For your consideration - I fixed it!

[Darthbluginal]

The state of PvP at the moment feels like a high school game of floor hockey. Its a zergfest with little skill and control needed. Here is some serious suggestions to atleast fix sorc/sage. The honestly feel the weakest in PvP,

 

TL;DR - The fun has been taken out of sorcs, add some CD's and decision making to bring it back. No one likes to play a game of whack-a-mole healing, Making the correct decisions and being competitive is what makes being a healer fun.

Most of my comparisons are going to be to commando healers, Operatives are good atm and with them having HoTS, it is hard to make direct comparisons.

 

Please remember that the numbers I am giving are tooltip numbers and do not include the 30% Trauma reduced healing debuff.

1) Give sorcs a 45 second Cooldown Instant cast.- Commando's have an 18 second Instant cast that hits for ~2k plus an ability that makes there next ability an instant cast (Nature swiftness if you're from WoW)

 

2) Reduce the deliverance cast time from 2.5 to 2.3, this may seem small, but in pvp it is huge, a 2.5 second cast is incredibly difficult to get off and has become almost useless. Also with this slightly lower cast time, reduce the amount it heals by ~200 on the tooltip (currently 2733-2877 for me)

3) Increase the amount Benevolence heals by 300, increase its cost by 14 force. (Currently 1373-1517)

**The changes for 2/3 will force us to make the decisions between quick but expensive heals while being pressure or casual standard heals. For a comparison Commando heals for 1.8s cast 2000-2287 or 1.36 s 1386-1672.

 

4) When applied to self, Force shield increases force regen by 7 Force per second, when the shield is removed (DMG or Expires) 55 force is restored, a more reliable force regen mechanic, if combined with lifetap, this can still bring the force regen rate to 0.

 

5) A DMG reduction cooldown. Our only defensive cooldown is sprint....which the mobility of it should be what makes up for our light armor. Going back to commando's in their heavy armor; they have a Defensive Cooldown that reduces damage by 25% while increasing healing received by 20% on a 2 minute CD. We have absolutly nothing while wearing light armor.

 

6) A shield that prevents damage is by definition protection. So why is Force Armor considered healing when it protects a target? These numbers are skewing peoples veiw of the healing output of a sorc/sage.

 

It seemed that the goal was to make sorcs/sages the "traditional mmo" style healer. These changes would make them follow that suit very well.

 

Every DPS player I am with tells me how ridiculously easy it is to kill a sorc/sage. They struggle with OPS, as it should be a struggle a healer 1v1. Right now a bad dps can kill any sorc eventually. A good DPS can kill a sorc quickly. And these are without the DPS having to pop cooldowns. I have been around, I know what I am doing but I cant outlive a DPS even with popping cooldowns, and working extremely hard to kite/LoS CC and baiting interrupts.

 

 

EDITED** I also wanted to suggest changing the trauma debuff from 30% to 25% and slightly increasing the Dmg reduction of expertise. I think that would bring a ton of balance, skill, and coordination into PvP, while addressing some of the ridiculous burst potential.

 

PLEASE, sign below in agreement to these changes. To get attention from devs these types of threads need a decent amount of discussion. Even if you disagree, please post why and what changes would make more sense.

Edited April 26, 2012 by Darthbluginal

[LancelotOC]

I dont know about Deliverance change of just .2 coupled with a Benevolence increase of 14 force. Your new abilities aside we'd probobly die even faster imho.

[Legonick]

signed, healers (besides opeeratives) just feel very squishy with little to do about it, I can't spec into survivability because of the trees and light armor doesn't help

[Darthbluginal]

I dont know about Deliverance change of just .2 coupled with a Benevolence increase of 14 force. Your new abilities aside we'd probobly die even faster imho.

 

0.2 second differance is massive in pvp. It may seem small. But that amount is a significant change in actually being able to get that heal off.

Edited April 26, 2012 by Darthbluginal

[LancelotOC]

I am aware how big .2 is, I just have distinct memories of DPS coming around corners and interupting the pre 1.2 Deliverance. So I feel that .2 will not amount to the desired effect you are hoping for and standing still these days is a dicey decision.

 

Regardless these changes were done to balance pve, in part, so unless the PVE servers are experiancing a considerable drop in end game content attempts, like to the dangerous level where people start quitting from frustration with the current added difficulty, I doubt BW would buff the big heal.

 

Sorry to be a negative nancy

[Darthbluginal]

I am aware how big .2 is, I just have distinct memories of DPS coming around corners and interupting the pre 1.2 Deliverance. So I feel that .2 will not amount to the desired effect you are hoping for and standing still these days is a dicey decision.

 

Regardless these changes were done to balance pve, in part, so unless the PVE servers are experiancing a considerable drop in end game content attempts, like to the dangerous level where people start quitting from frustration with the current added difficulty, I doubt BW would buff the big heal.

 

Sorry to be a negative nancy

 

Very true. The game should be balanced around PvE and PVP. And tbh playing in pve pre all these changes just felt like there wasnt enough pressure being put out there, instead of nerf batting sorcs over the top, they should have just increased the dmg output and or pressure being applied in PvE.

 

Thats for the raiding forums though.

 

I also wanted to suggest changing the trauma debuff from 30% to 25% and slightly increasing the Dmg reduction of expertise. While I think that would bring a ton of balance, skill, and coordination into PvP I didnt want to come off as over eager with changes I guess. But I should put those up there, I dont expect every change to happen anyway.

[RuQu]

6) A shield that prevents damage is by definition protection. So why is Force Armor considered healing when it protects a target? These numbers are skewing peoples veiw of the healing output of a sorc/sage.

 

It is considered healing because it is. By applying a shield with a fixed value (2.5k for example), you just prevented the next 2.5k of damage. That is 2.5k that you do not need to heal. If you were a Merc instead, you would need to cover that 2.5k with actual healing.

 

Assuming your bubble absorbs 2.5k (and I'm just making up a number right now), and you don't have the set bonus so the debuff lasts 21s, your shield on 1 target amounts to 119HPS that another healer needs to provide over a long fight. In a burst situation, your 2.5k shield is equivalent to an instant heal worth 1666HPS, on a 21s cooldown. While I am fairly sure Bacta Infusion (Commando instant with a 21s cooldown) heals for more, FA can be placed on multiple people.

 

As for your suggestions in general, they are good in theory but I think you miss two very key points.

 

1) The PvP Developers came to BW from Mythic, and have a track record of not wanting healers in PvP at all.

 

2) The simplification of healers in Patch 1.2, moving towards more static rotations and pure whack-a-mole gameplay, was intentional. They limited medpacs to only 1 per fight explicitly to make healing modeling easier on them. Before 1.2, I considered Sages too difficult to model, since they had so many options. Any simulation would be making so many assumptions that it would have no relationship to actual fight behavior. Post-1.2, I am in the process of making a Sage healing sim because there are only a couple of possible rotations. This is what the Devs wanted, so they can make models of their own, to aid their much beloved "metrics."

 

Finally, to the later poster, yes PvE is seeing a mass exodus of healers. The Healer forum has gone nearly silent, and those who still post report mostly no longer healing. A poll of healers across the forums got >700 responses, and ~25% of all healers (19-27 depending on class, with 24% total if my memory is correct) have unsubscribed. Others have simply rerolled DPS. There are numerous threads with people reporting being unable to find healers. The healer forum gets threads from people asking how to heal since their guild lost all of their healers and as a Sage they want to try and help. Etc, etc, and so on.

[Darthbluginal]

It is considered healing because it is. By applying a shield with a fixed value (2.5k for example), you just prevented the next 2.5k of damage. That is 2.5k that you do not need to heal. If you were a Merc instead, you would need to cover that 2.5k with actual healing.

 

As for your suggestions in general, they are good in theory but I think you miss two very key points.

 

1) The PvP Developers came to BW from Mythic, and have a track record of not wanting healers in PvP at all.

 

 

For the bolded part. I understand where they are coming from but what you just said is the definition of protection. Preventing damage = protection. If a tank puts gaurd on a target and that reduces damage taken by 50% and redirects some damage should the damage reduction portion be considered healing since they have now prevented a player from needing to heal that damage?

 

Say you put yourself in a bubble your whole life to prevent yourself from getting sick. Should that now be considered a cure for the flu?

 

This may be because I came from other MMO's (Not just WoW) where Shielded damage was not considered healing.

 

As for the Mythic devs. That is very dissapointing to hear. After failing in other MMO's you would think they would try something else. They need to make this game fun for everyone, not have a specific target of player types that the game should be fun for. Hopefully, they listen a little and learn from past mistakes.

[RuQu]

For the bolded part. I understand where they are coming from but what you just said is the definition of protection. Preventing damage = protection. If a tank puts gaurd on a target and that reduces damage taken by 50% and redirects some damage should the damage reduction portion be considered healing since they have now prevented a player from needing to heal that damage?

 

Say you put yourself in a bubble your whole life to prevent yourself from getting sick. Should that now be considered a cure for the flu?

 

This may be because I came from other MMO's (Not just WoW) where Shielded damage was not considered healing.

 

As for the Mythic devs. That is very dissapointing to hear. After failing in other MMO's you would think they would try something else. They need to make this game fun for everyone, not have a specific target of player types that the game should be fun for. Hopefully, they listen a little and learn from past mistakes.

 

While you are correct that that is protection, I think you are creating a false dichotomy between the two.

 

Is a vaccine to prevent a disease not medicine? Is it better to prevent the measles, or to treat it once you are infected?

 

You will see these arguments on healer specific forums frequently, when healers debate the merits of what they call "utility."

 

Some things truly are pure utility, such as a Sage's Rescue ability. You can't really ever put a number on the use of that. Perhaps you yanked a slow Sentinel out of fire, or out of range of a 1-shot boss ability. You just "healed" for 20000 HP in 1 cast! Or, maybe you just annoyed the hell out of them and didn't save any damage at all. It is a good tool, but it is only situationally useful and impossible to quantify.

 

In contrast, two of the healers apply an armor buff to their heal targets. This prevents damage, and makes healing easier, leaving the third healer (Sc/Op) at a slight disadvantage. While impossible to quantify on its own, with logs or simulations of incoming damage and data/estimates on tank stats, you can put a value on what this effective healing is.

 

In fact, I would argue that "healing" is too narrowly defined by most players, and, in this game's failed healing design, by the Developers. The healing role can be accomplished through a number of methods.

• There is the basic simplicity of direct heals and HoTs.
  
• You can also heal through absorption, as we see with Sage bubbles, which has the added benefit of increasing the effective health pool. This increased effective health pool is why Sage bubbles are so useful and desired for Soa Lightning Balls.
  
• You can "heal" through defensive buffs. Armor increases, %DR reductions.
  
• You can "heal" through offensive debuffs. Anything you put on the boss that decreases output decreases your needed HPS.
  
• You can "heal" through CC.
  
• You can "heal" with offensive buffs. Anything that decreases the duration of the fight decreases the total damage taken. This allows you to be less efficient, because you can go OOF in 4 minutes instead of 5, so you can afford to slip in some higher HPS abilities. This is really more of a concern in Mana-style classes, like Sages, where resource exhaustion is an issue.
  

 

Now, you might claim that I am painting too broad of a picture of what constitutes healing, but let's take two exaggerated sample classes and an example boss to look at this concepts.

 

First, the boss. He has 1,000,000 HP, and he hits for 1000 DPS. Our tank has 20,000 HP, and the raid group does 10,000 DPS combined, from all sources.

 

Healer A is a very basic healer (ie an Operative). They have a simple rotation of sustainable direct heals and HoTs, and they heal for 1000 HPS. The tank will survive, and the boss will die in 100s. The healer may also die of extreme boredom.

 

Healer B is a super-complex healer (no SWTOR equivalent). They have a debuff they put on the boss that slows attack speed by 20%. They have a set of buffs they put on the tank that decreases damage taken by 10%. They have an offensive buff that effectively increases Operation-wide DPS by 20%. The fight now lasts only 83s, and the tank only sees 720 DPS coming in.

 

The healer mana pool must be equal to or greater than (net rotation cost per second)*(fight duration). Since this is only a concern for mana-style resources, like a Sage, and not for small-pool, fast-regen style like Mercs, let's assume that mana pool = 600.

For Healer A: 600 Mana = (Rotation Mana Cost Per Second)*100s => Net Rotation Cost cannot exceed 6 MPS.

For Healer B: @83s, Net Rotation Cost cannot exceed 7.23 MPS.

 

Note that these MPS rates have nothing to do with the raw HPS itself, they are for resource consumption over the fight. That means that casting all of those buffs and debuffs plus the heals can, in total, be 20% less efficient and still heal the same fight.

 

You may notice that I didn't use an absorption shield for either Healer A or B. This is because we have already seen that it can be treated as part of the base HPS, by simply dividing the amount it heals by the frequency of shielding. Reactive heals, like Commando Trauma Probe, and HoTs can be treated exactly the same way. Absorption is proactive, Reactive shields are (obviously) reactive, and HoTs are passive with a tendency to over-heal, but they all serve the same purpose of padding the raw HPS number of direct heals through being maintained instead of spammed.

[Aritok]

The state of PvP at the moment feels like a high school game of floor hockey. Its a zergfest with little skill and control needed. Here is some serious suggestions to atleast fix sorc/sage. The honestly feel the weakest in PvP,

 

TL;DR - The fun has been taken out of sorcs, add some CD's and decision making to bring it back. No one likes to play a game of whack-a-mole healing (ask commandos), Making the correct decisions and being competitive is what makes being a healer fun.

Most of my comparisons are going to be to commando healers, Operatives are good atm and with them having HoTS, it is hard to make direct comparisons.

 

Please remember that the numbers I am giving are tooltip numbers and do not include the 30% Trauma reduced healing debuff.

1) Give sorcs a 45 second Cooldown Instant cast.- Commando's have an 18 second Instant cast that hits for ~2k plus an ability that makes there next ability an instant cast (Nature swiftness if you're from WoW)

Thats a joke, isnt it? Sages have this already. Its called FORCE ARMOR. and its far superior to the 31 skill BI from commandos. On top of it the sage 31 point healer skill is topping everything right now.

 

2) Reduce the deliverance cast time from 2.5 to 2.3, this may seem small, but in pvp it is huge, a 2.5 second cast is incredibly difficult to get off and has become almost useless. Also with this slightly lower cast time, reduce the amount it heals by ~200 on the tooltip (currently 2733-2877 for me)

I would sugest to get alacrity in exchange for surge if you want to heal less in faster time. Ahh, no. true. Surge has a better ratio as Alacrity. Great. Please, do this for all heals, so i dont need alacrity anymore and can use surge instead.

 

3) Increase the amount Benevolence heals by 300, increase its cost by 14 force. (Currently 1373-1517)

**The changes for 2/3 will force us to make the decisions between quick but expensive heals while being pressure or casual standard heals. For a comparison Commando heals for 1.8s cast 2000-2287 or 1.36 s 1386-1672.

I can agree that Benevolence at the current state is the less used spell (at least for me). I only use it when the force is no problem, and i need some really fast heals. Nice idea for PVE, but this change would make the spell for PVP a bit to broken.

 

4) When applied to self, Force shield increases force regen by 7 Force per second, when the shield is removed (DMG or Expires) 55 force is restored, a more reliable force regen mechanic, if combined with lifetap, this can still bring the force regen rate to 0.

You want to make force armor, a spell that cost a healer only 35 force, give you back at least 55 or more AND heal yourself for around 3500 or more? You must be nuts. This would make the sage even better as he was before 1.2.

Hell, one force armor would give you back 265 force for a cost of 35 with only one GCD. Sure, great idea if you want to kill every other healer and make the sage the new uberhealer.

 

5) A DMG reduction cooldown. Our only defensive cooldown is sprint....which the mobility of it should be what makes up for our light armor. Going back to commando's in their heavy armor; they have a Defensive Cooldown that reduces damage by 25% while increasing healing received by 20% on a 2 minute CD. We have absolutly nothing while wearing light armor.

Nothing but a permanent 4% damage reduction. And the sprint with relative short cooldown to get away from anyone (compared to a short damage reduction where you are at the end still next to the person who hits you).

 

6) A shield that prevents damage is by definition protection. So why is Force Armor considered healing when it protects a target? These numbers are skewing peoples veiw of the healing output of a sorc/sage.

They dont count as healing for the combat pareser. If they did, i bet no one would ever again complain about sage healers at all. The healing numbers are already by far better than the other two healers. And this force armor is not even in it. At least in PVP you can finally see a bit how incredible the force armor is.

 

It seemed that the goal was to make sorcs/sages the "traditional mmo" style healer. These changes would make them follow that suit very well.

No. These changes would skyrocket the sage way over the 1.1.5 standing. In case you dont noticed it so far. Sages are still the best healers.

 

Every DPS player I am with tells me how ridiculously easy it is to kill a sorc/sage. They struggle with OPS, as it should be a struggle a healer 1v1. Right now a bad dps can kill any sorc eventually. A good DPS can kill a sorc quickly. And these are without the DPS having to pop cooldowns. I have been around, I know what I am doing but I cant outlive a DPS even with popping cooldowns, and working extremely hard to kite/LoS CC and baiting interrupts.

And the difference to any other healer is what again? Healers are ..... in PVP. Thats not sage only. No healer can win a fight 1vs1 anymore on semi equal level. And even in a team you would have been better with a DPS instead of a healer. These who say healers are still fine in a team play premade vs random and/or Battlemaster gear vs recrute. Basicly not playing on the same level as their opponents.

The 1.2 patch ruined healer for PVP. Healer nerf combined with expertise nerf was way to hard.

And no, a bad DPS cant kill a sage at all. Same as with any other healer. Because no matter how bad a class is, a brainless player cant do anything as walking forward (zombie style).

Without any expertise two player might be equal. But as higher the expertise goes, as more overpowered the DPS class becomes right now.

 

EDITED** I also wanted to suggest changing the trauma debuff from 30% to 25% and slightly increasing the Dmg reduction of expertise. I think that would bring a ton of balance, skill, and coordination into PvP, while addressing some of the ridiculous burst potential.

Agree, and still not enough to compensate the double expertise bonus for DPS compared to healers.

 

PLEASE, sign below in agreement to these changes. To get attention from devs these types of threads need a decent amount of discussion. Even if you disagree, please post why and what changes would make more sense.

You play for sure a sage, and only a sage? Else you would not ask for these changes at all. Dont get me wrong, i play sage as well. Along with Commando healer. So i know the difference between these two really well. And to be honest, i didnt play a healer anymore in PVP. Because i lost the fun in PVP when i get killed within a few sec by the high geared PVP DPS machines. I am not going to spend days and weeks, losing in PVP to get equal gear.

But the parts you asked for would total screw up the PVE at all. And make the sages overpowered and the only healer at all.

Current numbers of healings in PVE: Commando around 1000 HPS, Scoundrel around 1200 HPS. Sage around 1500 HPS.

I hope this show you where the current problem is. Hint, its not the sages.....

The biggest problem is, the commando HPS is hard limited to a short time. The sage can always burst out a bit more for some time. No idea about scoundrel.

 

It would be easier when BW would merge the 3 healers to one. Comagrel or Saundo.

But you ask for all the parts the commando has and the sage is missing and want to add these to the sage. But total ignore that the sage has as well alot more specials over the commando.

 

Or in other words, you can get all these changed. But:

- the new instant heal replace your ae heal as the 31 skill spell. And its only 30 sec.

- Your force armor is only a force regen buff and not absorbing any damage anymore. Its called "force buff" now. But it just double the regen of any resource that is cast on. Can be cast on others as well to improve their regen (have fun with perma buffing everyone).

- The 25% damage reduce buff roots you where you stand and lower your cast time by half.

- You get a short duration haste spell that double the force cost of all heals during this time.

- the Benevolence change make it to a 30k heal. But the cost is 600 force now.

[RuQu]

Don't get us wrong, Darth, we aren't trying to tear you apart. Bear in mind that some of these discussions have been held 15-50+ times over on the Healer forums since around launch in one thread or another, and we've seen most every variant possible. It's good that you want to try and suggest improvements, as suggesting solutions is a key part of constructive feedback.

 

So far we haven't seen any sign that the Devs have listened to anything the Healers have said, and all indications are that they either don't care and/or have no vision of how they want Healers to work, especially in PvP.

 

Perhaps posting on the PvP forums, where rumors say the Devs reside, will get more of a response. I'm not holding out hope, though.

 

In the interest of balancing PvP, the answer has always been the same, and will remain the same. It is a two-fold answer, and the two options can work independently but work best together.

 

1) Class-specific Trauma debuff. When you zone into a WZ, your AC is checked and the right version of Trauma is applied. This allows for fine-tuning of class balance within PvP without disturbing PvE balance. DPS, HPS, resource efficiency, # HP, Shield %, etc can all be fine tuned at the class level if there is an imbalance.

 

2) Stat normalization. *Waits for the outcry to die down* Provide one tier, and one tier only, of PvP mods. The stat budget is fixed, but players can itemize how they choose to decide on crit heavy vs alacrity heavy builds, etc. PvP reward gear is cosmetic only. Any item equipped that isn't from a PvP vendor will be treated as an empty slot within a WZ.

Ask yourself, why do you PvP?

• To test your skill against other players and avoid the scripted repetitiveness of PvE? In that case standard stats put you on an equal footing and let your skill shine through.
  
• To slaughter people without your high level of PvP gear? You don't really enjoy PvP then, you enjoy ganking newbs. Roll on a PvP server and go grief some people on Tattoine or Alderaan.
  

 

You can then give a player a solo queue and group queue win-loss ratio record and attempt to group them accordingly, so they fight people of similar skill.

 

These solutions are blindingly obvious. While some coding would be necessary, ie breaking creating 8 ranks of Trauma, adding a flag to PvP gear, and adding a check when entering a WZ to assign Trauma and "break" PvE mods, it is far easier to implement the above than it is to attempt to concurrently balance PvE and PvP. In their coming expansion, WoW is adding "Challenges" which are dungeons where they assign you a standard stat distribution so that only your skill decides if you can complete the challenge, and you can never out-gear the content. I don't think they have yet moved in this direction for PvP (I haven't played WoW in 6 months), but the gating of PvP gear based on Arena rating helped keep gear fairly consistent across matched groups.

 

In the end, I think any and all suggestions are wasted on Bioware. I think the people in charge have too much pride to ever acknowledge that they can make a mistake, and far, far too much to ever lower themselves to asking the community for suggestions. Which is a shame, since the players are a large, free pool of invested people which would make a great opportunity for crowd-sourcing idea generation.

[LancelotOC]

Yep no one is trying to rip you apart, as a fellow healer and a sage I'm genuinly happy you took the effort to post your ideas.

 

What Ruqu is saying is also true. The Mythic Devs, that are now the BW devs do not like pvp stalemates or tank healers or any situation where the sum of a battle does not end up with people dying on both sides. They have coded to that style for years and this argument of making healing stronger has been made to them for years on this game and on previous games and they havent bent before.

 

Also as far as the classification of healing, you have to always think of things as they are related to TTK. TTK means time to kill. It would be your hitpoints affected by your mitigation to incoming damage over the DPS of that incoming damage.

 

So for all quantitative analysis purposes a bubble or your armor or an endurance buff or the defensive component of equiment you wear or guard or kiting around a corner to break LOS or a CC spell cast on the attacking DPS or mid combat stealth or a heal spell are all part of healing .. as they all are things that make you survive longer.

Edited April 26, 2012 by LancelotOC

[Darthbluginal]

I really see where you guys are coming from with the shield being considered a burst heal sine it gives the ~3k cushion talented of health.

I think I just have the priest class from WoW stuck in my head, because that is what a Sage feels like. And damage absorption on meters was in a separate category from healing done. People see my healing totals at the end of a WZ and think wow! your healing output was 550k!? Well no... I just spammed shields on everyone as often as possible...

My personal view of healing output and damage absorption is that they are 2 separate things.

 

I do play a marauder as well and I was not very good at it. But I was able to take down sage/sorc healers. I should really correct that, a bad melee DPS can eventually kill a sage, its a lot tougher for ranged with the amount of LoS mechanics to use.

 

I just want more decision making rather than just who to heal, I want fun in having to decide how to heal. And using making decisions for surviving. Instead of just sprint away and LoS as soon as you get pressured.

 

I do think that commando numbers need to be increased. there Direct healing should be better than a sorc/sage since our AoE healing is better.

 

 

I already have alacrity and my base cast of deliverance is down to 2.2 seconds. But that is still nearly impossible to get off in pvp. If you dont PvP you should go in and try to get a few of those off, with the amount of interrupts, knock backs,CC's, leaps (which also interrupt), and pulls...... its very very difficult.

Im in full battlemaster, and they said the survivability of a sorc increases with expertise by alot.... well...2 mauraders leap on me and I die in a few seconds, no stopping it.

 

I do not know how to balance these things with PvE, but as for PVP...something needs to be done to inject fun into being a sage. I may reroll a commando to test out the style.

[RuQu]

"Fun" is not quantifiable, and therefore has no metric to measure it. As such, BW does not consider it a factor worthy of consideration, and has done their best to distill it out of the healer classes as much as possible.

 

I hope you enjoy the Commando, I really do. Don't roll one expecting decisions though, there aren't any to be found there.

[LancelotOC]

May I suggest you read through the lines that Ruqu and I have posted. If you are dying too fast the answer lies in raising your time to die. The easiest and most effective way to raise your time to die on a Sorc is to raise Defence. The reason being your base defence, or chance to dodge/deflect is 10% ..or one in ten attacks. If you can raise it to 15% it will become roughly 1 in 6. Three additional hits defended against at current burst levels means you can have as much as 10,000 more hitpoints in a 10 GCD cycle on average than you have now. Can you then outheal 6 enemy attacks in 10 GCDs yourself? You heal and watch others.. who lasts long and why... think about it. Edited April 27, 2012 by LancelotOC

[Darthbluginal]

May I suggest you read through the lines that Ruqu and I have posted. If you are dying too fast the answer lies in raising your time to die. The easiest and most effective way to raise your time to die on a Sorc is to raise Defence. The reason being your base defence, or chance to dodge/deflect is 10% ..or one in ten attacks. If you can raise it to 15% it will become roughly 1 in 6. Three additional hits defended against at current burst levels means you can have as much as 10,000 more hitpoints in a 10 GCD cycle on average than you have now. Can you then outheal 6 enemy attacks in 10 GCDs yourself? You heal and watch others.. who lasts long and why... think about it.

 

You suggesting, as a healer, I stack defensive stats? Expertise is what is suppose to reduce TTK. Stacking Defense as a healer is ridiculous...and if that really is what there design is, then this game is a lot worse than i thought.

[RuQu]

You suggesting, as a healer, I stack defensive stats? Expertise is what is suppose to reduce TTK. Stacking Defense as a healer is ridiculous...and if that really is what there design is, then this game is a lot worse than i thought.

 

Bad news, it's a lot worse than you thought.

 

That's why so many of us have stopped healing, or stopped playing altogether.

 

Expertise boosts Damage Done >> Damage Taken >> Healing Done. If you rely on Expertise alone, you might as well reroll DPS right now, because they are actively trying to force healers out of PvP through the latest round of patch changes.

 

Lancelot's suggestion is a clever solution to the problem. Defense is usable by all classes, unlike Shield and Absorption which requires a shield that you can't equip. PvP specs rely fairly heavily on internal and elemental damage, and armor piercing, which cut through a lot of a tanks defenses. The only thing that cuts through Defense, though, is Accuracy, which isn't highly valued in PvP.

 

He isn't suggesting you stack Defensive stats, just Defense rating. Don't use a Defense + Absorb mod, use a Defense + Alacrity. They exist.

 

Consulars and Inquisitors already have a natural 5% bonus to Defense, so you are at an advantage. The early part of the curve rises quickly, so those first few points are the most valuable.

 

Every hit that misses is a hit that you don't need to heal.

[wolfmith]

I don't know about your suggestions, what I do know is that for PvP, healer sorc needs some improvement. Other than premade with a really good tank (those rare who can really protect, use taunts, whatever else they got) or another healer is fail unless their team is really bad. If they don't look for the healer, it's ok. If they have some brains, we can't do anything. Too many (long) casts, too long shield debuff, whatever. Something needs to change.