[What exactly is the point of respec costs?]

You're assuming people only want to respec twice a week. When I play that other MMO, I respec at least twice a day. One for soloing/questing and one for dungeons/raids. Can you imagine doing that in this game?

 

And yes, I am well aware of when dual-spec was released. Trying to do quests and dungeons with the same spec was doable, but it could get really painful.

[FREE Anti-aliasing in SWTOR (Improved Graphics Quality Zero Performance Hit) AMD/ATi]

Cool, I'll have to give this a try.

Most of your pasted links are borked.

something truncated then with ... in the middle

The links in the http://forums.guru3d.com post are working.

 

It should be noted that running .jar files requires Java to be installed. The standard version can be had at http://java.com. However, you'll probably want to disable the Java web browser plugins unless you really need them (they're a potential security risk.)

[What exactly is the point of respec costs?]

It's an outdated concept. This game and others (one notably dominated by a green skinned, blue-eyed Shaman Jesus) have multiple specs for a reason: to be used! Many players don't want to tank all the time, or heal all the time, or pvp all the time. A high respec cost is not a necessary gold sink - all it does is discourage us from trying different playstyles. Dual-spec would go a long way, but if that's a serious programming hurdle, just add a skill mentor to each planet and nix the respec costs. Boom. Problem solved.

 

It should be noted that that other MMO has even dumped dual-spec in favor of letting you change talents at will. I'm not opposed to keeping a fee for letting us respec in the field thru legacy, but there's no good reason to penalize us for wanting to switch things up. Get rid of respec costs, please.

[What has improved in PvP since 1.1?]

My WoW guild and I started playing at launch, and we went to a PvP server since most of the guys are hardcore PvP players. Unfortunately they quickly grew bored with PvP in SWTOR and all left for League of Legends. I've been thinking about how to get some of them to try the game again, but it's not going to happen unless they really like the current state of PvP. Ironically I, the only guy left, am a carebear and can't describe the current state or tell them what has changed. So... has PvP improved since March or so? Is it enough to convince them to give it another try?

[Why Xalek is Squishy?]

I gave up on Xalek because he was broken for a very long time. Sure, he's easy to gear for, but Khem is just a monster.

[New to healing in TOR, question....]

I dps sometimes simply because I get bored if I'm not pushing buttons. But yeah, our duty is to keep our group's HP up, so interrupts and stuns are handy when we're not busy. Damage prevented > damage healed, after all.

[The most ridiculous complaint ever in MMO history.]

Hmm. I haven't thought about this much, possibly because I haven't done enough ops. Sorc healing was very easy for me to pick up simply because it's a cross between resto shammy and disc priest, and I've raided with both. Never really healed with a paladin or druid so Operative healing is kind of foreign to me. (I've been told ops are druids with fewer hots.) Never healed with a BH.

 

Are sorcs boring? Could be. We have it easy compared to ops when it comes to large pulls. I wish we had better cooldowns tho'. There aren't any real "oh ****" buttons like WoW has.

[What should I (healer) know?]

Good stuff Kynesis.

 

One problem I've run into is that new players often go into flashpoints and play them the same way they fight solo. (50s are not immune to this either.) You have to keep the tank up, but he needs to keep you up too.

 

Pay attention to line-of-sight. Sometimes players will run around a corner mid-heal. Also, be prepared to duck behind a corner/wall and heal yourself if there are uncontrolled adds.

 

NEVER break crowd control. That's the tank's job.

 

Big pulls tend to have a lot of incoming damage up front. Sorcs have a great tool with their bubbles to deal with this. Try to cast it before the pull, but don't cast Resurgence until after the pull. Getting them in the wrong order can cause you to get aggro right off the bat. (Ticks from the heal-over-time portion of Resurgence cause a small amount of threat.)

[Why do tanks put Guard on healers in PvE?]

Guess I misread the tooltip. I thought it all had a 15 meter range.

 

With guard up, a simple hammer shot (no resource cost) will pluck the enemy off you. Without guard? Most likely 2-3 hammer shots, possibly an ion pulse, or maybe even a stockstrike / high impact bolt.

 

Does it really take that much, even after 1.3? To be fair, I don't have a trooper/BH at 50 yet, so I'm not sure how easy it is for them to grab things.

 

After thinking about it some more (I wrote the post at 2 am) and looking back at the thread, I realize that my main problem with putting Guard on healers isn't so much that they don't need it, it's that some tanks seem to think that Guard is a substitute for actual tanking. I should have emphasized the point: "every enemy in a pull must be controlled, either by someone hitting it (preferably the tank) or crowd control. Anything that is not controlled is likely to go after the healer, and Guard will not prevent that." I've seen too many tanks go into pulls as if they were fighting solo. This is especially a problem with pulls that have more than one boss or elite.

 

Anyway, thanks for the feedback everyone. It still annoys me, but I'll try not to complain about Guard so much if no one else needs it.

[Why do tanks put Guard on healers in PvE?]

Edit: Ugh. I never intended to start a flame war or anything; I just wanted to point out that a game mechanic was often not being used correctly. As it appears some have posted without reading the whole thread, here's my reply on page 3:

After thinking about it some more (I wrote the post at 2 am) and looking back at the thread, I realize that my main problem with putting Guard on healers isn't so much that they don't need it, it's that some tanks seem to think that Guard is a substitute for actual tanking. I should have emphasized the point: "every enemy in a pull must be controlled, either by someone hitting it (preferably the tank) or crowd control. Anything that is not controlled is likely to go after the healer, and Guard will not prevent that." I've seen too many tanks go into pulls as if they were fighting solo. This is especially a problem with pulls that have more than one boss or elite.

 

Anyway, thanks for the feedback everyone. It still annoys me, but I'll try not to complain about Guard so much if no one else needs it.

 

Since then, I've also come to realize (partly from this thread, and partly from tanking in SWTOR) that flashpoints are not quite like dungeons in that other MMO. I know that should be obvious, but many of us have seen that this game resembles WoW in so many ways that we assume flashpoints are the same too. I admit I'm as guilty of that as anyone else. In WoW, the tank is usually supposed to pick up everything and hold it in place while the dps burns them down. This was especially true in Wrath where nearly every pull was made for AoE. But SWTOR pulls aren't built that way: for one, the mobs tend to be more spread out, there are more of them, and tanks here seem to have fewer tools to grab aggro on multiple targets (my tank is nowhere near 50, so correct me if I'm wrong on this.) Second, there's a much greater spread of effective levels in each pull. WoW pulls are typically a few elites at or near the same level, but SWTOR pulls can have gold elites, silver elites, normals and weaks all mixed together, with the occasional mini-boss level thrown in. From what I've learned so far, not only is it very difficult for a tank to hold aggro on all that, they aren't supposed to. The tank grabs the silvers and elites while the dps takes out the little ones first, then goes after what the tank is holding. It sounds counter-intuitive to WoW players, but it works, and it actually makes healing easier since the tank isn't taking a huge hit up front.

 

It's about 8 months into the game, we've mostly settled in, and for most of you my post is probably old news. But if you've read this far, thank you for indulging a bitter old healer. I know tanking can be stressful; I've always thought tanking was harder than healing (tho' for some reason healers seem to get blamed more when things go south.) Anyway, original post follows:

 

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It's pointless. First of all, it does not reduce the healer's threat. Yes, I know it says it reduces threat generated, but it does nothing to prevent uncontrolled enemies from going after the healer. If a healer has 100% threat on something, there is nothing to reduce. It goes like this: every enemy in a pull must be controlled, either by someone hitting it (preferably the tank) or crowd control. Anything that is not controlled is likely to go after the healer, and Guard will not prevent that. Besides, it only works on players within 15 yards, and healers are often outside that which also makes it useless for damage reduction. Trust me, Guard works far better on a melee dps that is likely to pull threat.

 

I'm not trying to slag off tanks here - I know it can be difficult with all the stuff you have to keep track of. I've been a tank myself. But it's really frustrating when tanks refuse to put Guard on anyone else no matter how I try to explain it. I even saw one ragequit after saying nothing more than "Guard works better on dps that pull threat." Another tried to tell me it was "healer aggro." Listen, there's only one thing you need to know about healer aggro in this game: it doesn't exist. It never did. Kindly remove that phrase from your vocabulary.

 

TL;DR: the only way for a tank to prevent uncontrolled enemies from swarming the healer is to hit them. Put Guard on the highest threat dps. Your healer will thank you for it.

[Entering combat upon sleep dart wearing off]

Yeah, because you can't debuff people and just stay out of combat. That seems fair, doesn't it?

 

Well, kind of, since it only affects one target at a time and can't be reapplied once combat starts.

 

I also just switched from Concealment to Medicine and was really confused by this issue. Thanks for the info.

[PLEASE VOTE: Give Us Real Combat Logs]

I can't imagine why this was not put into the game at the beginning. It's not as if Bioware doesn't know how to do it - they've had combat logs in their games at least as far back as Neverwinter Nights (2001 I believe.) Heck, even KotOR had a combat log despite its obvious console roots. I like that we have the option to save logs to a file, but it's simply not enough. We as players need to be able to see what's going on in real number terms because, after all, this is a numbers game behind the scenes. As a healer I need to be able to see not only that I or party members are taking damage, but why we are taking damage, and I need it while the game is running.

 

I'm also for DPS/heal meters. They're useful for figuring out what works best and how players can improve. Yes, I know they will be used for epeen measuring and slagging off bad players, but turn that around for a second: if you have a player in your group doing poor DPS, a meter will help you figure out what that player is doing wrong and what they can do better. I would hope that good players will help the poor ones to improve, but if they don't it's those players' fault, not the meters. Keeping meters out of the game will not make those players less of a douche.

 

As for threat meters... I'm not sure they're actually needed. Maybe just a threat warning would suffice. (Tanks also need to learn that any mobs they haven't hit will come after the healer. That's not heal aggro; it's a tank being stupid.)

[Lvl 50 Sorcs: did Xalek get fixed?]

I don't have the means to check this myself. Does he get anything from shield and absorption rating now? Does he still cast Lightning Blast no matter how many times he's told not to?