For story mode ops and stuff like that, I agree that tanks and heals are needed more than DPS, but for the harder content, I think things change a bit. It feels like it's harder to find strong DPS for progression stuff. It seems like most DPS you come across just don't pull the numbers needed to clear that content, but tanks and healers are easier to come by. Granted, I play healers, but still. It has also seemed that way to me in other games that are similar to SWTOR, for what it's worth.

I like 4s....and I'd like to see skirms for that, too. I just happen to think that 2s and 3s would also be fun. The only time I ever get to do that is the odd world PvP encounter or sometimes in regs, but usually one side gets backup/respawns, and the objectives completely change the dynamic, anyhow.

Well, I suppose I can see how it would be possible to implement 2s and 3s without it being totally broken and unworkable. Guard definitely confers a strong advantage, there's no question of it. If it's that unsettling to people, I'd be happy to simply have skirmishes with no rank attached. I just really like those small duels, like, a lot. It's really fun to me.

No, I understand that guard makes for a challenging dynamic. I even conceded that point already. I honestly just don't care. To be fair, I was mainly thinking of solo queues for 2s and 3s, and I assumed that's what was under discussion. It's my bad for assuming that it was easy to infer this from my post without having explicitly stated it, I suppose. It's already unbalanced, so why not? Even if they just made it a skirmish, with no ELO attached, it would be fun. Why do people always have to resort to personal attacks, anyhow? Can we not just debate the idea itself without getting all superior about our "understanding" of the game, as if this were rocket science and not a stupid video game?

I would argue that ranked is already imbalanced and doesn't mean anything. For one thing, the population isn't large enough for it to mean much, at least without cross-server. For another, certain classes are already much stronger for ranked than others. Besides, faction imbalance is so strong on some servers that people are gaming the system to team up with friends against "bads" on the opposite faction when they know they're in queue. The imbalance is already here. It's not going away. Since this is the case, I'd like to see 2s and 3s because why not? It's already screwed up, so let's just have some fun.

Well, gee. I'm so glad you're here to be the arbiter of fun for us all. Maybe you don't think it would be fun, but there's no accounting for taste, right? If you don't like it, you don't have to queue for it, eh? I personally think it would be fun. 2v2 in WoW was horribly imbalanced...but still very fun. It's the most popular arena mode for a reason, despite the imbalances. Yeah, yeah, I know. There's no guard in WoW. BFD. Guard does make things weird, but so what? There's a pretty short time limit for arenas in this game. We also can't battle res or get out of combat and res in arenas in this game. We also don't have crazy BS like monster burst DPS paladins with great defensive CDs for themselves/teammates, along with big huge instant flash heals that cost nothing. It works out. This is a Wow-style MMO. "Balance" is unattainable. Different classes will have their moments in the sun as we cycle through the inevitable series of nerfs and buffs. As with many things in games like this, there's a vocal group who likes complain about stuff on the forums, but most people are basically content and silent about it because they don't even read the forums. If people don't want to do it, they don't have to queue for it. My point is that ranked is already a mess of imbalances, and that's not likely to change, so why not just embrace it? Smaller queues would be fun. The only thing I'd hate to see would be a healer/tank vs healer/tank (or, god forbid 2 heals vs 2 heals). I'd rather see 2 dps vs healer/tank or dps/tank or healer/dps. But even with that, I'd still rather have it than not. Ranked will never be balanced in this game. It will never, ever happen. So, why not just have some fun?

Look, I don't care if it's not balanced. 2v2 and 3v3 would be really fun, and it'd be easier to get pops going than in 4v4. With faction imbalances on most servers ("Hey imps are on....let's get in voice and farm some freelo"), the weird matchmaking system (pairing high ranked players with other high ranked players to fight the lower ranked players), and the class imbalance (mercs and snipers in solo ranked), ranked in this game is already fundamentally imbalanced. So screw it. Let's have tiny little duel queues. Hell, get rid of the ELO altogether, for all I care, and let's just PvP for fun for a change, without having to worry so much about what are the most powerful or "ideal" classes and specs for ranked.

We have a scrapper scoundrel in our HM ops group that does very, very well. Don't let people discourage you from it if it's what you want to do. It's absolutely viable. It suffers from the same problems as other melee classes -- Simply, ops tend to favor ranged dps. The only fight she goes ruffian for is the Monolith (the Ziost boss fight).

I was running around on Jung Ma not terribly long ago and stumbled upon a big skirmish on Tat between pubs and imps at an imp base. There was a character named Obama, and I guess they were trying to protect/kill him? Or take over the imp base? I don't know. Whatever it was, it was really fun. JM is a very small server, but even on our little server, we apparently have world PvP cropping up. I feel like the devs who made the game must have been hard-core carebears who don't understand PvP and playing competitively (especially open world PvP), and so they designed the game in a way that really seems to discourage that type of activity (no real damage meters, hard to find red names while leveling, etc.), which seems weird to me because why bother having PvP servers in the first place, but whatever. Clearly, there's not a huge interest in OWPvP, but it's obviously something that's interesting to at least some people.

You should take time to read the tooltips for your abilities, even the passives. Just hover over them in your Abilities screen (press "P" to open that).

It's not just about the gear anyhow. One of the goals of the developers seems to be getting more players involved in rated PvP, right? If we're trying to encourage more people to do ranked by helping them gear up more easily (which I do think is a step in a good direction), what's the point of having them go in completely unprepared otherwise? It occurs to me that the new (to ranked) players who are willing to finally give ranked a shot thanks to the gearing changes may find it discouraging for a couple of diffeent reasons. A lot of them are in for a rude awakening, for one thing. They'll need to adjust to the new environment. Something that I've heard from a lot of "PvP-curious" players is that they'd like to try ranked, but they don't want to feel responsible for someone else losing ELO. During pre-season, there's no need to feel the pressure and responsibility for "ruining" someone else's game, so maybe they could feel more comfortable as they find their footing and gain some confidence and experience before putting their ranking and their teammates rankings on the line. I guess if it's not going to happen, it's not going to happen, but it is disappointing. Maybe I'm crazy, but I honestly think I'd rather see the time slated for Season 6 as the pre-season, with Season 6 starting in October. No one asked me, though.

I don't think that's the whole point, but it is definitely part of it. There are other reasons I can think of, such as giving people the chance to test and practice with new builds in a competitive environment. During pre-season, people are more relaxed and wiling to try out different things. It's fun. It could also be a nice little break from the elo grind for some.

Why is there no pre-season? It would give people the chance to try out and learn new classes and compositions, and it would give people with less free time the chance to gear up so they can compete. I don't get it. We got one pre-season that never ended, and I get that it was frustrating for people, but what's wrong with having a short pre-season phase between seasons?

Even Jung Ma has queue pops every night. I'm sure it doesn't pop as much as on other servers, but when I was on yesterday there were 3 different solo matches going. The population on JM is low, but people there like the server and are still doing ranked. I imagine the same is true of other servers, even other small servers.

I think you'll see much better numbers by adjusting your stats. Your bonus healing looks low. You want the unlettered power mods. Your crit looks very high, and your surge looks low. I have no idea where your alacrity is, but it's probably pretty high, just judging from how low your surge is, so it's probable you could afford to drop some alacrity for surge. To summarize: More power, less crit, more surge.

http://i.imgur.com/jo7YeTO.jpg

How do you buff their solo viability without making them completely overpowered in group play?

I don't know. Last night on Jung Ma we had 5 groups in queue for team ranked concurrently, and it was a lot of fun. That's not usual, but it tells me that the people here care enough about the server to stick around and try to get stuff going. I know people get frustrated because they have to use the Ranked channel to get solos going, but honestly I'm content if there are enough people sticking around who care about our little community. Having played on other, larger servers, I have to say that since I always end up coming back to Jung Ma, I'll probably end up sticking around here. No one is on Fleet? I guess I don't care that much. Last week I accidentally stumbled on a large world PvP skirmish and had a lot of fun with that for an hour or two on Tat. Maybe everyone is in their stronghold or parsing on their ships. As long as queues are popping for regs, which they pretty much always are unless it's 5 AM or something, I'm content to wait it out and see how things go. Remember what happened the last time all the PvPers decided to create a PvP "superserver"? I do. I wish we could just get cross-server queues, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards for us. If I could copy/paste a character over to a different server, I'd do that, but I don't feel comfortable moving just yet.

Logging out annoys me. This game doesn't like to shut down nicely sometimes.

Yeah, it was Jung Ma. Good times.

My experience in other games has been that the people who care most about open-world pvp tend to roll on RP-PvP servers. People get into that stuff. I don't know how it's all going to shake out, but I like Jung Ma, so I'm not particularly inclined to move off it. I've tried out a few other servers and always ended up coming back. Of the servers I've played on (Ebon Hawk, Harbinger, Bastion), the one that felt the most like "home" to me was Ebon Hawk. Ebon Hawk is more populous, but I miss seeing red names when I'm leveling. PvE servers are hard for me to adjust to for some reason. Edit: That said, I want to say that most people just don't care about open world PvP. Then again, I remember that last week a friend and I decided to to poke around on Tatooine after she dueled someone in the PvP area there, and we stumbled across some Pubs who were attacking an Imp base. There was a pretty good fight going on. We fought there for a while. It was really fun. I don't know if it started this way or what, but the game ended up seeming to be that they were trying to kill the character named Obama (or protect him, in our case). It was pretty fun to stumble across that.

I like the sound of the Rangehunter.

This thread is so full of BS and misinformation. Most of the people posting in this thread seem to have no clue what they're talking about and have no right to complain about buffs/nerfs for any class until they actually understand what they are talking about. So many people are clueless about cover. Yeah, it's nice against pulls and force leaps. It also forces you to sit still. It's not like you can sit in cover all day long. If you do that, you're just asking to get face-planted unless you are up against totally clueless opponents. That's pretty fair trade. Evasion only acts as a self-cleanse since 2.0? No. It's always been that way. Does no one remember how surgical probe used to be? It got nerfed once, you know. People have been crying about surgical probe since the game was new. Two things have changed for operative healers as I see it: 1. Energy management became much easier. 2. Exfiltrate. This right here is the most sensible thing I've read in this thread. I absolutely agree. This is exactly what I have been thinking lately, too. It's a small change, but with this change, we would have to think more carefully about energy management. If you're at high energy to begin with, you can spam kolto probe indefinitely. It's essentially a free heal. This is one of the biggest problems right now, as I see it.

For PvP, my spec usually looks more like this: http://www.swtor-spy.com/skill-tree-calculator/operative/14/?build=020323220210023212110030003000100030000000000000000000000000000002302000000000000000000000000000&ver=20 Sometimes I take one point from Endorphin Rush and put it into Surprise Surgery, but lately I've felt that I get more benefit from it the way it's set up in the above link. I always have TA when I need it, so I don't spec into that talent very often anymore. This spec also works well for progression PvE content, though technically it might be more efficient to take points from Slip Away and put them into Med Shield for PvE content. Maybe for NiM Dread Guards it'd be nice to have that, but otherwise, I don't feel hindered in PvE by my spec at all. As much as I like the Infiltrator talent in the Concealment tree, I feel like it's a waste for me to spend 2 points on Concealed Attacks just to get it. I do use Backstab now and then, but I'd rather spend those 2 points on something that can more directly boost my survivability or heals. For PvP some healers go without Patient Studies. I prefer to keep it because I actually do usually manage to get a few burst heals off here and there, and I like to be able to recover my energy quickly when those situations arise. Seems like lately, most operative healers just run around hotting and probing everyone, which is fine (I do that, too, of course), but I don't feel that's always enough to save a key player in a tight situation, though it does give us those nice big numbers at the end of the match on the scoreboard. For me personally, I think it's nice to be able to get a good burst of healing off on someone and then regen some of that massive energy expenditure by using Diagnostic Scan. The biggest issue (for me) with the spec posted in the OP is that there are no points spent in Deadly Directive (the alacrity talent). It's a really nice talent. I wouldn't want to go without it.

I have one of each, and I've played them all quite a lot, though operative is my main and has been since pre-release. Mercenary is fine, but it feels a lot more "busy" than the sorcerer or the operative. I would personally say that sorcerer is the easiest to heal with in ops, followed by operative and then by mercenary. It just feels so relaxing to heal on a sorcerer. I love it. It's really, really nice. It flows so nicely and has a very nice toolkit for healing. My sorcerer seems to have an answer to any situation that comes up. It's great. It's the class I like to play when I just want to relax and have fun healing without having to think too much. The sorcerer just makes healing feel so effortless. Mercenary healing can feel a little more stressful, but I think that's mainly because my hands feel much busier when I'm on my mercenary than when I'm on my sorcerer or operative. It doesn't seem to "flow" as smoothly as the sorcerer. Speaking from personal experience, the main mistake that I see mercenary healers making is that many don't use their AoE heal nearly enough. It's cheap, and it's on a really short cooldown. Mercenary used to be stronger, it's true, but I don't feel that it's weak. I do sometimes feel like supercharged gas is somewhat lackluster, but that might just be because I remember how amazing it used to be. If I'm honest, though, I have to admit that the way it was a while back was really too good. Operative healing is nice. If you're on the lookout for the "strongest" healing class, I would be wary of rolling one right now, though, because PvPers are gunning for a nerf. There's a very vocal contingent of PvP whiners who are crying about us right now, so I am expecting to see a nerf in the next big patch. Maybe I'm just being pessimistic. It's pure speculation on my part. Besides, I was healing hard mode operations with this class back when everyone still said we sucked, so I'll keep with it, but it's something you might want to keep in mind if you're on the fence about which class to roll. I don't feel that any one healing class is particularly weaker than any other. I do, however, think that probably most people just don't like the way the mercenary feels compared to the other classes, which is why you hear so much crap about how they are "weaker" or whatever. I think it's probably the "hardest" healing class to play right now, just because of how it feels. So, to answer your question, merc healing isn't bad at all. Don't believe everything you hear. :]