSSES.

This game is very dependent on gear, the use of cooldowns when they're up (especially relics), and using the best spec/rotation.  If you can manage to have a run without bugs, things go pretty quickly.  Other than the new flashpoint, most can be done in 30-40 minutes or so.

We all had full sets of champion/centurion gear before we started hard modes, so I'm not calibrated on trying them without at least a purple in every slot.  Once you have at least tionese in all slots, things go pretty well.  If your tank and healer are well geared, it's very easy.  Work on getting them set up first.  Our healer dps'es on just about everything but boss fights now. 

My big annoyance is that each class has a very distinct pve and pvp spec.  Without dual speccing, I have to respec every time we run hardmodes to make things the most efficient.  Sure, we do fine running them when I'm in my pvp spec, but you can feel the drag it places on the group.

I really don't like all the little short CDs like relics and adrenals.

When I think of the epitome of fun dungeon fights I usually hearken back to some of the mechanics in LOTRO where they gradually ramp up the difficulty throughout the fight through different phases and punish you for poor play, not arbitrary gear checks.  For example, take the hard mode forge end boss from mines of moria.  Distinct phases, with errors in the later phases causing gradaully increased problems that eventually overwhelm the party unless they stay on top of adds, movement, etc...  Wow also had a lot of good mechanics too where a fight ramped up in difficulty if it took too long.

Here it's just: you hit the 2 minute timer, you die.  You stood for .5 seconds in the wrong place, you die.  You didn't get your dot cleansed in the first global cooldown(partially because of our TERRIBLE healing interface), you die.  Even when we win I don't really feel a sense of acomplishment, I just think "Oh good, I guess we made the timer."

It's like the un-patched stonecore instance from WoW (stupid instakill mechanics) except here it is practically every boss :-(.

Yea, I posted the same thing a page or two ago. Hard enrages are lazy design... there are plenty of things they could've done to make a fight harder and harder as it goes on so that a low-dps but very coordinated group can still win.

Most of my guildies are pretty good at following directions and moving out of the fire, but some of them aren't so hot at maximizing their own dps. Back in WOW-BC we one-shot Netherspite (beam boss requiring good planning/execution) every time, but struggled with Moroes (dps-intense fight with a 'soft enrage' since Moroes puts a new bleed on someone every time he vanishes) due to how low our dps was... and no, we didn't stack healers or anything. Something tells me running hardmodes with guildies is not going to be a very fun experience :P

I would just give anything for a completely different boss mechanic that was more about improvisation and unpredictability. I really hate this kind of gameplay where it's about memorizing and reproducing an elaborate choreography. Like something that was more akin to going up against a human-controlled boss only without the high probability of the controller being a douchestain.

Isn't the last boss [well, set of bosses] of Boarding Party / Mandalorian Raiders kinda like that? The problem with such encounters: most players hate them. Especially if the enemy NPCs ignore traditional aggro, use player abilities (and are susceptible to effects that affect players but not bosses) and try to do 'intelligent' stuff like CC-ing party members, interrupting heals, healing each other, cleansing CC and debuffs, ...

Obligatory wow links - BRD tier 0.5 arena fight (http://www.wowhead.com/quest=9015#comments) (vanilla), Priestess Delrissa (http://www.wowhead.com/npc=24560#comments) (BC), Faction Champions (http://www.wowhead.com/object=195631) (WOTLK). I personally love these fights to death, but I understand that this POV is a minority. :P

Right. But I think that's because of the operant conditioning employed in most MMOs: the boss is a lever I press to get my cheese, give me my electric shocks with non-cheese-getting until I learn the pattern of levers to press until I can get my cheese every time. Not "this is like PvP only less douchefilled", which really does make for a better experience in the long haul.

The problem is they make tanks irrelevant. Which I play. If you allow dual speccing and make the entire zone like that? Ok we're at least well aware of what's going on. If you make it the 3rd fight in a zone with 4 other bosses that operate normally? RAGE!

There are a lot of ways to make fights more interesting than enrage timers. One is stacking buffs with exponential effects, or stacking debuffs on the players. One is a progressive CC set on party members (ie- starting with 1 person for 4s, moving to 2, 3, 4, then 1 person for 8s). You can have the "mana drains" or exponential adds or decreasing ability cooldowns. Shit, there are tons of ways around this without <2M = win, >2m = lose.

Not when you have infinite and non-infinite healers in the same game.

In other games, the vast majority of bosses do have enrage timers (or more broadly speaking, "DPS checks"), they're just relative to a healer's resource pool instead of hardcoded.  That's out the window because of infinite healers.  Another option is to have the boss do an ever increasing amount of damage, but that doesn't impact all the healers equally either.  Force healers can shift their healing around quite easily to deal with that phase because of their large resource pools whereas the other two have a maximum output they can sustain without a low-damage period following it.

You can also hide DPS checks by saying "you must kill this new add in X or it blows up" but depending on specifics that's more a check for "burst DPS" or "sustained AOE DPS" which may not be where the game is particularly well balanced.

On a social note, I also like explicit enrage timers because they are clearly a "do more damage" message instead of getting the healer blamed for being bad and running out of resources.

I loved Faction Champions as a tank. Just throwing that out there.

Isn't there a boss in Cadamimu (however you spell this place) that sends his bot to freeze you for a period, then picks the next person?

The other thing I'm running into right now is I can't tell if I'm terrible at the Jedi Guardian tanking, or if the class is just horrifically underpowered with threat.

I honestly think I can't be THAT bad considering I was fine on a warrior in WoW, but damn I can't hold anything beyond single targeting.

Threat generation in the game is a mess.  It's not you, it's the game.

Specifically, it is JKs. Our threat is low compared to the other 2 tanks.

EDIT: There may also be an element of no auto attack meaning your baseline threat is not where you expect it to be.

Yeah, I find threat generation terribly confusing.

You know, I do think you could do a style of 'improvised tanking' that would work pretty well on a boss that didn't have a single set choreography. I know that one of the most skillful, interesting things I see tanks in MMOs do is less 'generate massive threat on single targets and keep it steadily throughout' and more 'snare/distract/pull something that's out of control or heading for the wrong guy' kind of thing. It's really a subset of how quick-thinking PvP players change targets to stop healers, occupy dangerous opponents, cc vulnerable people, etc.--smart, quick readings of the total battles. I think that's where tanking is both more fun and more demanding, when it takes a leader's quick reactions to changing tactical situations.

SWTOR isn't like WoW, where all the mobs are the tanks sole responsibility is all.


I only bother grabbing aggro on Silvers or Highers in groups.

Do Jugs and Guards get an AoE taunt?

Yes.

On a 45s cooldown.

Uh, untalented it is 45 seconds. Talented it is 30 seconds. You should DEFINITELY talent it.

That must be why your general threat is worse.  I don't know about Vanguards, but I can tell you Shadows have no talents to lower the cooldown on our AoE taunt.

If so that's an utterly horrible tradeoff I'd never make by choice.

There's no way to talent Vanguard taunts to my knowledge.


Not that we need them currently.

Same here. If it's three golds and a silver, I mark the silver for burn and ignore it.

My Shadow is only 25, though, and I haven't done much in the way of real tanking. A few heroics but all the FPs have been run-throughs with some highby SLAPper for loots/SP.

My favorite PUG was on Taris, had a really good consular along, marked targets even. So I started doing a bit of marking and communicating, even though one dude just blatantly kept attacking my CC target. But with two CC'ers on the job and me tanking everything except what Mr. ImasmackCC went after (once is a mistake, twice is unfortunate, three+ you're on your own) it was a lot of fun. Then it turns out the other consular is an f13'er who hadn't been invited to SLAP yet  :grin: (I forget who, sorry!)

How would yall rank the hard modes in order of least difficult to most difficult? Also in terms of length to complete?

Black Talon: Columi bracers 
Boarding Party: Columi Gloves
False Emperor: Columi Chest
Battle of Ilum: Columi Offhand 
Directive 7: Columi Leggings
The Foundry: Columi boots -
Kaon Under Siege: Columi Helm

Black Talon is the fastest to do with a good group (35 mins), boarding party isn't bad, but the rest can take 40 mins to an hour with minmal deaths.

They need to beef up the gear drops in HM's though because you can get almost full columi in no time flat. Right now there is little replay value to them once you're geared out.

It's actually faster to get gear through Normal EV.  If you can find 8 decent ppl it's a cakewalk, and I think some of the fights are easier than some of the HM bosses. 

The first boss in directive 7 can be rough if you aren't geared or have a good healer/tank

Fuck Bulwark, Fuck him up his exhaust port.  I hate that boss lol.  When I first started doing HM's I think we banged our heads against him for 2 hours.

HM The Foundry was actually pretty easy for my group compared to some of the others.  In general it's pretty easy to gear up, even through Hard Operations, so Hard Flashpoints aren't too much of an outlier.

Have you guys done the bonus boss in the New flashpoint?  He's a charmer also.
 

Nah I haven't hit him up, I don't run many HM's anymore since I'm in full columni with some rakkata.  I do love the Kaon FP though.  I pvp too much, I'm only 3-4 pieces away from full Battlemaster on my Merc and my Powertech just dinged 48.  I think my Powertech is gonna become my main pvp guy though, just because I love pulling ppl into fire on Huttball.

We just tried him for the first time tonight. After hitting his enrage three times without getting him below 20 percent the general response was #$%^ this.

 I don't get people saying hard modes are easy.  In every single one of them we seem to bang our heads against a stupid enrage timer.

Depends on balance I think. Also with Bulwark we had to cheese it by running under the thing when his timer went off to beat it. It buys you extra time.

I just spend 10 wipes in hardmode esseles because the circle of doom kept killing our healer, even though he ran out of the target and died 3 yards from the still shining death hole.

It was impossible. I'm not pleased at these kinds of bosses when the server doesn't even recognize your positioning in terms of the effect.

Was noticing something similar tonight with the grenade mobs. They'd start up the cast and the AoE circle would appear, I'd take off and still get hit if I didn't interrupt it even though I was far far far away from the circle.

The laser targets on the HK-47 fight in The False Emperor were rubber-bandy too. You'd get targeted, run away, then it'd lag a bit on finally placing the target. Easy to dodge, but harder to drop on the turrets.

It was the first time I'd seen this before. I've run Esseles 7 times before tonight with few issues.