So I stepped away from the game for awhile and came back to find you can augment all of your gear now with augmentation kits! Very exciting. So I spent today throwing money at the wall putting augments in everything and I must confess that I saw virtually no improvement on my heals.

My healing circle criticals for some 650 health. After augmenting all of my gear with Advanced Resolve 22 (+12 endurance, +18 Willpower) augments, my healing circle crits for 660. This was very disheartening and annoying seeing as I threw about a million credits at this process. What annoyed me more was that I see other sorc healers running around with their circles doing about 800.

I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I run a mix of Black Hole and Rakata gear. My Willpower stat is about 1850, and surge is doing 69% multiplier. Should I be focusing my augmentations more on +Power instead of +Willpower?

The lack of larger numbers is coming from a lack of stats on gear, not the itemization of your augments. Because of the talent and sorc buff, the bonus healing acquired via willpower is nearly that of power, so willpower augments remain the preferred choice because of the additional crit. What you need to look at is the stat allocation of the mods on your gear. Rakata had terrible itemization, which was not improved much in black hole. However, because black hole can be obtained without stepping foot into an operation, this is justified. As such, you need to do a lot of mod swapping with black hole pieces to get the kind of mods you need, often times only being able to use one of the three mods from a given piece. The high power/will power mods are of utmost importance, as well as the power/surge and power/alacrity enhancements.

Top tier sorcs can get over 2200 willpower, which you are quite far away from. Also, I'm not sure what your alacrity rating is but your surge is also rather low, as most people like to get to at least 75%. That 6% increase there will be a good boost for your healing crits, on top of other improvements you can make. One of the things to look out for is endurance heavy mods, which you do not want. Any prioritization of endurance in a mod detracts from the stats that increase your healing, and black hole gear is riddled with them.

I think augments are great!

Not for increasing your stats greatly but there great for fine tuning.

You need to get most of you stats from your other gear armoring/implants etc.

Than the augments come in if you need a few point.

Like the

Overkill augment that wil give only extra healing/dps

Resolve augment that wil give extra healing/dps and crit change

Surge augment wil give surge rating

Crit augment that wil give crit change

Alacrity augment that wil give alacrity

With these you can fine tune and if you got the best stats you want.

For sorcerer mostly 30% crit change 75% surge rating

and about 10% alacrity (personal opinion ofcourse)

Than you can pick power for rest for the little bit extra healing power.

Hopefully helpfull enouf

Aside from armourings in the Black hole gear, you should spend all your black home commendations on Stalker Boots and simply extract the mods and enchancements from them and apply them your other gear.

This is really the best advice possible.

Use resolve augments. They increase both your willpower and your critical rating. Put one in all fourteen available slots.

Minimize the amount of alacrity that is on modifiable pieces (mods and enhancements). There is plenty of alacrity on your earpiece and implants. One alacrity/power or alacrity/crit enhancement can be used if you want a smidge more, but I wouldn't go more than one.

Get your power and surge as high as possible. Surge should be around 75-78%. There is no cap on power, so use it as the secondary stat everywhere.

Make sure that you are using Resolve armorings, never Force Wielder. FWs are for assassin tanks, Resolve are for DPS/healers.

Acquire a couple of Resolve armorings that are not slot specific and put them into modifiable (orange) belt and bracers. This will allow you to squeeze out even more stats in these slots. They may be expensive, but they are very much worth it.

It is my opinion that the PVP War Hero Relic of Boundless Ages remains the best in slot for healing sorcerers, although the new Dread Guard version seems optimal for DPS sorcerers.

In optimized 61s, I had well over 2000 Willpower before buffs and stims. Buffed and stimmed, I was sitting close to 2300. Those numbers only went up in optimized 63s. Optimization is key.

My guess is you are not optimizing your gear properly. Rakata mod-optimized gear should do better than that.

For your Mods, you want to get the ones with the lowest endurance and a balance of power/willpower. If you use power crystals, you will need a few mods with low endurance willpower/crit.

For Enhancements, Power/Surge is a good one. Make sure it's the low endurance ones. A few of the enhancements will need to be power/alacrity so you don't use too much surge above the diminishing returns cap.

The advice I posted way back on sorc stats still holds true mostly. War Hero relics of boundless ages are not too hard to get and yet are right up there with the best in slot items.

For augments, you want all willpower. Power is almost as good point-for-point as willpower for healing, but very slightly behind because willpower also affects your crit rating and has a seperate diminishing returns forumla from crit rating.

So long story short 1.5 numbers look like this:

Get your crit/surge to about 250 or so, willpower/power as high as possible (as long as endurance is as LOW as possible on every mod/enhancement/armoring).

My sorc's power is 1k, crit 210, surge is 280, alacrity 281. When my AOE heal crits, it hits for about 900. Without a crit it's 530.

Note that I don't mention "force power" which comes from the hilt on your mainhand and offhand. A good hilt (at least rakata level) will help.

I will keep my advice short and simple...

Stack power

People read too much into crit. The bonus healing is what matters and if the "**** hits the fan" then pop recklesness, your adrenal and relics to survive the phase. Then from here on in, in nearly 90% of the time your higher bonus healing will make life simple for the tanks and anyone else caught in your puddle.

People probably wont agree with me though and tell you to stack willpower... I just disagree and my LInear Solver spreadsheet tells me that this is the best way to maximise heals per second. You wont overheal as long as you know what you are doing and start your heals at the right time.

People probably wont agree with me though and tell you to stack willpower... I just disagree and my LInear Solver spreadsheet tells me that this is the best way to maximise heals per second. You wont overheal as long as you know what you are doing and start your heals at the right time.

I will disagree with you. If you look at the ratings/stats you can get from augments (252), you can get a total of 55.8 bonus damage and 2.186 crit chance from the willpower after buff/talent bonuses. In order to get the same crit chance from rating you need about 50 crit rating. This leaves 202 power, which yields 46.5 bonus damage. Thus, will power is better. This is not even counting the fact that the crit rating curve gets steeper faster than the crit chance from will power, so you would need even more crit rating to equal the chance gain from will power.

Thanks for the responses all.

After reading the posts I cracked open my gear and examined all the mods that were in them. Needless to say there was room for improvement, which I've been working on as per suggestions. It's expensive, but i'll get there. By just swapping current mods with some columi mods from the market, my heals have seen a good improvement.

I'll assume that the suggestion about using black hole commendations to buy "Stalker boots" from the market is referring to the striker set by looking at it's stats. Thanks for that tip though, it'll save a good chunk on money.

So thanks again for the help folks!

I'll assume that the suggestion about using black hole commendations to buy "Stalker boots" from the market is referring to the striker set by looking at it's stats. Thanks for that tip though, it'll save a good chunk on money.

 

So thanks again for the help folks!

Yes. Aside from the armourings of the various Black Hole level items, the items in themselves are pretty much inferior to Rakata level items due to very, very poor stat-customisation. The way to go is therefore to buy one of each new item for the new armouring, and then buy Striker boots for the mod and enchancement.

This means a whole lot of farming for black hole comms, but that's how it is.

Best of luck!

I will keep my advice short and simple...

 

Stack power

 

People read too much into crit. The bonus healing is what matters and if the "**** hits the fan" then pop recklesness, your adrenal and relics to survive the phase. Then from here on in, in nearly 90% of the time your higher bonus healing will make life simple for the tanks and anyone else caught in your puddle.

 

People probably wont agree with me though and tell you to stack willpower... I just disagree and my LInear Solver spreadsheet tells me that this is the best way to maximise heals per second. You wont overheal as long as you know what you are doing and start your heals at the right time.

Exactly what i did, stack Power.

Have had fights where i reach more then 2k effective healing. and stil 40% crit.

My selfheal reaching 8500 and normal larger heals critting 8k.

Innervate doing (around ) 2350 (crit) a tick.

resurgence gives the crit i need on a small heal, resurgence makes your innervate crit.

I've been getting the BH striker boots all the time untill i was fully power in all slots.

At last someone who speaks sense

Way back in May I had relatively poor gear compared to what I have now and was first venturing into the world of operations. This is when my guild still existed and we did Bonecrusher on normal mode. Pretty sure the HPS still sits top of the records on Ask Mr Robot at about 2400hps and that was with all out power stacked mods from columi, let alone the black hole stalker ones and all the fancy new augmentations, focus and earpieces that have come out since then.

Without a shadow of a doubt, if people got injured enough then my heal output is significantly higher than that now. The trouble is, everyone has better gear and doesnt take damage anymore Would be worth trying though, I bet you could push 3500, perhaps even 4000 hps if you specifically asked your group to be bad and get hurt a lot

There are forums out there that show that pure power does give the best HPS return, they just argue that you are better being more rounded and versatile with the other stats. I just feel that with the high surge and a relativley low critical then when the time comes to pop relics, stims and recklessness then my crit chance is more than high enough to just about guarantee a few crits which gets you out of the required phase and back into maintanance.

As far as stacking power goes, I have to disagree although I did agree for a long time. When figuring out how I would like to itemize for level 63 mods, I originally was using the overkill augments and stacking as much power as possible. I found a build that with buffs and stims would give me 831.1 bonus damage and 35.61% crit chance. However, to experiment I switched to resolve augments and moved around some mods which resulted in me getting 833.1 bonus healing and 35.74% crit chance. On a dps meter the difference was even larger with a +5.6 bonus damage.

One could argue that this difference is negligible, but in my opinion it proves that although slight, stacking willpower is better.

Another note is that my alacrity might be a little low, but for the sake of force management I prefer it a little under 10%, and would only affect surge unless i augmented for alacrity.

The two builds are posted below

Power Stacking: http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/character/8b40d026-9d26-4878-a44e-07364dbec608

Will Power Stacking: http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/character/e720aa46-c153-47e3-87f1-238c5355640c

Stack power? Stack willpower? In my opinion neither. Choose your crit and alacrity cap and stack power and surge after that. Simply balance your gear in a way which suits you best.

My stat preferences are 40 % crit and 6 % alacrity.

My surge goes 78.75 and bonus heal is on 818.

Those 2 previous builds were very good but I think that you will be more efficient with 4.5 % crit and 3.5 % surge than with 3.2 % alacrity and 15 bonus heal

With this build you are like a healing catapult (offten and powerful crits)

This is my current gear build (click on wish list)

http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/character/068c4b5a-595a-4bb1-b11a-72c2d9238f0c

Stack power? Stack willpower? In my opinion neither. Choose your crit and alacrity cap and stack power and surge after that. Simply balance your gear in a way which suits you best.

 

My stat preferences are 40 % crit and 6 % alacrity.

You can't just consider a crit cap by itself as crit chance is affected independently by contributions from two stats. A preference can be made like your 40%, but how much of that is coming from will power and how much is coming from crit rating matter. As a result, will power is the best thing to stack if you are able to balance your crit rating appropriately.

What are the break points for alacrity to get an extra tick of Innervate? Wouldn't that be the alacrity cap?

Alacrity has nothing to do with the number of ticks in innervate. You'll still get the same amount, but they will go off faster with more alacrity. The "hard cap" of alacrity from rating is 30%, and I put that in quotes because you need an infinite amount of rating to get there.