My problem isn't really that I've "beaten everything". I still do operations every week, I'm still progressing there, I haven't beaten the game. I just don't really have anything to do when I'm not operating. But yeah, this format just might not work for me, or my guild.

Hi, I lead a guild. We do operations, we're working on nightmare mode content. My guild has 11 members, we're a tight knit group. My worry, however, is that we have stopped logging on. All of us. We log on to raid once a week, then we log off. Simply put, I don't think there is enough to do at level 50. I run operations once a week. I could run flashpoints, but I don't need the gear. I could grind PVP, but I don't particularly want to. I could do daily quests, but they're pretty boring and I have 2 million credits sitting around. I could level an alt (but that's not really max level content, is it?) So instead, I go play other games. So does my guild, all of us. No one logs on except for raids, because we don't have anything else to do. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy The Old Republic, but I have nothing to do. That said, I do think this is a problem with MMOs in general. It's a problem I've wrestled with in both WoW and DCUO. I don't, as of yet, know whether I'll continue to pay for The Old Republic. I don't think I can justify doing so if I'm only going to play it once a week, which is really a shame.

Wedge, you're correct. Surge is definitely worth more credit than I'm giving it. In my current set of healing gear, mostly Columi, I'm at 72% surge. So yeah, you're right. However, I stand that people should not de-mod their items to stack crit/surge over power and alacrity, and that alacrity (subject to far less diminishing returns than surge and slightly less than crit) is a good stat. Even a great stat. As for disregarding power, what are you thinking? Power has no diminishing returns whatsoever, making it a great stat to stack, especially for use on relics.

I just tested this. You only have to wait for 1 second out of the 1.5 second global cooldown. That's not much to wait, it makes it definitely worthwhile to use diagnostic scan to regenerate energy. Yeah, it's not that useful in PVP, but having a quicker rotation in pve is always helpful. Based on my theorycrafting the ideal rotation is SRM-UMEM-UMEM-UMEM-UMEM-DS, which I can pull with 13% alacrity, with less alacrity you must drop a UMEM. It is also beneficial to drop Kolto Cloud into this rotation if you can hit two or more targets. However most of the time I do not even bother with HoT's. They have a significantly lower Heals Per Second Casting than direct heals, unless you are reapplying them for the second time after a full set of ticks. Because of that it is only beneficial for your healing to cast SRM on a target where you can constantly reapply it and the target is constantly taking damage, the tank. Kolto Cloud is effective. Slow Release Medpac is unfortunately not very effective. Now I'm going to point out the flaw in your argument. 1. "If you can get surge without giving anyting up, it does not matter that it overheals." You cannot gain a stat on gear without getting it from somewhere else. I find it pointless to gain a stat that will go directly into unused healing. 2. "Overhealing is only an issue for healers with a finite resource pool or those that cared about healing 'meters'. in practice this does not matter. There are no healing meters, I do not care about that. I care about healing effectively and efficiently. Gearing for a stat that will not be used is ineffective and inefficient. You've already conceded that surge does contribute to overheal. I don't have a finite resource pool, but I do care about pushing my energy pool to its limits. 3. A lot of people are avoiding alacrity. They're removing 56 enhancements in their gear to replace them with 52 enhancements in order to gain surge and avoid alacrity. Note that I'm not saying we should avoid surge either, just that it shouldn't be stacked. I currently have 72.06% surge, this is enough. The people pushing 80%+ crit mult are, in my opinion, stacking it too hard. 4. Crit heals are unreliable. Now, I love my crit heals. I have 35-40% crit on my gear at any given time. However, crits tend to be streaky. If you base all of your healing effectiveness on needing crits, you might not when it matters. Which would be bad. I don't like to rely on crits like that.

If someone is taking a spike that's that urgent they A: need to use defensive cooldowns or a health pack: and B: probably screwed up. If they didn't screw up, they were probably victim of a predictable fight mechanic. The actual chance of someone taking an unpredictable unavoidable and critical damage spike within 1 second of me casting Diagnostic scan is pretty much nil. I can't even think of any unpredictable unavoidable and critical damage spikes in the game at all. Even the most raid damaging bosses like karagga and soa have predictable mechanics.

So often? I use diagnostic scan once every 15 seconds on full rotation. If I just stopped to regen I'd be lowering my healing output substantially because it would take longer, and any heals that I could cast instead of diagnostic scan would break the five-tick-threshold and make me cease to be an effective healer.

My guild runs with a sage healer and a scoundrel healer. In order for the sage to heal endlessly and not run out of resources he has to stick to a strict rotation, as a result, I end up raid healing. Based on my number crunching, the best rotation for raid healing is SRM-UMEM-UMEM-UMEM-UMEM-DS. This is just barely possible with my level of alacrity, so if I were to drop any I would have to go to a lower HPS rotation, one with three UMEM's. Here's the thing, though. I handle raid heals. As a raid healer, crit is a fantastic statistic. I have about 40% crit. Surge, on the other hand, is not very good. Surge isn't very good because it is an overheal statistic. It simply is not used. If a target is low on health I will target them with underworld medicine and emergency medpac, the combination heals noncrit for at least 4000. If they both crit it heals for at least 8000. If a target is not so low on health, I'll use emergency medpac on a different target. Because of the flexibility of emergency medpac I do not need or want surge to increase the size of my heals, especially because it's a stat that gets beaten to death by diminishing returns. Alacrity stacks much more efficiently because all the way up to 14% alacrity from items (trinket) I have experienced little to no diminishing returns. But really, why would a raid healer want bigger heals on fewer targets over smaller heals on more targets? For more direct responses: I have 13% alacrity, a new rotation is possible. My diagnostic ticks 13% faster than yours and crits 66% of the time. It gives me 4 energy in 2.59 seconds. I have more energy to spend than you do, if I have to break the five tick threshold without cool head, I can recover much faster than you can. Alacrity allows me to counteract the fatal flaw of scoundrel healing, variable energy regeneration. I love my alacrity. It kicks surge's ***.

In my opinion you have two options. Key: SRM- Slow release medpac KC- Kolto Cloud DS- Diagnostic Scan UMEM- Underworld Medicine+Emergency Medpac SRM-SRM-KC-DS-SRM-SRM-SRM-SRM-DS SRM-UMEM-UMEM-UMEM-DS Mess with these rotations, make sure you can do them without breaking the five-tick-threshold. But based on my calculations these are the absolute highest HPS rotations for me, and they're pretty easy. I'd wager they're pretty good for you.

link to all of my theorycrafting thoughts: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/118474/Sawbones%20theorycraft.txt I changed my stats around between tests. Right now I'm sitting at 1521 cunning, 469.7 bonus healing, 35.95% crit, 66.08% (+30%) crit mult, 13.78% alacrity in all pve gear. My rationale behind alacrity. 1. It allows me to regenerate my energy faster with Diagnostic scan. 2. It allows me to dump my energy into emergency heals faster. 3. It speeds up my rotation allowing for SRM-UMEM-UMEM-UMEM-UMEM-DS vs SRM-UMEM-UMEM-UMEM-DS, which gives slightly more HPS than the latter. 4. It allows me much more flexibility in the UMEM^3 rotation.

You're correct. I forgot to account for the increased healing received from Survivor's scars, and attributed the difference to healing hands. Woops. ALSO more data, it seems you can trust tooltips (only for underworld medicine and kolto pack, literally no other heals are accurate) if you A: Rely on the average of the range, not the range. And B: are okay with having roughly 1% of error. 1320 Cunning 33.39 crit rate 66.08 + 30 crit mult 12.97% alacrity 438.4 bonus healing 9% increased healing received 82 non-crit projected 82.59 crits Average heal 2640.52 tooltip average heal 2415 tooltip-average multiplier 1.093 Total heal 216523 2673 2765 2724 2538 2565 2514 2734 2590 2589 2667 2715 2718 2663 2678 2751 2762 2512 2666 2691 2784 2662 2467 2614 2715 2468 2463 2724 2558 2470 2703 2637 2747 2615 2470 2542 2638 2698 2710 2782 2506 2679 2519 2686 2517 2594 2747 2569 2491 2799 2477 2529 2788 2552 2638 2734 2714 2756 2715 2645 2495 2762 2591 2637 2783 2658 2541 2582 2688 2714 2703 2541 2788 2649 2614 2663 2563 2584 2597 2676 2667 2704 2686 42 crit projected 41.40 crits Average crit 5156.59 projected crit from tooltip 4670.37 tooltip-average multiplier 1.10 Total heal 216577 4903 5289 5062 4921 5497 5195 5159 5103 5289 5352 5014 5002 5026 4977 4857 5053 5066 4861 4840 5073 5212 5292 4927 5412 5202 5211 5079 5463 5152 5179 5263 5499 5056 5074 4982 5260 5430 5337 5028 5198 5350 5432 Underworld Medicine efficiency: 139.71 Average heal: 3492.74 Cast time: 1.74 HPSC: 2007.32 EPS: 16.66

Here are some numbers. My numbers. I hope they help you guys with some theorycrafting. In the process of getting these numbers I learned two things: Healing hand adds 3% healing base, plus an extra 6% per stack of upper hand, resulting in 15% healing bonus. Edit: Nevermind, forgot to account for Survivor's Scars When HoTing a single target, you should cast Kolto Cloud before Slow-Release Medpac, since it has higher HPSC and HPS. All heals with 2p and 4p PVE set bonus and 2 stacks of upper hand http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#701MffrzGRRzsZ0cZG.1 1442 Cunning 36.26 crit rate 66.08 crit mult 13.78 alacrity 458.8 bonus healing 9% increased healing received HPSC: Heals Per Second Cast HPS: Heals Per Second EPS: Energy Cost Per Second Efficiency: Healing output per point of energy Underworld Medicine efficiency: 145.202 Average heal 3630.05 Cast time 1.72 HPSC 2110.494 EPS: 16.66 Diagnostic Scan regen: 1.4/s heal amount 187 crit 311 Channel time: 2.59 HPS: 261.72 Kolto pack efficiency: 174.717 Average heal 3494.34 Cast time 1.29s HPSC 2708.79 EPS: 13.33 Slow-release Medpac efficiency: 180.01 Heal 363 603 Average tick: 450.024 Average heal: 2700.144 HPS: 150 HPSC: 1800.096 EPS: 10 Slow-release Medpac x2 efficiency: 180.2 Reapply efficiency: 360.55 Heal 727 1207 Average tick: 901.048 Average heal: 5406.288 HPS: 300.35 HPSC: 1802.096 Reapply HPSC: 3604.192 EPS: 10 Kolto Cloud ST efficiency: 107.7 Heal: 416 816 Average tick: 560.08 Average heal: 2800.4 HPS: 186.67 HPSC: 1866.93 EPS: 17.3 Kolto Cloud 4T efficiency: 466.73 Heal: 416 816 Average tick: 2240.32 Average heal: 11201.6 HPS: 746.68 HPSC: 7467.72 EPS: 17.3

Hello ladies. Look at your guild, then look at my guild. Sadly, your guild is not my guild, and it can't be, because we're not recruiting. But you can watch us raid. I'm in eternity vault. http://www.own3d.tv/live/57946 --Juyo Republic

Hello ladies. Look at your guild, then look at my guild. Sadly, your guild is not my guild, and it can't be, because we're not recruiting. But you can watch us raid. I'm in eternity vault. http://www.own3d.tv/live/57946 --Juyo Republic

Hello ladies. Look at your guild, then look at my guild. Sadly, your guild is not my guild, and it can't be, because we're not recruiting. But you can watch us raid. I'm in eternity vault. http://www.own3d.tv/live/57946

For those curious, this is the spec I was raiding on last night. http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#701bcZGZhMrkrMGdhR.1