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Sniper/Gunslinger Set Bonus Discussion


EricMusco

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Hey everyone,

 

We wanted to take a moment to reach out to the community to collect ideas on set bonuses. We are looking for opinions on current and previous set bonuses as well as concepts for future. This thread will cover Snipers/Gunslinger.

 

Note: Our intent is to have set bonuses not increase DPS by more than 5%. Please keep this in mind when posting your suggestions.

 

Current Level 60 Set Bonuses (for reference)

  • 2-Piece: Activating Explosive Probe, Ambush and Lethal Shot or Sabotage Charge, Aimed Shot and Dirty Blast increases damage dealt by 2% for 15 seconds. Cannot occur more than once every 30 of seconds.
  • 4-Piece: Reduces the cooldown of Target Acquired or Illegal Mods by 15 seconds, and activating either ability restores 15 energy.
  • 6-Piece: Laze Target or Smuggler's Luck now has 2 charges and its duration is doubled.

Cheers, all!

The SWTOR Combat Team

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For Marksman/Sharpshooter the 6 set works fine. The issue I have is on running virulence/dirty fighting with it. The old 4 set bonus gave the energy reduction to takedown/quickdraw so I end up swapping to old armor set pieces when running that spec. It's not anything that really affects ability to do high end dps, but as the tier gap widens with 204 ratings and above it would cause more issues.
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About the current set bonuses, I think they are ok on the whole. The 4 piece one could do with a little work though. it's really kinda meh....

 

The 6 piece is the one that really matters and I can see that being the one that might cause you devs the most concern. Marksman is very strong right now regarding burst and if you decided the burst needed to be reduced then this would be the logical way of doing it. However if you did so I believe it would hurt engineering and virulence much more. Not that I'm asking for marksman nerfs I hasten to add, it just seems a logical change if it was something you were looking to do.

 

From an engineering perspective I wouldn't want the 6 piece bonus to change.

 

What I would like to see is discipline specific bonuses, that way it allows you to balance classes regarding the set bonus much more easily, you don't have to concern yourselves as to the effect on all three specs.

Edited by BaineOs
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What I would like to see is discipline specific bonuses, that way it allows you to balance classes regarding the set bonus much more easily, you don't have to concern yourselves as to the effect on all three specs.

 

While I'm still unsure, I have a tendency towards that as well.

 

To be *really* honest, it kind of baffled me when I saw that Gunslingers / Snipers get "one size fits all", and every other class don't, with the only exception being Marauder & Sentinel, another DD-only class. But maybe that#s just the way it is now. No other class is like Gunslinger / Sentinel : DD only.

 

About the boni I can't say ... My current set doesn't have any, since I didn't do much raiding since the Revan Expansion came out. I was too much immersed into the story. :D;)

 

I'm a freak in that respect that I didn't even do both new OPs yet :D , but that was partially because I wanted to have the gear for both before I'd participate - and then the xp bonus came in. ;)

Edited by AlrikFassbauer
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The 6 piece set bonus are fine for sharpshooter but it causes energy management issues for Dirty Fighting. I think to make it work with the current 6 set bonus is just to lower the energy cost on either Quickdraw or Dirty Blast. If you do that, it will make the rotation smoother. Also anyone feel free to tell me if this is a viable option or not, I'm not a theorycrafter.
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I think the 6 set bonus is very good for Dirty Fighting/Lethality but it's very weak for Marks/Engineer. The reason is the cooldown on their signature abilities is so much longer. Might be better if the bonus was tied to something else, like series of shots/penetrating.

 

Increased survivability for the 4-piece would be better, too.

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2pc - decent

 

4pc - something defensive would probably be better BUT dirty fighting NEEDs the energy

 

6pc - is there a way to make it give the old 4pc in DF... it really is much better. It offers about the same dps (more or less) with significantly higher flexibility in the rotation... In addition, the extra energy can also be translated into some extra burst.

 

Please find a way to fix DF energy consumption (and while you're at it change the perk in the DF tree to buff sharp bomb instead of thermal grenade to mirror the sniper version). DF and the scoundrel equivalent are the only 2 specs with real RNG dependent energy and the set bonus change just made it worse

 

~Lunagazer

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The two-piece isn't fancy but it serves its purpose. Same for the 4-piece. I would also definitely not like to see the extra stack+duration increase of Laze Target going anywhere. If anything I think just plain reducing the energy cost of Takedown baseline, outside of the set bonuses, is all that needs to really be considered to give some Virulence QoL, and a tiny bit of QoL for the other specs. That or make it so that Lethal Takedown makes your next Takedown cost 5 less. Or if having every Takedown cost 5 less is too much, give an extra proc(call it Efficient Lethal Takedown/Efficient Dirty Shot) that has a rate limit of 16 seconds or something. Whether this increases the spec's DPS too much in turn by decreasing how many times we have to use free fillers, I don't know(and some would say that not having to pay as much attention to your energy would make the spec too dumbed down). It would make the spec's rotation more fluid in my opinion, though.

 

Increased survivability for the 4-piece would be better, too.

 

This would be nice but it would have to be put in addition to the current 4-piece bonus. The energy return on TA is necessary for PvE. But once again, there are other places they can buff survivability or QoL in that aren't set bonuses.

Edited by OMGITSJAD
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Set bonus 2 and 6 are fine unless there would be option to reduce 30 sec cooldown to 20 sec (on set bonus 2).

The set bonus 4 in the other hand is kinda not needed, especially the energy restore. Everyone who play Sniper/Gunslinger long enough is able to never go below 60% energy.

Would be much usefull if over here pop out a nice defensive cooldown, like in eg evasion would remove all negative buffs, or using evasion finishes cooldown of escape etc.

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Set bonus 2 and 6 are fine unless there would be option to reduce 30 sec cooldown to 20 sec (on set bonus 2).

The set bonus 4 in the other hand is kinda not needed, especially the energy restore. Everyone who play Sniper/Gunslinger long enough is able to never go below 60% energy.

Would be much usefull if over here pop out a nice defensive cooldown, like in eg evasion would remove all negative buffs, or using evasion finishes cooldown of escape etc.

 

The 4-piece set bonus is definitely necessary for Virulence, and is not something I don't appreciate for Marksman. Sure, maybe this is mostly on parses where you are always going ham instead of bosses where there is some downtime to regen energy during, but still. I would say if you never have to worry about energy management on a Sniper/Gunslinger(in PvE) you are not playing as optimally as you could be.

Edited by OMGITSJAD
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I'd want something that makes virulence energy management easier, instead of having to put in fillers of basic attacks/rolls in the rotation it would be more convenient to have it do less damage overall but with the resources to fire off takedowns/quickdraws and dirty blasts/lethal shots regularly and without energy difficulties.

Making it easier to use, squeezing in more heavy duty fillers and not touching its dps will only result in the spec being op(you're gonna have to do both if you want to do 1 of the changes), that's what I think.

 

The evasion cleanse is something I'd want as well, don't know why that had to be removed in 3.0.

Edited by cirruz
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*rage*Tbh i don't see any reason asking the community about ideas/opinion if your intent is do give set-wearer max up to 5% DPS increase. If i just think about it, that's up to 200 DPS if you normally do 4k. Does this justify the effort and time spent to get this? Clearly - NO. You can simply remove the set-items from the game. Given the fact your raid-encounters are mostly gear (DPS) check it is clear for me, this dev. team has no idea what its supposed to do. Hail all those free comms :rak_09: *rage ended*

 

If i would design a set:

I'd stay with the 2p bonus giving you a theoretical 1% DPS buff. It is not much but it teaches you at least some priority in using certain ability to get the bonus and keep its max. up-time. I'd replace the abilities though - the bonus should be granted by Penetrating Blasts/Series of Shots (and the corresponding pub abilities)

 

4p bonus is based in some resource regen, it is clearly the right idea. The solution though.... is far away from perfect. Since all 3 specs use Corrosive Dart, i'd make Snipe/Lethal Shot causes your next Corrosive Dart tick restore 5 energy (10 if it is a crit). If you are afraid this would push Virulence straight to the heaven - increase energy cost of Cull.

 

6p should be unique. For MM is should grand you 10% armor penetration, for Virulence it should make your poison effect tick 10% faster and for Engineering it should convert all damage to Elemental.

 

Last but not least: You should really rethink the item budget. For me as non DoT-based DPS alacrity makes 0 sense. In order to gain significant benefit from it, i need to sacrifice so much primary and secondary stats, so at the end i have a net loss...And this brings me to the idea maybe 2p bonus should be like +5-10% alacrity bonus? (added to your current %) This might make alacrity viable for everyone.

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First and foremost, the 6-piece Set Bonus is still not working correctly for Saboteur Gunslingers / Engineering Snipers. For Gunslingers, the first Sabotage Charge consumed with the first stack of Smuggler's Luck makes all following Contingency Charges crit. I would like to know if this is supposed to be intended for both Gunslingers and Snipers or not at all. It's not a game breaking thing if it's not removed/added, but further clarification here would be wonderful.

 

Regarding future changes to the Set Bonuses:

 

2 Piece: Fine where it is, there really is no Issue with it, however, it just takes a little bit of practice and timing to get max uptime with it in Dirty Fighting/Virulence.

 

4 Piece: I think this should be the only one that needs to be reworked. In PvP, the Energy added and Cooldown reduction rate is unnecessary. In PvE, it helps Saboteur/Engineering and Virulence / Dirty Fighting with their openers, and requires timing to put it to good use later on. The energy gain in Marksman is not very needed in PvE. I could see this go in two ways. 1) Keep following the DPS increase path, and add in the Old 4-piece in with the current bonus (decreases energy of Quickdraw / Takedown by 5) or 2) Take a defensive route, possibly reducing the cooldown of Hightail It and defensive screen by 4 or 5 seconds.

Edit: 3) Change the Illegal Mods buff to increase the duration of Illegal Mods by X seconds. Just tossing another idea here.

Edit 4) Wipe everything and make Flourish Shot / Shatter Shot useful again. "Activating Flourish Shot / Shatter Shot generates 1 extra energy per second over 15 seconds, and increases all damage dealt to the target by 10% for 6-10 seconds. Cannot occur more than once every 60 seconds.", though this should buff the damage done by Flourish Shot / Shatter Shot to about 85% of the damage dealt by Flurry of Bolts. This will grant a sort of DPS raid buff to Gunslingers / Snipers both in PvP and PvE without losing energy.

 

6 Piece: Besides what's already been discussed about Saboteur / Engineering, I'd say it's fine where it is. For Marksman / Sharpshooter, it provides amazing burst to the class both in most PvP and some PvE scenarios. If anything, MM/Sharp relies heavily on this utility. Sabo/Engi works the same way, although the Contingency Charges / Cluster Bombs need to be checked. I'd say the weakest point to it is in Dirty Fighting, simply because Wounding Shots / Cull is a channel, which means it can be broken. Aimed Shot / Ambush is a cast time, so timing is the only issue here, and Sabotage Charge is instant, so that explains itself. The damage dealt during the full 3 second cast by Wounding Shots / Cull itself (Not the extra DoT ticks) is about 12k in BiS PvE gear. (Used this parse as a reference), which is actually less than a typical Ambush / Aimed Shot. From a PvE perspective, this for Dirty Fighting / Virulence is fine, but since the setup for the critted Cull/Wounding Shots is so obvious, it sometimes won't get the full channel off, losing much more potential dps.

Overall here, it's got a slight disadvantage in Dirty Fighting/Virulence, but it's hard to incorperate a change here without affecting the other two specs negatively, so this should stay where it is. The only other option I'd consider is to open this up to Quickdraw / Takedown as well, but this would harm Sharpshooter in PvE under 30%, and the damage dealt by this ability is low in comparison to cull anyways.

 

Tl;DR : Keep 2 and 6, but look again at 4.

 

Edits:

 

4p bonus is based in some resource regen, it is clearly the right idea. The solution though.... is far away from perfect. Since all 3 specs use Corrosive Dart, i'd make Snipe/Lethal Shot causes your next Corrosive Dart tick restore 5 energy (10 if it is a crit). If you are afraid this would push Virulence straight to the heaven - increase energy cost of Cull.

.

 

Saboteur / Engineering has very little use for Snipe / Charged Burst, so this won't happen. You have to keep all three disciplines in mind here.

Edited by Camelpockets
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Any change to Quickdraw energy for Dirty Fighting should be in the Dirty Fighting discipline and not tied to a set bonus. Quickdraw energy is largely irrelevant in the other two specs. There is no need to replace a useful set bonus for two specs with one that is not useful, just to help one spec.
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First and foremost, the 6-piece Set Bonus is still not working correctly for Saboteur Gunslingers / Engineering Snipers. For Gunslingers, the first Sabotage Charge consumed with the first stack of Smuggler's Luck makes all following Contingency Charges crit. I would like to know if this is supposed to be intended for both Gunslingers and Snipers or not at all. It's not a game breaking thing if it's not removed/added, but further clarification here would be wonderful.

 

Regarding future changes to the Set Bonuses:

 

2 Piece: Fine where it is, there really is no Issue with it, however, it just takes a little bit of practice and timing to get max uptime with it in Dirty Fighting/Virulence.

 

4 Piece: I think this should be the only one that needs to be reworked. In PvP, the Energy added and Cooldown reduction rate is unnecessary. In PvE, it helps Saboteur/Engineering and Virulence / Dirty Fighting with their openers, and requires timing to put it to good use later on. The energy gain in Marksman is not very needed in PvE. I could see this go in two ways. 1) Keep following the DPS increase path, and add in the Old 4-piece in with the current bonus (decreases energy of Quickdraw / Takedown by 5) or 2) Take a defensive route, possibly reducing the cooldown of Hightail It and defensive screen by 4 or 5 seconds.

Edit: 3) Change the Illegal Mods buff to increase the duration of Illegal Mods by X seconds. Just tossing another idea here.

Edit 4) Wipe everything and make Flourish Shot / Shatter Shot useful again. "Activating Flourish Shot / Shatter Shot generates 1 extra energy per second over 15 seconds, and increases all damage dealt to the target by 10% for 6-10 seconds. Cannot occur more than once every 60 seconds.", though this should buff the damage done by Flourish Shot / Shatter Shot to about 85% of the damage dealt by Flurry of Bolts. This will grant a sort of DPS raid buff to Gunslingers / Snipers both in PvP and PvE without losing energy.

 

6 Piece: Besides what's already been discussed about Saboteur / Engineering, I'd say it's fine where it is. For Marksman / Sharpshooter, it provides amazing burst to the class both in most PvP and some PvE scenarios. If anything, MM/Sharp relies heavily on this utility. Sabo/Engi works the same way, although the Contingency Charges / Cluster Bombs need to be checked. I'd say the weakest point to it is in Dirty Fighting, simply because Wounding Shots / Cull is a channel, which means it can be broken. Aimed Shot / Ambush is a cast time, so timing is the only issue here, and Sabotage Charge is instant, so that explains itself. The damage dealt during the full 3 second cast by Wounding Shots / Cull itself (Not the extra DoT ticks) is about 12k in BiS PvE gear. (Used this parse as a reference), which is actually less than a typical Ambush / Aimed Shot. From a PvE perspective, this for Dirty Fighting / Virulence is fine, but since the setup for the critted Cull/Wounding Shots is so obvious, it sometimes won't get the full channel off, losing much more potential dps.

Overall here, it's got a slight disadvantage in Dirty Fighting/Virulence, but it's hard to incorperate a change here without affecting the other two specs negatively, so this should stay where it is. The only other option I'd consider is to open this up to Quickdraw / Takedown as well, but this would harm Sharpshooter in PvE under 30%, and the damage dealt by this ability is low in comparison to cull anyways.

 

Tl;DR : Keep 2 and 6, but look again at 4.

 

Edits:

 

 

 

Saboteur / Engineering has very little use for Snipe / Charged Burst, so this won't happen. You have to keep all three disciplines in mind here.

 

All they have to do for Dirty Fighting is lower the cost on either Quickdraw or Dirty Blast without messing with the current 6 piece bonus. I'm still using the old 4 piece set bonus just for energy purposes.

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I mainly play Marksmanship, and I've decent knowledge of Virulence. Won't be of much help about Engineering, though I briefly tried it for a week.

 

I believe the 6pc set-bonuses are just right. Marksmanship dummy parses aren't spectacular, but they aren't lackluster either, and the dependable burst from the 6pc set bonus keeps Marksmanship near-competitive* in PvP (and in some PvE where burst is important). The damage for a lased Cull is nice too, but Virulence suffers from more fundamental problems in PvP (while it is excellent for PvE). Same goes for Explosive Probe damage and Engineering, except Engineering is more viable in PvP than PvE I think.

 

The 2pc bonus is same across all classes - however I'd rather have it be activated by Penetrating Blasts/Series of Shots. It is possible to hold onto Ambush to preserve burst in some cases, but PB/SoS is too rotational to not use. This would ensure more uptime for the buff, for me at least.

 

The 4pc bonus is decent. It gives me some leeway in parses, but could use something more imaginitive. Energy reduction of Takedown would definitely go a longer way for all the specs.

 

* All sniper specs currently suffer from the offensive output not being worth the loss of defensive abilities - it is general consensus that they need to be balanced to reflect each other. Marksmanship makes it out better than the other two specs which are plainly not that great, as the offensive burst is dependable, and cannot be purged. But a story for another thread.

 

Any change to Quickdraw energy for Dirty Fighting should be in the Dirty Fighting discipline and not tied to a set bonus. Quickdraw energy is largely irrelevant in the other two specs. There is no need to replace a useful set bonus for two specs with one that is not useful, just to help one spec.
It does have utility for Marksmanship though - in the Execute phase one should currently replace Corrosive Dart with Takedown, except to reapply the debuff. Edited by Metthew
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I think the 6 set bonus is very good for Dirty Fighting/Lethality but it's very weak for Marks/Engineer. The reason is the cooldown on their signature abilities is so much longer. Might be better if the bonus was tied to something else, like series of shots/penetrating.

 

Increased survivability for the 4-piece would be better, too.

 

You couldn't put the 6 piece on penetrating blasts because you could just go: Laze Target > Penetrating Blasts (double relic procs somewhere in here)> Sniper Volly > Penetrating Blasts > and they would be in execute range for Takedown > Followthrough you could literally kill someone in pvp in 5 seconds from 35m away. In 4 seconds 2/3 of their health is gone and in the last 1 second they take a 9.5k execute and a 8k Followthrough.

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I'd like to offer ditching the 4 piece in favor of reducing the energy cost of Quickdraw and extending it's range by 5 meters. Slingers/Snipers are all ready fodder, and the five extra meters are nice but don't really make that much of a difference against classes with quicker TTK's, so more range and easier energy management would be a nice tradeoff.
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Look I'm just gonna throw this out there, since I posted the same ideas in the PTS forum and the devs ignored it. Sniper issues in PvP aren't DPS related, they're survival. If our set bonus(es) reduced Shield Probe's CD by 8 seconds and made it heal us for 5% of our maximum health when it collapsed, that would go along way towards helping sniper issues there. I would much rather see them add that into our utilities, but hey...I'll take what I can get.

 

And the 6 piece set bonus is so OP where Marksman is concerned. That's not to say Marksman is OP or Snipers are OP but you shouldn't be able to guarantee hitting someone for 20k twice every minute. I think the autocrit on set bonuses in general is sort of lazy and unimaginative.

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Look I'm just gonna throw this out there, since I posted the same ideas in the PTS forum and the devs ignored it. Sniper issues in PvP aren't DPS related, they're survival. If our set bonus(es) reduced Shield Probe's CD by 8 seconds and made it heal us for 5% of our maximum health when it collapsed, that would go along way towards helping sniper issues there. I would much rather see them add that into our utilities, but hey...I'll take what I can get.

 

And the 6 piece set bonus is so OP where Marksman is concerned. That's not to say Marksman is OP or Snipers are OP but you shouldn't be able to guarantee hitting someone for 20k twice every minute. I think the autocrit on set bonuses in general is sort of lazy and unimaginative.

 

Honestly, what Bioware should do, not just for Gunslingers / Snipers but all Advanced Classes is bring them back to the point where the PvP and PvE set bonuses were different. Because in PvE, those set bonuses we have are wonderful, don't really need much of a change, however, the Quickdraw energy reduction would be a nice QoL improvement. Even then, the 6 piece could stay the same, even as unimaginative as it is.

 

So if Bioware was to separate the Set Bonuses, the PvE ones could stay the same (preferably with the QoL Dirty Fighting change), and change the 2 and 4 piece:

 

2 Piece - Decreases the cooldowns of Defensive Screen by 5 and Dodge by 10.

4 Piece - Using Dodge refreshes the Cooldown of either Defensive Screen or Hightail it.

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The 4pc Set Bonus might be fine as is, if Target Acquired / Illegal Mods had a cooldown of maybe 1 minute, rather than 2 minutes. The ability does seem to have an excessively long cooldown for it's effect.
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Set bonuses are very fine.

For the energy management in dirty figthing / lethality, i propose to reduce the takedown / quickdraw cost by 3 per second of wounding shot / cull channelled. But this change must be in the tree, not in the set bonuses.

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