Bioware has stated that this is a bug. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=5234204#edit5234204

Khem does use force power, but presence only works on you.

It's class balance across faction due to balancing snipers and gunslingers, at lest that's what I thought unil I realized that commandos can get their BH focus, now I'm not sure what they are thinking.

Force-Masters has the set bonuses you want, but once you have it you will need to swap out some mods and enhancements from other pieces to maximize damage.

You always want as much willpower as possible, but avoid pieces with wasted stats (defense, shield, and absorb). Willpower will be more valuable that power, crit, surge, or alacrity, but not so much that it is worth taking a piece with slightly higher willpower and tanking stats.

The short answer to your question is that you pretty much always want willpower over any other stat. There is no DR on bonus damage granted by willpower or power, however because bonus damage is additive, the more damage you are doing the less power increases your damage as a percentage. This acts as a kind of soft DR, because every point of power is a point not in crit, which increases your damage multiplicatively. There are also other considerations, which have to do with your spec and other itemization: As a madness specced DPS sorc, alacrity does me very little good, it doesn't increase GCD or speed of DoT ticks, so it really only helps with force lightning, which accounts for about 30-40% of my total damage. Because of this I have itemized surge wherever possible (over 500 in almost full lvl 61 gear). Also I have in my tree +30% crit damage to 4 of the 5 spells in my rotation. All this increases the value of crit%, and after doing a fair amount of math, I have figured out that, at least for my spec, the 300 crit thing is a myth, and I am gaining better returns on total damage/point from crit than from power even though I am over 500 crit.

Raid-wide buff/debuff. The fact that we don't boost our allies' dps is probably the biggest downside to sorc dps right now.

Care to justify this statement? Madness does better single-target DPS, has better mobility, and thanks to more effective dots, gets a big boost when fighting multiple targets (like Zorn and Toth or Stormcaller and Firebrand). So why shouldn't I be using in Raid situations?

This is ridiculous. Marauders don't do 1800. I have seen claims of 1400 on sorcs, but have never been able to get more than 1200ish personally (Rakta and BH gear) against a single target (you can boost this against multiple targets if you are smart with dots and AoE) and have not seen a log of someone else doing much more than 1100 in an actual raid situation. Unfortunately right now It seems that Sorc DPS is a bit lacking. I have had better luck with full madness than lightning or hybrid though, even in ideal circumstances were you don't have to move that much.

I guess people have different interests, but I am surprised at the number of posts that seem to request more grinding for gear. If you are lucky enough to be in a guild that runs ops, then FPs are still good for filling out the gear that doesn't drop for you. Once you finish your Columi set, they do become obsolete, but are still fun to run. Yes, I geared up very quickly (Currently 8pc Rakata with Champion Mainhand and the rest Columi), but I never felt myself wishing it was slower.

Did you re-enter the instance before your party-mates looted? I had a similar thing happen on Foundry, but re-entered, and when they looted I was able to roll on the loot. Couldn't loot the chest for my tioneese crystal, but that was the only disadvantage. Sounds like you're blaming BW for something that was your party's fault.

The whole point is to protect IP, so it just makes sense that a company that holds as many valuable IPs as EA and/or Bioware would support it. I hate it, but I totally understand why they would be behind it.

If you think the delays are Republic side only, you haven't played Empire. I've heard rumors that on certain abilities the republic delay is slightly longer. But this is a problem throughout the game, not just for Republic.

Completely disagree with OP. The single player experience is really what sets this apart from other MMOs Bioware made a game that appeals to those who like to group for dungeons, and like PvP, but spend most of their time in-game on their own. What you want to get rid of is the thing that makes this game distinct.

I've found a couple, but they seem to be few and have long spawn timers. went in and found 2 (both around the edges) then wandered around for another 20 min or so and didn't find any more and the ones I got didn't respawn.

By far the best companion for healers IMO. Probably good for tank assassins as well. If you're DPS, she's not complimenting your weaknesses, which is the whole point of companions.