The Sage and Sorcerer are identical classes for the Republic and Empire. The only differences are the skills and abilities names and some of the visual effects. I'll be using the Sorcerer terminology, but everything also applies to Sage unless I specifically mention it.
The Sorcerer is the most similar healer to other MMO healing classes. If you played a healer in WOW or another major MMO you'll feel right at home with the Sorcerer with a very short learning curve. If you have previous healing experience and want to jump right in and know what you are doing, the Sorcerer is a good choice. He also doesn't have a complicated (or simple, depending on your personal skill) resource management mechanism the other 2 healing classes has. He does have management consideration and synergy between abilities which I'll get into soon, but it's more straight forward and quicker to learn and master, at least in my opinion.
Don't read the previous paragraph as the Sorcerer requiring no skills to play well, if you won't be aware of your strengths and weaknesses and be able to do the right thing at the right situation, you'll find yourself and your party dead very quickly. That's why this post is written, to try to give you as much information as I can to heal with the Sorcerer effectively.
From the Empire side, the Sith Inquisitor also seems to be the most common choice of class. It can be because he has both a healing specialization and tanking specialization (as an Assassin advanced class) or the fact he can shoot lightning from him finger tips. Whatever the reason is, it might be a reason to push people toward or away from this choice.
Like all classes in SWTOR, there are no race benefits, you can pick whichever race seems most attractive to you.
The Sorcerer uses force as a resource to use abilities this function very much like mana in WOW, you get a full bar and each ability you use cost you some force. When your force bar is depleted you can't do much more than pray, so it's your job to make sure you don't get there. One thing to note about force is that unlike mana in other games, the size of your force bar is constant, gear or item abilities won't add force. The only exception is a skill that adds to it, but once you get it, you have a constant amount. The interesting thing about this approach, is that the situation that happened often in WOW, once healers had enough mana, they were just spamming 1-2 of their most expansive spells, can't happen in SWTOR. Once your skill tree is complete, an ability that cost 10% of your Force as a fresh level 50 Sorcerer, will cost 10% of your Force when you completed all content and have BiS for every slot. The difference will be that the same ability will heal for more, will be cast more quickly, have higher crit chance and higher crit bonus.
Leveling: Like all skill trees in SWTOR, a Sorcerer healer is perfectly capable of doing the solo content, so you can use your healing spec to level. The Sorcerer is a ranged class, you will spend most of your solo play staying away from the mobs you are fighting while using ranged damage abilities. The Sorcerer gets a very capable tanking companion very early, around level 8-10, he's very capable of holding agro and add to your damage, you need to keep him alive and help him with damage. You also get a very good CC ability early on to help you fight tough groups. Relative to the other healing classes, you get your first AOE ability rather late, so your early fights against multiple mobs will take a bit longer.
Resource management: As I mentioned earlier, your resource is force, force regenerates in a constant rate regardless of the amount you have. You need to make sure to watch your force bar closely and be efficient with your abilities. A mechanism that greatly help you with that is the Force Bending skill which you can max out as early as level 22. What it does is once you cast Resurgence, a instant heal which also applies a HoT on the target, give your next healing spell a benefit depending on which spell you cast. These are: Dark Heal Force cost reduced 50%, Dark infusion activation time reduced by 1 second, Innervate crit chance increased by 25% and Revivification cost reduced 30%. This makes Resurgence a very important spell which should often be used on CD (every 6 seconds) to get the full benefit of this ability.
I'll describe the abilities in more detail in the next post, but one mechanism is major enough to worth mentioning here. Once you hit level 46, you can take the Force Surge skill, this cause your next Innervate crit to make your next Consumption, a skill that grant force in exchange for health and force regeneration, activate without the penalty. Innervate is a channeled single target strong healing spell which ticks 3 times, each one of these can proc this ability. So a often used sequence is to cast Resurgence which raise innervate crit chance by 25%, cast Innervate which, assuming you you have base 25% crit chance, gives you 50% crit per tick, this makes 7/8 chance (0.5^3) for your Force Surge to activate, letting you cast Consumption for free, getting Force with no penalty. This mechanic should be taken advantage of often during long fights to avoid running out of force.
I will review the Sorcerer abilities and skills in depth next post.
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