Merc Healing

Granted that the i love you so much i am going to shoot you with green @#$%, part of the merc healing is cool at first, my question is can a merc healer really compete with a say inquistor? i am 30ish and i was wondering how the endgame is like?

Anyone roll a merc healer to 50?

All healers can heal if spec'd and geared properly at any level, for thier respective level. Don't think that just because they are Bounty Hunters that they cannot be effective healers or that simply because Sith Inqs are "clothies" that they are by default the de facto top-heals. Let go of preconcieved notions of about casters being --THE-- healers. Though I'm not 50 on my BH I have a 50 main who has been healed just fine by BHs, and my BH is close enough (in the 40s, right now) to see they are effective at thier role.

Remember, there are ONLY --3-- Healing classes on each side, of the 8 total classes on each side. In this case, the Empire, that's Ops, Sorcs, and Mercs. BW has spent to much time and effort to only put 3/8 classes as healers but not to make all 3 viable and effective healers as possible. I know it seems odd healing with Boba Fett, but I assure you it works just fine.

FYI: This is the build I'm going with for healing, It's a pure PvE build:

http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#300rfRMR0cdkqZrcoZb.1

Merc healers do not get a Combat Res(the only one of the three that does not).
Merc healers are almost exclusively single target healers. We have Kolto Missile, which is a decently low CD aoe heal(ground targeted), that does about the same per target as a Healing Scan(without the talent HoT), maybe a little less. It really SOUNDS better than it actually is, to be honest.

We have no HoT ability at all, minus Kolto Shell, which is without a doubt the worst healing spell for all 3 classes. It scales worse and starts lower healing than anything else in the game. It currently is bugged and at least can trigger more than once every 3 seconds, but even if all the charges went off instantly, the healing done per global cooldown is pretty terrible. Compared to casting ANY of our other heals, it never is better to cast it. When I merc heal(very rarely) I usually toss it on someone who may take incidental damage every now and then, or put it on the tank before the pull. Refreshing during the fight is absolutely pointless unless you have a break where no healing is required. It is very close to just being a worthless talent point that you do not want to take.

Our single target healing ability is decent, but I have to wonder what they were doing while balancing between the 3 classes. Our instant cast heal is a fairly LONG cooldown(21 seconds is pretty damn long) and our Healing Scan is normally a 9 second CD with talent. We can then remove the 9 second CD for 10 seconds after we build 30 charges of support cell/cylinder. Comparing to the Sorc just between the 2 cast heals(Rapid Scan and Healing scan, versus the 2 Sorcerer equivalents that I forget the name of...), they do not have a cooldown on theirs and can basically spam it. It isn't like removing the CD always would make Merc healing OP, since chain casting it can run fill your heat pretty damn fast and the after HoT won't stack.

All in all, when I run my ops groups, I look for Sorc and Op healers instead of Mercs. This tends to be fairly easy since most people stopped healing on Mercs a long time ago on our server for the above reasons.
Sure, you can still heal, but of the 3, we are the worst. We should have the best single target healing output, but it seems some nerfs went overboard in beta and we never got retuned, as the Sorc can outheal us on single target pretty easily, especially when you throw in the Shield.

So far i have had no troubles healing my Ops groups in Normal and Hard mode. Most of the fight i heal with a hybrid agent and I solo Heal most content until more then 3 people are hurt. Then the agent steps in.. But for the most part as a BH merc heals i put out a ton of high end crit heals. In PvP warzones if i just focus on healing instead of passing the ball per say.. I will heal easily over 300k. Heat is almost never a problem.

My only complaint would be that alacrity should help with Heat loss. Making us on par with sorcery force regen.

Yeah, crit is pretty important. I'd say it's as important if not more so than alacrity, at least from a gearing perspective (reason being that we can get quite a bit of alacrity from the skill tree).

Back to the original question, I have a level 50 merc healer and I've had no issues healing level 50 warzones and hardmodes. The main weakness with BH/ Trooper healing is that in group wide damage situations things can get a little tough, especially if you're relatively new to the MMO space. What I do is rely on my triage skills (ie healing the guy most likely to die first and working your way back) and pop supercharged gas and use all of its associated perks. I only vent heat if things are getting really crazy or someone is just being stupid.

Mercs get a bad rap mainly because the heat resource system does take some getting used to. If you let your heat get above 60% and vent heat is on CD, kiss your ass goodbye. The upside is that if you manage your heat properly you can pretty much heal forever.

In the end, learn your class, practice, and you'll be fine.

As much as i hate to bring up a necro, i feel like doing it cuz this is still on the first page and people may still read it.

First...mercs do get a combat rez called "Onboard AED" http://www.torhead.com/ability/hvpmz0G/onboard-aed

Second, all healing classes can heal, some start off healing better at lower levels, but dont worry, all it takes is for you to know what you are doing. Above all, its not a spam-one-button-healing (though you WILL be firing your random heal shots at people a lot of the time, but you aren't gonna heal with just that). Merc healing also seems to run off of a little mitigation as well, with supercharged gas giving kolto missle a shield function, and healing scan increasing armor as well...just some thought...

Edit: for spelling

I know this is an old thread, but healing with Merc in 2.0 is a lot of fun and I compete quite well against the other classes in our guild.

Having played a Holy Paladin in WoW I find this class to be quite similar.

Stick with Aim and Power, then crit/surge and you will be fine. Alacrity is as good or as useless as it's always been. I'm running at 4% at the moment and have seen no improvement when I've managed to get it to increase up to 12%+.