I just refuse to play with random people. Keeps things very simple, and I never run into problems like this. Get into a half-decent guild and only play with people who have a brain, preferably both hemispheres(or at least the left one). If somebody cant get through solo quests without having top of the line gear for their companion you probably dont want them in your guild anyway. Besides, companions dont contribute anything to flashpoints and operations themselves. We have clear rules, with need for mainspec, greed for offspec/companion, pass if you cant do anything with it. Even if they implemented a LFG system someday I know I will never use it, because I dont even need the gear at this point, and I simply cant handle stupidity. It's worse than gaseous hydrogen cyanide.

The only problem with HM flashpoints and normal mode operations is that they drop a varying quantity of Columi gear, making Tionese gear and difficulty levels in general obsolete. Should get only Tionese gear from normal ops and HM flashpoints, Columi from hard-mode operations and Rakata from nightmare operations. That would also make the endgame a little more challenging if imported into future tiers of raids just by not inflating peoples stats prematurely. Right now it's a total cakewalk except for a couple of fights in 16-man nightmares. Yet I don't have a problem with the existence of a "normal mode" per-se, just the mind-boggling amount of loot it gives for minimal effort, and making it too easy to overgear hard-mode encounters before you actually progress to them.

Yes you can stop by but don't hold your breath. Furthermore, it's everyones role who can possibly accomplish it if the situation demands for it. If you have a healer that has an interrupt, has to interrupt, but he or she doesnt interrupt, the problem is not with the game. Or do you honestly think that having somebody sit there picking their nose, being like "omg it's not my job" is a very good approach to tackling content which you apparently find challenging? I suppose you can always beat your head into a mountain, but you know what Einstein said about insanity and all that.

Here's also the exact talent build I use right now(copy&paste if the periods break it). http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#800rfR0RbcdkqZbcoMZb.1 The kolto residue and heavy trooper talents can be swapped out for whatever floats your boat except any haste talents that would make you cross 7%. I took the kolto residue for buffing the raid and/or the tank for our sage's AOE healing on fights like 16 man NMM annihilator droid or Soa. Can be useful if you have spare ammo and the tank doesnt require a proper heal on that GCD. I chose the heavy trooper talent over havoc rounds because the kolto bomb does rather poor healing in the first place and has a 6 second cooldown. The extra health with more healing received helps with controlling thunderballs on NMM Soa, ground pounces on NMM Bonetrasher, the fire DoT on NMM Jarg&Sorno and minimizes the amount of GCDs that must be spent by myself or other healers for topping me off. If you can use first responder without crossing 7% haste and you would prefer better AOE healing, by all means switch weapon calibrations for havoc rounds and the cell capacitor talent for first responder.

I wouldn't recommend using them as a guideline because I stack crit to the point where it's significantly weaker than power for hp/s, for the purpose of spike healing on the main tank for 16 man nightmare ops, but here they are. Aim: 1711 Power: 70 Tech Power: 1217 Critical rating: 499 Surge rating: 396 Alacrity rating: 51 If you use those as a guideline, it's at your own peril and I would recommend taking weapon calibrations to get just past the new 5.5% haste milestone defined here: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=2891891#post2891891 For your everyday healing needs or depending on your healing style you may want to follow the spreadsheet to the note instead of going on any crit adventures like I did. Even after the surge nerf I cant think of a better stat distribution for my needs considering the absence of power+crit enhancements. I tend to view crit much like avoidance, perhaps not very efficient or stable, but it's a X chance of temporarily guaranteed survival for a tank, with high enough surge. EDIT: Just culled some of my ramblings

Hammershot is 100% of tech bonus healing value. You can use a blaster rifle if you want, the weapon damage ranges have no impact on healing output.

Impressive riposte, funny also because it's an accurate assessment of the thread.

I like it, and I made my own program in C++ to figure out where the diminishing returns for different stats hit the hardest, but right now it's for my personal use only. I'm quite confident in the minimal haste approach right now, that is also supported by your spreadsheet, generally I'm being assigned to main-tank healing anyway with the other 3 on dispels, off-tank or the raid, or whatever. Be nice to see if the next tier of raid changes things, but right now this is the style for our 10/10 nightmare-mode group and personal experiences are at least correlated to the spreadsheet results.

I've cleared 10/10 nightmare mode operations as a commando healer and I couldnt possibly care less about any stun or interrupt. Hi.

Excuse me Sir, but the OP has a colossal thread at the top of this forum section called "Combat Medic Guide" with the full spreadsheet and explanation. You would find your answers there.

I actually enjoy more bland raids and would prefer ones that put the characters more in the role of front-line troopers or special forces than some corny god-slaying scheme. Going through some riveting story that hypes up creature X to be some super-duper-god of doom that will destroy the universe and then killing him, taking the loot and going to bed gets old after a while. Still I am a hardcore raider and I prefer very challenging content, but the sappy or corny crap isnt my thing.

The only flaw with that logic is that every point spent in alacrity is one point less in other stats, so if you dont even calculate the value of other stats, obviously alacrity will reign superior, there being no competition... And in a static rotation alacrity starts to lose out anyway because you will complete the large casts faster, yet healing for less than if you stacked other stats instead, and being forced to fill in with hammershot sooner to avoid running out of ammo. Then you also have to take in account things like critical hit sizes scaling with both aim/power and surge, but not alacrity. It's just not that simple.

I skipped like thirty pages of this thread. Between raids I'm usually soloing my dailies, even the heroic 2+ ones. I cant be bothered looking for people to do them with simply because I dont need their help and I dont want to risk their stupid butt pulling an extra group of monsters and getting me killed as well. I absolutely hate playing with random people. But it doesn't mean I am asocial or that I would prefer single-player games.

Trauma probe is very useful. Especially for some bosses in nightmare mode operations where the tank is being hit extremely hard, such as the person tanking Jarg, or the Fabricator Droid. It makes a big difference in controlling the flow of incoming damage. There isn't much more that needs to be said. It's that simple.

On nightmare mode, we just cycled between the right and left devices(fire and ice). 2 tanks, 1 on the boss, 1 soaking proximity mines and helping with stun drones. Switch roles at 10 stacks of the armor debuff. 2 healers, one healing the puzzle team, one healing the ground team. Rest DPS. Did the same thing on normal mode ages ago, the difference is that in normal mode it doesnt matter which devices you use because they are all fire. It gets easier having at least one Jedi Shadow tank and one Commando healer in the group, because the shadow tank can pop a cooldown to negate a large part of the DoT damage from soaking the mines/drones and a Commando healer can quite easily keep the boss tank alive even if the tank has 10 stacks for whatever reason. Just remember to switch tanks at ten stacks.