Matchmaking would not solve the problem, because all it will do is match up teams with 4 healers against another team with 4 healers. Sure that fight is fair but I feel bad for the guys in that game. Unless you mean matchmaking like a group finder where you can only have say 2 healers on each side, but that's more of a role restriction. As long as healing is overpowered there's no reason not to play as a healer.

People tend to play whatever is currently overpowered and healing is currently overpowered. But unlike playing overpowered DPS classes, people all playing healers lead to stalemates which is even worse. Let's say Smasher is the strongest DPS by far and you've a WZ where every player is a Smasher. The outcome of this fight will be decided, rather quickly actually. It may feel pretty dumb but one side will definitely win. A WZ with 4 healers on each side is never going to have any meaningful outcome because nobody will ever be dying on each side and whatever objective you manage to capture is just purely due to luck.

Kolto missile was originally on the healing tree so Mercs won't necessarily have it. A Marauder speced for bleed damage will usually heal for more than a Merc DPS can reasonably heal for unless that guy just stops doing DPS and start healing, and that'd be rather inefficient. There's no logic to the way certain abilities are divied up. You got people who can interrupt every 6s (8s base + 2s from CD), guys who can interrupt 35m away, and guys who have extra lockout time on interrupts. Do you seriously think some all knowing dev thought of all the possible combination of these abilities and figured that it was balanced? No it's merely variety that sounded good, the same way assigning heal debuffs to Marauder and Sniper sounded good. It's not even an issue of whether a class is overpowered. It's simply something done without any concern for balance, and if things happen to be balanced it is just sheer luck, not because there was any thought put into to the way these abilities are assigned.

It's probably okay but why add another component to worry about balancing? Did anyone really think Merc having no interrupt and SW need to use 1 rage to interrupt even makes sense? It's the same issue with Marauders and Snipers are the only two classes that have heal debuff. What is the design choice of having two classes that are about as far from each other as possible be the only two classes that can do this ability? Is the point that these two classes are supposed to suck so they need the extra boost? Did someone just throw a dart and it landed on 'heal debuffs' when Marauder and Sniper went through their design? How can things possibly be balanced when you've fairly important abilities like interrupts and heal debuffs given out in a seemingly completely random fashion?

The class with 8s base CD on interrupt are all 4m, and that makes sense because for every 2 interrupt a 12s base CD interrupt class can use, you can use 3 of them so there should be some drawback. Interrupts aren't very useful right now because half of the heals aren't interruptible and if you can't kill the healers there's usually not much point to worry about DPS. I think it'd be best if they just make all interupts 12s, 30m, not modified by any talents. I know they used to try to distinguish classes with interrupts, like Mercs don't even get an interrupt and Sith Warrior interrupts used to use rage, and we saw how well that went.

Why do people always say 'it's different in rated' when talking about overpowered healing. It's a simple mental exercise. Let's say one team sends 3 DPS to attack your Op healer in regular, and your team possess enough intelligence to know not to attack the guy who is obviously a tank (and in a regular WZ sometime there wouldn't even be a tank to attack), so your DPS/tank pick target at random because they're supposedly bad. If your DPS/tank picked the healer then they're not helping your own healer, but usually we consider putting pressure on enemy healer to be a good thing. If your DPS/tank picked the DPS then they're obviously stopping the enemy DPS from attacking your Op healer. If you're trying to kill the opposing DPS you'll obviously use all your CCs wherever it makes sense, which lightens the load your Op healer faces. If they end up killing the DPS that's even better. So the only way it'd even matter is if in regular people have a tendency to spend time chasing tanks, which is something I don't ever observe. Otherwise, even if the rest of your team is picking guys at random, it's still generally beneficial to your team. Yes it'd help if you've guys who are especially good at denial drop a timely AE stun/AE mez while your Op healer is being chased by 3 DPS, but again even if your DPS is just attacking guys completely at random, there's a good chance they'll help out your healer anyway just because stuff like AE stun/AE mez is useful in killing enemy players anyway. The only case it'd matter is if your DPS attacked their healer, and the difference between their healer and your DPS is so great that they ended up accomplishingly nothing useful while your healer eventually died. Though in that case the quality of your DPS versus their DPS is just so great that eventually their DPS will win no matter what your DPS did.

I've been thinking about this issue in general. As easy as SWTOR is, it's still apparently plenty hard for most people. I think raiding/hard content in MMORPG is at an evolutionary dead end. Outside of truly gimmick stuff or crazy reaction time tests (e.g. 1 second to react before everyone dies!) if you're good at these things you're always going to find them easy. And if you're not you'll never find them easy no matter how much you've played. It's almost a mentality thing, because honestly you can often make the jump to the elite if you simply go find another elite player and humbly ask that guy to explain exactly everything he does in a fight. As long as you can replicate it, you're now part of the elite, because it's not like an elite player's Grav Round does more damage than yours just because he's elite. But most people aren't humble enough to accept that they're not elite and they remain that way. A lot of time, especially with DPS, it'd literally be like say guy A does 1000 DPS, guy B comes and say 'you should try 22222222222' as your rotation, and guy B does 2000 DPS, but guy A would never accept that '2222222222' is a better rotation than '11111111111', even though the guy doing double his DPS is pressing just one button and is willing to share his secret.

This is a bigger problem with S&V than TFB. The way TFB is setup, if you can beat Operator IX you know at least you have a group of guys who are fundamentally solid on game mechanics, since there is absolutely no way you can carry a guy who doesn't know how to channel the shield. So if you get past Operator IX you have reasonable confidence that the guys you get is solid enough to beat Kephess and TFB. Maybe you fail anyway but it's not because they're bad players, because if they are you'd never have gotten past Operator IX. In S&V the first 4 bosses are basically trivial so you really have no idea if your team is at all good until Olok the Shadow, which requires some semblance of competence to beat. Now this happens with everyone, but it's much harder to correct a bad guild than a bad PUG. In particular, what do you do if it turns out it's the DPS that are bad in the said guild? In a PUG I often run with guys who are grossly underequipped, and if we absolutely can't meet enrage timer then we obviously start replacing the weakest DPS first and that has a reasonable chance of working. Trying to replace DPS in a guild that has majority just doesn't work. Most likely they will blame the loner, and even if you have definitive proof it's their fault, you still won't win because they have the majority. Ouside of Operator IX it's very hard for someone truly clueless to wipe the raid, simply because the truly clueless wouldn't even know what you have to do to wipe the raid. For example one time I had a guy pick up the portable shield on Dash'roode and never moved which led to an instant wipe. Was that guy clueless? No because if you're clueless you wouldn't even know there was a portable shield to pick up. I had a tank that purposely turned the tentacles to slam the DPS on TFB. Again, this isn't something you can accidentally do. Even if you just stood at a random place to tanking, the DPS will naturally move behind to avoid the slam, so it took effort to ensure the tentacle always slammed the DPS. These guys are your biggest problem, but it's way harder to correct them when they're part of the majority. You'd hear stuff like 'we always have tentacles slam DPS when we won', and sure I don't doubt that because first phase of TFB isn't even hard, but that's still a very bad idea.

I think you should only be allowed to need something if the stats on it matched your primary class, or if the item is BoE.

The difference between a gulid run and a PUG is that in the latter you can usually try to help people who are bad while in the former you have no chance of helping others if it turns out the said guild is bad, because they have a clear majority and nobody is going to be dumb enough to say like: "Hey your guild's DPS totally sucked that fight" even if it was true because the said guild has a majority. Even the most obnoxious raid hero is usually well aware that he's not going to have the majority in a PUG, and since having a lockout on a mob like Operation Chiefs makes it almost impossible to find another group, that guy will usually be forced to compromise as he is aware his prospect of finding another raid at that point is very bad. The guilds that are truly good and just need another person will have an attitude where they're going to carry that last person no matter how bad he is (unless it's Operator IX). So they wouldn't have any high expectation from the last person and therefore have no reason to freak out over anything. The one guild run I got to that was actually good we actually ended up with only 7 people and still cleared bosses fine, and that guild never freaked out the whole time because if you're good, you should be expected to be able to pull off things like that. A lack of willingness to carry implies that you're working with PUG level players. Not saying you should expect to be carried, but working with PUG level players who you cannot give advice to (because the guild has majority) makes things even harder. I once joined a run with 6 guys in a guild and we ran out of shield generators on Dash'roode at 50%. The 2 PUG was DPS (me and another guy). The two DPS from the guild were horribly underequipped (like 23K HP) while the 2 PUGs are like 28/30K. But of course, the guild blamed us for lack of DPS. Frankly, even if we did 0 DPS you shouldn't have Dash'roode hitting 50% when you ran out of shield generators, not to mention we can see rather clearly that it was that guild's DPS who died right away as the fight started. If you're in a PUG you can politely tell those 2 DPS with 23K that they probably aren't ready for this fight yet, but what can you do when the 2 bad DPS have majority? Well in that case it was so bad we broke up, but imagine if you're at Olok the Shadow with the same setup. You'd be pretty screwed.

To me, that's the 'guild run' group finder, and I've been in group finder raids where we wiped on Dash'roode on 90%. This is a raid where there's a clear majority of a guild (usually 6+) and you're obviously not part of that guild. You might be thinking you'll be on your way to an easy win, but you'll be wrong. This is because if these guys are actually good they'd be usually be doing Hard modes unless they're just really bored (have seen this happened once in all my group finder raids). If you hear these guys tell you this fight is really hard and you can't screw up, and it's not Operator IX (where no amount of uberness can carry a bad player who doesn't know how to channel), it's going to be a painful experience, because that means your guild run is basically same as a PUG as this is the only reason why any story mode encounter outside of Operator IX would require everyone on top of their games. The said guild will often make plenty of mistakes, but you can't even correct them because they have a clear majority and you don't want to risk getting kicked. No you won't be wiping on Dash'roode at 90%, but do expect to randomly wipe on trash and have a high probability of having the group break up shortly after the weekly mob is done, leaving you in a position where it's almost impossible to finish the raid. To compound things this group is almost always good enough to clear the weekly mob (which isn't saying much), and after that you're totally stuck with them, because trying to get another group finder raiding going after you're past the point of the weekly mob is extremely difficult, as the only kind of group you're joining is likely another group that had some serious problem and needed to find replacements from group finder. In fact, looking at my various alt's lockout, wiping on Dash'roode at 90% is usuaully fine because the likely outcome is the group breaks up completely and you get to try your luck again. If you get a lockout on say Operation Chiefs or Operator IX and then the group breaks up, you may not be able to finish your raids at all.

From a design point of view, Merc heals are fine. DPS versus Merc heal is pretty close to 50/50 and that's how it should be. Now Merc heals are obviously weak compared to other healers, especially Operative who wins against DPS close to 100% of the time, but Operative should be nerfed. Sorcs are hard to gauge because Sorcs benefit more from being with a Operative than a Merc (Merc's strong point is survival, but that's completely unnecessary when you've an unkillable healer on your side). Sorc by design should be highest output and lowest survivality. Right now that's not a real weakness because you can usually count on an Operative to have your back.

I think you can blame WoW for starting the whole 'critical hit should be something that happens more often than a regular hit' design, which is absurd. I think some people will be right at home with EQ2 where you have 285% chance to crit (but your enemy has 250% crit mitigation, bring it to 35%). If you look at games with very high crit % they invariably end up with an 'anti-crit' stat which shows exactly why you shouldn't have very high crit % to begin with. Unfortunately the WoW bad designs not only leads to players with wrong expectations but devs as well. If you look at say, Arsenal Merc design, it's hard to imagine it was designed by the same guy as Rage Jugg. If Arsenal Merc was designed by the same guy, it'll probably be like 'your Unload makes your next Heatseeker missile a guaranteed crit", and that'd be pretty insane too, but it's not even as crazy as Smash always critting.

If you repeat a lie often enough it must be true. If it was possible to force an Op to only heal himself, then his amount healed has to be less than whoever is attacking him because he can only heal the damage he's taken on himself, which comes from the guy harassing him. Good luck finding a WZ leaderboard that shows any single target DPS coming even close to what an Operative can heal for. What actually happens is you do 500K to an Operative and he heals for a million damage because most of his heals can all be cast while running instantly. If anyone's neutralized it's the DPS not the healer. In fact this is so futile it's arguably better to ignore the Operative in this case because your DPS is greatly reduced while chasing an Operative (they'll find various way to open space), while if you attack a DPS at least you do close to your 100% DPS. If you have heal debuffs, it's often better to debuff and burst down DPS instead of the Operative because at least it gives you a temporary advantage. You're simply a bad DPS if you think you can come anywhere close to break even against an Operative healer.

The only reason why Snipers even do okay against Operatives is because they've a healing debuff, which is kind of a gimmick anyway (though a very powerful one). Usually you're better off just heal debuff someone else who is far more likely to stay within your LoS and then try to burst that guy down when you factor the difficulty to burst down an Operative due to all their tricks. Someone mentioned this is a lot like when Marauders were top of the food chain for a while and they were telling everyone it's not because the class is overpowered but that people who play Marauders are awesome. Now that Marauders are fairly average again, apparently all the guys who used to be awesome at playing Marauder are no longer that awesome. One thing I always found weird about healers is that if it's a class that's supposed to be dependent on team, how come there's all these talents in the healing tree that makes you hard to kill? Aren't you supposed to depend on the team for survival? In particular, there used to be the massive 'healing received' talent which only make sense in PvP (nobody's going to have a healer tank anything in PvE). It seems like there are two separate design philosophy when it comes to talents. In one school healers are made to be self-sufficient (all the various survival talents are on healer tree, and often better than the dps trees), and on the other hand heals are made to be very strong as if the class is assumed to have poor survivality, except it's not true.

Crit should be less valuable in total damage output than Power or any other stat in PvP because Crit adds unpredictability in PvP (but not PvE, because mobs have far too much HP to care). For example let's say a class cannot crit at all and they do more DPS in every applicable category (sustained/burst/ranged/melee/whatever) by a small margin (say, 5%). But against this class, if you have 50% of your HP you're actually very safe because they'd have no single attack that can do 6000 damage in one shot to bring you to execute range (no existing attack does 6000 damage uncrit). In fact a healer would feel rather comfortable facing one of those class since there's absolutely no surprises here (a healer's total HPS still exceeds this class's DPS easily). Now of course classes that can crit do have attacks that do more than 6000 damage in one shot, which means the healer has to be more careful or he risks taking a big hit and then dip into execute range. It won't always happen, but it's something you got to be worried about. Heatseeker Missile is an example of an attack that does work in concept. It hits very hard and is easy to setup, but there are no talents that increases its crit chance specifically. So if you want more 8K HSM crits you got to invest more in crits, which will likely reduce the damage it does by some too (because crit come at the expense of power). An example of a less well designed attack would be Marksmanship Sniper. There's several talents that adds a very generous amount of crit% to their hardest hitting attacks. Your hardest hitting talents are likely to have 30%+ chance of critting so you can often get away with stacking power, since your talent already cover most of the crit you need. And of course, an example of a terribly designed attack would be Smash, which has 100% chance to crit, so there is literally no value to getting more crit so far as Smash is concerned. Unsurprisingly Smashers tend to be all power/surge. In fact, just imagine if Smash didn't auto crit. Sure, people can still smash for 10K, but that'd only happen about 20% of the time, and I'm sure people wouldn't mind these odds. If you want to crit more often, you'll have to sacrifice some Power. That's how tradeoffs are supposed to work, but with autocrit abilities there aren't any.

You can easily throw out HoT/AE HoT plus whatever free instant heals you get while healing yourself and running away. The most ideal case would be if your DPS somehow can chase Operative behind a pillar where they've no LoS to the rest of the team, as that's the only way to prevent them from healing the rest of the team. Usually this only happens because the Operative paniced needlessly, though occasionally it's possible your DPS is so good that it forces the Operative to flee right away. You don't really neutralize an Operative. That'd imply they healed for less than the top DPS did, which is virtually impossible. All you do is contain the damage they can do, and because so many people are Operative these days you're bound to have some of your own team too even in PUG, so if you can limit their damage on opposing team, that's usually enough to win because you got Operatives of your own. Dealing with Operative is mostly a matter of terrain control. The easiest example would be Hypergates. If you see an Operative leave the center room, chase him because as long as he's outside that room, he can't possibly heal anyone inside that room so you want to keep him out of that room for as long as possible. Likewise if you see an Operative to go the back wall on the turret control rooms in Novare Coast, you should absolutely chase him because he can't possibly heal anyone else from that position, so you want to keep him there for as long as possible. This applies to all healers but is especially important on Operatives who are least likely to be killed amongst healers.

The Assassin is the only class that does not suffer from hitting 0 resources (technically Sorc do not, but good luck trying to do anything useful with 0 Force as a Sorc). Therefore in PvP the goal is to get rid of all your Force as fast as reasonably possible, because it provides a preemptive defense against CC, since CC prevents you from doing damage but if your Force is low, then your ability to do damage is not really significantly impacted. In this respect, conside the longest hard CC is 4 seconds (stun), that means you don't want to have more than 50 Force at any given time if at all possible. For taunt, I find that the most practical way to use it is just tab target as soon as it's up, use it, and then switch back to the original target, provided the original target is the wrong target, which means it's either: 1. A healer. 2. Someone who is obviously attacking you. Though you should have a healer targetted most of the time anyway, so your original target should usually be the wrong target to taunt.

Err, you don't need anything special to coordinate a stun precisely because Operatives are so overpowered. Basically you stun them at 30% because if you stun any earlier you'd white bar them before 30% and then they'd just escape. Of course it can take you 5 minutes to bring a good Op healer to 30% without stunning him, but there's really no point to get an Op healer to 30% if you've to white bar him in the process because he's going to escape basically every time if he has a full white bar. Notable exception would be if he's got an Electro Net but Mercs are still weak overall, not to mention most foolishly waste their net on melee instead of the Operative.

Having less crit makes crit more valuable. In pre 2.0 you've close to 25% crit with no crit modifier, versus now it's somewhere around 20%. The problem, as mentioned, is that none of this accounts for auto crit or even talents that add a considerable amount of crit. For example if your class's talent adds 15% crit on your hardest hitting attack, then your base crit on your hardest hitting attack is 35%, and if you look at the amount of crit needed to get another % you might say 35% seems good enough compared to say 40%. If your base is stuck at 20%, going from 20% to 25% is considerably better than going form 35% to 40%. Not only should the auto crit abilities nerfed, but most talents that add crit should be revised as well. It makes no sense when you get like 5-6% from crit rating on a standard setup (wearing all stock Conqueror) and yet you've multiple talents that add 5% crit. However, it's complicated because this gets into a PvE issue as well. These large amount of crits make sense for PvE because it's not like mobs with 6 or 7 digit HP even care if you crit for 10K more often or not. Players, on the other hand, obviously do care a lot about these 10K crits when you're on the receiving end.

If the primary reason for credit is for augments, the better way to do it would be allow us to buy something that inserts a slot for free as well as BoP purple augments for WZ comms.

The only way to stop the corner cap safely is with smashers. All the other AEs mentioned are either resource intensive or on a long CD. You're not going to just call an orbital strike on the control room 'just in case'. It's not a problem as long as you're even or ahead in smash power. If you're behind going into that room is suicide and every AE you can use from far away has some kind of drawback that will hurt you eventually. Sure you can stop it but if you have to throw a Force Storm each time someone attempts this, whoever's doing the AE isn't going to have a lot of resource left to do anything else useful.

Humans aren't really that much more unpredictable because there's only so many things you can possibly do that makes sense especially as you get better. The difference is that humans complain if stuff get nerfed while mobs don't get to post so you should cater to the human first and nerf the mobs who don't get a vote in these matters.

Some matchmaking is still better than no matchmaking. For example right now I'd guess the average Scoundrel healer has a much higher rating than the average Commando healer if a rating system existed for regular WZ. Even with a relatively limited pool of players, the natural thing to do is try to give the Commando healer better teammates compared to the Scoundrel healer. It won't always be enough, but it's better than doing nothing. I'm willing to wait for up to 5 minutes for more balanced games, and keep in mind same faction games can always be balanced since you get to rearrange the 16 players in any way you want. As an interim solution to matchmaking, you can simply favor same faction games more while you're working on a long term solution (cross server queue, or maybe the fact your matchmaking system works actually gets people to return to PvP) as same faction games are way easier to balance from a matchmaking point of view.

Yeah but that's a long term goal and there should be some ability to address the fact that there's probably always some overpowered class out there. I think the solution to this is also matchmaking. If class X is indeed overpowered, then class X will likely to have higher than normal rating, so after a while you'd naturally end up fighting tougher opponents or just the same class. Right now in the regular WZ you're definitely starting with a significant disadvantage if you don't have a Scoundrel healer.