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Sell Me on Combat/Carnage


TitusOfTides

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Bloody Hell, 96 views and nobody has responded to your question yet.

 

From what I've read here, there, and everywhere-- Carnage is in a really bad place right now.

In Bioware's eyes, it's not broken as-such because when fully kitted out and played by the best of the best, it's passable.

 

Like playing basketball with your arms tied to your back, there are other ways to get better results with less hassle.

Namely Fury & Annihilation

 

If you're absolutely determined to play Carnage, you can make it work, but you'll have to forget about being competitive with other DPS classes.

 

You'll be fantastically squishy, rage-starved after your "meh" burst, and you'll have to really embrace the idea of "Death by a thousand cuts" because sure you'll hit the enemy 9000 times, but you'll knock off a depressingly small amount of health for all of those strikes.

 

Here are where certain specs shine

Operations - Annihilation

PvE - Fury, Annihilation

PvP - Fury

Breathtaking, glorious stubbornness - Carnage

 

Personally, I'm crossing my fingers, toes, eyes, and gnads in the hopes that they fix the spec, because as a Marauder, I'd like to be leaping about like a lethal acrobat slicing people with my lightsabers instead of waving my arms and yelling to do damage.

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Here is the thing.

 

If you go to parsely, you can see combat is the weakest spec in the game atm. I liked it. I tried to make it work.

In flashpoints its alright cause its bursty, but

end of the day you are looking at 30k ish hits on your hardest hits. Maybe 40k if you are fully kitted. This is just not very much. Especially in pvp and given the setup needed to make this work. Full zen>armor pen fuff>damage buff>(proced) energy nuke , physical nuke and physical execute. The execution requirement is high and the damage is the lowest, so it doesnt feel very rewarding.

 

Now, is it useless? No. It's behind and as long as youre not doing nightmare mode ops it is not in a state where it's unviable. It's just weak.

 

I think they need to lower the execution requirement and increase the damage a bit. I think part of the reason the damage is low is cause tacticals for it are bad. Fanged god being basically the best one. It helps, but it's not as good as other specs.

 

If you're curious, i tried concentration too. It's fine, but it didnt click with me. I went watchman. The damage is not as consistant, but its more interesting to play for me. The self and group heals are actually pretty good. I think it's the best sentinel spec to solo stuff.

Edited by Nemmar
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Why would one choose this discipline over Concentration/Fury?

 

The only real reason to choose Combat/Carnage right now is if the cadence of the playstyle appeals to you (Lots of swings/hits, with a little burst here and there) AND you don't mind being bottom of the barrel DPS over time with no self heals.

 

I have always been Carnage and won't ever change, but I'm also very casual these days. Things die and I don't so it's ok enough but things sometimes take a while to kill.

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for a casual player, you are unlikely to ever do content that demands the performance which the top parsing specs (fury/anni) would provide you with, so if you like the playstyle of carnage you can play it as much as you want

 

if what you really care about is your numbers and comparing yourself to other players, selling you on carnage would be difficult

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Carnage is just plain bad right now and it kinda always has been, it's pretty much been universly labeled the PvP spec and even then i would take fury over it any day of the week.

 

To me Carnage has always been the death by 1000cuts build which looks good don't get me wrong i love the look of the animation but proformance i've always found it extremly laking.

 

Fury is in a really good spot right now so no their is no reason to no play it over carnage even anni i've found is a bit behind on fury which makes me sad since i've always loved anni but fury is just better at the moment, it has the massive burst, the giant crits and it even has good sustane so really it's a no brainer.

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I have been using Concentration/Fury since I made the OP, and was formerly a diehard fan of Combat for several years. I avoided Concentration/Fury because I'm always a bit wary about following the pack, but it's the real deal.

 

It's built so well for PvP. It hits harder, more often, and has the highest mobility of all 3 disciplines. Then there's control immunity. It really seems like a no-brainer.

 

 

 

However, I wonder if Combat/Carnage really wants you to go high Alacrity (like much higher than recommended). I am curious what numbers we'd see over time with something like 20% base Alacrity and Fanged God Form spam. Having a .75s GCD while using Zen/Berserk (6 stacks @ 50% Alacrity) is deceptively strong, and now with essentially infinitely spammable crits that always trigger an Ataru strike (2 per 'traditional' GCD). For a spec described in-game as "sheer volume", this seems really on-point.

 

The other way I wonder if they want us to go is something I posted on r/swtor a while back. 7 piece Amplified Champion set and Andeddu's Malevolence will almost give you 100% Armor Pen 100% of the time. My original calculations were off, as it seems that the additional amplifier actually has potential for a % as high as the base amplifier, despite the list of potential amplifiers saying otherwise.

 

With that being said, I still cannot say for certain it is ENTIRELY obsolete. I believe it is highly probable that one of these alt gearing methods is the way to make Combat/Carnage something with an, albeit niche, upside.

Edited by TitusOfTides
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Carnage is just plain bad right now and it kinda always has been, it's pretty much been universly labeled the PvP spec and even then i would take fury over it any day of the week.

 

To me Carnage has always been the death by 1000cuts build which looks good don't get me wrong i love the look of the animation but proformance i've always found it extremly laking.

 

Fury is in a really good spot right now so no their is no reason to no play it over carnage even anni i've found is a bit behind on fury which makes me sad since i've always loved anni but fury is just better at the moment, it has the massive burst, the giant crits and it even has good sustane so really it's a no brainer.

 

I am just getting back in the game lately. To be fair, historically, Carnage was consistently one of the strongest burst dps of all dps specialization, with strong sustain. It usually was in the top 5 dps parses in PvE and top 1-2 burst builds in PvP. Carnage was my main in 5.0 and left before Bioware changed the execute window from being 3 secs to being per GCD. This change ruined the specialization in so many ways. It lost on dps that was never replaced. It lost the momentum of requiring fast execution. It lost all aspects that define it.

 

I never really managed to understand the logic behind fury doing more dps than carnage. Sure it has a dot, but fury by all means is a burst spec with easier uptime. However, Bioware devs are not known for their logic. And, as usual, every expansion has a major balance **** up, cuz Bioware does not do any testing (and ignores PTS feedback). Carnage seems to be the one getting hit in 6.0.

 

It seems fury is the way to go now if burst is what you are looking for.

Edited by Ottoattack
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The main reason why i said carnage has always been pretty bad is just like you said the burst window.

 

In PvE everyone i have ever talked to said it was bad and i even tried it myself back when i first started playing mine all the way back in EV and yeah it was bad, on paper it always did decent but in practice it was bad because of that window. The moment you had to move during that window and boom your dps just tanks you could keep the sustain somewhat going with the extra hits and all that but your big burst was gone.

 

The reason why fury is the burst spec is that it is super easy to setup and you don't have to worry about those stupid windows of needing to do it in like 3 secs, with fury you know when you are going to do the burst how much you can put out and how quickly you can do and if you need to move you still have time before the crit debuff wears off and even if it does you can get it back really fast.

 

The reason Carnage is the PvP spec is that it really only works in PvP at end game in PvE most fights have you moving which can throw out the window and even with the window your big burst is that you simply by pass armor, how much armor do bosses have? no one knows it could be alot it could be next to nothing so on one end you do massive amount of extra damage if they have next to no armor then you do barely any extra damage.

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The main reason why i said carnage has always been pretty bad is just like you said the burst window.

 

In PvE everyone i have ever talked to said it was bad and i even tried it myself back when i first started playing mine all the way back in EV and yeah it was bad, on paper it always did decent but in practice it was bad because of that window. The moment you had to move during that window and boom your dps just tanks you could keep the sustain somewhat going with the extra hits and all that but your big burst was gone.

 

The reason why fury is the burst spec is that it is super easy to setup and you don't have to worry about those stupid windows of needing to do it in like 3 secs, with fury you know when you are going to do the burst how much you can put out and how quickly you can do and if you need to move you still have time before the crit debuff wears off and even if it does you can get it back really fast.

 

The reason Carnage is the PvP spec is that it really only works in PvP at end game in PvE most fights have you moving which can throw out the window and even with the window your big burst is that you simply by pass armor, how much armor do bosses have? no one knows it could be alot it could be next to nothing so on one end you do massive amount of extra damage if they have next to no armor then you do barely any extra damage.

 

All of this is absolutely wrong

 

Up until 6.0 Combat was a good spec for endgame rading, though it began to decline during 5.0 due to several nerfs. Back is 4.0 it was an excellent spec and during 3.0 era it was the second highest parsing spec in game.

 

Regarding the Armor Penetration window, good players never had an issue with keeping uptime and not losing the armor window.

 

Lastly we do know exactly the amout of armor endgame bosses have which is about 35% unless a particular boss has a special mechanic.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Well if you ask me, the "death" of Carnage was when Ravage/MS became 1.5 GCD casts that weren't clippable. Getting 4 abilities into one Gore window was amazing. Now, you only have three stacks, a weak Ravage and up until now a Tactical that hinders your most aggressive Play style the second you used a DCD.

 

Still, I always loved the Carnage spec the most and allways will. I'm not super happy but I still perform pretty good in vet and nim ops.

 

But as someone already mentioned here - you can still perform with it, if you really know what you're doing. In other cases, probably go Fury or Anni :- /

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Carnage is fun to play when performance isn't an issue, I used it to do solo/story content for the cool aesthetics and it still packs a punch in lowbie PvP. Then come late-end game it's Annihilation for PvE and Fury for PvP. Honestly, it's why I like Mara, there's a spec for every mood.
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