I was poking around Youtube when I came across Brum's video on PvE Gunslinger. After looking at his build and watching his video I can see how his rotation is quite good, but I can't call it the "highest DPS rotation for Gunslinger." That's mostly on the basis that we don't have a combat log to determine that quite yet.



There is a few things that I do not like about this build for PvE. First, he seems to empathize Alacrity in his spec but doesn't go over his gear so I'm not quite sure how he has his character geared. Too much Alacrity and he would be undermining his damage or possibly causing energy problems, too little and his rotation isn't going to be all it's cracked up to be. Second, Vital Shot is a core component of his rotation that he focuses on deeply. Due to Vital Shot's relatively large energy cost and only having a 100/100 energy pool it would be very easy to kick yourself below 60% energy possibly slowing your rotation. Lastly, he avoids opening with his cooldowns like Smuggler's Luck and Rapid Fire because he is worried about generating too much threat with that damage. His main reason is to avoid pulling Ops bosses. This doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever. Typically, when the battle for any boss begins the tank charges in with their highest threat generating attacks, this typically includes one of their taunts forcing the boss to target them. With a good tank, no one should be able to grab aggro right off the bat, and if they were to the tank should be on top of it with their taunt.

I'm not trying to state that I have a superior rotation, but I have been able to provide large bursts of damage along with constant high DPS on any target without the worry of dipping below 60% or pulling aggro. Now thinking about it I understand where he is coming from with this build. There are times in a Sharpshooter's rotation where many items would be on CD and a Burst Volly + Charged Burst combo would assist to keep DPS rolling, but I fear that it may eat energy too quickly. Even watching his demonstration again he needs to throw in a few Flourish Shots to keep the energy flowing and he even dips into his energy pool a bit when he throws a Vital Shot on the Strong Mob.

Overall, this is obviously a very well thought-out rotation that consists of a fairly unique style and emphasis, but I'm not quite convinced of its efficiency long-term against multiple targets.

sounds like its completely based off his gear and wouldn't work for anyone else. I haven't really looked at the gunslinger changes for 1.2 but that spec might not work when it comes out anyway.

The most interesting thing in that vid was hearing that Karagga summons the mouse droids every minute.

crazyBE wrote:

The most interesting thing in that vid was hearing that Karagga summons the mouse droids every minute.

Hehe, and even it was every minute, a 7.5 second cooldown increase wouldn't help since it is on a 60 second cooldown by default.

Applejack wrote:

sounds like its completely based off his gear and wouldn't work for anyone else. I haven't really looked at the gunslinger changes for 1.2 but that spec might not work when it comes out anyway.

1.2 is bringing some changes already to the Sharpshooter tree. I can't say it will make his rotation less effective, but the current changes make the Sharpshooter tree a lot more effective and since his points are spread out in Dirty Fighting a bit he will definitely have to re-prioritize his set-up. However, Burst Volley is being re-designed and will be a whole lot more effective, so I will most likely try to incorporate it into my future build.

His spec isn't much different from mine, we went different routes in the dirty tree, since my build is more PvP focused. I also have the talent for alacrity % and thats all the alcarity i have, zero on gear (pvp or pve) I've played with this in pvp more., but i've gotten speed shot to a 1.6 sec channel. However, shooting faster, but much weaker. When i tested this several weeks back, I had a 300 to 600 variation in tick dmg during speed shots duration (pre BM) 900-1800 lost dmg. As a PvP Fox, that didn't fly with me

Personally, i don't care for aclarity as a sharpshooter. We have burst volley *soon to be better* and illegal mods. So using the right rotation will keep volley activate to aid in the dps race. I would have played with mod buffs more if this game currently had a combat log.... or a training dummy and both seem to be coming in 1.2

Yeah, I couldn't tell you why he emphasizes alacrity, the only reason I can think of is he soft capped surge and hard capped accuracy and just stockpiled the rest of his secondary stats into alacrity because he literally had nowhere else to go (He probably COULD stack surge instead but he probably was staying under 68% so he wouldn't get hit with diminishing returns using relics). But too much alacrity makes illegal mods basically obsolete, as solely putting points into the 4% alacrity bonus with burst volley and illegal mods going puts Charged Bursts and Aimed Shots exactly at 1sec, which is basically global cool down. As for sharpshooter being the best gunslinger spec it's purely subjective at this point without meters, I can say I have played all three specs a reasonable amount of time, the only one that doesn't do well as far as I can tell in PvE is sabo, with Dirty Fighting and Sharpshooting being about even (Which seems to be the consensus, some people claim sharp is better, others dirty fighting, but there's really no way to test it right now). But rotation wise flourish should be constantly applied, it last 45 second so it's not like you have to go out of your way very often to put it up, vital shot not as much of a priority since it is energy costly outside dirty fighting but it is one of your few sharpshooter options out of cover and with boss fights you usually are moving in and out of cover a lot. The quick workaround to spamming your CDs is to hit surrender beforehand to bring your threat as low as you can before you burst, but you shouldn't open a fight with it since tanks have enough trouble with threat generation at higher levels as it is.