SWTOR Scoundrel and Operative Healing Compendium

SWTOR Scoundrel and Operative Healing Compendium by Kaladris

Based on the Sith Assassin Tanking Compendium by Alratan. I will shamelessly admit that I copied large amounts of information/layout from Alratan’s guide, as it is excellently presented and there was no need to re-invent the wheel.
Actually, i copied that as well as the most of the rest from Sol – thank you very much at this point!
I’d also like to thank everyone who joined this forum by now, making this really nice discussions available so long before the start of the game itself, and helping to get quite a nice overview over what’s coming – thanks to all of you!

Table of Contents:

I Skilling, Abilities and „How to heal“

I.a. Energy
I.b. Skill Tree
I.c. Healing Abilities
I.d. Situational Abilities / Survival CDs
I.e. Healing „How to?“

II Stats, Gear, Consumables, Crew Skills

II.a. Stats
II.b. Gear
II.c. Consumables
II.d. Crew Skills

As a scoundrel/operative, you will be able to put your skill points into the medicine skill tree, which will enable you to take the role of a healer in a Flashpoint and an Operation.
The main limitation of an IA/Smuggler healer will be his resource system, which has the potential to enable you to heal for an infinitive timeframe, but has also has a high possiblity to putting you into an energy hole where you just starve of energy and are unable to heal your group appropietly.
Furthermore, it is the only healing class with a stealth, making it quite desireable from a PvP perspective.

I Skilling, Abilities, and „How to heal“

I.a. Energy:

Scoundrels/Operatives use energy similar to rogues in World of WarCraft with one major difference; the rate at which we regenerate energy changes depending on our current energy levels. The less energy we have, the slower it regenerates. This creates a very different mechanic and will have an extreme impact on our ability priority/rotation. Our main focus will be juggling energy regeneration with the need to keep up sustained healing, along with situations where burst is required and will drain our pool below optimal levels.

We start out with a base of 100 energy as a Scoundrel/Operative and our base energy regeneration rate is 5/second. While you will never have more than 100 energy, we do get access to Pugnacity / Stim Boost, which increases our energy regeneration by 1 per second. It will always be a priority to keep this effect up no matter what spec you are, as faster energy regeneration = more ability spam = more DPS/healing.

As stated the less energy we have, the slower our rate of energy regeneration is, as shown in the following table:

Some healing abilities of us do not require any energy cost but have other disadvantages.
We have some ways to gain energy back a little faster than just waiting, which will be explained in the „How to heal“-section.

I.b. Skill Tree:

The core of every PvE-orientated healing spec is this:
http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#401MffbzGRRzsZ0cZh.1

It is important to note that we actually have two filler points in evasion that can be put elsewhere, for example in Chem-resistant Inlays for 4% less damage, which also seems to be a good survivability talent.
I chose Evasive Imperative for a 3 seconds short 20% sprint miced together with a 100% chance to evade and removal of all debuffs, which will make it much more easier to survive reactive situations, while Chem-resistant Inlays will improve our overall dmg mitigation against AoE attacks or normal mobs running wild.
This is a question of your own choice – it could become clearer what is more useful once endgame started.

It is also possible to put two points in „Deadly Directive“ for 4% alacrity, although i do not believe that this will be a good choice – as more speed to spend our resources won’t give us a real benefit at all.

The remaining 4 points can be spend at will, but while the lethality tree tier 2 has nothing useful to offer to a healer, it seems useful to invest our remaining points either in defensive skills in the medicine tree, like this:

http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#401MffrzGRRdsZ0cZh.1

Or putting the remaining points into the concealment tree, whose tier 2 has quite a lot of really good survivability talents like movement speed, endurance % or defense %.

I would be very happy to post some suggested PvP builds, as they tend to be completly different and not so focussed on healing alone.
Feel free to PM me an i will edit this post in order to make some good suggestions at this point.

I.c. Healing abilities:

So here is a list of all our abilities we will have that enable us to heal our allies or support them in some other ways.
Please note that in the next section i will list a lot of other abilities that will help us with our resource management and bring all of that together in the short „How to heal“-section.
For further information, please take a look in the „PvE-Healing Discussion“-Thread, esspecially the start post.

So here we go: 

Diagnostic Scan Our channeled HoT. Does not cost energy, will give 2 back if it crits once we skilled it. Can be viewed as our „filler heal“.
Kolto injection Our Standard heal with costs. Once skilled, it will grant us Tactical Advantage (TA) for IAs or Upper Hand (UA) for Smugglers, a self buff that is needed to cast some spells and also gives us a flat 9% increase in healing once skilled.

Kolto Probe Our HoT. We need to skill it to use it. Once it is improved, it will also have a chance to grant us TA/UH with every tick. Can be applied two times on one target.
Surgical Probe Our first instant healing ability, needs to get skilled and can be further improved. Consumes one TA/UH, but will regrant it if skilled and used on a target below 30% health. Does not cost energy.
Recuperative Nanotech Our AoE heal, which works on 4 allies as a HoT. Needs to be skilled. We will want to be careful with this skill, as it costs a lot and does not provide health instantly.

There are some other spells that can be used to help our allies:

Coordination Our Standard group buff. Available to all IA/Smugglers.
Resuscitation Probe Our Battle-Rezz. We will get it at level 50. All Battle Rezzes make any other abiltiy of this kind not useable for the next 5 minutes.
Toxin Scan Our decurse. Will remove 2 negative tech or physical effects. And metal effect if skilled.

I.d. Situational Abilities / Survival CDs

These are also worth to mention, as staying alive is surely important and can be done by quite some reactive skills we have. Furthermore, i will list our skills that allow us to manage our resources here.

Resource-related:
Stim Boost More energy reg. Try to keep it up all the time for maximal energy reg and thus a better way to react to every chance in situation possible.
Adrenaline Probe Restores 50 energy. Skilled 66, so 2/3 of our complete pool. Use it after a situation where you had to blow everything out in order to keep everyone alive, so you don’t fall into an energy hole.
Advanced Recon Only useable while your companion is active, so it won’t be useable in operations, just listed to complete the list.

Defensive Abilities:
Evasion + Avoidance Training Very nice combination of useful effects. If you skill Evasion in the Medicine Tree, you will also receive a movement speed-buff, which is also pretty nice to have and will make Evasion the one button that solve nearly all of your possible problems.
Cloaking Screen Our vanish. Will keep you away from enemies, should they start to target you. Still, you will want to consider if the 10 seconds without healing will be worth it.
Crouch Help mitigating ranged damage.
Debilitate A melee stun. Could be helpful if the tank has problems with a lot of mobs.
Flash Bang AoE Blind. Who wouldn’t want an AoE-Blind?
Infiltrate 15 seconds of 10 meter radius mass stealth.
Sever Tendon A melee slow. Very situational indeed.
Countermeasures Reduces thread, which is good everytime.
Shield Probe A dmg absorb just for us. Can also be skilled to increase our healing received while active.

I.e. Healing „how to?“

I will try to keep these instructions as general as possible, for a more accurate description take a look in the „PvE Healing discussion“-thread.

1. Keep Pugnacity / Stim Boost up.
2. Try to keep your energy as high as possible.
3. Try to have at least one stack of TA/UH on you all the time.
4. For lesser heals, use either your second TA/UH for a , or Diagnostic scan.
5. Disspell debuffs. (This could be very situational, and depends heavy on the debuff, but i think i follow a good tendency here.
6. If you are low on energy, use Adrenaline probe. If you are low on energy and your tank need heal, try to use Surgical probe while he is below 30%. It costs no energy, you can reg and will regain TA/UH all the time – till he is above 30%.

II Stats, Gear, Consumables, Crew Skills

II.a. Stats:

The base stats at the moment are Aim, Cunning, Endurance, Presence, Strength and Willpower.

• Aim improves ranged/blaster attacks, and is an inferior stat for Smugglers/Imperial Agents, increasing by 0.9 Aim per level on average. It is the dominant stat for Bounty Hunters.
• Cunning improves tech attacks, and is the dominant stat for Smugglers/Imperial Agents, increasing by 4 Cunning per level on average.
• Endurance improves health, and is an auxiliary stat for Smugglers/Imperial Agents, increasing by 3.5 Endurance per level on average. Every point provides 10 health points, and every 5 points provides 1% health regeneration.
• Presence improves Companions, and is an auxiliary stat for Smugglers/Imperial Agents, providing 3.5 Presence per level on average. Every 1 point provides 2 health points to Companions, and every 20 points provides a 2% bonus to Companions’ damage.
• Strength improves melee attacks, and is an inferior stat for Smugglers/Imperial Agents, increasing by 0.9 Strength per level on average. It is the dominant stat for Sith Warriors.
• Willpower improve force attacks, and an inferior stat for Smugglers/Imperial Agents, increasing by 0.9 Willpower per level. It is the dominant stat for Sith Inquisitors

For damage calculations, every 10 points in a stat provides 1 bonus damage to the appropriate type, and every 140 points provides 1% crit chance to the appropriate type. However, the dominant stat of a class provides this bonus to all abilities, not just the one indicated above, so a Smugglers/Imperial Agent, and therefore a Scoundrel/Operative, gains both bonus melee damage, tech damage & healing and crit chance from Cunning.

Furthermore, the dominant stat also provides some measure of healing increase, currently believed to be 0.5 +healing per stat point, although the amount is not yet known. Presence previously provided 1 bonus healing per 5 Presence points, so 1 bonus healing from somewhere between 5 and 10 points of the dominant stat would seem likely.

The secondary stats of interest are Alacrity, Critical Chance and Surge. (Note: Armour Rating is an indication of the relative worth of an item, analogous to the item level/ilvl, not the amount of armour provided by the item.)

• Alacrity is analogous to Haste in World of WarCraft, reducing activation and channeling times. As our potential healing is limited not by our cast time but by our resource, this stat will be like a double-edged sword that lets us do things faster, and thus enable us to burn away our energy also faster, as there is no other way to improve our energy reg apart from Stim Boost /Pugnacity.
• Critical Chance is the chance to score a critical strike, which improves the damage/healing of an ability by 50%, and is improved by Critical Rating and the dominant stat.
  It seems reasonable that we will want quite a lot of crit, as alacrity does not make much sense.
• Surge increases the magnitude of critical effects, improving their extra damage/healing beyond +50%. Given that we will stack crit this will also be an important stat to us, as surge and crit will scale very well with each other. (at some %point of crit, surge will become better, and vice versa – in fact, they will always compete with each other, as every improve of the first makes the latter better.)

Our stat priority from gear is most likely along the following lines, not taking relative item weighting/value and coefficients into account.

Cunning > Critical Rating >= Surge Rating > Power > Alacrity

Important note: As crit and surge are reflexive on each other, this list can’t be set in stone. On site 2, there is an analysis about the behaviour of crit and surge, which is (hopefully) understandable. I will keep this post up to date, as endgame data will start to emerge sometime soon.

II.b. Gear:

I will be linking the BiS gear once it comes available however I won’t be discussing best in slot gear in this thread, as I believe that it should have a separate thread of its own as it usually provokes a much different line of discussion. I will, however, link the appropriate thread once it has been created.

• Head:
• Implant 1:
• Implant 2:
• Ear:
• Chest:
• Gloves:
• Wrist:
• Waist:
• Legs:
• Boots:
• Relic:

II.c. Consumables:

As in other games and especially MMO’s, there are consumable available that will provide short term buffs with a high stat increase, in addition to ones that provide longer term buffs with smaller stat increases. In swtor, these are called Adrenals and Stimulants. Adrenals provide a 15 second buff with a 180 second CD, whereas Stims provide a 2 hour buff. Another available consumable that could be used is a Medpac, which restores health and has a 90 second CD.

The following consumables may be of use, depending on the official stat weights:

• Exotech Critical Adrenal
• Exotech Force Adrenal
• Exotech Skill Stim
• Exotech Medpac

Additionally, if you are decide to take Biochem, you will be entitled to the following recipes:

• Rakata Critical Adrenal
• Rakata Force Adrenal
• Rakata Skill Stim
• Rakata Medpac

II.d. Crew Skills:

The following Crew Skills known going to be the likely choices for Smugglers/Imperial Agents in general:

• Scavenging – Important for gathering materials for any of our chose crafting skills;
• Bioanalysis – Important for gathering materials for Biochem;
• Armormech – Allows us to craft armour;
• Armstech – Allows us to craft weapons;
• Cybertech – Allows us to construct earpieces, grenades, amour over and underlay’s, electro weapons, generators as well as feet and wrist items for all non-force users; and
• Biochem will provide you with Adrenals/Stims, the wow equivalent of flasks and potions – see above consumables.

Depending on your crafting crew skill chosen the following would provide you with the best affection/gathering counterpart:

• Investigation provides materials for Armormech;
• Treasure Hunting provides materials for Armstech and Cybertech; and
• Diplomacy provides materials for Biochem and also increases LS/DS points.

As only one crafting profession may be chosen, the decision between Armormech, Armstech, Cybertech & Biochem will be heavily influenced by the end-game suitability of these crafting skills. Cybertech may pull ahead of the other 2 due to the various socketed components crafted likely having use for longer, by being used to upgrade gear acquired from Operations. Biochem may also be favoured as it provide Adrenals/Stims that will be greatly sought after by raiders. All this is yet to be determined and as no crafting skill provides bonuses like they do in wow currently, I think it will come down to personal choice as to what you feel provides the best benefit to you.