I really have to applaud their PR spin though: "The loss of subscriptions is just casuals/trial players cycling out" 1) Way to once more implicate us as a bunch of know-nothing tryhards whose opinion should be ignored on the level it has been. After all, we're just casuals, or players testing our toes in the water. 2) Conveniently glosses over the possibility that maybe, the subscription total took a gutpunch because the developers released content that wasn't fun. and best of all 3) Makes no mention that no major MMO in the last 12 years has seen ANY subscriber falloff during the same timeframe, least of all in such staggering percentages like 25% This graph demonstrates my point, and does not even include the latest round of data that puts SWTOR at 1.3 million HOMG CHART

Actually, the playerbase would be more accurately represented by Custer's officers, who warned him away from his disastrous plan of attack to no avail. Custer was having none of it though. He had a problem and he was a young strapping Cavalry Commander of the United States Army dag nabbit! He wasn't going to let a bunch of little problems like class balance and math and UI functi--I mean, Native American tribes with bows and sticks get in the way of his success! The 7th Cavalry Regiment lost approximately a third of it's men that day (including a great number of officers that had advised against the charge), and here you are johnny-on-the-spot with news that a quarter of TOR's subscribers have moved on. This is getting almost eerie... But alas, I promised I would not geek out. And here I am, all a-dither over men with beards.

Firstly: ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE: http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3p67wh/ Second: I touched on this point in regards to whether or not BioWare should have any interest in retaining the healers that have categorically fled the game for greener pastures.They shouldn't, and can't. In a strange way, I sympathize with their plight, because I strongly doubt that the developers are actively trying to be malevolent, but the damage has been done on literally all fronts. The mechanical problem of addressing what makes the game mathematically imbalanced is not, in and of itself, a particularly large problem. As so many people that will attack any post of the "I do not enjoy the game" variety will be only too happy to point out, Flavor of the Month status comes and goes. A few values here, a couple variables there and you literally have a very different game. However, much like Major General George Armstrong Custer (there are actually a lot of interesting parallels between BioWare's history as a developer and Custer's career, but I'll try not to geek out), BioWare went in fully committed to their plan, and is past the point where heeding the advice against their path would do them any good. Implementing reverse healing changes now is an admission on a scale that they would never live down. It's not just admitting that they were wrong in changing one ability, or one class, it's admitting that their core design philosophy (See link above) is fundamentally flawed. And they'd lose standing with literally everyone. Those of us that made suggestions, or did work would shout "I TOLD YOU SO" and would become like a nagging ex-wife out of a bad episode of Jerry Springer. Every time they tried to change anything, we'd come in force with the singsong reprimand "Well remember when you tried to change healing? What you SHOULD do is..." Worse yet, with so many other games and entertainment outlets demanding our attention almost none of us would resubscribe anyway. And those who defended the changes would feel betrayed too. All the love and devotion they'd put into defending their vision would be spurned, much like so many healers felt when 1.2 went live, they'd feel like baseless childish whining won the day and not good sense. So all BioWare has done by making the move is unified the playerbase in it's ire for the people running the show. So what do you do? Exactly like Custer, you charge forward, and hope that you don't become a history lesson in folly for the next generation. Because well...with all your assets in plain view at the top of the hill....What else can you do?

They cut the return in half. It refunds 1 ammo instead of 2, and 8 heat instead of 16.

I've tried to scale back on posting posts of this variety, because as I've mentioned before, if you still like the gameplay in it's current state, that's awesome! However, in addition to the two things RuQu mentioned, one of our oft pleaded problems is that healing is mind-numbingly simple now. I can teach a rhesus monkey the ins and outs of Combat Medic play now because there is an unfailing rigidity presented by the size of our resource pool. Combo together ANY two abilities with an ammo cost and you're either on the verge of or are entering the regen penalty. Period. That doesn't leave a whole lot of room for meaningful discussion because you just use the most efficient two abilities for the particular problem you're having (If it's an AOE one it probably involves Kolto Bomb, otherwise, it's probably AMP/MP). Hammer Shot until you can repeat. Add in Supercharge and Bacta Infusion on cooldown, and you're most of the way there. Our ceilings are easy to measure, our rotations are easy to chart, and boss mechanics are something you've probably seen before: At least prior to 1.2, when Combat Logs weren't available, and everything was new and uncharted, I came here to see what others saw, share my personal experiences, and try to learn and grow as a healer. Now? With added transparency demonstrating problems we've been discussing for six months now, the initial mystery dispelled, and frighteningly little left to teach: What's left to say? Mostly (and for my part in it I will now apologize) just more empty pleading to a nonresponsive dev team.

Spike damage happens all the time, however, if a tank takes a big swing, your Trauma Probe/Kolto Shell has now mitigated what..400 of it? Wooo. An Adv Med Probe/Healing Scan can right 4k of it in 1.5 seconds. You're suggesting that time is not an important factor when measuring the per resource cost of healing, when that simply is not true. Look at it in terms of money and it makes more sense: You can give me one of two loans: 1) If you pay me 20 dollars now, I'll give you 50 dollars in a month and a half or 2) If you pay me 20 dollars now, I'll pay you a dollar a week for the next 50 weeks The right answer is obviously the first loan every time, because time has inherent value. Now it's slightly different with healing in that overhealing is possible, but the principle is the same: You're paying a significant time investment for no gain on TP/KS. Worse yet, because it does equivalent healing, you're time delaying your healing (which you need right now) at the cost of using a more effective Healing > Rapid Scan combo, because the bread and butter combo once is enough to put you into regen penalty. The lack of resource flexibility coupled with a comparatively astronomical cost make TP/KS near worthless. The ability in it's current state heals for too little over too long a time with too little flexibility of use at too high a cost. It gets precasted, and then forgotten, because in almost all cases doing literally anything else will generate more healing, faster, at a lower overall cost.

It matters because we have painfully little resource window to work with before dropping into bad regen zones. Currently, using Trauma Probe/Kolto Shell will result in a net HPS LOSS if you let even one charge go unused or if (god forbid) you cast it wtih 10 ammo or less. It absolutely matters when and where the healing shows up, because the scenario you described doesn't happen: No healer is going to let the tank dip that far without intervening which means what you're really giving him is is a tiny per swing mitigation on ten swings over thirty seconds. The armor proc from AMP/HS will mitigate more than before AMP/HS even cools down again, meaning the most efficient use of TP/KS is to precast it and then immediately throw it off your bars. That's not good design, and you'd do well to stop defending it.

So basically you're saying that those of us that have gone and collected the data, experienced endgame in both PvP and PvE (including Nightmare thanks), have crunched numbers, have politely and calmly redressed our grievances to the developers and tried to share with our fellow healers on a public forum what exactly is wrong don't have a leg to stand on? Even though by your own admission you haven't done...well any of those things? Right. Okay. Please stop. Prior to 1.2 a lot of us stood up for Operatives because your class needed help, and now that the focus has shifted elsewhere (P.S. Operatives STILL need help), you're not willing to bear our burdens? Please stop giving other members of your class a bad name by making me regret speaking out on your behalf. Then you aren't reading the boards very carefully. Countless people have explained in careful detail why 1.2 is such a disaster ranging from bad math (see: Combat Medics Trauma Probe/Kolto Shell) to reduction in skill variance, to outright abysmal communication from the dev team. You might not see the fixes anymore because the healer community as a whole put up a lot of great feedback prior to 1.2, and it all got roundly ignored. If you really think this is fun, then great! That's awesome! However, some of us feel that being robbed of the ability to make meaningful decisions and have any real impact on the outcome of a fight outside of "run an optimum rotation, and if everyone else performs perfectly, and we're appropriately geared, we'll win", and seeing as most of us are still (regretfully it seems) paying customers, we're still entitled to air our grievances, because, and here's the real kicker: SOME OF US STILL WANT TO PLAY. I, personally, have moved on, but the Star Wars franchise is a playground ALL of us have dreamed of playing on for a long long time, so people are trying to improve the quality of the game so that they may fulfill that fantasy. If you find nothing of use to read here, then please, move on. It is worth noting however, that threads with questions about how to heal even post 1.2 crop up frequently. They also drop off quickly because they are usually answered quickly, concisely, and with links to the relevant data.

We've had this discussion on the Healer forums a hundred times, although it used to be about Operatives. "Viable" doesn't get you an invite. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=420225 has logs on a Commando that outgears both an Operative and a Sage being put to shame for output. We have to wear a tier better gear and we still don't compete is not "fine" by my book, that sounds a whole lot like "bench me before I become a liability"

Of course others are entitled to that feeling, I never said otherwise, and it's exactly why I mentioned that there were a handful of players that I legitimately feared because I knew they could make me look like a silly waste of space. My problem now is the math just doesn't shake out. I am, mathematically at my running best, a liability to my team. There weren't logs pre-1.2 to confirm , but most of my Operations now peg me as somewhere between 1100HPS and 1300 HPS in PvE depending on the encounter (or in layman's speak: when things are running optimally, and I have no other demands on my attention) with the ability to burst pump as high as 1600-1700. By comparison, our DPS uninterrupted usually float somewhere around 1300-1500 DPS give or take, depending as always, on class, and encounter. Why do I bring that up in a discussion about PvP? Obviously things rarely run as smoothly in PvP as they would for a healer in PvE, but let's pretend for a second that they do. So I'm talking about a BEST CASE healing scenario where you are left to your own devices, free to pump healing into the group unscathed. The raw HPS/DPS values will scale down in PvP (because such is the nature of PvP gear), but for simplicity's sake, let's say they don't. When you factor in Trauma, BY DEFAULT I can now sustain approximately 840 HPS, and with cooldowns and willingness to bankrupt my resource pool, I can burst somewhere in the neighborhood of 1190. Even assuming DPS players saw a 20% DPS loss by stepping into PvP gear, they are still looking at being able to sustain a 1040-1200 DPS rate and that ignores a wealth of things like the fact that DPS classes are much more liable to frontload and burst in PvP, the fact that expertise scales twice as well for damage as it does for healing, and (god forbid) a Sentinel/Marauder applying a 20% healing debuff to a relevant target. See what I'm getting at here? It doesn't matter if I'm guarded, left to my own devices, or focus fired to shreds, every case is a net loss in overall production for my team. Like I said: Healers, Combat Medics in particular, needed to be reined in for PvP. I get that. I really do. I have no qualms with seeing balance issues where there were times popping cooldowns basically meant that three people could sink cooldowns into me and I'd probably still live to tell the tale. That wasn't fun for anyone, but the problems that have been introduced by their selected nerfs are out of hand. Applying changes to resources, output and scaling all at the time combines several small changes that would've done the trick into one massive one that steps beyond what's necessary. Another important issue can be seen over in this thread: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=420225 a Commando in Rakata is now getting outclassed by both other healers despite wearing a full set of raid gear a tier up from them? I'd be mortified to see the output differences if they were all equivalently geared, because they're incredibly telling as is! This is not a good state of healer balance on the whole, and if it was done for sake of PvP, that's even worse. Add to that, the utility nerf applied to Supercharge means that the new mantra is activate, run one combo, and immediately shut it down so that you can charge it up for that much needed ammo again. Our most interesting ability must now be TURNED OFF by the player so that they can keep up. Add I use that term loosely. As noted by their mention of it when discussing the medpac nerf, they wanted to make healing easier to measure. Well congratulations. Mission accomplished. What does it mean? We get shoehorned into one of maybe two "rotations" that are dictated by resources and not by party need. That's not interesting healing gameplay at all. The reason I play a healer is specifically to AVOID rotations so that I get to enjoy some level of reactionary gameplay where the thing I do next is dictated by the information I take in. Making the game simpler and less interesting as a means of bringing content in line so that they can defend some mystical "metrics" they haven't shared with the player community just isn't fun, and it's not conducive to enticing a player to play a healer.

I've already moved onto another game so make of that what you will, but this is a sentiment that boggles my mind: Why is it that people seem so diametrically opposed to a well played player being the difference maker in ANY encounter whether it's PvP or PvE? To me, that sounds like incentive to master my class so that A) against opponents playing poorly, I can run the table on them and B) Ensure that I know my class and team mechanics well enough to prevent another player achieving the same kind of results. Before I go any further, I will say that as a Commando, I felt our PvP healing was in need of some nerfs to bring us more in line, but the end result is too many changes to too much of our class. Resource costs up, effective healing down, utility down has resulted in a knee-jerk overdone product that's a liability to the team that would be better filled with a well played DPS character. And that's bad design. I don't get why you would actively discourage there being a skill gap in PvP, which is what almost all of the changes for ALL healers in PvP do. I played some rounds pre 1.2 where yes, it seemed I was nigh unkillable and that I turned the tide for my team, but it became a cycle that perpetuated itself. Not enough focus on me left me free to dump too much healing into the field which led to our team dominating the round. I've been on the other side of the coin too. I've had good Sentinels/Marauders pick me out of a lineup and make it their life's work to shut me down, and they usually racked up a fair number of kills outside of me also, and led their team to victory too. And you know what, in the heat of the moment, when someone executes that well and you lose really hard, it feels bad, and it's easy to say "Well this is just STUPID and I HATE IT." But why would you be opposed to giving yourself (and your friends) the opportunity to feel heroic? That seems counter to what makes a fun game for me.

I've been meaning to mention this to a number of threads for a while now but I'll start here: They aren't going to find it is too late at some point in the future. We are already past that point, both us as players, and for them as developers. While I can't say I support their action from a player's perspective, if you remove yourself from the equation and look at it objectively as a business decision, something becomes clear pretty quickly: BioWare should have little to no interest in retaining healers who have departed as a result of the 1.2 changes. Why would they? The damage has already been done, not just from a gameplay perspective (which is easy to repair) but from the community relations angle. Think about it. If TOMORROW, they came out with a new brand new patch that in whatever fashion rebalanced healing in a way that made us feel meaningful, and compete meaningfully with each other, what would that actually mean? Well first and foremost, it'd be admission of a mistake an almost unprecedented scale. Not only would they have to admit that those of us who were speaking for the healer community were in some fashion, right, they'd have to admit that their entire metrics based model of altering the game is clearly not effective. But second, and perhaps more important: it wouldn't bring me back anyway. After the ten months of evidence they've handed us that whenever they make changes that the playerbase is little more than a glorified QA team (which, much like a real QA team, they ignore for a long time anyway, vis a vis, bugs that have existed since Beta), why would I be interested in seeing what debacle they can publish next? Heck even if they learn from their mistakes and start releasing brilliant patches that vastly improve the state of not just healing, but the entire game at large, why would I want to gamble my money that it will become the standing trend, when as you've already pointed out, there are nearly half a dozen other products I already know I enjoy, and can play without feeling like a second class citizen?

The easiest way to parse this event is to assume that Field Triage gets calculated first. So Field Triage brings the cost from 3 to 2, and then Reserve Power Cell brings the cost to zero. But equally simply: Things cannot cost less than zero. The only two abilities that will return ammo are Supercharge Gas/Cells and Vent Heat/Fast Reload.

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.

I think we disagree in that I do think there is a way to admit you're wrong to the player community in a way that actually improves customer relations, but so far, whenever you ask a dev why anything happened This is pretty much the only answer we get