While I agree with you, some alacrity is certainly good, how much do you have? Ideally, I would love to be able to sit at 40%crit, 80% surge, and 1.7s cast time for injection, but I'm not sure that is possible with our inability to get top tier (58 rating/25) crit/surge enhancements. (Yes, I know they can drop in HM/Nightmare operations, but that is kinda random.)

Mine crit for around 3.5k right now. My Kolto Injection crits for over 6k. I have ~40% crit and ~85% surge right now, and that's with the only battle/assault enhancement 22s in my gear. I'm slowly farming them to 24s from other columi/champion gear

I've healed EV 4/5 Nightmare - 5/5 Hard - 5/5 Normal, Karagga's Palace 5/5 Normal - 5/5 Hard, and I'm valor rank 66 in nearly full Battlemaster gear (missing belt, bracers, and offhand). While these are valid points, I cannot stress enough how important it is for healing operatives to make sure they have swapped in the correct enhancements (crit/surge/power) into their gear over the some of the Alacrity. (I find just enough alacrity to get K.Injection to ~1.8s to be enough.) This means you may have to swap in lower level enhancements, or farm enhancements from other gear. A lot of the Battle and Assault 24 Enhancements can be found in various Columi/Champion gear. My biggest concerns with operative healing: 1) Talents - As previously mentioned, we have really important talents that do not work, or in RN's case, is extremely lacking for a 31pt talent when compared to Sorc/Sage healers. Simply put, our talents need an overhaul as the only class with comparably bad talent trees in my eyes are Marauders/Sentinels. 2) Lack of heals - For the most part, a PvE healing rotation will consist of only 5/6 skills: K.Injection, KP, SP, Stim, Scan, RN (extremely situational). Furthermore, we are severely lacking an "o-crap" heal. Good operatives should have TA up nearly all the time, but if that's not the case (or without a good crit from SP) you're out of luck. Overall, I could live with everything else such as our lack of a knockback, inability to shield someone, or other issues, but these two are the biggest for me. Because of the aforementioned issues, I truly believe operative healing to be one of, if not, the most challenging class/specs to play in the game. In my opinion, no other class has a margin for error as small as healing operatives with such a limited range of options.

I can get 24s no problem by farming some of what you said, and yes operations do drop 25s. I was just wondering if anyone figured out a better way then that, because as it stands, its nearly impossible to get useful 25 crit/surge/power enhancements, best we can really farm is 24

bump..any thoughts/ideas?

As healing operatives are aware, most of our set gear (pvp and pve) comes stacked with alacrity. I've been hearing conflicting reports as to whether alacrity actually makes our HoTs tick quicker. Regardless, this creates a need for us to swap out a lot of these heavily stacked alacrity enhancements for power/crit/surge ones. What enhancements do other healing operatives tend to prefer? Right now I'm using a mixture of Battle and Assault Enhancements, however, you can only get the top tier Battle Enhancement (Advanced Battle Enhancement 25) in columi/rakata lightsabers which are BoP and require tokens to even get. Furthermore, I cannot find where you can get top tier assault enhancements (Advanced Assault Enhancement 25). Assault 24 drops in various champion/columi gear similar to Battle 24. If any other healing operative prefers other enhancements (there a few more like Adept and Discipline that aren't bad), I'd love to hear it and possibly where you can get the top tier of said enhancement. Edit: I'm excluding trying to get lucky with one of these dropping in a Nightmare/Hardmode operation and you actually winning the roll for it when I say, where you can get them.

I'm a healing operative and I've just started mixing cover into my PvE play. An example where cover is EXTREMELY useful is the first droid boss in Eternity Vault. All you have to do is setup in cover on the right side of the boss, and throw out your heals as usual. When the boss starts shooting its missiles at everyone you will barely take any damage unless you are standing up casting kolto injection or something. This mechanic is especially helpful in Nightmare mode when the droid boss' missiles do insane damage.

I recommend pulling the enhancements out of gear you get with duplicate tokens. This might require you to buy the enforcer or field tech piece for good power/crit/surge enhancements, but its certainly better than leaving the alacrity enhancements in your healing gear.

Appreciate the feedback, some comments: 1) you're right you don't NEED it active at all times, but with it active you can roll through one mob after another without stopping to use many direct heals. 2) I did this during my entire leveling process and never really ran into energy problems as long as you keep stim boost active. I also Shiv+backstab combo'd every time when it was off CD 3) I ran with Kaliyo EXTREMELY well geared entirely up to 50 As I said in the OP, this is just based on my own experience leveling (which was quite some time ago. I hit 50 on 12/22), I'm by no means saying this is the best way to level. When I wrote this several weeks ago, the game was a lot different and people were looking for ideas on how to level. Unfortunately as I mentioned above, I hit 50 some time ago so I don't really have any video =========== I'm going to have a PvP healing guide very soon which will be extremely more in-depth than this one, so those that are interested should be on the lookout for it.

Yes we look pretty baller. Here is my lvl 50 heal operative: http://i.imgur.com/CMj3p.jpg http://i.imgur.com/lOuVg.jpg *edit* for those who might ask the chest is the 2nd tier PvE operative healing piece

I've seen quite a few leveling threads over the past few days, and as a result, I've decided to make a thread with my personal guide to leveling an operative. Please keep in mind that this is a leveling guide only, and what is described below will most likely never work well in PvP or PvE effectively. I hope at least a few people glean something from this. Enjoy~ Introduction At the time of posting this thread I am currently a level 44 operative, so I hope you can take what I'm about to say as something reasonably valuable coming from someone with a decent amount of game experience. The two major problems I see people talking about on this forum about leveling the operative are as follows: 1. The Operative heals are clunky and require too much energy. 2. The Operative does not do enough damage. I too ran across these issues when leveling my Operative, but after a bit of tweaking (and leveling), I believe I have found a sweat spot. Unfortunately there is a downside: the following strategy only becomes effective between levels 25-27, and much more after that. Step 1: The Basic Concept The most important part of this guide/build is Kolto Probe and Medical Engineering, you will need both skills maxed out. How you go about maxing these skills out is up to you. I personally recommend spec'ing straight into healing to get them maxed by level 27. The basic idea here is that you want to have 4 Kolto Probes active at ALL TIMES. Two on you and two on your companion. With Medical Engineering fully spec'd, Kolto Probe has a 30% chance to active TA every 4.5 seconds. With 4 probes active, the probability of getting a TA to activate every 4.5 seconds is pretty damn high. At this point you have done two important things: 1. You are keeping consistent heals on yourself and your companion, regardless of whether you think you need them. 2. You are keeping TA active/usable Step 2: Bringing it together With consistent heals and a nearly permanent TA, your next job is to work in your other skills. The minute you have one TA to spare, always activate Stim Boost, whether you're at fully energy or not. With 4 Kolto Probes activating TA, you should almost always have Stim Boost active at all times. Why do I recommend a near infinite loop of Stim Boost when Kolto Probe doesn't cost much energy? Simple, because when you start engaging mobs, you're going to start chaining more expensive energy costing skills. As a result, having Stim Boost permanently active helps keep your energy high throughout fights, which should for most mobs mean you are never scrambling for energy. As for the rest of your spec, it's completely up to you. The only other recommendation I will insist upon is spec'ing fully into Slip Away. I have come to believe this skill is an absolute must for every Operative in every situation (PvE/PvP). I find it best to spec entirely into DPS once you have maxed out Medical Engineering, as it will help you kill mobs/bosses quicker. Step 3: Combat Again, I don't really have many specific instructions on how to go about combat. Whether you want to utilize Stealth and CC your mobs or try to AoE your mobs is up to you. I would note, however, using AoE's like grenades will tax your energy more. There have been plenty of threads about how to stack your abilities, so I'll refer you to them. The most important things about combat are as follows: 1. Remember to ALWAYS keep Kolto Probe (preferably more than 1) and Stim Boost active. 2. When your TA is low/running out, Shiv to replenish it. 3. Try not to spend your last TA unless absolutely needed or you can't replenish it with Shiv. 4. Corrosive Dart should be active on all Strong/Elite/Champions at all times. This is really all I want to say on combat, if people would like more elaboration on how to deal with difficult Elites or whatever, I will expand on this later. Step 4: Gear, Stats, and Crits Again, I'm not going to get too specific in this section. The basic idea with your gear/stats is to increase your Cunning (obviously) and your Crit%. By keeping your Crit% high, you not only have a greater chance at doing more damage with your attacks, but each Kolto Probe tick has a greater chance of healing for more life. More life = less dying. Imagine a crit'ing Kolto Probe tick healing ~500 health. Yea, that's pretty good. One last thing on gear and stats. Personally, I'm unsure of how much importance an Operative should place on Surge. Perhaps someone can give their thoughts in the comments? Step 5: Putting it all Together There you have it. At this point you should have a permanent set of heals on yourself and your companion, always have Stim Boost active, and hopefully have a TA active at all times. What this build allows you to do is enter (most) combat without having to worry about activating Kolto Injection or Infusion. Obviously, when things get dicy, you will definitely need to use both those skills. However, the constant Kolto Probe + Stim Boost should keep you at high life + high energy for most mobs. Additionally, the constant TA means you're always dealing an extra 2% damage. Combine even more Crits for damage and healing, and you should be well on your way to owning mobs and leveling with ease. In Conclusion I'd like to reiterate this guide/build only really becomes effective at level 27+ (assuming you spec straight into healing) and slit spec'ing DPS + Healing will never work once you finish leveling. I'd also like to reiterate that this guide is from my own personal experience and the reason I'm leaving so much up in the air is to allow you to play with different variations of the general concept of this build. Am I doing this wrong? Maybe. But I've found the following build extremely effective in my leveling process. At my current level (44), I can pretty much run through all normal mobs without breaking a sweat and even Strong mobs with the right CCs aren't too bad either. Thanks to all those who read this far, and I hope someone out there found this guide helpful. Happy leveling! TL;DR: Kolto Probe + Medical Engineering + TA + Stim Boost + other skills = good times leveling

Like the previous have said, slip away by a mile, and not just for PvP. I'm using a hybrid healing+dps spec for leveling and slip away is fantastic on the larger bosses. You open with your normal stuff and when you draw aggro, all you have to do is debilitate => **Backstab** => sever tendon **This is optional if its off CD and you can spare the energy You then run away shooting blaster shots, maybe an overload shot, maybe put down an inject/infusion/probe or whatever. Point is, slip away is fantastic if for nothing else than reducing the CD of one of your better stuns. Get it.

Pretty much this. You really MUST have double probes up on the tank at all times while trying to keep stim boost up. This helps keep your energy high and the tanks HP from falling too quickly. Obviously you then mix in other heals when necessary. I've also rotated in some things like flashbang and shield probe sometimes to help get injects off when things get dicey. tl;dr it really comes down to keeping probes+stim boosts active and reacting to everything else accordingly

Once you get spec kolto probe out to activate TA, healing becomes super easy. I can roll through most mobs without stopping with fairly high health and energy the whole time. Only time I ever have to activate channeling heals is on larger bosses. *Edit* If it helps, this is coming from a level 40 operative partially spec'd into healing and dps specifically for leveling.

Does anyone know if it is possible to change your legacy surname once you set it? I accidentally messed up and didn't know what it was when I first did it so my surname is super gay and doesn't make any sense T_T