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.

Yes. Rakata gear in all slots.

If you are comming from WoW, I would say a dps sorc is more like an elemental shaman/shadow priest depending on spec, while the healer tree acts like a disc priest. Now if you want to stay off range dps, why don't you make an assassin? Just because it CAN tank doesn't mean it has to tank. No more than a sorc has to be a healer. Sure some people might want or even expect you to fill a certain role as a certain class but in the end it's you playing and your choise. Now I'm not going to lie, the world is full of dps sorcs/assassins alite, the inquisitor is probably the most played class and finding random groups for flashpoints or even raid spots in guilds will be alot harder for you should you want to play dps. But that is nothing new and it has always been this way in all games.

He is bugged, even if you don't count the massive force lightning damage he will keep fighting when he puts up his shield. My guess is you have never had enough DPS to make that happen. Against that bug, the only thing that worked was just stop DPSing for like 20 seconds for us when he is in his sith phase as described in my previous post. Just because he is killable, doesn't mean he is free of bugs.

They don't drop from hard mode flashpoints. If you dont raid you have to slowly (and I really mean slowly) gather columni commendations off the daily and weekly missions. Other than that the item tokens drop in normal mode operations (and I think they also drop in hard mixed with rakata but can't comment on the nightmare drops), and columni commendations you should get from every hard/nightmare boss in operations aswell.

We used to kill him a couple of days in a row, then we noticed we couldn't anymore. The bugg where he runs arround freely inside his bubble when he is supposed to die is most likely due to ___TOO HIGH DPS___. We heard from some guys that he should not be below 11% before he has cast his second force storm. We tested this today and pretty much just idled and danced once he hit the "rock phase" and let him be at 11 or 12% hp once he started channeling the second force storm. Our operative DPS is however a young and over eager guy so he started DPSing again once he saw the force storm being cast and quickly took him down to 10%. The result was that he got into his bubble and ran arround for a while. Our tank had died seconds before this to the 3rd force lightning when he no longer had any defensive cooldowns to soak the first tick of damage and in resignation i stopped healing. Our operative dps died aswell as I told him that is what he gets for DPSing too early. What happened next was that both the sith warrior tank and operative dps resurected outside the flashpoint and suddenly Revan went into emo mode and cut himself inside his bubble before commiting suicide giving us the loot. Of course the sith warrior boots dropped, with no way for our tank to get back inside the flashpoint since the mission was completed. Let's just hope that the game masters realise the stupidity in this and move the boots token from my inventory to his.

Actually if you are really asking for THE BEST, it would be to max out biochem to craft the rakata stim, adrenal(s) and health pack since they are reusable and beats the normal versions by miles. What's even better is that they don't require biochem to use, so once you crafted them you can remove the proffesion (untill the day they release better versions). After that you can pick up synthweaving e.g. and max it out to craft yourself a pair of Rakata bracers and belts. Keep in mind that the craft can be made with GREAT SUCCESS and recieve an open augment slot that allows you to boost them with 28 extra willpower, which in turn is sick aswell. You probably want to grind lots of hard mode flashpoints and convince your friends that you would gladly take all the crafting material dropping from the end boss once everyone has picked up the 3 or so they need for their own proffesion. After that, you could even remove synthweaving and go for articife to make relics, and lastly end up making your grenades with cybertech. There you have it, THE BEST. If you are a normal guy that have no care in the world for min-maxing but just likes to have someone else telling him what to do, go with biochem since it's a safe bet. You can always aquire the gear from flashpoints/operations, but there are no way to get stims, adrenals and med packs as good as the Rakata ones from biochem without leveling it yourself.

Actually after playing my sorc up to 50 and did some pvp with her, I thought to myself that I should try some other classes. Honestly, I felt like I lacked all forms of control on my other characters even if they had more utility skills like leaps, pulls etc than my sorc. The sorc is really powerful with the range dps, heals, the bubble and pull of friendly units. Maybe it's just me, but I would never play any other class unless I played with a couple of friends with support characters.

Dear player. Learn how to shoot down the range mobs as soon as they spawn. That is all.

I honestly think alot of people are making a big misstake by only healing their companion constantly. When I leveled I shielded my companion, sent him in and throw all dps spells in my arsenal at the mobs. Only time you will need to heal before the group is dead MIGHT be if there is one silver mob together with like 2-3 weak ones. However all the way up to 50 that rarely happened to me at all, even if I had to cast a 2nd shield on the companion mid fight and he ended up at low HP. Gold mobs or multiple silvers is another story though. It all depends on the situation but just keep in mind that you do have wirlwind at your disposal, and that the best defense is a good offense. You want to dish out as much damage as you can before you have to start healing, especially if there are multiple strong mobs. Dropping 1 quick before you have to start healing is often the difference between success and a death. If all you do is heal you will notice that you will fall behind from time to time and your companion will die. This could alot of times have been avoided by being more offensive. Final note; Make sure to learn how to not break your own wirlwind with your companions area of effect abilities. The best way is probably to open with wirlwind on your choosen target while standing at max cast range and run back a few meters so the rest of the group run towards you. After that send in the companion and start throwing spells.

Actually I already sit on 31.5% crit in my current gear self buffed (class buff and rakata resolve stim), even more buffed by the IA that I always run together with. Now I do have crit on a couple of rakata implants with crit on them and even champion pieces I'm using as placeholders untill the Columni pieces finally drop (which when I think of it turns out to be on 1/3 - 1/2 of my gear). Still I have tried to icrease my power and alacrity the best I could. Anyway with the IA buff I should have over 60% chance to crit each tick on innervate which rarely leaves me without a free consumption. Now I might sit at higher willpower than the average sorcerer but with those stats it felt like speeding up the casts would give alot more REAL benefit, even if the theory may say otherwise. Don't get me wrong I'm all for theorycrafting to figure mechanics, scaling and similar, but when it comes to stats for a healer I generally go with my gut more often than not depending on how my experience has been so far. (Which also has made me rework my gear several times in multiple games). I leave the spreadsheet slaving for my dps characters where I blindly follow my calculations.