Bounty Hunter damage breakdown -- questions

[NissaNissa]

I'm a Mercenary, and there are a lot of questions I have about the various stats that go into your damage and how they work together. Looking at my items, I've noticed that most of them have these stats:

 

-Base weapon damage (min/max damage)

-Aim

-Power

-Tech Power

-Crit rating

 

Looking at my abilities, most of them are broken down into:

 

-Kinetic damage

-Weapon damage

-Elemental damage

 

My question is, what are the relationships between the various stats and the various types of abilites I have? I can do a couple quick checks by removing inventory slots. Aim, for instance, increases all types of damage, and base weapon damage obviously increases weapon damage. My questions are:

 

- How should I itemize? which should I prioritize, power or aim? In what proportions?

- As an arsenal mercenary, is base weapon damage even useful since I'm using tracer missile (kinetic) all the time? I would be very upset if it turned out my weapons did nothing for my damage output -- that just seems flat-out wrong.

- Should I be using power shot?

- How does armor reduction play into all this?

- Which stats influence healing?

 

Also, Missile Blast is one of the most incredibly underwhelming abilities in my arsenal. Is there something I'm missing with this ability, or should I just not level it?

 

Thank you in advance. I have more questions, but I don't know if these are questions everyone's been asking or if there's been some research done on these different things already or if we should hold out until more information becomes available

Edited December 26, 2011 by NissaNissa

[Joeblows]

always AIM

 

The way i do it is:

 

1. AIM

2. CRIT

[Gunzwei]

Assuming level 50 merc spec'd deep Arsenal.

 

1. Aim

2. Crit

3. Surge

4. Power/Alcarity

 

Most of our dmg is mitigated by armor hence the huge amounts of armor pen arsenal takes advantage of (High Velocity Cylinder + Tracer).

 

Crit interacts with a lot of our talents for getting rid of heat.

 

You'll always have nice weapons since their level/dmg is based on the mods in them.

 

-

PVE Rotation

 

Tracer x3 for 5 stack of armor pen.

Unload (if barrage procs)

Heatseeker (25% bonus dmg due to 5 stack of armor pen)

-->Tracer x2

---->Unload (if barrage procs)

-------> Railshot (now that you have 5 stack of RS buff up)

 

From there just Tracer/Unload/RS/HS as necessary.

-

Rest of it is just situational as you want to use it. You'll never use power shot outside of the brief time you use it for leveling purposes. That's the basic turreting PVE dps rotation.

 

-

PVP on the other hand will seldom allot you the time to set all that up. To compete you'll have to adopt a secondary mobile style of play. This is where skills like missile blast shine.

 

See three people trying to capture that objective? Missile blast.

See three people trying to open that door? Missile blast.

See that huttball carrier at low hp? Missile blast.

[NissaNissa]

Oh crap, I didn't even realize missile blast was instant. Makes a lot more sense now. Thanks for your responses!