A little background: I played a priest in vanilla WoW. I leveled as holy, and me and a group of real life friends visited pretty much every instance on the way to the level cap. The friends consisted of a rogue, a hunter, and two paladins, one of whom was a backup healer/backup dpser, which was needed because the other one tanked as 2h retribution. For those of you not associated with WoW, that basically means he sucked at tanking. Now the reason I mention this is because aside from Pally McPoorTank, our group learned a LOT of **** going up the food chain. Why? Well, we had to compensate for the shortcomings of our friend. I learned how to heal while kiting, the rogue learned to solo one mob while stunlocking another, the hunter learned to CC, pet tank, and kite three separate mobs simultaneously, and the backup healer paladin learned how to peel mobs off of anyone who needed it. We learned to compensate for the shortcomings of our buddy. This is the same mentality I hope everyone else has in these games, and it applies here as well. People need to understand the limits of their tanks (and healers, and dps), though in this case it's less PEBKAC and more class/game limitations. Whether it's peeling a non-elite off of the tank or short-duration CCing a mob coming for the healer, people need to focus on the GROUP'S needs and not tunnel vision. Hopefully they stick it out long enough to figure it out.

First of all, it's in percentages, as in number of points to gain 1% surge or 1% crit. 1% surge from base translates into a boost of 1% of normal damage every time you crit, and thus if your crit were 100% it'd be a 1% damage increase. Since you DON'T have 100% crit, 1% surge translates into a dps percentage increase equal to your crit rate divided by 100. So if you have a 20% crit rate, 1% surge is worth .2% of your normal dps. On the other hand, assuming you don't have 100% crit already, 1% additional crit, is always worth at least .5% of your dps because you have 150% damage on crits even with no surge rating at all. So it's easier to GET 1% surge than 1% crit, but it's not worth as much, which is why the ratings scale the way they do. That said, for TK sages there are a few talents/abilites which make comparing a little harder: Turbulence automatically crits when you hit a target with weaken mind on it; assuming you do so, crit rate is useless for this ability. Force Potency is a crit boost. The skill Reverberation gives a 10% surge rating per point to Weaken Mind, TK Wave, and Turbulence, which makes crit rating more valuable for weaken mind and TK wave, but again, crit doesn't help Turbulence. Focused Insight, Psychic Projection, and Telekinetic Effusion only proc on critical hits. Penetrating Light and Critical Kinesis both improve your crit on certain abilities. I think that at low rating levels surge rating is better for TK sages simply because we have so many crit boosters in our talents and abilities, but I suspect that it's dependent on your current stat levels and that the optimal use of stat points will be some type of ratio, though whether it's 5:1 surge:crit or 5:4 surge: crit I dunno.

You don't need 5 per line to move up. You need 5 points in a tree to reach each tier past the first in that tree. So the first set requires 0 points in the tree, the 2nd requires 5 in the tree, the 3rd requires 10 in the tree, etc. It doesn't matter what line they are on, so long as they are in the tree. Feel free to take lower talents if you don't like the higher ones; you'll still get access to the top part.

Noble Sacrifice is most useful for healers thanks to the talent in the Seer tree that gives a cost-free Noble Sacrifice on a critical HoT tick from that one HoT we get- think it's Resplendance? (I'm still trying to remember what everything's called). When that procs your next Noble Sacrifice doesn't cost health or lower your force regen. It can also be useful outside of the proc if you are willing to eat a bit of health/regen loss. It works out to be 10% health for 28 force if you talented for the extra 100 force, though keep in mind this is only if you don't stack the debuff. Every stack of the debuff makes this conversion worse; how much so depends on how long the debuff still has up and how many stacks you currently have. Worst case scenario, you already have 3-4 stacks on you and the debuff is just about to fall off when you Noble Sacrifice. This turns out to be a long term loss of 32 force, though if you need it RIGHT NOW there might be a reason to do it. Also, once you are this screwed you might as well chain cast it if you can afford the health; you won't be extending the debuff more than a tick if that, and every use ends up getting you 40-48 force over what you would have anyway. Hell, if you have an outside healing source like a companion or a party member or you are ABSOLUTELY sure you won't take extra damage, that might be a good strategy to rapidly regain force mid-fight. A bit contrived but I could envision scenarios worth using it in - a rest period in an Ops fight that keeps you in combat, perhaps.

They very well might be different entities, depending on how it's coded. The talent says it adds 20% alacrity, but did the coders actually add an extra 20% on to your stat for the duration of the buff, or did they go the route of cast time = base * alacrity bonus / 1.2? It wouldn't be the first time an MMO's tooltip was misleading or blatantly wrong (), as you should know as a former priest. And the game is a bit buggy this early in release, so something like that slipping through the net wouldn't surprise me one bit. You might be right, but you might be wrong. I'm not judging either way; just trying to keep an open mind 'till somebody tests it for me.