Ride the elevator up...

I don't understand it. They charge fearlessly and without complaint into a battles where they can't possibly win on a single command from me. They never complain. Not once. They get knocked unconscious over and over again after I sacrifice them as cannon fodder so that I can be left standing. They utter not a single word of derision as I revive them for the 1000th time after the battle is over. Nor is there ANY hesitation to do it all over again and again. But when it comes to elevators they quake with mortal fear. They watch motionless as I descend into the darkness and when I get off they somehow have "found the stairs" and are ready once again to support me in battle. I have tried to be sensitive to their fears and occasionally say "hey I think I need take the stairs today I am getting a little 'thick around the middle' ". I then wander aimlessly around for hours looking for these stairs that only they seem to be able to find. I have tried to figure out what the under lying cause for this fear is to no avail. At first I thought it was a fluke affecting only my first companion but as I added others they all seemed to have the same problem. Even my droid has the issue, which seems weird as it would imply that someone wrote code that makes him afraid of elevators. I thought it might be some sort of claustrophobia but I've ridden elevators the size of starship landing pads and they won't get on those either. I then thought hey maybe they are afraid of getting crushed. So I figured I would show them there is nothing to fear by having them sit with me at the bottom of an elevator shaft while an elevator came down right on top of us. Oddly just as we were about to get crushed we appeared on the elevator (some passive ability they have that they have keept to themselves apparently). To my surprise they rode the elevator with me all the way to the top and even got off with me. I said "wonderful, see how easy that was, there is absolutely nothing to fear. Lets go back down". I rode the elevator down... Alone... while they watched from the top of shaft yet again. Maybe I just got a weird batch of companions. I don't know. But I guess I will have to live with it. I shudder to think of battle with a Sith Lord that takes place on an elevator. I can pretty much expect to have to do that one alone.

This goes back to the problem with slicing from a game economy standpoint. And that problem is one of too much cash entering the system out of thin air. Other crafting skills don't create cash out of thin air, they create resources that can be traded for credits that already exist in the economy. While currently other trade skills maybe generating more income they are doing it with credits that already exist in the economy. They may still be riding the wave of too much liquidity that was a result of pre-nerf slicing. Lots of players that weren't 50 and didn't have the level 50 credit sinks were generating far too many credits out of thin air. Once the economy corrects and the credit sinks do their jobs those trade skills may not be as profitable in comparison to slicing. Also remember this is just the first most obvious point of unbalance in the system. I suspect that there are other points that may need "adjusting" before we could call this system balanced. Developers aren't emotionally concerned with how a nerf effects us personally as much as how it effects the games economy. My personal opinion is that from a design standpoint slicing should never have been a skill to begin with or rather it should have been implemented in a way that doesn't directly generate cash. Slicing was nerfed because its the easiest skill to datamine for imbalance issues as it created credits directly. There are probably are plenty of other issues that need "fixing" but they don't datamine as easily. For instance if highlevel mobs are generating too much income in comparison to highlevel credit sinks, expect that to be nerfed as well. They won't take your credits away if you "exploited" this hole in their design but the party will stop just like slicing did.

Individuals don't need dual spec, the community however does. You see, unless a full 25% of the population decides they want to sacrifice leveling speed to fill that absolutely necessarily healing role in groups, then we have a problem. 1 person out of every 4 needs to be a healer or players sit idle spamming general chat for a healer whenever they want to run a flashpoint. It just poor game design from a community standpoint and its simple BASIC math to realize why. Now it could be argued that full spec healers aren't entirely necessary especially for the lower level flashpoints for sure. But the higher level ones really push things. Plus if the full healing spec isn't required then why would anyone spec healing? As you said it takes longer to level using it. We have a similar problem with tanks. I understand and empathize with healers who choose their support role to be a pure healer. I see how dual spec would be threatening to your unique role. But it's just poor game design to have to the community be overly-dependent on a role that is in such poor supply.

7/21 here, no email but my play button is active. Weird... I haven't pressed it yet though... It's a shiny gold candy-like button... must resist... can't...