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

Nope, My Sage is TK specced, Known as the weakest of the sage trees for PvP, but I found it fun and challenging.
My main is Gunslinger, And my Assassin is Madness specced, also weakest build for pvp. Why weakest? Because I like to try and push the challenge.

Never had unlimited force or used the bug as wasn't specced into them.

Neither am I a BH that can hit now for upto 8k.

Gunslinger main? then you must definitely know the pre1.2 frustration: you see that commando over there, you DPS him.. what the hell, he is being healed, healer out of LOS. Ok. reposition myself. You try to burst down the scumbag, he switched to healing himself, you use distract for one heal, he uses the other one, you use flash bang, he escapes it (hell, if he has the shield on), he might just consider eating your mez, since after one shot he is back to healing. You shoot and shoot him and the bastard just doesn't die. Oh and forgot, he has a long range stun, which you as a gunslinger DO NOT have. All this time the patient is not threatened at all wreaking havoc all over the place. You liked that? You enjoyed this sort of healer trolling?

I am a rank 88 Operative. I am a very popular healer on my server (Rakata Mind Prison). My team cheers when I join their side and the enemy team instantly puts a Star (the brightest, easiest to see mark) over my head. I'm not complaining about the mark, its just the way of things.

I finally quit healing warzones last night. Two reasons:

1.) 80% of my heals have been to myself. I usually cannot even spare a GCD to put a HOT on an ally. My role has changed, I am no longer supporting my team, but tanking for my team. I absorb as much damage as I can before dying so my team doesn't have to.

2.) Pugs. If the expertise changes had occurred simultaneously with the release of the intended 1.2 rated games, I think I would have gotten by. Alas, even if I group with a full premade, half my team is still not playing "with" us, they retard charge around the field chasing red (this is just The Way, that won't change). With a full team of 7 allies, I think I could survive; get protection, peels, taunts, cc, kb's, etc from my teammates. However, with the minimum of 1/2 my team being pugs they ignore everything going on around them and tunnel vision one target at a time. Solo queue as a healer is completely out of the question.

I can't get by. Where I used to do so well in WZ's, I now try to heal from the sidelines, hoping I don't get noticed for as long as possible. My death rate has gone from 0-5 deaths in warzones, to double digits in every match. I'm not helping anybody, I run in, heal myself and survive for as long as possible before a 2nd or 3rd dps notice me and put me down.

No clue where you're coming from with this BS after the changes to OPS. You might be suffering but if people like you are q uitting then its pretty damn obvious that all troopers and sages are too cause while you was buffed to being the new FOTM healer we were kicked down in the ground...

I used to coordinate with another team member to drop healers, You know, team play?

And even if I didnt kill, I put them out of the equation by forcing them to self heal so the rest of the team could take down the DPSers that the healer was keeping alive.

Sound like teamplay to you?

Now I can kill a DPSer being healed solo. I can kill a healer solo. Wheres the team play there?
Heals are the counter to DPS, not a small speed bump.

HPS of a healer should at least match the DPS of damage class. It's called balance.

Question for you..

If 1 healer + 1 DPS Can't kill 2 DPS. As the 1 DPS can match one of the opposing DPSers, yet the healing cant match the DPS of the 2nd DPSer..

Why shouldn't the healer, after seeing how innefective their heals are just reroll DPS to be on an equal footing?

Not saying healing didn't need tweaking from pre 1.2. But one has gone down whereas the othe has gone up whereas they should meet somewhere in the middle.

I honestly cannot even fathom how the other two healers must feel right now. I had an unkillable Mercenary healer on my server. I played conceal when bored and became quite good at it. I could kill anyone except a well geared tank, and this single mercenary healer. She's now dps.

I've dabbled in conceal for a few weeks leading up to 1.2. Besides this, I've been healing since launch. I have been through every patch as a 50 healer. I survived the 1.0 operative burst the vast majority of the time. As an operative healer I was against the conceal nerf because it made the game more fun for me because I was always on my toes. I had to keep 1 cc up at all times and be very aware of my positioning, awaiting the stealth-cannon; I enjoyed that extra dimension to warzones (from a perspective of not being the one class that can infinite surg-prob to survive until the conceal op is out of energy and is forced to vanish/flee, I supported the nerf for sake of balance).

Now I'm losing 1v1's. I can struggle, get down to surge probe range and try to sustain. But, the massive hits I'm taking are negating my <30% surge probe range (I have 16.5k hp buffed and 998 expertise).

I'm hoping that after a few days my server realizes I'm not healing anymore so warzones might become enjoyable for me again. I'm playing lethality now, its the best option to survive long enough to have fun.

I feel like im back in elementary school.

Why does healing need to out heal dps? Because if it doesnt, no one plays a healer unless they want to intentionally gimp themselves. And thats where we are now.

There are no merc healers left on my server. The few other healers left in pvp are slowly respeccing and quitting as they notice the scaling dps.

It just blows my mind that the people on this forum and bioware in general couldnt realize that in order to have heals it has to be viable IE you actuallly have to be able to out heal AT LEAST one dps, usually 2-3.

Now let me ask anyone who says healers were OP before. If so, how come you never saw a full team of healers? How come you rarely saw more than 3, and rarely more than 2, even in premades?

The answer of course is because they were never overpowered. They were right where they had to be to be viable. Now they arent.

I am a merc healer, and I heal just fine. If your mercs healers are leaving because of 1.2, they weren't that good to begin with and won't be a big loss.

I'm late to this, and probably have nothing that hasn't been already said, but I'll drop my 2 credits here for posterity:

I like healing in PvP, it's a blast being someone's 'support'. Dragging dumb dps away from objectives because they see my green 'jebus beam' and then watching my teamates cap behind them puts a big smile on my face. I've not had much time in 1.2 yet, but my impressions:
- BW seems to have failed in their effort to make rewards for healers more attainable. I get the medal for the 2.5k heal and sometimes nothing else (depends heavily on which WZ, to be fair, usually get the 1k defender also) because I spend so much more time running back from the respawn point.
- I don't mind so much that I die more easily and more often, though I am disappointed that much of the strategy of the WZs may be lost due to the more 'deathmatch'-oriented dynamic that has arisen due to the effects of 1.2.

Edit: Quoting myself from a previous thread, regarding the healer vs DPS debate:
That was pre-1.2, and it was my reasoning for thinking that healing was 'OK' at the time (not OP as folks were claiming).

TL;DR Version:
- gear matters more than skill; if a skilled healer in Cent gear is SUPPOSED to be killed ad nauseum by a fully BM geared DPS, then gear matters more than skill. As I recall, BW wanted this game to be average player friendly.
- healing is no longer fun; gone is the utility of having a healer in a PvP match. This had BETTER be why ranked matches are delayed, because that would suggest BW is at least aware of their sloppy and heavy-handed "fixes."
- healers were OP; we needed to be adjusted so that a hybrid healer could no longer get 400k+ heals and 300k+ damage. That was stupid and I am glad it was fixed.
- healers are now free kills, and doubly so because of class icons; a group doesn't even need to take the time to have raid markers any more: turn off nameplates, turn on class icons, kill the green symbols. great idea, BW. thanks.
- CC is stupid. Half of the encounters in PvP happen like this now: Start cast>CC>Pop CD>Start cast>stun>wait>Start Ca>Stun>wait>Star>Incapacitated>wait>Bubble!>Stun> dead.

Wall-of-Text Version:
I support this thread. I am subscribing to it. There is a lot of really good commentary and criticism on both sides of the picture, and relatively few trolls to have to sift through. I really wish, however, that people would learn the difference between there, their, and they're as well as to, too, two, and tutu; I would also like to suggest that people re-assess their understanding of the hyphen. (/end grammar rant)

I have been playing a progression raid tank since EQ. My first toon in TOR is an Immo Jugg (I have been Darth Nakoda since Heretic II, bladestaff/pheonix bow in your face!, it had to be done). It was fun, but I spent so much time in my class quests and solo content that, by the time I hit 50, I had only reached Valor 12. PvP was hella fun, though, because I could tank and guard people. That said, I had hit the 1.1.3 gear wall, and got bored of commendation farming very quickly. Putting out 2-300k Protection points always made me smile, though. I am an experienced and skilled, but very average player without time to be at the front of the gear pack.

So, I decided to make an alt that I could level through PvP and be competitive with my gear; to be completely different, I rolled my first ranged class ever in 14 years of MMO experience. I made a sorc. I fell in love. I was by no means invincible because this ranged nonsense was a big change to get used to; when I had, however, I found myself USEFUL to my group. I could keep up a ball runner and myself while being guarded by a tank, I could keep myself alive when I was being chased by a melee class as I had so often done to healers myself, laughing at the poor fool who thought I would let him free-cast. But I had a role to play, and that was stop a healer from casting. DPS players have one thing in mind: ME, MY DPS NUMBERS, MY KILL COUNtT, MY MEDALS, MY COMMENDATIONS. DPS players take the ME out of TEAM, which leaves us with AT, a really bland preposition and a poopy linguistic joke. Deal with it. Before 1.2, however, DPS played a role. They killed things until they noticed a healer, then they teamed up to kill the healer. Healers are certainly QQing, but the DPS QQ is just as lame: "This is imbalanced, I actually had to turn my attention to a healer and actually try to kill him, please nerf healers." You got your wish, DPS, congratulations.

What I really enjoy about TOR is that, even in the SP campaign, I feel like my toon is a force to be reckoned with. This is how it should be; as Jason Lee might have said it, "I'm a f#$@!ng Sith..." If I am in a WZ and the DPS is too stupid to come and stop me from healing, I ought to be able to sustain two, three, four, maybe even five players at once: I am a healer, that is what I do; conversely, if I am a DPS with a healer botting me, I ought to be able to kill two, three, four, maybe even five targets before I have to stop and play utility and keep my healer alive. The way the PvP worked before 1.2 created an environment that fostered teamwork, strategy, and goal-oriented gameplay. When I had even one skilled DPS paying attention to me, I was on lock-down: there is absolutely no excuse for DPS to let a healer heal.

In fact, it is the DPS's job to negate the job of a healer: this is synergy on the community level, that is, balance. That is why there is so much CC, BW gave everyone CC so that we didn't have to bring along CC spec'd classes just for the sake of crowd control. They wanted the game to be balanced for average players (why else would they be lazy enough to just mirror the factions; sorry folks, IMO, that is laziness, not good game design...100mil in development? Must have been some epic Starbucks at the planning tables.) But average players who have not spent hours a day since launch PvPing are now, as in every other MMO, ostracized for lack of gear. What exacerbates this problem is the overall reduction to PvP rewards. The amount of time it now takes for an under-geared player to catch up with comms through the slough of PuGs and WZ losses that net, often, no rewards, is staggering. If you are an average subscriber who logs in for an hour or two to pick up a few of those matches, you spend your time in a cycle of futility. And, now that healers have had their ability to keep themselves alive against any number of attackers, one or many - doesn't matter, healer dies - makes playing PvP a disheartening exercise in wasted time. I did not make it to the 50 bracket on my healer before the patch was released, so I haven't even gotten into the expertise problems yet. I look forward to watching DPS outstrip my ability to heal by an even larger percentage, truly...

We needed the nerf, there is no question. But we need to be given something that makes up for our lack of dps and healing output. Perhaps a talent-able CC break or temporary CC immunity that sits on a 3 min CD that gives us a few extra seconds to run to safety; two or three extra CC breaks per WZ match would go a long way to making healers a threat again. (If anything, this is my aesthetic complaint, I am no longer a threat, I am no longer a force to be reckoned with, I am target practice... that isn't balanced game play: EVERYONE SHOULD BE A THREAT so that teams work together to overcome challenges in more creative way than simply resorting to "my 2500 dps beats your 1750 hps, L2P healers LULULUL, qq moar!)

I enjoy healing and will continue to heal through this slog of dead bodies. I tried to go back to my tank; it isn't happening. I just want to feel useful again because right now I do not feel useful, I feel like a free target. I am sure I had a lot more I wanted to say, but I will leave it at that for now.