I just refuse to play with random people. Keeps things very simple, and I never run into problems like this. Get into a half-decent guild and only play with people who have a brain, preferably both hemispheres(or at least the left one). If somebody cant get through solo quests without having top of the line gear for their companion you probably dont want them in your guild anyway. Besides, companions dont contribute anything to flashpoints and operations themselves. We have clear rules, with need for mainspec, greed for offspec/companion, pass if you cant do anything with it. Even if they implemented a LFG system someday I know I will never use it, because I dont even need the gear at this point, and I simply cant handle stupidity. It's worse than gaseous hydrogen cyanide.

The only problem with HM flashpoints and normal mode operations is that they drop a varying quantity of Columi gear, making Tionese gear and difficulty levels in general obsolete. Should get only Tionese gear from normal ops and HM flashpoints, Columi from hard-mode operations and Rakata from nightmare operations. That would also make the endgame a little more challenging if imported into future tiers of raids just by not inflating peoples stats prematurely. Right now it's a total cakewalk except for a couple of fights in 16-man nightmares. Yet I don't have a problem with the existence of a "normal mode" per-se, just the mind-boggling amount of loot it gives for minimal effort, and making it too easy to overgear hard-mode encounters before you actually progress to them.

Yes you can stop by but don't hold your breath. Furthermore, it's everyones role who can possibly accomplish it if the situation demands for it. If you have a healer that has an interrupt, has to interrupt, but he or she doesnt interrupt, the problem is not with the game. Or do you honestly think that having somebody sit there picking their nose, being like "omg it's not my job" is a very good approach to tackling content which you apparently find challenging? I suppose you can always beat your head into a mountain, but you know what Einstein said about insanity and all that.

Here's also the exact talent build I use right now(copy&paste if the periods break it). http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#800rfR0RbcdkqZbcoMZb.1 The kolto residue and heavy trooper talents can be swapped out for whatever floats your boat except any haste talents that would make you cross 7%. I took the kolto residue for buffing the raid and/or the tank for our sage's AOE healing on fights like 16 man NMM annihilator droid or Soa. Can be useful if you have spare ammo and the tank doesnt require a proper heal on that GCD. I chose the heavy trooper talent over havoc rounds because the kolto bomb does rather poor healing in the first place and has a 6 second cooldown. The extra health with more healing received helps with controlling thunderballs on NMM Soa, ground pounces on NMM Bonetrasher, the fire DoT on NMM Jarg&Sorno and minimizes the amount of GCDs that must be spent by myself or other healers for topping me off. If you can use first responder without crossing 7% haste and you would prefer better AOE healing, by all means switch weapon calibrations for havoc rounds and the cell capacitor talent for first responder.

I wouldn't recommend using them as a guideline because I stack crit to the point where it's significantly weaker than power for hp/s, for the purpose of spike healing on the main tank for 16 man nightmare ops, but here they are. Aim: 1711 Power: 70 Tech Power: 1217 Critical rating: 499 Surge rating: 396 Alacrity rating: 51 If you use those as a guideline, it's at your own peril and I would recommend taking weapon calibrations to get just past the new 5.5% haste milestone defined here: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=2891891#post2891891 For your everyday healing needs or depending on your healing style you may want to follow the spreadsheet to the note instead of going on any crit adventures like I did. Even after the surge nerf I cant think of a better stat distribution for my needs considering the absence of power+crit enhancements. I tend to view crit much like avoidance, perhaps not very efficient or stable, but it's a X chance of temporarily guaranteed survival for a tank, with high enough surge. EDIT: Just culled some of my ramblings

Hammershot is 100% of tech bonus healing value. You can use a blaster rifle if you want, the weapon damage ranges have no impact on healing output.

Impressive riposte, funny also because it's an accurate assessment of the thread.

I like it, and I made my own program in C++ to figure out where the diminishing returns for different stats hit the hardest, but right now it's for my personal use only. I'm quite confident in the minimal haste approach right now, that is also supported by your spreadsheet, generally I'm being assigned to main-tank healing anyway with the other 3 on dispels, off-tank or the raid, or whatever. Be nice to see if the next tier of raid changes things, but right now this is the style for our 10/10 nightmare-mode group and personal experiences are at least correlated to the spreadsheet results.

I've cleared 10/10 nightmare mode operations as a commando healer and I couldnt possibly care less about any stun or interrupt. Hi.

Excuse me Sir, but the OP has a colossal thread at the top of this forum section called "Combat Medic Guide" with the full spreadsheet and explanation. You would find your answers there.

I actually enjoy more bland raids and would prefer ones that put the characters more in the role of front-line troopers or special forces than some corny god-slaying scheme. Going through some riveting story that hypes up creature X to be some super-duper-god of doom that will destroy the universe and then killing him, taking the loot and going to bed gets old after a while. Still I am a hardcore raider and I prefer very challenging content, but the sappy or corny crap isnt my thing.

The only flaw with that logic is that every point spent in alacrity is one point less in other stats, so if you dont even calculate the value of other stats, obviously alacrity will reign superior, there being no competition... And in a static rotation alacrity starts to lose out anyway because you will complete the large casts faster, yet healing for less than if you stacked other stats instead, and being forced to fill in with hammershot sooner to avoid running out of ammo. Then you also have to take in account things like critical hit sizes scaling with both aim/power and surge, but not alacrity. It's just not that simple.

I skipped like thirty pages of this thread. Between raids I'm usually soloing my dailies, even the heroic 2+ ones. I cant be bothered looking for people to do them with simply because I dont need their help and I dont want to risk their stupid butt pulling an extra group of monsters and getting me killed as well. I absolutely hate playing with random people. But it doesn't mean I am asocial or that I would prefer single-player games.

Trauma probe is very useful. Especially for some bosses in nightmare mode operations where the tank is being hit extremely hard, such as the person tanking Jarg, or the Fabricator Droid. It makes a big difference in controlling the flow of incoming damage. There isn't much more that needs to be said. It's that simple.

On nightmare mode, we just cycled between the right and left devices(fire and ice). 2 tanks, 1 on the boss, 1 soaking proximity mines and helping with stun drones. Switch roles at 10 stacks of the armor debuff. 2 healers, one healing the puzzle team, one healing the ground team. Rest DPS. Did the same thing on normal mode ages ago, the difference is that in normal mode it doesnt matter which devices you use because they are all fire. It gets easier having at least one Jedi Shadow tank and one Commando healer in the group, because the shadow tank can pop a cooldown to negate a large part of the DoT damage from soaking the mines/drones and a Commando healer can quite easily keep the boss tank alive even if the tank has 10 stacks for whatever reason. Just remember to switch tanks at ten stacks.

The fact that it reduces the ammo cost makes it an useful 1-point talent for Nightmare-mode Jarg&Sorno because you will want to cleanse the fire DoT off people, and since you will probably be assigned to heal the tank on Jarg, there isn't much ammo to spare. It can also be useful for hard/nightmare Karagga if you want to control the vortex thing that sucks everyone into the same spot.

I have a couple of questions. Is it possible to get the First Responder proc uptimes modeled properly to get a more accurate understanding of the value of crit? Does the spreadsheet use any kind of formulas for grasping things like diminishing returns on surge? Is there any way to simulate a short burst-healing rotation(like healing a person from 5% to full ASAP) to get another perspective on the applications of crit and surge? Would it be possible for the spreadsheet to figure out the average healing per ammo spent?

Trooper healing is quite fine as it is, the only thing really wrong with it is the rancid hammer shot effect. SCC is the holy grail of spamhealing, and the potent medicine talent makes spike heals quite decent(depending on crit and existing surge). The class is very efficient, if you manage your ammo right you can heal a marathon and not allow anybody to die even in hard-mode operations. Trauma Probe and Bacta Infusion are probably my favourite abilities right now.

I've healed all current content on hard-mode(including 8-man operations) as a Trooper and I like the class a lot. Havent had any sort of problems, and we are moving to nightmare modes in short order. Supercharged Cell is just something ineffable.

You misunderstand. If an item has an Expert or Endowment prefix, it just means the item itself provides different stats. The prefixes come from crafting only. You just have to pick the one that benefits you the most, usually Expert, if available, because it gives you more Power.

Now with 50% less fatigue I must say that I kind of like the enrages as they are in HM operations, often spend a very long time fighting after the enrage hits, even on botched Bonetrasher or Soa attempts

I am slightly delirious and inappropriately tired from doing a preposterous number of progression kills throughout hard-mode Karagga's Palace over a time span of approximately four hours. So I as if found this thread before going to bed and I immediatily had a mental image of an enrage mechanic in which your screen gains a distinct blue tint, with "HAX" written in pink flying all over it, with a bloated rancor head such as Bonetrasher's screaming in the background, transforming into that of a morbidly obese, constipated man from some tent in Nebraska and yelling "PORNOOOO" with a deep bass voice. Then the boss just whips out giant letters, beats you to death with them and does a drumroll with his bare hands before ordering a new pepperoni pizza and going to work. Very imaginenatifative. Yeah.

The poster above is right. There are no real requirements except a functioning brain. Wont even need two of those. Until you get into nightmare modes anyway.

We did hard-mode Soa by having the tank face the boss east, the rest of the raid behind the boss, and whenever the thunderballs would spawn, the people they were targeting ran out of the raid, soaked them by running directly into them and got healed back up. The thunderballs always spawn from the power sources in front of the boss.

Aim >> Power >> Crit(until ~200 rating) >> Surge(until ~270 rating) >> Crit >> Alacrity(until ~138 rating) >> Surge >> Alacrity For Columi gear onwards. Not entirely sure on fresh level 50 since your stats can vary wildly. The problem with alacrity is that there is too much of it, and it doesn't do enough, so you dont need a lot of it to reach the "optimal" number of alacrity after which it becomes complete rubbish and isn't very helpful even for clutch healing in the current content. Alacrity is the only stat that only benefits 2 of our spells and doesn't do a very good job at it either. It's also why the other stats are so much stronger after 138 alacrity for single-target healing. I use the listed stat priority order for healing hard-mode flashpoints and operations and moving onto nightmares shortly, and healing has never been an issue. The only relatively intense fights are HM-Soa and the Fabricator droid(in Karagga's Palace). Hardmode Soa because it can get messy when people are forced to soak their thunderballs so they dont kill everyone else as well, while you also have to heal the tank, and occasionally your co-healer will be in the air or mind trapped so you have to solo it. Same thing with the Fabricator, depending on who do you assign for the puzzle control panels, you might be forced to solo heal the tank and the entire raid from time to time. Casting speeds on AMP/MP dont really matter jacksquat there because you get to 1.73s anyway with 9% from talents and 138 rating on gear, if you cant push out enough raw numbers, then you cant and that's the end of the line for you. Then there's raid buffs and stims that further skew the balance in favor of Aim/power, since you get larger crits and more of them by virtue of having higher base values that are being multiplied. Trauma Probe is also possibly the most important ability for controlling damage income on tough fights and it doesnt scale with alacrity. It makes a big difference since you wont have to chain-cast things on the tank to keep him/her alive. I've also never had any problems healing fights like Ironfist on HM Esseles, or Vokk. Other bosses it doesnt even matter how fast you can heal, since there is barely anything to heal anyway, and alacrity isn't good for HP/s after 138 rating. For fights like Ironfist you can and should cycle in a kolto bomb while your Supercharged Cell is up and you know there is AOE damage coming in just to buy you more reaction time and prevent people from being gibbed with the +10% damage reduction buff. If you can time it well you can outheal even the headshots from time to time if the interrupters drop the ball. As for hammer shot, you're supposed to be using it a lot in your rotation as a filler to prevent ammo depletion, and when casting a large heal would be wasted. Building up 30 stacks of CSC is very important so you have to know when to use it and how much to use it. But yes, you're kind of supposed to be constantly healing with *something*. If you dont have to, and you have time to DPS the boss for example, then the content is so easy for you that it just doesnt matter anyway.