I wanted to start a thread to say thank you to all who have posted previous threads in this class forum, and to those who took the time to give thoughtful answers. I started playing my IA about three weeks ago and have just now begun Chapter 4 (Makeb), and as I noticed toward the end of chapter 3, combat was getting a lot harder. As an experienced gamer I knew immediately that the problem was I was not using the proper skills and my rotation was severely flawed; I was still winning all fights, but it was taking far longer than it should have. Literally every other class I've ever played in every other game I've ever played I've usually managed to figure things out enough on my own to stay within 90% of optimal strategy, but for various reasons I found myself far behind that curve with my sniper. My primary culprit was I think that the sniper was so OP in the early going that I never really bothered to try out any of the later skills I was picking up, because the handful they started me with were so amazing I never needed to bother. Over time though, those skills started falling behind and I was at a loss for how to proceed to get back to chewing through mobs efficiently. (It is worth noting that the other culprit I think was the fact that juggling the regular action bar and the crouch/cover action bar was also to blame). So I took a time out, read a LOT of threads on this forum about skills, rotations, etc, and went back in and completely changed all my hotkeys, action bars, and spent several hours retraining my fingers to learn an entire new system, and the results have been more than I could have hoped. I am once again absolutely ripping through trash mobs like they aren't even there, and boss fights have gotten markedly less time consuming. None of that would have been possible without all of your help, so I wanted to personally thank everyone for participating in the forums and for sharing your knowledge wisdom with all of us. You hear and read all the time that the internet is just full of trolls and negativity, but this forum provides evidence to the contrary. Thank you all again!

Greetings. I will start by saying I have recently come back after a very long absence, and am only just now into KOTFE content. I recently completed the chapter in KOTFE where me (Darth Nox) was forced to team up with HAVOC Squad, and we swarmed into an encampment of refuges/exiles to rescue them, and it was just the latest example of how frustrating the light/dark side choices always are. The truly successful dark side NPCs are effectively psychopaths; they are detached, see the long play, sacrifice short term gains for long term value, etc. But every The Old Republic game forced players who want to earn dark side points to play as sociopaths; we never get the chance to spare civilians without earning light side points, so to become dark we must kill them, always. I want the option to spare these people in order to subjugate them, inflict long term misery on them, set them up to serve as an obstacle for my enemies to have to get through, force them into indentured servitude, make them pay tribute, etc. Very little is gained by simply murdering lessers, and nobody really builds an effective power structure that way. There needs to be options to earn dark side points by sparing people of their immediate dangers only to set them up to squeeze them dry of all they hold dear over generations of misery. That's how a true dark lord of the Sith would operate. Hell, our class campaign was all about establishing a power base, we should be encouraged to enslave entire cultures! This HAVOK Squad chain was just the latest example of this, but as we all know, that is far from the only time a choice like this is asked of players. Every single time I lament the missed opportunity for greater, long term suffering.

For my two cents, I do not think the issue here is that it cannot be solo'd, at least for me the issue is that this has been a 100% solo job for a very long time, and then as you get to the end suddenly you need more people. It smacks of bait and switch tactics. Quest chains like this would be better served either to remain solo content all the time, stay Heroic 4 all the time, or else warn people at the outset that it will eventually require Heroic 4 to complete. I am at a point on this chain where I feel I have wasted my time because I have no interest in grouping and would never have begun this chain had I known it was not soloable.