Gunnery competitive at all?

[aridionzwei]

Hi guys,

 

returning to my Commando after a long time of hiatus.

 

As far as I am reading, when it comes to PvE and you are not speccing into Assault you are doing it wrong (at least that is what most of the guides and a quick glance at TORparse suggests).

 

Is this really so and would I be gimping myself if I go for Gunnery? Is there a huge margin between those speccs, or are we talking 100 DPS and the "OMG GUNNERY IS TEH SUCK" is more of an elitist thing?

 

Thanks in advance for any input!

[Bejarid]

Play how you want. The gap between a comparably geared Assault Commando and Gunnery Commando is more than 100 DPS - on a dummy. In ops, the gap is less definitive and doesn't matter as much; certain fights favor each spec (Nefra favors Assault, Draxus favors Gunnery, for example). I suck at Assault and so stay Gunnery for every fight and have never had an issue or a complaint about my performance.

[TACeMossie]

It depends on the fight and group composition.

 

If you go gunnery, you can run without a guardian, and your slingers will love you (The armor debuff is really nice - if there is no armor debuff on the target, gunnery is actually slightly better)

Similarly, if you have to target swap a lot, gunnery is better. Mainly cause the new target doesn't have the armor debuff yet, A decent amount of Assault's damage comes from DoT abilities, and you get extra armor pen on MortaR Volley

Finally, gunnery is a lot better at off healing, and doesn't worry about ammo as much, as its proc isn't cheatable RNG (that leaves you with 1GCD every 4 to do something not called Charged Bolts/High Impact Bolt), but rather a guaranteed proc

[cvak]

You could probably clear all content in the game as a gunnery commando, even in NiM (Draxus and Brontes actually favours it). However, in some fights, you're going to see yourself on the bottom of the dps list since if its just a single target encounter, dot specs are going to pull ahead. Which, I might add, is intended.

 

But if you're not going to venture into nightmare content, you really dont need to bother learning assault if you dont want to. With that said, mixing it up every now and then personally makes me enjoy the class more since ever after the gunnery rotation became fixed, it can become quite boring.