Combat Medic Leveling

So after struggling through Alderaan, I decided to make a switch after completing chapter 1. Since I was heading to the Republic Fleet anyway for some much needed R&R, I paid a visit to the Skill Mentor (who is not next to your training by the way - a little further down the hall) and paid for a respec, deciding to try out leveling as a combat medic using M1-4X as tank rather than going dual dps with Aric.

My first surprise was that apparently your first respec is free.

Working my way through Balmora, I've been incredibly surprised with how easy it has been to quest and level. I have no trouble at all keeping Forex healed up. I'm able to keep him topped off and do a fair amount of dps'ing myself to make sure things die more quickly.

He does have some problems holding aggro at times given how he likes to pull, but I'm always able to heal through it and it doesn't take him long to pull any stragglers off of me. It should be able to micro manage Forex's abilities a bit more to avoid this issue, but so far, since it hasn't caused any problems, I haven't bothered with the extra hassle.

The thing that I've been really impressed with is how easily Elite level mobs go down now. Before switching to combat medic, taking on an elite level mob usually meant that Aric was going to be needing a rez, and I was going to have to be shielding myself and using my cooldowns to make sure I didn't die before the boss did.

Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.

As combat medic, I'm able to keep Forex healed, dps a bit myself and end up finishing every fight with both us at full health or close to it.

From every recommendation that I've seen, you're better off using this combination with Cybertech as a skill so you can keep Forex really well geared. I'm currently an Armormech, so I don't have that benefit, but still not having any problems.

Once I finish up Balmora, I'll be picking up a new melee tanking companion, so I'm anxious to give that a try for a bit to see if that works better from an aggro standpoint than Forex. If I find I like Forex better, I might consider switching to Cybertech at that point.