I think you're correct in the sense that "healing" and "not healing" are going to become part of the game, but I guess I kind of view it like we aren't very limited by the resource right now as it is (just from my experience). In this current content, when having to make a choice of whether to heal or not, it's pretty simple - as we have a lot of resources to regain ammo/drop heat. By toning these resource-recovery abilities down, you'll have to be much more mindful about where your heals go and where you think your other healers' heals are going. I like to think of this as somewhat of a new dynamic with the changes if the new raid is kept up to par. Simply put, if you keep the mindset,"I have to heal everyone and get them topped off right now." You are going to fall flat on your face by over-heating extremely quickly with these new changes, not to mention you'll probably do a lot of overhealing (Ex: cast HS on a 90% health target). I feel like that same mentality now (remember, I only do 8 mans, and I'm sure it's atleast a little stricter in 16man operations) isn't punished very much due to our resource cooldowns and relatively low costs.

I know I've pretty much been a douchebag in the past, so I'm going to try and stay away from that with this post. I can only speak for Mercenaries, or rather, my experience as a Mercenary and not Commandos. I recognize there is quite the different between the two, which I do hope they fix eventually. The changes for me feel like it's going to bring a new active component to heat management. I feel like right now, much of the healing that is done by Bounty Hunters stretches (sometimes far) into overhealing. With just the HS/RS (AP/MP for commandos?) cast, we can control about ~25%-30% (I'm in full Rakata gear, so these numbers are a bit higher) of any classes maximum health aside from tanks without any crits in a 3.5 second burst. Perhaps it's just the 8man operations that is skewing my view, but I've never really had to worry much about heat at all in any of the nightmare fights except for maybe one and can heal basically whenever I want to. At the first sign of possibly-maybe-getting into a semi-dangerous heat situation you can pop SCG or Vent Heat (in extreme cases) and be fine. The decrease in efficiency, our heals become more crucial decisions and heat management become more of an activity rather than mostly-ignored. It's hard to pin down a healing rotation (Granted, there are only so many things you can do in the 10/13 seconds of SCG) - not to say that there aren't tips and tricks - but what you cast ultimately depends on what happens in your raid and during the encounter. This will make your decisions of your casts, instants, or venting spells more important and could possibly promote stricter assignments among healers and make them work as a team, rather than all of them seeing which is better at whack-a-mole. I feel like we will have to start the practice of reducing our overhealing as much as possible. I guess that's just how I see it, but I have no testing what-so-ever with the new encounters or anything like that. Our output will go down, I'm not arguing that at all. However, with it becoming easier to overheat with the new changes, the ones who don't manage as well may over-heating much faster than the ones who do, leading to an even further decreased output due to not being able to stay away from the high-heat regen brackets. The two sides to this whole argument seem to be: 1) The skill gap is coming closer together due to healing output going down and heat management still being fairly easy, thus the better players are less noticeable. 2) The skill gap is growing farther apart because of heat management for the worse players will just get to the point where they are constantly in the higher heat brackets and thus not as able to give as much output. Is this anywhere close to correct? Or am I seeing this in a much different perspective than I should be?

I can see this as a possibility. I'll agree that the biggest surprise to me was the Kolto Shell one being 16 heat as well. I do however disagree that they are "dumbing it down". Although it perfectly could be if they are also making boss encounter damage go down as well (I guess we'll have to wait and see at the patch!) The optimal rotation during SCG was pretty simple to understand: Use SCG - spam HS/RS - possibly Kolto Missile for the awesome buffs. After the nerfs with SCG and our Critical Efficiency you won't really be able to just do this as freely as you can currently and will have to throw in free abilities at the right moments to keep heat low. I see it as having to watch the resource more closely than before with these new changes, not that less HPS will be needed because you have to weave in free abilities. There isn't a doubt in my mind that HPS has gone down at least a little with these resource nerfs, and RuQu has even shown this through the math. However, with these healing numbers decreasing - if boss damage stays relatively the same, would this not make the encounter harder? I definitely feel like it will be more punishing for trying to over-extend(which really doesn't seem to be very punishing at all right now, not to mention is extremely easy to avoid), which more commonly happens with a less competitive (re: casual) player. You'll have to be smarter about your resource and where you are letting your heat go. I definitely didn't mean to look down upon any particular player, and now that I read it again the wording may have been a little harsh in the post I quoted. It did encompass what I felt is going to happen though - being that the skill cap overall is going to be raised, players are going to have to be smarter about their heat. Those ones that -are- smarter about where their heat goes, when to start venting their heat, etc etc, will now be more distinguishable than those who don't. This, coupled with real combat logs (yay!) should start showing real significance in the skill level of players. These are just my thoughts on it. Edit: I also think it will make it harder due to your raid having to avoid any damage that they can avoid. We can generally heal through a lot of mistakes as it is, but with the resource nerf we may be more reliant on our raids to take less damage - this seems like it would make the raid as a whole a bit harder in that perspective. We can't just heal every stupid little mistake anymore.

Easy on the attack there, big guy. 1)No, I haven't. 2)Everything on live right now is being based on "feeling" of healing, which varies greatly from player to player. RuQu has placed some good math theory behind it, but what is true and what seems to be true are not always the same. Personally, I feel pretty strong on live right now (as a BH healer), but that may be due to comparative skill, it may have to do with my raid's skill, or just the fact that there isn't a 'Recount' so to speak for me to truly compare with my other healers. 3)This is a pretty loaded statement. I'll remind you that healing was nerfed across the board (Except for Ops, which were buffed to be 'on par'), implying healing wasn't as BioWare wanted it to be. I'm not arguing that we were nerfed. Whether it was needed or not is your opinion, as well as mine. No, I haven't tested, but you could throw the word 'pretentious' at pretty much anyone on this forum. I wasn't trying to stroke my epeen to you at all. ****, maybe I'm the one who is uneducated. I could tell you that I fully understand the changes and what they mean to the merc bodyguard, but I doubt that will sway your opinion at all, and you'll still call me wannabe, etc etc. I do, however, have a different mindset about the changes than most. Do I do hardmodes and nightmare modes? Simply put, yes, but I could be lying for all you know because there is no way to track that and I'm not going to try and prove it to you. There would be no point in that and it would start unnecessary posts in this forum. I've cleared everything on nightmare. I'm fully aware mercs were nerfed, but I have always thought it was blown out of proportion a little bit. I've been closely following this thread by one of the top guild's main BH healer.

One of the best posts I've seen on the forums yet.

big long post has been editted: I'm going to be looking for your conclusions thread in 1.2. This isn't something worth debating because of our mindsets of gaming. You have your opinions and I have mine, both with logical backing and neither of which seem to be changing. I've clearly stepped on a few toes here and am once again becoming a lurker. While I do hope the patch notes stay as they are, I am interested in how this pans out in terms of difficulty with the next set of content and will still be playing my Bodyguard with the patch.

First, let me publicly apologize for anything you saw as attacking you personally. I did throw your name out a couple times and my post was rather aggressive, but when it comes down to it - I do respect you as a player, RuQu. I've kept watch over your threads, theory, and trying to put numbers to spells ever since those threads were posted and started working in my own ideas as I continued to play the lovely class that is Bounty Hunter. You're good, I'm not denying this at all. Demanding was probably the wrong word, admittedly. I used this word in frustration I had earlier coupled with lack of sleep (as if that's even an excuse) and it was wrong. Influencing, however, would make more sense. Many people see you as I see you as a player willing to parse out everything in order to determine what is best, which stat is your go-to stat, etc etc, and this gives you a bunch of influence on these forums due to you being "the" theorycrafting guy for Bounty Hunters. You're the guy who runs the numbers and does the work. I fully respect that. But seeing you post something this extreme (example, your signature) is a little disheartening because I think you underestimate people's willingness to cling to who they think knows best before they actually know how it affects them. The examples in the blog are extreme and not to be taken on the literal level you had taken them. 6 mercenaries in a raid? While not impossible, it's terribly unlikely and I realize that. The point was of the additive damage reduction. A more realistic example would be: Powertech armor at about 40% Sniper bubble at 20% Powertech pops Energy Shield for another 25% Merc uses SCG Kolto Missile for another 10% That puts the Powertech at 95% damage reduction. This is easily done even in 8man raids and there are many more combinations that can be done to achieve this number. The point was more directed at additive damage reduction. It may not have been fully tested, but this is true according to the tooltip in your defense menu (if you don't believe me, cast SCG and kolto on yourself and watch the number increase exactly 10%. Upon testing with another BH it goes up 20% with both active), which I suppose I can only assume is correct at this point. And the example of wanting a full, instant, no resource cost heal was extreme only to enforce the point that it isn't up to the players to decide what goes into the game. Players often give suggestions (be it, perhaps not that extreme) that seem good and fixing to them, but it isn't how the devs want to introduce what is being called as 'balance' in this patch. Moreover, the players could lead to a bit of a skew of the game as far as difficulty. I do hope you realize the name you have promoted for yourself upon these forums. You do promote pretty decent discussion compared to a lot of other posts I've seen on these forums. You do run the numbers and do the work. I love that, and support that. To say we have completely lost burst and sustainability is also something I'll disagree with. We aren't losing the burst, it's being toned down a bit, yes, but not lost altogether. We could argue all day back and forth about the magnitude of the changes because the impact is subjective to our playstyle, our raid, and what we perceive as "big" or "small" changes. Throwing percents at the new numbers, to me, is misleading. I can say that Kolto Shell had it's resource cost increased by infinity percent, making it sound much worse than it probably is. Our mindsets as gamers differ too much to comment much further, here. I still find contradiction in your argument of "we don't want classes to be the same" yet (albeit, it isn't just you, I know this) the argument still comes up of Kolto Missile vs Revivification quite frequently. Unless the spells are identical, people will find reasons to call the opposite over/underpowered. In my opinion Kolto Missile fulfills it's purpose very well. However, I'm going to drop this point because it's relatively irrelevant to the point of the thread and I shouldn't have brought it up in the first place.

The only thing that is spiraling out of control is your attitude towards these patch notes and telling all healers to unsubscribe from the game. "Viable", "Fun", "Hard" and "Interesting" are all subjective terms that vary on a player by player basis. It's going to be impossible to meet everyone's demands in this community without making drastic changes to the game. We had a bit of a resource nerf (arguably not even to an unmanageable level) and there is this immediate outcry demanding it be changed back without any real testing at all? Are you serious right now? This has gone on long enough. Mercs had a few resource nerfs (which in reality, don't even look that bad), there isn't a single thing that they've "taken away" from us. Viability? Not really, as classes are theoretically even across the board now. Fun? This is subjective to the player. Hard? Also subjective to the player. Interesting? Yep, you guessed it, subjective to the player. We have all of our abilities still, as well as all the other classes still having theirs. What makes this even better is that you have no testing of literally -anything- before making this public outcry of healers being what you call "unplayable". If you think the Devs don't keep eyes on the forums then that is terribly naive of you. I'm sure they have more things to do than sit around and read healer posts all day, but I'll tell you right now they do not completely ignore them. They may not implement everything you suggest, but it isn't up to you to decide what gets implemented into the game. I looked over that "Healer Compendium" list of changes, and some were good, some were downright awful, but ultimately the players have to realize that the list doesn't contain the only options for Devs to implement. The game is still relatively new and not everything can be programmed in an instant. A lot of the suggested changes are probably in the works right now, but don't make it into the game overnight and therefore you assume the Devs just don't care about them and will never implement them ever. I don't like getting nerfed as much of the next guy, but I'm not going to enrage the users on the forums because I don't like what's being done. There are many other solutions. I will agree with you that there is a bit of lack of communication, but this *****torm you've cause would hardly be any better if BioWare had said,"We are nerfing healing by a large margin". You can roll another class, you can better yourself at your main class that you love playing, despite the changes. You can even unsubscribe. However, I have a problem when you start demanding that other people unsubscribe because you think it's the only way to change things that you personally don't like. It isn't BioWare's intention to "make everybody reroll to sorcerer" either. It isn't exactly the Devs have zero interest in the healer community. These are all just assumptions by you placing the burden of proof on the development team. I could just as easily say that the majority of the healing community has the worst skill pool of the three legs, and there is nothing you could show me that says otherwise. Maybe I'm just an elitist ******e but there shouldn't be this much of an uproar because the skill cap is being raised a little bit (it is terribly low anyway in this patch, regarding PvE). I know that I will still be playing my Bodyguard with the patch even if these changes stick because it will challenge me as a player -- one who plays for the content and the people on the game along with interest in the class mechanics, rather than acquired gear or because my class is facerollingly easy. I made a very long post of overall thoughts on this here. This includes my thoughts on each individual bodyguard change (listed at the bottom). It's a bit of a read. And please stop trying to compare Kolto Missile to Revivification. They are different spells. Please understand this.

Editted. This isn't a **** storm I want to be involved in.

Just a quick thing - your spreadsheet crit total is wrong. You are summing up the surge column rather than the crit column. It should be =SUM(H4:H42) There is also no total for the Surge column, but you just need to paste the from the crit column

The quality of the video tends to rely on the quality of which you record and the quality in which you render it as. I'm no expert on it but if you are running something such as fraps like I do, there are options to record at "Half-size" of the screen or "Full size" of the screen. Obviously full size of the screen gives better results. There will also be options in whatever program you use to render the raw footage into a movie. I'm not totally sure but most programs should give you an option to render in 1080p which is one of the higher qualities. Of course it will take longer to render, too. As far as music choice, the only recommendation I can give as far as music is that the choice fits the pace of the fight to make it the most enjoyable to watch. The type of music is definitely personal preference (and I must say, dubstep is not a bad choice by any means). You can put almost any kind of music to a video and sometimes even edit the video around the music. One example I think I achieved this in was: (There was also slight motivation for the song because I was reading a thread in which people were complaining the BH's could not do anything solo because heat was too restricting, it urged me to post this video. That's another topic entirely, though) I don't find a lot of rock songs to kill videos, but I think it fits and I do like the Foo Fighters. Also, dubstep. Keep in mind that it's nothing of the caliber of CKN, as the date is pretty late in comparison to any real competitive guild (I think) and I really consider myself only an average BH healer at the time this was shot. Never-the-less, this is a hardmode pre-nerf kill running with people who only met after they dinged 50 (We basically just found most the people who hit level 50 first, and tried to find raid times that worked for everyone. Not the easiest thing to do when a lot of your members still raid in WoW ) It's more of an example of editting more than anything. I'm sure many people out there will call it horrible choice of music and not like it. If there are parts you want to emphasize, you can line it up with intense parts of the music along with zooming and all kinds of other crazy editting functions. If you want to keep it simple, I'd say your choice of dubstep was not a bad one at all. Thumbs up.

I can see them receiving a buff in the future. It's actually rather likely because managing heat actually takes effort compared to a constant regen of a sorc/op. It isn't that the heals are less efficient, Bounty Hunters suck, or that Sorc/Ops do a ton more healing. Heat is a very new mechanic that people aren't seeming to grasp how to manage yet. I can see the 'buff' coming making heat easier to manage, and that's it. Atleast that's how I hope it goes to shut people up, rather than buffing us in a healing department. Also, if they have metrics, then why the **** don't we have a combat log yet. All of the things being said are without proof from combat logs or anything like that. Until that is implemented, this thread is closed.

We realize you want to make a sorcerer because you can't play bounty hunter. Stop making posts about how they are underpowered. I would hope someone who has the time to pick apart my video by the second has time to watch both of those videos and realize everything wrong with trying to compare the healers in them. If you want me to list them out I will, but I guarantee we'll sit here and argue forever about this stupid topic. If you don't like the way BH healing works, then go Sorc. If you want so badly to play BH, play dps. I'm glad you like the aesthetics of the Bounty Hunter, but I really hope Bioware doesn't cater to you because you feel like you need to start with a full mana bar to be an effective healer. I love this class, and play it effectively. My guild running nightmare modes does not have trouble clearing things.

Marked for trolling. You're only bringing up 'issues' that have already been brought up and addressed, in what I would guess is an attempt to get those who actually -know- the bounty hunter healing spec up in flames. Kudos for trying, though.

I'm really not sure if you're just trolling me now. Part of managing your heat is that your heat dissipates faster than force regenerates barring you stay in the "Fast/Moderate Heat Dissipation" Zone. It's the 4 little arrows next to your heat bar, look for it. Comparing Kolto Missile to Revivification is pointless. We could argue about it all day over which is better or more efficient. Kolto missile - 16 heat (a 1.5 second cast after this will cause you to vent 8 heat before the cast even goes off, AND you even have to wait for the gcd to cast another spell. Potentially free spell), instant cast 1.5k heal(not including crits) to 3 people, a 6 second cooldown, 5% healing increase. Revivification - 70 mana, About 350-400 ticks (not including crits)every 2 seconds for 10 seconds, have to stick around for full effect, but hits everybody in the effect. Amazing for times when you can group up. Both spells are fantastic, but I'm going to have to sit here and call ******** on you when you say "lol an operative and sorc can jerk off while reading a book and heal Karagga's palace no problem, regardless of derps and gear and a BH has to go do perilous hardmode flashpoints for leet gear and still has trouble". It's simply not true. The swipes do the same amount of damage regardless of gear (barring the small % differences between light, medium, and heavy armor), and these people aren't totally decked out in full Rakata gear and things like that. This kill was relatively early compared to other guilds. We can sit here and argue about how I NEEDED medpacs to heal this kill by myself, but I'll keep telling you that I didn't because the only times people dipped dangerously close to death, I had more than plenty of time to heal them up(I even had time to throw in some dps!) and that the people I raid with actually have brains (which made it even easier for me). The only very dangerous time was when GrilledCheese dipped low between a swipe and a ground slam. Are we weaker than than the other classes? No, we simply excel in other places. Personally, I love BH/Sorc combo healing, and it's my favorite combination of healers in an 8man. But never do I ever feel outdone by a sorc or an op. TLDR TROQT YOU ARE GAY SHUT UP: I manage my heat. Bounty Hunters are pretty even with the other healers at this point. Your playstyle seems to fit Sorc more, awesome. Don't make any drastic changes to my class(we aren't suppose to be a 'do-everything-the-best' class).