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.

TP is balanced by only being usable on one person at a timeand requiring damage to trigger (it can't be put on someone to eventually fill them up). Being free allows you to swap it over without worrying that you are wasting the rest of the healing (PVP switching to a focus target or PVE in a tank swap). Sure it is good value with the raw figures, but the limitations balance this out. I think it's all right free - it's actually a good skill tester, as good use of it will make a difference, and skill testers are important. It needs a bug fix so that it doesn't double-proc and ir should also be an exclusive buff (so that only one CM can TP a player at a time). That would probably fix it. It just can't be ammo-negative in 1.2. With increasung the AMP-MP cost, and healing down all around there just won't be appropriate times to cast it. A cost of 1 (and having it contribute 3 to SCC) would probably balance it enough to bring it back into play, but as the patch is still on there with no modification from feedback, and no comment except for the statement about behind the scenes changes (none of which are relevant to ammo regen) it's probably time to just give up. They never listened on Ilum, 1.2 will just confirm that track record.

Then they made a mad design choice. How else do you define a healer that has 13 discreet points from empty to full, whose regen depends on staying in the top 1/3. This sort of healer can't gradually wear down to zero over the course of a fight - if they aren't on the ball from the start rgey'll quickly get to low regen and end up out of mana. If they have good management from the start they will be healing forever. I have to question whether you are a healer. What MAKES a fight interesting is those periods of massive spike damage or raid damage that you need to respond to. It's not like DPS, I don't want to do a "Max HPS" rotation. Sure I need to know it, but I like to heal so I can make meaningful decisions in a fight. I think you've probably hit the nail on the head with the devs. They want a nice HPS that they can design encounters around. If that is their intent they should state it. It sure makes it seem like their are actually no healers on their dev team. In that case, this isn't the game for me, as the rigidity of the new model just doesn't allow the encounters to test me as a healer by presenting challenging HEALING problems - it just isn't flexible enough, unlike their current model. I guess I'm just supposed to unsub, it's a shame though because like so many others I've had the best levelling experience ever in an MMO, a blast healing with a completely different resource system, that I felt had a lot of variety for a new MMO. For the most part I think the feedback and response from the healers has been the best I have seen in a response to a nerf of any magnitude. But the devs and the non-healers just don't seem to want to negotiate to make healing an interesting experience. There are many ways to nerf throughput while retaining flexibility.

This... it's the only hope I see. Put the Scoundrel buffs in, leave the others as is, and try to get the healing right with the release on Nightmare Mode which is being delayed. What's the point of new content if play is less engaging.

I do think people need to change their train of thought about Commando Healing. The resource mechanism basically means we never want to dip below 2/3 ammo as it kills regen. With 12 ammo points there are only 13 different discreet states that aour ammo pool can be in. So guess what... the Commando Healer was effectively designed as a healer that should never run out of ammo while healing. Simply put, with regen getting lower the lower your resources are, the traditional healer design of managing resources and eventually running out doesn't work - as it is the regen itself that is effectively drawing you down not the heals. So Commando instead was built around a sustained healing amount. The thing is to make it interesting, and to allow for skill, players need something to be able to shake this up. Prior to 1.2 this was the various tools that allowed for burst - the good Commandos could use them regularly to advantage. Post 1.2, the burst has been taken away, in terms of the bell curve, differences in skill level will not be as great. This makes it easy for developers to predict the heals available to an encounter, so it's great for tuning. However it removes choice and flexibility from players, making it boring. Post 1.2 you'll basically all be gearing the same way (away from Alacrity), using the same sequence for abilities and pretty much just using "burst" on CD as it's now comparatively small. It is shocking design - character trees should not be retooled to make things easier for designers. Use your metrics, see what the spread of heals is for Commandos and tune Story, Hard and Nightmare modes to those numbers. Let people play to their ability. Post 1.2 we become healing companions who use their abilities in a robotic sequence that maintains ammo. It all seems so easy to me... undo the % healing/resistance nerfs but ensure that buffs cannot stack (including the probe - get rid of its mana cost and just make it so it can't stack). Keep the ammo nerf on the other spells, but have Alacrity affect regen. This gives people choice in their gearing and play styles. Key some abilities to behave slightly differently to people that have a Trauma debuff on them if they need changing in PVP - you have a debuff there that you can use to tune all the abilities differently in the two environments if necessary. I don't want to be overpowered, but I want to have to think. I'd like to have the ability to pull a bad situation back from the brink if I'm good enough, and I think that can all be part of good character design. Hitting an ordered sequence of buttons where the only choice is "Which mole do I whack", and all I need to do is follow encounter orders is just not engaging enough to keep me in this game as a healer. It just seems like a large step backwards from the current design. If anything in the current state of play, the encounters feel underpowered rather than the characters feeling overpowered.

They explicitly stated the buff unlocks (gain a class buff when you level another character to 50) were usable in PVP. So I expect the speed boost would be, as it's not tied to heroic moment which was their method for keeping it out of PVP/instances.

Getting what amounts to a buff for raids in no way makes up for the changes to play to the individual. In the end you only add a raid buff if it is missing in too high a % of raid compositions. Especially if all healers have it, it's hardly going to get you a spot in a raid.

I can't transfer a 50 commando to test changes or I would. I can't auto generate a level 50 commando to test changes or I would. Do you really think people should level from one to fifty just to test? That I should pay to playtest a game? Sorry but a couple of titles don't cut it. I'm happy to read about testing and make my own conclusions (and not liking what I am reading). Pineapple is cheap, you aren't going to get me to pay a few hundred to see whether I like it or not. And unless I get to test it in a variety of situations I won't be able to tell what I like pineapple with. And I can assure you that the pineapple that Bioware is giving the troopers in 1.2 is not meant to be taken through the mouth

Investigation gets frequent schematics for blue gear for synth and armour. Underworld Trading gets infrequent schematics for orange gear for synth and armour. I'd stick with Underworld, it also services 3 professions compared with Investigation which services one (and the worst one to boot).

Combat Res is irrelevant to these changes. In combat res is balanced around an ops group(thus why no one can in combat res for 5 minutes after the previous one) so it's effectively an ops ability they give to enough classes to ensure it is available in an op. Effectively it is like a class buff or debuff. These nerfs are class changes. You don't balance class nerfs by adding ops utility. Unless they remove the ops CD (which I wouldn't want to see) in combat res is irrelevant, having access to it is something for the ops leader to balance a group around, not some utility to balance a class around.

There have been threads on the Trooper forum calling for Op buffs. A frequent Trooper poster had it in gis .sig until patch 1.2 was released. Operatives did have community support from non-operatives. It is usually one of the nicer things about healer communities in MMOs. These nerfs are too much AND they have said NOTHING about them. I'm trying to be fair, I like this game but when nothing has been officially said, drastic changes have been made, only the elite are getting to test and they are now no longer to down some content that was farm it isn't good. Nerfs happen, they are a necessary part of MMOs. This is not how I want to see them managed in a product I am paying for.