After heading into several battlezones through my entire leveling I have come to a bit disapointing conclussion.

I like healing, I have been doing so in most mmo's I have played, it grants you easy time finding groups for dungeons, to party for heroic quest and is a gratification to know you are making a difference in those combats where replenishing the life of several people makes you win.

Now, my average healing done in a battleground goes from 150k to up to 250k in large games and my average medal gaining is 5-6 while rest of the people gets about 7-8 to 10 badges.

Why is this situation happening? Very simple, other classes are being rewarded by their main role while healers need to commit 2 roles to achieve as many medals.

Now let's compare roles and see how many medals they can obtain by sticking to their original job.

First lets not include the Defender 1k and 3k medal gain, since that one can be achieved easily by any class depending on the map (Although on huttball dps have it easier, since dender points are granted by damaging the huttball handler)

 

DPS: 1 killing blow, winning 1 duel, doing a single blow over 2.5k damage, obtaining 75k damage, obtaining 10 kills, obtaining 25 kills. That's 6 medals they can obtain by doing their normal role.

 

Tanks: 1 killing blow, winning 1 duel, doing a single blow over 2.5k damage, obtaining 75k damage, obtaining 10 kills, obtaining 25 kills, protecting 1k life in a single life, protecting 10k on a single life. That's 8 medals they can get by doing their main role (Since a tank only needs to stick their defensive buff on another person to get the protection medals, so they are just free to do all damage they want.

 

Healing: 2.5k on one heal, obtaining 75k heals. Yeah... that's it... A healer sticking to their main role can obtain 2 medals.

 

Now here you will raise an eyebrown and go "What? Youy must be joking, you must be innacurate" Well, you have to realize I said this is a situation where classes stick to their main role -only-, in other words, a healer would need to stick out of their role if they want a bigger personal reward, entirely gimping the chances of their team to win.

Basically if a healer wants a good reward, they have to heal exactly 75k then forget about healing anymore and go around tossing hits to tag people hoping they die so they get the kill, having a hard time to reach the 75k damage with their small damage, and personaly me as a jedi Sage, I haven't found the way to obtain 2.5k damage on a single hit (Feel free to point me out how if someone managed to)

To recap this first part: Healers receive less rewards for doing their main role than other classes.

 

Let's talk about these rewards and how the different roles psienergy (sp?) with each other.

You have to realize this fact, which hardly anyone can deny: A healer increases the medal gain of other classes.

A dps aided by a healer can dish out damage for longer and kill more people.

A tank aided by a healer can dish out more damage and protect more damage from the person they put their shield on (Without a healer, the Paladin medal would be imposible to obtain)

A healer aided by any of the other 2 roles can... keep healing more so they can keep gaining more medals while still not gaining any more benefit~

Notice the breaking point here? My dedicated 250k healing has made us won the match, made the rest of the team stay alive longer to earn a bigger reward and has left me proud of my gameplay... and punished by the game. Granted that sometimes people can see through the efford and ignore that I'm not the first on the scoreboard (Mainly because by default the score board is arrange by amounts of kills) and are kind enough to give me MVP, but that is a rare case.

So to recap second part: A healer doing his job rewards others more than it does to himself.

 

I know people now will come at me and explain how good healers they are on battlegrounds because they get more medals than I do and saying they have to try and dps as much as they can for it. And you are totally right, but you will be missing the point, you are actually playing as an hybrid, not as a dedicated healer, my exposition here was to explain that other classes get more rewards if they dedicate theirselves to their main role, basically because the influx of medals come from beating other players. So either outplay the **** out of your class (which is hard enough as it is, being a single healer on a battleground is not easy, with luck you will have a second person doing it) to get the equal reward or benefit the rest by gimping yourself.

Also I would like to point that I'm not implying that people should play as a healer bot, you are a good healer if aditionaly you are capturing points, interrupting captures, carrying balls and specially keeping yourself alive (As soon as someone finds you are a healer, you will get SWARMED) and of course you can always damage when you are in a huge number advantage since no one is going to get damaged and you can try and get the 1 killing blow medal.

 

How do I recomend this to be fixed? Is quite simple and actually pretty easy to implement, make that you receive a kill count when you heal someone and that person kills someone shortly after, an assist so to speak. After all you did contribute to kill that person, just not as directly as using an instant cast to "tag" it, but it will be just like your roll implies, you killed that person by healing. That way it will make the 10 killing and 25 killing medals easier to obtain and put the count on par with the rest of the classes.

 

Sorry for the TL;DR post, but of course this is open for discussion and constructive criticims/ideas. Thank you.

Well said, my friend. It sucks to be the one on the background keeping the team alive and they forget about us. We rarely get the MVP votes. I hope this changes.

1 - You are grossly overestimating tanks.

Although the protective medals are a bit silly, i get 2-3 medals within first 2 minutes of most Warzones with guard, its pretty lulzy.

 

2 - Completely agreed that healing someone should count towards kill credit for whoever they are hitting. Everyone should be raking in kill medals.

 

3 - MvP votes are only one commendation reward. Not that big of a deal.

 

4 - You also completely forgot defense point medals.

 

saying healers only get 2 medals is ridiculous, they do get less than tanks/good damage dealers, but its normally tanks/dps @ 6-8~ medals and healers tend to get around 4-5.

Edited December 26, 2011 by scfs

You're definitely correct with healers, the whole medal system itself needs to be revamped, one way to improve it is to make more tiers to the achievements. Right now you get a medal for doing 75k healing in a warzone, how about another one for 125k, and 175k? Right now I heal until I get the 75k healing achievement then I start dpsing to get the 75k damage achievement, along with the rest of them. Edited December 26, 2011 by MrTerrito

Basically to put it as politely as possible, this is not that other game OP has played. As a healer you have /more/ opportunity/ability to gain credit for your PvP action than other classes. You can get all of those kill medals (easily) and also easily pick up most of the lower end healing ones. Your role in PvP to be blunt is not just to be a heal-bot for one person, you do a totally respectable amount of damage and should switch from healing to hurting when need arises. I play a commando healer and am doing great both in commendations earned and valor despite the Commando's pretty much innate weaknesses. (The huge natural penalty that is the green ray of "I'm a healer, please kill me and my target" really does suck at times).

I usually get 6 medals in a warzone as a Merc healer, 7 if I'm fortuante enough to get the 1vs1 one without the person running or someone else helping.

I am still low level but have already noticed a small difference in the medal awards. What I've been trying to do is staying at the back as usual but between my heals I cast a silence or stun at the enemy, which seems to add that kill to my count as well.

 

I could be mistaken and might need to try it out more, but maybe one of you can confirm.

 

^^

what are the actual rewards gained from those 2 or 3 extra medals? IS it worth the fuss? I too love being a PvP healer, but I don't worry too much about the medal gains. Winning a match and contributing is its own reward. I do it cuz I like it. And when I hand out commendations I rarely just give it to the #1 dps (though I think i may be an exception in that). I like to give commendations to tanks, healers, and people who i noticed were contributing to the match. (Some high dps people don't help guard the doors in Voidstar.. thats why they have high dps, not something i like to reward).

They need 2k healing Commendation.

15k Healing Medal Commendation

25k Healing Medal Commendation

50k Healing Medal Commendation

75k Healing Medal Commendation

100k Healing Medal Commendation

125k Healing Medal Commendation

150k Healing Medal Commendation

200k Healing Medal Commendation

You'll be happier if you play to win and ignore medals. I just vote MVP to friends I queue with. People farming medals are not necessarily helping me win the match (though the goals do sometimes coincide).

100% agree with you on all fronts. I'm an Agent healer, and I'll rock the heals over 250k sometimes and walk away with 2 medals scratching my head like "Is that all I get?"

 

To add insult to injury the main DPS I kept alive the whole fight who walked away with 9 medals gets the MVP votes. I hope Bioware changes this, otherwise we'll just have to be content being the silent heroes.

100% agree with you on all fronts. I'm an Agent healer, and I'll rock the heals over 250k sometimes and walk away with 2 medals scratching my head like "Is that all I get?"

 

To add insult to injury the main DPS I kept alive the whole fight who walked away with 9 medals gets the MVP votes. I hope Bioware changes this, otherwise we'll just have to be content being the silent heroes.

 

We are the silent heroes, always have been. In other games, if the group died, it was the healers fault. If the group succeeded, everyone did a great job. It's the same here, I've grown fond of that idea as well.

You'll be happier if you play to win and ignore medals. I just vote MVP to friends I queue with. People farming medals are not necessarily helping me win the match (though the goals do sometimes coincide).

 

this^^