Yeah this was the first thing I noticed logging back into my combat medic. They took Cryo Grenade and made it a talent you have to pick on the same line as Hold the Line and Echoing Deterrence and they put Tenacious Defense on the same row as Reflexive Shield??? Was the previous system of "talents" really so bad that they needed to replace it with this and remove skills from people just to sell them back to them. Also I like how the row 78 passive is just a passive we've already had before that was just taken away so they had something "new to give us" at 78. All the great pvp talents or abilities have either been just removed outright or put on talents with other key pvp talents so instead of having multiple good talents you just get one. So from a pvp combat medic's perspective for this expansion all I'm seeing is unbelievably massive survivability nerfs and nothing new at all. WOW did this over a long period of time where they just constantly pruned skills every expansion until they realized that it's a horrible idea and added most of them back in BFA. Maybe in 14.0 ill get stealth scan and Shock Absorbers back.

Correct me if I'm wrong but haven't the devs have stated multiple times that they have no intentions of ever putting in cross server queues. Part of the reason is money yes but a much bigger reason (as far as I remember) would be that they would have to take the servers off frequently and for long periods of time.

Nothing to see here guys. Just your daily scheduled dose of nerf operatives.

Same thing happens with operative roll. If you have some sort of progressive/reapplying slow on you (force crush/ series of snares slow from snipers) you don't go nearly as far as you should. Op roll will sometimes not move you at all and as stated above won't let you rocket out as far as you should be able to (or at all in extreme cases). Probably has something to do with the slow being factored into the distance you should move from the ability but I have no idea. It's been this way for a long time (like 3.x or so) but it's also very noticeable with rocket out on this patch.

Kappa

qft 5char

You don't have the mindset to main concealment op.

Plenty of people on my server have the "Scare Bear" title but I don't think I know anyone with the "10 solo kills in 50 different ________ (insert warzone here)" achievements. Also lets put time and resources into fixing the problems with pvp before we worry about the relative difficulty of some of the pvp related achievements.

Watchman - for dot spreading and thinking you have a massive ***** when you do 3k dps Combat - for trying to global people and nothing else Concentration - for actually killing people

I could go super in depth into the specific problems that mercs have with healing in pvp and how to fix them (and even balance changes across all 24 sub classes) but we don't even know if bioware considers mercs to be under performing. Any discussion of balance changes are most likely just a waste of time until we get any information from bioware as to their current thoughts on the state of healing in pvp. It's also slightly more likely to rain in California than it is for bioware to tell us what they're thinking so its doubtful we'll get any insight into balance changes until they're being released on live. Even if they came out and said "mercs are underperforming" anyone from the community giving their opinions isn't going to change anything. They rarely ask for ideas from the community and even when they do (set bonus discussion/ warzone ideas) they don't do anything with the responses that they get.

Donna is everyone's inspiration for sparkle powder and bonks.

It's not worthless at all. It's really good but it's highly positioning and map dependent. It also needs to be aimed but it has tons of utility that really good players can use to increase their survivability substantially. It's really good in positions where you can bait people out into the open or into your backline and then RO leaving them exposed in the middle of no where or in the middle of your team. I'll also say that like 95% of mercs don't use this ability right whatsoever and just use it the milisecond a melee gets anywhere near them. If you just blow it at the first sign of trouble then yeah it's a worthless ability but correctly using the ability can make it very strong in certain situations/maps. Their utilities are another thing though. Their last tier has so many good choices but since you only get 2 picks you have make really really hard choices that few other classes have to. There are like 4 or 5 viable to good options in the last tier that would all really help merc healers but you can't pick them up because you don't have the points for it. The second tier also has 4 or 5 really strong choices (it also has the most useless utility in the entire game (Infared Sensors/Nightvision Scope)) but you can't take more than 2 since you need to take 2 last tier so you can't go 3/3/1. Most other classes have very clear priority utilities that you only need 6 utility points to make the class very strong. Mercs would need like 8 maybe 9 points to be at the level of the other healers in terms of survivability/raw strength. The first tier is really the only place where you can make choices and not be screwing yourself over somewhere else. All of the utilities are strong while not being so strong or good in pvp where you are forced to run them. You can actually make choices in the first tier depending on what you want without gimping yourself in another area. The utilities are an obvious area that could be changed to buff mercs/mandos. Bioware is about as transparent as a brick wall though so we don't even know what their current thoughts on merc/mando healing are. They could think that sorc healers are balanced for all we know as we've seen nothing from them regarding healing class performance since 4.0 dropped.

Overall I think the problem with mercs (specifically in pvp) is that they're extremely immobile compared to sorcs and ops and they have abysmal heat management. Propulsion Round is on a very low cooldown (it's 20 seconds not 45) and has its uses. It's not a great ability but the low cooldown means that adding more to it would tip the balance between being good and too good. Cleanse also removes a ton of slows/roots in this game (the only ones you can't remove are force obviously). The only change I would be in favor of for Propulsion Round would be a utility change somewhere to allow PR to be used while immobilized. Even that change wouldn't really do that much in terms of keeping them alive but it would be a start I guess. Making PR be usable while immobilized base would be a little too strong for DPS mercs (I think) and wouldn't help healers as much as people think. The changes to kolto pods is sort of nice but the base heal is so small that it doesn't really matter. The radius is also so large on kolto bomb (and you're always targeting grouped people with kolto bomb anyway) so you'll usually get most people with most of the ticks of kolto pods anyway. A good merc healer will get the most out of kolto bomb and kolto pods anyway so changing the interaction of kolto pods wouldn't change much. At most that change would be a very very minor QOL change that wouldn't help merc/mando healers that much. As for changing the 6 piece set bonus, the only problem I see is that we're already using our filler/heat regen option so much more than either of the other healers and giving us a slightly faster big heal would just perpetuate the problem us of running out of cells or just having to sit there using kolto shot/med shot. Sages use one Vindicate and they can use Healing Trance which gives them even more stacks of Resplendence which lets them regen even more resources. Giving merc/mando more options to run out of energy is not the solution. Merc/mandos heat regen to ability cost ratio is way off. In order to not run out of resources in 5 seconds you HAVE to sit at the 5 cells/second area and if you go below it you just have to sit there spamming your auto to try to get it back. If you're doing this while people are getting destroyed in pvp you're just a useless healer so you have to sit in the 5 cells/second range constantly (unless you have your regen or cell cost removal) so you can use like 2 heals before you have to stop and spam your auto attack. Ops can spam kolto probes with no costs (pretty much) sorcs have infinite resources and mercs have nothing they can use without having to constantly stare at their resource bar to make sure they're not going to be in the "useless" range. Also mercs are by far the easiest class to stick on and kill as any melee dps. Sorcs are really slippery with fadeout/emersio, phase walk and barrier (plus they just do so much base healing it really doesn't matter) ops have roll for positioning and evasion for everything else and when things get really bad they can vanish. As soon as merc has no shield they're basically a free kill. From my experiences you can't pick up Smoke Screen in the last tier because there are too many better options for utility so PR/RO doesn't really help you vs melee. Hydraulics is really really weak for mercs in general. Yes it's good but if you have it on and someone leaps to you you'll still be in 10m hardstun range (juggs/maras/pts) so even with hydraulics they can still get to you and stun you very easily. Merc/mando knockback is also vastly inferior to sorc knockback with the no root and Kolto overload is a trash tier cd now (I think everyone who has access to KO feels this way) so basically mercs have ONE cooldown to prevent them from getting annihilated where as all the other healers have more and better options for surviving. Overall PvP report card: Raw Healing: Average Burst Healing: Good Sustained Healing: Below Average Kiting: Awful Overall Survivability: Below Average Resource Management: Awful Really is no reason to play this class in pvp in its current iteration. Sorcs (while im pretty sure everyone agrees are broken) are somewhere around 3-4x better than mercs in any given pvp situation and ops are about 2-3 times better in most pvp situations. If you have tanks on each team sorcs and ops just become unkillable and mercs are still liabilities for their team and require constant babysitting from their tank. TLDR: those changes wouldn't really help. Mercs need much more attention than 2 minor healing changes (and have for like 3 major patches but that's none of my business)

This is the biggest problem. It's either that they're incompetent or don't care. Generally I think it's that they don't care but who knows.

this isn't something new. This has been a bug for like a year or two