A Lot of Healers are Unhappy

[Vylettes]

Like others have said, pvp there is a case for sorcs to complain. But pve, i really do not notice a difference. I heal the same way i always did. I never leaned on the 2.5 sec cast heal when it was 1.5 sec cast , but i can understand that people who don't plan ahead with their healing would need to do such things.

[Tirantus]

I never over heated pre 1.2 and now i do now and again, if you did pre 1.2 thats pretty horrible...

Agreed. Pre 1.2 I've never once had to even slightly worry about my heat. Post 1.2 I think I've had heat issues in ops, FP's, and heroics MAYBE once or twice in prolonged boss fights, having bad tanks or overzealos dps.

[Sammuramat]

For a casual player in a casual guild it is a pain in the ***. PVP is now dead so I have less endgame cotent. We now struggle in EV hm which was already clear. So the patch was a major step backward for me as a working person with a family. I have two hours playtime a day. I could farm lots of weeks some black hole gear, that is not fun. We did not killed the second boss in the new flashpoint on hm, therefore we did not start with the new op.

 

So the patch closed a lot of endgame content for us and a good part of our guild have unsubs because they just lost the fun.

 

I like the game but the patch left out the casual players. SWTOR cannot survive with endgame content only for the hardcore gamers.

 

That is only my personal view and I may be wrong. But I also pay the 13Euro and I want to see the same endgame content as the others do.

Edited April 20, 2012 by Sammuramat
wrong spelling

[dragonfor]

For a casual player in a casual guild it is a pain in the ***. PVP is now dead so I have less endgame cotent. We now struggle in EV hm which was already clear. So the patch was a major step backward for me as a working person with a family. I have two hours playtime a day. I could farm lots of weeks some black hole gear, that is not fun. We did not killed the second boss in the new flashpoint, therefore we did not start with the new op.

 

So the patch closed a lot of endgame content for us and a good part of our guild have unsubs because they just lost the fun.

 

I like the game but the patch left out the casual players. SWTOR cannot survive with endgame content only for the hardcore gamers.

 

That is only my personal view and I may be wrong. But I also pay the 13Euro and I want to see the same endgame content as the others do.

Sorry to hear that you suck at a video game?

[Tirantus]

For a casual player in a casual guild it is a pain in the ***. PVP is now dead so I have less endgame cotent. We now struggle in EV hm which was already clear. So the patch was a major step backward for me as a working person with a family. I have two hours playtime a day. I could farm lots of weeks some black hole gear, that is not fun. We did not killed the second boss in the new flashpoint, therefore we did not start with the new op.

 

So the patch closed a lot of endgame content for us and a good part of our guild have unsubs because they just lost the fun.

 

I like the game but the patch left out the casual players. SWTOR cannot survive with endgame content only for the hardcore gamers.

If the current difficulty for ops is what you consider hardcore I honestly don't know what to say. Stacked against other

MMO's this games raid content is some of the easiest. Fact is if you're having that much trouble your guild is probably under geared. The majority of the raid group should be in full columi gear before doing HM's.

 

I can only play for a few hours a day myself. I work full time and have other hobbies outside this game. Using that as an excise doesn't mean you can't do said content. It just means it takes you longer to go through the gear progression that everyone else does.

That is only my personal view and I may be wrong. But I also pay the 13Euro and I want to see the same endgame content as the others do.

[XtremJedi]

There seems to be an assumption, that healers that leave the game must be bad healers who are failing to heal or finding it too difficult - and so don't want to play. I don't think that this is right at all. We all know that it's possible to still heal stuff. Even in PvP, it's possible to make a healing contribution - perhaps not as much as before, but still possible.

 

That isn't the issue for most people. It may be for some... but not for most, I fear.

 

I think that healers (and support classes, of which there are unfortunately none in ToR) tend to look for interesting game-play. They like their skill to be a real factor in success. They like affecting the way battles go by being good at what they do. They like a challenge - but just making it harder to generate the healing output to heal content doesn't make it more challenging. Making it harder to manage resources isn't as good as giving you a variety of tools from which you need to choose the right ones in varying situations.

 

Difficulty doesn't make for challenge. In fact, if anything, things got less challenging in many ways. Rotations have simplified, set patterns of healing have increased, viable variations in play have reduced, resource management has become less about choosing what to cast and when... more about choosing what not to cast.... none of this makes for more challenging play. It may be a bit harder to heal... but it's definitely not more challenging.

 

If other healers are happy with the game in general, despite all its faults, then I hope they continue enjoying it and healing in it. More power to them. But these characterisations of players who aren't happy as being bad or not up to 'the challenge' is neither founded in reality nor is it really good for the game. If people have justified issues with the changes but are dismissed as being bad players who just know no better... then their point of view may not be heard and that cannot be good.

 

Let's look at it from the other perspective; why do people choose to pay to play a game?

 

I know that for myself, I found the game-play in ToR to be pretty average. There weren't many really interesting mechanics going on in healing... with the possible exception of medics resource management. I played it in beta and thought it was a fairly solid but not innovative implementation of standard MMO stuff on the whole... but it seemed to have an interesting story line and there was promise of variety and being drawn into the story. There were some very annoying bugs around (Focus Targeting being a prime example) - but they would probably get fixed.

 

The reality worked out a bit differently. Missions, even on different planets, really followed the same patterns too often. Populations were low because of opening too many servers at launch, making grouping on many servers difficult. And then, people often weren't bothering much with heroics and lower level FPs when levelling alts either - which meant that actual opportunities for healing (or tanking) were coming up less and less often when levelling alts. It became more like a quite repetitive solo game, with co-op stuff in end-game.

 

But I still found enough interest in playing my 2 Sages and my Sorc - and was having at least some fun with my mid-30s Guardian tank... though not finding many opportunities to actually tank with him. When I did find groups, I often went for PuGs because that often offered more of a challenge as a healer. My other characters had fallen by the way-side because their game-play was dull and there really wasn't enough in the rest of the game to make me want to invest time on them.

 

So then 1.2 happens. The one class that I still find some interest in playing, gets nerfed in such a way as to make its game-play even less interesting than before. I don't mind the reduction in healing output - I think we absolutely needed that... and I would have loved to have to make more skillful judgements about what to cast when, based on force management as a constricting factor. But what actually happend was that my play-style got slower, less reactive, more tank focussed or based around casting AoE on CD and standing in it. There wasn't more skill or judgement needed... it got slower and clunkier. My force management became more about choosing not to cast than choosing what to cast and is still easy enough - very clunky and I spend half of my casts on my force management - but easy enough to do.

 

Incidentally, I wasn't too happy about what they did with Guardian Tanking either. Ops got buffed but nothing to address the lack of variety in game-play, lack of utility etc that people had actually been asking for since beta. Medics ended up with simplified rotations and quite a bit of what was interesting about their force-management nded up being spoiled. Many of those bugs and really bad design elements are still not sorted (Focus targeting, no filters/selective scaling on buffs/debuffs etc etc)... so I threw up my hands and gave up.

 

Why should I pay to play a game that is failing to deliver on the fairly average expectations that I had of it in the first place... and indeed seems to be getting worse not better?

 

I have a bunch of other games that I can play, that have more compelling and innovative game-play. Quite a few of them are even free to play. I play in perma-death guilds with very restrictive rule-sets in a couple of MMOs, because I love things being hard and really want my play to make a difference. And there are a bunch of new releases coming up in the near future that show more promise than this game does - especially when the ToR dev team signal their intent in terms of design and communication so disastrously in this patch.

 

I'm not somebody who runs from a challenge... but there is really no challenge involved in this game-play. There are no really interesting mechanics that require much skill to negotiate. BW made healing less interesting at a time when many players were wondering why they were paying for the game in the first place.

 

Meh... too long I suppose, for many to read. But you know... those people who are around the forums complaining so vociferously about these changes are doing so because they really want the game to work for them. They really want the game to improve so that they can get better... otherwise they would just disappear, stop posting and move on. It would be nice if so many people did not try to carelessly condemn them and disregard their feedback.

 

X

Edited April 20, 2012 by XtremJedi

[Thegriss]

and actually healing for me is a lot easier since 1.2 and yes i'm a sage. it just requires more thought something you obviously lack.

 

If healing is easier to you now then Pre 1.2 you where doing it wrong. My sorc was 2x the healer pre 1.2 than he is now. Sure My guild is still running HM/NM and the new denovo but the class sucks to play now lol. There is no variance in rotation no option its bland and weak compared to the pre 1.2 sorc. Again sure we can still get the job done but Sorcs feel gutted and optionless.

[Ewert]

From the merc point of view:

 

Their own design of high alacrity is now punished more than a heavy power/crit build

Their class mechanics of burst / cool-off (gas) is gone, since we no longer can chain-cast more than 3-4 skills

Their class mechanic of HS+RS, as in comboing together the two cast time healing skills, is now gone since HS is mathematically stronger spammed alone than comboed with RS

The reductions in heat now cause a lot more of Rapid Shots spam, as in "whack-a-mole" with a weak heal

The addition of heat cost to Kolto Shell totally removed all skill rewards from the skill, since swapping it around is no longer an option at all

The buffs on Kolto Missile, which if superbly managed could be kept up for a very good portion of time, are now so small that unless you can get reliably also heals with the missile to atleast 2 persons, it may not pay off overall

 

I could have lived with all that poop for a while IF we were still viable for ALL SPOTS of raiding. Examining the Stormcaller side of 2nd boss of EC HM 8man, I came to the conclusion that you should never have a BH healing that side. This was the tipping point for me. Sorcs still can overheal us by insane numbers due to their superstrong AoE, agents got enough buffs so they also overheal us by a fair margin. Imbalances like that are livable, if the 3rd healer is still viable for all spots, but, IMHO, the BH is not.

 

And I've solo healed pre-1.2 HM content, which was immensely harder than NM with 2 healers, nor have I seen a better BH or Trooper on my server in PvP, so I do not suck, IMHO.

[Xaearth]

Wow. The trolls are strong in this one. I'm guessing this was posted somewhere else and moved to the healer forum.

 

I do find all the comments about "healing takes more thought" or "healers have to be smart about skill usage" quite funny.

Healing takes 0 thought now people. You either push the buttons in the most efficient way without overhealing, or you don't.

 

Healing has nothing to do with group survival anymore either. Because there is no thought, no skillful application of knowledge, there is no upper range for a healer to succeed at. You're pulling the exact same healing numbers as any other healer that isn't woefully incompetent.

 

If you're doing the same as an average healer, and some average healers aren't making it through the content, then what's the difference between you and them? Your group. Not your skill, not your gear, your group.

 

Healbot. You see, where I come from that word means something very different I've come to learn. Apparently in WoW it's the norm. But in DDO, it's a serious insult. If all someone is capable of doing is playing whack-a-mole healing, they might as well be replaced with a scripted AI that can perform just as well if not better without having the possibility of RL interruptions.

 

That is what SW:TOR healing has been reduced to for 2 of the 3 healers. If they made the ship droid/healer companion AI not suck and actually made their healing throughput the least bit viable in endgame, Op/Scoundrel healers would immediately be obsoleted, as would Merc/Commando healers thanks to the nerfs.

[Tekkoclarky]

Cleared first 3 bosses with 2 wipes in total for 3 bosses in denova

 

Me - Sorc - Columni gear - Freind - Merc - Rakata gear

 

No problem at all ??????????

 

Story mode doesn't really count, you can do that without any thought.

 

Do HMs first 3 bosses with only 2 wipes and I might be impressed

[ErrantMercenary]

 

Healers just have to put more thought into what abilities they are using.

 

The nerfs did not make any AC "unviable" as people like to throw around.

 

 

I cut out the rest of your post because like anyone on either side of this flame war, the rest has been done to death. However I wanted to highlight these statements.

 

As to the first: This is false. I do not have to put more thought into what abilities I am using. Quite to the contrary, with my new ammo costs, I put infinitely LESS thought into what I'm using because it is no longer dictated by what's happening around me or what my party needs, it's dictated with few exceptions by resources. This is my major concern with the patch. Healing's too good? Fine, but going out of your way to make my job markedly less interesting by removing the performance gap between a knowledgeable player and a braindead one is never going to be an acceptable design philosophy, Star Wars Universe or not.

 

As an example Trauma Probe (which wasn't exactly doing much even when it was free) is now so resource inefficient that even if all ten charges get used AND I only recasted it when I had max ammo so as not to hinder my regen, is literally less effiective and efficient than if I had just casted Hammer Shot with that global cooldown instead. You can't sell that to me as "This involves more thought" I precast it once at the start of the battle, and then throw it off my bars.

 

 

The second issue of viability is a different one, because there is a matter of subjectivity to it, but here it is: I understand that it's tricky, but there is a stark difference between "viable" and "fun". As a reference: I direct you http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=420225. These are combat tests showing a Commando in Rakata gear getting outperformed by a Sage and a Scoundrel in a full raid tier of gear lower than his. Maybe (I don't have a second Commando available to test it myself) content is viable with two Combat Medics, but the other six members of the operation probably aren't going to put up with making the game any more difficult than it absolutely has to be and for players playing that class, it's distinctly un-fun to get benched for things that are out of your hands.

 

So what has to come about is that the various healing ACs need to come up with comparable results using different methods. Case in point, even in the new post-patch world, Sorc/Sage AoE healing so vastly out paces the other two ACs and so many boss fights revolve (from a healer's perspective) around groupwide damage that it is almost impossible to take BioWare seriously when they tell me that they're "tightening class balance" when they didn't seriously address the disparity causing imbalance in the first place.

Edited April 20, 2012 by ErrantMercenary

[swtorEleani]

The second issue of viability is a different one, because there is a matter of subjectivity to it, but here it is: I understand that it's tricky, but there is a stark difference between "viable" and "fun". As a reference: I direct you http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=420225. These are combat tests showing a Commando in Rakata gear getting outperformed by a Sage and a Scoundrel in a full raid tier of gear lower than his. Maybe (I don't have a second Commando available to test it myself) content is viable with two Combat Medics, but the other six members of the operation probably aren't going to put up with making the game any more difficult than it absolutely has to be and for players playing that class, it's distinctly un-fun to get benched for things that are out of your hands.

 

So what has to come about is that the various healing ACs need to come up with comparable results using different methods. Case in point, even in the new post-patch world, Sorc/Sage AoE healing so vastly out paces the other two ACs and so many boss fights revolve (from a healer's perspective) around groupwide damage that it is almost impossible to take BioWare seriously when they tell me that they're "tightening class balance" when they didn't seriously address the disparity causing imbalance in the first place.

 

Yeah the numbers are still quite ok for the sorc, I personally had no problem healing EV/KP nightmare before and after the patch. That being said I put a lot of work into my gear (current stats around 675bonus heal, 35% crit and enough alcrity to push my DI to 2.2seconds down) and play in a quite good performing ops-group.

We cleared EC-story on the first evening and currently progressing through hardmode (without checking guides etc, we wanted to figure out the bosses on our own to keep the fun and rest of challenge there is).

Almost any fight I due well because of a single spell: revivication. Stack a few players in it, spam shields on CD, hot and innervate for proc on consumption (have no mana issues even if it feels just silly to spend 12.6% life - "thx" for the bug btw - every time I want to regenerate force for healing...). When only one player, e.g. the tank, just precast DI nad cancel if it's not needed...

Conclusion: It's BORING, sorc heal is steady and powerful, but it's sooo slow. It feels like a fly stuck to tree-gum...

My subscription ended yesterday due to the lack of fun in PVP: "Oh look, a healer left in PVP!! FACEROLL him!!!!" and the slumberous PVE-playstyle. Give me 5-6spell to choose from and use them correctly, invent dispell mechanics, create encounter where my grip has a real purpose etc...

That would have made the encounters harder and more challenging! Just a plain nerf to healing was the worst idea you ever had, as it fu**ed up PVP with it...

I feel sad about leaving my guild in the raidn, as currently competent healers are impossible to find. Every evening the General Fleet Chat is flooded by " LF heal for OPs"... Why oh why might that be?

 

But thanks to Georg "the clueless" Zoellner post in the pvp-section today I can stop wasting my time waiting for a change. "Almost everthing is working as intended"

Edited April 20, 2012 by swtorEleani