Arsenal PvP advice

[Voxx_Voltaare]

As much as I often feel like a chew toy in PvP, I'm a die-hard and will continue to play this class, at least until I get fully geared out as I can.

 

At the moment, I am full BM. As for stats, they could be better. I only ever got a few of the datacrons and don't have the matrix cube yet either. I can't recall exactly where everything is at, but it is something like ~101 acc/28 crit/65 surge/~4xx power. Health is just under 17k without extra buffs. I know I need to get my crit/surge up. I'm basically waiting to get my WH gear and then try and mix/match mods.

 

In PvP, I feel like I've hit a plateau. I see people on this board claiming damage numbers of 400k and such. My best rounds I'll be lucky to get around low to mid 200k and at best maybe 10-11 medals. Average rounds are more like 150k and 6-7 medals.

 

I always try and stay at the fringe of the fight and pick lower health targets and focus on healers, snipers, ops, and other mercs if possible. I always use my Rakata stim and relic as often as possible. I get focused on a lot of course. When trying to stay at the fringe, I'll inevitably get jumped or pulled by one or two melee types and will be dead in seconds. I very rarely get the benefit of team heals as we are viewed as a "lost cause" most of the time. So when I'm trying to avoid detection or getting jumped/pulled/CCed into oblivion, I am not doing any damage. And so it goes.

 

So what am I missing? Other than benefiting from being on a dominant team and having the opportunity to be left alone to rack up damage, is it all stats? Is there any chance of getting my damage and medals up as an arsenal merc in the meantime, while I work on WH gear and datacron hunting?

 

For those that claim what I think are ridiculous numbers(since in most of the rounds I play, I rarely see even the top performs crack 400k) how do you approach PvP?

 

In general, how are you guys stacking up compared to what I posted? Am I severely behind the curve or actually doing about as expected for my gear/stats?

[djlowballer]

Arsenal is going to be a crapshoot unless you have a healer or guard to assist you. Once somebody notices you sitting in one place spamming damage they will go out of their way to get you for the "free kill". I have hit the 400k damage but only against poor teams that let me sit in one place the entire round hammering them. Otherwise it is cat and mouse trying to let off a salvo of missiles/unload before relocating to a different firing position.

[Sinsavz]

Positioning. Make it so that when someone leaps to you, you aim your knockback to send them off the edge onto another level where they can't get back to you. Too many people just see a melee on them and durr hit knockback and it sends them 1m into a wall, massive waste.

 

It sounds like you're already targeting the right people, ignore sins, marauders, jug tanks. All agents, mercs, sorcs should die in seconds unless they have a personal healer.

 

Your stats are pretty poor for full bm, you should be looking at 100% acc, 35+ crit, 75 surge, 700+ power. Maybe take the crit-surge war hero pieces first (gloves and chest I think?). The 2 piece pve set bonus is essential for arsenal merc too,(15% tracer crit). Try to get like 2 columi/rakata/black hole pieces for the set bonus, then just fill it with expertise mods apart from the armoring and you're good.

 

Utilise AoE as best as possible. Death from above is still very very good damage, it just doesn't hit everyone in a ten mile radius anymore. If people are clumped then use every DFA and explosive dart cooldown, maybe fusion missile too if you have thermal override up.

 

The key to doing top damage is: constant single target nuking with no downtime combined with maximising every aoe cooldown.

Edited May 10, 2012 by Sinsavz