I'm looking for a new guild to run Operations with on a regular basis. At the current guild I'm in we have an overabundance of tanks (strangely enough), and it doesn't look like I'm getting any action soon. I'm fully augmented 69+ and have tanked both SnV and TFB HM multiple times (just never picked up the underworld gear). Please send an ingame message or respond via this thread / PM's. Thanks for taking the time to read this. Shizue

I love reading your stories and though I hardly ever post on the forums I couldn't resist. Here's the story on my latest TFB SM run. Me on my PT Tank and a guildie on his Merc Healer decide to go nuts and q for a SM Ops. 10 seconds later we get TFB pop up. Accept, look at the gear, there's one sorc with 25k, the rest is all roughly 30k, other Jug tank's even got 37k. Could be better, but could be hell of a lot worse. After the general introductions and 'do we know what to do', we find there's two new people. The 25k dps and the 2nd healer. Again, could be worse. 1st boss, nothing special, Jug's on the boss, I'm on Male duty, boss goes down without too much effort. On our way to the 2nd boss I start noticing a trend. I'm tanking all the adds while the Jug... well. After doing the three hypergates, I tell him in chat that's he's welcome to help out on the adds. "ok". He helps out on the little critters in the tunnel, by aoe taunting them after my taunt's gone (so perhaps he does know what he's doing?) but on the next sets of adds, I'm having to do all the tanking again. By this point I'm getting annoyed and ask my guildy if he can keep an eye on the Jug to see what he's doing. As I thought, standard newbie DPS behavior, jumping in, hitting random stuff, no taunting, no guarding, just hitting. 2nd boss, we mark em up and explain tactics to the new guys. Me : "I'll start on Kel'Sara, swap on 5?" (I know there's no need to swap on SM, but practice for HM) Jug: "ok" We do a ready check, everybody's ready, so we pull. I use Death from Above and Taunt Kel'Sara away, while DPS goes nuts on Heirad. But the Jug's still in DPS mode, so he leaps on Heirad, while I have both Ciphas and Kel'Sara on me. I start kiting them around, while asking him to taunt one of them. He doesn't. Ciphas starts Surging Chain, I tell him to taunt Kel'Sara and I leap on Ciphas. By this point I have my guildy shouting in my ear, complaining about the other healer "I don't think this healer is healing". But I got more important things on my mind, after breaking the Surging Chain, I still have them both on me. I scream for a taunt, unfortunately he picks the wrong one, leaving me with Kel'Sara. But since it's storymode and better than nothing, I'll take it. Heirad goes down (eventually), dps moves on to Ciphas (eventually), green pools start spawning. Somehow we end up swapping bosses with me on Ciphas, him on Kel'Sara. As soon as I see the Jug's on 5 or 6 stacks, I charge and taunt. But I should've known better, now I'm tanking them both again. And what does our friend the Jug do... even though he's not doomed, he starts running through the green circles. Miraculously the doomed DPS beats him to 2 of them and lives. Ciphas goes down, I drop threat, dumping Kel'Sara on the Jug. Now I finally have time to look around. I'm trying to find the other healer since in all this time I haven't seen his name pop up once. Took me a little while to find him, he was still standing up top, behind the forcefield... When I tell my guildy all he can do is laugh. "Well, at least we know how good a healer I am then". We make it through without a wipe, my guildy gets remarks on his excellent healing. I whisper the Jug that he really should use his taunt "I was! I was trying to get him off you!".... sure. On our way to Operator, it's back to the original trend, I'm tanking all the adds while mr Jug starts attacking the cores. *sigh* but fine, no deaths. 3rd boss, after a long discussion about tactics we give it a shot. But even though I told him it was our job to keep the adds of the healers and channelers, our friend the jug happily ignores all the adds (including the first 2 largers droids) and goes for the cores. I think "ok, fine, I can do this bit solo anyways". Blue phase; allright, not good but we managed. Orange good. Purple.. our friend the Jug runs around like a headless chicken trying to find a console to click. We fail purple, big add spawns. "Everybody on the big add, then cores again", everybody does, apart from our friend, he just keeps channeling away. DPS was slow, we fail purple again, big add spawns, we call a wipe. Sigh, count to ten, **** happens. "Allright, now we've seen the fight, faster on the channeling, faster on the cores and it's fine." 2nd try, blue and orange went allright, purple was slow (because the 25k dps who was supposed to be in the middle decides to run out and help on the cores, even though he was told to stay in the circle), big add, wipe. 3rd try, blue and orange and even purple went allright, ofcourse I'm still soloing the adds. But then it's yellow (my turn to channel) the big add spawns and goes straight for my yellow partner. "Taunt the add". No reply, tank's doing dps on the cores. "TAUNT THE ADD!" (who has now reached my partner), still nothing. I can only sit by while the droid knocks my partner out of the circle, raising the shields. It is only then the jug comes running back mid, and starts attacking the add. Partner goes back in middle, I channel. But since the Jug didn't actually TAUNT the add, as soon as my partner starts getting some nice crits on it, it's coming for him again, knocking him out of the circle a second time. By now me and my guildy have had enough (and it was getting close to guild-raid-time) and leave the group. As soon as I loaded the fleet again, I whisper one of the DPS, who was helping out with explaining tactics and all, to apologize for leaving, and explain the other tank's behaviour, but he's allready offline. I catch him later that same evening and we share a few laughs and come to the conclusion "There's always one..."

Like someone said before as well, you're probably gonna cast Salvation anyway because there's a small group of people taking damage, why not stand in it yourself? Apparently I wasn't using the full potential, for one thing I did not know Healing trance did not consume the Conveyance buff, since I thought they fixed that 'bug'? Indeed, I still rarely run out of force, but since I didn't know about the full effect of Conveyance I changed my rotation slightly. I'll switch it back immediately Instead of just popping Sacrifice, cause it's free anyway, I ponder 'can i stop healing the tank for 3 seconds to pop salvation, maybe i have to move to get into the salvation first, and do my sacrifice. did the boss just do his big attack, can i survive if i lower my hp's and take a hit' What's so bad about having plenty of AoE heals around? I don't think I see 'exactly the problem' about using AoE when there's 4 people standing together who could use a heal. Would you rather me healing them all seperately? But don't get me wrong, I totally agree it is not the answer to everything and it is a crude method to heal, but effective. In raids I don't find myself stuck on my rotation that much. If I change it for some reason and start running low, i'll pop my sacrifice without the salvation. There's always two healers, I keep an eye on him, he keeps an eye on me. And I know, time's a wasted if healers start healing eachother when they should be healing the others. But if he uses the Sacrifice, I can toss him the HoT, if I use it, he tosses me one. That bad? As for the 'less fun' part, I find it more fun, since it's, for me, more challenging. Perhaps because I'm not using my sage to his full potential, and I know it's because i'm not the world's best healer. But my guild appreciates me, we run through every raid and I'm having fun.

oh come on you sage (and sorcs i suppose) guys (and girls) out there, we had it pisseasy before 1.2. 1: Rejuvenate to get Conveyance buff 2: Healing Trance to get the Crit 3: just before the Healing Trance ends, cast Deliverance (cast time reduced by 1 sec due to Conveyance) 4: Noble Sacrifice, which costs no life because of the Crit from Healing Trance repeat. No way of running out of Force, big heals everywhere. The first week of raiding after the patch I struggled with my Healer, kept running out of Force. But after a week I got the hang of it. You just need to think a bit further ahead. In Raids I never ever get into trouble. I stand close to either the tank (if possible) or close to the ranged dps. After a few casts, I do 2 noble sacrifices, put AoE on myself, which will also benefit the rest of the group. Furthermore, in raids you are not alone. Your fellow healer will notice your health dropping and will top you off. And in our raids, we are often with 2 sages, so AoE everywhere! In Flashpoints the same thing applies, if possible I keep close to the ranged dps for maximum use of the AoE skill. And if you have a good team, they will notice your glowing circle of life and stand in it. That way, you can still focus heal. It only takes 3 or 4 seconds to cast salvation and 2 or 3 noble sacrifices. So seriously all you sages / sorcs out there.... learn to play before you start all this 'ohh i'm not gonna bother healing anymore, bioware ****ed it up' crap. ps. I can't speak for any of the other healing classes. I do have a mercenary lvl 50. I levelled as dps but as I'm the only active player who can heal, I swapped to healing. He's still **** geared and we only did 1 HM flashpoint yet, so I haven't made my mind up yet.

I used Corso until Nar Shaddaa, then I quickly tried the Wookiee, but he seemed to die even faster, so I switched back to Corso. But when I got Risha, I kept her all the way to the end. Sure she dies alot, sure I take some damage, but damn the damage we do!! I never used Guss (mainly because my guildies said he was bloody annoying), and never used Akaavi either. Now after a week of flashpoints, both Risha and Guss have near full Columi gear, so I might be tempted to use Guss once a while. But the way I see it: With Risha, we kill things much much faster, and I lose only a few seconds healing myself, then on to the speeder to the next mob and Risha is full health when I leave the speeder. With Guss, it's slower kills, but I don't have to heal up. I'll take the fun damage way every time