Basically you have no choice. The set pieces are alacrity stacked and you will end up way under in the amount you want for surge. I've opted to PvP to get the crit/surge champion pieces and took out those enhancements.

This doesn't change the fact that for some strange reason they decided that force pools should remain static. Alacrity will decrease sustainability with no way of compensating for it through gear (Well, besides the +50 from the 4-set bonus). A benchmark for example could be the amount of seconds a player can go full throughput before being force starved. In other games, one would typically balance an alacrity stat with the total pool available and adjust from there. In this game you can't increase the pool through any stat attribute. Surge/Crit/Force increases throughput at no cost to sustainability. I am 6/6 HM bosses.

It is pretty terrible for healers too. While it does increase throughput, the designers seemed to have missed the fact that force pools remain static with no way to increase besides through skill and a a trivial amount from our set bonus. If willpower increased force pool as it increased, I would consider alacrity a possible stat to consider. In the current state, and from an efficiency standpoint, crit and surge far outweight it in my opinion.

It applies a debuff on the target, essentially giving it a per-player cooldown of 20 seconds.

My setup is the following (as a sorc, excuse the fact that even by now I still don't know my spell names): Keyboard (I use tilde key to quickswap to another bar when need to off-DPS: 1 - Shield 2 - Fast Heal 3 - Slow Heal 4 - Channeled Heal 5 - Instant Mouse Buttons: Middle Mouse Button - Dispel Shift+Middle Mouse Button - Extrication Side Mouse Button 1 - Force Speed Alt+SideMouse Button 1 - Crowd Control Shift+Side Mouse Button 1 - Stun Ctrl+Side Mouse Button 1 - Snare Side Mouse Button 2 - AoE Heal Ctrl+Side Mouse Button 2 - AoE Lightning Thing Alt+Side Mouse Button 2 - Inquisitor jumping AoE knockdown thing T - Cool Down 1 (Sorc crit buff thing) G - Cool Down 2 (Adrenal) V - Cool Down 3 (Relic) F - Target of Target X - Medpac R - Reactive Cooldown (Sorc consumption) I think that covers it... might have missed something. Can't figure out what I had bound to shift+Side Mouse Button 2.

Backpedal is absolutely useful for small adjustments backwards (ie. you are at very edge of void zone and your only movement option is behind you). It is faster than spinning your camera 180 to move 2 feet back, then swinging it back around again to reposition.

"Well geared" typically means to be as close to fully equipped from the previous tier of gear as possible. For hard modes I would say this to be about ~116 gear rating across the board for the starter hard mode flashpoints. I do not play Republic, but I am going to assume Esseles to be comparable to Black Talon. I am assuming your group composition is good (ie. your healer is actually properly healing specced) and your current issue is on survivability (you have no mention of hitting enrage timers yet). With that in mind, one issue would be that your group is not dealing with a mechanic on the fight properly. For example, second boss of Black Talon has probes that need to be kited out or they will do unmanageable damage to the group. In general, try to interrupt *everything* possible. If all that is accounted for, then the only weak link point left is on your healer's skill level.