I found leveling my operative as healer to be extremely unenjoyable. Being stuck with Kaliyo for so long, I had a ranged tank companion with not great DPS who couldn't hold aggro from me healing her, didn't last long without me healing her, with the extra salt in the wound of much of my DPS comes from stabbing things in the back, which I couldn't do because Kaliyo could not hold aggro from me. Operatives also have lousy AOE until orbital..oh nevermind. I don't have a sage, but I imagine it would be easier with your damage not contingent on being behind and in melee range. The force storm thing also seems like it would be invaluable for leveling and taking out groups of trash, something an operative just does not have. Commando/mercenary also seems like it would be easier to level, with heavy armor, no requirement on being behind a target to do real damage, and the mortar volley/death from above.

Jumping mechanics in this game are objectively bad. Between the way the game completely ignores jump commands for some reason and the really ridiculous physics that come with jumping and bouncing off of objects, it makes this an utterly unenjoyable part of the game. And that doesn't even touch on the nonsense of Jedi/Sith that can use the force to jump precisely to another person or yank them right over, or the tech users that have jetpacks, grappling hooks, or whatever but they can't put themselves on top of a pipe without physical jumping. I only did this mission once and lucky for me it was on my Operative. As I failed a few of the early jumps, I realized too quickly that I could just exfiltrate across the gaps before I could get frustrated by this mission. However, the stupidity of the mission design relying so heavily on expert jumping was not lost on me. The gaps in this mission are just large enough that if you jump too early you won't make it, and if you try to get a precise jump near the edge you risk suffering from the bad controls where your jump won't register and you just run off.

I'm sure no one cares, but this hurts medicine operatives (and the smuggler counterpart I imagine) harder than anyone else I think, in solo PVE. Fighting gold star mobs or higher are where this hurts hardest. I'm somewhat new, but nevertheless I have a 55 kinetic (tank) shadow, and a 55 medicine operative. My operative was my first character, leveled up as medicine. I always knew it was a painful, tough time playing that character, but I never knew just how bad it was until my shadow started leveling. Everything seemed so much faster, not to mention I had actual defensive cooldowns. Even stuck with Theran as healer, I just killed everything so much faster on my shadow. I mean I get to backstab them in the face with a proc! Why can't my Op get that when backstab has a cooldown? I mean really, I can't use my medicine knowledge to do any kind of damage to someone? And Oricon? Don't even get me started on how bad Oricon was for my operative compared to how easy it was for my shadow. Suffice it to say, my op has never done the dailies, my shadow does them regularly. Think about the single target rotation of a medicine OP. If you are lucky you can open with hidden strike, but with the psychic stealth detection mobs have, that is maybe 50/50 at best, unless its all alone. Backstab doesn't work now because the operative has aggro. You're left with shiv, explosive probe, and corrosive dart with rifle shot as filler in all too many places, because of the cooldowns on those. You can hit debilitate and get a backstab there, and if your timing is incrediblely good, flashbang will get you another. Most of the time I try not to heal early so that my companion gets some aggro from any adds so I can backstab them. Thankfully I can toss in orbital strike to speed things along. What about standard/weak adds and AOE? Well believe it or not, I rarely bother with orbital strike for those. Firstly, it takes far too long to activate and for the damage to come down on a weak pack of mobs. Thermal grenade and carbine burst are where its at. With Thermal grenade I can knock a standard down and backstab them while they are laying...on their back. And as medicine I can get 3 TA so 3 carbine bursts on a nice group of standards pretty much destroys them, with the grenade AOE adding a bit more damage on top. Whats my companion doing? Less DPS. And not holding aggro. After suffering so long with Kaliyo during the leveling process, despite keeping her gear up to date, I was so happy to dump her for ensign Temple and have a noticeable DPS increase. Kaliyo never held aggro anyway. Maybe I'd get a random backstab when she taunted, but that was it. I was always forced to heal, tank, and do most of the DPS to kill anything. But I can't heal and do DPS at the same time (Kolto probe is rarely enough). Orbital strike is a much needed single target DPS move for medicine because it has nothing else, and it sucks that it comes so late, but its so nice to have once you get it. Suddenly I could start fighting gold stars rather than avoiding them like a plague, even though it still takes a terribly long time. I know, no one cares at all about solo PVE, and probably even less about medicine spec DPS, but the bottom line is, if some DPS spec is doing too much damage, then clearly the answer is not to massively nerf orbital strike and impact every spec in wildly disparate ways, but to carefully and responsibly lower DPS for that spec and that spec alone.