Was playing today with a buddy of mine and, long story short, we died.

A lot.

My buddy is a SCI officer, while I'm the ENG. We're both pretty low level, and not by any means the expert players some other people might be. Anyway, I started getting bugged, and told him, "dude, you need to work on your healing."

"I can't target you by clicking your name; I have to hit either you or your picture. And the moment I do that, I start attacking your target."

Ok, sure. That's working as it should; you target your buddy (who is fighting someone else) and then when you use an attack skill, your target becomes your buddy's target and you start rocking face. Excellent.

Unless you want to STAY locked on your buddy so you can continue to heal him.

Yes, you can heal allies that are being targeted by your target, but what if you want to heal your friend, not the BOFF your target happened to look cross-eyed at for a moment? Now you've wasted a precious heal and precious time, while your friend is making peace with his maker.

My suggestion:
A fix, perhaps, that could be implemented would be to target through your ally, without "matching" your ally's target (as the system now does). You continue to keep your friend targeted so you can continue buffing and healing him/her, but then you are also able to keep contributing to the fight and attacking your target's target without it switching targets (in the same way as healing an ally through your enemy target works now).

Just a suggestion to make ground combat (and even space combat) a bit easier on the people trying to heal our sorry butts.

I too think we could benefit from targeting a friend and an ally at the same time. No reason to release the weapon lock to use healing i'd think...

For now, however, I uncheck the "assist target on attack" box in options/controls, and target manually I can still choose an ally's target by clicking on him, and then clicking on the picture of his target.

I would love to be able to target THROUGH an ally, rather that switching to the ally's target. This is what we had in City of Heroes: you target the tank, and your target stays on the tank. The tank picks his target and all attacks you make go to that enemy, but your "target" does not switch. You remain targeting the tank. You can heal, and it heals the tank. You can fire, and it shoots the tank's target.

LotRO has this too. Why Cryptic got rid of it for CO and STO beats the heck out of me. It's a wonderful feature.

Please put it on the docket!

Heh, precisely. That's the system I'm referencing as well. It works wonders in CoX.

Take a look at Vanguard Saga of Hero's. It has an offensive/defensive target configuration. Loved it as being a Bloodmage i could tap heal. Damage your offensive target and turn that damage into healing for your defensive target. . .incredibly useful in many situations. I wonder if STO could get something like that. . .

Currently my issue is when I fire of a barrage of damage, suddenly notice that my friend is almost dead so i click on him, hit my heal but in between the two it reverts back to my original target because the barrage is still underway. . .or I accidentally hit spacebar again which appears to auto select the nearest enemy. If that happens then the heal reverts to myself. Unfortunately if I'm healing someone else as an escort that probably means I wasn't needing it myself thus the heal was completely wasted and on cooldown. Of course murphies law dictates that after my heal misses and is wasted on my ship my friend dies and suddenly my shields are being stripped and I find myself in need of that heal that was just wasted. . .

Pretty much what that means is that in order to heal someone else I have to stop shooting, fly around like a sitting duck for a moment and then pop a heal before moving back to firing.

~D