Please clarify how thinking happy happy thoughts or sucking up to Bioware like a gushing fanboy will solve it either.

The tiny icons in the default UI was an egregious oversight. Failing to correct this glaring problem in the much heralded 'UI update' speaks volumes about the ineptitude of the devs tasked to tweaking the HUD. And I predict that when buffs and debuffs are finally scaleable, it'll be a ham-fisted fix, scaling ALL buffs without any filtering. As a HOT healer, for instance, I want to see the remaining time on my heal effects in great gory detail, large enough that I can track with my peripheral vision. I don't need to see the class buffs, or my raidmates' procs. It's just a lot of useless information obscuring what I need to know. Seriously, Bioware, this isn't rocket science.

Who's your dealer, because I want what you're smoking. The MECHANICS aren't bad at all, as an alternative to standard mana pools. It's the clunky controls we're expected to manipulate to USE those mechanics. ---- Imagine a car, a standard transmission, with the stickshift mounted in the center back seat. You can still get from one place to another just fine. So what if you have to reach back over your shoulder to change gears? Don't talk to me about it being an 'uncomfortable and unresponsive design', you just want it within easy reach because you're lazy. In fact, you're demanding more direct control because you like to speed, so you're a cheater too. This is what it feels like trying to reason with people on the forums about this issue. To hell with them. They can spend their time spamming "LF healer" while the subscriptions dwindle. Here at 50, the only thing keeping me playing is the presense of my old-time guildmates and maybe the single player RPG story (I could see my self playing through a few times just on the solo content, but that doesn't make for years of subscriptions).

Because fighting with the controls isn't fun. HOT heals are a critical part of my class. To be effective, I have to know how many stacks my groupmates have, and how long until they expire. The UI displays this as a 4x4 pixel above their health bars. This is just example. Yes yes, new game, kinks being worked out, big changes coming. But when emotes while mounted tops the developer list, I'm not encouraged. UR BAD LEARN2SQUINT

Healed end-game content for years in other games. Have been healing instances since Day 1. I'm now lvl 50. SWTOR healing blows. Even putting aside mouseovers and macros, the UI is pathetic. As a HOT healer, I can't tell who has my HOT on them, how many stacks of it, or how long til it runs out. Certainly not when the buff/debuff icons are approximately 4x4 pixels or smaller. But I suppose the reply will be UR BAD LEARN2SQUINT. I'll heal for guildmates. The rest of you aren't worth the aggravation. Unless serious UI improvements appear on the horizon, SWTOR is destined for the discount bin like so many other MMOs. See you next game.

As a singleplayer RPG, it's an unrivaled masterpiece. As an MMO, the next few months will render that verdict. For me, the clunky UI will make or break it.

Amen. My own most recent experience is healing end-game raids in WoW, BC through Cata. No healbot automation, don't try to lay that BS at my feet. Just raid frame UIs to display health bars and vital information (ie. critical buffs/debuffs and timers) where I can easily see it, and mouse-over casting macros, so I can quickly and intuitively respond. I was able to spend most of my time looking at and playing the game itself, not hunting and clicking through UI bars to achieve what I wanted. I could keep heals rolling off a tank, maintain CC or interupts on a mob, debuffs on the party would barely have a chance to tick and you'd never see me standing in fire because I was too busy squinting at icons to maintain situational awareness. And no, this was not spamming one uber-macro keybind, I still had to think about every cast and perform moment to moment triage. Lttle heal. Big heal. DOT on a DPSer, but he can wait, he's third priority. 5 seconds left on the CC. Things are stabilized, regen some mana...KICK THAT SPELL NOW NOW NOW. By comparison, healing in SWTOR up to the 30s has been a miserable and un-enjoyable experience. Maybe it's just my hardware (an 'internet browser' mouse and a stock keyboard), but I have ANTI-mouseover: if my cursor is left hovering over a portrait/UI nameplate after I click on it to select a target, my keybinds stop responding. So to heal, I'm like a boxer sparing with my UI, jabbing, ducking and weaving to achieve my desired result. It's getting very old, very fast. It cannot be stated enough: we're not whining for automation, we're gripping about targeting. For you DPSers spouting L2PLAY at us, imagine if you had to maneuver your targeting reticle with the arrow keys, like old FPS games that didn't support mice. Stop your complaining, mouse aiming is a crutch for bads, I used to dominate multiplayer Doom with just the keyboard, your arguments about being able to quickly swap targets are invalid. It's really very simple. If healing means spending more time fighting with the UI to get feedback about health and debuffs (and then acting upon that information), then it's more frustration than fun. And if frustration reigns, then subscriptions drop and SWTOR soon withers and dies like so many other MMOs since WoW began (which, let's face it, is the benchmark). Yes yes yes, the game was just released, big changes are coming, great things are planned. And soon, we promise. We'll see. Bingo. It knocks any argument that 'macros are cheating' into a cocked hat, as the Brits say.

Have to give them credit for allowing some basic customization, in that you can replace the party frames with raid frames, move them around the screen, and edit the size of the health bar. As a start, at release, it's not bad at all. How they failed to include an option to scale up buff (and more importantly, debuff) icons with that is beyond me.

Bioware should remove the mouse altogether. It's just a crutch for bads, and anyone who supports the use of a mouse to select targets (either by clicking or aiming a reticle) is just a whiner who wants the game automated. What's so hard about keyboard turning? And remember when you had to use the arrow keys to tilt your crosshairs up and down? That's how old school pros roll, learn to play.