Few things going on here: 1) Ironfist is hard. Really hard. You have to interrupt his Headshot ability every time. If the group misses a single interrupt, it's a pretty safe bet someone will die. Then another interrupt gets missed, and another person dies. Everyone has to be well geared in this fight, and if you have anyone in your group who doesn't have an interrupt or doesn't know how to interrupt (Commando don't have an interrupt), you're pretty much screwed. 2) SRMP can put out some decent healing, but it doesn't put out enough at reliable enough a pace to make it worth the GCD and energy cost. Where it really shines is with the talent Medpack Mastery, which gives each tick of SRMP a chance to grant Upper Hand. Fully talented, this can occur every 4.5s, which is 3 GCDs. Put SRMP on two or three people, and you've got a fairly good shot at getting a free Emergency Medpack every few seconds. Use that to your advantage. Don't keep SRMP stacked on anyone (unless the situation calls for it). Put one application on multiple people to maximize the talent bonus. 3) Don't use Kolto Pack. Ever. Kolto Pack is for non-healing Scoundrels who don't have Emergency Medpack. For a healer, it's an energy drain. Emergency Medpack heals for almost as much, doesn't cost energy, and has a faster cast time. Use that in combination with Underworld Medicine. 4) Kolto Cloud doesn't suck. I used to think it does, but, having done some experimenting with it, I now am confident it is fairly powerful. Use it in periods of low incoming damage, when you can effectively use it and regain your energy before having to start healing again. Remember that it has a 10m radius from your target, which basically makes it a 20m diameter AoE dropped on an ally you have targeted. It's a great tool to keep melee DPS healed, and it can be very effective in small ring fights like the boss with the shuttle shooting you in False Emperor. 5) Triage is awesome. No joke. Take the talent that makes it heal when you use it (Psych Meds), and it heals for about 1,000 non-crit. If a boss is lighting your guys on fire or making them bleed often, save it for removing those effects, but if the boss doesn't have any special debuffs that need to be removed, use it as a heal to top people off when Underworld Medicine would be too powerful. It only costs 10 energy, so it's a great little tick to add to your high-health healing. 6) Pugnacity. Love it. Use it. Always. This should be always on. If you get below ~40% energy, start using your Diagnostic Scan. Talented with Prognosis: Critical and Patient Studies, Diagnostic Scan coupled with Pugnacity gives you a tremendous boost to your low-energy regeneration rate.

I don't think that's what he meant. No matter when you PvP, whether it's in the 50s bracket or not, there will be some kind of mismatching going on. In the 50s bracket, it's gear. In the sub-50s bracket, it's access to abilities. Which you think is more fair or fun is a matter of preference.

Alacrity is bad for Scoundrels and Operatives, but it's not bad in general. Heals with cast times are exactly that: heals that take time to cast. Alacrity makes you cast them faster. It does not, however, make the heal weaker. This means that, in a clutch situation, you're better off with alacrity than without, as your alacrity stack can make the quarter second difference between a dead person and a not so dead person. In reality, however, stacking alacrity doesn't by any means force you to chain cast your heals. You should be healing as needed, not spamming a heal every single time you possibly can. Operatives and Scoundrels don't benefit much from alacrity simply because we, as a class, are very mobile. At least half our healing in any given situation comes from instant cast abilities, while fast cast times on our big heals aren't as important because we have healing from HoTs to give that extra little "oomph" needed to create a bit of cushion for that extra half second. Sages / Sorcs, on the other hand, should absolutely adore alacrity because every bloody thing they do has a cast time. TLDR: If you don't recognize the value in faster cast times on heals, you are a baddie and should delete your healer right now.

At the end of the round, say something thanking the healers and encouraging people to consider healers for MVP. Really, the MVP system is stupid because it gets people upset about basically nothing. The reward for MVP votes is rubbish. But if people bring the imbalance to the attention of people in the game, things change. Most people who vote for DPS are only doing so because DPSers are at the top of the list by default (because, big surprise, they tend to get way more medals).

Pretty much screwed. Some pieces have mods that can be stripped, which isn't a total loss. Also, the pieces that have mods are worth a few thousand credits, even after they've had all mods stripped (which, granted, costs about 50k, but if you don't need the mods you don't have to strip them).

This. They should have gotten rid of unlimited Biochem consumables before supernerfing an entire spec of a DPS class. Stacking consumables will always give anyone a huge advantage in both PvP and PvE, and the ability of Biochems to use their consumables indiscriminately without any cost or expense is pretty ridiculous.

1) You only get kill credit if the target dies after being damaged by your DoT and before being healed back to full health. Also, the target must die within a certain time period of your DoT having last ticked. 2) The instant cast DoT costs a lot of energy, at least for me as a Scoundrel. I'm not familiar with Sages / Sorcs, and I don't even know that Commandos / Powertechs even have an instant cast DoT. Anyway, if I DoT 5 targets, guess what? I can't do anything else unless I use Cool Head to restore my energy, which is a tremendously huge waste. 3) Each use of a damaging ability uses a GCD. That's a GCD that could be used for something we do, you know, better. Like healing. Nothing a healing specced character can do with a single GCD will have anywhere near as great an effect on the fight as casting a heal with the situational exception of slows, stuns, and crowd control abilities, which I consider to be part of the healing role anyway. Specialization 101. Earning medals individually shouldn't come at the expense of team success. 4) Telling me I have to play my healer as a hybrid in PvP is a super significant break from the MMO norm. Simply put, I don't want to. I want to be a healer. Tanks can be tanks (doing some damage is implicit to the tank role, though it would be nice if tanks got some protection credit for taunting), DPS don't have to do anything but DPS. Why do healers have to juggle two roles to succeed?

Instants are on the GCD and cost energy. Bro.

Hahaha, yep, pretty much that's how it happened.

Damage has 2.5k hit, 5k hit, 75k damage, and 300k damage for straight damage. There are also medals for one killing blow (Quick Draw), kills (10 and 25), and one solo kill (Assassin). That's seven medals, many of which are not attainable by focused healers. Same deal with tanks. There are medals for protecting 5k damage overall, protecting enough damage without dying (2k and 10k), and, because tanks can't do anything besides protect and attack, it's fairly easy for them to earn the kill medals and some damage medals. The problem for dedicated healers is that the healing medals, except for lucky crits for the 2.5k and 5k medals, basically require you to focus on healing the entire match. If you're healing, you're not attacking, which, combined with your spec sucking at damage, makes it pretty tough or impossible to earn most of the damage and killing medals and the healer medals. This right here is the hangup. Other roles have no trouble getting their role medals and the killing medals (plus some damage medals).

Honestly, now that I have all my champion gear and don't really care about winning WZs, I'm very tempted to switch to DPS simply because as a healer, I can't get any medals by focusing on healing (can't hit 5k heal as a Sawbones except very rarely with consumables, meaning I usually only get 3 medals if I spend all game healing and doing nothing else at all), and I certainly don't play to win. I don't try to cap objectives, I don't try to defend objectives, I don't try to plant bombs, I don't try to score points in Huttball. All I try to do is kill people because that is by far the best way for me to farm valor. As DPS, I get between 8 and 12 medals per match. As heals, I'm lucky if I get 7 (on Civil War, with the Defender medals).

It's canceled by the 30% PvP nerf to all healing done. Did you miss that memo? Expertise doesn't buff us. It makes up for about half of the debuff we receive in the first place.

It's not useless in PvP. If you're getting pounded by melee DPS as a healer Scoundrel, drop it square on yourself. If you get interrupted, you're free to use big heals. If not, well, stun the guy and /laugh at him as he takes a good 8k damage from the flyby and your other attacks.

I think the OP is forgetting that SWG's crafting system wasn't an afterthought. If you decided to be a crafter, your character was a crafter. That was it. It's what you did. It was your thing. In other games with more dumbed down crafting systems, you're an adventurer and a crafter. For example, you're a Scoundrel first and a Cybertech second. Granted, this game is easymode and it takes way less time and effort to fully level an adventuring class and a crafting class combined, but I really like the concept of a player-driven economy. SWG's crafting system was a lot of fun, even for those who didn't craft, because crafters became integral parts of the in-game community. I miss that.

Not the best argument ever. The number of people willing to go on dungeon runs is already limited now. If you put in a cross-server LFG tool, a lot of people will use it. That substantially reduces the pool of people who are willing to wait for a group to be thrown together using normal channels.

UO didn't. UO didn't have forums.

That's not what he's complaining about. Lots of people literally do not use any ability besides Tracer Missile / Grav Round, and they still top the damage charts. It's pretty easy to shut them down if you know how to interrupt them, but lots of players don't. It doesn't really bother me to see Troopers / Bounty Hunters doing this, but it is sort of a facepalm for the design decision that enables them to do that.

He's saying the, "Do what everyone else did," argument isn't valid because it's not possible anymore to race to 50, queue up, and faceroll 20s.

I don't understand why this is even an issue. Every base class has a primary attribute, and every item or modification has one of those primary attributes and endurance. You should never, ever, ever equip an item that does not have your primary attribute. Doing so gimps yourself. By a lot. Further, secondary attributes are pretty straightforward. If you're a tank equipping mods with critical rating, power, or alacrity (***?), you're missing out on defense rating, shield rating, and absorption rating. Rolling on something that isn't an upgrade for you hurts other people in your group who could use the item, and it will earn you a very bad reputation on your server. Don't do it, as this game's item system makes the fine lines between "idiot," "greedy !@#$," and "reasonable player" very clear.

Well, the OP mentions the Jedi Consular's Master title, which is the title they get for completing Chapter 1. I'm not aware of any title any class gets at the end of Chapter 3.

You do get a title. Not surprisingly, it's: It takes awhile to get it, though. I don't remember when, but it's way after when you'd expect to get it.

You have it wrong. The only loot that is assigned is tiered gear. This included Tionese, Columi, and Rakata. The only loot I've seen so far that is not auto assigned is schematics and dropped crafting mats.

I did a very, very, very basic test with heals and found that the results were pretty consistent with what I'd find intuitive. Specifically, Power get converted to Bonus Healing at a rate of about 0.1 per point, while Bonus Damage gets about 0.2 per point. Then, your Bonus for either Damage or Healing is multiplied by the base cast time of the ability you're using depending on its type. Say you have 800 Bonus Healing, then. When you cast Underworld Medicine, because it has a base cast time of 2.5s, you get a healing bonus of about 800 * 2.5 = 2,000. My test results were consistent with these predictions. I did not get the chance to see how instant cast abilities behave, however. And my numbers aren't very exact. Just a ballpark.

Rescue. It's even worse when it comes to the possibility for abuse because it has no cooldown and is useable in combat. Thankfully I haven't seen anyone actually try to harass their own team with either ability yet.

Please give us one. Make us glow. Put a gold star above us. It would help a whole heck of a lot if you would give us some graphical indicator showing how many stacks of Upper Hand we have active square in the middle of the screen. The short chuckle just isn't cutting it.