It is implied by the "grouping of people part". To create group of people larger than 4-5 is insanely hard these days. And by "group" i do not mean PUG.

I do not think i have troubles for the time being, but i'll share my observations: 1. Char = Jedi Focus Guardian, with orange gear from vendors and mods from lvl 38 level vendor. 2. at level 38-51 synchronized down to Balmora levels i had only one death in H2 - actually the first group when i realized how squishy T7 became as tank (affection~18 lvl). 3. T7 - tank(18lvl) and another H2 with Doc (lvl1 i guess - i did heroic while doing story Q for unlocking him). Doc was kind enough to not letting me die. note: i did indeed some regen pauses between pulls, and use Biochem stims and medpacks occasionally. note1: i am "new" player and no legacy buffs are available to me. note2: if i am supposed to grind those i expect to be able to gather 8+ mobs and burn them with Guardian's wonderful AOE abilities and essentially steam/face rolling grindable content.

i'd really like to help, but from MMOs i tried no one satisfies point d). That's because so called "hardcores" are used by developing company as beta testers for free. Actually they got NDA information, that is later included in their You Tube videos which generate the money flow. This is win-win and companies do not like to lose such players, because besides free beta-testing they do free advertisement. i'll monitor the thread though

Q: "So, can anyone explain why the "OP" companions were a bad thing for everyone? " A: if you played since 2003-2005 continuously MMOs you would notice that most of them are of so called "theme park" kind - where developers work hard to provide some "content" for players. In return players pay something,somehow to developers. And all of them suffer tremendously from one common problem - developers can't generate content as fast as players can "eat it", hence developers attempt to slow down as much as possible game pace and increase the playable time for players. The same award program that kept people to not drop their subscription before 4.0 was implemented in every other MMO. especially WOW - Blizzard went as far to gift D3 to people subing for whole year (!) You could search for another post in this forum, if not deleted already for another player who transposed his observations from other MMOs over SWTOR - drawn some conclusions and BioWare marked him as data miner (Big time ). As British gov says - Keep Calm And Continue The Grind Of Affection. edit: so it is bad because Devs can't keep up with customer demands and produce garbage, and players experience huge gaps between content patches.

worth mentioning It is neither first nor last time it happens in an MMO. Same as server malfunctioning on patching day It may take many hours to make a pie, but only several minutes to eat it. That's how devs feel about content devouring. It is quite normal to nerf...

No offense - i do not know how much experience you have with MMOs, but apparently is not enough to draw such general conclusions as the quoted one. L2P for any class happens mainly in PvP - over the years i found that is valid for all MMOs out there. That is not my invention - when i was told so i was quick to react like criticized teenager, but then i tried some serious PvP and discovered the other 50% of my class. Note that what most people does not like is the difficulty of supposedly grindable content. It will be challenge first 2-3 weeks, then players will start looking other places for fun. At some point (always happens) devs shall decide to turn back some or full power of companions. Then the big waiting/patching from yesterday shall be in vain :S

Well, if you want real challenge - try another game where even seasoned veterans got owned on daily basis - do your research for single server 100% PvP game. AI for "strong" NPCs there rivals any average MMO player. They invented the "may i have your stuff?" question, btw