Quote: Originally Posted by fire-breath

Erik, any word on smoothing the negative energy management for saboteur/engi?

 

Um, what? Someone needs to learn the rotation better, it seems.

 

Sorry for coming back a bit late at this. Had a real busy week. As I kinda wanted to do some numbers on this matter I thought this was as good a time as any.

Anyways. The numbers themselves don't lie. It's a fact that a sabslinger rotation is and was a net loss.

 

The other (and real) reason I wanted to make this post is that bioware is thinking sabs and engies were swimming in energy. I get it that a gunslinger doesn't work the same as a sage and that we will never see energy management like the balance sages currently have (seriously, can they even run out force anymore?)

 

Enough blah blah. On to my post.

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Obviously I am talking about the highest damage rotation. You can always weave in an ability that deals less damage like a hightailed scatterbombing or a flurry. With the same reason you could say a few weeks ago that balance sages could just use more TK-trow. Problem solved right?

 

Regarding the rotation:

Based on 0% alacrity

A normal sabslinger rotational block takes 18 seconds. In these 18 seconds you have 2 sub blocks

 

sub block 1

20 - speedshot

15 - inc nade

10 - shock charge

15 - sabotage

-5 - thermal nade (net gain of 5 energy)

total cost = 55 energy

 

sub block 2

20 - speedshot

15 - inc nade

15 - vital shot

10 - thermal nade

-3 - explosive charge (net gain of 3 energy)

total cost = 57 energy

 

Total cost per block of 18 seconds = 112 energy

In 18 seconds you will regain about 90 energy (5 energy x 18s)

This means you will lose about 22 energy per block.

Cool head = 50 energy gain

Illegal mods = 15 energy gain

 

Our goal is to stay above 60% energy to keep ourself in the high ranges. The tipping point at 60% energy happens at 66 energy, which means you have a total of 44 to spend without getting into the lower regen zone. This means we have a total of about 110 energy (45 + 50 + 15).

 

110 energy / 22 energy loss per block = 5 blocks / 90 seconds. With some good managing you could stretch this maybe to 100 minutes (with dipping below the mark a bit).

 

While cool head has a cooldown of 90 seconds it sadly doesn't allign with the loss.

 

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So ..... our options are:

1. Weave in low hitting abilities
   
2. Hope for a forced downtime in the fight
   
3. A change to our energy management to make it easier to maintain. (hint hint Eric/Keith?)
   

 

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A few additional thoughts

 

Even higher damage rotations (at higher costs)

Take in mind that for the highest damage rotation you want to use flyby as a filler. This means once a while you lose an extra 5 energy. To make the numbers easier to display in this post I ignored this for now. In essence this means the situation is worse than displayed.

 

Illegal mods

This 15 energy gain by illegal mods is dependent on setboni to remain as is for the next patch or patches.

Also in real fights you tend to use illegal mods right at the start to sync it with relic procs, setbonus procs and (passive) raidbuffs.

 

hightail deals good damage. Why not include it?

It deals good damage for sure.................... on a dummy. Using hightail in bossfights can be done but not in all cases. In quite a few cases where you can land all 5 bombs on the target you don't want to risk the roll. Hence I didn't include it as hightail is mostly used for a fun bit of extra damage except for a few exceptions.

 

State of the sabengie before the 5.3 nerf

Well. Calling it a nerf goes to far when looking at energy. We went from 4x 5 energy to 3x 6 energy. Translating 2 extra energy gives us 5,5 blocks instead of 5.

 

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Some ideas for improvement

 

 

2 things to note. The tooltip for speed shot doesn't update with the energy decrease for it that you get in the tree, it's actually only 16 energy. And you should never use that second thermal grenade. So that's an extra 18 energy that you would no longer be spending which would make the rotation 4 energy negative. That 4 energy is barely noticeable unless you go through the rotation several times without any breaks or using energy cd's which really will only during parsing and only once throughout the entire 2.5m health.

Thx for the reply shyroman. I appreciate the feedback. I'll adapt my openings post later in the weekend.

 

 

2 things to note. The tooltip for speed shot doesn't update with the energy decrease for it that you get in the tree, it's actually only 16 energy.

You are 100% correct on this one. I checked my logs via parsec and noticed a trend of spending 56 energy in 1 block and 76 in the other one. (with 11 / 17 regen respectivly)

 

And you should never use that second thermal grenade.

Besides flurry and hightail. Which other ability would you suggest than? A few weeks ago balance sages could just use TK-trow an extra time to regen their force. For single target fights the goal is to use the highest possible damage rotation. Artificially lowering the energy consumption by dealing less damage is not an ideal thing.

 

Now don't get me wrong. I don't mind sabengies staying as they are but I do want to make the point clear to Bioware that we are and were not in a lake of energy. If we stay like this I'll just use a few flurries to reduce my damage and energy.

 

So that's an extra 18 energy that you would no longer be spending which would make the rotation 4 energy negative. That 4 energy is barely noticeable unless you go through the rotation several times without any breaks or using energy cd's which really will only during parsing and only once throughout the entire 2.5m health.

I agree you wouldn't notice the 4 energy. With 4 energy you could go several minutes without needing cool head. But again this number 4 is done by lowering your damage output.

 

I realize there are fights that feature downtimes but those less than 50%. Out of the 52 instanced ops bosses only 20 feature large or frequent breaks.

 

Bosses with forced breaks

2/5 EV = pylons, Soa

0/5 KP = none

2/4 EC = minefield, Kephess (tanks has a few times to deal lower damage to regen energy

2/6 TfB = Operator, Terror (bonus boss = no breaks)

4/8 Scum = Dash (only when getting lost), titan, thrasher, olok (bonus boss = no breaks)

2/5 DF = Czero has a few short moments (when he jumps away for lasers on Master), brontes

3/5 DP = Calph, 4th boss (always mix up Tyrans and Raptus lol), council

2/5 Rav = Master Blaster, Rugar

2/5 ToS = Rev commanders, Revan (to state the obvious note: underlurker doesn't have a forced break in dps)

0/2 GoM = none

1/1 TC = yes

0/1 Monolith = no breaks

0/1 Eyeless = no breaks

0/1 Xeno = there are a few breaks but those are not frequent and long enough recouperate

The goal is to use the highest possible damage rotation while also not running out of energy. Using a basic attack or a roll isn't a bad thing, most specs are forced to in order to deal optimal dps. The only specs I can think of that don't are sorc specs (depends on whether you view force lightning or lightning strike spam basic attacks or not), fury/rage, lethality, and vigilance. So that's only 6 out of the 18 damage specs that won't use a basic attack, 12 of them do. Engineering only even needs to use 1 per rotation which isn't bad at all.

 

When it comes to the downtime all you need is a gcd or 2 every few minutes, not large or frequent breaks, even just having the occasional ability lag that most people will have in an operation will be plenty of time. There are significantly fewer fights where you will have an apm and uptime as perfect as a dummy parse and that's the only time where that energy will catch up to the point where you'd have to basic attack twice.

Using a basic attack has been a part of most rotations since launch. It's not a bad thing at all. Most specs have an actual energy spending filler and a basic attack. It's up to the player to adjust the rotation with those 2 (or more) fillers between big hitters.

 

Look at Pyro Powertech. People often complain that this spec has terrible energy management. And I agree, it's not the greatest. Pyro has the highest amount of Rapid Shots used between all specs. Most of us would rather have Flame burst instead, just for aesthetics. But does the high Rapid Shots usage limit it's DPS significantly? No, there are 3 Pyro parses in top 10 on parsely at the moment.

 

As for engineering, as Shyroman pointed out, with a correct rotation you use just one basic attack or roll in a cycle. That's pretty great. I personally only use my Adrenaline probe when spamming heavy AoE (I am talking about actual fights). Even in pure "stand and shoot" fights it's pretty hard to run into real energy issues. In the worst case you just use another free filler where possible to get back into it. It barely affects the DPS output.

Edited November 3, 2017 by Equeliber

I agree that it is annoying to have to use a basic attack every rotation, but that's how engineering works. Using a second grenade without an energy cooldown will, as you said, result in a negative energy. Although it would increase dps initially, you will end up digging yourself in a hole where you will end up doing a lot of rifle shooting to make up for it.

 

Regarding that engi is only usable on fights with periodic breaks/dps stops. I would say this is not true. Although not every spec is ideal for every fight, engi is normally chosen due to the large amount of aoe damage and burst damage. You should be looking at which spec can give the highest useful dps rather than how easy it is to play each spec on a fight.

 

And finally, there are a lot of ways you can use your filler spot in the rotation with something other than basic attack. You can roll (this usually requires planning a few seconds ahead of time), use a pyro grenade, use orbital + target aquired, or use grenade, then use an orbital + adrenaline probe the next rotation block.

 

So overall, I don't think that engi/saboteur has energy issues, I think it's just you are playing the spec too aggressively and need to use zero energy cost ability or plan out what to use and use an energy cooldown with it in your filler spots in the rotation.

Look at Pyro Powertech. People often complain that this spec has terrible energy management. And I agree, it's not the greatest.

Owh I agree on that one. Sabengies are by far the lesser offenders and other classes have it hard on energy too.

 

As for engineering, as Shyroman pointed out, with a correct rotation you use just one basic attack or roll in a cycle. That's pretty great. I personally only use my Adrenaline probe when spamming heavy AoE (I am talking about actual fights). Even in pure "stand and shoot" fights it's pretty hard to run into real energy issues. In the worst case you just use another free filler where possible to get back into it. It barely affects the DPS output.

True. When in a real fight you have to deal with lapses in focus which automaticly make the energy management easier. However in the stand and shoot fights/phases I do notice the limitations of the spec. But like Cooperjf was saying earlier, I try to play the spec aggressivly on the edge.

 

Regarding that engi is only usable on fights with periodic breaks/dps stops. I would say this is not true. Although not every spec is ideal for every fight, engi is normally chosen due to the large amount of aoe damage and burst damage. You should be looking at which spec can give the highest useful dps rather than how easy it is to play each spec on a fight.

Whoa! Hold your horse Cooper. Maybe my post might have suggested the feeling but I don't think sabengies aren't viable on a few fights. Like my sig is saying. I have always been playing saboteur and never ever was I feeling nor being a detriment to my group. Well. I was but that had more to do with my at time unorthodox ideas (and not informing my team/raidleader )

My 1st toon was a sentinel (because whats better than 1 lightsaber? ..... ). But when I made my 2nd toon back during launch I fell in love with Saboteur and never strayed. Except for when it was needed to play something different.

 

And finally, there are a lot of ways you can use your filler spot in the rotation with something other than basic attack. You can roll (this usually requires planning a few seconds ahead of time), use a pyro grenade, use orbital + target aquired, or use grenade, then use an orbital + adrenaline probe the next rotation block.

To be fair. The rotation I listed in the OP isn't the one I am using. My own rotation uses Flyby on cooldown (which makes it even harder I guess). Also cool head and illegal mods were already in my calculations. Sadly the cooldown on cool head is slightly to long.

 

The grenade thing is a good idea I guess. Although a bit costly

Well, afaik, it goes:

 

Flyby -> Snipe(don't ask me why) -> Explosive -> Series -> Incendiary -> Shock -> Sabotage -> Grenade -> Incendiary -> Series -> Vital / Flyby -> filler -> REPEAT

 

Now, I agree that using the basic auto attack is a flat deflation to one's excitement(would you rather use a Flamethrower or pewpew? Pyro example), but it is well thought out imo. The energy stays stable and you can MAINTAIN your dps. Sure, I could mix it up and do higher dps than that rotation, but! I'll soon enter energy problems(as soon as 4th / 5th pass) and then the dps will halve(at worst). Which is really, but really not ideal. Besides, that rotation's pretty simple. While during the "winging it" mode, you've to watch out for a LOT of stuff, stuff which are automated in that rotation.

 

It's ok imo. 4 energy loss / rotation is nothing(it'd be better if it was 0 or positive gain, but meh).