Scoundrel/Operative Healing Compendium

[Shirval]

Before I start this, I want to mention I haven't healed end game prior to 1.2...

I still don't get it why is alacrity so bad. I mean, don't aim for it, but don't remove it from your gear altogether.

My character is half Rakata and has some Columi and Recruit pieces, my Kolto Injection's casting time is 1.6 sec. with all the alacrity(I haven't touched my mods yet) and incidentally, an on use alacrity relic(I think from the Fabricator in Karaga) makes it 1.4.

This has not affected my energy management, even when nanotech casts are involved. More over - it has saved my mates many times, as Surgical probe is often not enough to keep them up.

I've never been faced with an unhealable encounter before.

The only catch I can think of is that I'm only healing 8 man ops, not 16. If I had 3 other people to work with, I'd happily neglect Kolto injection for a Kolto probe+Surgical Probe spam(using Nanotech when it's not going to be wasted on a single target). But I have only one other healer backing me up, so on some spiky fights and on trash(we have a leeroy attitude towards it ) I find it highly unreliable to depend solely on hots, so I like alacrity a lot.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but healing over time crits(high and/or frequent) don't seem sufficient in a 2 healer group scenario.

Maybe I'm wrong, I've been doing this for less than a month(and on my alt), but this is my experience so far.

[Tehmay]

(05-11-2012 07:39 AM)Shirval Wrote:  I still don't get it why is alacrity so bad. I mean, don't aim for it, but don't remove it from your gear altogether.

I too had those same quesitons.

I disagree with the general belief that "Alacrity is harmful to you". A healer that casts heals until they go OOE is a bad healer. Comparing apples to apples, Alacrity doesn't actually make you go OOE faster if you cast the same number of spells during a battle - it just allows you to cast them faster (you'll just have time in between casts if you stack Alacrity and cast the same number of spells). And in theory, the downtime between spells can be used by more/faster channelled Diagnostic Scans which give you back energy. When I heal, I'm constantly refreshing KP and channelling DS. If someone gets whacked significantly (so KP won't bring them back up quick enough), I'll throw a SP if they're a little whacked or a KInj or Kinf if they're alot whacked. But that channelling of the DS is what I'm constantly spamming - even if everyone is topped off. The energy it gives back is a nice boost to the natural energy recovery and when combined with Stim Boost, can really get you out of the energy hole fast.

That all said, the problem with Alacrity is that it takes so much Alacrity to make a meaningful difference in cast time that those same points put into another stat such as Crit or Power can have a much bigger impact.

Alacrity only speeds up activitation speed (cast time) and does not affect the NUMBER of ticks of a HoT or DoT like Haste does in WoW. Thus, Alacrity is not beneficial to Kolto Probe. If you spam Kolto Injection all the time, you'll go OOE quickly and Alacrity won't save you (all the alacrity in the world won't make energy come back faster). However on a channelled healing spell that doesn't cost energy such as Diagnostic Scan, it could be very useful.

So let's crunch some numbers to see how useful.

First some assumptions: You've gotten your Rakata Field Medic Legs and you're worndering whether the enhancement that give 37 Crit & 51 Alacrity should be replaced with the enhancement Eroghant mentioned that gives 27 Crit & 27 Power. Let's also assume for the sake of math that you've got 200 of Crit/Surge/Alacrity BEFORE the piece, so after the piece you have 237 Crit and 251 Alacrity. We're going to see what the effects of removing 10 Crit (a net 10 loss from swapping enhancements) and 51 Alacrity while adding 27 Power.

Formulas taken from this MMO-Mechanics.com thread.

At 237, your Crit % is 30.03. At 227, it is 28.97%, for a net loss of 1.06% Crit Chance.

At 251, your Activation Speed decrease is 7.98%. At 200 it is 6.56%, for a net loss of 1.43% of Activation Speed. That means your Diagnostic Scan is .042859 seconds slower. At those numbers, it'll take you 92.02 seconds to get 100 ticks of DS with a 251 Alacrity versus 93.44 seconds at 200. Not a huge difference.

Now let's swap out the enhancement and see what less crit but more power gets us. Assuming the same 100 ticks of Diagnostic Scan, the decrease in crit chance means you'll get ONE less crit. If your Surge is at 200, you're losing 70.85% healing on that tick, or roughly 120 points. But adding 4.59 points of bonus healing over those same 100 ticks, and you're getting 459 points for a net gain of 339 (459-120) points before taking crit into account on the bonus healing. Crit chance of 28.97% and Surge bonus of 70.85% means you're adding 227 additional points of crit healing over the 100 ticks. All told, this enhancement gives you an additional 566 points of healing (339+227) over 92 seconds of casting, for a 6.15 hps bump.

So what was our hps impact of Alacrity? The numbers above indicate that at the higher Alacrity, you're essentially getting off one extra tick of DS in the same time frame. Assuming it was a crit (there was a 54% chance it was), you're losing roughly 300 points of heal, or roughly 3.26 hps. Taking into account added crit chance of 1.06% over all 100 ticks (which means you'll additionally get another crit, or +120 ish points), and the hps impact is 4.56 hps.

So the net gain of swapping enhancements is 1.59 hps, or a 35% gain in hps. So do you give up 1.43% of cast speed for 35% increase in hps? Of course you do.

Granted, we're not ONLY casting DS. We're also casting KP, KInj and KInfu. Alacrity doesn't help KP at all. And at the levels I've crunched numbers on (a 1.43% increase in cast speed), your KInj is .035 seconds faster and your KInfu is .021 seconds faster. Assuming a half second difference is a meaningful amount, you'd need 900 Alacrity Rating to get a 20.11% casting speed increase, making your 2.5 sec KInj into a 2.0 sec cast. Diminishing returns of the Alacrity formula says you'll never get the 33.33% Activation Speed increase needed to turn the 1.5 sec Kinfu into a 1 sec cast.

[Jizones]

I have never even seen an enhancement that gives power and crit. Most people are going to be stuck choosing between power/crit and alacrity/surge. I'm not a fan of the huge amount of alacrity on the gear and plan on switching some out to get a higher amount of surge, but too much surge (300 is pushing it imo) is a waste as well. If I ever come across and power/crit enhancement, I'll jump all over it, but good luck getting your hands on one or more of them.

[Eroghant]

(05-20-2012 11:26 PM)Jizones Wrote:  I have never even seen an enhancement that gives power and crit. Most people are going to be stuck choosing between power/crit and alacrity/surge. I'm not a fan of the huge amount of alacrity on the gear and plan on switching some out to get a higher amount of surge, but too much surge (300 is pushing it imo) is a waste as well. If I ever come across and power/crit enhancement, I'll jump all over it, but good luck getting your hands on one or more of them.

Then you clearly haven't read the previous posts that SHOW you that there IS a Power/Crit enhancement.

Read up a little bit.

[azazael]

so with people going the 2 and 2 route I have a question about armorings. If you drop a campaign armoring into a battle master piece, which bonus wins?

[Fuhrerschein]

(05-22-2012 03:24 AM)azazael Wrote:  so with people going the 2 and 2 route I have a question about armorings. If you drop a campaign armoring into a battle master piece, which bonus wins?

campaign/war hero armoring have precedence over shells

[azazael]

Kind of what I thought, but wanted to make sure.

[Tann]

(05-01-2012 02:52 PM)Ebena Wrote:  

miglo Wrote:Is anyone else like me dropping the 4piece PVE bonus and opted for the 2 set PVE + 2 set BM bonus?

I dropped the 4 piece bonus and grabbed the 2 and 2 and noticed a difference. What pushed me over was looking at my combat log and seeing just how small Kolto Infusion played in the total healing for a raid. The screenshot below is me with the 4 piece bonus and I consider myself one of the few who uses Kolto Infusion more then most.


I haven't done a full EC run since the switch out, but I am anxious to look for any noticable change.

Yeah I don't use Kolto Infusion at all, it's just not worth it costing UH AND energy. You'll be able to use EMP much more often. Below is a log from a recent run of NmM HH, I rely a little less on SRMP than you it looks like. I used to use it more but found my numbers were better when I tried to round things out a little better. This was before I did some recent mod swapping as well as rotating in the pvp 2 peice bonus. I'm looking forward to seeing my numbers after, but this run was pretty good for me. I'm not sure if many people actually use DPSMeter.com for heals, but I got top 10 on 3 fights between my NmM HH and EV runs for the night.

[doubleooseven]

Based on some of quasimodo's thoughts with the advanced reflective enchancements, particularly how lower cunning but more power can be a better combination should we be augmenting for cunning or power?

I use 2 pve and 2 pvp gear set because I never use kolto infusion.

On the official SWTOR forums there's a thread about kolto infusion's worthiness

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=442800

I never used it. I find its still way too expensive in requiring both a TA and energy is crazy when it only heals a little bit less than kolto injection.

[Tann]

(06-20-2012 06:45 PM)doubleooseven Wrote:  Based on some of quasimodo's thoughts with the advanced reflective enchancements, particularly how lower cunning but more power can be a better combination should we be augmenting for cunning or power?

I use 2 pve and 2 pvp gear set because I never use kolto infusion.

On the official SWTOR forums there's a thread about kolto infusion's worthiness

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=442800

I never used it. I find its still way too expensive in requiring both a TA and energy is crazy when it only heals a little bit less than kolto injection.

Yeah I don't touch it for the same reasons. EMP isn't so weak as to warrant losing the energy in preference for Kolto Infusion. Maybe one of these days I'll try running an Op using it, but I just can't see it being beneficial over a long fight. I have it hot-keyed still but outside of pvp as a bait for interrupts I don't use it at all.