Finished this quest at lvl 9 with no issues so not sure what you are having problems with. Make sure all your abilities are trained, use a stim to boost endurance(hp) or willpower and have a medpack or two handy for the boss fight. I also found it easier to defeat Khem Vale(boss) by just using melee attacks as your force powers really don't do much against him.

Having the same issues no matter what companion I use, I guess 25-30 are just the "headache" levels for Shadow? I have basically all orange and blue gear that is up to date after Nar Shadda, same with Qyzen. We pretty much get punked by a mob of -2 womp rats on Tatooine. It's been frustrating playing shadow this far and I'm at wits end now even being +2 to some of these normal mobs the battles are like pulling teeth.

This. Not to mention being able to keep your hilt updated to whatever specs you like along with your enhancements. Only thing with Artifice is it can get expensive, I'm lvl 26 and constantly broke, but I have both Artifice and Archeology over 250 already.

The loot on Esseles does seem to be all for force users, which was fine for me running it through on my Consular a few times, but I felt your pain on Hammer Station. Ran that a couple of times with a friend of mine and every drop was for either Trooper or Smuggler. Ran it 3 times and not one loot drop for a force user. Also found it hilarious that of all the times I've run Esseles with my Shadow I only get the Consular Robe drop, but the one time I run it with my Sage I get the epic dual bladed saber drop that I can't use, lol.

I have yet to use a commendation vendor for really anything in terms of mods or gear and at lvl 26 already have an orange level chest, legs, gloves, and head piece all just from drops and flashpoints. The bigger issue to me is the crew skill schematics you learn from the trainers costing so much along with your class skills as you level. I am broke more often than not from just leveling up and having to upgrade my skills and pick up new ones, not to mention the cost of training for speeders. The only time I have ever had an abundance of credits was just after clearing Tython because I used only drop/quest reward gear and only bought a few medpacks and stims along with my skills. I got to the republic fleet with roughly 10k credits after doing that, but after picking up crafting skills that was quickly blown through.

I believe Plo Koon used a yellow saber, but can't remember if it appeared in any of the films.

On my Shadow I went Archeology/Artifice/Treasure Hunting, but on my Sage I tried Biochem/Bioanalysis/Diplomacy. Diplomacy is great because you can get either dark or light side points and some of the missions net medical compounds or other mats you can use with Biochem. I've been lucky so far and manage to get a couple of epic schematics from reverse engineering and it's nice to be able to run around at lvl 10 with a re-usable medpac that heals almost 1/2 my hp.

I don't think Stealth is working right for some reason. The other night a friend and I were running a heroic and I stealthed past a mob of 4, walking right through the middle of them to get to a panel we had to activate. None of them noticed me. I walked back out and waited a few minutes, then tried to stealth past them again to the elevator behind them, keeping a much further distance than when I had activated the panel and somehow all four of them sensed me in like 2 seconds and I got ganked. Didn't make sense to me.

My only issue with elites in normal game content is that to often they just drop credits...I'm selfish and want more gear drops, lol! As for the OP, your kid is 10....tell her to go play outside, we have enough fat kids sitting inside all day playing xbox and videogames and adding to the childhood obesity issues.

Ran it yesterday with a friend with just the two of us and Vette and Khem, all level 11 and we breezed through it easily enough to the point I figured I could probably solo it with Vette(had her well geared out for lvl 11, all blue and orange already, with upgraded pistols), my only concern would be the Champion level bosses.

Agree 100% with this, between leveling abilities and crafting I am broke constantly in this game. Abilities get real expensive around level 15 and it makes it tough to have credits hanging around.

There are a ton of orange(item level) sabres on the exchange for dark 1 and above or just normal use lightsabers that have the orange crystal, just make sure it has an orange crystal and not red, buy it and yank out the crystal. I found a bunch the other night for 500 credits a piece, and you can re-sell the saber for 250 credits to any vendor after pulling the crystal and other mods. Haven't seen any purples yet though so I'm assuming these are only high level drops hence why none have appeared on the exchange yet.

This has been standard practice on just about any MMO I have ever played including City of Heroes, Champions Online, WoW, and Star Trek Online. Pretty much all games come with 30-days but require an active subscription before you can play. More than likely when the 30-days is up it will decline your card and you will no longer be able to play the game until you pay for access.