http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=tRVXPXetgMo#t=78s I gave up. I told my guild, this is too frustrating, and they aren't even acknowledging it. It's not just that CMs/Mercs were destroyed (though as a healer, from what I hear, the other options aren't great either), it's everything. It's what the game should have been, vs what it is. Spacewow 2004 + voice actors. This isn't even like, WoW 2008. The missing features are so apparent, the lack of smooth gameplay (cast bars resetting for example), the SNES quality space combat, the loading screens (this game isn't pretty enough to be so resource demanding), the broken, pain to parse combat log (thanks to askmrrobot and others though, for making parsers), the 5 second cd on dispel, the lack of visible visual cues to dispel, or reapply hots, no click healing, no mouseover healing, no addons, no macros, no in game parser, no absorbs in combat log (I think?), a gutted class with broken mechanics, unfun and choiceless, without addressing any of the players' concerns (hammer shot on self?) and they're happy with the state of healing. I'm happy with the state of my subscription.

I'm not sure where I fit in, maybe #3. I'm still playing my CM, but I've grown bored of it, and only log in at raid time (I managed to avoid doing dailys for a few more raids by selling an old Rakata lvl mod I think if my guild had a replacement for me, I wouldn't be playing. I asked them to find one the day the 1.2 notes came out, but they thought I was overreacting. Our sage healer said, "there's no way those CM notes make it to live."

Codek, you object to the term "broken" when describing healing classes, but I actually do have doubts about CM viability atm. Now, whether or not they are viable, there are still lots of issues, and I'm not trying to make this into a CM vs other healers thing, but I really do wonder if they're viable. For my experience, I can say that I'm usually able to keep my side alive on HM Toth and Zorn (we still haven't beaten them, but they keep hitting hard enrage, so not usually my fault). On the other hand, has anyone cleared HM EC 8 man with 2 commandos? I remember on the PTS, there was testing done by people who had NMM EV and KP on farm, and they could not heal Jorg and Sorno with 2 commandos anymore on NMM. If anyone is able to do this (clear EC HM and EV/KP NMM), then obviously it can be done, and CMs could fit the criteria of "viable", depending on your definition. I expect that someone, somewhere, is able to do it, but has anyone reported such a thing? Has it been done? It would be very difficult or impossible to prove that CMs aren't viable, but the test to show that they are is fairly simple: heal all hard content using only CMs (no hybrid help!). If this has been done, please point it out, and I'm sure most of us will agree that the class is not unplayably weak. Regardless of the class' strength of healing, there are still many issues. If we only had one ability, a zero cd bacta infusion with a .5 second gcd, we'd be pretty strong, but still have plenty of issues.

Very much what Roqu said. I didn't like that CMs were being nerfed, because the only thing I'd heard prior to the 1.2 notes was that our aoe was going to be buffed, and because I had the perception that we were one of the weaker healers (pve). When I saw the notes though, I was frustrated, not so much because of the number changes, which I could live with, but because they actually made our aoe healing weaker (detailed by Roqu et al elsewhere), as well as making it so that we didn't have enough ammo to cast our spells when we wanted to, based on the situation. Like many commandos, I thought and said, "fine, lower the output if need be, but let me use abilities. Also, actually buff our aoe healing like you said you would." Gameplay as a CM in pve was pretty simple before 1.2. Now it's much worse. It's all focused on waiting (hammer shot) and efficiency of healing, and not on healing the guy that needs it, with the right spell. I'm thinking of my shaman in Cataclysm. Shaman is a pretty simple healer, but compared to CM, it's very much more engaging. Drop totems in a good spot, interrupt this guy, ghost wolf over to there, cast lightning bolt for mana (I don't think I had instant ghost wolf and TC at the same time, but I have played both specs), rocket boot over there (engineer), drop mana tide at the right time for all the healers, work with other healers on who's dropping their dmg reduction cd when, keep three riptides rolling, keep Earth Shield up (Earth Shield, unlike TP, actually matters, and not just for the healing it does), complain at anyone who strays out of my healing rain, figure out who to cast chain heal on for the most bounces, drop tremor totem (very limited use in cata, but on some tough trash..), drop earthbind on the runner, grounding for a certain cast, Greater healing wave the tank and spot heals, Healing Surge in some emergencies, Nature's Swiftness GHW to save a life, and all with much more interesting boss mechanics to deal with. Compare to CM now: hammer shot a lot, dispel if you can see it, cast amp/mp when high ammo and you have to, TP refresh if full ammo, damage reduction cd when you can/need it, scc to gain ammo (not so much to increase healing anymore), KB sometimes, BI on cd (if someone's hurt), use that ammo-free spell whenever appropriate, and same with recharge cells, instant spell to save a life (I forget the names of my abilities, let's call this "Commando's Swiftness"). I'm probably forgetting some stuff from either class, but overall, I find my CM extremely boring and frustrating. I can heal only so much without entering medium regen, and that's it. It's not tough to know what to cast, or where to stand, it's just a matter of either being able to heal enough before medium regen or not. I may not be a great player, but it doesn't matter if I am in this class. I don't think the difference between mediocre CM and great CM is obvious, because there is so little room for decision making. Maybe timing, click speed, and damage forecasting are the important things now, but that last one isn't so hard in a scripted fight. As for click speed.. at least give us mouseover healing, and click casting on action bars (like clique from WoW).

A guildie used the log I sent him and it merged. I'll try again on sunday (our next raid day). Thanks for the info.

One issue I've been having is merging my log with my guildies'. They play pacific, and I play EST, and I enter EST as the site says to, but because my log goes past midnight, it seems to cause an error. I get a negative value for the duration (negative 21 hours or something), and I can't seem to merge with them (I've merged before, not sure why it wouldn't work the past two times).

It might help to reinforce what you learned in making the first version. Sometimes finding a coding project to work on, even if it's useless, can be fun when learning.

Just watched it, nice guide. The strategy was a bit different from our own, but since we wiped all night on it, it might be worth switching to yours One thing I was looking for in the guide though was a boss hp total, enrage time, and then calculated dps. After our fights tonight, where we kept hitting the enrage, I did a quick caclulation, and it seemed like it was 5555 combined dps needed to beat the enrage, but that's based on 750k hp each boss, and 4.5 minute enrage timer (from mmo-mechanics). I don't know if either of those numbers are correct, but I know we aren't close, based on our meters, from hitting that amount of dps. This was 8 man btw. Did you guys merge your logs in some parser? If so, about how much dps did you do (combined)?

It looked right to me. Nothing seemed in error, and the fights didn't seem weird. I was a little worried because they're all pst, and I'm est (and I selected est without thinking), but it seemed to work out. Aye, the browser history had the combat log, ty. Registering didn't fail (I didn't try yet), it was clicking on the privacy policy and terms of use that went to an error page. I'm using firefox 11.0, and had adblock and noscript disabled.

Used this yesterday, was pretty neat. When I uploaded, the merge showed me three other guildies' reports from the op, including the other healer. I had some difficulty at first, with a silverlight error. Tried updating, but no luck. I was logged into the game still, so maybe the combat log file was still in use, or maybe something else. Anyways, later on, it worked fine. I tried to look up our log from last night, but couldn't find it with either my character name, or our guild name, so I figured maybe registering would be a good idea, however, when I clicked on the privacy policy, and the terms of use, it said "mr robot could not find the page you're looking for".

Mouseover Healing (with frame blacklists): I really, very much prefer this type of healing to clicking on targets. Sometimes I want to aim at the boss, or at the tank, or my cc guy. Also clicking is slower, and it seems like I even have a delay after I( click and before my target appears, which makes it slower yet. Stopcasting Macros: as a CM I can't interrupt, which is what I would stopcast macro in WoW, but there are other uses, like maybe dispel More Grid-Like Ops Frame: classes color coordinated, health missing from top to bottom, incoming heals clearly shown, debuffs which you can dispel very easy to see.

I googled it and watched a video, it starts on the fleet, in the inner circle (just outside the cantina is a holo-net thing).

Heya, does anyone know how to find the new Corellia dailys? Thanks

When I first read the nerfs, and thought about how drastic the changes would be, I decided to go on the PTS to see if they were really as bad as they looked. Then after some more reading, I realized that I couldn't go onto the pts with my medic, or a premade medic. So, I wrote an email to my guild, explaining the situation, and how I didn't think I would be viable in 1.2 as a healer. I said that I'm willing to try it out, but that it would be better if we had another healer, and I could go dps. Unfortunately, none of the other 50's seem interested in healing (we have another commando, and another sage, but the commando would be in the same boat I'm in, and the sage hates healing). I started leveling a sage, because, even with the nerfs, I expect them to be much better than commando (scoundrel may be good, but effective aoe is always a nice thing to have). However, I just can't get into leveling my sage. I enjoyed the planet quests the first time, but now I stop playing after 5 minutes. I tried to go healer and dungeon level, but it's so hard to get a group together. On the plus side, recently our guild leader leveled a sage to 50. However, I think he's probably our best dps (most of us come from WoW, and he was always a really good dps, and that's all I have to go by, lol), so having him switch will put a lot of pressure on me to step it up as a commando dps. Mostly though, this wasn't what I wanted. I wanted to play a commando medic. I thought we were getting an AoE healing buff, not a nerf to everything, including our AoE healing (I think, in this forum, I don't have to explain that). I always thought Blizzard did class balance with a sledgehammer, but their imprecision has nothing on Bioware's.

Well, there are both swords and sorcery in this game. I mean, there's a class called sorcerer. Star Wars has always been a sci-fi/fantasy mix imo. Anyways, in answer to the OP: I forget most mmos other than WoW, so I'll answer about things that are better than WoW: Area Loot (wow is implementing this, bioware should learn to copy good things too) Quick Travel Hubs (get those people out of Stormwind!) Companions (not much like it in WoW, though there are pet classes) And as AndasKastor said, the class storyline (WoW got rid of the few class quests they had)

It is a little ridiculous. I find is even more ridiculous that some posters are defending it with such unrelated points as: WoW had 7 years to develop their end game content (what does that have to do with premades or character copies?) This isn't WoW! (except it's very similar, aside from its lack of polish and quality of life aspects) Bioware can't include all features available in games after they began development! (except character copies and premades existed long before Bio started making SW:TOR) Look, you don't have to say nonsense to defend this game. You can point out the positive aspects, and explain how you think they outweigh the negatives. When you defenders of the lack of features say such silly things, it just weakens your position. From memory, WoW at launch had: a macro system, a functional AH, an addon community, a combat log. Over the years, they've included premades or character copies to the PTR, dual spec, an equipment manager, a looking for group tool (I prefer same realm, but you can't deny that the wow LFG tool gets you into a dungeon faster than no tool at all), the ability to pass off BoP items to group members within a time frame, and I'm sure several other features. Now, I understand that if WoW came up with all of that yesterday, it would be unfair to say, "bioware, why don't you have all this stuff that blizzard just made?!" but lots of this was in at the start, and most of it is several years old. And it's good stuff. If it makes things too easy, you can put stricter limits on, but missing these features makes the game feel incomplete compared to WoW.

It's amazing that anyone thinks HS on self would be op. Especially compared to sage shield or hot (I have no idea what scoundrels can do). But I don't really pvp, and I don't think pve should play poorly because of pvp. As a pve healer, it is extremely frustrating to be able to heal 7/8 players with HS, because I don't look at names much when I'm healing, I look at missing health, and this leads to trying to HS myself a lot, and having it not work.

Hmm, if you think the OP is stupid for asking why they're adding this, because you think they're obviously going to add more functionality to it, then please explain the following: The legacy xp system being in place made sense, as it enabled you to increase your legacy level while waiting for the actual legacy system. Supposing there will be more functionality for the family tree (which the yellow quote seems to indicate there will not be), what would be the purpose of having the system in right now? Other than having people make their eventually important decisions blindly?

I'm not sure why anyone is arguing with the OP. Either they don't understand him, or they think he's wrong. Let me try to explain what I think he means: The family tree system is a graphical display interface where your characters are shown, and you can decide how they relate to one another. The choices you make in this interface will not be visible to any other players, and will have zero in game effect. This feature could be replicated with more functionality by a pencil and paper (that is, everything you can do in the family tree, you can do with a pencil and paper, but you can actually do more with the pencil and paper, such as choose options which aren't in the interface, come up with intricate back stories for the characters, and so on). Also, the family tree could easily be on the web site, since it has no effect in game. So the point is, why did they do this? It adds nothing to the game, not even for role players. It costs resources, and does nothing. Don't compare it to gear, or light saber crystals, because those have a constant visible graphic in game, and other players can see them. This system, unless you keep it open, is never viewed by other players, and only viewed by you for 5 minutes until you get bored of it (because how often do you think you'll really play around with linking members of your family tree?). I don't care that they're putting it in, and I'll probably look at it for those 5 minutes, but I just don't see why they're doing it. If NPCs reacted negatively to a jedi who was the son of an evil sith, or positively to a smuggler who was allied with a sage healer, or other players could even see it, or you could have some greater interaction with your relatives, or a thousand other things, then I wouldn't be asking this, but since it's worse than just a pencil and paper, what is the point? This isn't a complaint. Maybe some people will find this fun, and good for them. Maybe it will even get them to think of writing fan fiction based around their characters or something. It's just that this doesn't make sense to me as a feature. Imagine, if you would, that instead of character portraits, and lines with words, there were circles with different shapes (a star, a square, a trapezoid, and so on), and you could connect them with different colored lines, not as a puzzle game, just as an arbitrary choice. Now, consider that you mentally assign the shapes to your characters, and the line colors to types of relationships. Is that any different than this feature? How about if they added a new currency, you get 5 each time you click on a button, but no one will ever know how many you have, and you can't spend them on anything. Is that something that's fun for anyone? Maybe this will be fun for someone, I don't know, but I think the OP has a fair point that having more in-game effects (even just the ability for other players to see your family tree) would make this feature more interesting than not at all.

I'm a CM healer, and I'll say that either I'm not understanding those graphs, or it doesn't look that bad. Looking at effective healing, it doesn't seem that the classes are so far from each other. However, I think I've read posts by RoQu or others about this particular log not being demonstrative of healing ability, because, supposedly, their healing was a lot more than the incoming damage (the overhealing on the first graph is huge, the effective healing on the second one is pretty close, while the overhealing is a lot lower). The idea was that a log which would show the real class disparity would be a NMM Jorg (and other guy), or some similar fight where healing is barely keeping up with damage. If I had a preference for what testers would do, it would be, assuming they had NMM on farm on live, to try and clear NMM EV and KP with teams of 2 sages, 2 smuggles, and 2 CM healers. This would take three weeks if you simply changed out the healers though. Anyways, I'm wondering, anyone reading this: has any 8 man team with 2 commando medics cleared any of the current NMM content on the pts? Which is to ask, has anyone on the pts demonstrated that commando/merc healers are actually viable still?

I'm not sure why tangent discussions in text material is so distracting for you, but I would point out that you're the one who brought up this off topic tangent, and I was merely responding to it. I don't know who you're referring to with "you people", unless you mean people who post on topics tangential to the thread's main topic, in which case saying "you people always do this" seems fairly redundant (and self-recriminating, since you were posting tangentially). As for the nonsense you posted in reply to my reply to your tangent, I will try to figure out how to use the pm system, since you're worried that an off topic post will derail this thread.

Mods, dual spec, lfg are all very good things, but I would hate for the lfg to be cross server. I played in WoW before and after, and was among those who said, while it was being implemented, "make it same server!" It really ruined the social aspect of the game. One of the best places to meet new players and chat, work together, add to friends list, and hopefully play with again was in dungeon groups. Yes, cross server lfg makes it a lot faster, but there's something about knowing you'll never play with those people again that makes cross-server dungeons uninteresting.

My problem with the nerfs and the explanation is that we weren't expecting it, and we have no idea if it's even true that commando medics were doing well. From everything I heard, we were getting an aoe buff. Did we? Well, if you consider how a commando medic heals during aoe damage, I think it's reasonable to say we actually got a severe aoe nerf. The change from 3->4 in KB seems insignificant to: halving the shield, lower bonus healing to KB targets, halving the healing bonus of SCC, lowering the ammo regain, and significantly lowering how much healing we can do during SCC. Since most of our healing during aoe damage was via SCC single target heals, and since KB still sucks and is still not smart, so we'll still be using single target SCC heals during aoe, and since SCC and ammo were nerfed to hell, I would argue that the notes make it look like we're taking an aoe healing nerf. I'm not one of the few on the PTS, but maybe someone could explain to me where this argument is wrong, and how we actually were buffed for healing during aoe damage. As for the rest, BW should run current NMM ops with 2 commando medics healing. If they can do it, ok, we're at least viable. If not, they should realize that they really messed up.

It's not so bad imo. I would guess less than 10k per wipe in good gear. I don't really pay attention to the cost though. 10k is one Ilum daily quest.

As a healer, I find dailys very painful (even with companion), so I wait until our operations are over for the week, and respec to dps, do that for a couple of days (if I feel like it), and respec back on operations night. This lowers the frequency of my doing daily quests, and also makes them more expensive (respec costs, though they reset every week). Most of my credits have gone to alts, and a lot of them have gone to the two-hour blue stims for operations. I'm sure plenty enough go to repairs. Why do alts cost so much? I like having large bags, and those are costly. I also like to give them enough to do all of their trade skills and buy mounts. I buy gear for them too. Also, if you're not a stealth class, doing the heroic 4 daily quests on Belsavis is a pain. I've only gotten a 4 person group for it once. Maybe it's better on high pop servers, but on mine, very tough. So, I usually miss out on the credits from those quests.