Bump vote for giving us options. My preference would be alphabetical, period. The ability to sort and quickly find toons is fairly important to altoholics like myself.

I agree with the OP as well, although for slightly different reasons. If I only have twenty minutes or so to play I'll cycle through all of my toons to get their companions out on crafting missions. The old sorting method made it fairly easy to ensure I hit each toon. This new method... not so much. Solution? Give us a few options. Let the user decide what kind of sort order they would like. Personally I'd set mine up alphabetical, period. I'm enough of an altoholic that I'm on just about every toon weekly, so it would be nice to know that Character X is always four slots down on the second page.

Bump! This worked for me coming to Nar Shaddaa for the very first time. Class quested updated. Returned to fleet (didn't even get off ship) and then returned to Nar Shaddaa. Quest updated as I came out of hyperspace.

The problem isn't that this quest is hard, it is that it is so much harder than anything else that has come before it. I'm playing an Assassin (DPS) and was at level 20 when I did this quest. Took me three tries and using some of the strategies on this thread to beat it. (The idea of kiting the mother back to the original entrance chamber is what finally worked for me.) I can understand wanting to make the final boss for a planetary class quest line a challenge, but I think the devs went a little overboard with this one, especially for the assassin spec. Assassins are all about striking from stealth, high burst damage up front, and killing off an enemy before it can down you in your lovely light armor. This encounter was designed in such a way as to eliminate most of the assassin's advantages. Doable, but it was like going from basic arithmetic to suddenly needing to solve an algebra equation.