With the current changes on the PTR you clearly have decided that gutting an entire spec to cater to baddies in pvp is your way to go so here's to you and the awesome game you've made and are managing to run into the ground like the last game to carry the star wars name Subs cancelled till 1.2. No you can't have my stuff Guess I'll actually have a look at GW2 after all. Originally had no interest at all.

So the real question here is why in gods name would you give a class with this much burst healing the ability to be un-interruptable. Maybe reducing the time SCG is active and removing energy shields immunity to interrupts would have been a better fix since you'd still be susceptible to being shut out from healing. But hey it's easier to murder a spec for PVE claiming PVP balance right?

Consider yourselves lucky. At least you'll get to see drawn out battles. With how completely gutted mercs are well be lucky to last the first minute before we're either heat capped for the rest of the fight, or our tank is already dead.

It's not being irrational when patch notes are released and are sooo completely backwards on the design path that you start to question just who in the hell is balancing this game.

10% damage reduction. that's how it's being handled. Ohh and power shot is being nerfed to equal lvls so guess what... tracer spam is still going to be there as there's nothing else to work into the rotation unless you like to rapid shots.

They already had your job. Now they're after your welfare check to

You want to know how you balance kolto missile if it's aoe healing is too strong? you increase it's cooldown to make it more on par with sorcs aoe. You don't massacre everything about it then say you're getting +1 person so you should be happy. Both my ops and Sorcs in my guild feel that Kolto is a little weak if you look at just the healing numbers. It's only redeeming quality was that it had a short cooldown, and made everyones heals better. Kolto residue doesn't make merc heals any more op than any other healer because it buffs ALL HEALING not just the mercs. The fact it has soo many abilities tied to it tells you that murdering the skill is a bad idea. Just take a look at how important kolto missile is in our rotation, despite being a worse overall heal numbers wise. 1) 3 person heal for a low amount. With massive crit it's semi respectful 2) applies kolto residue increasing all healing by 5% (everyone heals the target better) 3) with SCG active, applies a 10% damage reduction to each target hit 4) the cost and cooldown are respectful considering it's a key part of our rotation. So if you start going overboard with the nerfs to such a key skill, you screw everything about the class that makes us useful in a group. I'm not even counting the fact Bioware has decided crit has got to go meaning we're even more sub par healers. I get that Bioware feels that merc healers in PvP are op (they really aren't if you focus them) but completely crushing any chance of being viable PVE healers is just bad balance design.

how about: biowaretrolledmymercsoIrolledezmode Sound good?

Go for it. the worst they can say is no and you'll re-roll to sorc anyway like BW wants.

No cause they nerfed power shot too so it's still identical with tracer missile meaning you're still better off using tracer in every situation where you'd have to choose between the two.

Want to nerf TM spam? revert the changes to power shot so we can either choose to build up procs via tacer lock, or simply fire off a TM once in a while to keep heat signature at 5 stacks while spamming power shot. after 5 tracer missiles we'd still be using a rail shot. We'd simply be using power shot more for the sustained DPS rather than spamming TM nonstop. Does this solve the spam requirement of arsenal as a spec? no. Does it make us more than tracer spammers? yes since we would use power shot much more in the rotation than TM.

If you're running an 8 man with 1 merc and one other healer guess what happens if that second healer goes down. You have no battle rex for the rest of the fight. If you're running 16 man it wasn't an issue as you were bringing 2 sorcs, 1 merc, and 1 op most likely but guess what... in 1.2 you mine as well either run 3 sorcs 1 op, or 2 sorcs 2 ops as the benefits of having a bodyguard(better raid healing through residue, damage reduction via supercharge missile) are now much much worse. You are also less efficient for high damage phases since supercharge took a hit meaning you aren't even the go-to healer on fights like foreman crusher where fast continuous heals were needed. Bodyguards are going to be complete trash now compared to sorcs (no change here right) and were slightly worse than ops (rather than being better) though I'm still not sold on this fact. Yes the 31pt talent is better for them, I still think they are sub par for anything other than topping off a raid. At least give us the bloody battle rez to remove that issue. I'm fedup of gimping my raid if anything goes wrong and our second healer goes down.

We weren't. Crybabies in pvp didn't like that we did more than simply heal our target. We made them harder to kill through a damage reduction and an increase in healing done to the target.

What I find even more amusing is when they say they changed Arsenal to be less tracer missile spam heavy... then go and nerf power shot as well essentially keeping our rotation exactly the same. So we do less damage with tracer missile, AND less damage with power shot as well. Yea I'm really going to stop using the skill that buffs in favor of doing the exact same damage, and not gaining those buffs. Bioware are sniffing glue and it blatantly obvious. I feel bad for every non sorc healer. My bodyguard set is staying in storage till BW gets their heads out of their asses and actually balance the classes properly.

I was being sarcastic. Should have made it more obvious I suppose. And to the poster above me. The problem isn't that they buffed kolto missile by adding an extra target (sorcs are still 8 by the way, and ops could always heal 4 targets, and their heal got a buff in this patch) it's that the amount of people we were buffed to is still laughable, especially in the face of them nerfing everything that made kolto missile good. They didn't buff kolto missile. they nerfed it and tried to satisfy us by saying: well now it's 4 people so be happy. It's now the LEAST effective aoe heal, provides an utterly horrid healing buff (5% was barely noticeable, 3% is insulting) and to top it off they made the damage redux when we pop supercharge worse. We got our teeth kicked in horribly, and Bioware are claiming that they buffed us.