Seems to me there is no reason to take Laceration if you are trying to get Cull. The problem with Lethality as a tree comes down to TA generation.

Is that the case in PVE as well then? It sounds like accuracy is a completely useless stat all around if the only thing that can be avoided is white range attacks.

Is accuracy really useless in pvp? I thought the same mechanics were at play here. You'd want 5% to negate the base defensive capacity of players wouldn't you?

The med tech weapon is the better choice for both specs in my opinion, 17 cunning is better than 5 power + 13 endurance.

Well, as several people have been quick to comment in several posts, you can be successful in every encounter in the game. So it's not totally broken. Though I think this say something about the difficulty of healing in the game currently. I think some simple basic tweaks (and probably a good look at alacrity and how it benefits hots and instant cast spells) is all that is needed to fix things up. For me, as soon as the novelty of the mechanic wore off I decided that I didn't enjoy the style and I was too annoyed with the fact that the majority of the healing spells you have are of little or no use.

I'm surprised you are pleased considering the 31 point talent is useless. I'm surprised you are pleased considering only 2 of your 5 healing spells are worth using. I'm surprised you consider your role as the tank healer considering you don't have the tank +healing buff or -dmg taken buff... well, except you don't really have any other option because you just don't have the tools to heal the rest of the team effectively. I'm also surprised you don't notice the good things we have in pvp.. we have 2 short sprints (Evasive Imperative and Slip Away), we have stealth, we have a stun, we have a slow.. it sucks not having a leap or a pull.. but we can live without it.

If they don't implement combat logs for pve (we already have a meter of sorts in pvp), then this game is already over. A very big part of MMOs is going to be min/max type of thing. If the content remains so easy that it doesn't matter that you improve your character and play well in order to get it done then the game is doomed. And there needs to be a mechanism by which you can determine if how you are playing is as effective as other methods. If YOU want a video game without metrics to compare performance between different players/classes/skill sets (and yes this going to come down to some numbers), then you have the wrong genre, buddy. My guess is that they are still collecting data so they can bring classes into better balance. If they had combat logs available right now there would be much noise about imbalance.

With the current state of the professions at level 50 it looks like the most useful is biochem. I was armormeh and crafted the trainable level 50 purple gear you can make (wrist and belt slots) and am now mid switch to biochem. With 5 companions working overtime to get a new set of professions going I expect it won't take too long.

I'm pretty sure people have got enough alacrity to be able to safely answer these two questions without a combat log. HoTs (tick times and duration) are not changed by alacrity. GCD of instant cast abilities is not changed, but any ability with an activation time that gets taken below 1.5 seconds (Kolto Infusion) does not suffer a GCD wait after cast. I played with stacking some alacrity for a little bit because it felt like it was the intended method. I figured the core concept was to be using Diagnostic Scan between heals to regain energy and that alacrity would make this viable. I don't think it is quite viable, as people have mentioned several times is these threads the more (only?) effective way to heal in pve is to stack crit/surge/power and rely almost entirely on Kolto Injection and Surgical Probe.

I think that the current energy mechanic and associated costs to the abilities we have is incredibly restrictive. Most people are already talking about how they don't ever use two of the heals because they are completely gimp or destroy the capacity to heal for the duration. You can't really react to unexpected things (not more often than every 2 minutes anyway) and you really need to have basically no mistakes from your raid or you won't be able to recover. It's very strange to me that someone would say the class is great and super capable and at the same time say that the people who try to use the 31 point skill to heal are ignorant of how they should be doing things. If the 31 point talent in the healing tree shouldn't be used then there is something wrong. If you are saying that 2.5 of the 5 healing abilities we have are not useful then the problem isn't with people thinking they ought to be able to use those abilities, it's with how they are implemented. Quit telling people they just don't know how to play the class because they assume the talented abilities should be useful. The fact that people can solo heal a hard mode operation when the second healer dies half way into the fight says more about the difficulty of the fight than it does the capacity of operative healing. Why not just solo heal it from the beginning and have room on the enrage timer? If the content remains that forgiving then this game has about another month before going free to play. Yes the mechanic is new and interesting.. no, that feeling doesn't last that long. Why would you choose to make any encounter more difficult (by forcing a zero mistake run from dps and not taking any extra damage at all) compared to bringing a different healing class and being able to recover from little mistakes? I did heal a normal mode EV and was pretty disappointed in the difficulty (healing seemed incredibly easy), that might have been because I was paired with a sorcerer as the other healer, but I assume it's also because it's an introductory operation and it's normal mode. I was hoping that hard mode would be hard, if it can be solo healed by an operative then I guess I don't know what to think. And even though the normal mode was fairly easy it seemed like at any moment things could go wrong, always on the precipice where people were vulnerable for lengths of time I wasn't comfortable with, but it seems tuned in such a way that there are longish lulls in the incoming damage.. something I would expect to change. I don't know, I guess I might need to play one or both of the other 2 healers to see what condition they are in. Ultimately I think the class just needs some tweaks, I don't think using 2 spells (or one wrong one) should put you into trouble with your energy, it's very restrictive. I don't think 1/2 the healing abilities should be of such little use that it people opt to not even have them available (or in the case of the stacking hot, only be able to use it on the tank).

Heh, Carbine Burst was one of my most used abilities as I leveled. On my bar the first 4 were Shiv, Backstab, Grenade, Carbine Burst.. getting TA from rolling KP I sometimes didn't have energy for more Burst but in general I found it to be the most effective, usually I just AOE'd the packs as Kaliyo did her thing. Using a grenade to launch a weak mob that might starts off a little separated back into the rest of them can be helpful to make sure you can get them all in your carbine burst. Good times.

Well, there's a 6 second CD on KP to proc a TA, that could mean a wait for more TA. And 30% still makes for this to be a little bit too much RNG for my liking, 10 seconds or longer wouldn't be abnormal in terms of getting a TA from KP. Personally the problem I have with Kolto Infusion is the disruption to energy, if you want to be roughly energy neutral with the most consistent throughput you are likely casting Kolto Injection followed by the no energy cost Surgical Probe and keeping your Kolto Probe rolling. But once you throw in Infusions you are threatening your regen rate and might find yourself in a hole and needing a CD to get out of it. Strangely, and this is sort of contradictory, if you find that you need that burst of healing you are probably not sitting in a situation where you have the energy to throw into Infusion without dropping into the lower tier of regen. It seems to me that there are few situations where you are able to utilize infusion for it's increased healing relative to surgical probe and then have time off to scan or just sit there to get back into the safe regen zone. Perhaps this happens more often than I realize, I haven't been through much content, so I should mention that this is just my impression and that I can't say I'm especially invested in this perspective.

Edit: I see I missed that someone else addressed the error this originally commented on.