So, Alacrity?

[Fictionfan]

I spent a lot of time studying some of the Medic theory crafting sites prior to rolling a commando. I leveled gunnery and switched to medic as planned for raiding with my guild and I love it!

 

Most of the beta based theory crafting placed alacrity low of the priority list for medics. Early on I did dailies and stacked up as much power as I could. However, as we progress to harder content, I am finding that I need to spam off some heavy heals in certain fights on my MT (he is fairly well PvE geared at 19k hp), and in others I need to pop CS and spam out AMPs.

 

For the MT, the power seems good. But, for the raid group it seems like alacrity is good. I have recently gotten the Comlumni Chest and Feet, and Tionese hands. Those of course are loaded with alacrity.

 

In Eternity Vault 8 man regular, and in Emperor hard mode, I never run out of ammo and we only die if we bring someone with low dps due to the enrage timer. So, for now I seem to be okay, but for the future, I am wondering if I need to reevaluate my mods, and get some with alacrity from dailies until I complete my sets.

 

I am mainly look for some of you that have experience to give me some insight into how I go about these stats.

 

Thanks in advance

[Lileth]

You pretty much got it right in my opinion. Alacrity really helps when you have to bring a raid back to full health fast. The faster i get the raid up the faster i can start to regen Ammo before the next big wave of incoming damage. Once raid health is 90% I hammershot people back to full.

 

I prioritize AIM > Power > Alacrity. I use Power Relic aswell.

 

4/5 Hardmode EV (Stupid Lightning under the ground suck)

1/1 Hardmode Hutt's Hospitality.

[RuQu]

Have a guide in progress here. It would be nice if the moderators would sticky these things.

 

Our talents have a lot of synergy with crit, and only two of our heals have any benefit from alacrity (Adv Probe and Med Probe). Alacrity does nothing to benefit our ammo regen since those cooldowns and rates are fixed. Alacrity does nothing to increase Healing per Ammo (HPA), only Healing Per Second (HPS). Even then, our Healing per Second is limited mostly by cooldowns: BI with 21 seconds and AP with 9 seconds. The only time alacrity actually provides a HPS boost is if you are spamming MP (and burning all your ammo) or you are within Supercharge Cells (SCC), which is a very short duration. So really, you are only getting any benefit from alacrity during SCC.

 

Haste (alacrity) has always been a healer favorite because sometimes that extra 0.1 seconds is the difference between alive and dead. However, it has also always been about HPS gains, not HPM, and the increased mana usage per second was offset in other ways. In WoW this was done by increasing regen (spirit or some class mechanic) or increasing the total mana pool so you had enough to end most fights with a little left. As a SWTOR Combat Medic, there is no way to boost either regen rate or Ammo pool.

 

Our crits hit hard with Potent Medicine, and we have multiple talents that boost crit rate (should be up 9% from skill tree picks alone). Crit also boosts alacrity via First Responder. Crit and Power both increase our Healing per Ammo and our Healing per Second. These benefits are provided always, both inside and outside of SCC.

 

Crit vs Power will always be a matter of taste, no matter what the numbers say. Some people really hate relying on the RNG for their heals and will take the reliability of Power over Crit even if the math says the return per rating is higher for Crit. That's a valid call. I'd put our current stats at:

 

Aim > Crit >= Power > Surge > Alacrity.

 

Keep in mind we have a decent crit rate even if stacking power, so Surge is still always useful.

 

If you want to contribute to the theory crafting or want to argue with my above points, please do so in this thread so we can keep it on the front page until we can get it stickied.

[Aritok]

I currently choose Alacrity over other stats becauce of Supercharge Cells combined with Charged Bolt.

 

You can fire the Charged Bolt during the timer of Supercharge for free. And for me it means getting as much Charged shots out as possible.

 

I got CB already down to 1 sec. And this means 10 shot instead of 6 for free.

 

But i am still doing stuff solo and not raiding so far, and i cant compare it right now to other skills/combos. But i liked the idea behind it.

[Fictionfan]

Thanks RuQu for the response. I will keep an eye on your post. I messed around with Alacrity and I didn't like what I saw. My MT heals dropped significantly. I can see the stats you mentioned being priority. It's tough to really test it without at least a combat log to take numbers from.