Posted by Reedyn | 17 Comments

Halls Of Healing: Bringing Balance to the Force

Each week or thereabouts here at Ask A Jedi, we’ll meditate on the finer points of the healer’s role in Star Wars: The Old Republic. No matter where your allegiance lies, you’re sure to find guidance here in the Halls Of Healing!

Last week’s patch started some heavy complaints on the official forums and elsewhere in the blogosphere when they announced the nerf to Surge Rating. I was, maybe to your surprise, quite delighted at these changes. Why you may ask? I currently play a Scoundrel, and as you might know Critical Rating and Surge Rating are a very important part of the mechanics due to talents such as Accomplished Sawbones and Prognosis: Critical. So why would I be delighted at these changes? Currently the state of the Scoundrel/Operative healing is quite poor. I’m not talking in terms of numbers or how to be competitive, but how the actual mechanics and toolbox of the class. We are heavily dependant on our critical hits to be able to put out good numbers and if you ask me this is where the fault in the design is. While it is particularly so for Scoundrel/Operative healers the way Critical Strikes is designed in the game, it has a major effect on other healers as well.

Read More

Posted by Reedyn | 0 Comments

Halls Of Healing: Building A Healing Team, Part 3 – Motivation!

Each week or thereabouts here at Ask A Jedi, we’ll meditate on the finer points of the healer’s role in Star Wars: The Old Republic. No matter where your allegiance lies, you’re sure to find guidance here in the Halls Of Healing!

We have now covered ways you can find and recruit healers and how to build up a good base of communications in your team, but something we haven’t covered is motivation. As far as raiding goes motivation is probably the most important factor of them all when you’re aiming to make progress. If your fellow players don’t have any desire to be around, you will come across problems such as people not showing up, poor performance, attitude issues and general burnout. Issues for players who aren’t new to the raiding scene are probably all too familiar with.

How to actually go about this is very different for each and every Operation team, as every team and member has his or her own ways of gaining motivation. However, since all your members are in your Operation team you can assume that they are either interested in progression and loot, tactical challenges or they are just interested in doing something fun with their friends. I’d say that every team needs a little bit of each of these to be successful, and if you make sure you have all these things you will keep the majority of your players interested and motivated.

Read More

Posted by Reedyn | 5 Comments

Halls Of Healing: Building A Healing Team – Part 2

Each week or thereabouts here at Ask A Jedi, we’ll meditate on the finer points of the healer’s role in Star Wars: The Old Republic. No matter where your allegiance lies, you’re sure to find guidance here in the Halls Of Healing!

Last week we took a look at how to find new players for your healing team. This week we will have a look at what you can do when your healing team is assembled to build on the relationships between players in your team, and to improve cooperation and performance in Operations.

I’m sure a lot of you have been in a situation with a poorly communicating raid member, sometimes even a hostile group entirely. The leader is screaming at people in a desperate attempt to get people in line, the Damage Dealers have no eye for anything but their own performance on the meters, the Tanks keep pulling and can’t be bothered waiting for the group to be ready, and the people who truly cared about the group have long since gave up hope.

Even if a group as bad as this one are uncommon, it is not uncommon to see at least some of these things in most groups. Things may not be as elevated but there are always going to be some people that do less, and some who do more. Sometimes it’s the same person consecutively, other times it might be a different person. Regardless there is one thing that is true: we need to cover for each other’s mistakes all the time when playing with other people.

Now, what does this have to do with building a healing team? While all the roles have the need to continuously work together with each other, the healers are entirely dependent on coordination to achieve success.

Read More

Posted by Reedyn | 6 Comments

Halls Of Healing: Building A Healing Team – Part 1

Each week or thereabouts here at Ask A Jedi, we’ll meditate on the finer points of the healer’s role in Star Wars: The Old Republic. No matter where your allegiance lies, you’re sure to find guidance here in the Halls Of Healing!

Right now in that galaxy far far away, it’s a really interesting time to be recruiting. If you’re the healing team leader, depending on your guild’s situation it can both be a time of pleasure and a time of pain. What we know for sure is that the launch period is a unique situation during the lifecycle of an MMO, and as the leader of your healing team you need to adapt accordingly.

What am I talking about? For starters, the server communities are completely fresh. There aren’t many people who know each other yet and even the guilds that have been around for some time have to in some way adapt to new roles and new faces. There is also a large absence of max-level players, bigger than there ever will be in the game again. Another thing that there’s already been a lot of discussion about is the large amount of not-so-experienced MMO players – players that can be excellent, but are not used to the way online games work, both in terms of gameplay and socially.

While all of this makes a difficult environment to build a good healing team in it does create a great opportunity that can, if you seize it, make things a lot easier down the road.

Read More

Posted by Reedyn | 16 Comments

Halls Of Healing: Leveling As A Healer

Each week or thereabouts here at Ask A Jedi, we’ll meditate on the finer points of the healer’s role in Star Wars: The Old Republic. No matter where your allegiance lies, you’re sure to find guidance here in the Halls Of Healing!

I was lucky enough to be able to get into the game on the first day of Early Access and experience the wonderful process that is leveling in Star Wars: The Old Republic. If there is something to say about doing Missions (known as Questing for you ancient cavemen) it is that they can be hard. Yes, you can pretty much forget going up and soloing bosses designed to be taken down with a group, and sometimes you can fail multiple times just doing your normal Class Missions. These type of Missions makes me remember the days back in World of Warcraft with the rare Class quests. They were totally do-able, but sometimes required multiple attempts before you actually learned how to beat it.

Now, where does healing come into all of this? Leveling as a healer has historically been tedious. You usually do much less damage than your tank or damage-dealing counterparts and things just take much longer to accomplish. This holds true for TOR as well – you will have less damage output than the other roles and since some NPCs are actually designed around you nuking them down quickly, making things much more difficult as a healer.

However, there are aspects to leveling that will actually make things easier as a healer. One of them is that NPCs tend to do a lot of damage, especially when you get to the higher levels. The tanks and damage dealers will take more damage and will have to pause longer between fights to regenerate their health and resources – you won’t need to do this as much as a healer.

The other major part is the Companion system. Companions make this game very different in the leveling process from any other MMO I’ve played. Due to the way you can choose and customize your Companion to complement your role and skills, you can mitigate the impact of having reduced damage output. Where damage dealers and tanks might choose a healing Companion you can choose an all out damage dealing Companion or a tanking Companion.

Now, down to what this article really is about: how can you make your leveling in TOR easier and more enjoyable as a healer? Read on for some pro-tips!

Read More

Posted by Reedyn | 5 Comments

Halls Of Healing: The Social Side Of Healing

Each week or thereabouts here at Ask A Jedi, we’ll meditate on the finer points of the healer’s role in Star Wars: The Old Republic. No matter where your allegiance lies, you’re sure to find guidance here in the Halls Of Healing!

In previous articles we’ve covered topics on game mechanics, advanced classes and the user interface. This week we will take a look at the social side of being a healer.

I’m sure most of you who are reading this will have some form of connection to healing. You’re either planning to play one, have played a healer before or played with a healer on some occasion.

Healing in Groups

In groups the healer’s job is to keep yourself and your group members alive. This can often be mistaken by the majority of players that it’s solely the healer’s job to keep the group alive, not a group effort.

I’m sure many of you will disagree with this and say that, “Everyone needs to be a team player.” I agree that this is highly preferred, but it’s not the case in a majority of groups I’ve played with (I’m generally talking pick up groups here. Not guild runs with people you know. However this is also the case for a vast majority of players inside guilds).

Read More