A Healer's 1.2 Grievances: The story of why healers are upset

[pathiss]

But you do need good teamwork to survive....lol you must not of played WoW. Silences in that game lock out entire schools of spells. Here you can just cast another spell (and its not like you have a lot of those to worry about anyway). Healing is EASY in this game, stop complaining.

 

You want difficult? Go play warhammer, healers get lol1shot by any dps if your team stops paying attention to you for a split second.

 

Huh? You are out of touch with reality.

 

In warhammer my rune priest could face tank half a dozen people for quite a while. A warrior priest and disciple of kane was just as bad, if not worse.

 

I was never 1 shot on my RP ...not even remotely close. A 'good' mdps class would force a standoff with me, where I couldnt afford to do much in the way of damage because I was too busy healing myself. A little more hybrid running the spammable snare, and I could snare kite most anything to death.

 

My shaman was damn near unkillable too thanks to all those lovely kiting abilities.

 

In DAOC ...my bard and shaman could not be killed by any single dps in the game unless I let them kill me by my own stupidity. My druid and cleric were pretty much the same.

[Caeliux]

It's not their fault, the game just isn't evolved yet and doesn't reward a better level of skill.

 

I disagree, some people are born with it, some people are not.

 

PvP is the same way of thinking, either you got the juice or you don't.

 

FIN

[Zipzik]

sage healers got ganked hard on this patch.. almost enough to make me want to stop playing.

[Caeliux]

sage healers got ganked hard on this patch.. almost enough to make me want to stop playing.

 

You obviously have no idea what you are talking about.

[SWImara]

In warhammer my rune priest could face tank half a dozen people for quite a while. A warrior priest and disciple of kane was just as bad, if not worse.

I decided not to respond to that guy's post due to a generally high level of "wtfareyoutalkingabout" I couldn't agree with you more. My Dark Elf Blade Dancer (I think that was the class name) was death on wheels, in that game I could wholly understand people complaining about a Blade Dancer or Warrior Priest paired with a Tank. The level of competence necessary to take apart a healer/tank combo in SWTOR pales in comparison. Any opinions of SWTOR aside dude must have been on mars if he thought healers in WAR were lightweights.

[Dietra]

Why is it the problems you get as a healer I never have?

 

Healing is easy, doesn't require any skill... never did.

Still doesn't post 1.2. Get better

 

What are you doing wrong?

You're not LOOKING at what you're doing.

 

Can I ask what your class is?

 

I am a sage healer in full healer spec (since well also handy for PVE).

The way I see it... the healers in this game got doubly nerfed.

 

1. They took away one of my abilities to regain force without losing health... which was handy in PVP

2. They took away the ability to proc and get a 1 sec off of my 2.3 sec for casting my best heal

 

Those are things I could have lived with... but...

 

On top of that they also felt the need to lower the % of healing expertise and buff the % of dps dmg done in PVP...

 

That is double nerf for me.

 

I wear light armor. I don't do much (if any) damage, since I'm mostly in the seer tree. Without a guard... I'm target practice for dps ...

Sure I can kite and LOS them... but if I even want to attempt to heal anybody else... I need to come out of hiding and bam... get shot down easily by a dps (who's damage has been increased with expertise %).

My healing doesn't do a lot, since that % has been taken down.

 

End result:

Everybody in the warzone I'm in dies faster. So yes that also means all you dps-people that love your increased damage... you also die faster with less heals.

 

I don't mind having to work harder to keep people up (which the

adjustments to my class already took care of). But to have the % of the heals you do in a warzone also being less effective... it's almost pointless... especially if the opposite side still decides that they want to kill the healers... and focus them... then you might as well stand still and get the death over with quickly ...

 

Unfortunately I usually still try to outheal against the odds and still try to heal others... but I still see them drop like flies... simply because with all the adjustments (let's not call them nerfs) the damage being done is more than the heals I can put out... unless you count the heal with 2.3 sec cast... and how much damage can you do in those 2.3 seconds?? :-)

 

I just draw one conclusion from this... Bioware has done a great job with the 1.2 patch in most things... But they don't like healers in Warzones

[Rothoul]

You won't 1-2 shot an equally geared healer. I've played a lot of WZs in the last two days, PvP is about all I do, on 3 different 50s and haven't see this happen yet.

 

As for the teamwork statement.

 

1. It should not take "teamwork" to take down a single unsupported healer and it did prior to 1.2.

 

2. It still takes teamwork in 1.2 to take down a supported healer, and if there are two people focused on the healer and your DPS can't kill one or both of them then:

a. The healer is really under-geared and died too fast

b. Your DPS is under-geared, not paying attention, or just bad

 

Well evidently you don't play enough. I have a lev 50 sorc healer almost full BM gear and i get 2-3 shotted quite a bit. Okay...one shotted was a bit extreme. But my point is dps whores always complain about healers. And you are wrong again. It should take team work for someone to take down an unsupported healer. The healer can't really take down 1-2 dps so why should 1-2 dps find it easy to take down the healer. Oh that's right....it's the dps whore I'm god syndrome and I should be able to kill anything fast that can't kill me.

 

My point is proven. DPS whores think they are above everything else support roles, utility, etc and that they should be able to kill with impunity. No problem, I've set aside my healer and I'm playing my sniper and teaching most dps whores they shouldn't have alienated the healers because I'm face rolling most of these bit ches because guess what.....they aren't getting heals and the heals they might get aren't enough to compensate for my dps. Karma is a bit ch and all you dps whores are finding that out now.

Edited April 13, 2012 by Rothoul

[Vetril]

Blah

 

If I can kite and kill marauders with my gunslinger, you can handle them with your commando.

 

Healing is a support role. You're not gonna win warzones on your own, sorry. Your faction grunts are going to do that. Your role is to make sure that the grunts of the other faction die before yours; it's pretty much an attrition game. As a DPS, I do notice when someone's healing my target from behind. When I notice, I'm going to look for the healer and smash his face if you and your team let me. If you disrupt my attack, I die before I can do that.

I don't know if you ever played TF2. There's a medic class there, and as in TOR 1.2, it won't save his patient if the enemy gets a couple lucky crits or if the enemies focus fire.

In both cases however, he's soaking up damage, offering a health buffer to the whole team so that they die slower than their enemies. If your team survives longer, it can deal more damage and thus it can overpower the enemies.

 

So it's never been about keeping people alive. It's about buying time to outdamage the opposition.

[Bradael]

The True Imbalance of The Game Post 1.2

 

Standard Imperial Team

3 Assassins

2 Powertech

2 Marauder

1 Operative or Mercenary

1 Sorcerer (Heals)

 

Standard Republic Team

2 Sage (Heals)

2 Commando (Heals)

2 Guardians

1 Shadow or Scoundrel

1 Commando (DPS)

 

Now, if you look at these setups (which on my server is 90% of games give or take 2 roles respectively) who do you think is going to win?

 

Now that damage > Healing having a team stacked with marauders and assassins is going to boast a win more often than not. Having a team stacked with squishy's, even if they ALL had a guard on them, is not going to get you anywhere. While all our "DPS," which is mostly guardians and Commando's who have yet to hotkey anything other than Grav Round, try to focus down the other teams solo healer the imps ridiculous damage throughput has put us in respawn before their healer has to pop CD's. This is why you see a trend on the forums of pub sages complaining far more than imp sorc's. I personally play a sage, and yes the nerf's sucked, but they were needed. I think we will see a hotfix soon to expertise bonus because i should be able to healing trance through a non CD'd assassins force lightning. But when said lightning is ticking for 2.5 k and my healing trance is hitting for around 800... well yeah that's not quite right. All in all i'm welcoming the changes, i stopped playing a bit pre 1.2 launch because there wasn't much more to aim for other than 700k healed games and 11 medal sage. Now doing well in a game as a healer requires ridiculous skill rather than just watching people beat on you while you cast a 1.2 second 4k heal on yourself. We do have an imbalance issue currently and anyone who denies that is smoking something i want nothing to do with (or do I...) Anyway, if we stick through it and allow the dev's to collect data from in-game and player feedback, we'll all be happy eventually (Even if it's only 2 of us at a time for a one to two month period)

 

 

"Paper is overpowered and needs to be nerfed, but leave scissors alone they're fine the way they are."

 

-Rock

[Siega]

Nice eloquent post, OP.

 

So these balance changes came about because a lot of unskilled DPS could not call in teammates against some good healers? I am guessing a month from now the same dps will be griefing in wz and forums about how they never get heals.

 

A DPS job is to do damage and use their GCDs knowingly.

A healers job is to heal damage and use their GCDs knowingly.

( A PVP'ers job is to stay on the objectives, but some players never get that down either )

 

If two dps is up against each other, then one comes out alive. Either because of luck, skills or outside help which negates 1v1, but it is PVP teamwork, which warzones are all about.

 

However, a heal and a dps who are even in gear and skill should be stalemate against each other until one does a mistake or gets lucky. Evenly matched they should be negating the effects of each others. If the classes are perfectly balanced it should take a third person to make the kill or survive.

 

A heal should NEVER be easy to take down for a DPS of the same skills and gear.

If it was fair, the DPS would spend all their time damaging the healer, the healer should spend all their time healing/warding the damage.

 

The only chance for a healer to come out alive in a perfectly even match should be if 1. the DPS gives up, 2. they fight until the end of the wz or 3. outside help intervenes (which is less likely, when healers are not as valued anymore, and lots of DPS runs around with their head under the arm and expect heals from dead healers).

 

So while the nerf may have been warranted -- which is actually not a sure thing, the complaints could be about a lot of healers of higher skills and better gear, who could survive an amageddon of lesser skilled and geared DPS -- it was way overdone to the point of breaking PVP for a lot of healers especially those not geared enough to take any damage at all.

 

Just like there has always been room for bad DPS in spades, there should be room for bad healers too -- wether due to skills or gear -- so the snotty "l2p" remarks goes both ways.

 

BTW healers are not ignored, right now they are just butter, unless they already aquired gear, so noone notice they are targetted because it is over that fast - trust me, a lot of frustrated DPS are taking their past frustrations out on the gimped healers they find unprotected now and still focus damage elsewhere to win the game, because it is easy

 

So in short: Those who thinks they should be able to take healers down 1v1 easilly, no, you should not. DPS and Healer contribution to the game are direct opposit of each other, so 1v1 it should be stalemate if perfectly balance of skills, class and gear, which is utopia and impossible now.

Edited April 13, 2012 by Siega

[Eatmycritz]

I play dps, and yesterday we were running 5 premade groups with multiple healers of every class, all of whom had guards. From what i noticed... having healers gimps your team. It now seems to just be a zergfest and whoever has the most/best dps will win the match. Healing is terrible! Our Assassin (95valor) and fully tank geared was getting blown up in 2 seconds buy pugs having 2 healers on him! After playing many matches all of our healers respecced dps because healing was just completely impossible and no longer is skill related. Those saying bads just cant heal are wrong and dumb.... I dont heal but even I understand how bad it is to be a healer right now. DPS is too high.... the 12% buff to damage while healing remains the same is impossible for healers to heal.

 

 

 

Gone are the days of swapping between healer and guard back and forth until you land a kill.... gone are the days of CC....Healing is totally gimped atm, so roll dps. If you dont your gimping your team.

 

[Canarith]

I will just leave these two gems here of why I personally am not happy at all about my situation right now.

 

short info: I'm a heals specced scoundrel. almost full battlemaster set (I think the only things missing are hands and pants now)

 

 

we had a premade yesterday, 4 people, we got an insta-pop (bad sign? oh yes) ... we were thrown into a game of civil war that was at all 3 turrets capped by the other ops, and the points were around 600:270 (or something like that) ... guess what? we .stayed. and I ended up getting 2 medals. 2. our team stayed because we are no quitters. we got one turret and almost got a second turret (obviously way too late at that point so half the ops just went to stay at the turret we had) again.. I left with 2 medals. I got .nothing. for it. not a single thing. except the knowledge that my guild is not full of quitters.

 

 

then today, for the first time since starting this game (dec. 13th. heh), I quit a warzone.

 

it was a voidstar match. we were attacker. I'm healer.

I healed myself twice for roughly 5000k and didn't get a single medal for that (afaik that's a bug but annoying still) - then I got buttr* by 4 of them.

our ops was down to 3 people at that point (we only started with 4 and didn't get any extra people the whole match). the other ops were 8.

I went and started healing the other people in my ops (2) didn't get medals for that either.

I started 'dps' (I'm a healer) - obviously didn't get medals for that either because they buttr* me again. the last two 2 agreed to leave the ops and not requeue again. that was at about 4 minutes in. at that point there were only 6 lvl 50s on our side online.

 

 

 

 

 

oh yeah, of course, when I'm guarded and in a full team and winning (or an 'equal' match) medals RAIN on me, the highest I had so far was 11. granted that's not nearly as much as some others get, but I no longer get my medals just for healing, so that isn't so bad.

 

This post doesn't help your cause any. You came into a warzone that was already decidedly against you. You are not gonna get too many medals in a warzone where the other team has all 3 turrets. What do you want them to change on that.....most medals are largely based on time in Alderaan. Think of the medals you can get as a healer in this one, simply from sitting on one of the two turrets your team holds if you are ahead, or hell even one turret if you are behind: 75k healing/300k healing/2.5k single heal/5k single heal/1k defender pts/3k defender pts/5k defender pts/7.5k defender pts/10k defender points. This assumes you don't ever do anything but sit on one turret and help in any other way. It is NOT that hard to get medals as a healer. I healed all day yesterday and was getting plenty of medals, almost always at least the max of 8. You just gotta know what medals are available and go for them.

[Daayz]

/agree Edited April 14, 2012 by Daayz

[Zipzik]

You obviously have no idea what you are talking about.

 

no you

[pathiss]

You obviously have no idea what you are talking about.

 

Actually he does. Sorc/Sage healers, while OP against puggers who didnt know how to interrupt and shut them down, were nearly worthless and a liability outside of huttball in competitive play against enemies that knew how to neuter them.

 

The other hidden truth is that operative healers were more than ok BEFORE the patch and probably the best all around healer for competitive play.

 

So what happened?

 

The weakest healer got nerfed and the strongest healer got buffed. The only semi reasonable change was to my merc. That one feels about right.

[Canarith]

Well evidently you don't play enough. I have a lev 50 sorc healer almost full BW gear and i get 2-3 shotted quite a bit. Okay...one shotted was a bit extreme. But my point is dps whores always complain about healers. And you are wrong again. It should take team work for someone to take down an unsupported healer. The healer can't really take down 1-2 dps so why should 1-2 dps find it easy to take down the healer. Oh that's right....it's the dps whore I'm god syndrome and I should be able to kill anything fast that can't kill me.

 

My point is proven. DPS whores think they are above everything else support roles, utility, etc and that they should be able to kill with impunity. No problem, I've set aside my healer and I'm playing my sniper and teaching most dps whores they shouldn't have alienated the healers because I'm face rolling most of these bit ches because guess what.....they aren't getting heals and the heals they might get aren't enough to compensate for my dps. Karma is a bit ch and all you dps whores are finding that out now.

 

Pro or post nerf, I have never been 2 or 3 shot. Not even by an operative . No, never by a marauder either. Marauders do hit hard, but most of them I can heal through as a sorc.

[madtycoon]

I disagree, some people are born with it, some people are not.

 

PvP is the same way of thinking, either you got the juice or you don't.

 

FIN

 

Maybe to an extent, there are going to be faster players who are born that way. But take something like fake casting and wow (because it was brought up before). Go watch some of the old pvp videos from vanilla. You won't see fake casting at all. I mean it was for the most part non existant. Now how many years later, you see fake casting going on even in the 1500 bracket. The players evolved and got better, because imo the game forced them to get better.

[Amerailis]

The True Imbalance of The Game Post 1.2

 

Standard Imperial Team

3 Assassins

2 Powertech

2 Marauder

1 Operative or Mercenary

1 Sorcerer (Heals)

 

Standard Republic Team

2 Sage (Heals)

2 Commando (Heals)

2 Guardians

1 Shadow or Scoundrel

1 Commando (DPS)

 

Now, if you look at these setups (which on my server is 90% of games give or take 2 roles respectively) who do you think is going to win?

 

Now that damage > Healing having a team stacked with marauders and assassins is going to boast a win more often than not. Having a team stacked with squishy's, even if they ALL had a guard on them, is not going to get you anywhere. While all our "DPS," which is mostly guardians and Commando's who have yet to hotkey anything other than Grav Round, try to focus down the other teams solo healer the imps ridiculous damage throughput has put us in respawn before their healer has to pop CD's. This is why you see a trend on the forums of pub sages complaining far more than imp sorc's. I personally play a sage, and yes the nerf's sucked, but they were needed. I think we will see a hotfix soon to expertise bonus because i should be able to healing trance through a non CD'd assassins force lightning. But when said lightning is ticking for 2.5 k and my healing trance is hitting for around 800... well yeah that's not quite right. All in all i'm welcoming the changes, i stopped playing a bit pre 1.2 launch because there wasn't much more to aim for other than 700k healed games and 11 medal sage. Now doing well in a game as a healer requires ridiculous skill rather than just watching people beat on you while you cast a 1.2 second 4k heal on yourself. We do have an imbalance issue currently and anyone who denies that is smoking something i want nothing to do with (or do I...) Anyway, if we stick through it and allow the dev's to collect data from in-game and player feedback, we'll all be happy eventually (Even if it's only 2 of us at a time for a one to two month period)

 

 

"Paper is overpowered and needs to be nerfed, but leave scissors alone they're fine the way they are."

 

-Rock

 

 

More often teams looks like this on my side of things (Empire):

 

3-4 sorcs (Seriously, they're still everywhere I turn)

1 operative (Me)

whatever else...

 

 

 

...and for some reason I was in a game last night that had 4 Operatives... Really odd. But hey- we rocked it.

[Scoobings]

If I can kite and kill marauders with my gunslinger, you can handle them with your commando.

 

Healing is a support role. You're not gonna win warzones on your own, sorry. Your faction grunts are going to do that. Your role is to make sure that the grunts of the other faction die before yours; it's pretty much an attrition game. As a DPS, I do notice when someone's healing my target from behind. When I notice, I'm going to look for the healer and smash his face if you and your team let me. If you disrupt my attack, I die before I can do that.

I don't know if you ever played TF2. There's a medic class there, and as in TOR 1.2, it won't save his patient if the enemy gets a couple lucky crits or if the enemies focus fire.

In both cases however, he's soaking up damage, offering a health buffer to the whole team so that they die slower than their enemies. If your team survives longer, it can deal more damage and thus it can overpower the enemies.

 

So it's never been about keeping people alive. It's about buying time to outdamage the opposition.

 

This post makes the most sense out of any here. Commandos were absolutely insane pre-nerf. I don't really agree that sorcs needed nerfed as hard though... they didn't have near the survivability that commandos did.

[Erasimus]

Well evidently you don't play enough. I have a lev 50 sorc healer almost full BW gear and i get 2-3 shotted quite a bit. Okay...one shotted was a bit extreme. But my point is dps whores always complain about healers. And you are wrong again. It should take team work for someone to take down an unsupported healer. The healer can't really take down 1-2 dps so why should 1-2 dps find it easy to take down the healer. Oh that's right....it's the dps whore I'm god syndrome and I should be able to kill anything fast that can't kill me.

 

My point is proven. DPS whores think they are above everything else support roles, utility, etc and that they should be able to kill with impunity. No problem, I've set aside my healer and I'm playing my sniper and teaching most dps whores they shouldn't have alienated the healers because I'm face rolling most of these bit ches because guess what.....they aren't getting heals and the heals they might get aren't enough to compensate for my dps. Karma is a bit ch and all you dps whores are finding that out now.

 

Wrong again, about all I do is PvP in this game and in the over 8 years I've played MMOs I've always had a healer, most of the times my main. (Although on other games I've also done a fair bit of high end raiding.)

 

I stopped healing prior to 1.2 because it wasn't challenging. I may go back now and many of the healers I normally run with seem to be fine with the changes and are actually enjoying PvP more now.

 

Gear difference is huge and skill has become more critical. Small mistakes are magnified by the increase in DPS and decrease in healing. That is a fact. Does it need to dialed back maybe a bit? Sure I'll go along with that, but not too much. Personally I feel that the general direction of these changes has breathed new life into PvP, at least for me, and I was very close to un-subbing until 1.2.

[Rothoul]

Pro or post nerf, I have never been 2 or 3 shot. Not even by an operative . No, never by a marauder either. Marauders do hit hard, but most of them I can heal through as a sorc.

 

Then you've never met a competent player. I always get marked from the get go, stunned or double stunned and the ra_pe fest begins. Now I've adapted to this to but the changes to healing were not necessary....yes yes fix the bugs. The double heal crap was something I never used. I didn't know it existed until a few days ago so yeah I healed fair and square and I'm telling you the nerfing FB to DI was unwarranted and unnecessary. Healing properly per 1.2 was hard as my survivability was constantly under attack.

 

And no, I did not spec all the way up. I grabbed overload with the root to live longer and still would die quite a bit as good, competent players would use their interrupts often on me. The point is not so much about heals now as it is about whining, crying dps whores who think they are gods and should be treated accordingly. As I've said before, my sniper is loving the kill fest and the qqing because the healers are starting to disappear. I actually live longer as a sniper and if you get close to me, well you are just about as dead as you were 35 meters away. Karma bit ches, Karma.

Edited April 13, 2012 by Rothoul

[Zipzik]

Wrong again, about all I do is PvP in this game and in the over 8 years I've played MMOs I've always had a healer, most of the times my main. (Although on other games I've also done a fair bit of high end raiding.)

 

I stopped healing prior to 1.2 because it wasn't challenging. I may go back now and many of the healers I normally run with seem to be fine with the changes and are actually enjoying PvP more now.

 

Gear difference is huge and skill has become more critical. Small mistakes are magnified by the increase in DPS and decrease in healing. That is a fact. Does it need to dialed back maybe a bit? Sure I'll go along with that, but not too much. Personally I feel that the general direction of these changes has breathed new life into PvP, at least for me, and I was very close to un-subbing until 1.2.

 

You should have un-subbed

[SWImara]

One thing I will note in defense of those saying that healing is fine. The gear difference re-introduced in 1.2 through the hamfisted change to expertise is going to make non-Battlemaster players in a bad spot for a bit. I plan to basically junk my Champion/Centurion gear today and pick up the recruit set, basically starting over until I get full BM. Pre 1.2 playing in Centurion or Champion gear you were utterly fine against BM players if you were capable. The changes to expertise makes these sets decidedly undesirable now. Champion weapon is fairly worth holding on to, other than that it all seems to be garbage.

 

Fortunately it should only take a few weeks for gear to balance out again.

[Caeliux]

Actually he does. Sorc/Sage healers, while OP against puggers who didnt know how to interrupt and shut them down, were nearly worthless and a liability outside of huttball in competitive play against enemies that knew how to neuter them.

 

The other hidden truth is that operative healers were more than ok BEFORE the patch and probably the best all around healer for competitive play.

 

So what happened?

 

The weakest healer got nerfed and the strongest healer got buffed. The only semi reasonable change was to my merc. That one feels about right.

 

And yet again Sorc healers like myself is still producing huge numbers, and my pre-mades are winning.

 

You ever here this war quote?

 

"One person can shake a Empire with just a little effort and courage"

 

What does that mean?

 

A good player can shake a outcome in PvP if everyone is focusing and is playing as one.

 

FIN

Edited April 13, 2012 by Caeliux

[pathiss]

Marauders do hit hard, but most of them I can heal through as a sorc.

 

A bad maurader perhaps. A good marauder isn't going to let you get enough heals off to save yourself even if you could somehow match the raw output.