Aren't those bacta tanks?

As I was able to tell someone ingame yesterday who asked about my <Pax Imperius> tag, this guild is a little different than most, being that it's a multi-game, multi-division group. There's a lot of people here. But, that said, you don't fall through the cracks. There's a lot of people who take the time to come to your recruitment thread and get to know you through a series of questions and responses and friendly banter. So far I've enjoyed everyone I've met.

Wow. You must have really played it safe levelling up. I've had numerous moments where we strayed too close to another group, or a wandering elite or boss stumbled upon my in-progress massacre of his friends. Such a situation wouldn't really be much of a pulse-raiser with Doc out. With Kira? Different story. Often enough, when that boss comes around the corner, we're still halfway through the group we're working on and health is starting to dip already. No way to placate the dude and run away, so we charge into it, pop every "oh sh**" power in the stack and make judicious use of force stasis and other defensive powers. I've managed to pull out some pretty miraculous wins when Kira and I were both down to 25% or less health. Granted, I had to use Unity, Heroic Moment, etc, but those were still fun, survive-by-the-skin-of-my-teeth sort of moments. Best parts of the game. I agree with whoever said it above (I can't be arsed to look), I use Kira for faster questing. Sure I spend a few moments in meditation between fights, but overall the fights go a LOT quicker and tend to be simpler. The longer a fight goes the more I have to concentrate on focus management, cycling the right powers through, etc. Much easier to let Kira join me and rip the hell out of things in the first pass through the powers on my bar. I will say this, though, working with Doc has taught me a little more about the class and how to manage cooldowns, since before I used him I didn't really have much need to learn it. This class, particularly with Kira fully kitted out, has ridiculous DPS.

It's funny, but I leveled with a Combat build and actually started dying MORE when I got Doc as a companion. Maybe I started taking too many risks, but one thing is for sure: encounters started lasting a lot longer. With Kira, most non-boss, same or +1 level encounters are over sub-5 seconds. Bosses were pretty quick as well. Doc's healing can keep up with most of it, but he's useless for DPS and his healing draws aggro on himself often enough I have to be watchful of who the enemies are targeting, lest they kill my healbot. If you're a subscriber, I believe you have infinite respecs. So, try out the builds and see what makes sense for you. For myself, Combat and Ataru stance have been fun. The build I have on my lvl 37 Sentinel is linked below. Keep in mind it's a purely PvE-oriented build. http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#501ZGhMRRrbdR.2