Having a 43 Sage and a 24 Scoundrel I can't speak about what happens 30+ but I can say that up until this point Sage is in another league when it comes to PvE healing. I love my Scoundrel and I've levelled it in part to see how the healing compares (7yrs of WHM in FFXI makes me a healing fanatic).

I'm enjoying Scoundrel but it's much harder work.

Yeah, agreed. Your Kolto Pack suggestion is similar to mine—refreshing SRMP—although an altenative would be to give KP a talented HoT component (100% of direct heal value over 15s) and perhaps a 30% chance to refresh existing HoT's.

 

Med Screen is still super useful, especially in PvP. Personally, I'd drop the Dodge/speed talent and put Med Screen there, and then a Kolto Pack related talent where Med Screen was to keep hybrid builds from being too OP.

that sounds better then what i had for an idea.

so, basically, making kolto pack act like the preventative medicine talent

Adding a few more seconds to the duration of UH would make scoundrel healing easier without making us more powerful. Allowing it to stack to 3 would give us some more flexibility as well.

UI wise as well as the buffs being bigger, change location of them on screen, filtering out castable buffs, it'd be nice to have a HUD of UH stacks.

Adding a few more seconds to the duration of UH would make scoundrel healing easier without making us more powerful. Allowing it to stack to 3 would give us some more flexibility as well.

 

UI wise as well as the buffs being bigger, change location of them on screen, filtering out castable buffs, it'd be nice to have a HUD of UH stacks.

I love your ideas for UH, I do think we need some other buffs though. Specifically for kolto pack which is near useless at the moment because of how costly it is, kolto cloud could also use a buff to either its healing or energy cost. One thing that really grinds my gears right now is our 4 piece set bonus, I mean wth...why would you give us such a useless bonus for our 4 piece, most people dont even use kolto pack! It's honestly sad when I decide to use 2 pvp pieces and 3 PvE pieces instead of our full set just so I can get a more useful bonus from our gear.

Scoundrel is deff harder to heal with. But being good at it brings its own rewards. I ALWAYS get a raid spot as the only sawbones in guild, and without trying to be a dick, I'm very good at it.

Would I like to see some use for kolto cloud? Sure. ATM I cast it when jumping down the platforms at Soa and thats about it. Kolto pack is still on my hotbar for the occasional *Oh crap* moments, since UWM>KP>UWM>KP is our highest throughput .. but in all honesty I could prob count the number of times I cast it in a HM on one hand (if at all) and raids are pretty much the same.

As for our 4 set bonus, 15% crit on Kolto pack? yey ... my least used skill (hell I use DS more often to top off energy) gets a bonus.

The cost of Kolto pack is too much IMO, unless your behind on healing catching up its just not worth using. Energy and UH? Really.

Kolto pack should give the target a 10% mitigation buff for its cost, the same as the trooper and sage abilitys.

I mean lets look at the differences.

Trooper, 10% mit buff, Kolto Grenade heals a ton more (but is stationary), spammable on the run heal.

Sage, 10% mit buff, castable shield on all allies, AoE healing thats insane.

Sawbones, Rolling HoTs on 4-5 targets. Weak AoE that follows a target, on the run heals based on UH.

Dont even try to say that we're better off because we can manage our energy levels. Sage Life > Force makes that totally moot.

Honestly tho, none of this matters in PvE, PvE we can handle anything thrown at us as a Sawbones healer. I would like to see something done about PvP. Sage shield seems far better than ours, and Dodge? lol worthless defensive CD imo. We need a better defensive CD IMO, thats about it. Make dodge a flat *%chance to dodge all attacks for 5s* and we're golden. (remember that dodging / mitigating an attack only avoids dmg not effect, so we'd still be open to interupts / snares / stuns etc)

We can handle anything, but they handle it better (Sages).

Honestly though, I am torn between wanting our HoT's strength boosted, to just wanting some extra unique flair added in.

I wouldn't mind our current healing output staying the same if other effects were added to what we can do:

Emergency Medpac: Keep it, love it. It's perfect

Kolto Pack: Should add % of Absorption to the target for XX seconds.

Slow Release Medpac: Either reduce the stack's needed to 1, or make a 2 stack last longer.

Triage: Love that you can make this heal, but would be amazing if it granted a 2-4 sec immunity to Harmful effects to target after use.

Kolto Cloud: A % of baseline damage reduction would be great, but IMO, it needs to be more than 10%. This is such a costly special that is so limited (only 4 allies? wha?).

Diagnostic Scan: I'd love to see it improve the target's survivability; maybe "Inscreases target's base Defenses by XX %" so, let's say a 2% increase to their Defense, Shielding, Absort, Armor, etc, for a short time.

Dodge? lol worthless defensive CD imo.

Dodge for Scoundrels exists solely to be used before Disappearing Act because of Lucky Dodge. Once you get in the habit of using it, it really helps Disappearing Act go off, but it's annoying pressing two buttons for one function.

I wouldn't mind our current healing output staying the same if other effects were added to what we can do:

 

Emergency Medpac: Keep it, love it. It's perfect

 

Kolto Pack: Should add % of Absorption to the target for XX seconds.

 

Slow Release Medpac: Either reduce the stack's needed to 1, or make a 2 stack last longer.

 

Triage: Love that you can make this heal, but would be amazing if it granted a 2-4 sec immunity to Harmful effects to target after use.

 

Kolto Cloud: A % of baseline damage reduction would be great, but IMO, it needs to be more than 10%. This is such a costly special that is so limited (only 4 allies? wha?).

 

Diagnostic Scan: I'd love to see it improve the target's survivability; maybe "Inscreases target's base Defenses by XX %" so, let's say a 2% increase to their Defense, Shielding, Absort, Armor, etc, for a short time.

Ooh, I love your diagnostic scan suggestion. I am torn between that and "Diagnostic scan gives you insight into target's wounds increasing healing on that target by X%"

Kolto Cloud is just flawed in so many ways though. It needs A) more targets B) more output and/or C) lower cost. As it is, I regret having to take it for what limited use it is.

Also, the lack of immunity on Triage is so frustrating. Even if it only gave immunity to snares, it would be fine since you could use it in conjunction with resolve in PVP situations.

Dodge for Scoundrels exists solely to be used before Disappearing Act because of Lucky Dodge. Once you get in the habit of using it, it really helps Disappearing Act go off, but it's annoying pressing two buttons for one function.

That's actually a great tip, and something I haven't been doing (despite those two powers being hotkeyed side-by-side).

Thanks.

Dodge for Scoundrels exists solely to be used before Disappearing Act because of Lucky Dodge. Once you get in the habit of using it, it really helps Disappearing Act go off, but it's annoying pressing two buttons for one function.

Yes this is what I use it for. Vanish is 3min cd. And over 50% of the time I hit dodge then disappearing act it doesn't work (doesn't go on cd just won't fire) and I am left running around like an idiot. I don't even know what causes it, I used to think was cause many people were hitting me. Or many people in area, but it happens in random pve sometimes too. Lol it happens so much it got me to wondering whether it wouldn't let me use vanish while dodge was active or something but no it's just crazy buggy. My new theory is that it bugs out if I'm moving so will test that out.

Ugh, finally respecced into Kolto Cloud because I didn't want to waste my 2-set bonus. Talk about being....underwhelmed. I think I'll spec back into sucker punch. Maybe if it didn't have the target restriction.

What I would love to see, is a talent deep in Sawbones that would make handling Upper Hand proc's easier to manage. Something like, let you stack to 3, or lasts longer, or maybe it only falls off one stack at a time. Having to deal with energy regen plus the UH proc's seems to add more complexity than perhaps we should have to deal with.

Wow, how'd I miss this thread? I have a few thoughts:

 

1. The OP insists he does as much healing as a sage; he just feels that he has to work harder to do it. This has been my experience as well. So every single one of the suggestions in this thread which would increase our healing output seem out of place.

 

We need some Quality of Life buffs to make our lives less tedious, not increases to our healing output.

 

2. The biggest Quality of Life buff for the scoundrel is already on the way: Interface Improvements. Keeping SRMP's rolling is extremely frustrating when anything has to pull your attention anway from the UI. We need three general improvements, and it's been confirmed that at least two of them are on the way.

 

- Resize the Buff Windows (confirmed)

- Move the focus window so it doesn't overlap the target's buff windows (confirmed)

- Filter out castable buffs only (extremely important, and not yet confirmed)

 

These changes alone are going to dramatically increase the amount of frustrating and tedious work that's goes into SSS (Smuggler/Scoundrel/Sawbones) healing.

 

3. I think Kolto Pack needs a utility effect tacked onto a high tier skill. It's probably appropriate to be bundled in with Emergent Emergencies or Homegrown Pharmacology. Mostly, I think this is the sort of change that just makes the class easier to understand for players.

 

Currently, Kolto Pack does fill a role (a KP -> UWM rotation is our highest throughput healing cycle), but that application is so niche and rare that most SSS players don't even bother to hotkey Kolto Pack anymore. Tacking some sort of utlity effect on top of KP would, at the very least, reduce confusion over whether or not that skill has a role. Even something that's not directly heal-related, such as "Kolto Pack grants the target +20% damage for 6 seconds" would be pretty cool, and you'd definitely break it out for the burn-phases of bosses, etc.

 

4. What's the Sawbones Identity?

 

This is the biggest question for me. The 'inexhaustible energy supply' thing doesn't really seem to matter much, I've never seen a Sage go oom healing. Currently, I don't think there's much of an answer when someone says "Why not just bring a sage instead?". My answer is usually sarcastic: "Well, then who would loot all the +cunning gear that's going to drop?"

I agree with everything except your initial comment. While I said I am able to match most sages in healing output, I am attributing that to my ability and knowledge of the class rather than offering that of proof of equity. It is pretty easy to heal for 600K as a sage. To heal for 600K as a Scoundrel you really have to do everything right and have 0 deaths in a warzone. All things being equal, sages heal for more than Scoundrels. I don't think many people would argue with this at all. And from my perspective I would be completely ok with this if we were otherwise compensated with more utility. I don't really see that being the case.

I think we do need more healing output, but I don't think it is necessarily a question of making certain abilities give more base healing. Rather, they need to fix some ancillary things like allowing alacrity to affect the regen rate on HoTs, possibly giving us an extra tick within those 18 seconds with enough stacked alacrity. They also need to add synergy to some of our abilities, as you mentioned. For example, a 25% bonus to healing from Kolto Pack if a player has SRMP active. They definetely need to make our 31 level talent a game-changer. Whether it means improving the number of targets it can affect, the pure healing value of the spell, a tighter duration to increase the value per tick (I advocate all of the above), or attaching defensive bonuses to the spell, something needs to be done in this regard.

I don't know if our healing output can compare to a Merc's or Sage's. I feel they can outdo us in most if not all situations, even in single-target healing over time.

But EA didn't give us the tools to confirm that easily yet, so I will focus on other things in my post.

Also I question that we're supposed to be the "HoT" class. Just look at the PvP Healing Medals. A class with the focus on HoTs and that naturally focused on that during combat would have an awful hard time to get the 5k Heal one, for example (even 2.5k would be impossible to do without switching to your "non specialty heals" quite a bit)

Our HoTs are lackluster in their current form. A stack of two heals just about as much as our "big 2.0s heal", while costing more energy and also requires more attention to maintain and longer to apply. Only if we maintain a stack of two Slow Release Medpacks over the heal's original 18s duration it comes slowly more efficient. But even basic efficiency or throughput issues aside, there are two problems with this.

One:

We always lose at least the last tick of our HoT when refreshing it. The current tick should continue running when we refresh the HoT and the fresh 18s duration added to the end of it. So if the current tick runs already for 1.25 seconds when we refresh the HoT, it should run its course, trigger the heal at 3.0 and THEN the HoT runs for another 18s.

Two:

It is very difficult to keep track of when our HoTs exspire on friendly players. Since it will take quite a while until we get a bufftracker or even just something like poweraura, heals and buffs have to become more trackable both on the UI, as mentioned here in this thread already, but also in the world itself.

The drone that swoops down when we cast out HoT should stick around for the whole duration and change color when 6 seconds are left on the HoT (e.g. to yellow) and again when 3s are left (to e.g. red, but also start flashing every 0.5 so make it easier for colorblind people).

If two Scoudrels HoT the same person, both have to only see their OWN drone.

Other issues in my opinion:

We lack the tools to deal with a sudden burst of damage. Sages can pop a shield and buff armor. We have nothing the like. We need an emergency cooldown we can apply on a target. Med-Screen was suggested to be reworked and I agree. Maybe into a 30% targetable damage reduction for 7s or some such, look at other popular games for ideas.

We lack utility. Why do we have to be both in stealth and out of combat to use out long-duration CC, while Sages have to be neither to my knowledge? Why the super short range?

Why nothing comparable to AE knockback or sprint? Stealth doesn't do us any good as healers, both in PvE and PvP, with a few rare exceptions then and when.

Why does out interrupt have to have such a short range, too? We're healers and all our heals are long ranged, so you do not want us next to enemies apparently, but yet pretty much our only ability with which we can prevent damage requires us to be in melee range all of a sudden.

Are you sure it's a good idea to reduce our energy regent to 2 (with buff) if we have to counter a spike? Wouldn't maybe two levels of 6 and then 4 at 40% or so be enough to make us look at our energy?

And why are the regen-levels based on % and not raw numbers? What is the point of e.g. the 5 energy set-bonus if we can't make full use of it?

What's the point of our 20nrgy+UH heal? Make it refresh our HoTs at the -very- least.

All in all I have to say that I am really disappointed in our class' toolset at 50 and the perceived balanced compared to the other healing classes. I expected more from EA. And especially I expected more action taken on obvious problems during the first and second month of this game's life.

Edit:

Everyone should go and reads smooshie's post over in the Operative forum, halfway down the page:

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=230009&page=5

i have a 50 sage full seer spec'd as well as a 50 scoundrel

my opinions on how to have at least some parity:

1) healing trance > all. if all ticks crit it's almost a 7k heal for my sage. and quite often this happens. the crit chance on slow release should be increased through talents

2) the healing amount of slow release should be doubled. this wont be op in pvp due to the (in)frequency of the ticks

3) kolto cloud needs it's healing doubled and it needs to tick once per second or it's cost lowered to 10 energy. it is the worse healing per energy heal in the game and at 30 energy unless you have 105 energy you cant use any other ability for 2-3 energy ticks after

4) kolto pack needs the upper hand requirement removed. nothing else needs to be done to this heal than that.

such are my opinions.