this has seriously been bugging me cus i can figure it out

 

is it alacrity or surge???... or something else completely

I'm not a healing type but I'm sure it depends on the specific class you choose. If you haven't yet, check out the class forums and look for your specific class/spec combo, it should be able to answer any questions you may have.

Surge so your critical heals are more powerful. Alacrity isn't very good

Whatever your primary stat is for your class will go directly to your healing ability. After that, power will boost the number. Surge will boost your critical heals. Bring up your character screen and look at your stats and abilities. The tool tip will show you what is doing what. A good rule of thumb is don't worry about surge until your critical chance is about 30%. Alacrity allows you to "cast" faster. The downside is you will use up your power reseve faster. Some players don't use alacrity for this reason and prefer power, critical, and surge. Edited March 29, 2012 by Owsley

Aim for Commandos/Mercenaries.

 

Cunning for Scoundrels/Operatives.

 

Willpower for Sages/Sorcerers.

thnx guys!

Generally, PvP healers love alacrity because it lets them bang more heals in before the inevitable focus fire and death. For more measured, drawn out PvE boss encounters in HMs and Operations, there's an argument for non-Sorcerors (and Sorcerors after 1.2) that Alacrity just means you run out of resource faster, and you don't do any more healing. So it's better to grab a stat that actually helps in its place.

It's a matter of resource management, IMHO.

 

Alacrity has the flaw of making you tend to burn through your reserves faster- which for some healers like Commandos means you're going to kill your regeneration and flame out.

 

What it's good for is spike healing- when you need to patch someone up very fast and the heck with your ability to keep doing it. That's PvP. PvE, you need sustained healing and more Power/Crit/Surge is going to help there.

Assuming you're just talking about secondary stats (alacrity, surge, power, crit) then it's hard to go wrong with Power, which improves your healing throughput (ie, HPS, how fast you can heal) as well as efficiency (since each heal costs the same amount but has a bigger effect).

 

Crit makes you have more critical heals, which (when you're lucky) improves your throughput a lot, but it's hard to count on. If you're going to go this way you probably want to try to get a *lot* of Crit and combine it with Surge.

 

Alacrity improves throughput but *not* efficiency -- your heals cast faster but they don't individually get any bigger. As noted above, this is more of a PvP benefit, at least right now.

In a nutshell;

 

Stack your base stat, Aim/Cunning/Willpower.

 

For PVE - Crit + Surge

For PVP - Crit + Alacrity