Playing Rage Jugg. I've pretty much been able to solo every Heroic so far until Alderaan. It's not that it's hard, i'm literally just getting killed in like 5 hits. I have 8k HP and my gear is pretty much my level. I'm using full DPS gear and my companion is set to DPS, and i'm even over leveled as much as I can be. I'm sure if I set my companion to healer and went full tank I wouldn't die, but it would probably take 30 minutes to do a Heroic and i'm sure i'd fall asleep before I even finished.

Do I really need another person to clear them quickly and without dying at this point?

Set DPS character and Heal companion to reduce the speed of kill a bit, but enhance your survival as well. Alderaan is where the foes in Heroic areas start to ramp a bit further away from general foes on the same map.

(Also, saying you have 8K health doesn't help once you're overlevelled, since health gets clipped.)

What Heroics are you trying, and what mode? You should be only doing Heroic 2+ and in story/solo mode where applicable.

If you are trying Heroic4 in veteran difficulty setting, it would not be surprising that you are getting clobbered.

(I'm not sure about this but, right-click on your portrait and check your difficulty setting.)

i prefer to run the comps as tanks when i play melee specs. it's got the added bonus of them having the ability to pull mobs to you and they take some of the hurt away from you.

i only swap them to heal when there's those pesky mobs that throw dots around because they tend to hurt a lot.

As Steve said, the heroic mobs do start to scale a bit faster when you get to Alderran. If you have a heroic on Hutta its much different than on Voss for example. Technically you should be fine even with a dps companion due to level sync. The gear you ger from heroics is also enough for you since it drops based on your level.

I dunno, it does sound like a skill issue, but if you swap companion to dps you should be fine. If not, try to increase his influence to like 30 and that should do the trick. Or lastly, just group up for the heroic.

Personally, I have noticed a couple of specific heroics are tuned a bit high for easy soloing, but specifically for soloing there are two things I would recommend.

First, raise your companion influence level as high as you can - It caps at level 50, and getting the last 10-15 levels can be a pain unless you are using your first companion, whom you can level to 50 by running the Esseles/Black Talon flashpoints over and over (although that itself is a bit of a pain).

Second, run through the storylines for the various companions across all of the 8 classes. The first time you get to the end of each companion's personal story arc, you will get a Presence bonus (10 points per companion, iirc) across all of your characters. Open your Legacy panel, and check the "Imperial Classes" and "Republic Classes" sections, to see which classes and companions you need to work on.

What Heroics are you trying, and what mode? You should be only doing Heroic 2+ and in story/solo mode where applicable.

If you are trying Heroic4 in veteran difficulty setting, it would not be surprising that you are getting clobbered.

(I'm not sure about this but, right-click on your portrait and check your difficulty setting.)

There are no Heroic 4 planetary heroics, only a couple in the daily areas like Section X and Ossus still have the Heroic 4 name but they are easily soloable as well.

There is no difficulty setting for open world.

The difficulty setting that you can change by right clicking your character's face only changes the difficulty of KOTFE and KOTET chapters.

Some heroics on Alderaan are located in the bonus series area, which used to be a higher level area then other parts of Alderaan. Same on Nar Shaddaa.

That was way before level sync ofc, but to me it seems that those heroics are a bit more difficult than the others.

But if you set your comp to heal you should be fine.

For a faster run you could try to team up.