Engineering Sniper / Saboteur Gunslinger in 2.0 End-game PVE

[board]

2.0 Engineering Sniper PVE Guide

by B'oarder Board, The Board Legacy, The Bastion

NO AMBUSH: 5/36/5
WITH AMBUSH: 7/36/3 - Swap points from Lethality's Deadly Directive to get Precision Ambush in Marksmanship.
SNAPSHOT:

• Hit boxes - which bosses will Engineering excel at?
• PVE trailer, how it looks like in a boss fight - video
• Single target rotation (no ambush) - video

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Quote:PART 0: Engineering Talents
PART 1: Abilities and Rotation
PART 1.2: Single target rotation
PART 2: Covered Escape and Scatter Bombs
PART 3: Hit the Circle
PART 3.1: Hit Box
PART 4: Parses
PART 5: Sneak Peek
PART 6: Variations

PART 0: ENGINEERING TREE TALENTS
Let's take a closer look...

Terminologies: Sniper - Gunslinger

Engineer's Toolbelt - Saboteur's Utility Belt
Talented will let you "spam" Frag Grenade every after 1 GCD. A very strong talent for 2 points and should help you a lot in AoE heavy fights. Recommended for raiding and general PvE play.

Explosive Engineering - Independent Anarchy
2.0 - Tooltip is updated to be more specific: Suppression Fire, Orbital Strike, Frag Grenade, Explosive Probe, Scatter Bombs and Cluster Bombs. This talent along with Experimental Explosives will super buff your Orbital Strike. Remember to keep it on cooldown!

Cluster Bombs - Contingency Charges
This talent is buffed to detonate every half second instead of 1 second. This means faster DPS and faster burst energy regen when the bombs detonate.

Imperial Methodology - Insurrection
This talent along with Cluster Bombs makes your Explosive Probe a key ability for Engineering since it provides a nice DPS boost as well as giving you a very solid energy regen. Using Explosive Probe will essentially be a net energy gain for you. Due to the myriad of talents the buff Explosive Probe, it is very clear that this ability should be used and kept on cooldown as much as possible.

Calculated Pursuit - Hot Pursuit
A nice ability for movement heavy fights if you can keep track of it and spam Overload Shot. Overload Shot should be used as a substitute for Rifle Shot anyway IF you have the energy to spare. If you can keep track of it, and upon exiting cover, then it is preferable to use Overload Shot over Rifle Shot because it does more DPS. Overload Shot should be key-bound especially as an Engineering sniper because it can serve as a "safety-net" type of ability that you can use to keep your Electrified Railgun DoT from falling off (see #8 below). Hit it during heavy movement fights to give you time to reposition to cast a Snipe or Series of Shots.

Experimental Explosives - Arsonist
A mandatory talent for Full Engineering. It increases the critical damage of your Plasma Probe, Orbital Strike and Cluster Bombs, 3 of your hardest hitting abilites. This makes Crit chance and Crit rating an important stat for Engineering Snipers. As far as what Crit Rating to aim for, I digress on the topic until we can have concrete numerical proof from the community. This talent along with Explosive Engineering will super buff your Orbital Strike and make it very worthwhile to keep on cooldown. Full Engineering is already very easy on the energy bar and there should be no reason to not cast Orbital Strike when it is up.

EMP Discharge - Sabotage
2.0 - Immediately finishes the cooldown on Adrenaline Probe, Shield Probe, Entrench, and Covered Escape. This ability does not respect the global cooldown. A nice PvP talent with great PvE uses as well. With EMP Discharge you essentially now have Adrenaline Probe on a 1 minute cooldown which is ~30 seconds earlier than what Lethality Snipers get. Engineering tree by default is already an energy efficient spec and to cap it off with this talent, gives you a larger margin for error when it comes to energy management. Used properly however, this energy can be converted into damage in multiple ways one being via SNIPE - SNIPE - SNIPE (followed by an Adrenaline Probe). More importantly this ability resets the cooldown of your Covered Escape, which is your hardest hitting ability when talented with Scatter Bombs. This will be further discussed below.

Electrified Railgun & 2.0 - Electrified Blast Passive 2/2 - Blazing Speed & (?)
2.0 - When Series of Shots deals damage, it electrifies the target, dealing 344 elemental damage over 6 seconds. Stacks up to 3 times. With Electrified Blast - Snipe and Overload Shot has a 100% chance to apply 1 stack of Electrified Railgun's effect to the target. This talent gives the aforementioned abilities a DoT effect that deal elemental damage over time. Although the DoT effect does not make up a big portion of your damage done, this talent is still a DPS increase and should be utilized as much as you can. For this purpose the single target rotation will revolve around giving Electrified Railgun as much uptime as possible. Due to the short 6 second duration of the DoT, you will want to use either Series of Shots, Sniper, or Overload Shot every after 2 GCD's. This will be explained and demonstrated using a video further down the guide.

Deployed Shields - Riot Screen
This is a huge survivability talent and should be taken in PvE. 6% damage reduction while in cover will equate to a lot of damage reduction over the course of a raid encounter. When predictable AoE damage will occur, it will not hurt to go into cover to benefit from this talent and help your healers. On top of that a 30 second reduction on your best PvE utility ability is something that will always be beneficial to your group. Note that starting in 2.0, Ballistic Shields, or more popularly called the "Sniper bubble" is no longer attached to your character and can be deployed and left at the spot where you initially activated it. Run in, drop Ballistic Shields near the tank, run out

Imperial Auto Loader - (?)
2.0 - Reduces the cooldown of Explosive Probe and Series of Shots by 4.5 seconds and reduces their energy cost by 6. Lower cooldown on your Series of Shots and Explosive Probe. Enough said!

Scatter Bombs 2/2 Passive - (?)
Reduces the energy cost of Fragmentation Grenade by 4. In addition, when rolling with Covered Escape, you have a 100% chance to drop 5 Scatter Bombs in a trail behind you. These bombs explode soon after, dealing X kinetic damage to any nearby enemy.

This talent will be your DPS bread and butter. You will rely on this for your burst and sustained DPS. Take note that these bombs will make up almost a quarter of your total damage done. Because of this, it is crucial that you utilize this talent as much as you can for maximum DPS. Remember that they deal kinetic damage and thus will be affected by armor penetration. Scatter Bombs will be discussed more detail further down the


PART 1: ABILITIES AND ROTATION
Your "single target rotation"

List of abilities:

Quote:Damage over time and debuffs
PP - Plasma Probe
IP - Interrogation Probe
CD - Corrosive Dart
EP - Explosive Probe (cluster bombs)
SS - Shatter Shot (armor penetration)

Single target ranged attack
SoS - Series of Shots
Snipe - Snipe (LS - Laze Target then Snipe)
RS - Rifle Shot (auto-attack)

Cooldowns
OS - Orbital Strike
AP - Adrenaline Probe
TA - Target Acquired

Full Engineering playstyle is similar to Lethality and Hybrid in that it revolves around keeping your DoTs and debuffs up as much as you can on your target. Playing Full Engineering in a flashpoint or raid requires that you keep your target afflicted with the following DoTs and debuffs:

Plasma Probe - Incendiary Grenade
This ability is buffed by your Explosive Engineering and Experimental Explosives

The pinnacle talent of the Engineering tree. This ability is your strongest DoT and should be kept on cooldown at all times. Note that this ability also benefits from all your talents that affect AoE namely Explosive Engineering and Experimental Explosives. The stun component is nice for PvP and will only have minor effects in boss encounters. For trash and day-to-day PvE however, the stun component can prove useful and can even be used to interrupt adds or targets that spawn in a boss fight. Careful use of Plasma Probe is key to the PvE raiding Engineer. You do not want to potentially wipe the raid by breaking CC'd targets as well as aggroing a pat that walks into your Plasma Probe. This DoT deals elemental damage and is not affected by armor penetration (the same goes for Corrosive Dart which deals internal damage).

Interrogation Probe - Shock Charge
Your second DoT that deals energy damage and can be mitigated by armor. This DoT will benefit from an armor penetration debuff. When talented this DoT will be very easy to reapply and should be kept up at all times.

Corrosive Dart - Vital Shot
Your third DoT. Internal damage type meaning it will not be mitigated by armor. This ability will not make up a big chunk of your total damage done but should still be applied to the boss at all times. However due to raid mechanics, you may be able to forego or delay using this ability if it means casting something else that is higher in your priority list, say Covered Escape or Orbital Strike. This ability can be used on multiple targets.

Explosive Probe - Sabotage Charge
One of the Engineering tree's "highlight" abilities. Definitely not a priority in other specs, but when fully talented this abiltiy serves the multi-purpose of being a strong DPS and utlity abiltiy. With reduced energy cost and increased damage, keeping this ability on cooldown is one of the priorities of the Engineering Sniper. When detonated, it will leave 4 stacks of Cluster Bombs that detonate over time when hit by blaster fire (from any source), giving you more DPS as well as refunding you 20 energy back, for a total of 5 energy gained when the full effect ends. Remember that this ability deals kinetic damage and will benefit greatly from an armor penetration debuff. Use this ability on cooldown.

Shatter Shot - Flourish Shot
I cannot stress how important an armor penetration debuff is to the Engineering Sniper. More than half of your abilities will benefit from armor penetration. All your abiltiies that deal weapon, kinetic, and energy damage will do more as long as an armor penetration debuff is present on the target. In my gear for example:

• A Scatter Bomb with Shatter Shot does 1600 damage - without Shatter Shot it does 1500.
• Interrogation Probe with Shatter Shot ticks for 600 damage - without Shatter Shot it ticks for 500.
  

Quote:NOW that we are done with your DoTs and debuffs, let's talk about your single target ranged attacks namely, Series of Shots, Snipe, and Ambush.

Series of Shots 2.0 - 14 energy cost, 10.5 sec cooldown talented - Speed Shot
This ability is buffed with cooldown reduction and given a DoT component (via Electrified Railgun) in the Engineering tree. This will make up the top half of your total damage done, second only to Scatter Bombs and should be used on cooldown to maintain and reapply stacks of your Electrified Railgun. Note that each hit of Series of Shots will apply a stack of this DoT up to a maximum of 3 stacks.

Snipe - Charged Burst
Once you have applied all your DoTs and debuffs and Series of Shots is on cooldown, this will be the ability you will want to cast. This will also be part of your single target rotation and is crucial in maintaining 3 stacks of Electrified Railgun. Remember to keep Lazed Snipe on cooldown as well since Lazed Snipe (1 minute cooldown) will make your next Snipe an automatic critical hit. Snipe will also be on the top half of your total damage done and should be used as an energy dump when you have Adrenaline Probe available.

Ambush - Aimed Shot
This ability does not benefit from your Electrified Railgun talent. Cast a Snipe or Series of Shots after each Ambush you do to refresh your Electrified Railgun DoT.

Quote:NEXT stop your offensive Cooldowns.

Orbital Strike - XS Freighter Flyby
Use it every 1 minute. This ability is buffed by your Explosive Engineering and Experimental Explosives. Orbital Strike should be used on cool down. More on this ability further down the guide.

Adrenaline Probe - Cool Head
Your on-demand burst energy regen. Using EMP Discharge will reset your Adrenaline Probe as well and it is on a 1 minute cooldown.

Target Acquired - Illegal Mods
Aside from the energy gain it gives when you have the 2-pc PvE set bonus, this ability will give you an armor penetration buff which is very desirable for the Engineering Sniper. Remember all your single target ranged attacks deal weapon damage and your Scatter Bombs, Interrogation Probe, Explosive Probe and Cluster Bombs do kinetic damage. All these will benefit from armor penetration.


PART 1.2: SIMPLE SINGLE TARGET ROTATION (NO AMBUSH)
This rotation aims to give you the most uptime on your DoTs and debuffs as possible. Foregoing Ambush all together to be able to keep 3 stacks of Electrified Railgun up. I've divided the section into two parts. (A different rotation is one that includes Ambush which is placed on the purple boxes and will occupy TWO slots - more on this down the guide).

1ST DIAGRAM
Your duty as an Engineering Sniper is to keep all your DoTs and debuffs up and at the same time maintain a steady stream of Electrified Railgun with 3 stacks. I found that you can do this by following the pattern shown in this image:



Your DoTs and debuffs will go through the purple boxes in the diagram while you use Series of Shots and Snipe to maintain 3 stacks of the Electrified Railgun DoT. The rest of the time you will be using instant casts to maintain these DoTs and use Rifle Shot or Overload Shot for filler. I placed the DoTs in that priority list (PP, IP, EP (+Cluster Bombs), CD) because if you look at this pie chart:



You will see that the abilities are in that order in terms of percentage of damage done (with Plasma Probe on top followed closely by Interrogation Probe and Explosive Probe + Cluster Bombs). Take note that Plasma Probe has an 18 sec cooldown and lasts 18 seconds just like Interrogation Probe. If you always use Plasma Probe before Interrogation Probe, then you know that when Plasma Probe comes back up again, then it's time to refresh Interrogation Probe on your target.

Ofcourse Shatter Shot should be prioritized over your DoTs because maintaining the 20% armor penetration debuff equates to a huge DPS increase not only to you but to your group. Take note that Interrogation Probe, Series of Shots, Snipe, Explosive Probe, Cluster Bombs, and Scatter Bombs, all do either kinetic or weapon damage. These damage types are mitigated by armor meaning that an armor penetration debuff will increase the damage they do.

2ND DIAGRAM
If we plug in the abilities into the purple boxes, this is how an opener will look like:


Remember that in order to keep up 3 stacks of Electrified Railgun, you will need to use either a Snipe or Overload Shot every 2 GCDs. If you have Series of Shots available, you can afford to let the 3 stacks fall off since Series of Shots will easily reapply them anyway.

What I found while testing the new Full Engineering spec is that you have no one-size-fits-all rotation. The best rotational guide I can suggest is to keep these in mind.

• 2 GCDs to put DoTs / debuffs up
• After 2 GCDs use a Snipe or Series of Shots whichever one is available to maintain your Electrified Railgun stacks
• A Rifle Shot counts as 1 GCD or 1 purple box in the diagram
• Use Overload Shot for movement heavy fights to keep your Electrified Railgun stacks from falling off
  

Other DPS tips:

• Be careful when spamming Snipe. Using Snipe twice in a row might leave you energy starved and unable to instantly reapply your DoTs
• Keep SoS on cooldown. It is your 2nd highest DPS ability followed closely by Plasma Probe and Snipe
• Keep your Shatter Shot up. Armor Penetration benefits 6 of your 9 DPS abilities!
  

PRACTICE:
Click here for a simple opener:
Abbreviations:

Quote:PP - Plasma Probe
IP - Interrogation Probe
SoS - Series of Shots
SS - Shatter Shot
EP - Explosive Probe
CD - Corrosive Dart
RS - Rifle Shot - Flurry of Bolts

1. PP - IP - SoS - SS - EP - Snipe - CD - RS - SoS
2. PP - IP - Snipe - RS - CD - SoS - Snipe - RS - RS*
3. EP - PP - SoS - IP - CD - Snipe - RS - X - SoS

At this point you are probably waiting for your DoTs to run out or waiting for SoS to come back up. You can either burn through your energy and increase DPS by spamming Snipe followed by Adrenaline Probe, or rotate between Snipe and Rifle Shots to keep your 3 stacks of Electrified Railgun from falling off.

You must have noticed that the cooldowns of abilities as well as the duration of your DoTs have not "synced" or "aligned". That is why we follow a pattern instead of a set rotation. Every time you use 2 DoTs or 2 GCDs, you follow it up with a Series of Shots or Snipe depending on which one is available. When no DoTs need refreshing and your ranged attack abilities have not come off cooldown, this is a good time to plan your positioning and prioritize which abilities you will want to use next. As a final not, I think it is too much work to try and memorize a one-size-fits-all rotation for Full Engineering. I found that it is easier to manage DoTs by following the tips mentioned above. Remember:

Quote:

• Plasma Probe and Interrogation Probe both last for 18 seconds. Corrosive Dart lasts for 15 seconds.
• When Plasma Probe ends, you know it's time to reapply Interrogation Probe. After that Corrosive Dart is next. If you do it this way, then the only DoT you ever need to watch out for is Plasma Probe. And Plasma Probe has a huge 18 second cooldown. It shouldn't be hard to miss.
• The "GCD abilities" or abilities in the purple boxes in the diagram, will always be instant cast. Everytime you use 2 GCDs, follow it up with either a Series of Shots, Snipe (or Overload Shot) to maintain your Electrified Railgun. (Exception for when you include Ambush on cool down. Remember Electrified Railgun needs to be refreshed every 3 seconds. Casting Ambush takes at most 2.5 seconds)
  

Click here for the entire album.
Watch the basic single target rotation (no Ambush, no Roll, no offensive cooldowns) below:

PART 2: COVERED ESCAPE AND SCATTER BOMBS
Engineering: The AoE King

The Engineering tree has always been an AoE-centric tree. In 2.0, this AoE capability is increased even more to make you arguably one of the best, if not the best AoE class. This can be attributed to the following: Engineer's Toolbelt (for a spammable Frag Grenade), Explosive Engineering, Experimental Explosives, EMP Discharge (which resets your Covered Escape) and ofcourse your super buffed Orbital Strike.

To cap this off you have:

Quote:Covered Escape Instant, 20 sec cooldown
Roll forward 18 meters, freeing yourself from movement-impairing effects and landing crouched behind cover. While rolling your chance to dodge attacks is increased by 100%. When timed right, can resist any single target attack or AoE attack for the duration of the roll. This can be used defensively to help your healers or offensively by rolling through the boss and not worry about cleave or AoE attacks. What makes Covered Escape so strong as an Engineering Sniper is:

Quote:Scatter Bombs Passive 2/2
Reduces the energy cost of Fragmentation Grenade by 4. In addition, when rolling with Covered Escape, you have a 100% chance to drop 5 Scatter Bombs in a trail behind you. These bombs explode soon after, dealing X kinetic damage to any nearby enemy.

This talent is buffed by your Explosive Engineering and Experimental Explosives. In my gear with 1311 Power a single Scatter Bomb hits for roughly 1500 damage without armor penetration. If all 5 bombs hit a target, that is a total of 7500 damage done. Do not be fooled by this number though! If you look at this pie chart below, you can see that Scatter Bombs is very powerful and can make up almost a quarter of your total damage done.

Say... all 5 bombs hit a target and crit? In my gear I see a single Scatter Bomb crit for 3500. If all 5 crit, that is 17,500 damage using 1 ability. I use EMP Discharge to reset Covered Escape and drop 5 Scatter Bombs again and the highest damage I could be doing is 35,000 damage in ~2 GCDs! Ofcourse you will be lucky, and it is close to impossible, to have even 4 out of 5 bombs crit but what this tells us is that Scatter Bombs is one HARD-hitting-ability and should be used in the best way possible. Meaning Covered Escape is now your #1 priority, meaning you are required to have good positioning 110% of the time in a boss fight, meaning you should try to get all 5 bombs to hit at least once on any target in order for it to deal its ideal minimum damage.

As you can already tell there are a lot of pre-requisites by having a dodge roll as your main DPS ability. Engineering's Covered Escape and Scatter Bombs adds this unique playstyle to the Sniper class and makes it a high-risk high-reward kind of spec to play. The damage you do will be dependent quite literally on your positioning. Some people might like this and some might not, but regardless Full Engineering is a contender in end-game PvE if you can make good use of Scatter Bombs. If you can make it work Engineering will definitely give Marksmanship and Lethality a run for their money.

Check out this parse for example. That is 2951 DPS (wearing Arkanian gear), 20% of which comes from Scatter Bombs followed by Series of Shots at 13%. If you look at the pie chart:



You can see that a lot of your damage will come from those 2 abilities with Plasma Probe and Orbital Strike tailing closely behind. What this tells us is that as long as you keep these abilities on cooldown:

• Covered Escape every 20 seconds
• EMP Discharge every 60 seconds
• Series of Shots every 10 seconds
• Plasma Probe every 18 seconds and
• Orbital Strike every 60 seconds
• (Snipe as your energy dump ability)
  

You will be doing at least half of your potential DPS. That is not including Ambush into the rotation. The rest will come from your "single target rotation", keeping the rest of your DoTs up as well as using Snipe and Overload Shot to maintain 3 stacks of Electrified Railgun. That shouldn't be too hard right?


PART 3: HIT CIRCLE
Hit the circle (or box)

In day-to-day PvE it may not be. Mobs will most likely melt in one wave of Scatter Bombs and Plasma Probe while you spam Frag Grenade to finish off any stragglers. In a raid setting however, in order for Engineering to potentially beat MM and Lethality, first you have to consider the boss' hit box or hit circle. If it's big enough for you to roll from one end to the other, thus making it possible for 5 of your Scatter Bombs to hit, then Engineering is good to go. However if the boss has a small hit circle (these are usually humanoid bosses), then you won't be able to utilize Scatter Bombs to its full potential and it might be worth it to respec into MM or Lethality instead. Note that most world bosses have huge hit circles too so I'll add them to the list. Here is a short list (imo) of some of the more relevant / recent bosses and their hit box/hit circles:

Quote:Definitely small: (humanoids)
Ciphas, Heirad and Kelsara
Operations Chief
Olok the Shadow
Cartel Warlords
Dread Master Styrak
Col. Vorgath

Small to Medium:
High Warlord Kephess
Toth and Zorn
Kephess The Undying
Dashroode
Bo Zarram (can be tanked near the wall)

DEFINITELY LARGE:
Xenoanalyst II
Dreadtooth
Firebrand and Stormcaller
Writhing Horror
Operator IX
Terror From Beyond
Titan-6
Trasher
Kell Dragon

Remember that the bulk of your damage will come from Scatter Bombs. You have to be constantly aware of your surroundings so that you don't Covered Escape into something that might kill you. Due to the nature of Covered Escape, obviously there will be some encounters where Full Engineering is not a good choice. One example of this is Dread Master Styrak. Although 5 Scatter bombs can hit the entire length of the Kell Dragon the same won't be true for Dread Master Styrak himself. His hit circle isn't big enough and second you don't want to roll into the adds that close in on you. The same can be said for Toth and Zorn. That fight is too melee unfriendly as it is and you are better off helping your healers by DPSing that encounter as Marks or Lethality instead. If you can pull more daring stunts however, and that is in my opinion the greater appeal of the spec, then as you can see we have quite a list of bosses to down using the new Full Engineering.


PART 3.1: HIT BOX



PART 4: PARSES
TRAINING DUMMY

• 5 mins - 2951 DPS with Orbital Strike, Covered Escape, EMP Discharge, and single target rotation.
• 10 mins - 2467 DPS with Orbital Strike and single target rotation.
• 30 seconds - 4179 DPS - during a 30 second burn phase. This is doable, ideally every 60 seconds since Orbital Strike and EMP Discharge are both on a 1 minute cooldown and the bulk of that damage comes from Orbital Strike and Covered Escape (Scatter Bombs). This is a "lucky parse" with an abnormally high amount of critical hits. Orbital strike had a 50% crit chance which is 25% more than my NORMAL crit chance.
  

OPERATIONS

Quote:Operator IX - http://www.torparse.com/a/162518/3

• Adds / mechanics: The small silver adds are easy to dispatch with your single target rotation. The same can be said for the bigger gold adds.
• Boss hit circle / hit box: ✔ Operator is huge. The width of this boss is big enough so that it covers the entire 18m length of your roll.
• Covered Escape: ✔ Your dodge roll will "work wonders" on the cores. If you roll directly in front of the cores, you will roll a few feet forward as you hit the wall thus dropping all your bombs in the same spot. 1:10 of video.
  

Quote:Kephess - http://www.torparse.com/a/162518/10

• It may be worth going Lethality or Marks for this fight since Kephess isn't big enough to get hit by 5 Scatter Bombs as Full Engineering.
• Boss hit circle / hit box: Kephess is a bit small. You may only be able to get 1-2 Scatter Bombs off on him. I haven't tried Hybrid or Marks for this boss but so far I think the spec is viable and does more than enough DPS. I certainly didnt felt like I was getting carried in this boss fight.
  

Quote:The Terror From Beyond - http://www.torparse.com/a/162518/13 (No Void disturbance)

• Adds / mechanics: ✔ Phase 1 tentacles have huge hit circles. Plenty of room to maneuver but just make sure you reposition yourself asap unless you want to get slammed. Did not encounter any problems being on add duty or on tentacle duty.
• Covered Escape: Phase 2. Covered Escape DOES NOT drop you off the platform but "jumps" you into another platform instead. I found that at most 2 bombs will hit the tentacle on the platform. Note that the bombs you drop while "flying" in mid air will hit Terror From Beyond itself but with reduced damage (iirc).
• Tandtrum phase: When you Covered Escape during Phase 3, all 5 of your Scatter Bombs will hit the boss. This is definitely the part of the fight where you will shine the most.
• Note: Phase 1 and Tantrum Phase will be your strongest areas. Your DPS may lower slightly during Phase 2 due to Covered Escape rolling you to the next platform.
  

PART 5: SNEEK PEAK
The playstyle of Engineering is the exact opposite of Marksman. If Marksman needs you to turret and stay in cover to channel abilities, then Engineering allows you to be very mobile, only needing to get into cover for a Series of Shots, Snipe, Explosive Probe or mitigate some incoming damage. The rest of the time you are moving on your two feet, casting instant DoTs, laying down Plasma Probes and Orbital Strikes while looking for a good spot to dodge roll into. I need not remind you that as Full Engineering, outside of being able to put your DoTs from ~30m away, most of the time you will be engaged in close-quarters combat; running into melee range when getting ready to use Covered Escape.

You will be doing your single target rotation with:

• Covered Escape every 20 seconds
• EMP Discharge every 60 seconds
• Orbital Strike every 60 seconds
  

Here is a video trailer of how Full Engineering looks like in a raid (includes Operator, Kephess, Thrasher, Titan 6 and TFB HM)

PART 6: VARIATIONS
The single target rotation posted here is a AMBUSH-less rotation used to get yourself familiar with the flow of the Engineering rotation. A rotation with more DPS is going to be one with Ambush used on cooldown and placed as part of the PURPLE abilities. Ambush will take up TWO SPOTS IN THE PURPLE ABILITIES, (seen in 1:14 of the video guide) because it takes ~2.5 seconds to cast. Since Electrified Railgun (3x stacks) needs to be refreshed every 2 GCDs or ~3 seconds, you will have to use a Snipe or preferably a SoS afterwards each time you use Ambush."

Quote:1) On single target rotation - Use Ambush on CD. Include Ambush in your "single target rotation." Ambush will occupy the "purple boxes" and will use up two slots. This means that every time you use Ambush, follow it up with either a SoS or Overload Shot/Snipe to try to maintain your Electrified Railgun stacks.

Quote:2) On talent trees - Swap points from Lethality's Deadly Directive to get Precision Ambush in Marksmanship.

[board]

Edited to include the correct pie charts.

Updated with Gunslinger terminologies.

[cosmicdebris]

I know data is still pretty new so far, but does anyone have any rough idea of what kind of stats we should aim for? I've read that 20% is basically the soft cap for crit now. I assume we still want 100% ranged accuracy. How about Surge? And now Alacrity?

[board]

Here's my attempt at parsing 270 and 0*** crit rating for Engineering..

Notes:
1) ~52 dps increase with more crit gear
2) I may have some crit but can not remember exactly how much.. But my bet would be between 0-93***
3) Using the same Conq and Partisan SA relic combination. I swapped 2 crystals, one mod and replaced my verpine acc/power implant for a black market acc/crit implant

2488 DPS WITH 270 CRIT RATING

' Wrote:Conq and Partisan SA Relics
2509 http://www.torparse.com/a/227352/time/13...0/Overview 39%
2516 http://www.torparse.com/a/227352/time/13...0/Overview 37%
2484 http://www.torparse.com/a/227352/time/13...0/Overview 38%
2422 http://www.torparse.com/a/227352/time/13...0/Overview 36%
2509 http://www.torparse.com/a/227352/time/13...0/Overview 39%
2490 http://www.torparse.com/a/227391/time/13...0/Overview 38%
AVG DPS: 2488
AVG CRIT: 38%

2436 DPS WITH 0-93*** CRIT RATING

' Wrote:Conq and Partisan SA Relics
2443 DPS http://www.torparse.com/a/222865/time/13...0/Overview 35%
2378 DPS http://www.torparse.com/a/222865/time/13...0/Overview 30%
2481 DPS http://www.torparse.com/a/222865/time/13...0/Overview 38%
2422 DPS http://www.torparse.com/a/222865/time/13...0/Overview 33%
2430 DPS http://www.torparse.com/a/222865/time/13...0/Overview 35%
2475 DPS http://www.torparse.com/a/222865/time/13...0/Overview 37%
AVG DPS: 2436 DPS
AVG CRIT: 34%

[KayGBee]

Thank you for posting this.

I am curious, I had heard pre 2.0 that a hybrid Eng/Leth (Sabateur/Dirty) was putting out high DPS is this now true? I see more talk regarding full Eng (Sab) instead?

I have not been able to run any numbers (I'm not close to 55 yet) so I was wondering what others are seeing.