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

Its called Adrenals/Medpacs. It sucks when marauders/guardians use their defensive cooldown and pop one while their strengthened and get whacked on.

I'm on Sword of Ajunta Pall and if you'd like grab a friend and both of you level to 50 as DPS'ers (any class you want as DPS specs) and get full recruit gear, I'll use my merc and put full recruit on him in healer spec.


We can go to the outlaw's den and i'll let you both attack me (with a 2 second head start before i react) and I promise I will kill you both as a healer without going below 30%. Its so easy a cave man could do it.


All the while as this is happening I'll even tell you exactly what abilities/buttons I am pressing...it'll be

3...3...3....oh an interrupt? 4...1...6...3...3...3...

Or if you'd like (because you are most likely too lazy to actually collect evidence) I'll come to YOUR server and we'll do this and post results here putting this "argument" if you can call it that, to rest?

LOL 2 dpsers on your merc.. will wipe you fast.. especially if you give them 2 seconds... a sent and a shadow will wipe you fast...

and you need to be a full healer... not a hybrid man... hybrids are for dps not for healing... you need to GO FULL HEAL TREE... you will lose fast dude... you wont do enough dps to take down 2 dpsers. unless they are god aweful bad.

As a lvl 50 Sorc Healer I'd like to weigh in with the overwhelming majority.

I completely agree with the OP: prior to 1.2 PvP was fun for all classes. It was a different game to what we had seen in previous mmo's and it was exciting to be a part of. All of a sudden, tanks and healers could DO something. And not just that, it was FUN. In WoW a good helaer made a dramatic difference to a PvP match, I'm not denying that, but they often needed to be constantly protected and, more importantly it wasn't all that fun playing a healer. Why? Because it's a rinse and repeat formula of run in, spam heal, die, respawn, run in, spam heal.

Prior to 1.2 as a healer I could heal ppl, and if I was attacked I could hold my own. As is continually repeated in this thread I could NOT kill the dpser focusing me, but I could indeed kite him around, bubble myself and heal, cc until my cds popped and start the cycle over again. It was always an "epic" fight, in the sense that it was frantic, requiring quick response times to counter the dpser and precision in my rotations or I would end up stranded without an ability up. If that happened, in light armour with no dmg mitigation to speak of, I would be dead in less than 5sec. So, assuming I was up against a decent dpser, the result would be a stalemate until either my force ran out (and this DID need to be fixed), I slipped up my rotation or some friend came to aid one of us. If I was up against a bad dpser, I could literally stand there and spam heals and bubbles - If you don't know how to interrupt and cc then I'm sure healers seem totally overpowered to you, actually you are just bad at PvP. Against a great dpser who timed their interrupts and cc abilities I would always need a friend, or i'd be locked down and systematically pulled apart.

I liked this form of PvP, it was tactical and heart thumping and fun. As my alt juggernaut, learning how to counter a healer was just as strategic. Battles were long and required teamwork and a tactical approach. Mark the healers, lock them down or kill them, use your interrupts and cc. Likewise, mark your own healers, dpsers and tanks no longer just had to focus the attackers, they also had to look out for their healers and keep them free to heal. Any 1v1 battle between equally skilled players regardless of the class was fun and challenging.

Now, well, now we are back to the style of PvP where not many choose to play a healer. Run out, spam heals, get smooshed, respawn and do it all over again. Usually I don't even bother healing myself and barely bother to use my cc etc to elude the enemy as it usually gives me a precious few second more of life in which I do NOTHING but keep myself alive. The only time I bother now to actually kite and cc an enemy the way I used to is if there is a tank/dps in the room who is specifically protecting me, and even then, I don't bother for long. More than that, burst dmg from Snipers and Bounty Hunters is through the roof. Even when I am left alone to heal my teammates (which never happens against a good team) I often cannot heal through the ridiculous burst dmg of grav round & snipes. So not only has patch 1.2 meant that I have to resign myself to boring PvP as a healer, I can't even keep my teammates alive half the time when given the chance.

And why? Why have we been nerfed? Because players are used to the old formula. Every dpser expects they can stun a healers and pull it apart in seconds, without using interrupts and cc, just spamming a few burst dmg buttons. (I would like to point out here that not having lvl tiered WZ definitely made a difference to the perception of healer survivability, at 48 & 49 I was hard to touch unless my opponent was in the same lvl bracket, again that has nothing to do with the class itself being overpowered)

Unfortunately, PvP is my favourite part of mmo's... I'm busy lvling an dps spec Operative so I can enjoy it again.

Troll post is trolling

Unfortunately I wholly disagree with the majority of your entirely well written post. I feel that you are wrong. I feel that pre-1.2 healers were far more powerful than they should have been.

You make a few poor statements, but the worst offender, to me, is this one:

The healer favored system didn't offer us the satisfaction of locking down a healer. It gave us the frustration of locking down a healer. Because it was impossible if you had more than one healer, and if there were more healers than DPS then forget the DPS because they were useless. This is one of the issues with Huttball, DPS is marginalized in favor of knock backs, pulls, rescues, and the Force knows what else.

It wasn't a sense of accomplishment for us when we beat on a healer, working ourselves over, simply so that the healer could heal himself and still heal his team mates.

On the other hand, healers now have the satisfaction of helping people not die and turning the tide in any close battle.

Killing is the point of playing a DPS class. We don't get any satisfaction from swinging away and accomplishing nothing. That is not fun. That is not fair. That makes healing the most important thing, heck you didn't even need Tanks pre-1.2. You needed healers, many matches were completely decided based on who had the most healing.

We don't stop you from doing your job completely. Healers are not known as "Immortality Granters" they are "Healers" they "Heal" and sometimes the person they are healing dies but you still kept them alive longer than they otherwise would be alive. You expect us to take satisfaction from dealing ineffectual damage, but yet you are not willing to take satisfaction from healing targets and making them last longer because, to you, them living permanently is what your class is there for.

You are, in essence, guilty of the same hypocritical and self-serving behavior as the DPS's that you decry in this thread.

Delaying death, however, is the entire point of playing a healer. It isn't, again, supposed to grant your charges complete immortality only to help them to heal, or negate, some of the incoming damage. If you could negate all of a DPS's damage then what is the point of a tank? You have better survivability than they do and can grant any class better survivability, in fact there was no point for a tank if you had a paired Healer and DPS. Better damage and better damage mitigation, win win, for everyone who wasn't a Tank.

That statement alone should show you the issue. Pre-1.2 there was no reason to ever have a tank, they weren't needed, and you could do their role as well, if not better than they could.

Think about what you are saying:

It took you and another sage together to allow a cloth wearing class who is supposed to be squishy to negate the effect if the highest DPS class in the game. If it wasn't a sage, but a Guardian he might have had a better time, this isn't a matter of a problem, this is a matter where you outlined why healers were overpowered pre-1.2.

And that was the problem. It shouldn't be hard to keep everyone on your team alive in PVP it shouldn't be possible and that is why they had to nerf it.

This is an exaggeration. We can't kill healers like they are nothing, it still takes time and effort to do. We aren't one, two, or three shotting healers. Not good ones anyway. Also, we have to worry about killing that healer. If I am fighting another melee DPS that healer healing my enemy almost certainly spells my doom. I have to kill that healer, but if I do, I'm going to die too. That isn't a problem, that is balance.

The problem you are having is one of a logical disconnect.

There is an entire class devoted to literally holding people's hands and peeling enemies off of them constantly. An entire class. Pre-1.2 your class outmodded the Tank. There was no need, and no point. Now Tanks need to protect, guard, and peel. That is how the game is supposed to work.

If you think that DPS don't need anyone else to make them work then you have never played a DPS. Our survivability, even us Sentinels, isn't something that isn't enhanced a million fold by a good healer.

DPS classes need healers, because we don't have long-term survivability but can deal high damage.
Healers need tanks, because they can grant long-term survivability but don't have it.
Tanks need DPS, because they have long-term survivability, but can't deal much damage.

It is the circle of life.

This is the cruix of the situation. You aren't as important as you once were and it stings. I can relate to it and nobody has said that you have no right to feel that way. The issue that people have with healers isn't that they feel less important now, it is that they are lying about what the situation is, exaggerating events, and making up excuses that don't make a lot of sense.

This is like Sorcerers claiming that Sentinels are hitting for 10,000 damage with Master Strike, it is insane and not true. If you simply feel upset about not being the center of attention anymore then you are completely within your right to say that and nobody can tell you that you can't feel that way.

BULL!

Healers should be just as powerful as they were 1.2. The only thing that should have been altered was resource regen. Too freaking bad if you don't like swinging away on a healer... Deal with it. If resource changes were as they were now, you would not have had any problem with multiple healers. They would have ran dry, and natural course of pvp would have taken place.

Healers were only GOD LIKE pre-1.2 because they never ran dry. Well guess what, we still don't run dry today, we usually die with 80%+ of force/ammo left because we can't heal through the burst damage dps deals on us.

^this

but this isnt just for healers dieing with 80% ammo its everyone but sents/maras because people ( EVERYONE ) is dieing fast...

RIGHT NOW it really has nothing to do with healing or damage its just the lack of SURVIVABILITY that is 1.2.... IF we had the same SURVIVABILITY we did before 1.2 i totally believe we would still be talking about healing but asking for nerfs to guard/ taunt which i might add should have been FIRST on the nerf bat and i play a Vanguard.

This is one of the best and most well thought out posts I've ever read. Thank you! If BW doesn't at least take some of the things being said in this thread to heart, then all hope really is lost.

On my server, Daragon Trail, The imps have the higher population and are mostly DPS (I think that goes for most Imps). The Pubs are the underdogs and we have mostly healers and tanks. This update destroyed PVP on our server, as you could probably guess. The Imps tear through us like tissue paper.

It just makes me depressed now anytime I play my Sage.