Actually I would dare saying sorcs are the best healers in PvE since with our force reserve we are able to spam heals alot better than operatives/mercs during critical moments. If you run out of force I only see one or multiple of these scenarios happening: - Your gear is bad (get the epic mods, armorings and enchantments from dailys and stick them in orange gear to solve this) - Your spell priority is bad. Do you utilize static barrier and resergence -> innervate and free consumptions to it's fullest? - Your spec is bad. I don't really see how this can happen since the corruption tree is really straight forward. - Your tank is using horrible/dps gear/spec - You don't understand certain boss mechanics that might make you take more damage than intended. - Your group fail at interrupting boss abilities. The hard mode flashpoints/operations should not dry your force pool unless misstakes are made, or that you or your group are not using your abilities properly. And with all this said I still believe the sorcerer/sage is the strongest healer out there for PvE.

Black Talon as many said is a pretty simple flashpoint, I had no trouble doing it with any of the Inquisitor, Warrior or Bounty Hunter advanced classes at level 10, as long as you don't choose the light side boss. To win versus that encounter you probably want to get to level 12 or 13. The next flashpoint being Hammer Station is probably not something you want to do solo arround it's intended level. 2 manning it should be easy enough though as long as you don't mess up.

From especially a PvE perspective you also have to consider the damage gained by not having to reapply affliction as often.

One UI change I would REALLY love is a cooldown counter. Sad to say that the recent change in cooldown display actually made it harder to see when a skill is available again. Once it's close to completion you will not be able to see if it's actually ready or not without spending alot of time looking at your actionbars. Which ofc is bad since you will los focus on what is going on arround you. So yea, please give us the option to add a simple counter for the cooldowns, should be trivial to solve.

I think the problem is larger than that, as it is now half the team will probably not care about objectives at all but rather zerg all game to score as many medals as they possibly can. At the meantime the people that actually try to complete objectives gets nothing from it. I would say start by adding a reason to actively seek to complete the intended objectives before adding bonuses for fast completion.

To be perfectly honest, stats don't tell much of how a game went. Especially in hutball I tend to get the absolute lowest ammount of heal/damage/kills done in the games we win smooth (even if it takes 11-15min). Unfortunately the war zones promotes useless zerging to farm medals, and actual teamwork and effort to win the match only ends up penalizing the players who do it. So to sum it up, my guess is that you queue solo and end up with/participate in doing useless crap while expecting everyone else to do the important stuff while getting mad when they dont...just like everyone else. This is what make everyone lose every game, because it's everyone elses job to win the game.

An alternative is to run your second "real" companion in aoe stance which is really nice. However let's not spoil too much of the story for the new guy, let him discover those details himself. What I wrote above still holds true no matter which companion you use. But using a tank companion is always nice against multiple strong enemies, while you will do well with a DPS one in other situations. It's more a question about how many companions you can manage to keep geared. Most people tend to end up using only one or max two while leveling.

I personally spent my 7 first points into lightning before going through the corruption tree to get a larger force pool, cheaper spells and improved the bubble. When doing missions make sure to not spend more time healing than needed. More often than not you will perform better while being very aggressive even as a healer. Start by shielding khem and make sure to kill off as much as you can before you need to heal him, and make sure to utilize your shield as often as you can instead of using cast time heals. Remember that you can always heal him after the pack is dead, which is why it doesn't matter if you end the fight with Khem at 5% HP. Other than that do as the poster above said and use wirlwind on packs with strong enemies. What I did was to have Khem on passive while I cast wirlwind and made sure to run back a few steps to have range enemies pull off from the one i CC. After that I sent in Khem that could use his AOE abilities without breaking the CC.

Afaik the only real bosses in D7 are.....the guy that spawns clones.... Bulwark, the bonus boss and Mentor.

Something we noticed about SOA is that he reset whenever he tried to cast or attack someone that was inside a mindtrap. Don't know if he can reset for other reasons aswell, but it was damn annoying. Regarding the pylons on hard/nightmare, having the south side solving each stage before the north touched their panels and only using the right panel has worked for us 3 weeks in a row. On normal mode we just spam clicked however and had it work fine.

It is counted. Try this by shielding yourself and run through a fire at the start of a huttball game. The result should be that you are instantly awarded with the 2.5k heal medal. Same thing with the shield absorb has taken me above the 75/300k heal mark several times.

There are more scenarios than tank healing, and situations where you can not count on your aoe heal to top off your group. No matter how hard a single spell heals, it will not help if you can't throw enough of them to heal everyone that needs it.

I actually think alacrity is really undervalued both in pve and pvp. Sure it might not look that good to a theorycrafter but in reality you want to land your heals as quick as possible. Especially when it comes to activation trinkets, running it when you know that you will enter a phase that requires lots of healing is awesome. I will use my alacrity trinket over power or crit/surge any day. Finally when it comes to force efficiency, I don't know what people do to manage to run out of force, but as long as you make good use of your shield, never miss a free consumption and use innervate over any cast time heal when it's available you shouldn't run into problems. Sure you can run low on force temporarily, but it's very rare that you are not given a chanse to slowly regen.

A shame that will no longer be possible to do in patch 1.1.

Standard Mercenary play tend to be: TRACER MISSILE TRACER MISSILE TRACER MISSILE TRACER MISSILE ........ etc Most fun is that if you interrupt it in war zones, a majority of them will just stand idling untill it's off cooldown again.