As a new player, I am very reluctant to try something in hard mode if I haven't done it in tactical first -- I don't want to be learning the basic mechanics there. And I can't really learn the mechanics in solo mode. It's a bit overwhelming feeling like "here I am at level 65, not quite halfway through the story, having never used a single XP booster, and I'm really unsure what to do when the fit hits the shan." Hopefully starting in on tactical mode will help with that.

The replies are very helpful. My wife's comment was "thank you, thank you, thank you." We all currently have the [sOLO] Maelstrom Prison quest -- we'll drop it and go at it in tactical mode. And yes, the "god-mode" droid really does trivialize it. Much obliged, again.

As a new player, but one with lots of MMO experience, I understand your frustration. As experienced SWTOR players, maybe you can help me with mine. I'm finding it bloody difficult to figure out how the game balances class interactions given the trivial content I'm hitting. And I'm struggling to figure out how my small family group can go through and do things that are more difficult. Example: this afternoon, the wife and one kid (college age) and I go to do a flashpoint -- the next one in line, Taral V. We want to experience the content as much as we can, so we take the quest from what appears to be the "correct" questgiver (on Balmorra/republic side) and then figure out how to find the cruiser from fleet -- so far so good. But in talking with General not-Yoda each of us end up with a [sOLO] flashpoint in addition to our "complete the flashpoint" quest. And we then struggle to actually start the flashpoint -- it looks like the choices are "solo", "tactical" and "hard mode". So we start it in "tactical" mode (I'm guessing that's "normal") but we have these three droids that trivially destroy anything in our path. So much for planning on tank, healer, ranged DPS and our one (melee) DPS companion. I gave up on tanking, I never could get aggro, so it seemed pointless. I can't imagine how I'd even figure out what "aggro" is if this was my first MMO. Is there a way to play it "correctly" -- meaning tank, healer, 2 DPS? Is that now only for Hard Mode? Can we do Hard Mode while leveling? It's just as frustrating for want-to-be-skilled-players, I promise.