As far as a reload and regen graphic I think the trooper got the short end of the animation stick. I mean its not even in the same league as the smuggler with the coin or the bounty hunter with the flame. I found the other day that if you happened to pick Mirialan as your race you do have a choice, your racial also acts as a reload/regen and you get to sit all zen and glow and not have to check your gun for loose parts.

TOR is a great game that is as advertized, it is STORY driven that is also its problem. When your story ends then it becomes just another grinding MMO and that is not something that can hold a great number of peoples attention for long. WoW held peoples attention (myself included) for a number of years by creating good end game raiding content and supporting an active modding community so that you could change the way your game looked to suit yourself. TOR has some endgame content but it is nothing that has not been seen before and is currently very buggy. The legacy system could be a way to keep people around because it could be something that players would work towards but at this point we have no idea what that system will reward players. I have greatly enjoyed rolling both a bounty hunter and inquisitor to level 50 and I am currently enjoying leveling a trooper but once I am finished with that I do not think I will be around much longer. The end game grind holds no fascination for me I burned that out with 6 years of WoW. The Old Republic (aka KoTOR 3) for me is a great single player game with lackluster group play.

My advice would be to turn off the visual indicators of light side or dark side and then make choices on how you think your hunter should react. I am finding that to be the most fun and its surprising to me how middle of the road I'm staying on my choices. I will recommend picking up the crew skill diplomacy so that you can level to max dark or light without regard to your choices because bioware has not added a neutral vendor.

You can use a hammer to build a house, you can use an air gun to build a house. You can heal without mouse over macros it would just be a lot more user friendly if we could have the choice to use them. Having them will not make bad healers into good ones just as having that air gun will not make that wall straight and level.

You can, though I will say that if you are fully dark side leveling her affection can be a pain. My normal m.o. is when I get a new companion I visit the gift vendor for those easy first 4000 affection points... With Ashara I did the same but none of the gifts would give more the the Like level of affection I assume this was due to my dark side being almost maxed out -diplomacy makes it max out very fast. I was able to bring up my affection with her through questing with her and once you unlock the "flirt" conversation choices she will respond with max level affection gain for courting gifts though still not with any of the others.

I know I for one was bummed when I learned that we would not be able to acquire HK-51 as a companion. My suggestion is this, make a "Motivator Core" or "Memory Core" drop from him when we fight him. This we would have to take to a "Droid Tech" for reprogramming which would provide us with a re-skin for the droid we have on our ships. Just seeing HK-51 being forced to only heal and not being able to use a blaster I would find amusing. It would take more effort but with this could also be added some new emotes from the droid about how if he could only get a blaster he would happily hunt down master or how he is stuck in this feeble shell.

Both Mako and Gault use the mostly the same gear with only the weapons that you need to keep up to date for both. Its more a matter of play style and how comfortable you are with each as to which you will use. These two and Blizz are your best companions due having upgradeable weapons.