Immortal | Defense Compendium | A Tank's Guide To The Galaxy

[theothersteve7]

Nice to see someone working that out. I have a bad habit of using Force Scream / Smash back-to-back as the fight starts, and I need to stop that. Given the mechanics of Courage, it's important to space those out in your rotation as much as possible.

I'm also forgoing the use of Backhand early in my rotation. I'd rather open with Throw -> Charge -> Sunder -> Crushing Blow. That does nearly the same amount of threat, and gets 5 stacks instantly rather than "wasting" two stacks.

One way to model our long-term rotation may be to look at it from a one-minute perspective. In one minute, we can use:

13 - 14 Sunders (+26 to +28)
10 Riposte (-10)
4 Blade Storm (-16 to -4)
4 Sweep (-12 to -0)
4 Guardian Slash (-16)
1 Hilt Strike (-3)
1 Stasis (+3)
2 Master Strike [can be 2 GCDs]
1 Push / Saber Throw / Leap combo [3 GCDS, edges out a sunder] (+6)
1 Enrage (+6)

That's about 32 GCDs of forty accounted for, and ignoring Dispatch. Adding up the net focus of these abilities, I get +8 to -26, depending on Courage procs. Then we add another 30 focus for Soresu form, and we're at 4 to 38 focus per minute with 8 GCDs to burn it in.

8 uses of Slash per minute would put that at +6 to -28. If your courage stacks average 2.47, you will end up dead even. Any higher means surplus Focus, any lower means you hit Strike instead and gain 4 net Focus per hit. You can also extend the Master Strikes to use their full 2 GCDs, gaining 3 net focus each time you do so at what I believe to be a negligible loss of DPS (Slash damage minus half of Master Strike damage).

Of course, that's assuming a lot. A perfect rotation, no major cooldown conflicts, with no focus ever wasted, rapid courage stacks between every ability use, constant Soresu gains, and it's even assuming you can use the Force Push combo. Hitting Strike a few times won't gimp your threat nearly as much as missing GCDs will. On the other hand, if you get knocked back with any frequency, or change targets, the model breaks another way as you get a free saberthrow/leap and bonus focus. Eight slashes also cut the cooldown of Combat Focus by a nontrivial 24 seconds, which is roughly the equivalent of getting 3 more Focus for free.

I guess the conclusion of this post is that if you do your rotation right, you should be hitting Strike no more often than you hit, say, Master Strike. And ideally, never. Of course, a fight under ideal circumstances isn't really a fight at all.