I think Luke didn’t actually become a character on his own till they started to do the expanded universe novels. Vader dominated so much that it wasn’t till he was gone that Luke could start to develop. Before that it was all reaction to Vader. Vader also really has the power-Luke’s struggle was not so much to defeat the emperor as to win his father back, and it was up to the father to really defeat him.

It’s really interesting stuff to think on.

Call it the wolverine effect.

My experience with “good classes” is that they tend to be protection/defense oriented and do lower damage, where “evil classes” tend to be more dps oriented… and everyone loves to do lots of dps, so there you have it.

SWG was anomalous, though — it was each person’s individual choice as to the faction (or no faction) that they chose, and since anyone could be any class they wanted via the skill system, it was simply a matter of which faction was perceived as “cooler.” And as a result, Rebels tended to outnumber Imps by about 2 to 1 on most servers. Devs sought to correct this by offering really nice faction rewards for Imps, but it wasn’t until the NGE gutted the game and then new players came in and went “oh look, the Imp faction rewards kick the Rebel’s butts” that the balance went the other way.

But I HATE the human and dwarf starting areas, I find myself directionless and out of quests (in Loch Modan) or running frustrating distances (Westfall/Redridge) long before I’m ready to strike out on my own in contested areas, and the leveling just stagnates.

Fortunately, Draenei, Blood Elves, and … Trolls appeal to me visually, and Bloodmyst, Ghostlands, and the Barrens can get you past level 20 without any shortage of things to do.

Which characters have/have not “stuck” for me has less to do with faction and more to do with level design. If I can’t stand to get the character out of the starting zone, they’re not really worth bothering with.