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  1. I'm feeling this is nearly every aspect of the game at the moment, this is just one of those things that should have been ironed out conceptually before launch. Population in game drops every week, we're kind of at the critical point where if developers continue to ignore issues the game is going to go through a *very* steep decline. It's simple stuff like this that make me feel like the developers aren't trying to create a positive gameplay experience, but are instead trying to keep an appropriate amount of subscriptions that will continue to make the game profitable long term. I feel this more and more all the time. At this point in Star Wars you log on to do an Operation or to PvP. There is quite simply no other reason to even enter world on a lvl 50 character. If the end-game for SW:TOR is to level alts for some half-baked legacy system then I'll just have to find something else to do with my time. The developers have done nothing to make crafting, companions, or the legacy system in general attraction for anything in my honest opinion. Crafting and the in-game economy drive other aspects of the game and they've been largely ignored.
  2. I know a lot of people could care less about the in game economy, the GTN, and generally making large sums of money. Let me explain you, though, why this is an integral part of the game. All games that have been successful long term have had a very viable economy that forces you to constantly consume. This means players constantly need to make money, aka they have to log in and do stuff with frequency or they'll not be able to afford the things they need to succeed. This also means players will, to make money, use the auction house/GTN to make this currency to fund their own endeavors, whilst still providing goods for others to buy. It's a nice circular thing that tends to work very well. Games that were a good example of this: WoW, EVE online, SWG, etc. All these games had/have extremely good in-game economies. WoW does it with the constant needs to new enchants/gems/inscriptions/socketing which is all neccesary anytime you pick up a piece of gear. This drives in economy because you're constantly acquiring new and better gear. In EVE when you die you lose your ship and any modules attached. This is a much harsher example, but serves the point. This won't carry over to star wars very well, but it's an extremely long lived game and I think a lot of that has to do with the economy setup by the player base, there is always incentive to acquire currency and thus always incentive to find ways to make more faster. SWTOR has made some rather large mistakes in this area, and patched some of them in 1.2, but also shot themselves in the foot at the same time. - Before Repair costs were high, which was GOOD. Now repair costs are extremely low, half of less of what they were. I'm a PvE player mostly, just FYI, so don't attack just yet. Without high repair costs someone with 200k credits can literally do Operations for weeks without ever needing to make a single credit. This isn't really a great design. Players need to have other reasons to log into the game than for the Operations bosses. - In 1.2 Orange [Augmented] gear has become BiS. Cool, I like that we can wear a variety of armor sets. The problem with augmented gear is that its basically a one time deal, then you've got not only the look you prefer, but also a best-in-slot piece of gear. This creates a bad situation as well, because now you've taken these crew skill professions and made them virtually useless beyond the first purchase, now once you have a set of augmented gear, you'll never need another piece, from a performance standpoint you've got the best you can have. So, Bioware has created a system where right now Augmented Custom armor is very expensive, but in two months it'll be 20-30k a piece. Cheap as dirt, because guess what.? Everyone that wanted the armor already has it. So, how do we fix that? The 30k per mod cost to take stuff out of gear is a decent money sink, but then again what else will a raider have to spend their money on? They aren't paying repair bills to speak of, they're probably Biochem, they don't have to enchant anything, basically all they have to do when they get a piece of gear is pay 90k and they're back to being BiS. This will come back to haunt the game. There is no emphasis on the Crew Skills. All the sockets come from Raid/PvP gear. All the Crew skills exist for basically is to make an Augment (once per piece of gear) and make the gear itself (only need to buy once!). Basically Bioware has only implemented optional credit sinks for stuff people don't really care about. The Legacy credit costs are absolutely outrageous to begin with. People aren't going to spend three or four months worth of currency on something useless like a GTN in their ship, or a mailbox. Trying to fight inflation with things like these won't really work, but only a very small percentage of the population will even acknowledge that these things are worth that much money. Most of the others including myself look at that and say, "Wow, with 5 million credits I could pretty easily play the game for an entire year and never need to make a single credit." I'm sure people will roll in here and talk about how they don't want to be forced to farm and they don't want to do anything but 'play' the game, and probably talk about how if they did it differently then they're promoting the sell of credits for $$$. Ask yourself, if people want so badly to get at end game currency that they're willing to fork over their hard earned $$$, then isn't the economy working really well? I don't think gold/credit selling is legitimate and hate them as much as anything else, but if they were more prevalent I think that'd be a good indication that people are very interested in making money in game. I'm going to TL;DR this for people who don't want to read through all this: SW:TOR doesn't have a viable end game economy, and this is part of the reason population numbers are dwindling. People don't have a reason to log into the game besides doing an Operation or doing some PvP (and PvP is just bleh to the max after 1.2). For the game to be viable long term the economy needs to be self sustaining, but at the moment we're basically making armor/items/weapons that will literally last us until they implement something with two augment slots. All MMO's that have existed for long periods of time have done so because they created a well balanced in game economy. SW:TOR currently doesn't have the balance necessary to sustain itself. aka Money will eventually devalue to the point where as long as you can repair and change sockets once in awhile then you basically won't need it anymore.
  3. Yes, this has been one of my very top issues since I started playing the game. The healing side of things is surprisingly uninteresting. Especially since DPS/Tanks have all kinds the fancy fun abilities we might expect them to, and the powerful CDs to match. What do operatives have? Evasion. Woooooo! That one is almost too fun. Almost as fun as hitting that self damage shield that absorbs maybe 1 hit from another player in PvP. Operatives are all about stealth and evasion, but really the healing model doesn't fit with that. As an Operative healer I spend almost no time in stealth, because you can't heal people from stealth. Yet, my class and abilities are all based around this. Someone posted on this earlier, and I agreed: If we're going to be forced into Bioware's weird marginalized model of healing at least let us be decent at other things. Give the healing trees some nice utility or mitigation CDs to aid our allies. An On-target 25% Damage reduction Cooldown could potentially be game changing for a Merc, and would be in line with their type of healing. Likewise Operatives could benefit from a way to proc HoT refresh from received heals, and Sorcs would certainly benefit from some sort of powerful instant heal on a medium CD.
  4. If you learned to spell you could probably run for office. But yeah, we all know he's full of it. He's obviously hitting those 4-5 buttons harder than the rest of the community, especially on the PvP side of things.
  5. Sorc can mindlessly pop down a ring on many fights and easily do 250k healing just from the circle, not counting all their other abilities. So in that respect, Kolto bomb is pretty weak. I'm not sure how the Op heal stacks up, because with a Sorc in the group all the time it's rare that I need to lay it down. All we do is mindlessly heal stuff with 4-5 abilities. I'm not sure how you're arriving at this being new and innovative game play. Combine that with a really really bad UI to work with: No click2cast, no large debuff/buff frames. I don't know if you've played an Operative healer, but do you know what it's like trying to keep HoTs stacked on a couple people during a fight? I don't buy into the whole "Needing to avoid damage" that doesn't work in PvP, which is where about 90% of my qualms exist. PvE is fine, all the healers CAN with enough effort get through the content. My biggest problem is the very uninteresting and lackluster mechanics present for healers in these fights. Basically we just dispel something when it comes up and back to healing a tank. None of our heals have any cool mechanics, they aren't smart, and honestly its just rather blah in every respect. Where are our cooldowns? Where is a nice mitigation cooldown for us to put on a tank or group member at a critical moment? Where are our tools besides raw HPS? My raid leader asked me the other day if we had all looked up the strats for the HM Denova fights and I said, "Nope, I bet I heal and stay out of AoE on all of them" Amazing how that works. There is literally nothing more to it for a healer, every fight is the same, some require more healing and some require more avoidance. My big issue is the sad sad sad state of PvP healing. So, I'm not trying to question PvE viability; I acknowledge everyone can do PvE just fine. But what is going to be done to fix PvP?
  6. Who cares. When I run the meter they still accounted for something like 1.3% of my total healing for a fight. I put the +power on use relic back on and never looked back. I'd much rather pump out 200-300 more per heal for 20 seconds when I need it.
  7. Not to attack you, but unless you're at level cap and doing HM Denova or PvP then I'm not really interested in your opinion of the healing balance in this game. PvE is basically fine, although I will say that it really seems like the difference in mechanics puts a lot more stress on healers than the DPS. DPS continue to derp through the fight as always while I need to do twice the amount of healing and worry about new dispellable debuffs (with a terrible UI). Anyone who was doing NM before 1.2 will tell you that the difference between HM and NM was basically just a bit chunk of healing and that's pretty much it. Agreed. Healing is this game has got to be the most basic hamfisted method I've ever seen. You have 4 heals, 3 of which are single target with various energy/heat/ammo/force costs, while one is a very mild AoE heal. Oh wow Bioware, how long did it take to develop those abilities? 5 minutes? 15 tops I say. Healers have to do the most with the fewest abilities and with the most drawbacks against us. We're all very suceptible to interrupts, which are all too common in this game. We have no cooldowns to deal with spike DMG and certainly aren't packing anywhere near the toolset that a more traditional MMO healer does. Yeah it can be done, with a boat load of effort, and even then you feel very marginal. It's very difficult to feel motivated when you're doing your absolute best and it's just barely good enough most of the time. Scoreboards are important, because the game doesn't factor overheal. So all you see is effective healing. Sorcs is always inflated (especially now), because of their force regen ability. But there is a reason Combat medics are generally low, it's because they simply aren't healing as much as everyone else. It takes about 5 minutes watching one play to figure that out. Healing less is NEVER better than healing more. There is no mitigation in this game offered by healers, besides a sorc shield once in awhile. Higher numbers = more effective heals = you're doing your job pretty well. You're making an argument as if doing less damage was a good thing. If you'd said that it didn't matter because of objective based combat then I might have agreed, but to say that less is more is just unfathomable. That's simply a fallacy.
  8. When I saw your post this is what I actually read, Wavyhill. I do wish you'd debate in a more civilized manner instead of resorting to trying to belittle our intelligence. It's obvious you're building your arguments on fallacy. Stop hiding behind this false facade while you talk about healing mechanics. Some basic misconceptions you're not understanding. Class A can beat Class B in 1v1. Class A can beat Class C in 1v1. Class D can beat Class E in 1v1. Class D can beat Class C in 1v1. In a fight where group one's composition is: AADD and Group two's composition is: BCCE - Who wins? See the point? There is a transitive property at work here. It's easy to understand. 1v1 is extremely relevant, because when you merge classes the individual characteristics of said class aren't completely different. This isn't chemistry where hydrogen gas and Oxide make water. You're basically assuming that group A or B has tanks, thus further balancing the mechanics. No single role should be required for balance to be achieved. Much the same as 1v1, DPS and overall throughput is HUGELY important to not only a single pvp encounter, but also to the overall match performance. If I can land 800-1 mil heals every game on people don't you think that there would therefore HAVE to be a lot less deaths? There is an equilibrium here, understand it. Don't cite some ridiculous example of 10k instant damage abilities. Don't cite anything but abilities present in game, and then once you have compare them with healing throughput. Ahh, there's the rub. Throughput is relevant because it represents a best case scenario, guess what? The best case scenario for healing is lower than that for a single DPS. Problem? You bet. That's a significant balance issue. If they can get a stun on me while my CC breaker is unavailable it's pretty much over. Of course if I'm guarded I'm basically immortal, but more on that later. Tanks can do 1000 DPS, plus Guard, plus taunt, plus DMG reduction CDs, plus CC and effectively double an allies EHP permanently. Healers can do about 800-1000 HPS in a PvP environment, plus some dispels, plus CC. DPS can do anywhere from 1200-1600 DPS in a PvP environment, plus dispels, plus CC, plus any utility they might additionally offer: such as Sniper shield, marauder CDs, mortal strike. Notice the healer can do about 1 thing, and that's heal. Cool, whatever. Now make it so I can at least heal as well as everyone else can DPS. In terms of usefulness it would appear to be that a heavily DPS/Tank based team would likely have more EHP/DPS/Utility than an evenly balanced team. Because let's face it. NOTHING can stop two or three decent DPS, you will die, and there's no amount of healing that can save you through focus fire. Just because in a PuG warzone healing seems okay because of lack of focus fire, and group PvP mechanics in no way shape or form illustrates that rated WZ will have any semblance of balance. In a nutshell the problem is this: - Healers do too little healing in PvP environments, with no notable utility or mechanics to fall back on to be useful to the team. We heal and that's it, and we can't even do that effectively. Why I believe this occurs: - Tanks offer too much mitigation and to keep gameplay from going into OMG NOTHING DIES, the developers have decided that healers should be marginalized the most. Remove trauma, nerf guard and taunt to 50% total reduction on a PTR (with max level champion level transfers) and we'll see what happens. Really. I think it'll make for a more positive game play experience for everyone.
  9. All of the healing nerfs are result of PvP, I'm pretty convinced of that. People QQ because they can't kill a healer when there's 3-4 of them in a WZ. Guess what, focus fire. 4 DPS > 4 Heals, this is a really dumb POV and someone will say but...but...Guard! All I have to say about guard in PvP is that it's currently ruining the healing mechanics on that side of the game. If you don't have a guard you're boned, if you do (and the tank is taunting off you) you're unstoppable. Tanks are damn near too viable in the PvP environment to the extent that DPS is over inflated to deal with guards/taunts and healing is lackluster for the same reasons. Tanks are going to roll in here and go "But we won't be viable!". Please. Tanks are some of the strongest 1v1 specs in the game, you have three major DMG reduction CDs, tons of EHP, and most of the game types are objective based, meaning controlling an area/ball/turret is the way to win. Once you factor in Trauma and MS you're literally healing for HALF what you would in a PvE environment. Nobody else has to deal with this kind of ridiculousness, and frankly PvE healing isn't overly strong. My Overall HPS is scarily similar to DPS of the best raiders. I tend to heal for ~1500-1700 HPS or so on Hardmodes. DPS are breaking the 1300-1400 mark relatively easily on most fights. How the hell can you cut 1500 HPS in HALF and call that balanced? I'm an Operative healer and I did fine before the patch (clearing all NM content) and I'll do fine after the patch (cleared Story, working on HM). I'm actually a little beefier than before. Sorc/Sage was a bit over the top, and everyone knew it. I'm still trying to figure out why they nerfed Merc/Commando (bet it was PVP since they were easily the most durable healer). Healing in this game is very different from other MMOs because the game expects you to heal like you would DPS, which is in short bursts, or a steady stream, neither of which are a good mirror to the mechanics present in the raid. Still, at the end of the day I can play well enough to push my gang through any content out there, so I don't think there is anything wrong on the Operative side of PvE healing, but I have read/heard first hand that Mercs now are really really close to useless, which is a shame, really. We're going to take one to HM this week and he'll be parsing so we'll so what kind of HPS he throws out. Ways to Fix PvE: - Stop nerfing healers for PvP purposes - Stop creating fights where it's possible to gib players randomly. (Kephess) - Stop making the difference between HM and Story healing needed. - Give healers some interesting heals, besides Single Target + a Hot and a group heal with extremely short range. - Differentiate the healers so they actually bring unique values to the group. Currently most HPS = Best healer. Where are the mitigation type CDs? Where are the CDs at all? Where is pain suppression? Where the hell is the game for us Bioware? It's seriously ridiculous that the only CD I have is a Relic and Adrenaline Rush. In case you haven't noticed the difference between NM and HM and Story mode is basically a little bit of DPS and a whole metric boat load of healing. I'd say the difference in healing neccesary is roughly 25%. This is a very large difference, especially when I've rarely ever seen a boss go into Enrage, even on HM. Ways to Fix PvP - Get rid of Resolve and put in diminishing returns. Resolve is the worst system I've ever seen in an MMO. The mentality: "You're stunned for 10 seconds, but then you're immune for 10 seconds (or however long it is)!" Bioware you're dead if you're stunned for 10 seconds. You made the game, how can this be considered a valid mechanic? Diminishing returns is in every other game for a reason, it works. And being able to perma root and snare people? Yeah, that's fun. - Keep Expertise. Take off the % DMG bonus. Allow it to give a nice health bonus, and make the PvP set bonuses much more relevant to competitive play. - Get rid of Trauma. - Reduce effectiveness of guard by ~15%. - Reduce effectiveness of Taunts. Trust me tanks, you'll have a lot more fun if you can actually stay alive when we're trying to heal you. Did I miss anything? Oh yeah, - 6 sec CD interrupts with a 3 second lockout, but if they take Trauma out. Just my rather long laundry list of things I'd fix. I've been playing since Beta as a healer. I've cleared all PvE content except for the last boss in the EC HM and am Valor 61 from back before Ilum was free Battlemaster in a week. I've played about every aspect of the game and feel that of the three roles healers are definitely being pushed aside in favor of a DPS/CC centric mentality. If we want to play that then we'll go play guildwars 2.
  10. I was pulling 700-800 as Healing Spec lol. I doubt that's useful information, but there it is. Parsed healing in the new raid last night and was anywhere from 1300-1600 depending on how crazy it got. Just an aside, our new AoE heal is really handy and I'm finding 3 stacks TA to just be a godsend.
  11. Cover system is stupid at lower levels when you don't have portable cover (snipers) and you're lacking most of your melee stuff on the operative side of things. Trick to successfully using cover as an Operative? Shift+F - That's right, screw the mitigation. I'm going into cover right here. I use it even in PvP to drop Explosive probes, and occasionally sniper that sorc who is trying to lolsprint away. I like that operatives can still use cover, it's part of what makes operatives the most versatile classes in the game. Here are some more facts: - Agent is one of the hardest classes to level. - I agree the Agent story is really really good. But lets not forget that it starts out agonizingly slow. Really seems to pick up and get good towards the late game. - Operative really blows in Huttball, and that's about 75% of PvP at this point. - Operative healing clunky at times. Merc and Sorc offer much more well thought out talent trees. - Operative is the least played class because to be effective it requires a great deal more effort and technique than other classes. - Operative armor sets are generally less impressive than other classes. I'm thinking Troopers/BH/Marauders in particular. This goes for snipers as well. - Sniper play style is turret mode. Snipers in real life are masters of hiding in plain site, surviving the harshest environments, mastering physically challenging terrain, and of course being able to make some ridiculously good shots. They got the shooting part down it seems. Seems like Operatives inherit a lot from snipers. I don't think it'd be game breaking to give them some sort of stealth mechanic in PvP. - Vibroknives need an overhaul. They aren't very exciting, and using the exact same one from 1-50 is quite irritating. I'd really love a small lightblade or even just a much larger, shinier serrated blade to shank with. Vibroknives are basically an operative's primary weapon. We use it a hell of a lot more than we do our gun. I also believe we should get a melee range auto attack as well as the ranged variant. Ramp up the DMG slightly on the melee version. Shooting people in the face with an enormous blaster rifle just doesn't seem practical when I have a perfectly good knife. I'd also love for the knife to be displayed on my belt or somewhere else convenient. I'm a firm believer that the "stat-stick" should be that giant rifle we carry around and not our primary weapon (although I understand that tech attacks benefit basically just purely off of power). Sorry, this is getting long, but you asked. This is stuff that I think would keep the flavor of the class while supplying more of that O.o factor. As an operative healer I'm tired of my ninja costume. It's ridiculous. I want a Medical droid inspired armor set with kolto stims strapped to my chest and some stinking armor! Marauders look like they're wearing much heavier armor than we are, when in fact we wear the same type. Operatives are all needles, dart, and droids. Our armor sets should reflect this. Another thing that bothers me is how small my wristband/probe launcher is. That little wristpiece is entirely too small and inconsequential. I'd love to see a variety of models based on the armor I'm wearing and that has a little more flash and substance to it. We look like light armor wearing ninjas who for some reason have giant needles, green darts, and a battalion of kolto probes- Fix it! We need a power-aura type visual indicator for TA as well. Things an Operative is responsible for tracking as a healer: - Tactical Advantage (2) - Stim Boost (Requires TA) - Kolto Probe (2) - Occasionally More, not often though. - Managing our Energy resource very carefully - Debuffs that are about 0.5mm in length on the crappy raid frames. Especially on fights where dispelling is essential (jarg and sorno NM anyone?) this is a hassle like you wouldn't believe. - Adrenaline Probe CD - You'll need it. - Finally we're keeping track of all boss mechanics and each individual health pool. All at the same time. Pretty sure nobody else is managing this much stuff at once. I need some visual queues to make it a little less difficult. I feel in PvE that we're very effective healers, but in PvP we need some mitigation CD's on the Healing side of things. We just get shredded. My experience: - Valor 60+ - 10/10 NM w/ Titles - All three specs - Primarily a healer. I like the Operatives, and I like it more that we are a rarity. I'm fully geared for the new Operation coming in 1.2 and will surely hit the ground running. P.S: Take alacrity off our gear, or make it useful.
  12. Operatives are the "weakest" healer, but very viable no matter. My guild currently clears 10/10 NM with a single tank and no offtank. We only have one player with a taunt and that's the Jugg tank. Generally in AoE situations the Sorc is in charge of throwing down the healing circle and I'm in charge of triage on the lowest HP members. This works incredibly well on Annihilation droid missile phases (we stack and heal). We also have a Sniper and a Marauder we bring. We use the Shield on phases 1 and 3. Marauder Buff on Phase 2 Phase 4 is all self CD and he usually dies just before or during this phase. I'm more than capable of solo healing some of the fights even in NM, although we just don't do it. Saying that operatives aren't viable is wrong. Saying that they aren't the best is probably accurate. The longer the fight the better we become, proper gearing 40% crit, 75% surge, max power will really improve things. Keep alacrity to a minimum is important. I feel like our AoE heal is useless and instead pickup combat stims in the lethality tree which is a substantial burst to HPS throughout the fight. I firmly believe operatives require the most dedication to master, and the most patience to learn, but I also believe we are quite viable and I've never come across something that I couldn't heal that someone else could. Routinely break 500-600k in WZ as well. Operative healers are in need of some mechanic changes to smooth things out, but the design has grown on me a bit. Energy management and making smart choices (like dispelling instead of healing at certain times, which practically nobody does) will make things a lot more interesting.
  13. A lot of the fights are nearly ideal for max DPS, this game doesn't have that much stuff to avoid to be quite honest, and of those ranged DPS are going to be least effected. There is just no way that spreadsheet is anywhere in the neighborhood of accurate. Anyone who's actually clearing NM modes knows that Operatives aren't doing 10% more DMG than arsenal mercs in ANY situation, that's just absurd. There was operative simulations floating around with any TA proc granting a "free" SP proc for heals (which wasn't being factored into GCD), which made Operatives healing look pretty inflated as well. I wouldn't be surprised if this simulation is doing something similar with lacerate that auto-procs the attack even during GCD and then again always multiplies the bonus to the proc. Giving the operative nearly unlimited usage of one of our most damaging abilities. I also have to wonder if that's pre-acid blade nerf. Since then we've gone down a LOT. I just don't think this was calculated properly. Simulations are less than useless unless done properly, and it's important to valid the simulation with in-game meters and parses. We can't currently do any of that and so I'm going to go out on a limb and say this "simulation" is just a fabrication of mechanics that *might* be working properly. But how could we know? We have nothing to base the numbers on.
  14. Assassins? Some of the mobs also do knockbacks which can really diminish the DPS for some other classes which use channeled abilities. It's really not a great benchmark for DPS.
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