Well yes, obviously you bubble too - I'd have thought that goes without saying really. And I think I stressed several times the importance of being able to time it well. But it does work and can be used very effectively. OP asked whether there could ever be such a situation... and yes there can; no more, no less. X

No the situation does exist in a way, and it is a good tactic if you have the timing right. The strategy he's probably trying to use, is that you begin casting your Whirlwind and during the cast he'll leap to the group of mobs that he wants to grab. He should still be the first person actually acting on the mobs... but the Sage/Sorc would start casting first. It's a question of timing though... if he leaps too late, then obviously you'll have aggro. The benefit is that the tactic reduces that big spike of damage a tank has at the beginning of a fight. All of the mobs are hitting on him at the beginning, so during that period he's usually taking a high amount of incoming damage. If you have pre-cast most of your WW cast, then not only does the WW remove one of the mobs more quickly - thus reducing that damage spike at the beginning... but because your CC cast is ended earlier too, you're free to be casting the early heals on the tank. If you wait for him to leap and then start your CC cast... then for that couple of seconds he has more damage incoming and you're not ready to heal him. This also means, that if he can judge the timing well, he'll leap just fractionally before your CC lands. You get the most benefit out of it that way. I've tanked using this approach and I personally use the quite distinctive casting sound and judge it from that. Just a quick explanation and it usually goes OK. But as somebody else said too... if you have voice chat and an established group, then it's much easier to time well. X

Hey, My game account now has a single day remaining and I imagine I will not be able to post again once it drops, so I thought I'd say farewell. It's been fun being around the ToR forums on the whole. I'm really sad that the game didn't deliver on my expectations - but hope that all of you still playing are having a great time. I'm off to other games. At the moment, my focus is on The Secret World. It's a strange game, but once you get your head around some of the possibilities in the skill system, there's a great deal of variety and interesting combinations to try out. Game-play can be a little weak at times, but the story-line and interesting puzzle quests etc, make up for a lot. If you go over there, give it time. A lot of the systems in the game are innovative and it will take time to learn how to use them and get your head round them properly. I'll probably be heading off to GW2 at some point too. I've played that a little in beta and like some of it's elements a lot. We'll see what happens. So then. Farewell and good luck to all of you in that galaxy far, far away and so very long ago. X

Hehe... good luck with that... it's been a very, very much requested feature since early beta.... X

Hehe, not ridiculous at all really. What you're complaining about is really that skill isn't a deciding factor and that content isn't designed well enough to really challenge the players. Along with a lot of other skill oriented healers, you're trying to find ways to make it more difficult for yourself, as a way to 'fake' needing skill. Then added into that, the selection of abilities isn't as strong as it should be, so there aren't many viable casting patterns, leaving your game-play with little variety. Many of us who left the game after the 1.2 patch really saw this coming, although the signs were there in beta even. The Devs flat out refused to look at ways to make the content require more skill, preferring to reduce the casting options of the healers to try to make things more difficult. They also have very tight margins on output metrics, which trump all other considerations. So they ended up making changes that reduce the game-play fun of the classes in order to meet those targets. And importantly, they're very focussed on controlling the variability in healing that's possible. Thus making changes like the once only medpacs, which as they themselves stated, made the amount of healing available too variable between players without biochem/lots of money and players with them. They felt that this made it difficult to balance the difficulty of the content, because the variation in player performance was too wide. Their design goal is to reduce player performance variation. Basically, they won't design anything in any more, that allows a really skilled or well equipped player to exceed other players - otherwise the balance would go off. That leaves them designing the skill and fun out of the healing classes in the name of balance.... but in the end haven't even really achieved that balance. The reaction of a lot of healers, has been to leave the game. We see a lot of "I used to be DPS but my guild says I have to heal" threads over in the Sage/Sorc forums, partly because the healers are leaving (have left). Those remaining are trying to make things artificially more interesting by playing a more hybrid playstyle - or even actual hybrid healers. But Hybrid Healers really don't have enough output without their AoE to stand a chance of healing all end-game content. They're also arguing strongly against anything like mouse-over healing that may further reduce required skill. Back during all the arguments over 1.2, these forums were full of threads about these issues. Many were astonished that the Sage/Sorc AoE was left untouched (even the Sage/Sorcs). Others couldn't understand why the mechanics of things were being changed in ways that would make skill redundant and homogenise players. Many couldn't understand why the content's mechanics and balance was left largely untouched. Don't get too comfortable with the Mercenary difficulty by the way. The resource changes that were made, were aimed at reducing the variability between excellent merc healers and weak merc healers. In the end, it nerfed their output a bit too much, pushing their healing outside the thin margins that BW likes to allow. There's a strong likelihood that they'll notice it at some point and homogenise that out too.... X

As far as I know, all classes still have only one AoE heal. The only real differentiation is that the Sorcerer is an AoE heal for up to 8 targets whereas the other two have only 4 target max. You might also include the fact that the Sorc is a ground field HoT, Scoundrel is an AoE HoT and Commando is an AoE direct heal. Commando includes some more interesting gameplay mechanics, such as reactive healing shield and some potentially interesting resource management mechanics... but these got quite heavily squished in patch 1.2, so a lot of the interesting stuff got ironed out and the most efficient approach plays more straight-forwardly now. In PvE, commandos have been noticeably reporting the weakest healing parses and I think that most healers would agree that Commando is probably the weakest PvE healer at this time and possibly 2nd best in PvP due to survivability. Scoundrel is very straight-forward, almost has fixed rotation and is really largely about pushing a couple of buttons repeatedly. They have good output now, decent survivability and are very mobile, making them excellent for PvP. You need to refresh stacks of HoTs on your targets, for which the UI is woefully badly equipped - making it annoying at times, but if you get into a fairly steady rotation rhythm you can manage it well enough. Probably best in PvP and 2nd best in PvE at this time. Sage is still the best PvE healer and is probably still the most interesting game-play of the 3 healers. There's a little more variety and interaction between their abilities... though not much more. They have shield/ward, great cc, great cleanses, good stun etc. Resource Management isn't really an issue, but does force a more restricted game-play than pre-1.2. But since 1.2 in particular, there are issues in PvP - longer casting times on all the good heals, few defensive CDs, kiting tools are a bit limited in the ToR PvP environment. Most people would probably put pure healing Sages as best for PvE and just about 3rd best for PvP (there are some more interesting Hybrid PvP options - but real hybrids will struggle to heal all PvE content). All in all, Scoundrel is probably the best overall PvE and PvP package on pure healing specs. It's a little dull to play though and the UI really doesn't help. Sage is the PvE king still - just managing to keep a little ahead of the Scoundrel. Commando is pretty much the cinderella healing class; lots of potential but needs a fairy godmother to bring it all out. I wouldn't say that there's such a great difference between them on the solo levelling front. They're all much of a muchness.... choose the right companion, gear them well and you'll whip through stuff well on all of them. X

Try it again with a different group. See whether it runs better... though in general, the early FPs will always tend to be a bit more ragged than higher ones, since people are still learning their class to some degree - especially if it's PuGs at lower level. As I said, you're a bit lower level than you perhaps should be and the style of healing and resource mgt is quite different to the Sage, so you may take a little longer to adjust. You may have also been doing Athiss on your Sage in a different patch that made a difference etc. It's always a bit difficult to compare across classes unless you're doing the same content at pretty much the same time. Memory can be a strange beast and fool you at times. If you're still struggling, I guess check through the Scoundrel Healing guides in the Scoundrel forums and double-check that you're not missing anything. I know I levelled a Scoundrel to the mid-30s before 1.2 and don't remember having any major issues healing the content - except in PuGs where people were doing silly stuff. X

Sounds like you were a bit under-levelled. Is your equipment similarly weak? Perhaps you could tell people what you're finding difficult? Too little healing output? Running out of resource too quickly? Not enough Upper Hands? Are you mixing DPS with healing? etc etc. That way people are more likely to be able to give you some feedback on how to improve. X P.S. Scoundrel forum might be the best place too...

Aye, I too am coming to the end of my time on the forums I think. Indeed, the 6 month subscription posse in general has their time-out coming up, so it's likely that there'll be quite a few people falling away. Have you moved on elsewhere at all Daehlia? Terra? TSW? Plan to play GW2? Would be nice to keep track of you. X

Aye, it's the very high co-eeficient that balances out the lack of Crit. And anyway... the dev team have made it very clear that healers are now at just exactly the right metrics for their balance. So even if they did make bubbles crit, they'd only take away that extra healing somewhere else. Trying to make an argument for more healing output (or less), is likely to fall on deaf ears, I'm afraid. X

{edit} Bleh... can't be bothered getting into it.

I think that there's probably an issue with difficulty levels that causes some of these disagreements. ToR really isn't in any way challenging as a healer. There's a relative lack of differentiated abilities, few valid combinations of abilities - to the extent that the healing classes verge on having rotations, there's relatively little variation in mob damage (spikes), few complex encounter mechanics etc etc. All this together means that healing in ToR just isn't very complex and really doesn't require a great deal of thought.... and it has worsened rather than improved over the 3 main patches so far. For those players who really seek challenge and want their skill to be a real factor, targeting is one of the few areas where their skill and speed can perhaps contribute to make a difference over other players. For such players, the thought of making targeting a lot easier, really presents them with yet more simplification of their game-play, which is likely to be unwelcome. Other players don't really seek to challenge themselves on a skills basis, but instead are more result oriented; that is they want to heal their friends well enough to beat the opposition, whether that be mobs or other players. These outcome oriented healers will tend to see further ease of targeting as very attractive. Frankly, a lot of the healers who have left over the 1.2/1.3 patch cycles are the healers who are looking for challenge and for their skill to be a deciding factor. So the majority of remaining healers are likely to be much more outcome oriented. The ToR design team has made a point of homogenising and simplifying the healing in the game, reducing variability, which means that their remaining customer base is even more in favour of mouse-over targeting. If they introduced mouse-over targeting now, they may alienate a small portion of the remaining healer player-base. But if they don't implement it, then they're more likely to see fewer healers coming through the ranks and staying in the game. Not implementing isn't goign to attract those skill oriented healers back to the game. Most content balance is predicated on a 1 healer in every 4 players ratio.... which means that they need a lot of active healers in game to support heavier duty content requiring more than 4 players. They can't afford to take design decisions that may alienate the remaining healing pool... and doing nothing won't do anything to attract the unsubbed healers back again. I'm not sure whether ToR can really afford to ignore the mouse-over healing any longer. We already see quite a lot of players coming through the AC forums saying they used to be DPS but their guild has told them to respec to heals and asking for advice. They're not catering in any way to a market of players that demands complexity and challenge in their healing, so they might as well bite the bullet and cater to the outcome oriented player base. X

Did you perhaps mean Ask Mr. Robot? See guide on using it here. Not sure that it actually does what you mean, but the guide there does mention adjusting for Patchwerk/Light Movement/Heavy Movement through SimC based on set-ups logged into the site. X

Hehe... I love it when Daehlia gets out the maths. The TL;DR of it would be I guess; that Dark Heal is only better than DI if you absolutely need the heal quicker than Dark Infusion (because it has a better heal per cast time). Which is why it's only really useful if the tank would otherwise die in the next 2 seconds and you haven't got Innervate or Static Barrier available for the tank. Both Static Barrier and Innervate are a better choice and would get healing to the tank quicker - which you want if the tank is right on the edge of dying. I can see that there's a lot more point to DH in PvP though. Mobility is key and beating interrupts is important... both of which favour heals with shorter casting times. And PvP can tend to happen more in short bursts, which means that force management may be less of a consistent issue. X

This. X