Anyone else get bored with Infil's rotation in pvp? CS, CS, Project, (wait for Shadow Strike,)...wait for Force Breach to hit 5..

If they made Shadow Strike proc more often, and do more damage it would greatly inprove the gameplay of Shadows.

I rerolled after getting all my champ gear.

Anyone else get bored with Infil's rotation in pvp? CS, CS, Project, (wait for Shadow Strike,)...wait for Force Breach to hit 5..

 

 

If they made Shadow Strike proc more often, and do more damage it would greatly inprove the gameplay of Shadows.

 

I rerolled after getting all my champ gear.

I think the rotation is one of the lesser of infil's problems atm.

Anyone else get bored with Infil's rotation in pvp? CS, CS, Project, (wait for Shadow Strike,)...wait for Force Breach to hit 5..

I'm not sure it's better in other specs.

Kinetic: Slow Time, Dual Strike, Dual Strike, Slow Time, Project, Kinetic Throw.

Anything predictable is boring at the end.

Rotations are always predictables, in every spec, except for a few procs with low probability to happen, which are unliked by people because people will complain that sometimes they never get the proc and died because they needed it to match the power of other, more predictable specs.

So, yes, imho, that's nothing related to infils.

Give force cloak on 20 s cooldown please ;O

(That's how I always pictured infiltration. You pop out of stealth, swoosh swoosh, pop in stealth again. If they catch you, you die in 1 second. Sadly only the latter part applies.)

I will have to disagree. I love infiltration spec and the rotation I use kicks ***! CS,CS, (force Potency, battle readiness, and expertise stim) project, force breach, spinning strike. Game over 90% of the time. if still alive, cloak, re open spinning kick, then back stab.

It is quishy but if you have a good healer and give him a heads up that you are so and protect him you are golden. Once they see you take someone out in 3 seconds they will work to keep you alive.

Last night I hit 320K and damage and had a 4200k crit. All champ gear no BM gear.

Infiltration has several problems and yes, when looking strictly at its job as DPS, the rotation is one of them, because it is only good for 2 big hits. Infiltration lacks a filler attack. Once you have executed your Project + Force Breach, you are struggling heavily, because your only noteworthy filler attack above 30% is Shadow Strike, which has a hard conditional and ridiculous cost.

So unless you can land that Shadow Strike after your Project + Force Breach combo and take that target into Spinning Strike range, you often feel like trying to kick somebody's *** with only one foot to stand upon. This feeling becomes all the more prevalent, when Force Breach is on cooldown and you basically have nothing else than Project on a 6 second CD, that can deal 3k damage (all other abilities are either not available on demand or just don't hit for more than 1.5k).

Purely DPS-wise, Infiltration needs Shadow Strike to cost no more than 25 Force (and I am willing to bet that if the developers put this ability through their metrics system, they would see that it's underperforming, because attacks are either limited by cooldowns, resource cost or hard coded conditionals, while Shadow Strike is limited by resource cost AND a conditional on top of not even being a force or tech attack).

I'd love to see Shadow Strike cost 25 force when under the effect of Shadow Technique with "Find Weakness" triggering no more often than once every 5 seconds (instead of 10 seconds as it is now). This AC is heavily dependent on a powerful attack as follow up to Project and Force Breach and that would turn Shadow Strike into that ability.

Last night I hit 320K and damage and had a 4200k crit. All champ gear no BM gear.

4,200,000 in one hit? HAX!

Seriously though, for a good rotation, go Balance. Your rotation on any given target is pretty simple, but there's no set order (like the CS -> CS -> Project). When you add in multiple targets, suddenly it gets really tricky. To truly master Balance, you have to be able to keep DoTs up on several targets at once.

I've found it to be harder (and therefore more exciting) than Infiltration. I can't really speak for Kinetic.

When I'm infiltration and I have party fighting same targets I only do CS->CS->project->CS->CS etc without using boosts or fb.. Saving exit strategy+exp pot+fp+relic for a big bang on healer. I don't do usual rotation that often unless I'm 1on1 or 1on2.

Sometimes I also do CS->CS on a passing player just to get procs for a real fight so they can't count on usual 2x CS -> defensive buffs..

Well, Infiltration priority/rotation is fairly nuanced in practice for any extended fighting, and potentially one of the less repetitive playing specs in the game.

If we had infinite Force, yeah…it would just be a very repetitive rotation. But, we don't. So, depending on force available, when cooldowns are coming up, when procs are and aren't available…things shuffle around quite a lot. It's not complicated, but it gets very shuffled up instead of doing the same buttons in the same sequence over and over. (Although some players do force it into being repetitive.)

To me, that's pretty much ideal. I don't want my basic dps execution to be overly convoluted because I'd rather be focusing my attention of operation boss mechanics or pvp situations instead of needing to tunnel vision my button pushing just to output ideal damage. And the shuffling and break-up in sequences keeps it from becoming especially boring.

One of the other things I like about it is all this shuffling doesn't hurt long-term damage appreciably. It was something I checked out quite a bit in simcraft… making seemingly big changes to ability priority (which gets done first) in most sensible cases had literally no significant effect on long-term damage. All the same abilities get executed, just in slightly different order.

This means two things. First, the spec is extremely flexible gameplay-wise…people shouldn't view executing Infiltration at a high level as regurgitating predetermined button sequences. Second, what separates playing Infiltration at a high level is specific situational adjustment to ability usage. Infiltration can afford to sandbag a bit to burst later, or dump a force bar because an uptime window is closing, or insert key utility abilities when they are best used rather than when they happen to fit into the rotation without losing dps. Many specs encounter steep overall damage penalties for making adjustments on the fly that deviate from the perfect rotation; Infiltration thrives on it.

Personally, I think Infiltration is a gem of MMO gameplay. It's not for everyone….some people want the torturous rotations. Some people want something ultra-spammy and repetitive. That's what other classes are for.

Infiltration has several problems and yes, when looking strictly at its job as DPS, the rotation is one of them, because it is only good for 2 big hits. Infiltration lacks a filler attack. Once you have executed your Project + Force Breach, you are struggling heavily, because your only noteworthy filler attack above 30% is Shadow Strike, which has a hard conditional and ridiculous cost.

 

So unless you can land that Shadow Strike after your Project + Force Breach combo and take that target into Spinning Strike range, you often feel like trying to kick somebody's *** with only one foot to stand upon. This feeling becomes all the more prevalent, when Force Breach is on cooldown and you basically have nothing else than Project on a 6 second CD, that can deal 3k damage (all other abilities are either not available on demand or just don't hit for more than 1.5k).

 

Purely DPS-wise, Infiltration needs Shadow Strike to cost no more than 25 Force (and I am willing to bet that if the developers put this ability through their metrics system, they would see that it's underperforming, because attacks are either limited by cooldowns, resource cost or hard coded conditionals, while Shadow Strike is limited by resource cost AND a conditional on top of not even being a force or tech attack).

 

I'd love to see Shadow Strike cost 25 force when under the effect of Shadow Technique with "Find Weakness" triggering no more often than once every 5 seconds (instead of 10 seconds as it is now). This AC is heavily dependent on a powerful attack as follow up to Project and Force Breach and that would turn Shadow Strike into that ability.

I like the idea and think shadow strike under performs for its cost and positional requirement. I think a better filler though would be CS. Its dmg is just a touch under what i expect fillers to do again relative to resource cost. I think a lot of the issue is that infl is force starved after 1.5 rounds of cs, cs, proj, fb. KCs rotation costs a bit more force but im almost never waiting on force to regen for my next cast. KC also has a passive 30% regen in its tree. I think if infl had a passive regen of 20-30% and cs force cost was lowered by 5 pts, it would eliminate the force starvation, allow cs to be used as a filler and bump infl's sustained dmg. This would only leave survivability as an issue, which in my opinion is more important than the force starvation. yea, infl is great for a 1v1 but as most ppl are quick to point out this is a team game. I dont think infl needs the survivability of a sentinel but something other than a bump to defense % is required. Infl's escape mechanics arent on short enough cds to leave and heal up after every fight which is a good thing but infl also doesnt have enough survivability to take on back to back 1v1s in a group and survive. splash dmg from a group fight coupled with a 1v1 is enough to make an infl have to cloak out of the group and go heal up....lowering sustain...lowering group viability. A cd to survive splash dmg from a group and give a healer time to toss a few heals on us so we can stay in the fight longer is needed. If deflection was a flat % reduction to damage taken rather than a % increase to defense, i think this would do the trick.

Well, Infiltration priority/rotation is fairly nuanced in practice for any extended fighting, and potentially one of the less repetitive playing specs in the game.

 

If we had infinite Force, yeah…it would just be a very repetitive rotation. But, we don't. So, depending on force available, when cooldowns are coming up, when procs are and aren't available…things shuffle around quite a lot. It's not complicated, but it gets very shuffled up instead of doing the same buttons in the same sequence over and over. (Although some players do force it into being repetitive.)

 

To me, that's pretty much ideal. I don't want my basic dps execution to be overly convoluted because I'd rather be focusing my attention of operation boss mechanics or pvp situations instead of needing to tunnel vision my button pushing just to output ideal damage. And the shuffling and break-up in sequences keeps it from becoming especially boring.

 

One of the other things I like about it is all this shuffling doesn't hurt long-term damage appreciably. It was something I checked out quite a bit in simcraft… making seemingly big changes to ability priority (which gets done first) in most sensible cases had literally no significant effect on long-term damage. All the same abilities get executed, just in slightly different order.

 

This means two things. First, the spec is extremely flexible gameplay-wise…people shouldn't view executing Infiltration at a high level as regurgitating predetermined button sequences. Second, what separates playing Infiltration at a high level is specific situational adjustment to ability usage. Infiltration can afford to sandbag a bit to burst later, or dump a force bar because an uptime window is closing, or insert key utility abilities when they are best used rather than when they happen to fit into the rotation without losing dps. Many specs encounter steep overall damage penalties for making adjustments on the fly that deviate from the perfect rotation; Infiltration thrives on it.

 

Personally, I think Infiltration is a gem of MMO gameplay. It's not for everyone….some people want the torturous rotations. Some people want something ultra-spammy and repetitive. That's what other classes are for.

Well then in keeping with the force management gameplay, dmg needs to be increased....probably on CS (as base dmg or armpen). Burst is probably fine but with a lack of splash dmg, sustained dmg needs an increase

KC resilience should be baseline.

Buff Fade 1/2 mins off force cloak cd, 15/30 seconds off black out cd.

Buff Shadowy veil to 30/60%.

I like the idea and think shadow strike under performs for its cost and positional requirement. I think a better filler though would be CS. Its dmg is just a touch under what i expect fillers to do again relative to resource cost. I think a lot of the issue is that infl is force starved after 1.5 rounds of cs, cs, proj, fb. KCs rotation costs a bit more force but im almost never waiting on force to regen for my next cast. KC also has a passive 30% regen in its tree. I think if infl had a passive regen of 20-30% and cs force cost was lowered by 5 pts, it would eliminate the force starvation, allow cs to be used as a filler and bump infl's sustained dmg. This would only leave survivability as an issue, which in my opinion is more important than the force starvation. yea, infl is great for a 1v1 but as most ppl are quick to point out this is a team game. I dont think infl needs the survivability of a sentinel but something other than a bump to defense % is required. Infl's escape mechanics arent on short enough cds to leave and heal up after every fight which is a good thing but infl also doesnt have enough survivability to take on back to back 1v1s in a group and survive. splash dmg from a group fight coupled with a 1v1 is enough to make an infl have to cloak out of the group and go heal up....lowering sustain...lowering group viability. A cd to survive splash dmg from a group and give a healer time to toss a few heals on us so we can stay in the fight longer is needed. If deflection was a flat % reduction to damage taken rather than a % increase to defense, i think this would do the trick.

I initially worked on a solution along those lines. A month or so ago I suggested that for 1.2 CS had to receive a crit damage multiplier talent, simply because Double Strike gets one in the Madness tree, which makes it superior to CS damage-wise (even with the 30% damage to your next Project).

After thinking about the issue some more I came to the conclusion, that buffing CS for the mere purpose of creating a filler attack and "fixing" sustained damage was way too restricting, because this not only would require 31+ points in Infiltration, but also completely neglect the fact that Shadow Strike is the defining Infiltration ability (not just because of its placement in the talent tree, but also because no other tree affects this ability at all).

problem is if our survivability is increased we will be OP. For me i id rather have some acrobatic/port move that has a built in damage strike and places you behind the target. say limit it to a 10 meter range. then to compliment they need to change exit strat to give say a 30-50% chance that the new shadow step ability will refresh the cd on force cloak. put the ability on a 15 sec cool down as well. this gives us a little more utility while makeing us harder to hit thus more survivability.

in group play, how does this make us harder to hit and increase survivability? i dont see it. maybe if cloak actually dropped targeting on the shadow reliably but increasing infl survivability wont make the spec OP. knights are critting for higher dmg per single target and have better survivability cds and they just got buffed for 1.2.

I initially worked on a solution along those lines. A month or so ago I suggested that for 1.2 CS had to receive a crit damage multiplier talent, simply because Double Strike gets one in the Madness tree, which makes it superior to CS damage-wise (even with the 30% damage to your next Project).

 

After thinking about the issue some more I came to the conclusion, that buffing CS for the mere purpose of creating a filler attack and "fixing" sustained damage was way too restricting, because this not only would require 31+ points in Infiltration, but also completely neglect the fact that Shadow Strike is the defining Infiltration ability (not just because of its placement in the talent tree, but also because no other tree affects this ability at all).

you've obviously put more thought into this than i have. i think we both agree though that something needs to be done about the force management/sustained dmg issues. I do like your ideas.

you've obviously put more thought into this than i have. i think we both agree though that something needs to be done about the force management/sustained dmg issues. I do like your ideas.

I don't really think sustained damage is an issue. I think each tree has a distinct role. Kinetic is for tanking, Infiltration is for burst, and Balance is for sustained. You get a ton of force recovery mechanics that are stacked to let you hit incredibly hard for the first ~12s of a fight, but after that I think it's only fair that you have more issues. That's the downside of the class, just like Kinetic's downside is low DPS and Balance's downside is a reliance on DoTs.

I don't really think sustained damage is an issue. I think each tree has a distinct role. Kinetic is for tanking, Infiltration is for burst, and Balance is for sustained. You get a ton of force recovery mechanics that are stacked to let you hit incredibly hard for the first ~12s of a fight, but after that I think it's only fair that you have more issues. That's the downside of the class, just like Kinetic's downside is low DPS and Balance's downside is a reliance on DoTs.

kinda depends on what u mean by dps. if you just mean damage, kinetic has low burst but not low total dmg. its hard to have a low total when one of ur main abilities is an AOE. if you actually meant damage over a period of time then its actually better than infl since the wz is the same length for everyone but total dmg is lower for infl. which goes back to infl's survivability. also trying to point out infl low sustain wouldnt be an issue if another melee class didnt have both burst and sustain as a comparison (knight)

kinda depends on what u mean by dps. if you just mean damage, kinetic has low burst but not low total dmg. its hard to have a low total when one of ur main abilities is an AOE. if you actually meant damage over a period of time then its actually better than infl since the wz is the same length for everyone but total dmg is lower for infl. which goes back to infl's survivability. also trying to point out infl low sustain wouldnt be an issue if another melee class didnt have both burst and sustain as a comparison (knight)

Yes, well, Sentinels are a DPS-only class. If we go burst, we can equal their burst. If we go sustained, we can equal their sustained. In exchange for our ability to go tank if we want, they have the ability to out-sustain us while built for burst and out-burst us while built for sustained. Seems like a fair system to me.

I don't really think sustained damage is an issue. I think each tree has a distinct role. Kinetic is for tanking, Infiltration is for burst, and Balance is for sustained. You get a ton of force recovery mechanics that are stacked to let you hit incredibly hard for the first ~12s of a fight, but after that I think it's only fair that you have more issues. That's the downside of the class, just like Kinetic's downside is low DPS and Balance's downside is a reliance on DoTs.

That'd be true, if Kinetic wasn't able to sustain higher damage than Infiltration (in fact I have a hard time seeing any other dps AC getting lower sustained dps than Shadow, but I guess we'll have to wait and see for this one).

That'd be true, if Kinetic wasn't able to sustain higher damage than Infiltration (in fact I have a hard time seeing any other dps AC getting lower sustained dps than Shadow, but I guess we'll have to wait and see for this one).

They might be able to sustain more damage in an ideal AoE situation, but that's it. Against single targets, Infiltration definitely has better sustained and burst damage. And either way, you're comparing a non-sustained spec to another non-sustained spec in terms of sustained damage. Balance beats them both by quite a bit.