Weapon damage matters in the regard that it seems to be based on the Tech Power you have on your vibroknife. As a direct stat it's utterly useless though, as was said it feels they decided to change something the last few weeks.

There is more damage in 16 man runs, although it's not intended from BW's side. If you look in the 1.1.0 patchnotes on the PTS you'll see two bulletpoints with that mentioned.

I actually hope they nerf our burst a wee bit, but compensate with a higher sustained dps and a gap closer of some sort. Thing is, if we have all out CD's we can actually "oneshot" someone, they die before they get a chance to do anything. Open with AB & Hidden Strike, if they trinket out just Debilitate and hit them till it breaks. If they're low on HP just finish them, otherwise dart them and vanish. Wait and then HS them again, now they're dead unless their healer is watching closely. The above thing is the problem. We _can_ kill people while they just watch, given that we have all our CD's. Nerf our burst a wee bit and give us a higher sustainable damage and we get less whine that we're OP.

^^ This Operative Healing is dreadfully boring. You keep 2xKolto Probes up on your tank and whoever else takes a lot of damage, then you rotate KI->SP, KI->SP, and of course toss in the odd Stimboost to keep that buff up. Operative healing for me is like a clunky sort of Priest healing in WoW vanlilla. You have your hot and 2 direct heals, but that's about it. Give the healing classes some fun utility heals as well, and for the love of all that is holy, make alacrity reduce our GCD. Please.

At low levels you can use Snipe & Explosive Probe to open up, it's actually a decent opener. In combat though it's a bit of a hassle to crouch, snipe, and then backstab. Once you pass 36 you'll only rarely use Snipe in PvE. In PvP it can have it's uses, but I seldom use it there. I think I more or less stopped using Snipe around lvl 20'ish. Your toolbox is getting there by then, and it takes too long to set up for me to bother with the extra second or two for the snipe.

0.5 seconds shorter casttime on KI can sometimes be a lifesaver. Alacrity is kinda meh though, it has it's uses until you comes to a certain point. I still think that healing based on crit/surge is a bad idea. Unless you get your crit rate to 100% you have to heal as if your heal won't crit, otherwise you can bet you'll never get your crit when you need it. Operatives are a bit funny when it comes to that, we have a lot of crit on our gear yet we have no benefits, other than the obvious bigger heal, from critting. Power > Cunning > Alacrity (until KI is 1.5s) > Crit > Surge is my preference. This is of course assuming a rough parity in the actual stat numbers. I won't swap 30 surge for 20 power for example.

I agree that reducing the cost would solve the biggest problem, but it's still somewhat UP for a 31 point talent. It's on a 12 sec CD, so you still wouldn't spam it, and it takes 15 seconds for the healing to take place. I can't quite recall what it ticks for, but I think it's in the 400'ish range every 3 seconds. In a PvE setting it's useful to top off a few players, but it's not enough to outheal any serious kind of AoE. Make it crit more often, give it some synergy with our existing hots, or reduce the duration to increase the healing time. Come to think of it, making alacrity affect the tick time of our hots would go a long way towards making it more useful, along with that lowered energy cost of course.

It would be useful, but hardly the biggest issue. We only have a few abilities which require stealth, and only one or two of them are the kind you _must_ have hotkeyed. I wouldn't mind if the cover bar was changed to a stealth/cover bar tbh. As an operative you "never" use cover anyway.

Not sure I agree with that, it being a 31 point talent, but it would make it far more useful. The two biggest issues it has is the cost, it takes us far too close to 60 energy, and the slow healing. The amount healed is fine, but it ticks too slowly. I'd be fine with it being 20 energy, if some other talent improved it as well. Preferably by increasing the ticks or crit chance, maybe toss that into the first DS talent.

Nope, damage rating on your Vibroknife is purely cosmetics. The damage rating seems to correspond to the Tech Power on your Vibroknife though, so higher numbers do indicate that the knife is better. Damage rating on your Rifle is mostly cosmetic as well, it's only used for a few abilities as an Operative. Weapon Damage: Rifle Shot Overload Shot Carbine Burst Other than that it's all Tech Power/Power/Cunning that determines your damage. Just mouseover your abilities and look at the tooltip. If it says "Weapon damage" it's based on your blaster rifle, otherwise it's based on Power.

That _is_ Surgical Probe. KI costs 25 energy, if it was KP it'd bring the total cost up to 40 energy. Besides, why on earth would anyone recast KP after 2 seconds? KI + SP will drain your energy if you keep spamming it. Keep Kolto probe on everyone in 4 man runs. Assuming you're above the energy cutoff that costs you 24 (net) energy every ~15 secs. You regen during the GCD. That means that without having DS you can get off 1 or maybe 2 of those KI->SP casts in the remaining 9 seconds. If you cast more than that your energy take a dive below your efficient regen. I say 15 secs before recast to avoid losing the probes in case of nasty spikes or stuns. You can push it to 17 but that's risky. Maths on that: 4xKP, 6 secs cast/GCD: 60 energy cost, 36 energy regen => -24 2xKI+SP, 7 sec cast: 50 energy cost, 42 energy regen => -8 I can't quite recall if SP triggers a GCD. I think it does so calculated it here, but won't swear to it. Now this gives you 2 secs to burn before refreshing the probes, you can throw out a KI and drain another effective 13 energy, or you can DS and probably regen 2-4 energy with a wee bit of healing thrown in for free. Also keep in mind that there's some talk that the energy regen is actually a bit more distinct than the UI seems to hint at. I've heard it said that the thresholds are actually 80-100: 5 energy/sec 60-80: 4.5 energy/sec 40-60: 4 energy/sec 20-40: 3.5 energy/sec 0-20: 3 energy/sec For Stimpack you just add 1 energy/sec to that. If that's true you most assuredly run out of energy with your rotation, with some care you can stay in the 5/sec regen at all times with the KP only. Of course even then you'll need the occasional dip below 80%, but DS can regen that for you.

You need a lot of rest between the casts to do that, otherwise your energy will go down the crapper. 0 sec: 100 energy (KI -> Probe) 2 sec: 100->75 energy (KI->Probe, 12 energy regen) 4 sec: 87 -> 62 energy (KI->Probe, 12 energy regen) 6 sec: 74 -> 49 energy I know you won't spam that much, but even adding 1 more sec of regen in there barely brings you over the 60 energy limit after the third cast. This is of course assuming you actually heal the tank enough to keep him up, relying too much on crits is going to bring you to a bad end as a healer . You never get that crit when you absolutely need it. ** Edit ** Yes I messed up the GCD from SP cast so make that 0, 3.5, 7, 10.5 secs instead.

We seem to be a crit based healing class, but alacrity is very useful up to a certain point. Personally I'm trying the following 1) Power/Tech Power. I'd rather have consistently high heals than gamble on crits 2) Alacrity until I get Kolto Injection to 1.5 sec cast, especially true if this affects Kolto Probe ticks as well. 3) Crit 4) Surge For primary stats Cunning > Endurance > everything else. While I rank Alacrity as #2, don't stack it at the expense of crit/surge. It's useful to get KI down to a 1.5 sec cast, but not a must. Alacrity doesn't do anything for our energy regen, it doesn't improve our GCD or do much at all in fact. I haven't looked at it's effect on hot ticks, but it does affect the channeled DS so it might help. In practice healer gear seems to favour crit & alacrity. You get Tech Power on weapons etc but other than that there seems to be very little of it.

It doesn't suck, it's just underwhelming and extremely situational. It's useful in two cases that I can think of. 1) You just want to top off your group a little faster than the Kolto Probes tick, or in an Ops group there are a few sitting at 80-90% HP. 2) You have to move while your group/ops group takes some aoe damage. For a normal group you can just hot them, but in an ops group that's too expensive. So it has it's uses, but it's very situational. For normal hardmodes it's not a must, although some of the other high level talents are very useful, but for operations I wouldn't want to be without it.

Because you have no Melee attacks. You only have short ranged Tech attacks

Recuperative Nanotech is a bit underwhelming IMO. It's certainly nice to have for Ops, but the healing doesn't usually match the cost. The two exception I can think of is from EV, 2nd and last bosses have uses for it. You have to move while the raid takes some AOE damage. The Recouperative Nanotech moves along with you, where the Sorc (and maybe merc) AOE heals stay behind. I won't drop it from my spec, but it's far too situational. As has been mentioned the cost vs. healing doesn't justify it. It should either be free (or cheaper), make it eat a TA instead, increase the healing done, or make it heal all those in range. Do one, or a combination of the above, and it's more worth it. I'd prefere higher ticks and a slight reduction in energy cost.

While you don't have any set rotations there are two which tend to crop up. Before pull just get a TA and stimpack yourself. Then toss up 2xkolto probes on the tank, and toss one probe to every dps'er. This only applies to 4man runs, for ops you'd drain your energy. Then the most important thing to remember as an Operative healer. Keep the Probes up at all times, if they drop get them back up ASAP. For a tank I just apply 2xprobes if they drop for some reason, for a dps'er I just toss them 1 probe and add the second one on refresh. The other "rotation" applies to the tank, or anyone pulling agro. If you have 2 TA pop Surgical probe on them, if they have less than 30% HP rinse and repeat since it refunds your TA. If you have 1 or 0 TA toss out Kolto Injection to get a TA. The beauty of having 3-4 players with Kolto Probes ticking away is that you'll almost constantly be at 2 TA and can heal for free. Refreshing the Kolto Probes every ~15 secs or so costs you 6 effective energy pr probe, then you can rest and top off the tank for 10 secs or so. The maths for this part is: Regen (at 80-100% energy, with Stimpack) 6 energy/sec Casttime (Kolto Probe, only GCD) 1.5 secs Cost: 15 energy So regen is 6 * 1.5 = 9 Effective loss: 15 - 9 = 6 energy So you run around doing "Free" healing most of the time, with only the tank draining some energy and the occasional AOE heal to top off a bit faster.

You notice the lack of Accuracy when you go Hardmodes/Operations as a healer. I try to toss inn some Rifle Shots when I don't have to heal, and I get a lot of dodges on them. So aye, it's very useful to have as DPS. At least in a PvE setting. As to how much to stack, I'd guess something like 10-20% is sufficient for now. Once we get a combat log and parses we can actually start figuring out stuff like that.

Alacrity's best feature is to reduce the cast time on accessing your galaxy map On a serious note, it affects at least Diagnostic Scan. Which kinda messes up the animation and ticks on it, but meh. It's also useful to get Kolto Injection down to 1.5 secs, after that it's more or less meh unless it affects Kolto Probes. I have to admit I haven't tested that just yet.

I think it's fair to say that the previous post that Tech Power on a vibroknife directly corresponds to the weapon damage listed is correct. I took a look at different knives yesterday, and I couldn't find a single example of Tech Power not going up with weapon damage. The best way to test it would be to equip gear with Tech Power equal to the Tech Power on a vibroknife you have available. Then remove the gear and equip the Vibroknife. If it acts as we suspect, ie. only Tech Power is used, your Shiv should show the exact same damage as before. The trick would be to find gear matching the Tech Power on a vibroknife exactly, and also make sure you don't lose any Cunning or Power in the process.

Almost everything is reliant on Tech Power (or Power) rather than weapon damage. Mouseover your abilities and look at the tooltip. If it says "x Weapon Damage" it uses the weapons damage stat, otherwise it uses Tech power. So Rifle Shot, Carbine Burst and Overload Shot are reliant on Weapon Damage + Power, while everything else (Shiv, Backstab etc) are reliant on Tech Power + Power.

In PvP we're highly reliant on the burst, OP was probably worried that the same applies in PvE dps.

Not for sure, since we have no combat log or parsers, but it most certainly looks like it does. Wording implies that it does as well.

Because a knife without damage would look silly? Doesn't really make sense, I agree, but it might be the highest damage for blaster/knife is used for Weapon Damage abilities? Can't really say I've played around with it, but play around with your weapons and you'll see Tech Power affects damage of Shive/Backstab etc while weapon damage itself doesn't affect it.

Vibroknives are pure stat boosts. It has a damage stat, which might affect your Weapon Damage, but melee attacks are all based on Tech Power and not Weapon Damage.