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Railshotless Prototype Build


Panzor

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Railshot in AP is a guaranteed crit, 30 meter white damage attack. Why anyone would spec out of it is totally beyond me. Your dps will go down, in spite of what the "guide" claims.

 

It sounds like you have done extensive research on the matter and can back up your claims as well?

 

By the by I do not play AP.

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It sounds like you have done extensive research on the matter and can back up your claims as well?

 

By the by I do not play AP.

 

Not sure what you mean by "back up" as just from a common-sense perspective you should not be giving up one of your only white damage attacks that cuts through armor, is buffed for a 100% crit chance and can hit from 30 meters for 4k. Not to mention that in "norse" you essentially waste two points in retractable blade buffs that essentially serve no purpose in that build at all.

 

Norse is a garbage build. If you want survivability, just run the AP hybrid instead. It's way more survivable, and does more damage than Norse.

 

But if you need numbers: 74k damage in 30 seconds with full AP. Norse is not going to touch this.

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I was wondering if anyone has tried this before. Completely forgoing any railshot skills so you can forget about accuracy all together.

 

I used to play NORSE and even played with the writer of the AP / NORSE guide and discussed it extensively with him (he quit many months ago).

 

The thing is that PFT has been changed so it needs only 3 stacks and not 5 as it was before when the guide was written. So with this you have more flexibility in your rotation in between Flamethrower cooldowns, so using railshot, especially on a proc, makes a lot more sense now then it did before. So I think NORSE is less useful now and if you did want to go AP it probably would be better to do it with rail shots. The issue with this is heat management, you really have to be conscious of it and aware of it at all times, a lot more so than Pyro.

 

The thing about AP is that it is not so much a pure burst DPS the way Pyro is but more of a utility spec. So you shouldn't expect to put up the big numbers or damage that Pyro will. Its value lies in other things that wont show up on a parse or scoreboard. Its an underrated spec but is still kind of underwhelming, Ive since switched to Pyro anyway.

Edited by Z-ToXiN
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I was wondering if anyone has tried this before. Completely forgoing any railshot skills so you can forget about accuracy all together.

 

Like others have mentioned, that was the NORSE build (No Rail Shot Excellence). It was created before you only needed 3 stack of PFT to generate maximum FT damage. NORSE put aside Kinetic and Energy damage, and it utilized nothing but elemental and internal damage, which left the user with the option to stack nothing but Power/Crit/Surge. The rotation was very static and revolved around a 12 second window, of which 9 were used on necessary abilities for procs, heat management, and a dot refresh. That essentially left two "free" GCD's for the user to activate situational abilities.

 

While NORSE didn't suffer so much from a direct DPS disparity, it did suffer from flawed game mechanics. FT is a channeled ability, and can be interrupted with a stun of any kind, or a knockback/pull. If the FT channel was interrupted before the forth tick, the user took a significant DPS loss and would have to wait another 12-14 seconds before trying their luck again. Also, unreliable player tracking on the server end meant that sometimes a FT cone would completely miss its intended target. Additionally, the intended target could simply evade the cone by running around the user, which forced the user to pivot in attempts to keep the cone centered - again, flawed by player tracking.

 

In the right hands, and in a perfect world, NORSE could have been a great PVP spec with its combination of sustained damage and self-utility. However, the reality of the situation is that NORSE simply does not work as intended due to a variety of reasons that has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of the spec, nor the skill of the player.

 

I understand you'd like a functional NORSE build to use, but, at this point, a PVP'er wishing to take advantage of the AP self-utility characteristics should look towards the available hybrids which utilize Rail Shot. These hybrids simply work better than NORSE in the current state of the game.

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