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Saboteur/Engineering Guide 3.0+


Camelpockets

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So ideally, I have used Sabotage recently (for the free Thermal Grenade later), have Sabotage Charge ready to place on the boss as soon as the adds spawn, then I cast Freighter Flyby cast immediately, use Incendiary Grenade, and lastly use Sweeping Gunfire until adds are dead. If the adds are dying slowly, I put in 1 Rifle/Quick Shot in between each Sweeping Gunfire to keep my energy from being destroyed. As I retreat to hide behind a rock, I typically throw out my DoTs if I used Cool Head or use the opportunity to use my free skills (ideally, a free Thermal Grenade from the previously used Sabotage).

 

This is actually what I do try to do, but, there's always something that seems to go wrong. If everything does go smoothly, I'll do just a couple of things differently:

 

I typically toss my Sabotage Charge on one of the adds rather than on the boss to make sure that i'm pumping a little bit more DPS on the adds vs. the boss. Saboteur does enough on the boss anyways, so the extra 7-12k I've found is better tossed on an add. Then if someone doesn't kill one of the loner adds fast enough, that's what I save the thermal for (Unless I know ahead of time I'll go under), or just pop an instant CB to kill the add instead of applying dots since Adds > Boss DPS here.

 

The other thing: In the beginning of the fight, I'll use Sabotage in the first half of the rotation, and Sabo Charge in the second, just to be sure I have some burst ability in each GCD block I can use on an Add if need be. (Even if I need to toss a Shock Charge on an add just for that purpose.) Although, I don't remember the last time I actually needed to do this, so I could just be spewing nonsense.

 

In short, this is what I actually mean by "throwing stuff out there". Toss AoEs, Burn through energy, Recover, don't die. Rinse and repeat. I believe that I was hoping to find a MAX AoE DPS rotation that didn't require the use of FoB/Free Quickshot, but that's obviously not possible. So, I just need practice doing it again.

 

Have you tried doing Saboteur on Torque yet? That's pretty damn fun :rak_03:

Edited by Camelpockets
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Unfortunately, you just have to use free skills because the energy cost of AoEing is so prohibitive in Saboteur unless you are doing it for a short time and are using Cool Head and/or Illegal Mods to cover the cost. According to my math, without those two abilities, you'd have spend 37.5 seconds (roughly 25 GCDs) of every 90 seconds (roughly 60 GCDs) to maintain an almost energy neutral AoE rotation in perpetuity. This assumes you are using Freighter Flyby, Incendiary Grenade, and Sabotage Charge on cooldown and using as many Sweeping Gunfires as possible (which would be almost 6 full times in this 90 second cycle).

 

I know when my team is pulling those terribly long trash packs in Temple of Sacrifice and have to spend a minute or two just spamming AoE to mindlessly kill them, this is what I end up doing to usually average around 8k DPS. Having to spend over 1/3 of the time just using free skills is fairly boring.

 

As for Torque, I've done it as Saboteur a few times, but I've ended up needing to kill adds every time so it's just not very fun (though Saboteur on Commanders is more enjoyable to me for some reason). If you just focus the boss with your spec, I think it'd be fairly interesting.

Edited by Vaidinah
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  • 3 months later...
With 4.0 being less than a week away, I'll do my best to update my guide accordingly, that is, if people have found it helpful at all. The only change I see in the rotation is prioritizing Fly-By/OS much more since our AoE-Critical Chance is increasing by 15%. I'd also highly suggest running with the opener that uses IG/PP before the first Speed Shot/Series of Shots. If someone feels the urge to redo my possibly outdated guide, I'm all for it, however, with this being the only change to the spec, a whole new guide shouldn't be necessary. I'm quite busy during the week, so I may not be able to test the changes and update the guide as fast as I was able to in the past. Just throwing all of this out there for you folks to think about.
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  • 2 weeks later...
With 4.0 being less than a week away, I'll do my best to update my guide accordingly, that is, if people have found it helpful at all. .

Trust me your guide has helped :) helped so much I switched my slinger/sniper into my main raiding toon. Out of all specs I enjoy saboteur most. My slinger used to be less than average dps on pug groups but ended up doing almost 5k towards the end of 3.0. Looking forward to new guide!

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Trust me your guide has helped :) helped so much I switched my slinger/sniper into my main raiding toon. Out of all specs I enjoy saboteur most. My slinger used to be less than average dps on pug groups but ended up doing almost 5k towards the end of 3.0. Looking forward to new guide!

 

The guide will basically be the same. I'll just need to edit a couple of things.

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The guide will basically be the same. I'll just need to edit a couple of things.

 

I'm finally going to seriously play endgame stuff and I'm gonna be using my Engineering sniper, so I can't wait for the updates (I'm assuming their stats related as well as a couple other stuff). Thank you!

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So I took a look at engineering spec yesterday and it seems ike i need a lot of abilities on my main bar as compared to the other specs. Am i wrong in thinking this? I didn't know what i needed to get off my bar for either pve or pvp to palce some of the spec specific abilities
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So I took a look at engineering spec yesterday and it seems ike i need a lot of abilities on my main bar as compared to the other specs. Am i wrong in thinking this? I didn't know what i needed to get off my bar for either pve or pvp to palce some of the spec specific abilities

 

Out of the three specs, yes, Engineering has the most abilities to use. If you take a look through the guide, I believe I've mentioned every useful PvE ability that should be used either for direct damage or as a utility (say Pulse Detonator/Cover Pulse for Nightmare Styrak). If you want to talk PvP, I'd recommend looking at Zoidrinali's videos (The Angry Sniper on Youtube).

 

As for updates on the spec itself, I still actually need to get gear on my Sniper/Gunslinger (most likely sniper) in order to do testing, so I won't have results for a little bit. I'm going to work on grinding out the SM stuff over the next couple weeks so I can relay this information to all the fellow cool kids. (Not having accuracy sucks, especially since you can miss explosive probes :mad:)

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  • 2 weeks later...
So I do not think I'll actually be able to get around to updating this guide like I thought I would. I've got too much stuff going on in real life that's preventing me from logging on enough to even gear any character into the SM stuff. I might be something I get into eventually, perhaps over winter break, but for now, don't expect any updates from me. Sorry to those who were anticipating an update to the guide sooner.
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So I do not think I'll actually be able to get around to updating this guide like I thought I would. I've got too much stuff going on in real life that's preventing me from logging on enough to even gear any character into the SM stuff. I might be something I get into eventually, perhaps over winter break, but for now, don't expect any updates from me. Sorry to those who were anticipating an update to the guide sooner.

 

 

that sucks was hoping to see what stats i should be running

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So I do not think I'll actually be able to get around to updating this guide like I thought I would. I've got too much stuff going on in real life that's preventing me from logging on enough to even gear any character into the SM stuff. I might be something I get into eventually, perhaps over winter break, but for now, don't expect any updates from me. Sorry to those who were anticipating an update to the guide sooner.

 

That long con finally paying off for you? If so, you're welcome for that.

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So, I heard that while this is the highest parsing spec on the dummy out of all classes right now, this is the worst gunslinger spec in actual fights. Is this true?

 

Short answer: No

 

Sligthly longer answer: each spec has it's optimal bosses, engineering is viable/best for a lot of fights tho for others marksman or virulence will be best.

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I run Sabo on every boss in every operation with the sole exception of Torque, for which fight I run SS. Dps output is consistently superb for all other bosses.

 

Take the rotation presented in the guide at the start of this thread, master it and then modify it as necessary to suit your situational needs in any given fight.

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Is there a list somewhere of which specs/classes are best for which bosses?

 

If you play the game enough, you'll figure out eventually which specs you prefer to run on each boss. Typically a good rule of thumb is if the boss is mostly stationary (or if tanks can work well with an Engi/Sabo Sniper/Slinger), and if adds are frequent, then it's probably a good fight for this spec. There are I think 46 Operation Bosses (not including World Bosses or the other single instanced ones), so creating a list that long would take a little bit of time. I probably wouldn't be able to do it because I don't really know how well each spec is performing against the others (I know Engi is #1, but idk where Marksman and Virulence stand against each other), but someone who plays sniper a little bit more frequently might be interested in making one.

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If you play the game enough, you'll figure out eventually which specs you prefer to run on each boss. Typically a good rule of thumb is if the boss is mostly stationary (or if tanks can work well with an Engi/Sabo Sniper/Slinger), and if adds are frequent, then it's probably a good fight for this spec. There are I think 46 Operation Bosses (not including World Bosses or the other single instanced ones), so creating a list that long would take a little bit of time. I probably wouldn't be able to do it because I don't really know how well each spec is performing against the others (I know Engi is #1, but idk where Marksman and Virulence stand against each other), but someone who plays sniper a little bit more frequently might be interested in making one.

 

One could look at the parsley operations leaderboards for a quick overview of which spec has the biggest numbers between each fight. Only caveat being that if your tanks want to move too much you may be personally do better with MM or Viru than Engi even if it pulls the highest numbers.

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  • 3 years later...
Can the rotation guide be updated for 4/5.0, please? Overload Shot isn't available anymore, and Bioware might have changed other things regarding the class since 3.0. Thanks!

 

The OP's last activity was a year-and-a-half ago, so it's not likely that they'll be updating this guide. There are 5.0 guides for Engineering Sniper on Dulfy for both PVE and PVP.

 

5.0 Engineering Sniper PvE Guide by Veldix

5.0 Engineering Sniper PvP Guide by Kitchen Sink

 

You can find other 5.0 guides on Dulfy, too.

 

http://dulfy.net/2016/12/22/swtor-5-0-class-guides-master-list/

 

If you need to convert a guide from Imp to Pub, or Pub to Imp, you can use this site that has tables with the mirror abilities.

 

https://mmobits.com/2018/08/24/swtor-class-mirror-ability-tables/

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