I have to say that sorcerer armors are the nicest looking armors in the game, by a big margin

As great a healer as you are, force is not an unlimited resource and as far as i know, you can´t cast heals on different characters at the same time. A lot of the heroic +4 quests in the game need proper CC and proper aggro, especially when in a open world environment where pulling aggro from a different mob group is always a very present possibility. Although, there's a strong argument that the mob group composition promotes a more relaxed healing approach due to there being a lot of easy trash on the way to bosses. A good healer, as you say, can and should adapt. But if we keep healing irresponsible damage dealers they will never learn.

I have a question for the Healing minded Sorcerers among us... What are your healing priorities? Healers playing through group content, especially when inserted into a less than ideal group setup, soon learn the one universal truth about healing... "sacrifices need to be made for your force pool is not infinite" We can further define the concept with a simple mantra that every healer should memorize and repeat as needed: If the Tank dies, it's the Healer's fault. If the Healer dies, it's the Tank's fault. If the DPS dies, it's their own damned fault. So.. who's the Healer actually supposed to Heal? If The Tank Dies, It's The Healer's Fault, the Tank is always the healers priority in any kind of group content, and when i say "Tank" im not referring to the Imperial agent that keeps pulling all the aggro. Let your Tank die and in most situations the group is doomed to wipe. If The Healer Dies, It's The Tank's Fault, Remember meat-bags (tanks) your only job in the world is to keep your healer alive, not only alive but not wasting his force pool healing himself. If The DPS Dies It's Their Own Damned Fault, we all know that damage dealers are just as important as any other class, no one likes to spend an hour clearing trash mobs because you don't have enough DPS. But we all have to remember that a good damage dealer is a someone who "kicks "#$ without getting their "#$ kicked in return". If a damage dealer has their stuff together, he doesnt need heals because he probably not pulling aggro from the Tank. "But this game doesn't have a threat meter!" the masses cried. It´s back to old school and pay attention when your DPS starts taking damage. Try to understand how that's happening and educate them politely (by letting them die). In the end, the more you heal the more you accumulate aggro towards the mob, if your throwing heals left and right, you will end up dead. So try to heal on a single target during each pull. Most important of all rules a healer should follow... Heal yourself before you heal anyone else. A dead healer is a useless healer. So the question i ask fellow sorcerers... What are your healing strategies while grouped?

It would be nice if the OP updated the thread with the server/language list. Would spare a lot of people a lot of aggravation

Make no mistake, this game is still "trinity" based. Flashpoints involve a dedicated Tank´s and Healer´s, as well as DPS, what classes fill those roles is largely irrelevant as long as they are prepared for it (skill and gear wise). It´s a fact that most people will expect a sorcerer to be a healer, even tho it makes for a good damage dealer. Sorcerer will have to deal with it, as Shadow priests and Balance Druids did years ago (sorry for the WoW reference, but hey... its seems like its the simplest way to get a point across these days).

Asking a DPS class to use their "weaker" geared Healer role, in the case of a Sorcerer for example, might get your group started faster but you will be missing out on an excellent damage dealer as a trade off... and these days, longer clear times for flashpoints are a big issue with a lot of the community used to 15m Heroics in WoW. You cant generalize a class role as broadly as you just did, well... you can, and did, but it doesn't mean its true. DPS rotations and mana efficiency are different, synergies and rhythm are different. A good damage dealer doesn't make a good healer.

There isn't a combat log currently available to the player, and i don't think Bioware intends to implement a way to parse your combat data in the foreseeable future. They mentioned UI improvement and customization, but i don't know if combat number crunching could be included in the definition. Concerning force conservation, from what i played of the Sorcerer, it´s a non issue in regular combat if the group gives you time to regroup before pulls. I never found myself out of mana healing or dpsing with a smart group...

I think SW: TOR is bringing back a great "blast from the past" in the form of crowd control. MMO´s recently have tended to ignore that component of game-play except in a raid environment. While testing the game as a sorcerer tho i found myself using CC wherever and whenever i could just to be able to deal with regular pulls, especially in Heroics (flashpoints start getting tougher about half way through the game). this just to say that nice communicative group play, strategies and especially"challenges" are essential for me to have fun while playing an MMO... UI mods on the other hand are not essential to that and are in some cases detrimental.

Great insights

I think the versatility of gameplay and player-base are, as you mention, the biggest "pluses" of allowing dual specs. I´m more interested in the "cost" to the community, if any? Will it push it towards a less skilled more greedy player-base? or will it allow for a democratization of the Healer/Tank roles? I think COH/COV had a style of gameplay and customization that allowed for a perfect implementation of multiple character builds. I´m sure the game had it´s fair share of "min-maxing" but maybe it was not as pronounced as in mmo´s like SW:TOR or WoW? The biggest fear i have seen in the discussions concerning a dual spec system is, arguably, the loss of class identity and function. Sorcerer´s currently can either be Healers or DPS but not both... add dual spec to the mix and you have an unconventional "hybrid" class, where you can fill each role situationaly (but not at the same time or during the same fight). I played a Druid for a long time when WoW launched in Europe, it´s still one of my favorite mmo classes. The jack of all trades but master of none was a good sign to year around my neck and it felt unique enough to make me want to optimize the class mechanics to their fullest. When dual spec was introduced into the mix, i felt like the class lost it´s "uniqueness", i could now spec for each role to maximum effect with no compromises. No longer were druids unique, they were simply there to be asked or told to be Tank´s or Healer´s. Anyways, and back on the topic, i think dual spec should be taken into account as a viable gameplay mechanic when the game is more "mature" and everyone has had the chance to play around with their respective classes to their fullest extent. PS Edit: Thanks, i have a lot of time on my hands at work, as a graphic designer for a small company, i can pretty much schedule my work as i see fit. So that leaves me a lot of time to check the forums and try to argue myself into a corner (don´t tell my wife tho, she would probably force me to proof read for her all day, damned writers) If your a good player, playing as a DPS sorcerer shouldn't stop you from finding groups. From my experience, the only difficulty is the initial contact with a PUG, if your truly an awesome dps sorcerer, word will get around and people will actually whisper you to join them in a flashpoint run... this from someone who saw his brother become one of the most kick *** shadow priests on his server.

I found myself to abuse on the lighting during flashpoints, for the simple reason that the fights were over too soon to use DOT´s effectively. Even on drawn out boss fights, the lack of a dot timer or a proc announcement system leads to a lot of wasted dps.

Heal/cast on "Target of Target" is a much needed feature in my view.

Dual Talent Specialization (or dual spec) specialization is the ability to switch between two skill specs. Now that the definition is out of the way, lets get to discussing how dual spec would impact the Sorcerer class if and when Bioware decides to implement the feature in SW: TOR. What would dual spec imply function wise for the player? With some or no restrictions beyond the obvious... "Not allowed in Combat", as well as a level based or credit based cost.The ability to change between 2 skill specializations would optimally imply the automatic use of a set of action bars for each spec as well as an equipment profile for each specialization if the player so desires. Why would it benefit the player in general and the Sorcerer in particular? Dual talent specialization can be beneficial to players who want to cover multiple roles or participate in different types of content. The Sorcerer being one of the designated "Healer" classes, is frequently assigned the healer role in groups content. Dual spec allows the Sorcerer to set his second talent specialization to take on the damage dealer role and be able to efficiently kill enemies while questing alone, while the PVP minded Sorcerer could tailor one spec for player vs. enemies (PVE) content and the other for player vs. player (PVP) battles. What would the negative impact be of implementing such a system? As easily as the system could lead to player benefits it would lead to community problems, such as: 1. Under-geared and unskilled players who are not particular apt to fill any role be it on PVE or PVP content. 2. Encouragement of "need looting" behavior to fill gear slots of both of the players specializations, even if the player is not currently using the spec he is rolling gear for. 3. Devaluation of certain "Hybrid" or "Less specialized" talent trees. Sorcerers in particular would mainly go between lighting and corruption, leaving madness as little more than a support tree. It would be interesting to get a discussion going here on the Sorcerer forum on how this feature would affect how you played your class and the implications to the game in general.

It all depends on your approach towards flashpoints. 1. Do you plan on pugging or do you have a regular group of friends to play with? 2. Do playing as a dedicated healer even while specced lightning (will only take you so far)? or go DPS? 3. Do you intend to play flashpoints more than once to farm gear? or just blow through them on your way to level 50? Personally i think the game has an overabundance of healer classes, so the chance of getting picked up as a DPS Sorcerer are not that bad, but people do have expectations of certain classes and its always a source of contention. Now if we had dual spec, that would make all of this a non-issue.

This is the build im planning to use: Sorcerer 32 / 7 / 2 At level 50 i was left with one useless skill point that i invested on one rank of empty body. Any recommendations towards improving this build?

Be that as it may, from my experience in mmo´s, and risking generalizing an entire country, Russian players are far more willing to use cyrillic in general chat than a portuguese speaking portuguese in chat. Maybe i should have phrased my initial comment better, but i dont think its a bad idea to allow Russians to speak their own language only in guild, /say or /private chats, the same would apply to any other languages that are not listed as official server languages.... How to implement it? dunno.

Give Russian´s their own servers, but dont allow cyrillic characters on the current European servers. It´s a mistake, community wise, to keep launching these mmo´s in Russia without proper support, the players frequently flock to an unofficial "russian" server much to the aggravation of the rest of the server population. It also doesn't help that Russian players seem to keep to themselves and shun / piss off everyone else that´s not from the motherland.

You address the biggest problem in mmo´s group play, lack of communication. People just dont plan, CC´s, Aggro, etc, are all left to be dealt with on the "fly" as the fight rage´s on.

A non corruption sorcerer can and will be able to solo with Khem, as the heals available are more than adequate for a "tank and spank" strategy. For the most part you wont even need to heal all that much for normal or silver difficulty mob groups, just dps away.

Agree, apart from UI mods, playing with a full suit of mods in WoW felt like the mods were constantly telling what to do... use buff, proc available, heal x, etc. As a healer at one point i felt like a lemming running in a mod treadmill.

I agree with the need for a more clear "information system". The icons and notifications for procs and debuffs are ridiculously small and hard to notice unless your constantly looking at your and each party member´s portrait.

You do understand that this pre-acess period doesnt count toards the monthly fee... So its free pre-access -> first month thats included in the box price -> start paying the monthly fee Pre-access, the game people are playing before the offical Dec 20th launch is free for everyone that is playing.

Compared to what for example has this launch been so terrible? People are playing a free game for the time being at bioware´s expense, its a gift they decided to bestow the player base for no other reason than to thank people for pre-ordering... But people just loose their ***** for no other reason than to sound dramatic.

If you didnt expect these forums to be overrun with entire WoW server population´s of whinny little #$%& then you were clearly living in a fantasy land and not this awesome scifi one.

In the history of what? Clearly you werent there at WoW´s launch when people couldnt even loot and the server´s were blowing up left and right with queues in the thousands. You coudnt possibly have been at WAR´s launch, or maybe DDO´s, seriously... if you think this is the worst launch in HISTORY (way to go hyperbole) then... hell, i was gona try to say something funny about PMS but that would just have been rude.