In thinking about it, I don't actually believe forcing trinity comps will make a merc more viable in solos. Now it will certainly have a longer life expectancy with a trinity comp, but I don't think it will be more viable, in fact it may lose even more with the current meta. Heck forcing trinity comps will likely make Madness and Hatred even stronger in solos.

 

The reason being is Mercs don't have a pressure spec. IO and Arsenal are both burst specs. (Don't give me crap about DPS parses - IO's godly PvE rotation is impractical in PvP)

However to kill a trinity comp with burst classes you need to be able to pull off some kind of hardswitch, in solos however you don't have coordination, you don't get to call swaps or yell at the tank for a clutch AoE CC. Heck in solos you will probably not even get a co-DPS whose class synergizes well with yours.

Meanwhile actual pressure specs such as Madness would do absurdly well because pressure strats against a trinity comp boil down to a simple DPS tunnel which requires little to no coordination.

arsenal can swap. IO is a fish out of water, but given solid heals 'n' peels, it can wear out even a guarded sorc. I've done it in grp with a MM sniper on my team. we had the healer dead to rights a few times, but the MM got los. an AP wouldn't have that problem, nor would a madness or hatred. but anyway, it gives arsenal viablity in ranked instead of the run away as long as you can strat in all-dps matches.

I see your point about it making the uber dot spread specs even more ridiculous (particularly hatred), but what can you do? they're out of control no matter how you slice it.

uh. I mean... if there's only one merc in the queue, then he's an anchor to whichever team he lands on. there's no denying that. aside from fixing balance or forcing trinity comps, neither of which will happen any time soon, what needs to happen is more mercs and pyro PTs in the queue to soften up both teams.

I play IO/ Assault and Plasmatech / Pyro >_<.

On a serious note can someone answer me this, what should crit % be for assault specialist in pvp? Seriously, I went from gunnery to assault and my crit jumped from 25 to 30 percent because of plasma cell.

theoretically, you want to put on alac to speed up the dots AND the cleave, but there's nothing in the discipline to proc an alac multiplier. it's just a really poorly constructed spec. it also has a guaranteed crit (rail) plus the crit buff that's universal to all PTs/VGs. unfortunately, that's NOTHING like the kind of guaranteed procs you get from fury spec jugg/mara. so what I'm going for now is crit through aim and a couple mods to get around 25%. the idea is, with all the dots, to spike as many crits as possible instead of trying for the few and far between big crits. the 10m dot sticks on targets for a long time, so that alone should make it worth the exchange in bonus dmg vs. crit. this is just something I'm trying after having dabbled with crit and tried full power builds.

edit: d'oh! I thought you were on assault VG. lol

theoretically, you want to put on alac to speed up the dots AND the cleave, but there's nothing in the discipline to proc an alac multiplier. it's just a really poorly constructed spec. it also has a guaranteed crit (rail) plus the crit buff that's universal to all PTs/VGs. unfortunately, that's NOTHING like the kind of guaranteed procs you get from fury spec jugg/mara. so what I'm going for now is crit through aim and a couple mods to get around 25%. the idea is, with all the dots, to spike as many crits as possible instead of trying for the few and far between big crits. the 10m dot sticks on targets for a long time, so that alone should make it worth the exchange in bonus dmg vs. crit. this is just something I'm trying after having dabbled with crit and tried full power builds.

 

edit: d'oh! I thought you were on assault VG. lol

Sooooooooooooooooo, 30 % is too much then, well ranged is 30 % and tech is 28, dunno why they did that tbh, but whatev. I guess I will just pull the mods and enhancements out and keep them just in case I want to go back to gunnery. My crit is at 25 percent on my plasmatech, pretty much full power / mainstat build.

ahahahahah 10/10

Quing ranked with my merc right now yes FOTM kill me if you dare