What about Bracers/Belts? Are they empty shells or the actual item (as they are pieces with no mods)

No effect on healing but a big effect on utility. Hail of Bolts (AoE) and Charged Bolts require an assault cannon. This makes soloing as a healer much worse (if that is important to you). Also there are the odd occasion when you are healing that the best thing you could be doing is one of these two attacks. Sure you are there to heal, but if you can make the trash go down faster with some AoE, or toss in some damage (particularly as Super Charged Cells affects Charged Bolts) to help beat an enrage you are far more of an asset to your group. I see this question pop up and I keep wondering why? I love the big cannon look. I can't understand why you'd want to be a trooper healer if you didn't love the cannon - there are Agents, Bounty Hunters and Smugglers to choose from if you don't want a big gun.

There have been a LOT of changes between January the 26th and now, not to mention the gear (and thus numbers) are a lot higher now. Look at the date of posts before you decide you need to chime in with how awesome you are. You really don't help anyone resurrecting threads that aren't relevant to the current state of the game (noone got attacker or defender points and healers got no credit for causing deaths when this thread was last live).

Sorry but that's wrong on a lot of counts. Look at your tooltip... it tells you what Aim does - it is giving you critical chances not critical rating. A look at crit rating will show you how much crit you get from Aim, how much from Cunning and how much from Crit Rating and how much from talents/buffs/companion bonus, etc. This is important because diminishing returns is on each category - that is there is a separate formula for Crit rating with it's own level of diminishing returns, another for Aim and another for Cunning. There is no diminishing returns for talent/buff bonuses. And the crit levels from each source do not contribute to the diminishing returns from other sources. There is no diminishing returns on the tech/ranged damage bonus from Aim, it is a flat 0.2 (0.14 for heals). Check this with your tooltip if you don't believe me, with no buffs, your tech/damage bonus will be Aim/5. Power gives a flat 0.23 (0.17 for heals). But Aim in raid and group situations should have a 14% buff, so that 1 point of Aim is actually 1.14 points of Aim giving 0.228 (0.16) damage/heals bonus. Factor in the crit bonus, and as someone said in another thread Aim is always better than power for DPS until you have 8000 Aim (a bit less for healing but still an unattainable Aim number). Commando's should never be using Power augments where Aim is available. The reason some of the lower Aim/higher power mods win out is because the Aim + Power total on the low Aim/high Power mod is better.

Note to clarify (as people seem to often get confused about it), Alacrity affects (and only affects) all cast times (including 1.5s cast times) and channets. Cast times / channels do not have a global cool down, so Alacrity always benefits them fully. This however does not change the fact that it is next to useless

I don't think this one would have been picked up on the PTR - without character copies I doubt there is a lot of Matrix Cubes on characters there. The big hassle is the fact that it means there will be another patch in the week. And it has happened a lot. For Oceanic Players this is during peak play time. Not only that, while we are used to scheduled maintenance meaning we only get 6 days out of 7 to play, an unscheduled maintenance during peak time on another day will likely hit a scheduled raid night for a significant portion of players. Which means it is actually affecting the week. This is particularly the case for Wednesdays, Thursdays and Mondays which historically tend to be peak days. Very glad that Wednesday was changed as that is the most common raid day. It would be really nice to have a policy that has unscheduled maintenance have different time windows, so that one portion of the player base isn't bearing the burden for all unscheduled as well as scheduled maintenance.

With maintenance tightened, there is less flexibility and thus people are forced into more of a set rotation. This pretty much means that a player now just has to know what spell he will cast next, and the only choice to make is who to cast it on. When you had more resource flexibility, the rotation was more flexible, so you have choices as to what to cast as well as who to cast it on. SCC gaining twice as much resources meant you could skirt a little lower. The good players knew when they could dip a bit lower, there was a real choice with SCC (delay it a bit if that suited the fight or cast it on CD). Any time you take away choices you reduce complexity. In cases like this, the reduced choice has also increased difficulty. So it isn't "easier" but it is "simpler". And the trouble is it wasn't that complex before, so reducing that level of complexity is not good for the gameplay experience.

I'd like to see alacrity affect regen rate, as it is currently a stat we cannot afford to have post 1.2. The hammer shot suggestion is good (or alternatively just let it self cast). I was also thinking, if the Trauma Probe ammo cost remains, how about a hammer shot adding a charge to Trauma Probe (to a maximum of 10) if there is a Trauma Probe buff on the target. I acknowledge it won't help much in PVP (unless HS can self target) but it would be great for PVE. I'd like to see SCC returned to its capability to get a lot of people up. I was thinking what about if, when SCC was active, MP refunded one ammo every time it was cast on a character without the AMP HoT. What this would mean is that SCC would return to 1.1 functionality but ONLY if healing was spread over multiple people (thus increasing our group heal functionality through single target healing). I think what everyone needs to realise is that the mechanics of Trooper healing basically mean that at its base level it has to provide solid sustained single target output. With 12 ammo there isn't really room to play with regen as a limiting mechanic (I think they've gone too far, they certainly can't push it any further). So to add complexity you really only have cooldowns as a way of increasing complexity. That means SCC, the instant heal and the various 2 minute ammo/ability related CDs. Having talents that can decrease these, particularly ones that require active play (a small reduction on a HS crit, or a TP activation for example) are a good way of allowing good players to increase throughput, which in the end will help the devs create good balance points for the three raid difficulty levels,

It's also more uses of SCC (which means more non hammer shot heals and much more healing)

PVE repairs can be very high for very good players (in the short term anyway), if they are pushing the envelope. Regardless of that, there will always be some cost in repairs, and the cash in instances is not good. Having said that, both high level PVE and PVP have consumable costs in stims/medpacks/etc. Both will incur heavy costs optimising their gear and transferring mods (either to augmented orange pieces or swapping mods whose stats aren't quite right). High level PVE players would also regard dailies as something to be avoided if possible. It would be nice if the cash in PVP and PVE activities was enough to finance them to a decent level.

http://www.couriermail.com.au/travel/news/what-a-trooper-traveller-in-solo-walk-across-australia/story-e6freqwo-1226324968690

In Australia at least there is a strong case for refunding subscriptions. For a comparable precedent, Apple was recently forced to offer refunds for the new 4G iPad. The 4G it uses doesn't work on the 4G network in Australia, and while this was widely reported, and there was no deliberate misinformation, because it was advertised as the iPad 4G, Apple was forced to contact customers and offer to refund the cost of the iPad if the customer wanted to return it. I don't think many people took them up on it. Rated Warzones were advertised until the last moment as content of 1.2. So people that resubbed within this period have a case for a return of subscription fees, and cancellation of their sub. If they were challenged legally this would more than likely be the outcome, so it would simply be good customer service to allow people to do this. The majority of their playerbase wouldn't take the exchange, but more importantly, for those that do, the customer service benefit is that those people likely will have a much higher chance of coming back once rated warzones finally come in. I have a six month sub and PVP is a fun side thing for me, so this has no effect on me. Simply pointing out a very recent parallel.

The thing is the solution is boring. When you remove burst and remove tools (such as Trauma Probe flexibility) you lower the skill. In the old system, devs could modify NMM so that players had to optimise their extra tools to get through. In the upcoming system, there are no real tools, it will just require a solid rotation. There will be no meaningful healing CDs, no real burst, tuning will be done based on gear and predicted HPS and the % of optimum the devs feel is right for the level of an encounter. They'd be far better working out how much lower the HPS needs to be and nerfing the heals across the board by that without changing the current mechanics. That would actually increase the difficulty and the Skill Level (needing to keep people up with lower than usual values). These changes lower the throughput AND lower the skill level required. In other words, Healers have had their gameplay gutted so that developers can tune encounters easier. They'd actually have a far better game if they ignored their metrics and PTS and actually had a dialogue on their forums. But they are too pigheaded. It follows their pattern so far, and it's not a pattern for a sustainable product. Seriously if 1.2 goes through as is, with no change based on feedback from the players on the PTS or the number crunchers on the forum, noone should bother with this game any more. If PTS discussions and testing have no relevance, what is the point of them? Bug testing? Sorry, but acceptance testing should also be something you strive for with software. Oh and foresight IS boring. Foresight means planning your rotation beforehand and working out what to do in each situation. Sure it is important, but I want to have to make meaningful choices in the heat of battle as well. It keeps things interesting

Your Guild Bank concerns aren't at all relevant here, though. Please stick to the topic and start another one in another forum if you want to talk about Guild Banks.

I think to continue healing would be a vote of confidence I'm not prepared to give. The loss of flexibility will just make PVE too painful (having just come from a game where as a tank healer pretty much 80-90% of what you did was cast a 3s heal I don't want that tedium again). It means you can't make fights that test healers doing healing. I'm not guilded (waiting for the Oceanic transfer, have been able to complete HM content in PUGs) so at least I won't be pressured to do something in 1.2, but on the flipside it will make it hard to get into anything on a new server after 1.2 (as the transfers are supposedly end of month). I may PVP, but raid marks you can see from the other side of the field and the fact that I PUG (it probably won't happen in 1.2 but at the moment there are lots of problems on my servers with 4-5 healer random groups that just don't do enough damage to claim objectives) probably mean I'll give up on that pretty quickly. To be honest, the only thing I am looking forward to in 1.2 is levelling a Scoundrel. Not for the healer, but for the fact that I can buy my way to a Sith Pureblood one, who can treat Corso in a fashion he so richly deserves. I have a 6 month sub, so I guess I can just see the 8 stories (and while some are better than others, so far I've found gems in each of them). It'll be interesting to see what happens in the healing forums post 1.2.