For some certainly it's aspirational, but for others it's not fun. Being uncompetitive at lower levels wasn't fun so Bioware is adding brackets. But being uncompetitive at 50 is fun? I think objectively it's less fun. You can make gear aspirational in much better ways. Expertise is poor design.

AS a dps all the way until 50, Until you get your healer, you sometimes need to use a taunt rotation with your companion to defeat bosses. No, you're not taught to do this, no there's no handholding guide, it's lucky I'm a relative veteran MMO/Bioware player as it happened alot with my shield and sword toting dragon killing ****** in Dragon Age It basically gives you an extra healthbars time to do damage. It is enough pretty much all the time. Start off with T7 attacking the mobs, when he's about to die, taunt, and you have all the extra dps you do while he's being killed, then all the extra dps he does while you're being attacked. Makes a huge difference. You can do it the other way around and maybe even stretch a fight out long enough for survival cds to come back up.

But I think there's something we all can agree on hopefully, is that this quest is a major step up in difficulty. And I'm not a casual by any stretch, but much more casual (and lets be fair this is the market SWTOR is aimed at) will find this impossible to solo. And they will want to solo it because thats how many people want to play this game in many cases.

3 fold problem. Class Imbalance: I think you can whinge about 3 of the classes being "OP" when in reality they're very very even. Some abilities need to be changed obviously. Unfortunately one class, and especially one advanced class is fairly rubbish in group combat. That's the Guardian/Juggernaut. Faction Imbalance of Numbers: You have more players on the Empire side. And therefore you have more 50s, and what do 50s do in Warfronts? Murder everyone else. Class Popularity: The most popular class for republic is the Jedi knight, and it's the worst in pvp as I mentioned earlier. You put all of these things together and it's rarely fun to be the republic in pvp. (Though it does feel great when you win ) So how do you fix it? fix the faction imbalance? Well bioware all you have to do is rewrite the entire history of star wars so more people play republic... so that's out. You can't make the classes less popular (among people who pick on coolness) unless you radically change the design of them. Which would be really wrong for anyone who like me has fallen in love with their character. Lightning vs Pebbles, sorry there's really only one choice for example. But you make make the classes vaguely balanced in group combat. And you can stop the 50 nonsense. Either these relatively simple fixes are implemented or someone like me, will just stop playing PvP. For the first time in ages i've enjoyed the journey of playing. but you've taken a great deal of that away by stupid stupid things which could be fixed.

It's just not fun, and before people hit 50 it was. And that's why it's so disappointing.

There's 50 European countries and over 60 servers. Not discounting the countries that share the same language (not asking Bioware to do like 30 x Voice Acting) You could go as far as having one per nation andd a few extra for the larger number of speakers. A few for the non xenophobes An some pure RP ones. And everyone's happy. Want your own language? You're fine. don't care or like many other MMO players have made friends from around the world? You're fine. Want to speak in Shyriiwook, you're fine. Just need someone to enforce it. Oh look, Bioware have a pile of money they just made, isn't that handy?

The EARLY strength of the class is weak, it's very simple. You don't get the equivalent or counter abilities at the same time as the other classes get their core skills. And you know what, you spend a bit of time getting to ten, you enter a PvP match and fight other level tens, and you will lose. And if that's your first experience, then you're going to say the class sucks. The Jedi Guardian has perfectly adequate skill set. But I tried PvP early on too, and it was crap. Excusing my badness I didn't feel there was much I could do to do well. I'm 27 now and it's perfectly fine. So how do you fix the early bad experiences? Do you give counter measure to what the other classes can do? Well it's hard, because if we can stop everything they can do when they don't have much themselves, then we just reverse the problem. The boosting system is both super and incredibly flawed. And unless you make everyone max level like guild wars will do, you won't get balance all the time.

If you think anything in the game isn't optional, an you're compelled to do it, either seek professional help, or don't look into the eyes of the next jedi you see. I don't believe there is a server out there where noone wants to do anything like flashpoints or heroic quests. You need to get outside of this bubble you've created for yourself. I think the issue must be how you communicate, because i guarantee there are heroic quests and flashpoints going on, on your server. In rift you had to in many cases group up to do the bonus waves and final waves of rifts, but you were ok with that. The only difference (apart from the "dynamic event" system) was that you didnt have to go to any effort to make a group. You just had to be in the same area, no communication required. It's completely antisocial. I think you should adjust your mind set to the game you play, in SWTOR, you're encouraged to group up and communicate, an this will be difficult for some people.