Okay, I really can't stand reading this in the forums anymore. Its driving me nuts, Why does everyone open AB>HS>BS why the hell would you waste your ONLY other skill that applies acid blade with the 12 second cooldown RIGHT after you already applied acid blade?

Personally i find that it works MUCH better like this:

AB>HS>shiv>lacerate>lacerate>AB>BS>shiv>lacerate

by this time you've hopefully gotten a TA regrant from collateral strike, and you can refresh your stim boost, and after this i mostly improvise, trying to make sure corrosive dart is on them, and applying acid blade whenever possible. my overall point is this: you can begin a fight with 12 seconds of acid blade uptime, followed by 50% uptime of the DoT after that. Why does everyone seem to love wasting their backstab so early? another reason to save it is if you get pulled, knocked back, or your initial target dies before you've gotten into your rotation. in a situation like this, you can just acid blade and backstab another target, I guess i just feel like tons of people are wasting the dps gain they can get from acid blade. And with our constant nerfs we NEED every bit of dps we can get.

tl;dr: DON'T HS>BACKSTAB

2 weeks ago this was 100% correct, but with the energy changes using BS without AB is very tempting ... particularly in PVP where you just want to put a lot of pressure on in the opening 5 seconds.

BS without AB is by far our most efficient attack (approx 519 DPE), so this strategy is also somewhat valid for PVE, however I doubt many people have actually done the maths on the AB DoT alone. So here it is to clear up any confusion*:

AB DoT: Damage = 2838, DPE 189.2*

This puts the AB DoT slightly above Lacerate on DPE, which means that:

AB+HS>Shiv>Lac**>OrbS(+AP)>AB+BS is probably our strongest possible PVE opener.

* Using numbers from this thread

** Note: With this opener you do not hit Stim unless Lacerate procs - otherwise you will cap on energy during the OrbS strike and you'll lose your 2% TA damage bonus. If Lacerate does not proc you will need to Shiv+Stim immediately after BS and continue your rotation as normal.

Our opener (and rotation in general) is annoyingly difficult to finalise. E.g. Shiv is our lowest DPE ability, but delaying Lacerate (our highest after BS) I believe would be worse than substituting in a CD in place of Shiv>Lac, even though the latter delays the AB DoT by 1.5s. More maths required!

This puts the AB DoT slightly above Lacerate on DPE, which means that:

AB+HS>Shiv>Lac**>OrbS(+AP)>AB+BS is probably our strongest possible PVE opener.

What is "+AP"?

Seems to me you want:

AB+HS, Shiv, CD, Lacerate, AB+BS, Shiv. You get the full 6 second DOT from Acid Blade, the full effect of +2 TA and good uptime on Corrosive Dart from the outset.

Seems to me you want:

 

AB+HS, Shiv, CD, Lacerate, AB+BS, Shiv. You get the full 6 second DOT from Acid Blade, the full effect of +2 TA and good uptime on Corrosive Dart from the outset.

WhT do you mean corrosive dart from the onset? Doesnt that break stealth?

It depends what you're fighting...

For PvP, if you need to help take out a healer/squishy fast, using HS->BS will give you more burst. If you're going to 1v1 a tank to try take a turret, then ofcourse you wouldn't do it the same way. Depends on the situation.

What is "+AP"?

Adrenaline Probe. It gives ~17eps for 3 seconds, so you want to use it as Orbital strike hits so that your AB+BS won't take you below 60e (actually I think it will still take you to 59, but you get it back immediately with AP up.

Seems to me you want:

 

AB+HS, Shiv, CD, Lacerate, AB+BS, Shiv. You get the full 6 second DOT from Acid Blade, the full effect of +2 TA and good uptime on Corrosive Dart from the outset.

OrbS is a 2GCD cast, so you still get the full 6 second AB DoT using my rotation - in fact you are pushing the AB re-application out by 1 GCD, but the Shiv is required to prevent dropping your TA, and the Lacerate is required to prevent energy capping during OrbS cast.

An alternative would be AB+HS>CD>OrbS>AB+BS>Shiv>... In this rotation you would not cast Stim Boost until the Shiv, which means you won't be casting your first Lacerate until 6 seconds later (unless you risk losing your TA stack if CS doesn't proc). I suspect that the other rotation I posted will be ahead for this reason, but I haven't taken either of these rotations out past the first few seconds.

The damage bonus from TA doesn't stack (it's 2% regardless of whether you have 1 or 2 TA's available), so that is a non-issue (I might be misinterpretting your post about that). CD uptime is very important, but more because we can't afford to hit Lacerate while our target isn't DoT'd (CD's DPE is below Lacerate and OrbS, so getting those in should be higher priority). That is not an issue at the start of the fight when we can theoretically chain 4 consecutive AB DoT's (HS > BS > Vanish+HS > BS)*

OrbS is our highest DPE ability other than BS (without AB), so we want to use it as often as possible. Granted, with such a long cooldown there's not too much risk in delaying it a bit, but it also takes fairly careful planning to get off an OrbS without either energy capping during the cast or dropping into medium regen when we take the energy hit (the window is something like from 72 - 81 energy). I find it easier to hit this energy window towards the beginning of the fight before everything gets too hectic

* I've done some napkin maths and this looks possible, but energy constraints means we're pushing around Shiv quite a bit during this opening phase ... I suppose it doesn't really matter what the napkin says though since it's impossible to take Collateral Strike RNG into account (I do at least make sure that there's a DoT on target the entire rotation.