We'll hit this one up after the next bullet-point.[*] NS/Consumption are always force positive. With this in mind, you're essentially advocating double stacking NS while standing in Salvation. Which I do as well, if you actually paid attention to the OP. The reason for single stacking it is because the 3rd resource we deal with is our global cooldown. NS costs not only health, not only (potentially) 20 force over the following ten seconds, but also a GCD during which you're not healing. Our healing is slow enough that if you followed my advice and dropped alacrity for more power and crit/surge, you end up not having to NS as much because the heals you do cast are more functional. You're nitpicking singular concepts within the guide without taking the entirety of it as a whole. When used in totem, yes, everything you wasted hours figuring out for your guide is present, accounted for, and basically improved upon in mine, without having to make it seem like it's forced, and without me having to go into other peoples' guides and link to mine (four times in two guides, actually ) even where it's appropriate. *As for Salvation on just you: It costs a lot of force. It's also okay to cast without three damaged targets if it won't impose force issues in so doing. I mentioned that earlier in this thread or possibly the sorcerer one as well. Rejuvenate also gives Conveyance and Force Shelter. It's not always just about the healing. Chances are if Rejuvenate's off cooldown, you were going to need Conveyance anyways. Idling doesn't give you conveyance. Conveyance > Healing Trance is still our best HPF and HPS we're capable of single-target outside of Force Potency > Deliverance x2, showed the math on that in this very thread. It's not counterproductive. You as a healer are tasked with maintaining the health of your parties and operations. This includes your own health. Even when not taking a lot of damage, generally with proactive NS use and maintaining optimal force economy, Salvation and the occasional Rejuv on yourself are generally good enough by themselves to maintain you. IN cases where your rotation has had to go force-negative and you've taken some damage, it doesn't matter where that damage came from, whether it came from you or Bonethrasher or your mother-in-law, self preservation is number 2 on your list of priorities after maintaining the tank(s) (#1 on the list of priorities during Bonethrasher specifically. ). Ergo, you heal yourself. You don't think about it, you do it. It doesn't matter if you think of it as an inefficient usage of your resources. You yourself are a resource, and you don't heal jack-all if you're dead. The triage section in my guide applies to everyone in the group, including yourself, no exceptions. You would be incorrect. Your guide is basically the overscientific Rube Goldberg approach to force management. You expect people to adhere to a 20 second rotation while healing. This is impossible, for several reasons that I won't bother to explain because if you heal it makes sense. There's a lot of things a good healer has to watch, and their rotation (other than the basic guidelines I laid out) shouldn't have to be one of them, especially for 20 seconds at a time. Instead, they can watch their bars and during dips/lulls in necessary throughput, they can maintain their own force and health bars. No specific technique or rotation required. Summary: Healing is more of a script than an equation. Your guide, for all the time you put into it (which I praised earlier for lack of anything else positive to say about it, was trying to be nice) doesn't really accomplish much that 'Watch your damn bars, cast stuff with the best HPF possible whenever you can, stand in your own Salvation. It's okay to heal yourself if you get too low.' doesn't state far more succinctly and accurately. Hell, I could've distilled my entire guide down to that sentence, but then it wouldn't have been a guide any more, so I showed what is the best HPF stuff you can cast along with what to watch out for, and helped with people's force management in a way that ebbs and flows along with the chaotic conditions of combat rather than giving them 3 free GCDs every 20 seconds and otherwise making them adhere to a rigid structural healing method that doesn't take the environment or specific contextual information about a fight's mechanics or group into account.

Other than Sage/Sorc that can mezz a gold and two normals simultaneously with an instant cast that also stuns them for 2 seconds when it pops and with a potentially 45 second cooldown.

It's like I said, don't prioritize Plasma Brand over Overhead Strike, least of all during Execute phase. The upfront damage on PB just makes up for having just clipped the dot, and at 3-5 focus per use, you pretty much only want to use it when you need Force Rush. OS does more upfront damage as long as the PB dot is already running on your target. Only use Blade Storm when you have Momentum during this phase.

Dunno man, no minimum range on Saber Throw is a pretty significant quality of life upgrade IMO.

Woot, someone likes the Metrosexual Koala.

Two main avenues of control: Move with mouse, hotkey with keyboard, and Move with Keyboard, Hotkey with Mouse. Since you're kinda the latter, a Naga or something pretty much solves your problem handily. The thumb buttons can be set so that the three easiest to reach can be ctrl, shift, and alt, and the rest can be numericals, and then you can put some other hotkeys on whatever other buttons are on the mouse such as wheel left, wheel right, and wheel down. Then you can actually play the game with something like a Nostromo n-52 or something and get accustomed to controlling your character with the thumb stick and set the jump button to your index finger on your left hand or something.

I wouldn't prioritize Plasma Brand during execute phase. The reason for this is, the DoT still does quite a bit of damage and Overhead Strike costs less force and does more upfront damage. The upfront damage on Plasma Brand just makes up for having just clipped it, IMO. Ergo, during execute phase, I'd only use Plasma Brand if OS is on cooldown (for Force Rush) and probably wouldn't cast BS at all unless you have Momentum, you just used Force Rush on Dispatch, OS or PB is coming off of cooldown, and/or the mob moves out of range for a GCD/you're moving out to Throw > Leap back in for some burst force. Your force gets kinda strained at that point, but the only thing that Dispatch really competes with is Blade Storm, for Force Rush procs.

To add to this, a lot of the time HPS isn't even important, but burst healing when it counts. For Commandos/Mercenaries and Scoundrels/Operatives, they tend to be at their best when few targets are taking a lot of heavy damage, compared to Sages/Sorcerers being at their best when several players are taking light to moderate damage. No one metric can really adequately compare them because their fields of expertise differ significantly.

DoTs add up over time (Specifically Weaken Mind/Affliction) and apply gradual pressures to the force healers on the other team in PVP who are faced with either burning GCDs and their Cleanse cooldown on removing them, or GCDs and Force in healing through them. Problem is, a lot of healers are rerolling FOTM Scoundrels/Operatives to heal PVP now and they can't do **** all about them but heal through them. And, their resource is much more limited than Sorcs/Sages are. Do the math. DoTs become significant if there's many sources generating them and few removing them, and, as if healers weren't already pressured in PVP enough as it was, adds one more thing to strain their situational awareness. Use *********** DoTs.

I'm gonna assume it's Revivification that's responsible. If your single target healing is marginally on-par, Revivification will put him way ahead of you in situations where it can hit several damaged targets simultaneously. I suspect on fights where it comes into play in a significant way, you'll see it squarely at the top of his list in MoX.

My Sage leveled as the equivalent to Corruption/Lightning with Effusion and that approach is actually pretty viable, it's just that its dps is pretty immobile. If it's working no sense in trying anything else, tho.

Aside from the minor niggle that Toth didn't exist prior to 1.2, this is a good post that underscores a lot of my feelings as well, and also give insight into the reasoning behind the nerfs in PVE. Sage/Sorc healers were capable of compensating for sloppy play, and the sloppy players started blaming us when that was no longer the case.

I'm not a huge PVPer in SWTOR and especially not on my Sage, so take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt, although I was a pretty baller pvp healer in Rift (lol). The biggest problem with Sage/Sorc healing in 1.2 is the cast time of Dark Infusion is too damn high, and Consumption now always noms your health even when used with Force Surge. Keeping those two bullet points in mind; I see two primary approaches, one being you go all the way up to Revivification and suck it up (31/9/1), and two being a hybridized approach where you only go up to 21 in Corruption and grab Lightning Barrier in the Lightning tree and dump the rest into Madness (21/7/13). These particular builds assume you basically won't even be casting Dark Infusion at all, and are centered around Static Barrier, Resurgence, Dark Heal, Innervate, and for the first one, Revivification for healing and give you some offensive goodies otherwise. They're both still primarily Healing builds but also have some teeth. I went pretty defensive with the filler skills. In the Rev build the central offensive mechanic is Weaken Mind on everything. I chose not to take the Consumption talents because I'm of the school of thought that you heal until you die, or break combat and Seethe, and Consumption in 1.2 has no place in your repertoire unless you have some baller backup healing to compensate for it. Taking this approach as well as the Infusionless stance allowed for a lot of cool utilities to be taken with those points instead.

Nice necro. Just the same though, in other games they've retrofitted detaunts to work as though a tank taunted them sorta. Basically it makes whoever you detaunt do like 50% less damage to you for a few seconds or until you do something hostile back at them. The duration doesn't have to be long to be significant.

Good job with the thread. Most of that info is pretty much already baked into the guide though.

I checked it out, X, and I tend to think that you don't really need a hard and fast rule of thumb or specific technique. As long as you don't let your health hit 100% and use Healing Trance/Innervate as your primary heal, you'll be fine. Keeping you alive is also your own and your other healer's priority, so if your NS/Consumption use gets to where it's taking a significant toll on your health, it's a pretty simple matter of correcting it. Either you'll look over at the raid frame and notice your health dipping or the other healer will. It's not like you need to do this every time you NS, though, probably twice a fight.

I only created this build so I could give it a name. Behold, the Metrosexual Koala.

Lol. Seriously though, Enure by itself doesn't make up for the extra minute we have to wait on Saber Ward. Enure + Focused Defense is a pretty good combo but again, other classes get more and better defensive combos than we do.

So the kinetic/energy damage proc relics would be better for a Vigilance/Vengeance Force Frontliner than a Matrix Cube for straight DPS? Other slot would be the power clicky, right?

Alternatively you can grab the 5 points in Lightning for the force efficiency and slap points all willy nilly and then respec up to Wrath at level 25. The main reason I advocate this is because Flashpoints are tuned for hybrids up to Athiss because realistically everyone pretty much is one up to that point anyways. I was main healing on my Madness +5 Lightning up until Boarding Party where it finally became a burden and I had to stick to just being DPS or respec Corruption. WTB dual spec. :3

Lol yeah, other one got stickied within like a half hour. Probably nerf control strategy by the devs. Hey I can't complain.

Thanks man, someone had to do it! Also I can has sticky!

NP, and thanks. Yeah as of pre 1.2 the original flowchart worked, and you helped me fix this one now.

Sniper and gunslinger are literally just 5 hours post-buff. What you just said is no longer relevant.

Yeah, moving Vicious Throw/Dispatch to an earlier level would be a great change, as then you'll have time to get used to hitting it when it's up. Right now you get it at 46 and it takes you a little while to get it into your repertoire.