A guide to SWTOR Tactics and Plasmatech DPS Specs, updated for for 3.2 and focusing on PvE. Written and edited by Kwerty of The Harbinger.
NOTE: THE 4.0 UPDATE WILL BE DELAYED, THOUGH ROTATIONALLY BOTH DISCIPLINES ARE UNCHANGED
Contents
Sick of having to channel all your abilities on your RDPS toons? Tired of having to stand in melee range and get hit by all the AoE? Sick of being pushed into the tank role?
If any of the above is true, then the Vanguard is the DPS option for you!
Taking advantage of being the only mid-range spec in the game, Vanguards bring a number of benefits, such as high mobility, decent range on all their abilities, a number of decent defensive cooldowns, and some of the strongest mechanics negaters in Hold the Line and Sonic Rebounder.
There are 2 options to choose from:
TACTICS
Tactics is a very burst oriented spec. Almost all its damage is instant, it has multiple attacks that deal delayed damage or off the GCD damage in order to deal as much damage as possible at once, and it doesn’t have to channel a thing – though in an AoE rotation its a good idea to incorporate Mortar Volley and Pulse Cannon for their great AoE damage.
On top of that, it has a huge number of defensive benefits, such as +3% defense chance, 30% damage reduction while stunned, 30% AoE damage reduction, A reduced reactive shield cooldown when you are attacked, a damage absorb shield when being attacked, and shoulder cannon can be talented to do a 5% self heal per missile – for a total of 35%. It also has access to 6 seconds of 30% extra defense and resist chance every time you use Sonic Round.
It does come at a cost, with its resource management being highly dependent on the target having a bleed, but when you can do all your damage without having to stand still in those nasty AoEs while standing at a distance, what is there to complain about?
PLASMATECH
Due to the changes that were implemented in patch 3.2, Plasmatech is the uncontested AoE DPS Monster. Combining a DoT spread on Incendiary Round with the strongest spammable AoE of Explosive Surge, a buffed Pulse Cannon, and a boost to Mortar Volley on burning targets, pretty much nothing can stand up to a Plasmatech Vanguard in AoE situations.
But AoEs aren’t its only strength. Plasmatech can perform quite well in a sustained situation, as where its not able to keep up to the burst or mobility of Tactics, it can make up for this through a number of DoTs, and far easier resource management.
With that in mind, have some abilities and utilities available to everyone:
Most of these have been covered, but here’s another quick run down of them. I have emphasised the more useful skills for PvE DPS reasons.
Skillful
Masterful
Heroic
With that ridiculous amount of information covered, its time to look at the actual disciplines.
ACCURACY: You MUST have more than 750 accuracy. This brings you over 100% accuracy rating. You also MUST have the companion accuracy bonus. Otherwise, you will be missing attacks. You don’t want much more than 750 accuracy though, otherwise you are wasting stats (777 would be as high as I’d recommend)
SURGE AND ALACRITY: The only thing you must know here is that Surge should not be lower than Alacrity until about 300 surge, unless you are using the alacrity heavy gearing option. Surge + Alacrity are almost equal in 3.0, though those with higher input latency should put more emphasis on Surge rating. Depending on your surge rating, you want different levels of Crit Rating.
CRIT RATING: Depending on gear levels, you want different amounts of crit rating. Same with how much Surge you are running.
For crit rating, more power makes crit better, so I’ll give 4 different crit levels:
This assumes a 50/50 split of surge to alacrity, favouring surge.
If you are not using a 50/50 split of surge to alacrity, use the following graphs for a good idea of how much crit you want. The values represented by the different colours are the surge, so alacrity would be what is left afterwards. These also assume Power augments, so if you are using Aim ones you would drop crit by about 60.
“What about the black line?” The black line is explained below, in the “Kwerty’s Crazy Gearing Method” section.
Resurrected Gear
Revanite Gear
Monolith Mainhand, Mix of 198s + 204s
All other secondary stats should be in power
With that out of the way, we want all our augments to be either Aim, or a combination of Power + Crit. The difference between the 2 is so small you will never notice it, though I’m going with power as that way I will spend less time optimizing my gear (Crit drops like crazy from everything, while power already has issues like not existing alongside accuracy on the implants)
We also want to have a Serendipitous Assault relic, and a Focused Retribution relic
Finally, you want to be using the 6-piece Combat Tech’s set bonus, and be running in High Energy Cell. The 6-piece combat tech set bonus gives a huge number of benefits such as auto-crits and resource management, while High Energy Cell boosts all Kinetic and Energy Damage by 5% and enables all of your procs.
A note on Alacrity Heavy gearing or “Kwerty’s Crazy Gearing Method”
Originally, I had believed that alacrity should not really go above 240 right now, as preliminary testing found it wasn’t getting a DPS improvement. However, with 3.0.2 a lot of the input lag is gone, and with it Alacrity is significantly better. I started investigating this because of reports from Watchman Sentinels of all people, who found that they were getting comparable DPS numbers with full alacrity augments to what they were getting with full Power or Full Might augments. And with that, I modified my stat optimization code to give out optimal stats assuming any augments and any combination of Accuracy/Alacrity/Surge enhancements.
The end result? A method that minimizes the required token drops while pulling superior numbers on a dummy and in a raid.
Basically, you get your Alacrity + Surge values to the values of the black line on the graph above, and once that is done you simply have accuracy in every other piece, and Augment it to 100% accuracy. And thanks to Bioware’s token setup for Vanguards, its actually rather easy to get your Surge/Alacrity into the levels on the graph above. Also note that you can be about 50 rating in either direction and you’ll be fine. Though with 204 rating gear, get the 390 surge. You get more power that way (204 mainhands only provide Power/Surge enhancements)
Reaching the Accuracy Cap should be your highest priority
The DPS bonus given by alacrity is slightly lower on average per point than Surge for current gear levels, though due to diminishing returns you still want alacrity. If you are PvPing you need just over 305 accuracy if you don’t plan on missing rail shot, but after that, you should stop getting surge at about 300 rating and dump the rest into Alacrity.
Due to a 30% surge boost to pretty much everything, crit is very useful for the spec.
Choice of relics should be the Serendipitous Assault and Focused Retribution, though the Boundless Ages relic can be used for when you need burst damage in specific situations, such as the Nightmare Raptus DPS challenge in the Dread Palace operation. You can craft a rating 186 relic if you have an artificer with an RE’d schematic from a vendor, so you have no excuse for not having one.
Get the set bonus as quick as possible. The 2-piece is a 1% DPS boost, the 4-piece makes resource management very nice, and the 6-piece is about a 1.7% DPS boost. 192 Set Bonus armoring is better than 198 non-set bonus armoring.
The Old set bonus should be replaced when possible, but even a rating 146 set bonus will be better than no set bonus.
For Mods, make sure to get mods without a letter in the name – E.g. Advanced Agile Mod 36 instead of Advanced Agile Mod 36A, as these are much better. However, if you are jumping up a tier (e.g. 192 to 198), the A-mod is comparable in stat contribution to the previous tier unlettered mod.
For Enhancements you also want the low endurance version, only the difference is far larger – A crafted rating 186 enhancement is better than one from the Ultimate Comms vendor.
There are a number of procs to track in this spec, as well as one incredibly easy DoT to track. These are:
Proper tracking of these 3 procs, as well as resource management, is the difference between a great parse, and an average one.
There are also 2 debuffs you will want to keep on the target. These are:
New abilities added with 3.0 are highlighted in green
High Impact Bolt (HiB):Does high ranged weapon damage, and refreshes your gut bleed if present as well as recharging 5 energy. With the proc Tactical Accelerator, this ability is free, so it is used to generate energy. This ability ignores 90% of the targets armor. Has a 30 meter range. Due to it having a cooldown reset, this should be delayed until you have a free cooldown if necessary (and this does happen)
Tactical Surge (TS):Does decent energy damage, and if the lockout is finished will activate Tactical Accelerator. This is your ideal filler as it does not have a cooldown. It also activates your 2-piece and 6-piece set bonuses – the 2-piece increasing damage by 2% for 15 seconds (30 second lockout), and the 6-piece causing your next Cell Burst to automatically crit (60 second lockout). Uses 15 energy and has a 10 meter range, which can be expanded to 15 meters with the utility Muzzle Augs.>
Stockstrike (SS):Does slightly more energy damage than Tactical Surge, but also provides an armor debuff and has a natural 5% crit boost. It should be used on cooldown. Uses 15 energy, or 13 energy with the 4-piece set bonus, and is restricted to melee range
Assault Plastique (AP):Does slightly more damage than High Impact Bolt and has a natural 5% crit boost, though without armor penetration it ends up doing slightly less against most players and against bosses. It has a 30 meter range and uses 15 energy, and a 15 second cooldown. This also provides a tech damage debuff, making it very nice because of 70% of your damage being tech based.
Cell Burst (CB):Does a very large amount of damage when used at 4 energy lodes, and due to the 6-piece set bonus will crit about 40% of the time automatically. This ability can be delayed due to a lack of cooldown, though it should take priority over High Impact Bolt, and any Tactical Surge that will not activate Tactical Accelerator. It should be used about every 24 seconds, and will use up 20 energy.
Hammer Shot (HS):Due to how energy hungry Cell Burst is, you fill find yourself using Hammer Shots quite often in the spec – about every 15 seconds. Its not that bad though, as the removal of RNG in this spec means you can go HSx2 -> Tactical Surge without having to deal with RNG. This ability should be used if your energy is about to drop low, or if you are about to do a heavy burn (using Stockstrike, Assault Plastique, Tactical Surge and Cell Burst one after another is an example of this)
Gut:This ability should be used minimally – the only time it should be used is when the target doesn’t have a bleed, which is pretty much when you first engage it. Of course, this isn’t always true – mechanics will constantly force you onto a different target or prevent damage on the current target for 15 seconds, which is cause for a refresh of the bleed effect. It will use up 15 energy
The Rotation is a priority system of all your different abilities. While I can’t give you the complete rotation (its over 300 ability activations long!), I can give you an opener and a priority list after that opener to work with.
Another thing to note is this changes if you move from single target to AoE, and the AoE rotation is under the normal one.
So, without further ado:
Single Target
OPENER
Preload Shoulder Cannon, Energy Lodes
AP -> Gut -> HiB -> SS –> TS -> [Adrenal] CB -> [Battle Focus, Start Shoulder Cannon Spam] HiB -> TS –> HiB -> Priority List
NOTE: WHEN 4.0 DROPS, USE BATTLE FOCUS BEFORE CELL BURST, AS THE 4.0 CHANGES MEAN BATTLE FOCUS IS +25% DAMAGE TO AUTO-CRITS
The priority list consists of 4 GCD Blocks, with choices made in each block depending on what cooldowns are available, and how much energy you have left, as well as if you have energy cooldowns available.
Reserve Powercell should be used on every 4th Cell Burst, while Recharge Cells should be used at 30 energy. Try to time your energy so you have about 60 energy when the free Cell Burst is used.
The 4 GCD Block consists of the following:
Filler 1 -> Filler 2 -> Proc Filler -> Filler 3
Due to how the opener was organized, stockstrike will only fall into Filler 1 and the Proc Filler, while Assault Plastique will only ever fall into Filler 2 or Filler 3.
Filler 1 Priority List:
Filler 2 Priority List:
Proc Filler Priority List:
Filler 3 Priority List:
For those who are more visually inclined, here is a picture of said priority list per GCD:
How do I use this priority list? Well, I put this section in as a few people got confused. Its relatively simple.
Look at your abilities available and your energy level as you enter each cooldown. Then, go down the list, and pick the highest ability available to you.
Lets use an example of you have just used High Impact Bolt and are entering GCD1. The target is bleeding, Stockstrike is available, Assault Plastique is 1 GCD away from being off cooldown, and you have 4 energy lodes. With that, you would do the following:
GCD1: Stockstrike
GCD2: Assault Plastique
GCD3: Tactical Surge
GCD4: Cell Burst
and then it moves onto the next set of GCDs, where you would start with High Impact Bolt in GCD1 and work from there.
Following this priority list should end up with everything on cooldown, with no wasted procs either. The difference between a good vanguard and a bad one, is when you can recognise when you need to burn your energy and when you need to go without losing it.
Of course, use Battle Focus on cooldown, and make sure to fire off all 7 Shoulder Cannon missiles inside it in order to maximise your damage capabilities.
Here’s an example of the priority list being used:
AoE
Abilities not mentioned previously:
Sticky Grenade (SG)Does decent kinetic damage to 8 targets. This damage does not get a surge boost, and is slightly weaker than Tactical Surge before crits, but the fact it is hitting multiple targets completely makes up for this. If it hits a bleeding target, that target will have the bleeds duration refreshed back to the full 15 seconds and cause it to tick immediately. This will not spread the bleed effect, only refresh it.
Explosive Surge (ES)If you are in an AoE fight and are using Explosive Surge, you will want to have Shrap Satchell for the 25% extra damage. Without it, you need 3 targets to justify using Explosive Surge over Tactical Surge. This should all but completely replace Tactical Surge in your rotation for AoE situations.
Mortar Volley (MV)Difficult to fit into the rotation because of its high energy cost, it does very good damage and in an AoE situation you will not regret using this. You should use Reserve Powercell on this instead of cell burst in an AoE situation
OPENER
Preload Shoulder Cannon, Energy Lodes
SG -> AP -> Gut -> [Adrenal, Battle Focus, Start Shoulder Cannon Spam] HiB -> SS –> TS -> CB -> HiB -> SG –> HiB -> Priority List
The priority list consists of 4 GCD Blocks, with choices made in each block depending on what cooldowns are available, and how much energy you have left, as well as if you have energy cooldowns available.
Reserve Powercell should be used on Mortar Volley, while Recharge Cells should be used at 30 energy. Try to time your energy so you have about 60 energy when the free Mortar Volley is used.
The 4 GCD Block consists of the following:
Filler 1 -> Filler 2 -> Proc Filler -> Filler 3
Due to how the opener was organised, stockstrike and Sticky Grenade will only fall into Filler 1 and the Proc Filler and never interfere with each other, while Assault Plastique will only ever fall into Filler 2 or Filler 3.
Filler 1 Priority List:
Filler 2 Priority List:
Proc Filler Priority List:
For those who are more visually inclined, here is a picture of said priority list per GCD:
So as you can see, its almost the same – though with Sticky Grenade added into the priority list, and Tactical Surge replaced with Explosive Surge (sure you miss out on the 2-piece and 6-piece benefits, but skilled players can still use a Tactical Surge every 30 seconds to keep these advantages). It also mixes in Mortar Volley when possible, which is very difficult to pull off but is worth it when you can.
This section used to be a lot longer, but thanks to Marisi’s great parse analysis tool, Parsely, this section can be cut back on substantially.
In order to have maximum DPS, a dummy parse should have Stockstrike and Assault Plastique used on cooldown, High Impact Bolt’s proc every 4 GCDs, and Cell Burst every 4 High Impact Bolts.
To see how close you get to this, upload a log to Parsely and click on the “Ability Usage” tab, which shows how often you use each ability.
For example, in the parse below, we can see that I used my abilities more often than their cooldown states! Except… I have like 7.2% alacrity. So I lost quite a bit of damage in the end.
High Impact Bolt was used 2% less often than it could have been
Stockstrike was used 4.5% less often than it could have been
Assault Plastique was also used 4.5% less often than it could have been
Overall, I lost quite a bit of DPS just cause I couldn’t keep my APM up to as high as I would have liked. That, and pathetic crits on Assault Plastique.
As for hammer shots usage, you want to try to delay the first hammer shots as long as possible. I typically don’t need it till ~60-70 seconds into the fight, in which case I’ll only need to use it 5-7 times before the energy cooldowns are back and I can do another minute long energy burn. Ideally, you’ll want 60 seconds with no hammer shots uses, followed by 40 seconds of which 5 hammer shots are used in, before the cycle repeats itself.
So here’s an example of the 1 mill dummy being killed by my vanguard. By no means the best parse ever (i’ve hit well over 200DPS more than this), it shows the basics of a parse in all but 1 case (CURSE YOU ASSAULT PLASTIQUE AND YOUR PATHETIC CRIT RATE!). I used this instead of my best as this is what I hit in the video above.
The parse is found here: http://swtor-parser.elasticbeanstalk.com/parser/view/13185/2
With that in mind, here’s a few things to note:
High Impact bolt is used 25% of the time, and not surprisingly will do about 25% of all the damage.
After that comes Tactical Surge, which is used far more often, at about 35% of the time, though it only does ~23% of the damage – its strength is coming from it proccing Tactical Accelerator and not having to worry about a cooldown (as well as activating the set bonus)
Third comes in Stockstrike – not surprising considering its only slightly stronger than Tactical Surge on average, though with a 9 second cooldown. It is boosted a little by having a 5% crit boost though, and should do about 13-15% of your damage
After that is Assault Plastique, which hits by a truck and gets a 5% crit chance boost, but is held back even more by its 15 second cooldown. It should do about 12% of your damage – though in this case its damage was far lower due to a below average crit rate and the next abilities having a higher than normal crit rate.
The 5th place position is usually a tie between Gut’s bleed effect and Cell Burst, at about 10% each. Gut’s bleed gets its damage because its ticking more than every 3 seconds, while Cell Burst just hits for such a ridiculous amount it doesn’t matter you aren’t using it more than once every 24 seconds. Cell Burst should also have an unnaturally high crit rate – 40% minimum – due to the set bonus.
Finally, you have shoulder cannon doing about 5% of your damage, and Hammer Shots doing the rest of your damage. Gut’s initial hit will do either ~1.5k damage or ~3k damage, and should only be used once anyway so the longer the fight goes on, the less you are going to notice it.
ACCURACY: You MUST have more than 750 accuracy. This brings you over 100% accuracy rating. You also MUST have the companion accuracy bonus. Otherwise, you will be missing attacks. You don’t want much more than 750 accuracy though, otherwise you are wasting stats (777 would be as high as I’d recommend)
SURGE AND ALACRITY: The only thing you must know here is that Surge should not be lower than Alacrity until about 300 surge, unless you are using the alacrity heavy gearing option. Surge + Alacrity are almost equal in 3.0, though those with higher input latency should put more emphasis on Surge rating. Depending on your surge rating, you want different levels of Crit Rating.
CRIT RATING: Depending on gear levels, you want different amounts of crit rating. Same with how much Surge you are running.
For crit rating, more power makes crit better, so I’ll give 4 different crit levels:
This assumes a 50/50 split of surge to alacrity, favouring surge.
If you are not using a 50/50 split of surge to alacrity, use the following graphs for a good idea of how much crit you want. The values represented by the different colours are the surge, so alacrity would be what is left afterwards. These also assume Power augments, so if you are using Aim ones you would drop crit by about 60.
“What about the black line?” The black line is explained below, in the “Kwerty’s Crazy Gearing Method” section.
Resurrected Gear
Revanite Gear
Monolith Mainhand + Optimized 198s
All other secondary stats should be in power
With that out of the way, we want all our augments to be either Aim, or a combination of Power + Crit. The difference between the 2 is so small you will never notice it, though I’m going with power as that way I will spend less time optimizing my gear (Crit drops like crazy from everything, while power already has issues like not existing alongside accuracy on the implants)
We also want to have a Serendipitous Assault relic, and a Focused Retribution relic
Finally, you want to be using the 6-piece Combat Tech’s set bonus, and be running in Plasma Cell. The 6-piece combat tech set bonus gives a huge number of benefits such as auto-crits and resource management, while Plasma Cell boosts your elemental crit rate by 3% and enables all of your procs, as well as providing a burn to most of your damage. This burn ticks on application too.
A note on Alacrity Heavy gearing or “Kwerty’s Crazy Gearing Method”
Originally, I had believed that alacrity should not really go above 240 right now, as preliminary testing found it wasn’t getting a DPS improvement. However, with 3.0.2 a lot of the input lag is gone, and with it Alacrity is significantly better. I started investigating this because of reports from Watchman Sentinels of all people, who found that they were getting comparable DPS numbers with full alacrity augments to what they were getting with full Power or Full Might augments. And with that, I modified my stat optimization code to give out optimal stats assuming any augments and any combination of Accuracy/Alacrity/Surge enhancements.
The end result? A method that minimizes the required token drops while pulling superior numbers on a dummy and in a raid.
Basically, you get your Alacrity + Surge values to the values of the black line on the graph above, and once that is done you simply have accuracy in every other piece, and Augment it to 100% accuracy. And thanks to Bioware’s token setup for Vanguards, its actually rather easy to get your Surge/Alacrity into the levels on the graph above. Also note that you can be about 50 rating in either direction and you’ll be fine. Though with 204 rating gear, get the 390 surge. You get more power that way (204 mainhands only provide Power/Surge enhancements)
Reaching the Accuracy Cap should be your highest priority
Despite the large number of auto-crits, having a surge boost on some of your biggest abilities makes crit somewhat useful for the spec.
Choice of relics should be the Serendipitous Assault and Focused Retribution, though the Boundless Ages relic can be used for when you need burst damage in specific situations, such as the Nightmare Raptus DPS challenge in the Dread Palace operation. You can craft a rating 186 relic if you have an artificer with an RE’d schematic from a vendor, so you have no excuse for not having one.
Get the set bonus as quick as possible. The 2-piece is a 1% DPS boost, the 4-piece makes resource management very nice, and the 6-piece is about a 1% DPS boost as well. 192 Set Bonus armorings are better than 198 non-set bonus armoring.
The Old set bonus should be replaced when possible, but even a rating 146 set bonus will be better than no set bonus.
For Mods, make sure to get mods without a letter in the name – E.g. Advanced Agile Mod 36 instead of Advanced Agile Mod 36A, as these are much better. However, if you are jumping up a tier (e.g. 192 to 198), the A-mod is comparable in stat contribution to the previous tier unlettered mod.
For Enhancements you also want the low endurance version, only the difference is far larger – A crafted rating 186 enhancement is better than one from the Ultimate Comms vendor.
There are a number of procs to track in this spec and DoTs you have to track when using this spec:
PROCS
DoTs
If you have any of these burns on a target, then all Kinetic and Energy damage will be increased by 5%.
Proper tracking of these 3 procs, as well as DoTs and resource management, is the difference between a great parse, and an average one.
There are also 2 debuffs you will want to keep on the target. These are:
New abilities added with 3.0 are highlighted in green
Pulse Cannon (PC):Does very high elemental damage over 3 seconds, and slows the target down. It will also overwhelm the target, making it take 10% more damage from AoE attacks, and thanks to Rain of Fire it will spread your Incendiary Round to all targets it hits. Due to dealing elemental damage, its damage is boosted by 10% on a target below 30% health. 15 second cooldown, and uses 7 energy per tick of damage.
High Impact Bolt (HiB):Does high ranged weapon damage, and will automatically crit with Hyper Assault Cell. This has about a 35% chance to proc Plasma Cell, and ignores 60% of the targets armor. If it hits a burning target, it will deal 5% more damage as its a kinetic attack. 15 second cooldown, and uses 15 energy
Ion Pulse (IP):Does average elemental damage, its true strength comes from it being free with Plasma Barrage, automatically activating plasma cell, and building a stack of Pulse Generator, while also getting a 10% damage boost on targets below 30% health. When not free, it uses 15 energy, and the ability has a 10 meter range, which can be expanded to 15 meters with the utility Muzzle Augs.
Shockstrike (ShS):When compared to Stockstrike, Shockstrike does about the same kinetic damage, but it also has an elemental chunk of damage added on top. It also activates plasma cell, makes your next High Impact Bolt auto-crit, its elemental portion gets boosted when the target is in execute range, its kinetic hit will deal 5% more damage to a burning target, and it gets a nice surge boost. Overall, this ability is great and should be used as close to on cooldown as possible (which ends up being every ~10 seconds).Uses 15 energy (13 with the 4-piece set bonus), and has a 4 meter range. Its cooldown is 9 seconds for if you are doing a pulse cannon free mobile rotation (though honestly, who does that?)
Incendiary Round (IR):Nice and easy DoT to track, use it every 9th attack if using pulse cannon, or every 10th if not. This ability has a 30m range as well so you can use it as you are closing in on the target. No need to put it manually on multiple targets though, because Pulse Cannon will spread it for you.
Plasmatize (PT):Does a very large amount of elemental damage, only it takes 30 seconds to pull it off. Should the target die with this, it is automatically casted again on a new target for free (doesn’t even need a GCD), so long as the new target is close enough to the dead one. This makes the target take 5% more damage from tech attacks, with the debuff lasting 30 seconds, and because its elemental damage it is 10% stronger on a target below 30% health. It also has a 30% surge boost to make its crits hit a little harder. Costs 10 energy, and has a 10m range.
Fire Pulse (FP):Does a big chunk of elemental damage (about as much as IR does over its duration), while making your next Ion Pulse or Explosive Surge free, and it also builds a stack of Pulse Generator. It also deals 10% more damage to a target below 30% health. It only costs 12 energy as well, which is nice. Due to the 6-piece set bonus, 1 in 4 of these should be dealing a critical hit on average, and its 30% surge boost only sweetens the deal. Finally, it has a 10m range, and a cooldown of 15 seconds, lining up nicely with the rest of the spec.
Hammer Shot (HS): While this ability is used quite often, this is for good reason. Similar to how Assault Specialist commandos need to constantly use Hammer Shots twice a cycle when resource cooldowns are not available, so does Plasmatech. And like Assault Specialist, this has a 35% chance to activate plasma cell on the target, and has a 30m range. One other thing about Plasmatech hammer shots is that it deals 5% more damage to a burning target.
Unlike Tactics, where the rotation is a priority system of all your different abilities. Plasmatech has a rather static rotation. What makes it difficult is trying to squeeze in extra ion pulses, and hitting as much stuff as possible with Pulse Cannon.
So, without further ado:
NOTE: SOME OF THESE 15 SECOND COOLDOWN ABILITIES HAVE A LITTLE WRIGGLE ROOM, SO THIS IS NOT THE ONLY WAY TO PLAY THE SPEC, VARIATIONS TYPICALLY END WITH ABOUT THE SAME DAMAGE ANYWAY
Single Target
OPENER
Preload Shoulder Cannon, Pulse Generator (Spam Explosive Surge)
PT -> IR -> ShS [BF/Relics/Adrenals] -> PC -> [Shoulder Cannon Spam] HiB -> IP -> FP -> IP -> IP –> ShS -> IR -> IP -> PC -> HiB -> ShS -> FP -> IP -> HS –> Rotation
The rotation isn’t that different from the opener, though it is different in a couple of situations.
PT -> IR -> ShS -> PC -> HiB -> FILLER -> FP -> IP –> FILLER -> ShS -> IR -> FILLER -> PC -> HiB -> ShS -> FP -> IP -> HS –> Repeat
For those who are more visually inclined, heres a picture of said Rotation:
So, what the hell is FILLER?
Filler is very easy. Every minute, you will gain the 6-piece combat tech’s buff from using Ion Pulse. If this is to happen, then the first and third cases of FILLER are to be replaced with Ion Pulse. This way, you can get the extra damage from the Ion Pulses under the 2-piece buff, maximizing their contribution. Whats more, is if you are using Recharge Cells on that specific cycle, then the second FILLER would be used as Ion Pulse. In all other cases, you should use Hammer Shots in the FILLER slot.
Finally, before we move on, a video example of the rotation:
AoE
Abilities not mentioned previously:
Explosive Surge (ES)If you are in an AoE fight and are using Explosive Surge, you will want to have Shrap Satchell for the 25% extra damage. This should all but completely replace Ion Pulse in your rotation for AoE situations.
Note that the AoE rotation is almost the same, swapping pretty much all cases of Ion Pulse (outside of the one to proc the 6-piece bonus) with an Explosive Surge
OPENER
Preload Shoulder Cannon, Pulse Generator (Spam Explosive Surge)
PT -> IR -> ShS [BF/Relics/Adrenals] -> PC -> [Shoulder Cannon Spam] HiB -> IP -> FP -> ES -> ES –> ShS -> IR -> ES -> PC -> HiB -> ShS -> FP -> ES -> HS –> Rotation
The rotation isn’t that different from the opener, though it is different in a couple of situations.
PT -> IR -> ShS -> PC -> HiB -> FILLER -> FP -> ES –> FILLER -> ShS -> IR -> FILLER -> PC -> HiB -> ShS -> FP -> ES -> HS –> Repeat
For those who are more visually inclined, heres a picture of said Rotation:
So, what the hell is FILLER?
Filler is very easy. Every minute, you will gain the 6-piece combat tech’s buff from using Ion Pulse. If this is to happen, then the first case of FILLER is to be replaced with Ion Pulse, with the third being replaced with Explosive Surge. This way, you can get the extra damage from the Explosive Surges under the 2-piece buff, maximizing their contribution. Whats more, is if you are using Recharge Cells on that specific cycle, then the second FILLER would be used as Explosive Surge. In all other cases, you should use Hammer Shots in the FILLER slot.
“So why is pulse cannon delayed a third GCD in both cases?” Its simple. This slightly altered rotation will not only allow for slightly earlier burst compared to the one I was using earlier (as the offensive cooldowns start in GCD 3 instead of GCD 5), but also allows for more APM – If you are skilled enough. By putting a 15 second CD ability after Pulse Cannon, if you can keep your abilities used as the GCD comes off, you can mash the High Impact Bolt button while Pulse Cannon is channeling, and not lose any damage. BE CAREFUL NOT TO CLIP YOUR PULSE CANNON THOUGH.
Hilariously, if you have the utility Efficient Tools, Neural Surge can also be used as an AoE filler (over hammer shots) due to its minor elemental damage it deals, but you would need about 4+ targets to justify doing this (unless, of course, they are prone to CC), but doing so requires giving up awesome heroic utilities such as Re-energizers or Charge the Line.
This section used to be a lot longer, but thanks to Marisi’s great parse analysis tool, Parsely, this section can be cut back on substantially.
In order to have maximum DPS, a dummy parse should have High Impact Bolt, Fire Pulse and Pulse Cannon used on cooldown, Incendiary Round every 15 seconds, Plasmatize every 30 seconds, and an average cooldown on Shockstrike of 10 seconds. Ion Pulse should also be used every ~9.3 seconds on average (though most of the time it should have a 15 second delay between uses).
To see how close you get to this, upload a log to Parsely and click on the “Ability Usage” tab, which shows how often you use each ability.
For example, in the parse below, we can see that I used my abilities more often than their cooldown states! Except… I have like 7.2% alacrity. So I lost quite a bit of damage in the end.
Sample Parse
So here’s an example of the 1 mill dummy being killed by my vanguard. This isn’t my best parse since 3.2 dropped (Hell, there’s a better parse in that log that was uploaded, though I made mistakes on that one), though it is what was achieved in the video above, and its a nice average to work off.
The parse is found here: http://swtor-parser.elasticbeanstalk.com/parser/view/26265/2
With that in mind, here’s a few things to note:
Your most damaging ability is Pulse Cannon, which does about 19% of your damage.
Next up is Shockstrike. Despite being delayed in order to avoid delaying Pulse Cannon, Shockstrike is still a very powerful move for your rotation, doing things such as activating Plasma Cell, hitting harder in the execute range, and outright hitting like a truck. It should do about 14% of your damage
Third place goes to a tie between pretty much every one of your abilities, bar Hammer Shots, Plasma Cell, and Shoulder Cannon.
Finally, Plasma Cell does about 9% of your damage, and Hammer Shots and Shoulder Cannon make up what is left at about 2-3% each.
For those who don’t know me, I’m a friendly guy living in Australia, where I comfortably play the game with >180 ping (I laugh every time I see someone complaining about the game being unplayable @ 100 ping). I picked up this game a few years ago, where I leveled a sentinel through the storyline, than left it, thinking “Yeah that was good”, only to come back a year later cause a friend wanted to try it out. One thing led to another and though a number of things, like being moved to the Harbinger and barely touching my sentinel anymore, I picked up a Vanguard, and loved it ever since. I mean sure, I primarily tanked content up until patch 2.6, but when the Hybrid VG DPS spec was removed in that patch, I took it upon myself to figure out how to get the best damage out of Assault spec.
It wasn’t long till I had figured most of it out, and made a guide to help keep track of things, and before I knew it there was a 15 page thread with 2 spinoffs – one for tactics, and one with pictures – and everyone was looking up to me cause I was getting them results. And now, with the complete rework of everything with patch 3.0 including removing Assault because it was so OP (I kid of course) we ended up with what we have now.
If you want PvP advice, know that I have admitted on multiple occasions to sucking at PvP. For PvE though, I’m part of the main progression team of the guild Excession, a great group of people who brought me in as a DPS about a week before the huge buffs were announced for me, and since then have thoroughly enjoyed the game. If you see anyone on The Harbinger with a keyboard-themed name, its probably me (whether its named after a keyboard or just a bunch of letters on the keyboard in a row) and if im not doing anything, I’ll happily help you out.
Enjoy the guide!
SWTOR 3.0 Balance Sage Guide by Milas
SWTOR 3.0 Telekinetic Sage Class Guide by Soulkuun
SWTOR 3.0 Focus Guardian DPS Guide by Artorias
SWTOR 3.0 Commando DPS Guide by Fascinate and MarisiSWTOR 3.0 Scoundrel DPS Guide by Raulos