Power is a good stat, but it's usually tied together with alacrity. One good stat and one bad stat vs two great stats. Easy to figure out.

Wedge I agree with a lot of your points except when you say it's a bad idea to pull out those power/alacrity enhancements to replace with crit/surge despite them being lower level. Power/alacrity is not nearly as good as crit/surge and as long as you are stacking both, the diminishing returns isn't quite so bad as if you were stacking only one. It makes no sense to keep higher level enhancements that do almost nothing for you when lower level enhancements with proper stats will do more for your healing. It sucks because other classes don't have to do this and can use their high level enhancements and be better. Blame Bioware for making a completely useless stat (alacrity) and overloading our gear with it.

Surge contributes to overheal as well as heal. Alacrity contributes to over spending energy, that's it. Honestly, overhealing in this game is not really a factor. People have so much health and our heals do comparatively little that when people are at half health and we crit an underworld medicine it still doesn't top them off, especially if they are a tank. If they are at 90%+ they don't even need a heal (except tank), Triage 101. During an enrage phase from a boss, you want to have your biggest best heals lined up for the tank to survive. Relying on your fancy rotation of small heals is not going to save the day. When you are approaching 50% crit (I raid with 43% buffed and 93% surge), crit heals are no longer streaky, but regular. I agree with your comments regarding our hots. They just aren't powerful enough. I usually try to keep a double stack on the tank, and only hot anyone else during periods of low damage to buffer against possible future burst. I have full/near full energy might as well make use of it with positive healing (or at least the potential to be). It's really insulting on Soa where our blanket hotting the raid during the falling series should be our time to shine. Constant movement, healing on the run, but the hots just barely do anything, even with cloud running as well. We end up waiting for Salvation from the sages to really top everyone up for the next set of jumps. Pretty frustrating.

You still have to wait for the global cooldown.

I don't cast DS often, only in rare cases. Using DS every 15 seconds is a lot. If someone takes a spike right as you hit your DS you can't react to that spike until 1.5 seconds later. If you had not cast DS and just let energy regen on it's own you could react to it instantly. That is huge when doing harder content.

You may have more energy to heal with, but you are also locking yourself out of casting a lot more by using global cooldowns on DS so often. A few hundred hp isn't going to make a big difference, but just not casting will allow you to regen and also respond to spike damage faster since you aren't locked into a global cooldown.

Unless we get some absurdly high amount of alacrity to where an entirely new rotation setup is possible I just don't see it working. You give up so much going for alacrity with little gain as I see it.

You could be doing better if you balanced your stats properly. You have very high alacrity for a class that benefits very little from it. My gear is probably only slightly better than yours overall, yet my average UM crit is between 5900 and 6500 when healing myself (9% bonus). I stack surge and crit. I sit self buffed at 1555 cunning 40% crit and about 92% multiplier, 442 bonus healing. I have just the 4% alacrity from talents.

It's 6% for any stacks of upper hand, not per stack.

http://www.youtube.com/user/Maxvla?feature=mhee Make your dailies a bit easier and time efficient. A Lesson is Learned solo in 5 minutes for stealth classes. Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/user/Maxvla?feature=mhee Make your dailies a bit easier and time efficient. A Lesson is Learned solo in 5 minutes for stealth classes. Enjoy.

You can do just about anything you want to really. Sometimes (rarely) I'll let Risha take the first shot and initial aggro on everything. Most of the time I just lob a grenade and bum rush the first standard mob hitting it with auto shot as I run in then blaster whip for the kill. After that I'll see if I need a heal myself, if not I backblast the next lowest rank mob. Typically I don't need to heal until the 2nd or 3rd mob. I only keep a handful of dps spells on my bar, now that I've rebound everything at 50 to maximize healing. I use auto shot, grenade, backblast, and blaster whip. I have XS-Freighter bound since it's good aoe, even for a healer, but I don't use it regularly. I also normally keep Risha on sniper mode with AOEs disabled so single mobs die asap lessening the healing burden. I gear her with maximum alacrity and HP since she is my tank and is not bound by resource. On champions I usually let Risha tank giving her first shot, a manually activated Aimed Shot. Depending on the damage she's taking I might just heal her, but usually there is opportunity to at least auto shot here and there. Sometimes I'll toss in a backblast since it's only 10 energy.

So, what, should we all stop playing sawbones? All respec to melee damage (like TOR needs more of that..) and wait til we're fixed? You're all fire and brimstone about anything related to sawbones so I'm curious what you are going to do.

Just have to use it right. It's not great most of the time, but when everything lines up it's pretty good. Used it on the Darth Malgus fight and learned how good it could be. Will be trying to use it more when I recognize situations that would be good for it. 2nd boss in this video Our first time there, trying to figure out how to finish the fight. Also had some lovely heals that didn't 'heal', just got stuck in the animation and had to recast it. Almost died a couple times because of it. The heal is not a lot per target, but 30 energy for 5 350-400 ticks (fresh 50 gear) on 4 targets and 1 global cooldown is CHEAP.

I don't PVP so no help there. That shouldn't be 'the' reason you can gear up a companion anyway. Regardless, I was doing exactly what you are saying to do, but I couldn't afford to do it until I was using a companion with the same gear as me. I explained exactly why in my previous post. I agree with 25 points being best for leveling and using your last points to fill the remainder of sawbones once you fill the other 2 trees, but don't discount Kolto Cloud. It's not as good as it should be, but it's quite nice especially if you are running a melee group. Move into melee range and 1 button and 30 energy heals a LOT of damage.

That's because there isn't gear that's moddable for them unless you are either lucky or like to roll need over other people in dungeons for your companion's loot. I'm not doing it wrong, I just didn't have the moddable gear to do it with. You can't afford the 10-14 commendations for moddable gear for your companions if you only get 20 or so commendations from a given planet. Commendations barely pay for gear for yourself until you are well into the game, by then you'll nearly have Risha anyways. By the time I got Risha, Corso (who I used exclusively) only had 3 orange pieces of gear, all purchased with commendations, but not as well maintained because of how expensive the orange pieces are to begin with. Once I got Risha I was able to keep both of us up to date on mods and enhancements with decent armoring levels all the way to 50 with commendations. So like I said back when I originally posted, you should aim to use a companion that uses your gear so you can easily get them into moddable gear without having to pay a ton on the GTN for oranges or spend an extra hour per planet doing the pointless bonus series for enough commendations for one orange for your companion.

Risha tanks just as well as Bowdaar in my experience. The issue is that my hand me downs are better than his greens from quests. My hand me downs might have 40 endurance vs his greens with only 30. For any class, a companion that shares your gear will likely be your best companion as far as a leveling efficiency stand point. Vanguard tanks + healer companion that uses their gear is a solid solo anything composition.

Yes, it's very stupid. I think I died like 6 times trying to do it. As a healer, having my companion CC'd completely (the Sith dudes with their force lift every 5 seconds for 5 seconds duration) makes it rough to solo 4-5 mob packs with non-improved dps spells.

Only non 50 flashpoint I didn't do while leveling my character was Red Reaper. Groups were pretty easy to find, and I also did most of the heroics in every zone. Not sure why you were having problems.

Why do people have problems with heal tanking while using Risha for dps? If you spec right, you heal 9% more on yourself so its actually better for you to tank than Risha, or at least even. How much health.did that boss on corellia have? I killed one on Voss with 189k HP with Risha in about 8-10 minutes.

It's a Mini game. Deal with it.

It's 20 energy.

You just upgraded it 3 levels prior, it's adjusted for level. Most of the time you wait 8 levels or so between ranks. It's about 1/3 the price for 1/3 the level coverage.

The problem is unlike you, when you saw the high levels and turned around, these people charged right in, died, resurrected, ran further, died, resurrected, ran further, died, resurrected until they got to where the unguarded chest was so they could camp it for thousands of credits and whatever else was inside every few minutes.

It does become significantly more efficient later on, but you should try to keep pugnacity up. Once you get Emergency Medpac, you'll find you have a lot more freedom and pugnacity isn't quite so critical unless you are in a situation where you have to spam heal. I'm not healing hard stuff yet so I haven't tightened up my play. Also since I'm still leveling I have a crap ton of useless dps spells on my bar and my hotkey setup is far from ideal for healing because of it. Things will get better soon. Hit 47 tonight so not much longer to go.