Thank you for your responses.
You are correct about dying, thegodofchuck. I brought it up just to comment on the end result. What actually frustrated me was how long it took to get through mobs that had no relation to the objective. They were simply in the way. I was already many mobs into the heroic and feeling the strain by the time I died, and I was less than a third of a way through the irrelevant mobs. It was the killik hive heroics. Dying was simply the final straw that forced me to ask for help. I'm a firm believer that when the game gives you more stress than it relieves, something is wrong. Lately SWTOR has being doing just that.
Regarding adjusting and compensating, however, I did. That is how I was able to get deep enough into the heroic to get attacked by 4 gold mobs. Yes the heroics can be managed, but I am not getting enough fun back out of it to justify the adjustments it takes to do it, and it doesn't look good for that changing. Combat is merely a means to an end for me, not the fun part of the game. If it becomes the only viable way to do anything else in the game, then I have nothing left to keep me interested in the game aside from speaking to the players I've grown accustomed to speaking to.
As excited as I was for the new story and the promise to shift in the story direction more in the future, I'm not going to strain myself just to hang around long enough to see it. It feels like the game is changing to increasingly force me to play only one certain way which I'm only going to struggle so hard to do. If it only leaves me with options I don't want to deal with then there is no reason to hang around. I will wait and see what happens, but at is stands. It looks like I will be spending less and less time in SWTOR and I will hold back on subscribing like I had wanted to. I was eager to see KOTFE but oh well.
tl;dr It's not dying or whether I can finish heroics solo that concerns me. What concerns me is that I can't personally justify spending that kind of effort on gameplay that isn't fun for me and the game feels as though it is increasingly narrowing down to gameplay I find grating.
Regarding companions, that is just unfortunate that we did not get boosted if the leveling system would have us farther along than we are now. This sadly starts to look like poor planning. However, getting companion gifts means struggling to do what is grating me or spend up what precious credits I have left over from when I could make money decently well. It feels like telling the system you can't see and getting the response to rub sandpaper on your eyes to clear your vision. I'm not saying you are wrong. It's just that this system is going to make me hate the game more before it makes me love it more.
