lol what? You mean our massive 1.5-2k opener (as a healing specced op) that does not even stun you? Also we lose the ability to heal ourselves when we use vanish for 10 seconds ( the hots will tick for zero). You really know bupkis about this class. You must be trolling.

Not really. The only increase in heaing throughput was the more frontloaded aoe (which was compensated by a commensurate cooldown increase). Other than that they just offered two minor quality of life increases (increased TA length and 3 stackable TA's) They just nerfed the hell out of the other healers and brought them down, they really didn't raise us up.

Yeah, about that....

Healing operative/smuggler + DPS companion. Leveling I could solo every 4 man (except one or two, one on Voss i think was bad). I can solo all of the end game daily quests including the new 4 man. Also the best looking ship. Style is important.

Healing is not OP. It never was. Healing with proper support is OP, and will continue to be so after the patch. In the PvP scene most of the scrub players complain about DPS Merc/Sorcs. This is silly because anyone with some sense can LOS these classes and they do not really have any decent burst capabilities. The real OP DPS are maruaders/juggs/PTs especially groups of 3+ who focus fire. An unguarded player will die to that group in less than 4 seconds. The only counter to that is on the ball tanks who shield/taunt with proper healing support. This is as it should be. these groups can also be countered by focusing on objectives rather than kills. Having high damage numbrs/kills means nothing if you cannot take and hold objectives and if you need to send 6+ players on one node/door to accomplish your objective you are leaving somewhere else weak (excpet maybe on offensive voidstar). healers and tanks can be easily taken out of the equation with judicious uses of pulls/knockbacks. All this focus on raw numbers really doesn't do end game PvP justice. I would rather do 150k healing in a game where I solo gurded a node/door and we won than 600k healing in a game where we lost. I play healing operative right now and if I am solo I will dies in 4 seconds to 3+ competent dps, if I have a decent tank protecting I literally can survive for 20-30 seconds against 5+ equally geared opponents unless they are very good at coordinating their cc and know when to interrupt me and the tank. That paradigm is not going to change after the patch. Healing is not OP. Smart playing and coordination is OP, at least to scrubs who don't understand the basics of teamplay. The nerfs to healing are not going to change that. In general DPS players tend to be full of tunnelvision ******* who get angry when they can't get a kill (not all but a lot). I predict next patch will be full of QQ about tanks and how OP they are when more tank class players discover the utility of their guard and taunt buttons.

You have a 30 meter instant sleep (if traited) and knockback and a ranged slow. And a 30 m interrupt. ops lack the knockback and mercs lack the interrupt. Also all of the op stuns/slows are melee range only. That alone is enormous. Which debuffs the op for ten seconds effectively taking him entirely out of the game (except maybe to stop a cap of something). It is usually better just to die and run back in those circumstances. Also sorcs can force speed 6 times more often than ops can vanish (30 second vs 3 minute cooldown). Oh hi there, the ops group heal is 31 points as well and is total crap, even with the new buff, compared to sorc aoes. Sorcs will still be the preffered PvE healer based on this ability alone. It's amazing front loaded healing that can be applied any time, and is incredibly useful, especially talented. It gives you time to breathe to let your other skills catch up. The merc insta heal is for less and on a longer cooldown and the ops intant requires TA and is only spammable if the target is literally about to die anyway. The merc and op "cast for free" heals are crap fillers only used for energy regen purposes, the amount of healing is literally negligible. It really isn't when you look at the class in total. Also comparing force speed (which is awesome in so many situations) to rocket punch really doesn't bolster your argument here. Since most damage bypasses armor in this game you effectivley have the same mitigation as the other classes (and very close to operatives not-withstanding). No defensive CDs? Didn't we just spend a whole page talking about knockpback, force-speed and bubbles? Listen, it sucks to be nerfed, but the pre 1.2 situtation where a sorc could basically free-cast forever and not worry about mana management while also having all these great utility tools was never going to stand. Even if Sorcs are no longer the best single target output healer they bring so much to the table for both PvE and PvP that they will still be the prefferred healing class in both situations. You are just now going to have to do what the other healres do and more carefully manage your resources. the fact that you can come here and claim that sorcs are eviscerated after Bioware literally gutted merc healing indicates to me that you probably lack perspective.

Yeah, the changes to Op healing really are quite good, better than necessary honestly (speaking as a rank 69 Op healer). I don't think most of the complaints were about OP healing (other than making RN useful, especially considering it was an end-tree talent), they were about utility. ANY type of movement/positioning ability would have been a good start. Saying stealth is ridiculuous, because if you are spending any significant time as a healing op in stealth you are really doing it wrong. In the new patch solo DPS (or even two dps) are going to have a VERY difficult time killing me. If I have a competent tank gaurding me it will be ridiculuous.

I will ask: will this work in warzones? If so its pretty much going to be a requirement for serious PvPer's to level a few alts...

Yeah, highlighted part of that statement right there answers the question: you really do not know what you are talking about. Protip: 1.3 second casts are not faster than instants. You are also completely discounting interrupts when weighing the usefulness of an instant cast shield. Please get out of this thread.

The real problem is that Bioware decided to fix the entirely wrong things. Op healing was fine except for RN (which I think was appropriately buffed). The thing ops were missing was utility (shields, "oh crap" abilities, some form of movement ability/sprint/knockback, alternative heals to avoid interruption lockout). The buffs would have been reasonable had they left the other healers alone (save maybe fixing force bending). I have an ops healer and a Sage healer and overall I would still go with the sage most of the time, if only for the excellent shield/AOE and marvelous pvp utility with sprint/pulls/knockbacks. However the complete kick to jimmy that Combat medics took seems to have come utterly out of nowhere. What the heck metrics are they using?

Yes I do think good sorcs would in plenty of situations. If you can't think of the myriad of uses of even an untalented shield ability you must be a horribad player.

Ryemof - Let me try to explain this to you succinctly: there is zero comparison between DS and the bubble because the bubble, even untalented, is incredibly useful. However a fully talented DS is only marginally useful and an untalented DS is total garbage. Edit: the new changes to DS may make it "useful" but I will have to see it in action. 600-700 healing in one GCD is still quite meh.

This may be true, but the way you deal with it is not making the ammo resource unmanagable (a slight nerf might have been due) but finding a way to decrease survivability apporpriately in WZ's. Eg... lowering or removing the uninterruptable shield or making an interrupt of one hardcasted heal lockout both. These changes completely gut the class for PvE and PvP for no good reason, and I am saying this as an operative healer who has faced plenty of tank guarded troopers.

Also, why can't we do this, this would do a lot to make the class better in PvP (especially friggen huttball, it would be a nice perk to be the only healer able to sit on a catwalk and heal without worrying about charges/pulls).

Rymhof is a pretty big troll on the operative main boards. He has a thread where he says that the four points required in diagnostic scan is totally justified because sorcs have to spend 4 points on shield to "make it useful." Pretty much take for granted anything he says is going to be silly.

Georg, thank you for this. I think this is really all the community is asking for: noting that you understand there is an issue and you are eventually going to make a good faith effort to correct it. No one here (well almost no one) is expecting perfection, but the acknowledgement will earn you a lot of goodwill.

Georg, While, I appreciate your frustration with the player community, a lot of folks have been politely asking the devs to address the issues with ops/scoundrels and have received little if any feedback other than "working as intended." As outlined in the healing roles forum, currently a healing op literally brings nothing to the table over a healing sorc, and gives up a substantial amount of PvE and PvP utility. Stealth really isn't that useful for a healer, especially considering the punishing mechanics in place for utlilizing our long cool down vanish ability and the mechanics that keep us in combat pretty much the instant we throw a heal. I think we just want to know if BW has a vision for the class or if this is just it and we need to learn to deal with it. I find the argument that we are the least played class because "everyone wants to wield a lightsaber" unconvincing. Han Solo is THE most iconic character in the star wars series (well, maybe after Darth Vader and Yoda). The populaiton gap exists because there is a perception (and reality) that we are subpar at our intended roles.

Honestly I think healing is OK, save for buffing recuperative nanotech, and maybe reducing the time/not requiring 2 stacks of KP. What I really want is mobility/utility skills or talents. A knockback or sprint would be delicious. Or how about having an activated ability that makes us immune to knockbacks/charges/pulls for 10 seconds. That would give us a unique ability and a role in huttball. Or make crouching/cover make you immune to knockbacks as well.

That and the knockback, and the ability to hardcast another heal if the first isinterrupted.

Lets not be silly here, mercs are pretty survivable.

I try to diagnostic scan to draw the interrupt, if that doesn't work (better players recognize the animaiton right away) I try to fake cast to half way to draw the interrupt. That is usually unsuccessful however as folks have different reaction times (some people get the interrupt right away others will hold it off until after you cancel). Even if it does work they will usually have 2-3 OTHER interrupts (either stuns or knockbacks) so, yeah, having a single hardcast really sucks. I usually prehot everyone and try to keep at least one stack of TA to allow me to insta-heals someone who gets below 35%. Sometimes I use my own stuns to get off ea big heal. Also do not forget you can turn around and shiv the dude chasing you to generate a TA and begin the heal spam. Also get used to kiting. I HIGHLY reccomend your PvP build include the +15% to movement in combat talent in the concealment tree. It makes an enourmous difference.

I hope so, I will happily adjust my opinion in the face of hard data.

That's pretty optimistic. I read it as pretty large failure of imagination on Bioware's part and a strong sign that they are not going to waste development time fixing our class. I mean, we will get fixed, every MMO eventually gets around to fixing broken classes (except maybe Warhammer). But the time frame for these fixes is not going to be a few months because they obviously have other things on their plate. Most likely we are looking at 6-8 months at least before we get a decent rework. I'm not sure how that pans out though. They seem to have designed the game around healers with infinite resource pools and mediocre healing (see enrage timers on every boss), but gave one class burst healing with an effectivley infinite resource pool (sorcs) and the other heavy utility/buffs/survivability (mercs) and gave us hots. Sort of. My guess is that it can go in a few different ways: 1. They give all healer archetypes finite resource pools so they can move away from a heavy reliance on gimmicky enrage timers. Maybe introducing more hard coded "stances" into Merc/op healing. 2. They keep the current resource system but introduce gradual nerfs into sorc healing and buffs to op/merc healing until they get better parity. 3. They just never fix it and go the Lern2play route. (That's kind of what they are currently saying, but I imagine the addition of combat logs will allow parsers to blow this argument out of the water). In any event that fact that they cant figure out a way to give us more utility without making us overpowered indicates to me that they are not trying very hard. Heres a hint: every other class in the game has mobility abilities, including the other stealth class, why not give us some? Or better yet, give us a passive buff making us immune to charges, pulls and knockbacks (ok that is a bit op, maybe an activated ability?) beyond crouching. Crouching/cover has its uses but most Pve/PvP is mobility dependent.

It varies a lot. Quick games will have far less healing, but if the game goes full length (and you are not being sat on/have decent support) 300k-500k is respectable, with it trending toward the lower end of that range in fights where you are moving a lot. Having said that it is much more useful to have 200k healing and be at the right node at the right time than to have 500k healing becuase you were banging your head against a wall and losing. But thats just my opinon.

Great new, thanks Georg! Hopefully we will hear more response from the Devs regarding Operative concerns in the near future...