Cybertech has the advantage of the grenades at higher levels. The thing you should bear in mind is the the developers will nerf the hell out of any prof if it becomes the defacto choice of PvPers. (See also: Engineering in WoW). That said, I'd go with either Biochem or Cybertech for now. Unless they start giving stat buffs and prof-only enchants/buffs for other crafting professions, those are the only 2 that make sense from a PvP perspective.

As DPS, the frustration becomes ten times worse the second you realIze there is no outcome that will not leave you looking ridiculous. As a healer, I live for these moments because watching that poor sap pinball between the two of us is hilarious.

I wasn't complaining, just pointing out that nobody who is focusing you will allow a CC like that to be cast. The knockback is great, but on the current maps it's got a pretty limited use. Do me a favor. Watch the Ops Medicine PvP videos in this thread, then try & come back & tell me Ops don't have enough control: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=390343

Gunslingers & Snipers have a ranged ability which will force you out of cover for 6 seconds.

For new PvPers, you might want to include stuff like "inc" and "omw." (And maybe "GG" and "FFS." ) For pugs, "AoE."

Against the 3-pack trash mobs: - Get into cover. - Instruct companion to pull 1 mob. - Cast Charged Bolts against a second mob. - Before the cast goes off, tab target to the third mob & chuck Sabotage Charge at them followed by Flurry of Bolts (ie, the auto attack). This usually results in one mob severely wounded, the other dead, and that other one is Corso's problem. If there's a larger group, I'll rotate Thermal Grenades into the mix, in order to knock down weaker mobs. If they're lying on their butts, it means they can't do damage to you or your companion. The general idea is to take out one opponent immediate, and short term CC the rest to mitigate as much damage as possible.

I may have read it wrong, but the tone of her posts implied that she thinks that she should be able to do this.

Very cool. Great food for thought. Thanks for the response!

No, seriously, this was an eye opener. My main is a Combat Medic, so obviously I don't have your mobility but I'm still eager to log on & try a few new things. One question about your Ops Medicine vids: You seem to have a lot of control during every encounter. How effective are you at kiting melee DPS classes, specifically with the use of Tendon Blast? (Sorry, I don't know the Imp equivalent -- it's the short range snare that reduces movement speed by 50% & has a 12 second cooldown). Also, do you use that Accuracy debuff grenade against most players? I thought I saw the cloud a few times against both force wielders and blaster users. Finally, do you always use crouch, or are there specific times when you'll roll into cover? I was on the fence about rolling a Scoundrel Sawbones to try out another healing style, but your vids pretty much convinced me to do it.

Learn to peel for your healers. Or maybe you don't know any better? Healer tanking is a stupid playstyle. It's a difficult balance, but I'd rather be slightly underpowered in a way that requires actual team play than be able to tank multiple DPS while keeping the clueless alive.

Thiiiiiiiiiiis, my god, this. There are certain other games on the market that may have spoiled a few folks. Healers shouldn't be functionally immortal with unlimited resources. I love healing, but my god does that get boring fast.

Wow, this gives me an entirely new perspective on WZ healing. Amazing videos.

Look up "confirmation bias" on Wikipedia. While there may or may not be a problem, it's almost impossible to know from your observations alone. You're more likely to remember the events (eg losing rolls) that reinforce your preconceptions than remember those that don't (eg winning roles).

Depends on what you consider "CC," I guess. There are classes in this game that get knockbacks at level 2, others get 4 second stuns at level 12. But that level of detail is missing the point, which was that all CC is equally effective, regardless of the character's level.

But ... Medical Probe has a high resource cost and a cast time. Having to readjust coefficients on an ability every time you introduce a tier seems like awfully shortsighted design. While running across a Warzone map, should you be able to gain a buff (and essentially a proc) for an ability with multiple benefits? Probably not. Self casts would also negate the purpose of Supercharge's buff stacks being in a timer, since you could refresh the stacks on yourself at will. I agree that the mechanic is awkward. Being able to use ability on everyone but yourself is clunky as hell. I don't see much way around that, unless they completely change how SCC and Hammer Shot works.

This post should be the biggest takeaway from the thread. It points to the problem with simple healing meters in general, which is that they're only really good for rough comparisons between players of the same class and role. Any class with HoTs is always going to have more overheals, any mitigation won't show up at all (how much damage did the Merc's armor buff prevent during these fights?) and someone who is tank healing will have lower overall numbers than raid healers.

Seriously? This isn't an intentional time suck. It's just bad design. (The entire PvP reward system is stupidly complicated.)

Because Sages aren't Holy Paladins? Why do you think you should have any kind of survivability against two well geared DPS, without peels? Now, if you want to complain about DPS classes with nearly half a dozen functional interrupts (real interrupts and instant cast CC that serve that purpose), I'm with you. But I don't see why an unprotected, light armor wearing healer should de facto be able to simultaneously tank two DPS while keeping themselves and their team alive.

I agree, but there are the occasional lowbies who are obviously experienced in MMO PvP and play toward the objectives, not ganking. SWTOR has no spell resist mechanic, so a level 10's CC works just as well as anyone else's as they can obviously click on turrets and doors just as well as level 49s. Granted, these kind of lowbies are rare but I don't see any reason to shut them out. The real title of this thread should be "I don't want to play with strange nubs." And my response to that would be, "Well, duh, nobody else does either. Suck it up and play, because that's the game." The real question is: How many of us are great enough players to win games even when we've got the disadvantage of multiple lowbies on our team?

No, I understood your point just fine. I think it's shallow & shortsighted, in that it ignores real world constraints. And this is the first time in this thread, in this context, that you mentioned specific content. I was half responding to you & half responding to the other guy, but the basic point still stands: adjusting healing metrics is easier than rebalanced fight mechanics, on any scale. You also might consider that Bioware intentionally is trying to make all group content, from Cademimu normal to EV Nightmare to PvP warzones, more challenging in one fell swoop. Then you'd be on the forums complaining about throughput, or that Commandos aren't built for spam healing the way Sages are. How is it less work? Again, you're assuming the only goal here is to "fix" endgame raiding, whereas Bioware might be more interested in tuning the game overall. How does it limit future content? Healers running around with unlimited mana pools limits design choices far more, because (again, pointing to WotLK and Cata) the only really way to make fights challenging are gimmicky mechanics like massive spike damage on the tanks or raid wide, unavoidable AoE damage.

It doesn't scale well now, but wait until we're a few tiers into the game, or even the next expansion. The other thing to consider is that it builds a stackable buff that increases damage and heal % and is necessary to proc Supercharge. Somehow, the design falls a bit flat if you can get that while you're alone. True again, but I still think the crux of the issue is "free, uninterruptible, zero cast time." The only reason nobody complains about it is because the ticks are so small.

Gee, has it already been 3 hours? Because the PvP forums definitely needed to see this thread again.

I lean towards it being a backed authentication issue because of the way Blizzard's forums were set up. Way back when, they used to operate like SWTOR's -- the forums would go down with the game servers. About the time they implemented the Armory (and the new Battle.net), the forums would stay up but you couldn't login; you could only post if your browser had been authenticated before the shutdown and retained Blizzard's cookie. These days, afaik, that issue has been resolved. The forums, login, and Armory are available even when th game itself is not. That implies, to me, that over time Blizzard increasingly decoupled its authentication servers from the actual game, because they wanted to offer other services 24/7 (like toys and in game items), and didn't want every customer's login to be directly tied to Warcraft. So I'm guessing EA/Bioware hasn't done that, even though it's clear they want to (eg: the existence of Origina and single accounts working across multiple games).

Man, I can't tell you how disappointing that thing was. In WoW, I had a macro I could hit that would dynamically place the "Skull" mark over any mob's head. I never had to mark multiple targets or describe a kill order to pugs. All I had to do was tell them to follow the skull, which I could change with one key press as combat progressed. The SWTOR Targeting Device is nearly useless by comparison. It's small and translucent, and half covered by nameplates. More on topic: I agree that raid markers should be disallowed during warzones.

Hi. Professional web developer here. I kept trying to figure out why they do this, because it makes no sense. These forums run on vBullentin, on top of Apache 2 and CentOS. The backend is most likely mySQL. Production web servers are never taken down for maintenance, especially not for 8 hours at a time every single week. Think about any other community or forum you belong to, of any size. Have you ever seen it taken down with some message about maintenance? On a regular basis? The only reason I can think of is their login system. If they shut the login servers down so no one can access the actual game, and EA's Origin memberships references the same database, then there's no way to authenticate anyone coming to the forums. What I can't, for the life of me, figure out is why they shut off the main website and all the marketing material, breaking parts of it. That exhibits some kind of disconnect and cluelessness which is totally foreign to me.