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

Pretty much. If you come from the school of thought where you don't think there should be any healers in a warzone, I'm assuming you are as happy as a clam. For everyone else, this is a disaster.

I thought Warzones were supposed to be all about teamwork and coordination. That the team that works together the most, plans their attacks, cycles their CC/interrupts, and focus fire were the ones that triumph. Pre 1.2, that was absolutely the case. Healers were only immortal if you and anyone helping you had no idea what they were doing. Put one solid player on a healer and they are dead, if not useless to their team pre 1.2.

Some classes failed to have the burst to really threaten healers. But that has never been the fault of the healers. To illustrate my point, let's look at the difference between Commando and Vanguard burst while using the Assault Specialist tree (the shared class tree). Last weekend, a buddy of mine asked to duel me a few times to find some ways to kill me. He's a Commando. I gave him a few tips on when to CC me as an interrupt (Commando doesn't have an actual interrupt) and to use it in combination with peak burst (which but me down to about 30%). Despite all of that, I was able to survive all of his burst without burning emergency cooldowns. On top of that, I even had enough time to use Full Auto and Charged Bolts and actually defeated him.

Now, that might sound OP to you. But here's the context. Take a Vanguard, same spec, and put them on me. What happens? My emergency cooldowns are popped the second my armor goes up in flames. If I stop healing myself at all, I'm dead, so dealing damage in such a situation is never an option. 9 times out of 10, if I cannot LOS/CC them, I'm going to die without a teammate to bail me out.

What exactly causes this differential? Why is that I can pretty much ignore a Commando, but at the same time need all my cooldowns against a Vanguard (the same is true for the mirrors obviously). Because there are design inconsistencies between the two that makes one - Commando - have a severe burst deficit that the other - Vanguard - is not affected by! The healer has nothing to do with it. If healers were OP, I'd be able to ignore the Vanguard too - but I can't. I need help from teammates to stand a chance in that kind of situation. And guess what? I'm fine with that. It's a team game.

But then there's 1.2. It may have only been live for 24 hours, but the question I must ask is already clear: why is teamwork no longer necessary? With so much damage flying around, focused fire (teamwork) is no longer necessary to kill someone. For healers, healing is pretty much a waste of time. If you waste all of your resoruces to save a life, you're most likely rewarded with your teammate dying anyway and the DPS turning their bloodthirsty sights on you. The extra damage and reduced damage resistance makes tanks more squishy increasing their dependence on survival cooldowns and their trusty healers. Guarding someone is a sure fire way of melting away now.

I think the part of the community celebrating these nerfs either are trolls, willfully ignorant, or apathetic to anyone but themselves. This update is not conductive for teamwork! How much effort do DPS have to put in to be rewarded with a kill now? Compare that to amount of effort a healer needs to put in to save a life (and be rewarded with that ally dying anyway). Or to the efforts of a tank to protect their teammates using guard and taunts, only to die sooner due to the weakness of healers combined with the increase in damage?

I hate to rant about something as simple as a game, but man. If this is the direction Bioware wants their PvP to go, I am personally happy that my subscription is almost over. I have zero intentions on spending $15 a month to be **** on by DPS every time I enter a warzone. I fell in love with healing in this game because it had purpose; tanking was a close second because it was so seemlessly dynamic with healing. You could control the match if you had a loyal tank to watch out for you and DPS to focus down your main threats. But in 1.2, all you need is uncoordinated damage and win.

I do sincerely hope Bioware that your reason for not implementing ranked warzones in this patch is because of this glaring flaw in your balancing logic. You are seriously teetering on the edge here. You have a game with three archtypes: healers, tanks, and DPS. In PvP, two have them have just been handicapped. If healers and tanks have no place in your vision of PvP, so be it. But if you have any intentions of keeping all three of your roles viable, you better start thinking with your head and not those metrics.

Perhaps you are right. My Imp guild which was entirely PvP based left because of the PvP issues some time ago (60 unique accounts). Most nights, even last night with almost 300 people in fleet on the Imp side I was the only one in my guild that was on. Some went back to WoW most have been playing the Tera Beta and will probably give GW2 a shot.

But, there are lots of things I liked about this game, especially the class quests. Now that PvP seems to be on the right track I'll stick around for a while.


P.S. I also have 2 50s in a republic guild that I play a lot. I got tired of Huttball after a while on the Imp side.

Here is from my experience as a healer, tank, and dps.

Pre 1.2 Healing was too strong. As a Merc healer, I would keep myself and my team alive while being FF'ed and with little help. Maybe the Dps on their side was just bad, maybe my side was just too welled geared. I really doubt it, since I remember holding a node in Civil war on countless occasions against 4+ dps. As soon as my resolve kicked in all I had to do was pop my shield and heal myself, didn't even need to worry about LoS. That is simply not fair to the other side, as it took over 45 seconds to take me out, and that is more than enough time for my team to show back up.

As a Healer, I disagree with the 1 vs 1 Dps against a healer thought. It took my awhile to kill a dps, but I killed it. Fusion Missile, Explosive dart, a few shots here and there, and just popping heals anytime I hit 50%. I truely needed 2 vs 1 to not be able to kill the dps.

Post 1.2 The situation is much more level (Mauraders need to be re-tuned, everything else is fine for the most part). A healer can still keep others alive, provide they themselves aren't being locked down. You still need to focus a healer before you kill his friend, unless it's 3 vs 2, and then all 3 of you can kill the non-healer fast enough. This seems fair.

Long and short of it, healing pre-1.2 felt epic because it was grossly unfair. I come from 2 servers now where republic teams tend to have 4+ healers and simply nothing dies. I've played voidstars where it is impossible to get a door without a lucky ninja, and to the Dps and Tanks (2/3rds of the roles) that doesn't feel epic at all, it's just boring.

(On a side note, the main impact of these nerfs has been to squash Healer/Dps hybrids... I'm looking at you commandos. No more 6+ commandos tossing Grav-rounds and popping of heals on the 1 commando being focused.)

Long and short of it is, pubs need to play more roles than just healers, and hopefuly 1.2 will prod them in the right direction. Imps, you all need to play more healers, since despite 1.2 we still need some heals!

As a Sage I found this Nerf Reasonable and not that big anyway. Sure, Deliverance(big heal) can't spam it at a 1.5 sec cast is back up to 2.5, thats where Haste/Alacrity comes back into play now.
I'm fine with the changes made and they barely effect me. I'm just glad I held on to my Alacrity Relics and my Adrenal.

Honestly, I haven't had a problem with healing people at all on my Commando.

As this seems to be the thread to stand the test of time I will repost my impressions and feelings about healing as a sorc in 1.2:


The funny thing is I actually used to laugh ( /laugh ) at bad DDs before 1.2, it was just laughable when terrible player lacking any sort of skill kicked an innervate at the very last second, even after I got my proc for a free sacrifice already, or were just hitting me with styles a serious playerer wouldn't even bother to keybind... They were doing everything wrong there is to do. Left alone the fresh to be lvl50s which were standing there trying to kill me geared in their lvl40-47 blue-orange mix with around 12k hp and then started crying about overpowered healers - seriously?!
Any decent DD with an interupt could at least shut down my healing for the group and coerce me to heal no one but myself.

As mentioned by a lot of players (myself included) numerous times before, there were a certain setup which definetely made (and to a certain point still does) a healer op: Being guarded by a geared tank. Sure I cloud keep myself alive against a lot of classes trying to kill me solo, but I refuse to see a design flaw in that, as there are other classes who cut through me like a hot knife through butter even before 1.2 hit live servers. I tried not to use the double force bending at all, so my statement is based on that; excessively exploiting that bug certainly made sages/sorcs overpowered! But they were unable to fix it, so their way of overcoming it was just to change it to an useless effect, which no one cares to use, as it is way to costly (consumptiom nerf anyone...) and it even heals for less than a non-crit Dark Infusion.
Only reason anyone is using it right now is to get a least a couple of heals off before they're stomped into the ground. Dark Infusion is now useless, as it is being kicked, stuned pushed, etc.. by anyone who is not completely incapable of playing his class.

I unsubbed after testing pvp-healing on the ptr a few weeks back, but left me option to resub, if things would turn out otherwise, but they didn't! Everything happening right now in the warzones was predicted before it hit the live servers. They told us to look for underlying changes; well there they are: the expertise gear is favouring DPS even further - also something that was mentioned in the ptr feedback threads before.

Yesterday over the roundabout 25 warzones I played (I know quite masochistic as a healer in 1.2^^) I noticed a shift in the pvp group setups, less and less healer were present. Even to the point were I played 6 warzones in a row, in which I was the only healer on both sides and wanna know a funny thing: It didn't matter, just everyone got faceroll in a metter of seconds or a during of a single stun timer.
I didn't even bother heal anyone under 50% life anymore, because before I could give him a sustainable heal he was already dead meat.

Even when not being focussed and dying within seconds unless a tank was kind enough to grant me guard and spot I felt utterly useless, as I was left with the impression that as a DD I would have been way more useful.
That is the main point btw, playing my healer used to be fun, I could actually help my team and have an impact on the course of the warzone.
And it's definetely not my own impression after having dicussed with a bunch of other healers (all hardcore pvp) on my server, they talk the same line.

There were plenty of threads and posts about the bad developments about healing in 1.2 and that they are already abating is not to the fact, that the healers are coping with the changes: They simple stop playing their healers or the game altogether. What's happening right now is the worst thing that can happen for a game - players stop caring...
As long there is a fluent discussion (even if it's only a flamestorm") everything is fine, people are still interested in the game and there is a chance to get back lost customers. But right now I'm not seeing that happening.

Even the DDs - and I'm not talking about the short sighted ones posting their pleasure about the recent changes, who still can't believe their luck that they got an I-WIN button now - start complaining about the killing speed in pvp, just read the forums...

I was hoping for a better outcome, as of the current state of the game I won't resile my unsubbing. SWTOR was fun, I especially enjoyed the great class story (and the cute british accent of my character).


TL;DR:

HEALING BROKEN - DPS WAY TO HIGH - FUN IN PLAYSTYLE GONE - BYE BYE

I agree 100% with this post. Its the truth and unbiased judgement of what WZs are currently like.

Sages/Sorcs were the weakest healers?
Really?
In my opinion Sages/Sorcs got a much needed adjustment. You just feel like you're being nerfed because you were overpowered to begin with. I agree that some of the changes are a bit evil...like making your long-casting heal like 3ish seconds prior any alacrity...but...come on....

I feel really sorry for the commandos because of their lack of mobility and I think they really really got the short end of the stick...NOT sages...

As far as ops/scoundrels getting "buffed" I think you should read the patch notes. We were basically left alone and got a couple minor adjustments.

I healed in a bunch of warzones yesterday as a scoundrel and I yes, I noticed a difference in the effectiveness of my healing, but I'll adjust. Everything seems sucky right now, but I bet after a month or so you won't even remember what it was like before 1.2.

As far as healers not getting medals...well...it seemed like I was getting way more medals yesterday because of the new medals to be had. Most healers can get the killing blow/2.5k damage in addition to the healing ones, defensive ones, etc...


If you think there's ever going to be a true balance between pvp classes you're delusional. If you've ever played a mmo before you know that the balancing act is never-ending. What's overpowered today will be underpowered in a couple months and so on and so on and so on. You've just got to get over it or find another game to play.

You and your groups might, and some groups have better focus than others true.

But people coming on here and telling me that healing is gimped and isn't working is complete and utter BS.

It's almost hilarious the amount of bads that has posted nonsense on how healing sucks in 1.2, and now dps is the only way to go.

But when the match ends and all the people standing around realizes a healer just healed that Warzone in 1.2 for over 500k as a Sorc/Agent/BH, then they scratch their head wondering how the hell is people posting BS on the forums, and blowing steam up everyone's bum hole.

And yet good healers are still good, bad healers still are bad!

The cycle never changed, a patch can't destroy a good player, it only makes them work a little harder which brings more of a challenge.

And a challenge for a good player = more e-peen and more gratification each and every match.

It's what good players want, more gratification.

I would agree. With my marauder (or even my slinger, whatever) I now can make sorcs and sages implode in very little time. That means they have to be proactive to survive: most just try to outheal me (won't work), or they just run away (which just gives me extra time to bash them on the head without retaliation).

Still, the easiest way to shake a marauder off your back is to lead him into your team. At that point HE will implode, not you.

I find the guy who spits out stuff about karma, *****es, snipers and DPS quite amusing. I guess he raged about getting ganked for a while and now is past it, but still sour. Truth is we DPS don't care if we die. Or at least, I don't care. It comes with the game, and I walk into a WZ expecting to die a number of times. For me, it's all about making others die. As long as I can kill people more times than I die (or even just kill priority targets a few times), I'm good about it.

But starting a war zone expecting to never die and to keep up most of your team mates is just unrealistic. You want to tone down your expectations, if that's your goal.