I think the "skill cap" comes in the form of actual energy management being inherently harder than NO energy management (which they had before since the healing rotation was all throughput without fluctuation), but I also agree that people who remember this playstyle and were good at it won't see any skill cap increase, and will simply see what Sages needed in PvE, and that's control of their healing output. Now they cannot burst like a gassed Commando, they can't trickle-heal and pump out massive amounts of HPS like a Scoundrel, but they're incredibly flexible due to both their increased raw heal amounts and various raid and ST healing tools. All without changing HPS values too much (which might still have to be determined, some people say the new iteration is overtuned, I think a lot of the eHPS moved from Force Armor to actual raw healing). I like it currently. I feel like I have way better control over my heals and over the fight, even if my raw eHPS output isn't really that much higher, if at all sometimes.

And this was my one and only major concern with these changes. "Throttling" is really the name of the game in PvP; You've gotta be able to respond to burst damage, but you also have to be able to do slow triage, on top of making sure you roll your DCDs at appropriate times to maximize survivability. Sages are now in an excellent spot to do this, because the HPS output has not moved too much, but now comes in shorter, more powerful windows. This fits PvP ebb and flow VERY well, and could easily make them the strongest healer in a PvP match by a fair margin.....IF they can manage their energy. The real important thing to remember here is that energy management is key. The almost-iteration where Vindicate had no drawbacks was broken; I could see Sages absolutely decimating the healing slot under those conditions. The addition of Weary (and more importantly, the fact that Weary REPLACES the regen buff) made it so that active management is necessary for any mode of play, but especially PvP. I've not PvP'd since the dev-sponsored testing of the almost-iteration, so I couldn't give personal experience and insight, but it seems like active management would introduce enough downtime (through physical time spent on GCDs and through further split attention of the players) to mitigate the Sages' capability to respond so well to almost any healing situation in PvP, while still leaving them the desirable option for psomeone who doesn't want to specialize in any one form of healing output. Of course, the outlying problem with this are the people who are reeeeeaaaaaally really good at playing this new Sage build, since I believe that in PvP it has potential to be overtuned in the hands of a few key people who really know how to handle it well. Is that as it should be? I can't say for sure, since I don't PvP. But it would probably be frustrating for the other team, at the very least.

^ This. Hopefully people will actually try to understand new mechanics (actually requires less raw actions than before) instead of just dismissing it as terrible because they can't keep their force up the way you're supposed to (and are more than capable of doing).

That's kinda how I feel also. They can't ST as well as a commando, and they can't HPS-machine like a Scoundrel, but as far as being a good, solid healer, they are in a nice place right now.

I can't say I can really disagree, since I don't play the other two healers. But if that's true, it can't be by that much. And if it isn't by much, then it's ok by me. I still think Sages can get themselves into serious trouble if not played correctly, which I feel is where the class balance comes in. Better healer, less people who can play it effectively. Curiously, what would you do to tune Sages correctly from here?

Hey Marco, you know what most of these responses show me? Exactly what I knew would happen. The skill cap increased significantly. And it needed to. The only point we ever disagreed on was one you mentioned already, and that's playstyle preference. I MUCH prefer this playstyle, and jumping back into operation healing last week felt like a refreshing breeze to say the least (my computer had been out of commission for 3 weeks). Looking forward to more real-time testing tonight, but my initial impressions are very good. The overall HPS and eHPS hasn't decreased, the HPS capability in the short term (1-2 minutes) has seen a significant boost, and even taking two scenarios pre and post 3.3 where HPS is the same, this Sage FEELS more powerful and more flexible to me. Now that might just be because I'm used to this healing style, but really it's 2.0 Sage healing without the crippling drawbacks it used to have (over-dependency on Deliverance/Healing Trance, health cost, Force Armor costing too much for what it mitigated...), which is perfect to me. I wish to thank you for actually understanding that the devs were set on this playstyle, and doing what you could to see it land in a good spot live, instead of the unbalanced garbage we were presented with initially (TWICE).

Agreed. Roll it up, let it go, toss it behind us, and move on seems like the best option now.

Hold on a moment.... Screenshots are required for non-server first clears of bosses, even 5th, 6th, 7th, heck even 10th by this logic? I mean, yeah it's a courtesy, but AoL is a pretty established and (from what I understand) well-respected guild on this server. And people are doubting they can do it after other guilds have cleared it already? I mean, I despise drama, and this is pretty silly...people should relax. *shrug* Not like it's NiM or anything. Sheesh. Also, as far as pre-3.0 progression is concerned, I think someone else summed it up nicely. Lvl 50 progression was counted in the 55 tier (under a different color or asterisk or whatever, can't remember since it was ages ago), so naturally one would assume you phase out lvl 50 completely and count 55 under an asterisk or different color or whatever. I dunno. That's why I'm not running the thread, lol. Too much work. >_<

Great job guys, 3 guilds have put up over 11m points now. Very solid.

Simply put, we wish not to give unreasonable people a chance to cause further trivial and unnecessary drama. So we're just gonna move the thread back on track and answer any legitimate comments or questions people have about this. It's already been expressed numerous times by both members of Aisthesis and members of other guilds that what we're doing is not any more "evil" than what has been going on for a while now (that is to say, the practice of selling achievements and/or vanity items), AND we are also considering implementing some of the suggestions made in this thread about this. But for now we're just going to leave it as it is in the OP and make any changes in the future as necessary. As a side note, I'd like to say that this endeavor may not interest a single person. At all. And that would be okay. Even if people banded together into a super guild and beat the stuffing out of us in a conquest, we'd actually be kinda impressed and happy that the community had the cohesion and drive to accomplish something as a collective unit, even if it means we were on the losing end of it. Why? Because it would speak well of our server community in some respects. And that's something we can all take pride in, because the community here on the Ebon Hawk is quite good compared to some other servers. A lot of thought went into the development of this. We did not pitch this idea because we want to siphon credits from people. We did not pitch this idea because we want help with our conquesting so we can be try-hards at casual content. We pitched this idea because some people genuinely do not want to apply to another guild, but are still interested in conquest titles. We understand this; We know what it's like to be attached to ones' guild, to love playing with the people in ones' guild, and to not want to leave for any reason. So this begs the question, "Why charge credits at all?" Again, simply enough: We are not a conquest guild. Our member slots are already quite full as it is, and we are primarily a PvE progression-oriented guild. As such, we simply aren't doing open recruitment on the basis of only wanting to be in a guild that gets high numbers in conquests. Players who join would be expected to contribute more than just that, and heavy preference for recruiting at the moment is on NiM-capable raiders. Surely this recruiting preference is something people can understand, or at least accept as our guilds' right. And as Tam mentioned before, if someone wanted to join as a raider, or simply as someone who wanted to contribute to all aspects of the game and not just conquest, their right for recruitment procedure is just as valid as anyone else. Is the amount of money too high? Is any credit amount unacceptable? As the OP says, this thread is not the place for discussions like that. We honestly didn't have any idea what kind of response this idea would be met with, since there is a vast amount of variance in the opinions and personalities of people in general. I think the responses have given us some things to think about though, and any information about the price will be updated in the OP if it comes about. Aisthesis has a large commitment to community and enjoyment. We try hard to make sure that if anyone raids with us, does FPs with us, or anything, that we provide the most enjoyable experience we can for them. This is not some sort of obligation we've put on ourselves as a "large guild". It's one of our driving goals as a guild. We've had plenty of people who had negative preconceptions about us apologize to us after learning how we really function as a guild, and how we interact both with each other and other people on the server. We all (well, most of us) pay $15 a month or so in order to enjoy this game, and even those who are preferred or F2P still give up part of a valuable asset in order to play: time. So to hear the accusations that have been hurled is quite hurtful, even if most of us won't admit it. Most of the people here who have thrown baseless accusations around have apologized for that, and we appreciate that (please note that I did not say people apologized for their opinions; everyone has a right to an opinion as a human being, although we can all agree that we're capable of expressing said opinions in a dignified manner, and that doing so helps to avoid unnecessary conflict). Again, any further questions and comments about this arrangement are welcomed and encouraged, but please try to keep things respectful and civil from now on. We are not interested in having any arguments with people, so any unnecessarily rude comments will not be met with a response. Many thanks. (Whew, what a long side note...) ~Rosalyn

I rather agree with this as well. <Aisthesis> honestly has only ever done mass amounts of crafting the two weeks we went up against Veritas (and WOW that was exhausting >_<). Every other week we've hovered around the 5-6m area, and though we did some crafting last week (there WAS a bonus for it after all), it wasn't a metric crudton of crafting. We actually pushed ourselves pretty hard doing FPs instead of just crafting all week. We like the idea of the shifting focus in conquest, and it really provides an opportunity for guildies to be on and do stuff with each other. But that aside, on the topic of "craft-to-win", I personally find it to be incredibly flawed design as well. They really should either reduce the efficacy of crafting, or pump more points into other things so that they even out. I'm not sure what Bioware has planned to fix this, IF they even plan to fix it, but I hope they do.

*nod nod* Fair enough, fair enough.

Aww, that was actually kinda interesting....

Reserved.

Wow, it seems a little cold in here, no?