A Healer's 1.2 Grievances: The story of why healers are upset

In a 1v1 the better player should always be able to win. Those that want a "God Mode" healer that can't be killed 1v1 are the ones that shouldn't be taken seriously. Healing is a support role (and I've played a healer in MMOs for over 8 years now).

They needed a nerf to healing to balance group dynamics in PvP. It was ridiculous seeing teams of almost all healers winning in WZs, which I saw a few times prior to 1.2.

It was either nerf PvP healing or give everyone the same healing abilities and do away with PvP healing entirely.

The good healers I know are pretty much fine with the changes and are enjoying the challenge. The people that choose a healer because they couldn't be killed, well not so much.

I was actually planning to make a healer but as it looks now I'm happy that my first alt is a powertech.

One thing that I noticed straight away is that in low level pvp you can get a lot more kills as a powertech than as a sentinel.

However, even with all the bulk you've got you still melt very easily when you get focused. I dunno if that is the same as always (as I didn't play PT PvP until after 1.2) but it seems you're a bit flimsier than a sentinel (Which probably comes from lack of defensive CDs)

Nope. My husband does. Also a friend of us. I did play healing sage, switched to commando, started with healing tree and am now DPS. I've always been the healer in any other MMO we played together and finally decided to try something different as of now. But yeah, I DO know, what I am talking about.

Like I said: I understand the nerf hit the healers harder than anybody else. But I also think it WAS needed, even though they overdid it a bit. And like you said: out of all the healers, your class got hit the least. Which is exactly what I said before. We don't disagree, you just think we do XD

Here is what I noticed last night as an Operative healer.

-- Operative healing output is about the same.
-- Energy seems to deplete faster or regenerate slower.
-- Burst damage on several DPS classes has increased.
-- Players have less health.
-- Stealth is even easier to see through.
-- World PvE is a lot more tedious due to lower Operative damage.

I can deal with all that.

What I'm having a hard time dealing with is that, in Warzones, I now have to play the Medals game rather than playing the Warzone itself. If you are losing, the game is no longer about how to turn it around, it's about how to get enough medals so that the game is not a total waste.

In Alderaan you stop fighting and sit on one point to get objective medals, or you put on DPS gear and try to get a Hidden Strike Crit or maybe even the first damage medal all while not healing your team. It's sick and sad, and I hate it.

I am and was a healer all the way through the game. (Sage Level 50 geared all pvp gear). I agree with Darkammo. The nerf to healers and a buff to everyone else does not do justice and just makes all healers under dps not balancing them. If we stayed the same and everyone else got a buff that would have balanced it out.

In a warzone I still get top heals or second but its way less than before. I was getting on average 300k heals in a warzone now Im lucky to get 250000 because im always dead. The instant someone targets me if its an assassin, maruder, ops well pretty much any dps I can not keep myself alive, and I can defiantly not heal someone else. Another thing with the pvp is the medals as a healer it seems like most ive seen people get is 9 maybe 10 medals if your lucky but on average like 5 medals. Dps gets 12+ medals just because they are dps I think if your a dps the wz just gives you 2 medals just to start the wz. One more thing about the war hero gear MY GOD sages look like sad disgusting creatures with that crap on. If anyone needed a nerf it was shadow and assassins yet they did nothing to them.

So Reroll shadow? or change my sage in to dps?

no we do disagree because 'they overdid it a bit' is quite an 'underdone' statement. if I - as a scoundrel - am at loss because I know it's not worth the effort joining a late game (or queuing solo at all) then I don't even want to begin to imagine what sages or commandos feel like right now.

One of the things I always thought SWTOR did well when considering the balance of the game was devising different rolls for the different advanced classes within the style of PvP being played (Objective based PvP). So they had some classes that could put out high total damage number like sorcs which could stand at range and switch targets easily and if unmolested put out a steady stream of damage. But if the person they attack is getting healed they were never going to kill them in a million years.

Thus when people say a dps should not be able to kill a healer 1 vs 1, I disagree to the extent that I feel ALL DPS should not be able to, but to have 1 spec out of 15 designed with healer killing in mind as the Annihilation Marauder is was a good idea provided the way the class was able to do this was through steady dps and a number of interrupt abilities.

On to the OPs point I think the problem with where healing was at and its a problem that would have been solved by allowing 8 man queues and rated wzs is that in random groups you were too much at the mercy of lady luck in the group finder as to whether you got a healer and it was frustrating playing with no healers against a group with 2 which effectively made the game a no contest from the start.. BW have tried to fix this issue and I am not sure yet whether they have taken the right route

Let's suppose for a second that of those 3-4 people that we were tanking consisted of these 2 good dpsers that can kill me. What's stopping them from being smart and using cc and knockbacks to seperate us and kill one of us, which they would have and could have done pre 1.2.

Not every 3-4 group could be dealt with by a tank and I. First need a well geared tank. Second need a 3-4 group that didn't interrupt or cc right. Quite common. Third, wouldn't hurt if half of that group kept trying to cap before killing one of us. You know you've seen it.

The only reason why healers got away with God mode was cause people didn't work together well enough. The tables were flipped and now it's like well you healers deal with figuring out the whole teamwork thing. We just want to faceroll.

DPS think it's broken that healers were hard to kill. But why? Was it impossible to win when the healer wouldn't die? Not necessarily. It was frustrating to not be able to solo kill something but killing isn't the objective of the warzone. There is no deathmatch warzone in which you win by having the most kills.

Having a strong healer on your opponents team that you couldn't kill didn't mean you'd lose. In a void star, you could not kill a single person and cap a door with baiting them off the door and ccing. Or transitioning from one side to antoher with slows and again ccs. In civil war, if you capped one of the side nodes before the other team, and had mid contested the whole game. Wouldn't require you to kill a single person against these god mode heals, and you'd still win the game. In huttball, you could not kill a single person and get the ball reset more often and outplay in maneuvering.

In no instance is it impossible to deal with the favored heal team. DPS has just expect to be able to kill everything in 1v1. They got a taste of the healing experience, and said it was "frustrating" cause they couldn't do their expected job of killing. They forget that there's also interrupting and ccing and working together. All that stuff you expect your healers to do, but woe is you if the game decided hey the dps should do it.

As it is now, I think the ablity of Healers to heal up Pressure is nearly fine (I play a VR78+ Sage Healer and a VR 65+ Shadow), It was way too easy to heal up Pressure-DMG, with that I mean DMG over a long period of time or spread out over several targets.

On the other Hand, even before the Patch, the ability of 2 Healers (which should be the right amount for a 8-man Team) to heal up focused and spiked DMG (which is, even with just 4 DD, way over 25k in under 1 second) was almost none. The Scoundrel had some decent instants, the Commando had bacta (like all 20 seconds, which against a good spike, would mean 1 decent insta-heal every 4th spike) and the Sage had the bubble, which can be dealt with pretty easily by spiking targets that have bubble-lockdown.

I would be fine with not being able to keep targets alive without ever going OOM, I'm not fine with not being able to do anything to heal/prot a target against 4 DD's that can count to 3 and are able to somewhat attack the same target at the same time.... Another very important thing is that the biggest DD's now cannot really be interrupted, yet it's very easy to interrupt/CC/stun Healers. Just think about it: Stunning 1 healer removes 50% of the heal, but stunning 1 DD only removes like 15-20%, see why 1 Healer should do more Heal more quickly than 1 DD does his DMG?

Solution: Give Healers 1 very strong Insta-Prot or insta/heal that has a big drawback like saccing HP or costing a lot of Mana, reducing mana-reg for a few seconds etc. - that way, healing up pressure doesn't get easier, because of the heavy drawback of the heal, but healing up spiked-dmg at least would be possible.

Give us THIS:

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Infuse_Health

OP liked healing before 1.2 because healers were 1 man fortresses. Now they were brought into line a bit.

I will agree that damage output has been buffed too much.. probably need to scale it about a bit (5-10% max). But, hopefully we won't go back to pre 1.2 where it took a tremendous amount of focus fire to kill a healer.