Class Changes: Medicine Operative / Sawbones Scoundrel

[AllisonLightning]

he will probably sit there happily kolto waving a bunch of people who are already at full hp, then look at his numbers and be like oh wow these nerfs did nothing i'm still doing 12k hps

 

He probably is one of those that won't jump to break a channel and instead of bouncing heals off a tank- he probably focus targets Eric while he stands in stupid and goes 'look at my EHPS... aren't I awesome'- no, you have a frellwit for a DPS while his tank dies. And doesn't know how the TA nerf will hurt because he's hardly ever got any up because who needs procs when you can spam Kolto Waves/Underworld Medicine... oops out of energy and his tank died, again!

 

Note: I've had a pain of a week, this and the Marauders healing better than us made me laugh although your observation is probably true. Numbers can mean very little, a high EHPS can just mean you had some very, very stupid DPS with high DTPS numbers than healing you are required to do to clear content.

[dscount]

I'm sure these change will have a great impact to the bottom line as people once again leave.

 

Thanks Bioware! Appreciate you helping people out the door.

 

Whose great idea was it to NERF a majority of the classes instead of just BUFF those few that needed to be brought up a bit?

[AdjeYo]

I can understand the nerfing if Recuperative Nanotech and HoTs in general. Hell I can even understand nerfing diagnostic scan crits and TA gain to make energy management slightly more difficult. But I just can't understand why they felt they needed to nerf the surge bonus on our biggest hitting single target insta heals. This area is exactly where Operatives are lacking. I'd happily take a nerf too Kolto Waves and even a nerf to Kolto Probes to keep that surge bonus

[lawfig]

They say they gave us some burst, I say they really didn't give us much at all and took away a lot. They took away 10% crit healing bonus on kolto injection and kolto infusion. So those will be doing less heals, which means less burst. They took away 20% bonus healing when you crit on surgical probe. That's a big removal of burst. They take away the healing bonus granted by surgical probe to increase surgical probes healing. More burst gone. Then a reduction in HOT healing. Then making it only a 10% chance to get tactical advantage?

What? It's gonna be a lot harder to keep everyone's double probes up with that. So we will end up spending more energy by clicking probe instead and suffer from energy problems.

I usually always take Curative agent for that extra burst on kolto infusion, now if I take it I lose that burst and it turns into a HOT.

I personally don't like these changes. They give us a boost to kolto infusion but also nerf it at the same time along with every other single target "burst" heal, such as kolto injection and surgical probe. Then they nerf HOT's at the same time. These changes are going to make it a lot more difficult to heal in HM and NIM operations.

 

I'm pretty tired of the nerfs. Just when you think you know what you are doing they change everything. Additionally since I we can do with higher levels is grind until a new chapter comes out, I really hate having to figure out what's changed on each combat spec. IMO they need to spend more time on content and less on nerfs.

[Spankdog]

alot of the nerfs come do to pvp they make the stuff for pve then they nerf stuff for pvp just for facks sake just nerf stuff for pvp like you did with the smash fury spec killing deception dps which was fine where it was parses vary from rng 1k difference I see the jug chilling scream nerf 60% but you buffed other things so it should do about the same and to take 5% to 3% crit on honing shot for snipers thats just being petty seriously 10% to 5% on lighting sorcs *** o but you buffed shock nobody used that **** unless they was moving and TB was on cd where do you get your numbers from whats was the point of 248 gear if you want all classes to perform at a 240 gear lvl well except op and scoundrels they might as well be lvl 65 again in 224 gear and will still do better then 70 in 248 gear with these nerfs Rip my op healer Smellycát and scoundrel healer Won'thealstupid

[darkblubber]

Please Bioware, reconsider these Changes as they will steal the identity of the Operative Heal.

Just reduce a bit healing on the Kolto Probes and Nano tech and we are fine.

[DarrelK]

Tldr kids don't bring operative healers into PvP.

[Transcendent]

Recuperative NanoTech is now reduced by 12%

Durable Meds no longer increases the healing done by each tick of Recuperative Nanotech from 5% to 0%

Medical Therapy no longer increases the healing done by periodic effects, this is 5% down to 0%.

The crit chance of Diagnostic chance has been reduced from 30% down to 10%. (Diagnostic crits return energy)

Surgical Precision no longer increases the healing done by Surgical Probe from 5% down to 0%.

The chance of getting a Tactical Advantage from a Kolto Waves, Kolto Probe, or Recuperative Nanotech tick granted by Medical Engineering is now 10% down from 30%.

Accomplished Doctor no longer affects Surgical probe, reducing crit healing from surgical probe from 20% down to 0%. It also reduces crit healing from kolto injection and kolto infusion from 20% down to 10%.

 

These are the percentages we lost for each ability.

 

Ouch.

 

I don't see how this improves burst, especially with the loss of those TA crits which help pushing out larger heals when needed? If anything I'd say it's a straight out nerf to burst, because with the way that the "burst" gained is tied to making HoTs unavailable, that straight out naffs any chance of using that gain of burst.

 

I'm not sure what the combat team is really thinking of here, that is a terrible way to improve any burst from how I'm looking at it. Shame, operative heals is the only healer I've ever enjoyed playing.

[PrometheanDeath]

Most of these changes have been geared towards pvp, but this also goes against pvp. Losing chance to gain tactical advantages means operative will have to use kolto injection more often....but isn't it strange how operatives are the only healer that doesn't have an "Immune to interrupt" ability? Now not only is the least mobile healer even less mobile because of needing to use more channeled abilities for the sake of burst healing, but has only a 10% chance to recover if even 1 of the enemies in pvp happens to interrupt kolto injection to hope they gain a TA back. Thanks Bioware, even more useless in pvp.

[FerkWork]

A simple solution to Op healing lacking Interrupt and Pushback immunity would be to give Interrupt and Pushback Immunity while Stim Boost is active. Zero effect on the heals but improvement in PvP especially Ranked.

 

The actual heal changes are fine and Ops will remain viable Healers in PvE and Regs (Ranked without Interupt immunity does make them very weak there but as mentioned above an easy fix of they so desired)

 

At the end of the day all 3 heals will be fine as they were overturned.

[AdjeYo]

A simple solution to Op healing lacking Interrupt and Pushback immunity would be to give Interrupt and Pushback Immunity while Stim Boost is active. Zero effect on the heals but improvement in PvP especially Ranked.

 

The actual heal changes are fine and Ops will remain viable Healers in PvE and Regs (Ranked without Interupt immunity does make them very weak there but as mentioned above an easy fix of they so desired)

 

At the end of the day all 3 heals will be fine as they were overturned.

 

Sure a nerf was warranted, but nerfing the surge bonus, especially on Infusion is pretty harsh imo. I mean, with Infusion becoming instantly healing as a baseline, it's supposed to be our big burst heal, but that's getting nerfed, even though they acknowledged operative's mediocre burst.

Edited September 28, 2017 by AdjeYo

[killatroll]

Even with the crit nerf to kolto infusion and the buff to its healing to improve burst and healing on tanks during high DTPS spikes is completely negated by the fact that they nerfed Kolto injection and surgical probe and the way you regain Tactical Advantage and Energy from Diagnostic Scan. It doesn't matter if it was a 100% increase in healing or a 44%. They took away healing from every other burst we could possibly do and told us to rely on a burst heal with a CD on it. Something we cannot spam and if we did we would burn through energy so quickly we would be forced to Diagnostic spam for quite a while and since they nerfed the crit on Diagnostic Scan by 20% it would be even harder to regain energy which means less use of abilties like Kolto Injection and Kolto Probe to keep people alive.

 

I see a lot of difficulty maintaining probes on raid groups without burning through energy, not to mention using kolto infusion or injection on the tanks or dps that are low during this. The less Tactical Advantage we have the less Surgical Probes we can use to refresh our double stack of Kolto Probe so we will be forced to let the stack fall off or use Kolto Probe to refresh the stack and that would burn through our energy as well. We already cannot spam Kolto Probe on people and Kolto Injection/Infusion without losing energy. We need Surgical Probe and Diagnostic Scan to maintain and regain our energy.

[Zarturo]

some nerfing of this class is fine, but as mentioned by several others, burst does not seem to be improved at alls.

some suggestions to improve burst:

 

+50% healing for emergency medpack for targets below 30% health

 

modify pugnacity with some of:

• interrupt immunity (as already mentioned by FerkWork)
  
• reduce CD to 1min or so
  
• +25% healing to next one or two single target direkt healing abilities
  
• next one or two single target direkt healings const no energy
  
• next two instant
  
• increase the upper hand limit to 5 temporarily (you may have 3 when an emergency arises, but using emergency medpack twice or underworld medicine before using pugnacity may not be possible to ensure the survival)
  

 

modify sly surrender by applying two stacks of slow-release-medpack with emergency medpack and +25% healing for every medpack already on the target

[ITS_FYA]

Lets see how it is if 5.5 is live.

The burst get nerfed a bit so how cares...

We have enough the fill the gap we are not alone in this situation.

Look at the sage/sorcerer they got nerfed harder than the Operativ/Scoundrel so come down.

Yes its a bit harder but we must deal with this changes.

Try to compensate the changes and go ahead.

You can still spam AOE Heal and reach ~20k HPS when you want to...

 

 

I Operativ heal main and I can live with it.

[wainot-keel]

So where's the improvement to burst healing ?

 

They said they knew OP heals are lacking in that regard and these changes do nothing at best , probably they make it worse. Infusion, with an utility, can already be a instant heal. It has been like that for a while and that did nothing to improve burst healing of this class.

 

Not only this is worthless change, but there will be less TAs, so less Surgical Probes so less refreshing Kolto probes with them, and surgical probes will do less healing as well. Surgical Probe is the only instant heal (that is not HoT) the class has and it's weak already... It'll be weaker soon...

 

"relatively improving its burst-healing capabilities" my ***

 

I guess they don't know how to make it better or don't care. Probably both.

 

I'm done.

[AdjeYo]

You can still spam AOE Heal and reach ~20k HPS when you want to...

 

So why not nerf that and leave at least the burst healing intact. Sure Sorcs got nerfed but there's still better at bursting than Operatives are right now, so why would they nerf burst when they specifically stated (when they didn't change operative healing previous patch) that burst healing is an area where Operatives lack

[ITS_FYA]

Im with you i can live with ~20% overall healing nerf if they buff the burst for ~20%....

[Melff]

Hey,

Sorry guys but what the hell is this change suppouse to do ???!!!

Such a massive nerfs of overtime heal ?! - Scoundrel was always heal over time healer - that was his speciality.

Did you aim to nerf all healers to do exactly same ? - same burst same aoe same HoT but just another animation of abilities ??? - If yes, than thanks for ruining last variability among healer classes.

Around patch 2.0 healing - (and i mean PVE healing. DO NOT CARE ABOUT PVP) was stable, fuctioning, each healer has its own weakness and strengths, since them your constant changes led this to inbalancies as hell.

Did your test team start smoke something ? - or did you fire them - or *** ???

 

Sorry but if you going to screw this class same as you did with SAGE healer than im off playing this game.

Instead of inovation and adding into game something new and original (for exaple as WoW disciple priest - healing via dmg ...) you just tooking interesting abilities off - why ???!!!

And trying to do each healer same is really stupid idea.

 

Your explanation is:

"The changes made to Medicine / Sawbones bring the discipline to the target HPS while relatively improving its burst-healing capabilities. Overall, the majority of the healing reduction was aimed at the Operative’s / Scoundrel’s heal-over-time abilities, which are usually more prone to over-heal."

*** ??? - yes you took effective heal out of scoundrell to add him what ?

Kolto pack boost ? - its not so far with sly surreneder its boosted by 44.5 procent. So you basicly swaping current effect of kolto pack with sly surrender into kolto pack without sly surrender. - thanks wery much for that !!!

 

PS: it was wise to wrote how many percentage it will be now without original state how its now so people cant see how much is this for nerf.

 

Im strongly agains this change - PLEASE DONT DO IT.

[Veluna_Kaas]

Sorry, but there is no buff located in this. This is the results of the changes:

 

Increase the healing to kolto infusion by 45%, not sure if it affects the HoT version in the Curative agent, or if so, how spread out the percentage is to the burst and HoT portions.

-15% critical chance to diagnostic scan

-20% critical heal bonus of surgical probe

-10% critical heal bonus to Kolto injection and kolto infusion

-17% healing from recuperative nanotech

-5% healing from surgical probe

-20% chance to gain a tactical advantage (Now 10%)

 

There is no buff to our burst except in the process yet again, you nerf the critical healing of the burst move you tried to buff. Don't see how your delayed changes made anything better than make sorcs and mercs more responsive to burst damage over operatives.

 

I am not a guy who goes and bemoans every change that comes out, classes get buffed, classes get nerfed, but this on the surface analysis seems like complete overkill, scoundrels are the minority healer because of the activation and skills required to use them effectively, yes they have a lot of overhealing, but the corresponding lack of burst already made them questionable additions to hm raid teams, and pairing scoundrels rendered raids unhealable. These changes nerf the one thing they do well, raid healing, without really addressing what they are deficient in, burst healing, yes on the surface they add another large channeled heal, but with the reduction in upper hand generation, you aren't going to be able to use it like a sage would benevolence, all the healing classes are different, scoundrel healers look to their hps with pride, mandos and mercs look to their effective heals and point our their high efficiency, and sages point out their damage mitigation and shielding numbers. nerfing scoundrels to bring them "into line" with the other healers without taking into account the other healers special attributes will render the scoundrel/operative as non starters for hardmode content. I have subscribed to swtor since the day of release, the changes in 5.5 are strongly leading me to consider unsubscribing for the first time in 5 years

[Decidion]

You can still spam AOE Heal and reach ~20k HPS when you want to....

 

No you can't spam AOE heal. IT has a 9 second cooldown and aside from that, being able to stand still for the entire channel, all the while getting the other 7 people in a raid group to stay within your aoe circle while staying out of raid mechanics and being able to stay within melee range, etc., isn't very common.

 

I Operativ heal main and I can live with it.

 

Based off the above comment alone, I am very doubtful you actually main an operative heals.

[Jaryk]

Say that you want to lower total hps while improving burst capabilities...

 

Tweak one ability for an on the surface appearance of increased burst.

Nerf the abilities that support that ability.

Nerf other burst abilities.

Nerf HoTs.

Nerf resource management.

 

...good changes. Mission statement accomplished.

[AngraMainju]

some nerfing of this class is fine, but as mentioned by several others, burst does not seem to be improved at alls.

some suggestions to improve burst:

 

+50% healing for emergency medpack for targets below 30% health

 

modify pugnacity with some of:

• interrupt immunity (as already mentioned by FerkWork)
  
• reduce CD to 1min or so
  
• +25% healing to next one or two single target direkt healing abilities
  
• next one or two single target direkt healings const no energy
  
• next two instant
  
• increase the upper hand limit to 5 temporarily (you may have 3 when an emergency arises, but using emergency medpack twice or underworld medicine before using pugnacity may not be possible to ensure the survival)
  

 

modify sly surrender by applying two stacks of slow-release-medpack with emergency medpack and +25% healing for every medpack already on the target

 

 

While I disagree with majority of this post, this is one of the very few that actually tries to solve some of the problems that scoundrel healers face/will face.

 

As of emergency medpac:

It is one of very few healing abilities that were NOT nerfed- which means that it will become even more important ability. I love the idea of it being our main burst healing ability, so I agree that it should get a buff, especially with less upper hands, because of decreased chance of getting it from HoT management, hower I thinkg it should be a flat out buff, not under 30% only, as it would mean that we would actually benefit from being more reactive and less proactive healer.

 

As of pugnacity:

Giving it interrupt immunity is pointless. It has too long CD and gives instant cast UM or KP, after which I prefer using SRMP, KC etc.; Making two instant cast is unnecessary buff, as usually you use it in critical situations and one instant cast is enough to stabilise ally for long enough so that he/she can benefit from your HoTs rolling.

 

As of Sly Surrender:

This is THE utility that you want to give you interrupt immunity. With CD 45s it is reasonable, and it could even make only your next KP uninterruptable. Just keep this utility double SRMP stack, remove change in KP mechanics, as it is NOT worth a point in legendary tier

 

As of Kolto Pack:

I kinda expected that by "boost" to burst healing they meant flat out increase in Kolto Pack, but still I cringe when I think about it: Kolto Pack is weaker than Commando Healer Advanced Medical Probe, which Commando can insta-cast TWICE every 45 second AND can use supercharged cell to remove CD fairly often, WHILE having interrupt immunity on casting while aforementioned supercharged cell is active (with utility). Yes, I know, Commando is supposed to be burst healer, but the entire point of the nerf was that hps of all healing classes should be close to each other.

 

Basically, I see two options of fixing scoundrel's burst healing problem:

1. Buff Kolto Pack SIGNIFICANTLY, AND give interrupt immunity to Surrender. I like this idea less, as it would still make scoundrels less mobile than sages, but it's more plausible;

2. Nerf HoTs, maybe even decrease UH chance even more so that UH-management becomes actually challenging and building UHs through HoTs requires actually good HoT-management, BUT boost emergency medpac by A LOT to make up for it. In this case, we wouldn't even need interrupt immunity, as activation abilities would be more of a fillers between putting out burst by using instant cast emergency medpac on people with HoTs rolling, which would make scoundrels more mobile, increase burst healing and decrease HoTs healing which account for vast majority of our overhealing

[AdjeYo]

As of emergency medpac:

It is one of very few healing abilities that were NOT nerfed- which means that it will become even more important ability. I love the idea of it being our main burst healing ability, so I agree that it should get a buff, especially with less upper hands, because of decreased chance of getting it from HoT management, hower I thinkg it should be a flat out buff, not under 30% only, as it would mean that we would actually benefit from being more reactive and less proactive healer.

 

Actually it is being nerfed, it loses a 5% bonus to healing through Emergent Emergencies and a 20% surge bonus through Accomplished Sawbones.

[AngraMainju]

Actually it is being nerfed, it loses a 5% bonus to healing through Emergent Emergencies and a 20% surge bonus through Accomplished Sawbones.

 

Damn, my bad, the way those changes are written makes it difficult to read through them.

 

It means that our burst healing gets a nerf as, even being kinda meh, it was an important burst healing ability...

[supertimtaf]

Damn, my bad, the way those changes are written makes it difficult to read through them.

 

That's actually a huge deal.

Before, whenever peoples had a hard time reading or understanding something from one of his post, Musco would change it in a more "clear" manner. Now, this hasn't been done, and the actual difficulty to understand the changes announced in this post just show that they know they didn't improve anything. It's sad to see they are actually trying to hide it from us, even though most peoples here who play a scoundrel or took the time to verify saw through this right away.

 

Still, good job Eric for this post, I didn't think it could be possible to say these nerfs in a way that would actually make peoples less aware of them. Even though it's not a nice part of the role of a community manager, you've handled it well.