Hello, some early impressions for Virulence Sniper:

1. Precise Target 6 piece vs current set bonus: So when I used the new Laze Target ability even though my cooldown stated it was at 39.5 seconds it actually took 1 minute to add a charge to this ability. Bug or intended? As it stands, the new version you can initially have 3 Laze Targets but then basically get one per minute and you have to now sorta include it as part of your rotation because it is no longer a passive but an active ability to use. The original set is basically 2 Laze Targets per minute (about 52 seconds currently on my sniper) and once you activate the ability it becomes a passive bonus that you can forget about until it comes off cooldown. If the timer is corrected to gain a charge every 40 seconds instead of once a minute I think this would take some getting used to but could be very nice.
   
2. I could not tell in any way if Greased Lightning was doing anything - I did not see a buff, an increase in basic damage or bonus damage, etc. Bugged?
   
3. It seems like the (6) bonus of Established Foothold should be swapped with the (4) bonus of Stationary Grit, or Established should only be a (4). With Grit I got a 5% bonus when crouched/stationary and with Established it is the same except there is a cooldown with using the Entrench ability, even if you reduce it with Pillbox Sniper you are going to get more bonus uptime with Grit vs Established. And with Grit I can then add another 2 set bonus piece to gain another minor boost to alacrity or crit , etc so even though Established does add 2% power I would not be losing out by not using the 6 piece set.
   
4. Having said that, I really like that the 2 piece bonus for Established is for +2% acc - this could be a nice boost more easily attained (?) while gearing your character but trying to maintain that 110% acc that dps need. And yes, I checked and the four piece +2% acc did not stack with the two piece +2% acc for a nice +4% acc bonus - I am sure at this point this must be intentional (even though no tooltip states this limitation). But this two piece is ideal for mixing with other sets. I did not have the comp bonus so I could not check to see if the 1% comp bonus stacked with this set (not sure how to get my real server legacy into the PTS).
   
5. Berserker set improved power by 25% and this time my damage reduction went from 22.1% down to 12.49% - compared with the 0.7% damage reduction in the sorc. This seemed like a more fair tradeoff (more dps but more glass cannon) than for a sorc.
   
6. Orbital Strike heal was interesting. I'm just not sure how useful as how many times will enough people be standing within the strike zone to take advantage of the not so great heal? (about 10K non crit?) Seems way too low considering my PTS sniper has 273K hp. I think this will need to be buffed and probably add a dot the way revivication works for it to really be useful.
   
7. Poison Splash and Culling Shots are straightforward - one for fighting mobs when out and about in the world and one more single target for op bosses and such. This will depend on what it will take to swap Tacticals - will they be like augments that you remove for a credit cost and then can re-use? Or more like dyes that once slotted will have to be overwritten? But no issues with the tacticals themselves.
   
8. I also think Life Warden could be a nice tactical for a sniper since they have no real self heals. Would be a good trade off for the minor damage boost of Culling Shots.
   
9. Luck Always Changes resets on any critical - which for a dot spec is basically almost constantly as any little dot that crits causes this to reset. Not sure of any good way to change this, so I'm guessing most dot specs will skip this tactical.
   
10. So, overall, I think there actually is tactical use out of the sets - i.e. I can see a character swapping tacticals depending on what they are doing (dailies, pvp, ops). Needs some fine tuning but nice!
    

As always, just my two censt. Thanks for listening!

Reposition - Evasion finishes the cooldown of Covered Escape and increases you and your allies movement speed by 50% for 6 seconds.

This is too much. I don’t see a PvE scenario where you absolutely need this, and in PvP it‘s just completely broken. Most PvPers will probably complain about Hololocate, but this reset on roll is gonna be a much bigger problem. Especially since you can reset both roll and evasion to roll again with imperial preparation.

Next thing is: right now you can use hololocate inside diversion. Diversion was meant to be the counter to sniper‘s invulnerability during entrench. While that is still countered, hololocate gives you the ability to simply escape that counter.

And: Right now the Adrenaline Probe Stun actually lasts 4 seconds, not 2 seconds as stated in tooltip.

I quote my own post from the Sniper Ability, Tactical Item, and Set Bonus Feedback thread.

So, let's sum up, what we got here.

 

4 times roll with the "Repositioning"-set and "Imperial Preperation". In between 2 times "Evasion". If you should really get into trouble somehow (Maybe because other snipers are hunting you), you just phasewalk away. And while you're on the run, you can activate +20% dmg buffed ambushes instant after roll and Hololocate with the respective tactical item.

 

And to this point, I have not taken into consideration all the standard kiting tactics a good sniper uses before or after he pops his real cooldowns. You know: knockback, roots, snares (if skilled into), positioning in general, the small shield probe in between and of course the of all beloved diversion.

 

With utmost politeness I have to repeat the question of a previous poster: Are you allowed to drink at work?

 

Well...I have to admit: Considering double vanish of marauders and aoe-obfuscate of assassins, these sniper changes may look somewhere near reasonable to some people, but I expect snipers to overperform really hard in terms of defensive abilities.

 

Conclusion: Get sober guys, sleep a night or two and reflect on the changes. This should not go live...

The new Tactical item : Explosive Trigger doesn't work as intended, we do not have the +50% damage on explosive probe.

Culling Shot are insignificant and Poison Choke is useless because if you have no dot you can't cull so you need to apply your dot again after

Precise Target bonus

Hey there,

.Precise target 6 Piece set bonus feels a bit useless to me compared to the live set bonus. I love the change of the 3 charges if it was like live but the way it is now on pts, I feel like the setbonus is only a CD reduction for Laze target which is kind of too weak for a 6 piece set bonus - I'd rather have 3 charges at once like it is on live and duration increase instead of the CD reduction or a 4 piece that is only a 20 sec CD reduction so that you could have more variability of the sets and can add a nice 2 piece set bonus to it

the first suggestion would obviously be pretty imbalanced for the sniper due to the fact that not every class has an autocrit anymore in 6.0 (which I think gives the specs that have one in their rotation a slight advantage in general dps).

My Virulence thoughts:

The tactical that increases weakening blast damage is just the same virulence we've always been using with slightly increased damage but the damage increase didn't seem as big as what other classes were getting.

The tactical that explodes all of the dots but puts weakening blast on a higher cooldown is a great idea but the cooldowns line up horribly. The rotations I was trying were 1: do normal opening with dots>WB>Cull (can use cull still because of weakened dots), and then reapply dots again so that you can use cull again when it's back up and go through the normal virulence rotation. However, with that rotation, when WB comes back up, it's right before the dots will fall off naturally and using WB to explode 1-2 ticks of the dots left feels really unsatisfying. So it's either hit weakening blast for a very weakened explosion or delay WB for another entire Cull block, which also feels horrible. 2: do dots>cull>WB>takedown>dots>cull but it had the same issues. I think the idea of this is great but needs some cooldown timing changes. My ideas for a change are to increase the cooldown of WB by another 6 seconds but increase the duration of weakening blast on the target or you could go the other way and keep the cooldown the same as live (no 6s cooldown increase), but it doesn't add a debuff to the target that deals extra damage per dot tick. I'm not sure how the 2nd change would play but it would play more into the burst aspect of the tactical and making it less of a sustained option. I will try a rotation similar to the 2 Cull rotation where I refresh dots early and see how that feels tonight.

The aoe lethal shot tactical is busted AF. Can lethal shot pretty much infinitely with just 3 targets and with lethal shot doing full damage on the splash damage, the aoe rotation becomes dots>lethal shot until dots fall off and then repeat. Super easy and does insane aoe dps. I really want to try it out on 8 targets because even just on the 3 target dummies, its dps was so high.

From a PVE perspective:

A few general thoughts to start, Sniper took a hard hit, losing the 15 energy back on target acquired. While this hurts all three specs significantly, it severely hurts engineering. I think it may be worthwhile looking into giving sniper's some sort of extra energy regen to make up for this, however, others may feel free to argue against this if they feel it is not necessary. Additionally, the set bonuses are frankly disappointing; none seem to compare to the Berserker set as far as raw output is considered.

Virulence

This spec seems to be mediocre compared to other classes/specs. It doesn't wow me, but it isn't garbage. The biggest problem I currently have with virulence is that both single target tacticals don't really significantly benefit the spec. Ryann summed up my thoughts about Poison Choke perfectly in his post. It makes the rotation very awkward and does not lead to much gain in DPS. This leaves Culling Shots as the only viable option for single target DPS, which while it leads to small gain, isn't really special and do anything big for the spec. However, virulence's aoe is currently crazy strong due to Poison Splash

Marksman

Marksman definitely seems to be the worst sniper spec for PVE. Its single target damage is very weak, and I don't think it does enough comparative burst compared to the other specs to make it useful in most situations. However, MM's damage could improve if the Corrosive Tactical was fixed. Currently, something is bugged with the refresh, leading to fewer ticks of corrosive dart in parses with the tactical on compared to if the tactical was off. This clearly doesn't make sense considering that, with the tactical, corrosive dart has 100% uptime. Therefore, if the tactical was fixed, we could have a clearer idea of where MM stands in regards to single target damage.

Engineering

Based on my testing, this seems to be currently the strongest spec. I specifically like the Ruthless Interrogation tactic as it allows for an extra filler to be used in the rotation. However, Engi currently suffers from the loss of energy regen per the loss of target acquired energy. Because of this loss, the spec is forced to utilize more rifle shots than before, which in my opinion hinders the spec significantly.

Another PVE perspective:

Haven't really done a deep dive into the numbers so i'll give my impressions on what I have tested so far in regards to the feel of how they play.

Set Bonuses

Established Foothold- Interesting set bonus, not sure how viable it will be in a raid setting if you are needing to save entrench for certain fight mechanics.

Precise Targeter- I was very interested in this set bonus but as has already been mentioned by Dracmor something seems off with the way the cooldown for this is working. I'd much prefer you get all 3 stacks on activation then you build back up 1 stack every x amount of seconds similar to how the new Warrior ability works.

Beserker- As i mentioned i haven't done a deep dive into the numbers but as things stand right now i'm not sure how this set bonus isn't the only viable option for a dps.

Tacticals:

Virulence:

Poison Choke-I share the same feelings voiced by Ryann and Laet regarding this tactical. I was very interested in this when i first read it but in practice it turns Virulence's rotation into a mess.

Culling Shots-Considering the issues with Poison Choke this seems to be the only viable single target choice for viru. It's fine, if not a bit underwhelming. My issue is with the loss of the energy regen from Target Acquired you can't squeeze in as many lethal shots in your weakening blast windows without risking your energy going all to hell, that's a bit of a downer.

Marksmen:

Corrosive Followthrough-Need to do more testing with this but this is more underwhelming than i hoped. My first impression is damage wise, as Laet mentioned, there seems to be an issue (bug?) with corrosive dart and while i thought it was going to make the rotation smoother it actually seems to be worse than having to reapply corrosive dart. The rotation does not flow very well making you have to add in an extra snipe in places which will get you in energy trouble eventually (loss of Target Acquired set bonus issue coming into play again) or you throw in some rifle shots, which is always depressing to have to do.

Engi:

Ruthless Interrogation-I play engi the least of the 3 specs but i found this to be the most enjoyable of all the tactical items i tried and really enjoyed how the rotation felt.

Hey folks,

 

If you are looking to get started on PTS, please check the Welcome to Phase 1.5 post, here. Please use this thread to share your thoughts on the Sniper tactical items and set bonuses after getting your hands on them on PTS.

 

Be sure to be as specific as possible in your feedback!

 

-eric

Your link is broken. "here" doesn't take you anywhere.

Set bonuses:

I'm generally really disappointed, most of the bonuses are just plain boring. Some of the bonuses seem great for PvP, but PvE bonuses seem meh at best. For PvE I don't really see an alternative to the Berserker set, especially as you can combine Berserker set with another 2-set bonus.

Escape Artist: This one seems fine, though quite dependant on Reestablishing Range utility to be of much use.

Established Foothold: This is what, a 2% increase in damage overall in best case? The bonus seems weak and extremely boring.

I'd rather see a more extreme version, e.g. "Reduces your damage by 5%. Sitting in Cover builds stacks of Offence, stacking up to 12 times" so you actually have to consider the pros/cons of moving and losing your damage boost.

Outlaws Parlay: It's fairly situational but seems alright. I'm not sure how energy management holds up here, since Takedown is fairly costly.

Perhaps add a -energy cost to Takedown as well?

Precise Targeter: It's possibly better than our current set for the first minute, then starts dropping off.

Perhaps make it restore like 5-10 energy when you use Laze Target to restore the energy regen we have on the lvl 70 set bonus?

Quick Thinker: Easily the worst set bonus. I'm not going to waste Adrenaline Probe just to stun someone for 2 seconds, and the chance I need energy and need an attacker stunned at the same time is just very small.

Repositioning: This set bonus feels very strong, especially for PvP. On one hand I like it, on the other it seems a carbon copy of Marauders Predation - not a problem in itself, but we're already stealing Phase Walk from Sorcerers too.

The Slow Road: I don't see myself using it outside of PvP, and I very much prefer Repositioning over this one