That's not what was said. The statement was that he has one of each healer so that he can play the class that he thinks will best help his guildies/friends. While I may not agree with the practice, his lack of insight into the Smugg./Op certainly suggests to me that he has a class he perfers to the others. A nice buff? I disagree. They buffed Ops/Smuggs slightly and then nerfed the other two specs down to that performance. They did nothing to add utility or help the mind numbing rotaion. IMO, that is not a fix, it's a slap in the healing communites' face.

^^^ This! A million times this. I give this a +10 This is why I like being a healer and I like being on this section on the boards. I am making this my signature!

I agree with how you describe Sroc./Sage mechanics with one exception. I can greatly prolong my resource pool but I have never been able to make it "bottomless." Maybe I'm doing somehting wrong... I have played the changes on the PTS here is how that will change... I define "burst" as the ability to put at a large amount of healing almost instantly at a very high resource cost. This patch will add a bottom to our resource pool because of the noble sacrifice changes and also increases the cast time of our big single shot heal. Our heals are big but they now come out much more slowly which, for me, killied the ability to burst. The new cost of Noble Sacrifice is painful. You will use it much more gingerly and you better have a plan for recovering the health before you use it. This cost also makes the healer his own largest source of damage in end game encounters and both changes greatly reduce the utility you can add to group. As far as Bioware's mind set... Who can tell? The best way I have seen it described is that Bioware is balancing healers like they would DPS. What they are doing has most of us in healing community scratching our heads and they really aren't sharing any information. So far all we have is conjecture.

Herein lies the problem. Because so much of these changes are mechanical (i.e. they force major rotation changes and casue a swing in play style), they feel more like changes that should have been made with an expasion when all of the classes and encounter design could have been looked at togeather. The "point" releases are hardly a place to overhaul major systems. To be honest, short of a few buffs here and there, I figured that was how they would deal with issues Scound/Op healing. Yes, maybe the encoutners are to easy right now but they easily could have come out and said, "We wanted things to be a little easier in the beginning becasue we believed that we would be attracting a lot of new MMO players. Now that they have had a chance to come in, get comfortable and experience some success our future encounters will be more difficult." They could have moved their metrics up to our performace and "tuned" the new encounters to require what we had been producing. In my mind that should save them time and money in avoiding this healing "re-work." Not to mention it would have saved them a lot of anger from the healing community... I love your zeal but, that's never been how the healing community worked. We either slog it out becasue we like our friends and guildmates, stop healing and move on to another role, or just quietly move on to another game. This may be the biggest healing "protest" I have seen in my years of MMOs. Honestly, I just don't think Bioware understands...

I agree the the diffrences must be accounted for. However, as things stand on the PTS now, the cost of Noble Sacrifice is just to high for the force returned especially with our abililty to burst heal having been removed. IMO, Bioware has over compensated. A log will never show how a class feels to be played. I have played on the PTS and I can say that I was uncomfortable casting NS. While I think that the health cost should be reduced by 7-10%, even a 5% reduction would make a huge diffrence in making it more playable. [Rant] Everything I have said aside. It is just poor design, when in any encounter (PvE or PVP), any player's single largest source of damage is himself but it is especially so for a healer. It's counter productive, counter intuitive and utterly stupid! It makes me wonder if I am supposed to be PvPing against myself. The dev who dreamed this up should be taken out back and kicked in the groin and the manager who approved it should be fired as it is clear that they can not produce results greater than that of a trained monkey with a rubber stamp![/Rant] That has been building up to a while, I'm better now... I won't launch into the burst healing issue beacsue I am still untterly confused by the choice to remove it and I don't have a constructive suggestion...

But that would mean also nerfing the DPS specs. Why the heck would anyone nerf DPS? Healers are a much more fun target! That is basically my point. They decided that it would be easier to "switch off" the other specs utility rather than rework Operatives. And, they based the decision to do this on metrics that said our utility provided to much avoided damage. See what I mean? It's a question of where we are exceeding numbers. And maybe, it's not in the place we thought it was.

Hey buddy... I don't swing my "super fancy glowing stat stick." It's far to pretty to get dirty and if it gets near a bad guy it might get a smudge!!! I always have to clean it after I block the laser bolts, can you imagine the mess a bad guy would make?!?!?!?! You melee types and your "whack them with a stick" mentality... Sheesh!

I agree with so much of what you are saying but this has me scratching my head. I always thought the intent for healers in SW:ToR was to have more utility (e.g. DPS abilities, Interrupts, stuns etc...). While our healing skills were supposed to exceed those things, they were still there and to be used. It added a dynamic play style and off set a rather unimpressive healing toolbox. Personally, I like it. It makes me feel more involved in the group. And, if I see the this fail in any one place it's that they did not equip OPs/Scoundrels with that same utility. The changes coming in 1.2 seem to be a major departure from that. It's like they are ripping the utility from us by making resources more difficult to manage. That is a departure from, what I understood to be, the fundamental intent of an expanded role for healers. Perhaps utility is the metric that they are measuring. Maybe it wasn't that our healing was to great, it was that the utility we were bringing to groups was to great and pushing us past their limits. I have been pondering RuQu's recent posts about the use of "cleanse" abilities. Stuns, interrupts and, to a lesser extent, damage are really the same idea. They allow us to mitigate incoming damage and in turn it becomes avoided healing. IDK, is is possible that we, especially the Sage/Sorc. community, are mitigating to much damage? Is there a way to even quantify those kinds of numbers? In my mind, this would explain Bioware's decision not to work on Scoundrels/Ops and their choice to functional "turn off" utility on the other two healing classes. Thoughts?

Hmmm... Dispels/cleanses... Sounds like an additional fight mechanic that could be used to make encounters more challenging and lower healer through put without a nerf. Are ya paying attention Bioware? EDIT: I know, I know... that was a complete troll. I just couldn't help myself...

I think there is more here than just the class and the player. Some of this comes down to encounter deisgn and the diffrence between story mode, hard mode and Nightmare Mode. In my mind, Story mode should be doable for 100% of the population, Hard mode for about 50% of the population and Nightmare Mode for about 10%-15% of the population. This makes it so that the player makes the class and not the other way around. In PvP you can get so many diffrent opinons about "the most powerful class" that I can only assume that this is a player skill issue. So yes, I want those "God-like" types downing the Nightmare Mode and being unstopable in PvP. Because for every person like that, you have 5-10 guys like me who will be struggling with Hardmode content, struggling in PvP and learning for the that top 10-15%. I don't want equality. I want equal opportunity. As far as I'm concerned, that is balance.

The easy answer to this question is, "Yes!" Play the class you like and find interesting not because it's the "flavor of the month." If you like the play style of the Sorc. than a Sage would be a great option. But it has been my experience that if I'm playing a class or filling a group role that doesn't fit me, I won't stay with it for very long. Just my 2 cents...

The difficult part about this is that they have not shared with us the performance targets that we are exceeding or how they are have intended for the different healing classes to work. This being the case, there is almost no way that we can do more than just make stabs in the dark about how balance should be achieved. However, it seems to me like they are in a "no win" situation. The conversation goes like this... Bioware: “Healers should do nothing but heal.” Community: “Great! Please give us an interesting tool box and healing mechanics that aren’t mind numbing boring to play.” Or Like this... Bioware: “We want healing to be dynamic and offer utility beyond heals to the entire party” Community: “Great! Please bring all of the healing in line and give Scoundrels and Operatives the same ability to weave in DPS and other abilities.” Either way, they end up with a pretty big over haul that they have to fit into their metrics. Maybe there is a even a third option that I am missing. Maybe there is even more to it than that what I'm putting forth here. But, we have no way of knowing that unless they share more information with us. Again, It is my hope the 1.2 Q&A will bring that kind of insight or at least a little more then we have now. But regardless, if Bioware can’t show me that they are interested in a healer’s quality of life as much as or more than their metrics, I am probably done with healing. Not because of the changes but because I play the game for enjoyment and what they are doing with healing just isn’t fun.

I get what they are trying to do and I think their goals are right for the game. It's just the methods that seem to need a little work. In the last Q&A GZ talked alot about the numbers and the metrics but nothing about preserving what players loved about their class. That concerns me more than the current changes. It is my fervant hope that the Bioware development team is looking beyond the numbers and seeing the players. I'm waiting for the next Q&A which is supposed to be completely dedicated to the 1.2 changes. I'm hoping that we'll get a look at their thinking behind all of this and how they think it will affect the players. If it looks they care more about the numbers than the players, I'll probably throw my hands up. But until then, I'm trying to stay positive and give them as much constructive feed back as possible. Perhaps if we continue to offer better ways and solutions, one will get through...

I am still laughing! I think I will come back to this thread everyday just to read this post!

Wow! Quick some get some heals on the English language before he gets any more DPS on it! Seriously, I'm sure you have a positive contribution to make but it would help a lot if you could put it in a form that we can read and understand. (e.g. Sentence structure, grammar, and punctuation.)