Esoteric Gearings

[TitusOfTides]

If you have been on our forums lately you may know I have been messing around with some bizarre stat allocations. I have reached a few conclusions, and I really think that many Marauders and Sentinels would benefit from what I have found.

 

With my Sentinel, I've been experimenting with high accuracy and have been using 13% to get a nice 80% on my offhand. My critical chance is 37% and my critical damage is at 68%. I am still using the power and critical relics. I have switched to Combat, and I think that both Concentration and Combat benefit a lot from the additional offhand accuracy. With Combat, you squeeze more damage out of Blade Dance and Blade Rush more often. With Concentration, you do offhand damage with your supercrit on Concentrated Slice more often (as well as all of your two-weapon abilities do).

 

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the amount of damage you gain from 8% more accuracy than the 'traditional' 5% would amount to more DPS than you are losing with the 3%/2% loss of crit.

 

With my Marauder, I have a different gearing. He has 101% accuracy, 30%/60% crit with 15% alacrity and 15% defense chance. He uses the crit and defense relic. This type of gearing works really well for Annihilation and Fury. Fury benefits from this type of gearing because it makes up for much of the crit loss with passives and gets to perform much faster. It also benefits from the defense chance (it grants a frequent 10% defense gain in the rotation). Annihilation obviously benefits from the alacrity, and doesn't really feel like it's losing much with the crit (we get so many passives/buffs) and we also get a big boost off of the crit relic when it procs. With the extra defense you are alive longer to actually receive some decent healing from your dot heals. I used to go 20% Alacrity with Carnage, but then realized that Ravage's channel is capped at 2s and won't benefit fully from 50% alacrity.

 

Defense chance is obviously a DPS loss, but it does have the potential to yield more damage since you will live longer to deal it. Annihilation is already the highest parsing spec in the game, it won't miss a very small amount of DPS to live longer and do everything incredibly fast.

 

I have also been meaning to experiment with a high endurance gearing, but I am incredibly happy with how both of these builds are performing in each of their respective disciplines. I'm so impressed by their performance that these two characters have both become my mains, and I used to main a Sage.

Edited January 1, 2016 by TitusOfTides

[Kyovarde]

Gonna mess around with this for combat for PvE!

[Bahadori]

If you have been on our forums lately you may know I have been messing around with some bizarre stat allocations. I have reached a few conclusions, and I really think that many Marauders and Sentinels would benefit from what I have found.

 

With my Sentinel, I've been experimenting with high accuracy and have been using 13% to get a nice 80% on my offhand. My critical chance is 37% and my critical damage is at 68%. I am still using the power and critical relics. I have switched to Combat, and I think that both Concentration and Combat benefit a lot from the additional offhand accuracy. With Combat, you squeeze more damage out of Blade Dance and Blade Rush more often. With Concentration, you do offhand damage with your supercrit on Concentrated Slice more often (as well as all of your two-weapon abilities do).

 

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the amount of damage you gain from 8% more accuracy than the 'traditional' 5% would amount to more DPS than you are losing with the 3%/2% loss of crit.

 

With my Marauder, I have a different gearing. He has 101% accuracy, 30%/60% crit with 15% alacrity and 15% defense chance. He uses the crit and defense relic. This type of gearing works really well for Annihilation and Fury. Fury benefits from this type of gearing because it makes up for much of the crit loss with passives and gets to perform much faster. It also benefits from the defense chance (it grants a frequent 10% defense gain in the rotation). Annihilation obviously benefits from the alacrity, and doesn't really feel like it's losing much with the crit (we get so many passives/buffs) and we also get a big boost off of the crit relic when it procs. With the extra defense you are alive longer to actually receive some decent healing from your dot heals. I used to go 20% Alacrity with Carnage, but then realized that Ravage's channel is capped at 2s and won't benefit fully from 50% alacrity.

 

Defense chance is obviously a DPS loss, but it does have the potential to yield more damage since you will live longer to deal it. Annihilation is already the highest parsing spec in the game, it won't miss a very small amount of DPS to live longer and do everything incredibly fast.

 

I have also been meaning to experiment with a high endurance gearing, but I am incredibly happy with how both of these builds are performing in each of their respective disciplines. I'm so impressed by their performance that these two characters have both become my mains, and I used to main a Sage.

 

Hey brother,

 

This is definitely an interesting read. With that said, and this may just be my engineering background at play here, do you have any documentation or analysis results that you can provide so this can be studied in depth by those of us interested (speaking of the OH strategy)?

 

Also, in what capacity are you experimenting with the Defense and, so to be, Endurance builds? Are these meant to be for solo play only? In PvE operations Story Mode through Nightmare Mode you'd be wasting huge amounts of possible DPS from gear to augment yourself for a concern that is not your job. Healers should be more than capable of keeping you alive so you do not need Defense or increased Endurance to accomplish this. As long as you understand the mechanics of each fight and are raid aware enough to avoid damage when possible this should not be needed and would be wasted DPS with those builds.

 

If this is meant for solo play, for example StarFortress, Heroics, possibly Flashpoints, then i could understand your methodology and thought process in suggesting and testing these builds. Otherwise it is my personal opinion you would be wasting stats.

 

At any rate it never hurts to bring up new ideas or try something different. Thanks for the post mate

[TitusOfTides]

Hey brother,

 

This is definitely an interesting read. With that said, and this may just be my engineering background at play here, do you have any documentation or analysis results that you can provide so this can be studied in depth by those of us interested (speaking of the OH strategy)?

 

Also, in what capacity are you experimenting with the Defense and, so to be, Endurance builds? Are these meant to be for solo play only? In PvE operations Story Mode through Nightmare Mode you'd be wasting huge amounts of possible DPS from gear to augment yourself for a concern that is not your job. Healers should be more than capable of keeping you alive so you do not need Defense or increased Endurance to accomplish this. As long as you understand the mechanics of each fight and are raid aware enough to avoid damage when possible this should not be needed and would be wasted DPS with those builds.

 

If this is meant for solo play, for example StarFortress, Heroics, possibly Flashpoints, then i could understand your methodology and thought process in suggesting and testing these builds. Otherwise it is my personal opinion you would be wasting stats.

 

At any rate it never hurts to bring up new ideas or try something different. Thanks for the post mate

 

Thank you for reading this I haven't done any parsing, and have been putting off buying the dummy and setting aside the time to parse. I'm spending almost all my time PvP these days, with a growing pleasure of soloing Star Fortresses - so that is where my experiences are being drawn from. I have (over the last few months) played countless hours of warzones with these loadouts (I have a problem). To be entirely honest, I was secretly hoping someone would be intrigued enough by what I've seen in PvP to parse it (the accuracy build specifically).

 

With that being said, I really only think that the defense gearing would be applicable in PvP, or perhaps if you were really dedicated to solo PvE.

 

I've always suspected alacrity had some hidden potential, and when I realized how accuracy impacted two-weapon classes I was curious to see how far that would go.The defense gearing started out with just a focus on alacrity, but then I switched out the power mods for defense ones and then added the relic and was surprised at the large gain I received for a small loss/effort. After committing to both of my hunches I really enjoyed the results and have stayed with them, and really hoped that someone else looking for something a little different would appreciate.

 

Thanks again for reading, and I really appreciate the feedback!

Edited January 1, 2016 by TitusOfTides

[verfallen]

Thank you for reading this I haven't done any parsing, and have been putting off buying the dummy and setting aside the time to parse. I'm spending almost all my time PvP these days, with a growing pleasure of soloing Star Fortresses - so that is where my experiences are being drawn from. I have (over the last few months) played countless hours of warzones with these loadouts (I have a problem). To be entirely honest, I was secretly hoping someone would be intrigued enough by what I've seen in PvP to parse it (the accuracy build specifically).

 

With that being said, I really only think that the defense gearing would be applicable in PvP, or perhaps if you were really dedicated to solo PvE.

 

I've always suspected alacrity had some hidden potential, and when I realized how accuracy impacted two-weapon classes I was curious to see how far that would go.The defense gearing started out with just a focus on alacrity, but then I switched out the power mods for defense ones and then added the relic and was surprised at the large gain I received for a small loss/effort. After committing to both of my hunches I really enjoyed the results and have stayed with them, and really hoped that someone else looking for something a little different would appreciate.

 

Thanks again for reading, and I really appreciate the feedback!

 

 

Someone did the alacrity stacking a while back, and it was not as good as standard build due to the harder DR on it and, the way alacrity work.

 

Same for stacking accuracy higher than usual. You'll have some extra hits on the offhand due to being a dual-wielding class, and a few extra melee hits on tanks in pvp, but all crits are going to be less frequent and of a slightly lesser magnitude. Fury's auto-crit will get a net loss, as being force attack they do not benefit of the extra accuracy, and will lose on the new crit chance formula for auto-crits.

 

The math is each extra % of accuracy probably do give you a slightly minor gain on the offhand, but overall that same stat budget point by point would give you an higher % of dps increase on stats that are on lower values then.

 

That said, combat at the very least has some extra offhand damage that might make it slightly more workable than doing so than fury.

 

As for stacking defense, as Bahadori/Hayete said, could be workable in solo pve or pvp, but I'm personnally in the school of tought that think it can save you a bit of damage, but most situation make it north worth it.

 

As DPS in solo PvE (and in groups too), your best method to reducing damage taken is to quickly dispatch any normal/strong mobs. Dead enemies don't damage you

 

Sent/Marauder well played has impressive defensive cooldowns, and healer companions being what they are currently.

 

For PvP sometimes having those kind of stat might situationnally make you better (Higher def could probably come in handy if focused by an MM sniper) but lessen considerably your effectiveness against others (Sorcs, has force attack ignore defense)

 

 

As a rule of thumb:

 

Accuracy Vs Defense (baseline 5% all class, safe inquisitor, 10%) for melee/ranged attack

Accuracy Vs Resist (baseline 0% on all class, some spec have buff to it, or active cooldowns) For force and tech based attack

 

Crit vs Shield for an attack on a tank. A crit cannot be shielded, so attacking tanks with lower crit builds, unless they are dps geared, means while the high acc will pass their 2nd line of defense more often, your damage will be reduced more often by their shielding. Especially sin tanks and PT tanks.

[AcaciaDragon]

If you have been on our forums lately you may know I have been messing around with some bizarre stat allocations. I have reached a few conclusions, and I really think that many Marauders and Sentinels would benefit from what I have found.

 

With my Sentinel, I've been experimenting with high accuracy and have been using 13% to get a nice 80% on my offhand. My critical chance is 37% and my critical damage is at 68%. I am still using the power and critical relics. I have switched to Combat, and I think that both Concentration and Combat benefit a lot from the additional offhand accuracy. With Combat, you squeeze more damage out of Blade Dance and Blade Rush more often. With Concentration, you do offhand damage with your supercrit on Concentrated Slice more often (as well as all of your two-weapon abilities do).

 

You should really be using the Mastery Relic instead of the Critical relic. The Critical Relic is to RNG to be reliable for your DPS, it could hit at the wrong time and hurt your already unforgiving rotation in Combat.

 

Stacking accuracy just to get more damage out of your off hand, which does no where near the full damage of your main hand, is gimping yourself. You will hit more with it, but the power and Critical you would have had, is no longer benefiting your hardest hitting abilities. It would only greatly effect your dps with Massacre, which is also no gimpped with the less power and crit to hit behind. Massacre gets a 15% bonus to surge. You are making that passive now considerably less useful. Blade Dance is only used every 15 seconds on average? So that added accuracy is only useful 25% of the time every minute on average. The added accuracy does nothing for your mainhand either where the majority of your white damage comes from.

 

With that said, I am curious to see what % the offhand has in the overall dps? A parse really wont reflect this. Has anyone tried using the lowest stat Offhand saber just to see how much it effects our dps?

 

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the amount of damage you gain from 8% more accuracy than the 'traditional' 5% would amount to more DPS than you are losing with the 3%/2% loss of crit.

 

While that sounds ok, its not, because its not just 3%/2%. With the way crit works now, depending on the actual ability being used, that % is actually higher when your discipline passives are taken into account.

 

With my Marauder, I have a different gearing. He has 101% accuracy, 30%/60% crit with 15% alacrity and 15% defense chance. He uses the crit and defense relic. This type of gearing works really well for Annihilation and Fury. Fury benefits from this type of gearing because it makes up for much of the crit loss with passives and gets to perform much faster. It also benefits from the defense chance (it grants a frequent 10% defense gain in the rotation). Annihilation obviously benefits from the alacrity, and doesn't really feel like it's losing much with the crit (we get so many passives/buffs) and we also get a big boost off of the crit relic when it procs. With the extra defense you are alive longer to actually receive some decent healing from your dot heals. I used to go 20% Alacrity with Carnage, but then realized that Ravage's channel is capped at 2s and won't benefit fully from 50% alacrity.

 

Defense chance is obviously a DPS loss, but it does have the potential to yield more damage since you will live longer to deal it. Annihilation is already the highest parsing spec in the game, it won't miss a very small amount of DPS to live longer and do everything incredibly fast.

 

Why did you feel you need Defense chance? Are you dying often in grps? There is 0 reason to use it in either a PvE or PvP environment, even if you are soloing. In PvE, your healer should be keeping you up, or your guild/grp isnt ready for the content, or you are standing in fires alot. If you are soloing, your Healing companion is more than capable of keeping you up. Even doing the Star Fortress Heroic Achievement is doable in even PvP Gear(Just Use Lana)

 

We actually have an ability and a Utility that can boost our Defense by 10% and has a pretty dependable uptime. We can even extend its time and reduce its CD using other Utilities.

 

I have also been meaning to experiment with a high endurance gearing, but I am incredibly happy with how both of these builds are performing in each of their respective disciplines. I'm so impressed by their performance that these two characters have both become my mains, and I used to main a Sage.

 

See my comments on Defense stacking.

 

While what you are proposing is good on paper, without parse to back it up, your theorycrafting is just that, a theory. You have to look at the class and what abilities you use as a whole and stop focusing on one ability that gets ignored stat wise here or there. There is a reason it is.

 

Before you go any further with anything, Parse it.

[g_mK]

In general the OH represents about 9% of an ability's damage.

Exceptions are:

• Strike where the OH damage is higher
  
• Dispatch which is MH only melee attack
  
• Force attacks(Clashing Blast, Raging burst, Blade storm): These are not affected by weapon damage but are based on Force bonus damage and Base Damage.
  

 

Comparing crit to accuracy there seems to be a 1:1 relationship when it comes to MH damage, since OH damage is one 10th of MH damage we can conclude crit to be about ten times more beneficial than accuracy once you have reached the 100% cap (these values will obviously change depending on where you are at the crit DR curve). A theorycrafting example of this is the following:

Average dps for 224 gear is 6747.97 at the accuracy cap, increasing accuracy by 400 will increase dps by ~20 dps and removing 400 crit will result in a decrease of ~223 dps giving us a net loss of ~203 dps

[Bryanseven]

My question along this line is whether offhand attacks can also proc ataru strikes?

 

It already states in the description of massacre that this ability 100% procs an ataru strike and increases the chance on other abilities to proc one by 30%. The crucial part in the description is that it specifically states that massacre BYPASSES the rate limit of one time per second that this can happen.

 

Assuming an offhand attack CAN proc an attaru form strike as well...then that is a much more significant DPS contribution than the offhand attack itself and might be interesting to see how this stacks up with a higher alacrity setup.

[TitusOfTides]

My question along this line is whether offhand attacks can also proc ataru strikes?

 

It already states in the description of massacre that this ability 100% procs an ataru strike and increases the chance on other abilities to proc one by 30%. The crucial part in the description is that it specifically states that massacre BYPASSES the rate limit of one time per second that this can happen.

 

Assuming an offhand attack CAN proc an attaru form strike as well...then that is a much more significant DPS contribution than the offhand attack itself and might be interesting to see how this stacks up with a higher alacrity setup.

 

I've wondered this myself actually, and it's worth mentioning that my Blade Rush does seem to tear through people faster than I remember (now that I use the accuracy build), so I am assuming that offhand strikes do trigger an additional Ataru strike.

 

It's also worth mentioning that the alacrity build is a top performing DPS spec if you drop the defense mods in place of traditional power ones. The 10% loss to crit obviously takes away from your burst (only when your crit relic isn't active), but the base 15% Alacrity will drastically improve your overall numbers at the end of a WZ - and you'll have the most fun you've ever had, guaranteed.

Edited January 31, 2016 by TitusOfTides

[Markark]

......

If this is meant for solo play, for example StarFortress, Heroics, possibly Flashpoints, then i could understand your methodology and thought process in suggesting and testing these builds. Otherwise it is my personal opinion you would be wasting stats. .....

 

My main being a Sent, this is exactly my thoughts as I read the idea of replacing other stats for accuracy to beef offhand damage, if you've parsed and viewed offhand damage, you know that offhand damage is minimal, a fraction of mainhand, the return for increasing a small % of offhand damage in exchange to losing crit, alacrity or power to your mainhand would be a loss.