Opinions on this build please

[NoFishing]

I've been happily gunnery spec'd on my commando forever, but feel like trying something new. I mostly raid now (PvE, no PvP), and am wondering if the more DoT-based approach of assault might serve me better on motion-heavy fights. Anyone try something close to this 3/10/28 build?

 

http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#8000cZMIkZbIMrzGhMc.1

 

I find on the ops dummy I lose about 10% of my DPS over the gunnery tree in stationary turret mode. But I can get close to 800 DPS from nothing but hammer shot, incendiary round, and HiB, so I could literally run in circles around the dummy and maintain that (while staying at max ammo too). On the downside, I have seem to have very little burst DPS ability; spamming charged bolts, FA on CD, HiB when proc'd, doesn't seem to add much.

 

Am I losing too much by not going a full 31 points into assault?

[Pavixx]

I've never done any PvE really in this game so I can't offer too much advice.

How often is pushback an issue? If it is a real concern, then Steadied Aim is fine, but otherwise I might move the points elsewhere.

Hammer Shot is a large chunk of our DPS, would it be worthwhile to drop Soldier's Endurance for Target Lock for more white damage and more plasma procs?

Again, I have 0 PvE experience and can only ask your opinion on these points.

 

Otherwise it looks pretty stock.

[NoFishing]

I've never done any PvE really in this game so I can't offer too much advice.

How often is pushback an issue? If it is a real concern, then Steadied Aim is fine, but otherwise I might move the points elsewhere.

Hammer Shot is a large chunk of our DPS, would it be worthwhile to drop Soldier's Endurance for Target Lock for more white damage and more plasma procs?

Again, I have 0 PvE experience and can only ask your opinion on these points.

 

Otherwise it looks pretty stock.

 

Good questions. If I can recall from times before I had Steadied Aim, pushback happens frequently when solo-questing (dailies), but rarely in raids, unless I pull aggro from the tank. I might try dropping those points and see how it goes. I'd likely move them to Heavy Trooper to make life a bit easier on our healers, and a point in Adreline Fueled. And also good point on the accuracy. My tech accuracy when I had it was over 114%, which is kinda pointless. But if hammer shot is going to become more important for my DPS, I probably need to boost my ranged acc.

[oaceen]

i run this for PVE

 

other than the pentultimate boss fight in EV, i don't find pushback is ever an issue in PVE

 

and i have about the same accuracy as you, so i don't bother with spending points to boost it up.

that said, the 4% alacrity isn't going to make much of a difference either, so it's 6 and 1...

 

i really like heavy trooper for PVE. i liked it so much that i spent the points in pvp and well... that was kind of a waste of points lol

 

i also find that assault plastique is something i wouldn't want to give up. it's probably the second most powerful damaging attack you have, especially if you're worried about lack of burst.

[Swuge]

I, too, have recently switched from gunnery to assault for PvE because the DPS is a lot higher.

with respect to your build, i understand the placement of the 3 points in tier 2 gunnery (steady aim) to reduce the pushback on charged bolts/full auto, however my only qualm with that is that if you are running ops correctly pushbacks from damage should be minimal. I can only think of a handful of fights where taking damage is a real concern, for instance Nightmare Pilgrim has a constant DoT on you that will pushback casts, and perhaps Firebrand and Stormcaller in Explosive conflict (if youre eating the double destruction, which should go to a different party member)

Also, the lack of 3 points in target lock (tier 1 assault) is a mistake. You shouldn't have to worry about the extra endurance and should focus on the 3% accuracy boost (which WILL help considering you have to use charged bolts and Full auto).

 

here's my build for PvE

http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#8000cZMckZfGbbzGhrs.1

*note i placed two points in the endurance boost (tier 1) to avoid placing them in PvP talents (for instance degauss with reactive shield isnt necessary) Also, placing two points in the Parallitic combat stims is more useful than a slow (which will not work on ops bosses anyway) and will help keep ammo up when knocked back, stunned, snared, etc.)

Also, Adrenaline Fueld IS A GREAT TALENT!!!! it usually makes reserve powercell on a 45 sec (ish) cooldown which is GREAT when in a pinch for ammo! It also reduces adrenaline rush's CD and lets you use that to help keep pressure off of a healer.

And incendinary round is too good to pass up on single target DPS. it is our highest hitting ability and typically ranks behind your burns and charged bolts on the DPS meter.

 

My guild reached Kephess last night on 8-man hard EC and i matched our top sage DPS on our two wipe attempts in which we reached the final burn phase on the battlewalker

you can check out my logs from our 4 attempts here:

http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/combatlog/3ff4144e-71c1-427e-a565-6ae489308425/player/1#d=0,f=1,b=2

the dps came out to 1091 DPS with a lot of moving parts and "down time" in between certain phases. Also the last 30 seconds or so of each fight was spent trying to salvage running all the way back to the boss by dying in a specific corner when we knew it would be a wipe

[rjavig]

what i recommend for pve is gunnery since its a much better spec for pve because you can do much more damage to bosses with placing grave vortex on bosses which reduces armor. assault is good but only really for pvp due to the fact its dot damages which bosses usually have a defense for them while gravity vortex reduces there armor. also makes it much more use of high impact bolt i believe and full auto. id recommend 5/33/3

[NoFishing]

Thanks all for your comments. I've gone the full 31 points into Assault, and so far it is working well. Still working on an optimal/manageable rotation.

[NoFishing]

what i recommend for pve is gunnery since its a much better spec for pve because you can do much more damage to bosses with placing grave vortex on bosses which reduces armor. assault is good but only really for pvp due to the fact its dot damages which bosses usually have a defense for them while gravity vortex reduces there armor. also makes it much more use of high impact bolt i believe and full auto. id recommend 5/33/3

 

Well as I mentioned, I was gunnery spec'd for a long time, and agree it has several nice features. But I'm no longer convinced it is "a much better spec". Especially when you consider:

 

1. Multiple stacks of grav round do not stack with each other, so only one counts for the entire raid, and we still have a gunnery commando in our raids.

 

2. Assault DoTs are elemental damage, which simply bypass armor. And the armor reduction from grav round is somewhat gimped by the DR on armor ratings (a 20% reduction in armor rating results in less than a 20% reduction in armor effectiveness).

 

3. Most important, new fight mechanics are requiring more movement...like LR-5 and Doctor Lorric in Lost Island, Firebrand/Stormcaller in EC. Especially if you are the designated runner on FB/SC, you are moving every few seconds for lightning spikes/yellow circles/red circles/defensive systems. Not sure how a gunnery commando would be more effective here...would be limited to an occasional grav round/demo round/HiB sequence, and probably wouldn't be able to keep 5 GR stacks up consistently.

 

Even Gharj in EV typically takes about 15 seconds to move from one island to the next, which is a time of 0 DPS for a gunnery commando, and plenty of time for the grav round stacks to fall off...while my AS hits him with 2 DoTs that keep ticking during the move, and triggering my relic.

 

TL;DR, I'm looking to cause more damage per fight, not maximize DPS on a stationary OPS dummy with no mechanics.

[Glorionn]

You shouldnt be on the ground for twin tank fight, thats the healers job imo. They've got **** all healing to do that side anyways.

[rjavig]

You shouldnt be on the ground for twin tank fight, thats the healers job imo. They've got **** all healing to do that side anyways.

 

pretty much what this guy said a healer should run it not dps and a gunnery is a better pve spec because of the rotation. assault is nice but bosses have a higher defense to them then players. overall most bosses do have elemental defenses and you dont have a armor reduce for elemental but if you do have a gunnery commando in your raid still assault isnt bad then because it gives more variety. and for gharj you can put hits in and it shouldnt be 15 seconds once the islands go down you can trhow one hit it then run to it but dont need to run right away. and for dr.lorrick and the droid on lost island you do have times to stand still for the droid all range and healer should be seperated and only one would have to move at a time so 2 would be standing still or if it was true what you said healers wouldnt be able to channel heals at all or activate them since we wouldnt be able to stay still

Edited May 10, 2012 by rjavig

[KeyboardNinja]

1. Multiple stacks of grav round do not stack with each other, so only one counts for the entire raid, and we still have a gunnery commando in our raids.

 

Not to hijack this thread, but is this confirmed? (ideally by log parses) I run with multiple commandos fairly regularly. I can say that the grav round stacks certainly appeared to enhance DPS cumulatively in pre-1.2 fights, but obviously hard numbers were difficult to come by back then. Commando-stacked DPS is *definitely* down since 1.2, but it's hard to separate the overall changes to the gunnery tree from any stacking difference with grav vortices.

[Pavixx]

Don't have any parses confirming, but afaik you cannot stack vortexes beyond 5.

[KeyboardNinja]

Don't have any parses confirming, but afaik you cannot stack vortexes beyond 5.

 

Both commandos get their own set of 5. That's easy enough to see looking at the debuffs on the target. Whether or not that counts for 5x2 stacks worth of armor debuff is really the question.

Edited May 10, 2012 by KeyboardNinja

[BroadStreetBully]

Both commandos get their own set of 5. That's easy enough to see looking at the debuffs on the target. Whether or not that counts for 5x2 stacks worth of armor debuff is really the question.

 

Based on patch notes and dev comments, they at least fixed it so that Demo round only takes your stacks into account. I would assume then that this is the case for all attacks.

[BroadStreetBully]

pretty much what this guy said a healer should run it not dps and a gunnery is a better pve spec because of the rotation. assault is nice but bosses have a higher defense to them then players. overall most bosses do have elemental defenses and you dont have a armor reduce for elemental but if you do have a gunnery commando in your raid still assault isnt bad then because it gives more variety. and for gharj you can put hits in and it shouldnt be 15 seconds once the islands go down you can trhow one hit it then run to it but dont need to run right away. and for dr.lorrick and the droid on lost island you do have times to stand still for the droid all range and healer should be seperated and only one would have to move at a time so 2 would be standing still or if it was true what you said healers wouldnt be able to channel heals at all or activate them since we wouldnt be able to stay still

 

While bosses do have some elemental resistance, it is generally very very low. With assault, you will see damage numbers very similar to what the tooltips state. With Gunnery, you will see much lower numbers than the tooltips state simply because even with the armor reduction from the Grav Round debuffs, the target will still have a lot of armor present. Also, due to the mechanics of Grav Round, you can't have any extended down time or you have to start your DPS from scratch. As mentioned before, with Assault you can still do significant damage while on the run.

 

I leveled from 1-50 as Gunnery but it wasn't quite what I was looking for. Switching to Assault has been a much better route for me and I am killing enemies noticeably quicker. It may not be the route for everyone, but Assault certainly isn't anywhere near as bad as people have made it out to be.

[rjavig]

While bosses do have some elemental resistance, it is generally very very low. With assault, you will see damage numbers very similar to what the tooltips state. With Gunnery, you will see much lower numbers than the tooltips state simply because even with the armor reduction from the Grav Round debuffs, the target will still have a lot of armor present. Also, due to the mechanics of Grav Round, you can't have any extended down time or you have to start your DPS from scratch. As mentioned before, with Assault you can still do significant damage while on the run.

 

I leveled from 1-50 as Gunnery but it wasn't quite what I was looking for. Switching to Assault has been a much better route for me and I am killing enemies noticeably quicker. It may not be the route for everyone, but Assault certainly isn't anywhere near as bad as people have made it out to be.

 

yes assault is better soloing but in operations your in a group not solo and grav round stacks help the whole party out and not just yourself your increasing everyones damage output instead of yourself. you may do maybe 50k more in 5 minutes then a gunnery spec but if your gunnery your whole group will do more which outshines assault because in the long run your whole group will do more damage then that 50k you pulled from switching to assault. so the real question is are you going to raid a lot if so do gunnery because everyone will do more damage overall then if you were assault. (e.g 25% armor reduction to a 10000 armor is 2500 off which means everyone would be doing 25% more damage overall instead of getting it mitigated)

[Luceon]

However the concern still stands, do others benefit from your stacked debuff? If it does it is easily understandable that multiple 5 stacks of the debuff would not combine so one gunnery commando would be necessary, otherwise the bosses armor would drop so low it would be cake walk. You add on top of that mobility has a tendency to add to your ability to survive longer, or at the very least keep your health up so healers have more time to focus on tanks, melee dps and other healers. I don't know about you guys but the idea of constantly switching my skill tree to match what I am about to do, wasting my time and credits on a regular basis just tires me. I bet actually doing it would piss me off.

[Malorific]

There are no hard and fast numbers on this.

 

All we do know is that Demo round is effected by ONLY your 5 stacks.....it used to double dip with others and hit for silly dmg.

 

However armour debuffs, despite what some people are saying do stack......this is clearly demonstrated by the parses from people in 16 man groups with a few comms/Mercs doing quite a bit more DPS than their 8 man counterparts with near identical gear.

 

There is now math on this....at least that I have found, but the stacking of the debuffs is the only way to account for it. I saw a parse last week on an 8 man run with three commando's in a guild run. They commented that they all noticed an increase in DPS than whey they have run alone in Ops. While this could be attributed to increased gear, on of them ran 3 days before without the other two and did much less ~200.

 

Take that for what want, but think the devs design is that armour debuffs do stack from classes that can give them, but they fixed our Demo rounds so it only includes our own Vortex - which is a different issue

 

M.

[Gyronamics]

I've been happily gunnery spec'd on my commando forever, but feel like trying something new. I mostly raid now (PvE, no PvP), and am wondering if the more DoT-based approach of assault might serve me better on motion-heavy fights. Anyone try something close to this 3/10/28 build?

 

http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#8000cZMIkZbIMrzGhMc.1

 

I find on the ops dummy I lose about 10% of my DPS over the gunnery tree in stationary turret mode. But I can get close to 800 DPS from nothing but hammer shot, incendiary round, and HiB, so I could literally run in circles around the dummy and maintain that (while staying at max ammo too). On the downside, I have seem to have very little burst DPS ability; spamming charged bolts, FA on CD, HiB when proc'd, doesn't seem to add much.

 

Am I losing too much by not going a full 31 points into assault?

 

Yeah you are.

 

Here's the thing. You don't spam charged bolts. That's pre-1.2 thinking.

 

Here's the logic.

 

1) Fire HiB

2) Proc a free HiB with CB and FA

3) In the 6 seconds where you have ZERO chance to proc another HiB you need to use other attacks.

4) 6 seconds is up, now you can use CB and FA to proc another free HiB

 

So when you fail to spec into Plastique you've lost a 2 ammo attack that hits much harder than CB which you can use during the 6 seconds where CB is totally unable to proc any more HiB.

 

On that note, Stockstrike ALSO hits harder than Charged Bolts for the same cost. I don't use this on operation bosses unless they get themselves to me but it's far better to use than CB if you are close enough. Won't get pushed back either.

[BroadStreetBully]

yes assault is better soloing but in operations your in a group not solo and grav round stacks help the whole party out and not just yourself your increasing everyones damage output instead of yourself. you may do maybe 50k more in 5 minutes then a gunnery spec but if your gunnery your whole group will do more which outshines assault because in the long run your whole group will do more damage then that 50k you pulled from switching to assault. so the real question is are you going to raid a lot if so do gunnery because everyone will do more damage overall then if you were assault. (e.g 25% armor reduction to a 10000 armor is 2500 off which means everyone would be doing 25% more damage overall instead of getting it mitigated)

 

I find in ops and flashpoints, that I am still more effective as assault. With assault, I do slightly more damage, and I take a lot less damage. Since most of my attacks are done on the move, I can avoid elemental damage and I can kite enemies meaning the healers can spend a lot less time worrying about me and focus on the tank.

 

What your are saying may be true in ideal situation. However, builds like Gunnery start to fall apart in fights where you have to move. Moving interrupts your rotation and can allow your procs to fall off. Assault doesn't have that same dependency.

 

Ultimately, I think both of these specs now are viable and they simply are two different playstyles.

[rjavig]

I find in ops and flashpoints, that I am still more effective as assault. With assault, I do slightly more damage, and I take a lot less damage. Since most of my attacks are done on the move, I can avoid elemental damage and I can kite enemies meaning the healers can spend a lot less time worrying about me and focus on the tank.

 

What your are saying may be true in ideal situation. However, builds like Gunnery start to fall apart in fights where you have to move. Moving interrupts your rotation and can allow your procs to fall off. Assault doesn't have that same dependency.

 

Ultimately, I think both of these specs now are viable and they simply are two different playstyles.

 

so far i have not seen a boss were you cant stand still for a while and shell out good damage and keep grav round on ive run all ops and all hm fps. though i do agree that they are both viable and are just different play styles