Sup? I'm Overheated.

[Cempa]

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1055439-Bounty-Hunter-Merc-dps-guide-%28Arsenal-Spec

 

Other can do it, why cant you?

[Vallowen]

this class doesnt need to be any easier to play....

[longgrassgrows]

1. keep heat below 40(will dissipate at 5 per sec)...when it get close, use your normal attack once or twice and continue

 

2. against raid bosses, use "vent heat" early in the fight so you can use it as much as possible

 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

three is that early vent heat

 

3.use a relic with a crit. boost...use at the beginning of fight(get most uses of out it) and just go crazy, because every crit dissipates 8 heat, you should be seeing ur heat stay relatively low, if not dont worry...max it out...pop vent heat...go back to #1

 

4. if heat is up around 50-60, use uhhh ****(that move that allows your next move to cost no heat, lol, forgot) and than use unload...if you are on arsenal spec, crits with unload will dissipate heat.

 

5. again if you are using arsenal, you had better be using crit.

 

6.IF YOU DO NOT HAVE "VENT HEAT" NEVER MAX OUT(should be obvious, buuuuut just in case)(only exception is when boss is low, and enrage is coming)

 

This works great for me, hope it helps

Edited February 11, 2012 by longgrassgrows

[Gerrard_Ennui]

I agree, heat is just generally an over-restrictive mechanic that could possibly be more fun and engaging to play with a few changes to the system. It's playable as-is but its really just a roadblock system when it could be much more.

 

Getting your 4pc set bonus will help with heat management - and its doable - but its still just a sh*tty boring system where your heat meter says '0 - 100' but you really only have 40 heat.

 

Stop spamming all your specials constantly.

 

Done.

How can you spam something with a fifteen-second cooldown? I tried; It doesn't work... Edited February 12, 2012 by Gerrard_Ennui

[Yazule]

Haha, ok fair enough, if it helps, I actually misunderstood that 'People will reconsider inviting you for dps', to mean the opposite, such as people would reconsider in wanting low-heat mercs even more than other classes. Ok, in any case, good to have that clarified.

 

In other news, I discovered the cause for the heat problems I was facing, which originally started my reading threads like this in the first place... somehow 'High Velocity Gas Cylinder' accidentally got switched off and so no cylinder was ticked. Imagine the agony of doing a full day of quests with a broken linear heat system (the horror *shudders*, wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy). I did find it sort of reassuring though that I was still managing enough heat/damage to be able to beat all the silver/gold bosses even with almost no procs for my levels.

 

But, on the bright side I now have as a consequence read tons of guides and relevant info, so very quickly now at level 41, everything falls into place instead of seeming random. I see it as simple as playing a mini-game inside the game, kind of named 'Unlock-the-Icons':

 

while prioritizing heat below 40:

3 Tracer Missiles = 5 heat signatures = hit Heatseeker Missile (this occurs routinely)

Tracer Missile until something procs:

5 Tracer Locks = hit Rail Gun

1 Barrage = hit Unload

 

The first time properly using a Heatseeker with 5 signatures for +2k damage was like the first hit of a drug, a clear incentive to use the system instead of strong-arming through baddies.

 

I could visualize coding a script to juggle these variables and balance them together with pattern matching. Anyway, I can't wait to get 30% crit gear and hopefully by then update patches will allow it so it can be added to my cool looking Mercenary Elite orange armor.

 

I am glad we all helped, you have come far my apprentice!

 

once you have spec and gear to make railshot heat free you may be using it to dps while you are at 42 heat to get it down while you cast

Edited February 13, 2012 by Yazule

[Crestlin]

I dont even agree with them all the time, like TSO IMO has nothing to do with why alacrity is bad, but that would be a long discussion with Crestlin to explain my logic, have him counter and for us to come up with decent final answer, but the point is that either way alacrity is still bad.

 

My problem with alacrity has nothing to do with TSO. You have to consider procs when dealing with alacrity; Terminal Velocity, Barrage, and Trinket ICDs. My understanding is that procs trigger at the point damage is dealt, not including cast times and travel time to target. When you start throwing alacrity into your gear you are deviating from the standard 1.5/3 second cast times(we will consider projectile speeds consistent, which they are not, but for arguments sake) thus creating additional time before you can activate your 3/4.5/6 second procs. I am not mathmatically inclined enough to fathom a formula that will find ideal "sweet spots" for alacrity to sync for optimal proc on rotations, but just spitballing it, I feel its safe to say alacrity will most likely hurt more than help in small doses, without even contemplating the nature of increased heat generation.

[TempestasSilva]

My problem with alacrity has nothing to do with TSO. You have to consider procs when dealing with alacrity; Terminal Velocity, Barrage, and Trinket ICDs. My understanding is that procs trigger at the point damage is dealt, not including cast times and travel time to target. When you start throwing alacrity into your gear you are deviating from the standard 1.5/3 second cast times(we will consider projectile speeds consistent, which they are not, but for arguments sake) thus creating additional time before you can activate your 3/4.5/6 second procs. I am not mathmatically inclined enough to fathom a formula that will find ideal "sweet spots" for alacrity to sync for optimal proc on rotations, but just spitballing it, I feel its safe to say alacrity will most likely hurt more than help in small doses, without even contemplating the nature of increased heat generation.

 

I totally agree with that, sorry if I misinterpreted your previous comment. It has always been my feeling that at a certain level of alacrity, you would hit a sweet spot as you call it or a stair step as I normally call it. This would allow you to modify the rotation to fit something in or use it in a different order. So increasing alacrity would not do much then at a magic number it would. Then more wouldn't do anything until you hit the next stair/sweetspot. Do the spots exist? Are they attainable? Does it cost too much in what you are giving up to make them worthwhile? All of those answers are important and require a lot of math. I am certainly not prepared or possibly even skilled enough to figure that out. Without a proppert combat log/parser I wouldn't even try.

 

So again, until someone figures it out, I think it safe to say alacrity should be avoided as Aresenal. It gets much more interesting with Bodyguard, but no one has cranked out those numbers either.

[Snagulus]

. It has always been my feeling that at a certain level of alacrity, you would hit a sweet spot as you call it or a stair step as I normally call it. This would allow you to modify the rotation to fit something in or use it in a different order. So increasing alacrity would not do much then at a magic number it would. Then more wouldn't do anything until you hit the next stair/sweetspot. Do the spots exist? Are they attainable? Does it cost too much in what you are giving up to make them worthwhile?

 

Alacrity is a different beast for us, and our resource system renders any sort of sweet-spot-holiness points inadvisable anyway.

 

As of now, our core dps is limited by heat regeneration. We'll assume that heat stays under 40, since that's ideal anyway.

 

Heat regeneration is fixed, so over the first 30 seconds of a fight we have

39 (base) +

145(passive regen)+

40(5 Terminal Velocity procs)=

229 heat to spend.

 

With no Alacrity, and just spamming Tracer Missile for simplicity, you can cast 14 Tracer Missiles with that amount of heat, 9 seconds of dead time. Now say you have 10% alacrity(about 350 rating). You still only have 229 heat to spend, so you end up with 11.1 seconds of dead time (30-(14*(1.5*.9))).

 

In this example, you gain a generous(I'm rounding up) total of of two Rapid Shot casts worth of damage, which is something like 1.7k for me. It's hard to tell, each individual hit can crit, and crits aren't added to the total ><.

 

For the same amount of rating in Power(which is like 2/5 as valuable or something), you're adding about 280 damage to each Tracer Missile(with its absolutely fabulous 2.0 power coefficient). That's ~3900 damage.

 

Note:: I'm fairly sure Power and Alacrity are not worth nearly the same in terms of itemization budget(and if they are, they sure as hell shouldn't be), but I can't get in game to check, so pretend numbers it is.

 

 

Now obviously actual heat usage is very different. TV procs will vary anywhere from 0-10, Unload and Rail Shot use less heat than TM. In fact, this particular example is almost worthless other than to illustrate that we have a relatively fixed ideal amount of heat to work with over a given period of time.

 

From the other side of things, in order for alacrity to see non-Rapid Shot returns: lets magically assume you use an impossible number of four Rail Shots, and seven Unloads in that 30 seconds. You spend 6 seconds casting Rail Shot, and 21 seconds casting Unload, giving you a whopping 3 seconds to spend 117 additional heat. = Two TM casts.

 

With a 10% alacrity(350 rating), you get 4.1 seconds to spend all that heat. = Three TM casts. So, a 2.5k damage increase here. The 140 increase in power that'd you get instead would be around 773 total damage to Unloads, 1064 total damage to Rail Shots, and 560 to TMs. Annnnd this comes out to about a 2.4k damage increase if you were to instead add power.

 

Again, near worthless example to illustrate when alacrity would be giving you solid returns.

 

 

But from these two silly examples, you can see that unless we have extra heat we literally can't spend fast enough, alacrity gives you a small dps increase by allowing extra time to use Rapid Shots that might be completely offset by the fact that *any* alacrity significantly reduces average heat vented by TV. I think you might even lose dps even if you had extra heat by adding alacrity. TV is no small part of our heat management, that extra heat might not be available.

 

Now, the cool part, don't need math to discern if we have extra heat. Do you need to use Rapid Shots ever? Well then, you do not have enough leftover heat to see gains worth considering from alacrity.

[TempestasSilva]

I actually have some new data for Bodyguards. The latest theorycrafting says 0-2% alacrity is a step, and then the next step is at 14.5% to 16.5%.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/oimg?key=0AvwIIORblfXkdHNITEd1UDVFSThId2Yzb0hNa3NVNUE&oid=1&zx=vi3d2xdos6ps

 

We have a finite amount of heat we can dissipate, just like Arsenal. What makes it so Arsenal doesnt have any "steps"?

[Sentry_gun]

I can see how alacrity would be a useful stat, but its effectiveness is far out weighed by other more useful stats (crit/surge). Heat will always dissipate at a certain rate so speeding up your attack will only be of real benefit if you are in a situation where its important to get the attack out fast in order to avoid interupts or casting knock backs of something like that. Alacrity strikes me as more of a pvp oriented stat than a pve one for the afore mentioned reasons.

[Snagulus]

I actually have some new data for Bodyguards. The latest theorycrafting says 0-2% alacrity is a step, and then the next step is at 14.5% to 16.5%.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/oimg?key=0AvwIIORblfXkdHNITEd1UDVFSThId2Yzb0hNa3NVNUE&oid=1&zx=vi3d2xdos6ps

 

We have a finite amount of heat we can dissipate, just like Arsenal. What makes it so Arsenal doesnt have any "steps"?

 

To be honest, I'm not very familiar with Bodyguard. I'm not entirely sure what you gain at each of those steps.

 

For Arsenal, TV procs lining up again nicely for Tracer Missiles would require 33% alacrity, which isn't feasible. I can't think of anything else in Arsenal that is affected by alacrity other than an all around faster rotation. Technically, I suppose if you actually had heat to spare even after throwing off TV proc timing, some percent of alacrity would net you an additional cast over the period where you generate the additional heat. But that's pretty unlikely, and unreliable while TV procs are random. You could average it out and get fairly reasonable numbers, I just don't think its worth it.