So my guild finally scrounged together enough 50s to run some Ops over the weekend. I had tried to withhold judgment on healing in TOR until I had experienced Ops in some form and now that I have seen an Op, I have only one positive thing to say about it:

It is doable.

Yes, it is a grating, frustrating experience that feels like you're playing with a horribly incomplete toolkit and half the time feels like you're fighting the UI more than the boss' damage output, but it is doable. It is doable enough that we tackled both Eternity Vault and Karagga's palace without much incident, albeit on Normal, in mostly questing/daily gear with a smattering of HM Flashpoint gear.

Beyond that, I can only level criticisms at healing in TOR. I know the UI is a tired subject, but it must be addressed. It feels like I'm healing in a game from 10 years ago with spruced up graphics.

No mouseover healing, No target of target, No aggro warnings on other raid members, Ops frames that display only the first 4 de/buffs on any given target with like 10x10 pixel icons in a world where trash debuffs are thrown out like candy (what is "Grapple," and why are there 16 copies of it on every raid member preventing me from seeing Force Imbalance when this "Grapple" does seemingly nothing?)...

The ui is flat out, undeniably terrible. Really, if there is a member of the RPG trinity that UIs should be tailor made for, it should by all rights be healing. Tanks and DPS have their rotations and their procs to manage, but by and large the group that spends the most time wrestling with the UI are the healers and the TOR developers have failed us miserably in this.

In addition to the UI, though, healing in TOR is just horribly unresponsive. Ability delays and what I can only assume to be shoddy coding in Ops environments add up to the point where sometimes I have a 1.5s cast heal and there is almost 3-4 seconds between me pressing the button and my heal going off. I'm not entirely sure what the hell is up with TOR's engine, but my computer and connection, a setup that can run 25-player WoW raids at 50ms and 40-50fps, gets reduced to mush randomly in an 8-player Op in some areas and plays perfectly in others (notably, the blasted room wherein you fight the first boss of Karagga's palace forced me to play top-down and zoomed in, but I had no other latency/FPS issues in the instance).

TOR's system of having animations trump cast bars exacerbates the issue. It made me rage every time during leveling when I would have a heal queued on my companion or a party mate, the cast bar would finish, and my target would die between the finish of my cast and my heal actually hitting them. It's moderately rare in an Op - usually only happens when someone screws up - but it's no less rage-inducing when it happens there, too. I'm already fighting a horribly-designed UI in addition to the boss, I shouldn't have to fight my own cast bars by having to account for an extra .2-.5 seconds depending on which heal I'm planning to cast. That's just stupid.

edit to say here: The 1.5s GCD also exacerbates the issue of feeling unresponsive. It may be that I'm still just used to WoW's 1s GCD, but that extra .5s feels like an eternity when there's burst damage from the boss going out.

Something has to give here. Either the devs need to fix their bloody UI (and game engine), give us the tools to do it for them, or accept that as more people get to 50 and start hitting up content that isn't a level 30 Heroic 4 quest, healers are going to be a scarce commodity, because I can't imagine that the general population playing this game is going to be as willing as I am to put up with this crap in the name of getting something done for my team.

All valid.

On a positive note, the patch notes for today do say that they are implementing some fixes for ability delay. But obviously that is only a small part of the problem. On top of the fact that I don't put much faith in them fixing anything, given that Coruscant is still riddled with broken gathering nodes several weeks after they said they fixed them.

But yes, healing is doable. It is just much more frustrating than it needs to be. Challenge CAN equal fun, but not when the challenge comes from the game not functioning properly or being poorly designed. That just leads to frustration, which is not fun.

But yes, healing is doable. It is just much more frustrating than it needs to be. Challenge CAN equal fun, but not when the challenge comes from the game not functioning properly or being poorly designed. That just leads to frustration, which is not fun.

Pretty much. Challenge is good. I'm all for challenge, just challenge me with encounter mechanics, not the fact that I have to play with a UI from the 90s.

I agree completely with your entire post, very well said.

Also, I feel I need to... inb4l2p.

Target of target would be nice though why not just focus frame the boss for the same result?

Really though, you can scale your raid frames and put them anywhere you like. What more do you need?

Instead of looking at your target frame health bar, watch the raid frames, click the name and press your heal bind. Easy.

Target of target would be nice though why not just focus frame the boss for the same result?

 

 

 

Really though, you can scale your raid frames and put them anywhere you like. What more do you need?

 

 

 

Instead of looking at your target frame health bar, watch the raid frames, click the name and press your heal bind. Easy.

With global cool down and the skills not actually activating when you push the button it makes the delay between heals very frustraiting. if u have to click on somone while their dying it take about 1 to .5 seconds to click before you start casting the heal (im not talking about the actual clicking action im talking the reaction time it takes to see somones health dropping to the time it takes to mouse over their name and click it) so most peoples heals wouldnt go off for about 2 to 2.5 seconds and in a boss fight that is an eternity for not having heals. if you were able to mouse over heal it cuts that second off the heals or even if u could queue the heal to your mouse and not self cast then u could have a heal ready to go to click on your tank or raid member so your healing the second you select them rather then select and then start healing. this is a game of time management and with the current ui it is near impossible to be effective and effecient.

Target of target would be nice though why not just focus frame the boss for the same result?

Because that doesn't tell me who a mob is targeting beyond a blind guess based on where it turns to or a horribly clunky series of keystrokes to see who's on the guy's **** list.

Take an example: All good healers are preventative healers rather than reactionary healers. Lets say a DPS gets overzealous in a tank and spank fight and pulls threat. This is how various healers respond to the situation:

Bad or Inexperienced healer

Healer has tank targetted -> Boss targets DPS -> DPS takes damage -> Healer targets DPS -> Healer begins to cast heal on DPS.

Best possible response from TOR healer

Healer has tank targetted -> Boss targets DPS -> Healer sees boss turn, swaps tank with focus, assists target -> DPS has probably already taken damage -> Healer begins to cast heal on DPS.

Good healer in other games (i.e. with mouseovers, good UI)

Healer has boss targetted healing tank with mouseovers -> Boss targets DPS, aggro warning shows up on target-of-target or raid frames -> Healer begins casting heal or instantly uses mitigation ability on DPS -> DPS takes damage -> Healer already halfway through cast of heal and/or damage was mitigated.

Which of the other two healers is the best healer in TOR closer to?

Yes, that's an example of someone screwing up, which ideally doesn't happen. It's also an example of what a good, preventative healer is capable of when they're given tools that don't suck.

Even further, it's a pre-emptive counter example to people who are going to come in here and try to tell me I'm asking for EZmoad or say the things healers are asking for dumb down the game; look at a game that is capable of differentiating between healers 1 and 3 up there. Then look at TOR, which is capable of differentiating between healers 1 and 2. Tell me in which game are good healers more differentiated from bad ones and in which game the developers can actually create encounter mechanics to challenge healers more thoroughly.

I haven't even done the 50 stuff yet since I'm about to hit 50, and this stuff frustrates me to no end as op. In any kind of fight where I can expect a fair amount of damage on several people, I should maintain a KB 2 stack on them, but the UI makes this beyond frustrating to track. It blows my mind MMO developers still keep doing this, creating these large clunky UI's that are designed to look somewhat pretty but are extremely inefficient in terms of displaying the information you need to see or conserving screen space. By all means make a shiny looking UI for people who care about that, but give us the option to get rid of all that crap and actually see the stuff we care about.

In WoW (using a custom UI), not only can I condense the health bars for 25 people into the same space that is taken up by 4 people in SWTOR, but I'll also have all the relevant information needed to do dispels and to track my hot timers as resto druid. Meanwhile, things like built in power auras will easily allow me to track procs, and there are a myriad of options to track cooldowns. If they don't want to make all these things, that's fine, give us the tools to do so. There's a reason WoW did it, and it works very well. WoW's UI was/is terrible too, but at least we can fix that one.

Even further, it's a pre-emptive counter example to people who are going to come in here and try to tell me I'm asking for EZmoad or say the things healers are asking for dumb down the game; look at a game that is capable of differentiating between healers 1 and 3 up there. Then look at TOR, which is capable of differentiating between healers 1 and 2. Tell me in which game are good healers more differentiated from bad ones and in which game the developers can actually create encounter mechanics to challenge healers more thoroughly.

I applaud most of what you've written in this post as it's well-reasoned and well-written. Having been a healer from way back in EQ (beta'd as a cleric, played as a 2 boxed cleric/enchanter, man am I old), I'd only point out that you can differentiate bad healers from good ones no matter what the tools are and that the tools dictate how the content is designed. I'd prefer not to see it get to the point of WoW where you basically couldn't do your job as a healer without certain add-ons, which is where most of the whining would come from I think.

Admittedly the MMO genre has moved leaps and bounds from CH chains (eq), but I'd imagine, just as WoW did, you'll begin to see more advanced encounters as more tools become available. While I'd join you in wanting to see at least a better UI (I'm indifferent to mouseover because I use a razer naga so it's left-click/thumb-click for me when I'm not just using F keys in groups), considering the tools we have now the content isn't really out of line with it. I'm at least moderately confident BW will slowly give us more tools and increase the difficulty in encounters as they come. Really though, healers just need to be able to...

1. See what's going on: health bars, debuff frames, casting bar for boss skills about to do big damage, a big dunce cap for the 'you make bad players look good' players, etc.

2. Effective way of dealing with what's going on, which is easily dealt with as long as you have the information in 1. I imagine mouseovers and target of target frames would be representative here.

In any case, I think you make good points, just wanted to point out that most dissenters will likely be wanting anything other than what was required to be successful in 'that other game'.

I applaud most of what you've written in this post as it's well-reasoned and well-written. Having been a healer from way back in EQ (beta'd as a cleric, played as a 2 boxed cleric/enchanter, man am I old), I'd only point out that you can differentiate bad healers from good ones no matter what the tools are and that the tools dictate how the content is designed. I'd prefer not to see it get to the point of WoW where you basically couldn't do your job as a healer without certain add-ons, which is where most of the whining would come from I think.

I agree that you can differentiate bad from good regardless of the toolbox each player is given. Hell, even if the toolbox was a single button that you just spammed repeatedly, there would probably still be nuances that good players would figure out and bad players wouldn't.

That said, I do think that the more well designed the toolbox you give healers, the higher you can push the skill ceiling. The higher you can push the skill ceiling, the more you can allow the truly talented to display their abilities and the more you can meet them at their skill level with the challenges you give them. There aren't just "good" and "bad" healers. There are world first healers. There are regional top 100 healers. There are average-heroic-raid-guild healers. There are healers that don't see heroic modes, but dominate normals. You get the idea.

I think the notion that WoW eventually got to the state of "required" addons demonstrates this rather eloquently, honestly. Vanilla WoW healing was about on par to what we have now in TOR (perhaps with less interesting individual class mechanics), and not too much of a step above CH chains and battle rez zerging in terms of its complexity. However, the player base itself (aided by the fact that Blizzard allowed customization in the form of macros and addons) pushed the skill ceiling higher of its own accord and Blizzard allowed this instead of stymieing it. So, the good players figured out macros and created addons, among other things like establishing an impressive knowledge base of game information on the internet, to help them capitalize on their latent abilities, play more efficiently, etc; the developers created challenges to match the higher skill ceiling; and eventually through a long process and multiple expansions we go from a Ragnaros fight with, by best recall, 3-4 unique mechanics (melee knockback, caster knockback, adds, possibly something I'm forgetting) to a Ragnaros fight that has somewhere around 20. The players were the ones who drove the game in that direction by raising the skill ceiling of the game.

Now, I almost share the queasiness over mandatory third party addons, but I think if things get to that point, it demonstrates something about the current state of the game. Mandatory third party addons indicate that players have figured out a boost to efficiency so profound that one of two things is happening:

Sometimes an addon or macro is just clearly overstepping its bounds - mostly when an addon begins to flat out making decisions for the player (recall the AVR fiasco at the end of Wrath of the Lich King). This is a significant issue because it raises the skill floor . I.e. in addition to allowing talented players more opportunity to excel, it literally plays the game for bad players and prevents them from failing. As much as trolls bemoan things like macros, addons like WoW's Grid, mouseovers, etc. they most assuredly do not fall into this category because they don't make decisions for the player. Addons like AVR start to tread in the territory of making decisions for the player and I agree with shutting them down.

Other times, I think that it simply demonstrates how limiting, or possibly incomplete, the fundamentals built into the game are. In this case, whatever tool we're talking about isn't raising the skill floor and literally preventing failure, but is an undeniable boost to efficiency for those who know how to use it. If anything, I think the onus here is on the developer to then create a first-party version of it.

For that second category, essentially, it's not the addon's fault it's mandatory; it's more the developers' fault for not including it in the first place.

Side note, I know I'm laying a lot of this at the feet of what is probably an already overstressed development team, but this is the kind of stuff that just has to be taken care of if you're going to compete with a behemoth like WoW and believe me when I say that I want TOR to be able to compete with a behemoth like WoW.

.....But seriously. "Grapple" on those trash mobs in Eternity Vault. What the ****, man?

Two things. I don't disagree with a majority of your post, but two things really got to me. First of all, you do not need mouseover healing to be good. If you're really that desperate to have mouseover healer to function, you need better reflexes. It's that simple. It shouldn't take you but a split second to target someone, and it shouldn't be the difference between life and death.

That said, people need to understand that this is not WoW. SWtoR does not use the same engine, it's not even on the same playing field. Their graphics engine is a great deal more powerful, and more draining on older computer systems. WoW, even when it was newly released, had been coded to be kinder on older machines. That was what made it more accessible. In short, if you're experiencing such horrendous lag, turn your graphics down or invest in a new card/machine.

Overall, a good post. The UI is a little... behind the times, and though it's primitive and lacking a few nice components, it will not make or break a good healer. Work with what you have, it's what good healers have always done. WoW didn't always have such a nice, clean UI, or an excessive number of addons to choose from, and yet, vanilla healers did just fine, tackling some of the hardest content in the game without the hand holding of addons that made things easier.

Over time, things will get better, things will get easier. For now, use what you have and understand the game developers are still learning what works and what doesn't.

Two things. I don't disagree with a majority of your post, but two things really got to me. First of all, you do not need mouseover healing to be good. If you're really that desperate to have mouseover healer to function, you need better reflexes. It's that simple. It shouldn't take you but a split second to target someone, and it shouldn't be the difference between life and death.

The problem with the lack of mouseover/click-casting healing is not that you need it in order to be "good".

The problem is that you want healing to be fun and accessible to maintain a healthy population of healers. We're not just talking about ops here; from the moment you pick up an advanced class at level 10, you want people who are interested in healing to find the activity enjoyable and fun. You don't want them to get bored, frustrated, and burned out.

Lack of mouseover/click-casting healing in particular contributes to the "all I see is health bars" syndrome, which is further exacerbated by the lack of target of target information, tiny debuff icons, etc. But mouseover/click-casting is probably the biggest thing. Most importantly, it allows you keep a mob targeted while casting heals; interact with it, see who it targets (assuming you have target-of-target information), see what abilities it casts, and so forth. In short, any form of healing that does not require you to actively target your group members allows you more interaction with the game world on top of interaction with the party/op frames. That's a significant QoL issue.

Two things. I don't disagree with a majority of your post, but two things really got to me. First of all, you do not need mouseover healing to be good. If you're really that desperate to have mouseover healer to function, you need better reflexes. It's that simple. It shouldn't take you but a split second to target someone, and it shouldn't be the difference between life and death.

I've never used mouse over healing, but I know most healers do, and many MMO's these days allow you to do it. I think this is simply a habbit they would like to take into SWTOR because it is a good concept, and they are disappointed it doesn't work here. If you've been used to MO healing for years, I could easily see mistakes happen when things get really crazy because you attempted to MO heal instead of targeting.

That said, people need to understand that this is not WoW. SWtoR does not use the same engine, it's not even on the same playing field. Their graphics engine is a great deal more powerful, and more draining on older computer systems. WoW, even when it was newly released, had been coded to be kinder on older machines. That was what made it more accessible. In short, if you're experiencing such horrendous lag, turn your graphics down or invest in a new card/machine.

For things like stuttering you might have a point, but my heal that's a 2 second cast taking 4 seconds because when the cast bar is finished I stand there for an extra 2 seconds doing nothing? No that's not my computer.

Overall, a good post. The UI is a little... behind the times, and though it's primitive and lacking a few nice components, it will not make or break a good healer. Work with what you have, it's what good healers have always done. WoW didn't always have such a nice, clean UI, or an excessive number of addons to choose from, and yet, vanilla healers did just fine, tackling some of the hardest content in the game without the hand holding of addons that made things easier.

Some of the hardest content at the start of vanilla was extremely trivial by "modern raiding standards". Healing was still done in rotations, most healers were 1 button wonders (like priest flash heal), boss mechanics were extremely simple. By the time genuine harder fights came around (like C'thun or Naxx) we also had much better tools available to us already, and healers had been improved to have a little more depth at least.

In SWTOR, they skipped ahead with some of this, without giving us the tools for it. Healers already have proc based mechanics and buffs to track (double KB for example), but the UI is completely horrid for actually managing these things. Tracking procs is staring at tiny buff icons between a sea of useless ones, and tracking KB means targeting people and then looking for the KB buff stack between another sea of useless buff icons. It's great that they wanted to make healers more interesting and in depth from the start, but they overlooked one of the most crucial aspects for healers, which is the UI they have to work with.

edit to say here: The 1.5s GCD also exacerbates the issue of feeling unresponsive. It may be that I'm still just used to WoW's 1s GCD, but that extra .5s feels like an eternity when there's burst damage from the boss going out.

WoW's GCD is 1.5s for non-melee abilities. It is, however, reduced by Haste, unlike Alacrity in TOR.

Two things. I don't disagree with a majority of your post, but two things really got to me. First of all, you do not need mouseover healing to be good. If you're really that desperate to have mouseover healer to function, you need better reflexes. It's that simple. It shouldn't take you but a split second to target someone, and it shouldn't be the difference between life and death.

You don't need mouseovers to be good, but they do raise the skill ceiling on what you're able to accomplish as a healer. I would draw a comparison here to Keybinding + mouse turning vs Clicking action bars + keyboard turning for tanks/DPS. A clicker can be good, better even than most bad players who keybind, but will not be as good as a similarly talented player who keybinds. It's just a simple consequence of one method being more efficient and effective than the other*.

The fractions of a second you save by using mouseover instead of hard targeting may not individually be the difference between life and death, but they certainly add up across a fight.

edit: *Just to cover my bases: There are other ways to boost healing efficiency too (e.g. click-healing), so it's not just method 1 vs method 2 like clicking vs keybinding is, but you take my meaning on the general idea of efficient method vs inefficient method.

to put it into perspective for people who mainly dps, or who have always played by selecting somone then healing them. Not having mouse over healing to someone who has played with it for years would be the same if they didnt allow you to change the key bindings for you skills. So now you can only press 1-0 and alt 1-0 and ctrl 1-0 that should be all you need. yes its slower and a pain in the butt to reach across you key board to hit that 0 but hey, you'll get used to it. Learn to play with the tools you have. Im pretty sure that you would quickly see alot of posts asking to allow key binding which is exactly what the healers here are asking for.

Yes we don't 100 percent need it in order to heal effectivly and yes eventually we may get used to this style of healing. But what are the forums for anyway if not to ask for a feature that you would like implemented into the game.

Arguing you dont need this to play is not needed, if you dont like this feature its fine just play with the regular UI we are just asking for the option to play how we are comfortable playing.

first off im gonna tell myself to cry more noob and l2p just so i can be first but.

My passion in all MMO's is pvp, i find it very dynamic and always evolving making me think on my toes to best my foe. In this game I have become so overly frustraited in trying to play a heal role that I cant bring myself to do it any more. In pvp I find myself in my group running into a fight and some guy next to me has a stealther jump him and crit him big so i try to react and click him for an instant heal but the stealther is running around him all sparaticly so i keep clicking him rather then my friend... ok plan B ill see what his name is real fast and then find him on the bar and click him and heal him, oh wait his name is like 5 words long.... Apocolypto major cletus van buren.... hmm which part is his name and which is the title well there is no apocolypto or major or clutus ok he was dead 5 seconds ago while i was trying to find him among the other 4 people taking damage around me but hey if mr apocolypto is around me again ill know who to look for.

How im used to playing is mr apocolypto gets jumped i tab target the enemy hit an instant cc. click my instant heal and the game knows i dont wanna heal the enemy so it puts it on my mouse i hover my mouse over my friend in front of me and even if mr enemy jumps in the way of my mouse the smart target system heals the friend behind him. woohoo hes saved. now i can keep mr bad guy targeted as well as mouse over heal my friend at the same time, also keep the enemy dotted, i can interrupt his channeled abilities with cc or just straight out help my dps damage him. HURRAY im contributing twice as much to my team rather then being just a heal bot, and all those other abilities on my bar that arnt heals actually mean something. plus i can now watch the flow of the battle and adjust positioning according to needs to be healed so they dont LOS me rather then camping my raid frame.

As is, i find myself staring at health bars on my screen not moving hoping no one sneaks up on me. Then i spam heal across the board and hope no one runs out of range or LOS's me. very very very frustraiting.

I've never used mouse over healing, but I know most healers do, and many MMO's these days allow you to do it. I think this is simply a habbit they would like to take into SWTOR because it is a good concept, and they are disappointed it doesn't work here. If you've been used to MO healing for years, I could easily see mistakes happen when things get really crazy because you attempted to MO heal instead of targeting.

I'm afraid that it's not just a habit. I've been healing in WoW since vanilla (when there was no mouseover healing or click-casting), and am also still playing other MMOs that do not have mouseover/click-casting functionality. In short, I have extensive experience with all of those styles.

I can function fine as a healer without mouseover/click-casting functionality, but I strongly prefer not to, just because it's so damn uncomfortable. Just as, while I could run a 100m sprint in high heels, I strongly prefer not to.