there's still plenty that can be improved / fixed... (i'm looking at you search feature in the GTN)... but overall, i'm having a blast. the gameplay, the story, the look of the gear... it's all really fun. maybe the biggest and best (albeit unexpected) part of it for me has been the server community. I may have simply lucked out on the server I chose, but aside from a couple of ******s, the grouping has been really smooth and easy. The kind of crowd that were notorious on WoW just hasn't been such a problem here. I'm one of three friends that play so creating a guild just isn't an option. I'm reliant on grouping with others. There's still a few dingleberries out there that make me ashamed of humanity, but for the most part it's been a very friendly and co-operative bunch of people. I cannot, in any words, describe what a difference it makes towards an enjoyable game when you're surrounded by people having fun and focusing on the postive as opposed to those who will always find a problem.

Maybe i'm just lucky, but i'm still getting new schematics at around 5 - 6 re's. Of course i haven't tried the purples yet. Just green to blue and blue to purple.

Me too. I believe it was from the Heroic 4+ south of the city where you had to collect the 25 artifacts and draw out the leader.

I'm not sure what the OP's tanking experience is. If you're like me and have very little experience take the above suggestions and one more thing... Teach yourself how to properly maneuver the mobs as well. I'm always forcibly reminding myself to turn the mobs away from Vette. Her hit percentage will go way up with their backs turned to her which in turn means she'll hit them more often, which in turn will burn them down faster. Get yourself used to doing that in open world so it's second nature in FP's and OPS. I'm only a lvl 19, but looking at the immortal skill tree as i'm leveling, it looks like our survivability just skyrockets as get further up the tree. Our cc isn't the greatest compared to others, but between dmg mitigation, accuracy reduction, defensive procs and damage absorbtion skills it really just looks like you have to get a handle on your abundance of talents and stay geared appropriate to your level. Sorry, got off on a bit of tangent there. TL;DR - don't lose heart, complete side q's / bonus objectives, gear up, it's fun as hell.