should be great in WZs, hard modes might be a little trickier. i'd start with taral v and maelstrom to get a feel for it if you plan on doing much pve healing. we really excel at WZ healing though, something about the mobility and the multiple hots ticking away. also it's amazing how little we get focused, even when healing the guy next to us through 3 on 1! i would not bother picking up kolto cloud unless u are going to be mainly PvEing or you have the 2 piece stat bonus from the champ gear. those points can be spent more effectively elsewhere.

lol i feel silly. i actually vendored a champion off-hand blaster, didn't even think to pull the mods out. now i know!

doesn't cleanse get rid of dots? just pop that before disappearing act.

lol it sounds like you have been amazingly lucky. i don't think the majority of people's experiences will be the same ...

given that you seem to think scoundrels are ranged, i can't say i find that threat particularly convincing.

Thanks, that's very helpful. i realise I wasn't using EMP nearly often enough. After reading this and also going back and re-reading the healing sticky (which i hadn't read since level 10!), i am embarrassed to admit i did not fully understand UH and was trying to keep two stacks up at all times, which is pointless when one provides the exact same benefit. So i was basically missing out on a free instant heal every rotation. i think this will make a world of difference. earlier i managed to heal risha and myself through 4 champion mobs (one at a time of course) in a h4 daily on belsavis because i couldn't get anyone else to do it, and i feel like we can keep a single target (even one as squishy as risha) up through almost anything. i'm looking forward to trying out a HM today with this new knowledge; hopefully i can throw in a EMP on the dps whenever i have 2 stacks of UH. it should also add a whole new dimension to my pvp healing, thanks again!

This seems to be the main issue. Most people have no idea yet how to manage their cc breaker. They will mash it at the first sign of being slowed or a 2 second stun so they can chase some 4 on 1 kill, and then when a real threat comes along they are totally helpless because their trinket is on cd. I would say if it's on cd most of the time then you're doing it wrong. Hell, a lot of people don't even realise you can trinket out of knockdown! We are being handicapped because of other classes' lack of knowledge and experience.

Let me preface this by saying that i do okay at pvp healing, notching up 300k heals in pugs a reasonable amount, having only re-specced to sawbones from scrapper a few days ago for something different. however, getting bored with constant WZs (sick of getting 3 medals and 0 or 1 mvp for top healing...), and ilum being the joke that it is, i have been trying some HMs for a bit more of a challenge. I feel kind of underwhelmed with my limited experiences of PvE healing thus far, so i would like some opinions from sawbones' who are doing them successfully. I have half champion pvp gear and half maxed out oranges (rating 124 or something) and top end crafted gear with augment slots, about 15k HP unbuffed, and i am finding it a struggle to heal hard modes. Granted that is not the best gear for pve, but it isn't bad, and I feel like i should be doing better. i have attempted 3 now: taral v twice, first one went smoothly but we skipped bonus boss and then today we couldn't finish bonus boss after 4 attempts. the tank wasn't bad so i don't think it was his fault, although the boss did enrage once so maybe the dps was too low (a dps scoundrel in the group had 13k hp ...) the problem was that he kept pulling us in and taking half my (and the dps') health in one go, despite me running out again. i made it clear that my aoe heals suck so i could only focus on the tank and myself, but i kept dying just after or before the dps, depsite just healing myself and the tank. Also the final boss enraged with no deaths up to that point in the fight, so the more i think about the more i think the dps was the weak link, but it's hard not to feel responsible for wipes as a healer. The only other one i tried to heal was eselles, and we died repeatedly at the very first boss. now in this case i think the problem was the tank, as it was me who was dying first when the waves of adds came out, so i feel like he should have been picking up the aggro quicker. he had never done a HM and his HP was really low so i am guessing his gear sucked. anyway, i am kind of worried about trying any more because there is nothing worse than that sinking feeling of wiping repeatedly and the whole group silently thinking "it's the damn healer!" my strategy is basically alternating between SRMP (making sure 2 stacks are on tank at all times) and UW, wjhich i crit for 5k about a third of the time. non crits seem to be <2k. crits on 2 stacks of srmp are about 1100 i think. i have pugnacity up at all times and if i run low on energy i will use diagnostic scan once which usually gets me back to 100. i feel like i have no trouble at all keeping the tank up, but when the dps and i inevitably start taking damage, that's when it starts getting hairy. maybe my crit/surge is too high and i should be stacking power or alacrity more? it takes me 1.87s to cast UW. my champ gear is mostly field tech as i was more focused on dps spec before, but that is basically the same stats as medic armor, other than the set bonuses. i am now getting medic gear with the duplicate stuff. my tech stats are: bonus dmg: 586 bonus healing: 421 crit: 35% crit multiplier: 81% activation speed: 6.7% should i just try and gear up more with ilum/belsavis pve dailies before doing more HMs? i have read here that taral v is the easiest HM, so the idea of stuff like kaon and battle of ilum is kind of daunting. should i do normal modes first? i almost never see people recruiting groups for NM, it's always HM. thanks in advance for any suggestions.

wait and see, it might not be so bad!

Okay a couple of things have been bugging me. 1. Does Kolto Cloud's AOE effect keep healing people after they move away from the area of the target? 2. the sneaky talent in the scrapper tree says "Increases movement speed by 5/10/15% and effective stealth level by 1/2/3%". The picture is the same as the stealth icon. My question is, does the speed boost affect us all the time, or only when in stealth? Thanks in advance.

yeah it's devastating in voidstar after your team has planted one of the doors. just step back and launch it and watch their health drop as they mill around trying to defuse.

i've also mainly been pvp healing since i switched to heal spec a couple of days ago, and yeah i maxed out the sawbones tree, although i have rarely found the need or application for kolto cloud. i have only healed one hard mode, earlier today, which was Taral V (apparently one of the easiest HMs), and i was kind of worried about being well enough geared. i have just under 15k HP, about half champion gear and half good lvl 50 oranges. the group said we would have to skip the bonus boss because of my gear but other than that we should be fine. i actually think we could have done that boss easily also because nobody died (except me once on a very standard pull when the tank didn't aoe taunt quickly enough) or even went below half health really, and i did not even need to use EMP once on anyone but myself a couple of times on the final boss. i will probably drop KC when i respec in a few days. so yeah if you are doing well at pvp healing i would say you definitely don't need kolto cloud for pve either!

i quit my sent at 45 a few weeks ago and rolled a scoundrel, now level 50. the difference in difficulty between the 2 classes is enormous. i did not lose a single class boss fight on my smuggler from 1-50. not one. on sentinel i was broke from repair bills and having to go away and re-gear myself and my companion just to beat a class boss. on sentinel, if i had an amazing WZ i might get 6 medals, everything would have to go perfectly. more often than not i would finish mid-field with 4 medals. as a dps scoundrel, 5-6 is a baseline and i regularly get 7+, dealing 200k damage without too much effort. when i see a sent/marauder in a WZ i say here is an easy kill. their 1 utility/non-dps skill is force choke (lol) or they can disappear and run away for a couple of seconds (scoundrels have this skill too btw, except it doesn't wear off after 4 seconds!). i was expecting at 50 to see some beastly marauders in WZs which might make me return to my old sent, but so far in several dozen lvl 50 WZs i have only ever come across 1 marauder who provided a challenge. i can sneak up on (or avoid) anything in the game using stealth, and if i get sick of dps, i can respec, to a healer! oh, and did i mention that regardless of spec i can cc anything for a minute? but wait, there's more: scoundrel's 2 best companions (healer and sniper) are ... wait for it ... also smugglers! this means i can pass on all my old gear, not once, but twice down the chain. so i have companions with awesome gear and have never had to buy them a single piece. this includes passing on endgame pvp gear that gets duplicated from bags. sentinel has zero utility outside of being a mediocre dps. i am not trying to say scoundrels are awesome (although IMO they really are), i am just making the point that anyone who says "sentinel is fine, l2p" needs to go and try some other classes to see just how bad sentinels really have it. they need to up their utility by adding at least some kind of cc or a better aoe. i feel like i was duped into playing a half baked, broken class for the first couple of weeks after release. re-rolling was the best move i ever made.

why would you ever favour accuracy (and to a lesser extent power) over crit and surge? based on your reasoning, if you have zero added accuracy you are still 90% chance of landing the attack. stacking accuracy just raises that percentage? whereas crit and surge you can work your way up to around 50% chance of critting and an almost 100% damage increase on the crit. also if you ever switch to heal spec the crit gear is going to serve you a lot better than accuracy because the crits affects heals too. i have opted for crit at every opportunity and with moderate gear (a couple of champion pieces and about half crafted purples, the rest orange) my crit % is currently 39 when buffed, with 82% crit multiplier from surge. my accuracy is at 97% even though i have opted away from accuracy when given the choice. i would love to know what peoples' numbers are in full battlemaster/columni gear with crit and surge stacked. tl;dr: i think dps scoundrels should be stacking crit and surge ahead of accuracy and power.

so it sounds like if one is planning to switch from scrapper to sawbones, it's not even worth getting kolto cloud. might as well put more points in the other trees?

it's just a matter of personal preference really. i play a smuggler because i prefer the republic story-lines and over-all feel of republic. but in terms of aesthetics, i have to admit that i find operative way cooler with their secret assassin feel and shivs etc, right down to the sound effects and animations. smuggler feels way too much like a stealthy cowboy, which i feel goes away from the original material. when did han solo ever wear a cowboy hat and sneak up behind people with a shotgun? i think they should have gone for a slicker, more secret-agent-style aesthetic on the republic side too or at least given the option between the two. still love my scoundrel though!

Played about 3 WZs over the last half hour or so. Honestly the nerf isn't all that noticeable. Still critting shoot first for seemingly as much as before and still getting that 75k damage medal fairly quickly. Yes there's a difference but it's not broken by any means. I was all set to switch to healing but I'll give it a bit now.

they need to work on our blasters too. Some of them look like a child has built them using wood and crayons ....

it's impossible to stealth through tight tunnels/corridors without aggroing stuff while sneak is on CD, so yeah tranq clearly has a use in taking out the closest mob, but you can't have your cake and eat it too in having the mob gimped when it wakes up AND not aggro.

an assassin disappeared on me earlier and i was still in combat despite no other enemies being around, so i assume it's the same for us.

Just hit 40 and got my guy decked out in the pvp set. it's great having 2 smuggler companions to pass all the old gear onto ... so much better than playing my sentinel. finally feeling competitive in WZs, able to take 50s down to 50% health before they even get an attack off, using flechette, shoot first etc etc. Anyone under 50 is gg.

i saw the nerf announced because of grenades which they said are OP in PvP. wjhich grenades are they talking about specifically? i have biochem and i can't sell a grenade to save myself. maybe they are the level 50 ones or something?

yeah it's useful as a finisher and to spam when chasing someone around within 10m.

mine up to this point. i re-map the most accessible keys (for me E, R, T, F, G) to the most used skills as they become available: http://tinypic.com/r/5oyq2u/5 hopefully getting a g-13 soon so that will make things much easier in that it will be possible to record macros.

yeah, because a good half of the community are childish trolls right ... oh wait, THEY ARE!