SWTOR 7.7 Concealment Operative PvE Guide and Best Builds

SWTOR 7.0 Concealment Operative Guide (DPS PvE) for beginner players and more experienced veterans: Skills, Choices, Rotations, Gearing, Builds, Tips!

Introduction to Concealment Operative

Concealment is the premier tech stealth discipline. They deal exceptional single-target damage by eviscerating their victims with a variety of vibroknife attacks and horrifying toxins.

Concealment truly excels when it comes to single-target damage, they are one of the best specs in the game in terms of sustained damage output and can deliver potent damage when required for burst DPS checks.

That being said, you will have to earn that damage output because Concealment is, in my opinion, the most challenging DPS spec in the game. Its rotation is complicated and variable, requiring you think on your feet with almost no access to useful abilities with beyond 4m range and manage 2 resources.

Like other “burst” specs, it can’t deliver AoE damage in Operations and PvP without sacrifices, but it’s fantastic in solo content and Flashpoints.

In terms of survivability, Concealment excels at mitigating spike damage but cannot handle sustained periods of high DTPS, the likes of which you’ll find in all burn phases and fights meant to challenge healers.

Lethality is much better at mitigating sustained damage, so you do have access to an alternative when you need it, but you’ll have to give up access to a cheese and learn another challenging rotation.

Some of these problems, like the uptime demands, can be fixed with simple changes, but a lot of Operative DPS limitations come from the vast differences in survivability that exist between each discipline and the lack of parity in effectiveness between PvE and PvP.

Major Changes in 7.0

Utility points are gone! Instead, there is a new system called the Ability Tree. Each discipline has 8 choices where they pick 1 of 3 options. The options have several similarities across the combat styles:

• 2 choices buff a discipline-specific ability (2 abilities, 1 choice each).
• 3 choices which are just old Utility effects. These choices are almost always the same for all disciplines. 
• 2 choices where you’re picking between 1 ability or 1 of 2 passives. One of the ability choices tends to be an offensive cooldown (OCD). The other seems to be related to PvP balance, but there isn’t a clear pattern beyond the choice forcing players to decide which of 3 capabilities they want to keep.
• 1 choice where you’re picking 1 of 3 abilities. One of the abilities is always one of your primary CCs, either the 8s mez or 4s hard stun. Another of the abilities is the movement ability with the longest cooldown. The third option is less consistent, it seems to be there as an extra balance lever for BioWare since some abilities that got locked away are more impactful than others. The 3 abilities are almost always the same for each discipline.

This means almost all disciplines had 5 abilities locked away behind choices with the option for players to keep up to 3 of them. In addition, many extremely situational abilities were pruned entirely. Concealment permanently lost access to these abilities: 

• Countermeasures (kind of)
• Sever Tendon
• Resuscitation Probe
• Stealth Rez

Battle rezzes, in general, are now healer-only, but there is no longer a global 5 min lockout on those abilities, so it’s treated just like any other ability, albeit with a much longer cooldown. This was done because BioWare made it so stealthing out in Operations no longer actually pulls you out of combat, making stealth rezzing impossible. You can still activate Cloaking Screen and it will reduce your threat and make your next Backstab deal more damage.

Guarding is now a tank-only ability, which is the logical next step since the nerf to Guard for DPS partway through 6.0 was ineffective at stopping its ubiquity in PvP. 

The word Imperial has been replaced with something that is faction-agnostic since Republic Origin Stories now have access to the combat style. Unlike Snipers, Operatives didn’t have any abilities that included the word, but they did have a few passives that now have slightly different names. For example, Imperial Brew was changed to Potent Brew.

Group Composition Tips

In order to deal maximum damage, Concealment requires 1 other DPS debuff:

DPS Debuff	Presence of debuff increases DPS by approximately
Armor	4.8%
Total DPS Gain:	4.8%

Concealment is somewhat unique in that it only requires 1 DPS debuff to deal maximum DPS, though just because it only requires a single debuff doesn’t mean it’s more independent.

The spec gains a fair bit of DPS from that one debuff. Thankfully, almost all DPS specs benefit greatly from the armor debuff, so it’s likely you’ll have one in the group. Operative DPS in general offers great synergy with its own DPS debuffs as well since it provides both the Tech and Internal / Elemental debuffs. 

DPS Mindset

How can I do as much damage as possible in each GCD (global cooldown, 1.5 second duration before you can activate another ability) given the constraints of the fight? Which ability do I use right now that will provide me the most DPS? How can I maximize my uptime? If I’m not activating an ability right now, why not? Can I finish this cast before I need to move? What happens if I don’t have time to finish a cast before moving? Can the healers deal with it without too much stress?  

Check out the SWTOR Damage Types and Damage Mitigation guide for more details on how they differ from each other and how to determine which attack does what damage!

Our in-depth analysis and breakdown of the relationship between mechanics and strategy in boss fights in SWTOR may also help you perform better in group content.

Abilities Explained

Please have the game open while reading through the next few sections. I will not be writing out ability descriptions and I will only be transcribing the components of discipline passives that directly relate to the ability and rotation. This forces you to read through what everything does so that you can understand what all of your passives and abilities do as well as locate these abilities in-game. Make sure you place all of these abilities on your bar in an order that makes sense to you. 

Single Target Rotational Abilities, Attributes, and Important Procs

Tactical Advantage

Tactical Advantage (TA) is a proc, not an ability, but it is an integral part of playing Operative in general. You can read through the description for it listed alongside your other combat style passives, but it isn’t very helpful in explaining what exactly a TA is.

Tactical Advantage is an additional resource (alongside Energy). In order to use some abilities, you have to spend 1 TA. You can gain a TA from the following sources:

• Dealing damage with Backstab initiated from stealth
• Dealing damage with Veiled Strike
• Activating Stim Boost
• Landing the killing blow on an enemy

Most abilities have cooldowns, so this just represents an additional resource to manage, though this essentially functions as the cooldown for your Laceration ability. The following abilities cost a TA: 

• Laceration
• Toxic Haze
• Tactical Superiority
• Kolto Infusion

For Concealment, you typically want to generate TAs as often as possible, so long as it doesn’t get in the way of dealing damage with your strongest abilities or cause the Acid Blade DoT to fall off (if you’re using the Acid Lash tactical).

When you have the opportunity to gain a TA, it’s important that you don’t already have the maximum number of TAs or else you will effectively be wasting it, so you have to predict when you’re about to get one to avoid this.

In addition, the Tactician Legendary Implant allows you to gain 10% crit chance for 10 seconds whenever you generate a TA. Since there’s no longer a rate limit on the effect like there was in 6.0, you don’t have to worry about maximizing its uptime.

Backstab

(Tech/Kinetic/Direct/Single Target/Instant)
This is the only ability in the game that requires you to be behind your target in order to be usable. In addition, if it is used from stealth, it deals more damage and grants a Tactical Advantage (TA).

Thankfully, Volatile Substance provides a debuff that allows you to use this ability while in front of your target as well and be treated as though you attacked from stealth, though it isn’t always up.

When your target does not have this debuff and you aren’t in stealth, it’s important to use Cloaking Screen (if it’s available) so you can receive a TA and deal more damage. Even without the bonus damage, Backstab is one of your most damaging abilities. Backstab has 1 DoT, and 2 procs associated with it that are relevant to your rotation:

Acid Blade
Dealing damage with Backstab applies a 6s DoT, called Poisoned (Acid Blade), and increases your armor penetration by 30% for 15 seconds. The armor penetration proc should also never fall off since it lasts much longer than Backstab’s cooldown. The DoT is what we care about.

The Poisoned (Acid Blade) DoT is 1 of 3 ways you can detonate Volatile Substance, and the only one that’s 100% rotational. The other abilties are Toxic Haze and Corrosive Dart, which tick far less often.

With the Acid Lash tactical, the DoT should have as high of uptime as possible, 100% on a dummy. For some boss fights, 100% uptime on Acid Blade is impossible, but if there isn’t any downtime, you should never let this fall off.

Calculated Frenzy
Dealing damage with Backstab grants Calculated Frenzy, which increases your ranged and tech critical chance by 10% for 15 seconds. Just like the Acid Blade proc, this should never fall off.

Volatile Substance

(Tech/Internal/Direct/Single Target/Instant)
This extremely gruesome ability deals roughly the same amount of damage as Backstab (though the new autocrit makes Volatile Substance deal considerably more on average).

Volatile Substance is quite unique as an ability because it can only deal damage after it has been on the target for 3 seconds and takes damage from one of your Poison effects, either Acid Blade or Corrosive Dart. 

While damage output alone is enough to make it so that you have to use it on cooldown, you have to consider if the target will die before you can trigger the damage.

When you switch targets, Acid Blade might not be on the target and Backstab may not be available, so you may have to use Corrosive Dart to trigger it, and that might not be worth applying if the target is about to die since it’s an 18 second DoT. Volatile Substance has 2 debuffs associated with it that are relevant to your rotation:

Assailable
This is the internal/elemental debuff and is part of the base ability. This debuff is considered the second-best DPS debuff in the game since almost every spec deals some sort of internal/elemental damage and the debuff is 7% compared to the 5% that most of the other debuffs provide.

The armor debuff is typically better because it usually affects a greater proportion of the total damage dealt, but in certain compositions, it is possible for this debuff to be the best for your group. 

Revealing Weakness
Dealing damage with Volatile Substance applies Revealing Weakness to the target, allowing your next Backstab against the target to be usable while face-to-face with the target and treated as though you attacked from stealth.

This debuff makes it so that Backstab gets to deal its additional damage, makes it so that you don’t have to care about positioning nearly as much, and makes it so that Backstab grants a TA. Since Volatile Substance and Backstab have different cooldown durations, sometimes you will have to use Backstab but won’t have this debuff available.

The best way to tell if you’ll have this debuff is to just look at the cooldown on Volatile Substance immediately after using Backstab. If Volatile Substance’s cooldown is longer than Backstab’s, you won’t have the Revealing Weakness debuff for your next Backstab and will need to use Cloaking Screen.

Remember that using Cloaking Screen while you have the Revealing Weakness debuff yields no additional benefits, so save Cloaking Screen for when you won’t have the Revealing Weakness debuff.

Laceration

(Tech/Kinetic/Direct/Single Target/Casted)
Like many of Concealment’s abilities, Laceration is rather unique because it’s used as often as many other classes’ filler abilities, but it hits a lot harder than most other fillers.

Of course, Laceration isn’t as simple to use as other fillers because it requires and consumes a TA. In general, the goal of the rotation is to be able to use this ability as often as possible in order to minimize the number of weaker abilities you have to use. Laceration has 3 procs, 1 tactical item, and 1 discipline passive associated with it that are relevant to your rotation.

Collateral Strike
Laceration triggers a Collateral Strike, dealing additional kinetic damage. This is basically just extra damage on this ability. In PvE, the fact that it isn’t just a hidden percentage damage increase doesn’t really matter beyond being a flashy way to have other procs associated with Laceration. In PvP, it means that part of this attack’s damage has extra chances to go through mitigation like shield and defense chance. 

Tactical Opportunity
Collateral Strike immediately re-grants a TA when hitting a Poisoned target. Cannot occur more than once every 10 seconds. It’s technically important to make sure you’re getting this as often as possible, though because you have so many other important considerations, it’s difficult to actually change your rotation to benefit from this proc more often.

The biggest thing you can do is just maximize Acid Blade’s uptime so you’re never missing out on the proc when you otherwise would have gotten it. Since this effect triggers off of the Collateral Strike damage, which happens after the Laceration damage, you may have to wait a split second before deciding which ability to use next if you had max stacks of TA when you activated Laceration.

Try to get a sense of when you think this will proc or your APM will suffer. You need to be able to decide basically instantaneously whether you use Laceration next or something that generates a TA.

Culling
Increases the damage dealt by Laceration and Collateral Strike by 5%. In addition, when Collateral Strike damages a target, you recover 2 Energy. This proc makes the effective cost of Laceration only 8 Energy rather than 10.

This is important to know as you get close to 60 Energy. The flat damage increase does not have any effect on your rotation, I only included it since it specifically mentioned Laceration and Collateral Strike. The only thing that really matters rotationally is the Energy refund. 

Acid Lash Tactical Item
This is your default tactical item that makes it so your Acid Blade DoT deals more damage and dealing damage with Laceration refreshes the duration on the Acid Blade DoT and ticks its damage. This tactical item allows you to have 100% uptime on the Acid Blade DoT, assuming there isn’t any downtime.

Since the DoT only lasts 6 seconds, there’s a high chance it will fall off if there is any sort of downtime. It can also fall off if you have to use 3 abilities in a row that are not Backstab or Laceration.

I will talk about this in greater detail later on, but it is important to know the priority well enough so that you don’t let it fall off accidentally since it will create problems in your rotation, like dealing less damage overall due to less DoT ticks, dealing less damage with Laceration, and potentially not triggering Volatile Substance when necessary. 

Prey on the Weak
Laceration deals 10% more damage to targets affected by your Acid Blade DoT. Thanks to Acid Lash, it is possible to always benefit from this passive, though it also represents yet another reason that you need to make sure that the target always has Acid Blade.

Veiled Strike

(Tech/Kinetic/Direct/Single Target/Instant)
This ability’s primary purpose is to generate a TA for you to use on Laceration, and since the goal of the rotation is to be able to use Laceration as much as possible, you’ll be using this ability fairly often as well. It’s basically your second filler.

It deals a bit less damage and costs more Energy than Laceration, so it should never be used when you have max TA or when a higher-priority ability would max out your TAs.

It’s a bit more complicated than that and its usage frequency is build-dependent. Some builds require you to use Veiled Strike on cooldown while others require you to be more judicious. All of them depend on how much Energy you have.

Your main considerations are which abilities you have available, how many TAs you have, and when you’ll next need to spend one. Veiled Strike does not have any passives or procs associated with it that I haven’t already mentioned.

Crippling Slice

(Tech/Kinetic/Direct/Single Target/Instant)
This ability deals very little damage per use, though it’s free, and if you don’t use it roughly on cooldown, you will run out of Energy unless the fight has a lot of downtime. The talent choice in the ability tree further incentivizes its use.

It’s far more of a PvP thing, but I would also like to note that Crippling Slice does prevent the target from turning, allowing you to get behind your target for a Backstab.

Crippling Slice does not have any additional procs, debuffs, or discipline passives associated with it that are relevant to your rotation. However, the talent you choose will determine how and when you use Crippling Slice, to the extent that it defines your rotation.

Corrosive Dart

(Tech/Internal/Periodic/Single Target/Instant)
This DoT deals slightly less damage than Laceration, and while it doesn’t require a TA to use, it does cost more Energy and potentially makes the rotation more difficult depending on your ability tree choices. There are 5 instances in your rotation where Corrosive Dart should be used:

1. If everything is on cooldown and you don’t have any TAs for Laceration. It’s difficult to execute the priority perfectly and if you mess up, you will run into a situation where all of your abilities are on cooldown and you don’t have any TAs to do Laceration. This makes it so that you don’t lose much DPS for a single GCD.
2. If you are more than 10m away from the boss. This is by far your strongest ability with 30m range, and since it does almost as much damage as Laceration, you won’t necessarily lose DPS if you leave melee range.
3. If you have an opportunity to pre-cast during downtime. You will miss out on a tick or two, but if the boss has a shield up, you can apply this right before the shield goes down for additional damage.
4. If you are about to activate your Adrenal or Tactical Superiority. These sorts of offensive cooldowns apply their damage boost to all damage that hits while the cooldown is active. By applying Corrosive Dart immediately before using one of those abilities, you get to apply that boost to an extra GCD, effectively extending the duration of the cooldown. This should only be done to increase your sustained DPS, do not use it for burst DPS checks unless you can precast. Don’t do this if you don’t have enough Energy though, you definitely don’t want to run out in the middle of your boosted DPS window. 
5. If you just applied Volatile Substance, but the Acid Blade DoT is not on the target. This can happen if you switched targets or otherwise let the Acid Blade DoT fall off. Volatile Substance will not deal any damage unless the target takes Poison damage from either your Acid Blade DoT or Corrosive Dart. You shouldn’t wait until your next Backstab since the target might be dead by that point and you won’t get to benefit from the Revealing Weakness debuff. 

Multi-DoTing by applying Corrosive Dart to a second boss or enemy with a lot of health does not result in a DPS increase since Laceration is typically a superior option.

The only benefit you’ll get from doing this is if you need to slightly redistribute your damage from one enemy to another in case they need to be killed at the same time. Corrosive Dart does not have any additional procs, debuffs, or discipline passives associated with it that are relevant to your rotation.

Other Semi-Rotational Abilities

Your semi-rotational abilities may or may not be usable depending on your build. You don’t always have the Energy to spare.

Rifle Shot

(Ranged/Energy/Direct/Single Target/Instant)
Rifle Shot is free, but weak. If you aren’t using Relentless Blades, it’s the only Semi-Rotational ability you can afford to use.

If you ever dip below 60 Energy and Adrenaline Probe won’t be available anytime soon (this should only happen if you really mess up your rotation or get killed), use Rifle Shot once or twice ASAP, though don’t delay Volatile Substance or Backstab and don’t let the Acid Blade DoT fall off either. After a few cycles, you should be able to fully stabilize back to around 75-80 Energy.

Fragmentation Grenade

(Tech/Kinetic/Direct/AoE/Instant)
If you’ve already used Corrosive Dart and are still more than 10m away from your target and Adrenaline Probe is available, use Fragmentation Grenade since it is your second most damaging semi-rotational ability.

Be extremely careful when activating this ability because it is extremely expensive, costing 20 Energy. I don’t recommend using it unless you have 100 Energy or Adrenaline Probe available. Without such a high amount of Energy, you can suddenly find yourself in a sub-60 death spiral.

Overload Shot

Overload Shot deals more damage than Fragmentation Grenade and only costs 15 Energy, but it only hits a single target and has a 6m effective range. Its high cost and low usability make it impractical to use in general. It doesn’t deal enough damage to make it worth using over Rifle Shot unless you’re using the Relentless Blades talent.

If you are using Relentless Blades, you’ll typically only fire Overload Shot if you run out of TAs, but know that indicates you made a mistake.

AoE Abilities

The formula for determining how much damage an AoE ability does per GCD such that it can be compared to single-target abilities is: (Damage Dealt/Number of GCDs) x Number of Enemies. An AoE ability’s place in the priority is as high as it can be until it reaches a single-target ability that deals more damage than the AoE will deal to all enemies in the GCD.

AoE damage is considered fluff if the adds do not need to die immediately or if you are otherwise shirking your main responsibilities to deal more damage than necessary to adds. It’s pretty easy to tell what is and isn’t fluff, don’t be greedy and don’t hurt your group’s chances of beating the boss. 

Toxic Haze

(Tech/Internal/Periodic/AoE/Instant)
This is your strongest AoE ability by far, though it does cost 15 Energy, just like Corrosive Dart, as well as a TA, unlike Corrosive Dart. Since you have so many considerations to make already about how to spend and maintain your TAs, it’s extremely challenging to use Toxic Haze frequently or on-demand outside of solo content. 

Since Toxic Haze has a somewhat long cooldown, you should only use it when you have a spare GCD that would go towards Corrosive Dart or a Laceration GCD that isn’t essential to refreshing the duration of Acid Blade (assuming you don’t need Explosive Cells).

Don’t forget to consider the rest of your rotation, particularly with refreshing Acid Blade, but Toxic Haze does surpass Laceration if you manage to hit at least 2 targets, though it’s only a small increase, so don’t bother using it unless you can hit at least 3 targets.

Noxious Knives

(Tech/Internal and Kinetic/Direct/AoE/Instant)
This is your spammable AoE, but I only mean that in the sense that it doesn’t have a cooldown since it costs 15 Energy, so you can’t sustain it for long periods of time. If you want to do pure AoE, you can sustain it with an Adrenaline Probe for about 2 durations of Toxic Haze, with a Backstab + Volatile Substance for the buffs and TAs. 

If you just want to weave Noxious Knives into your general rotation, you only have enough Energy to sometimes swap it out for non-essential Lacerations. You’ll deal almost exactly the same damage as Laceration if you manage to hit 3 targets with Noxious Knives, but due to its higher Energy cost, you shouldn’t use it unless you manage to hit at least 4 targets.

It technically surpasses Volatile Substance’s single-target damage at 6 targets, but then you start cannibalizing your TA generation from Backstabs, so I don’t think it’s worth it to ever delay Volatile Substance. Backstab also grants valuable buffs that affect your AoE damage, so it isn’t worth delaying that ability either. 

Explosive Cells Tactical Item

Concealment’s AoE tactical just lets them do actual rotational AoE, so just keep doing your rotation and adhering to the single-target rotation and you’ll be fine. Make sure you use Volatile Substance on cooldown and unless you’re paying very close attention, it’s probably a good idea to apply Corrosive Dart as well so you don’t have to worry about it not detonating because the Acid Blade DoT fell off. 

If you’re having to use Noxious Knives consistently during the fight and there isn’t a huge single-target DPS check, definitely use this tactical, but historically, single-target DPS checks almost always take priority over AoE DPS checks, and you won’t get any sort of a single-target DPS increase off of this tactical. 

Explosive Cells also spreads the Revealing Weakness and Internal/Elemental debuffs. The former allows you to Backstab anyone who got hit by Volatile Substance and the latter makes all the DoT spread specs fall in love with you.

Almost all of the DoTs that are spreadable by other specs deal Internal/Elemental damage, so even if you aren’t dealing a whole lot of AoE damage, you’ll give a decent damage boost to the other players in your group.

Fragmentation Grenade

(Tech/Kinetic/Direct/AoE/Instant)
Operatives have a combat style passive called Skirmisher, which buffs Fragmentation Grenade like this: “The AoE damage dealt by Fragmentation Grenade is increased by 50% and it now deals AoE damage to any nearby enemies, even if they are stronger than Weak or Standard.”

This makes Frag Grenade useful to Operatives in all AoE situations. It’s difficult to test, but I think Fragmentation Grenade will deal slightly more damage than Noxious Knives, even with the Curbing Strategies ability tree buff that you shouldn’t use.

Offensive Cooldowns

All offensive cooldowns (OCDs) should be used as frequently as possible under the conditions stated here and should only be delayed if they need to be saved for a DPS check or burst window, but don’t start delaying them until you see that you have to. 

Stim Boost

Stim Boost now grants an additional effect that is unique to each discipline. For Concealment, this additional effect is that Stim Boost increases your critical damage dealt by 20%, resulting in the ability offering a more significant DPS increase than it has in the past. It also synergizes well with most of the ability tree buffs you should take for PvE content. 

The DPS increase from the alacrity is relatively small, though it can make a bigger difference during a burst DPS check. Over those 15 seconds, you’ll be able to do a single extra ability (12 abilities vs 11) thanks to the shorter GCD. 

The cooldown reduction from ability tree buffs enables Stim Boost to have approximately 60% uptime when they are taken. Unfortunately, Concealment lost access to the Revitalizers utility effect, which has become the unique Stim Boost effect for Lethality.

Adrenaline Probe

Adrenaline Probe recovers 50 Energy over 3s. As a Concealment Operative, your Energy consumption varies depending on your build. You might need to use it on cooldown or you might not run out of Energy even if you took it off your bar.

You’ll be more likely to need to use Adrenaline Probe the more often you use Corrosive Dart, Overload Shot, or any AoE abilities.

If Adrenaline Probe is not available and you dip below 60 Energy at all, you’ll need to insert Rifle Shots in place of non-essential Lacerations until your Energy stabilizes back at its maximum regeneration rate. Otherwise, you will spiral out of control and run out of Energy.

If Adrenaline Probe is available, you should use it as soon as you reach 40 Energy, the last line on your Energy bar. Don’t worry about getting down to exactly 40, and it’s better to play it safe by using it early.

Adrenal

The best time to activate the Adrenal right after you activate Stim Boost so that both effects are active over the same 15s period.

You shouldn’t have to worry too much about timing your Adrenal with a specific point in your rotation since your high-damage abilities have such different cooldowns from each other.

I recommend trying to apply a Corrosive Dart right before activating your Adrenal since the rest of that DoT’s ticks will be boosted. However, don’t delay anything important to make that happen.

Defensive Cooldowns and Mobility

Defensive cooldowns (DCDs) are not used just to stop you from getting killed, they’re there to minimize overall damage taken. For any combat style in any fight, your most effective DCDs should be mapped to the most damaging attacks in the fight while weaker DCDs should be used against weaker attacks. 

Don’t pop all of your DCDs at once or only use them when your health gets low. You should be attempting to mitigate as much damage as possible by using your DCDs against predictable damage.

In fights where you’ll be taking a high amount of sustained damage, it’s important to use your DCDs in the order that maximizes your overall uptime. If you can tweak the order that you use your DCDs where it allows you to get an extra use out of one of them over the course of a long burn phase, you should definitely do that instead of activating your potentially stronger DCDs first.

It’s good to have 1 emergency panic button too, but everything else should be used to prevent your health from getting low in the first place. Part of knowing a fight is understanding how much damage you take and what you can do to mitigate that damage.

Shield Probe

This ability has a very short cooldown and is relatively weak, so it won’t really protect you from a whole lot on its own. Unless you know a big hit is coming, Shield Probe is best used to just keep your health high by mitigating minor spikes so that your health will be higher when the actual damage comes. If you think you will die if you don’t use Shield Probe, just use Exfiltrate instead. Dying is a bigger DPS loss than spending a GCD to roll. 

Medpac

Don’t save it for a rainy day because today is that rainy day! Unless you get hit by a one-shot mechanic (which you shouldn’t), you should never let yourself die while your Medpac is still available and you certainly should never try to use one of your heals before using your Medpac.

If everyone’s health is getting low or there’s a heal check in the current phase, do not hesitate to use your Medpac if you can take full benefit of the health provided or need to be above a certain health level to survive an imminent mechanic.

If you think Medpacs are too expensive, it’s time to get Biochem on one of your alts or even better, your raiding toon so that you can make your own or get reusables. Choosing not to use a Medpac for financial reasons and subsequently dying is not a valid excuse.

Evasion

As part of the ability pruning process, the devs chose to make Countermeasures unique to Snipers and Evasion unique to Operatives. The capabilities handled by the pruned ability for each discipline are now granted by the base ability or a specific ability tree option as part of the level 35 choice. As a result, Evasion now does a ton of different things:

• It purges your debuffs and it isn’t on the GCD, so you don’t lose DPS and your healers don’t have to waste their own GCD to cleanse you. Purges are stronger than cleanses because they remove all removable debuffs rather than just two and can remove things that cleanses can’t always remove. The only other purges in the game are Force Shroud and Force Barrier. This purge comes from the Preparedness combat style passive.
• It increases your defense chance by 200%. This effect isn’t incredibly helpful for defensive purposes in raids since DPS don’t have to deal with Melee/Ranged damage too much. The only time you’ll really experience it is if you’re kiting a boss or have to deal with adds that the tanks aren’t able to keep aggro on, and neither situation is likely as a Concealment Operative. Furthermore, Melee/Ranged damage tends to last for a lot longer than 3 seconds. The best use of the defense chance is to protect you for a couple of seconds in case you get aggro of something and hopefully the tanks can taunt it off of you before Evasion wears off. 
• With the Quick Countermeasures ability tree talent, Evasion increases your movement speed by 100% for 4s. This speed boost used to be a discipline proc called Ghost, not a utility. I think it was migrated to the ability tree choice for PvP balance reasons, though it will technically be available more often for this purpose thanks to the Evasive Imperative ability tree buff and 15s cooldown reduction also provided by Quick Countermeasures. 
• Quick Countermeasures now also makes it so Evasion reduces your AoE damage taken by 60% for its duration. This component of the effect greatly improves Concealment’s survivability in Operations where the vast majority of damage taken is considered AoE damage.
• Evasion functions as your threat drop. This was previously part of Quick Countermeasures but is now given to the base ability. Always use Evasion as a threat drop at the beginning of the fight, right after your second Backstab.
• With the Blow for Blow ability tree talent, Evasion reflects (but doesn’t absorb) 150% of direct single-target damage. Unfortunately, since Evasion has the purge effect, you can’t use it to reflect everything that you can with other classes’ reactive damage. Remember that you will take any damage that gets reflected, so it’s very dangerous to stand in circles to take unnecessary damage and your healers will hate it.
• The Curative Agent utility effect from prior expansions has been removed completely.

Cloaking Screen

In PvE, Cloaking Screen offers a small amount of additional survivability by acting as a debuff purge and potentially giving you 2s of Evasion and/or movement speed. Prior to 7.0, you could use it to exit combat for stealth rezzes and stronger Backstabs.

Since stealth no longer causes you to exit combat in Operations and Flashpoints, nether of these functions is applicable. You’ll still see players use it in dummy parses on Parsely, but the trick doesn’t work in Operations.

Toxin Scan

This is the cleanse for the Operative combat style. Generally, healers are responsible for dealing with most of the cleanses, though there are a few instances where the DPS should help, like on Dread Council with Tyrans’ Death Mark. Never use this on yourself if Evasion is available since that ability is off the GCD. 

Your job as a DPS is to spend your GCDs on dealing damage. Your healer’s job is to spend their GCDs on mitigating damage, which includes most cleansing.

Exfiltrate and Shadow Operative Elite

Exfiltrate is Concealment’s cheese ability thanks to the Shadow Operative Elite discipline passive. During the roll, you increase your defense and resist chance by 200%, allowing you to avoid all incoming damage.

Unfortunately, Exfiltrate costs a GCD to use, so you shouldn’t use this ability to mitigate damage unless said damage would likely kill you. Thanks to Concealment’s nearly nonexistent defensive options, you’ll have to do this more often than you would like. 

Exfiltrate is also one of Operative’s mobility tools, though it doesn’t take you as far as most other movement abilities in the game. Since it’s on the GCD, you also shouldn’t use it if you’re within 30m of your target at least until you’ve already applied Corrosive Dart.

Since Exfiltrate has such a short cooldown and two charges, you shouldn’t ever have to decide between using it for mobility or cheesing, though if you do ever come across a situation where you have to choose, make sure you have one charge to cheese the damage. 

Holotraverse

This is your gap closer ability. It now has the effects from the Circumvention utility built in. Holotraverse is pretty straightforward; if you’re within 30m of the boss, Holotraverse instantly teleports you to melee range, gives you a 75% movement speed boost for 3 seconds, and grants a TA.

Using Holotraverse as a gap closer takes priority over using it just to generate a TA since you’ll lose more DPS by not being in range than you’ll gain from a single extra TA since you can’t use your most damaging abilities while out of range. 

In fights where you know you won’t end up out of range of the boss, feel free to use it as needed for TA generation. If you want to get a little greedy in fights where there is only occasional need for a gap closer, I prefer to use Corrosive Dart for regular gaps in my rotation and only use Holotraverse to grant a TA if it will destabilize my rotation, like if I don’t have a TA to refresh Acid Blade right before Volatile Strike detonates.

Group Utility

These abilities can potentially provide substantial value to other group members.

Tactical Superiority

This is your raid buff. It should be used on cooldown just like any other offensive cooldown unless it needs to be used for a burst phase or DPS check, normally the raid lead will make the call on when these should be used. 

Remember, this is not a personal buff for you, it’s something that buffs the whole team. It also only has a 40m range, so be mindful on larger maps that it might not catch everyone and position yourself accordingly so that it catches as many people as possible. Use this on trash mobs if you want to troll your team.

Off-Healing

If you ever have to do this, something has clearly gone wrong with the attempt, or someone is not pulling their weight and you should complain to the raid lead and make a big scene about having to off-heal. This game is designed around each role being able to fully perform all of its duties without the need for another off-role’s help. 

You should never off-heal yourself unless you literally think you will die if you do not receive healing right now and the pull is salvageable. You should also not waste your time healing anyone with Kolto Infusion since it costs a TA and 20 Energy, just apply a stack or two of Kolto Probe and return to DPSing. Diagnostic Scan is not gonna prevent anyone from dying. 

Besides it being not your job, a lot of bosses have fairly tight enrage timers, so if you’re having to waste your precious GCDs helping out another role because they can’t deal with what they are fully capable of dealing with, you’re gonna end up wiping to an enraged boss later anyway.

If there is downtime though where you can’t do anything else at all, apply Kolto Probe to yourself, but really make sure there’s nothing you can do at all that would increase your damage output first, then if you still have time you can channel Diagnostic Scan if you really want to, though I don’t even bother putting that ability on my bar because it’s so weak.

Crowd Control and Other Abilities

There are only a handful of instances in operations where CC is required, so I will briefly go over what the Operative has at their disposal along with any other abilities I have not yet covered.

Debilitate

This is your hard stun, meaning it does not break on damage. It’s locked away in the ability tree next to Quick Countermeasures, which provides essential benefits to Evasion, so you won’t ever be able to take Debilitate in PvE.

It’s worth noting that stunned targets can’t turn, so you can technically use Debilitate and then follow it up with Backstab, though Crippling Slice is the better option if it’s available.

Distraction

This is your interrupt. For a melee DPS, the cooldown on your interrupt is a little on the long side, at 18 seconds its duration equivalent with Sorcerer and Sniper interrupts. If you really want to be a clicker, I highly recommend you at least keybind this ability or you will have trouble with some of the shorter casts that need to be interrupted. 

Flash Bang

This is your mez, a CC ability that breaks on damage. Usually, if you’re using this in-combat, you will want to use it very soon after the enemy spawns. Thanks to the Preparedness combat style passive, this ability can blind up to 7 additional nearby targets, making it quite potent. Since it breaks on damage, it’s best used against adds that you do not intend to kill immediately. 

Escape

This is your CC break. Use it when you get CC’d. 

Sleep Dart

This ability allows you to CC an enemy from stealth without entering combat. This can help you to skip some sets of trash in between bosses, though it isn’t worth using if you’re progging on that boss since someone is eventually gonna pull them all accidentally.

Stealth

This is a toggle ability that allows you to enter and exit stealth, which allows you to sneak past some enemies. You have to be in stealth in order to use Sleep Dart and Infiltrate.

You can’t use this ability in combat, though you want to enter combat from stealth using Backstab so that it deals additional damage and grants a TA. If you want to enter stealth while in combat, you’ll have to use Cloaking Screen, but that doesn’t work in Flashpoints or Operations.

Infiltrate

This ability allows you to put your entire group in stealth. I have never seen it used successfully in PvE. You might be able to use it to sneak past some groups of trash enemies, but that requires the whole group to be more coordinated than it usually is during trash.

Tactical Overdrive

This is an incredibly potent offensive cooldown, but due to its long cooldown and the strength of the alternatives, it’s ever worth taking in the ability tree in PvE, at least as a Concealment Operative.

Ability Tree Choices

Make a habit of reading through all of your ability tree choices each time you log in. They are intended to be changed on the fly and having a clearer idea of what all of them do will help you to recognize situations where individual choices will be useful in-game.

Level 23 Choice – Laceration Buffs

Defensive Stance

• Effect: Dealing damage with Laceration applies Defensive Stance to you, increasing your damage reduction by 5% per stack. Stacks up to 3 times and lasts 10s.
• Recommendation: Never take this in PvE. 15% DR all the time is definitely nice, but you’re giving up 1-2k DPS and have to deal with the hardest form of the rotation.

Roll Knife

• Effect: Laceration’s critical chance is increased by 10% and activating Laceration reduces Stim Boost’s cooldown by 10 seconds.
• Recommendation: Take this if you plan to main Concealment. Roll Knife offers the absolute maximum DPS, but it does make the rotation more challenging. You will need to worry about Energy management and be functionally unable to use Corrosive Dart, Overload Shot, or any AoE abilities. However, you won’t need to activate them as often as you would with the alternatives because Stim Boost grants a TA and will be available far more often.

Relentless Blades

• Effect: Laceration deals 10% more damage, no longer costs Energy, and slows the target by 50% for 6 seconds.
• Recommendation: Take this if you don’t plan to main Concealment. Laceration’s use is primarily limited by your TAs, not by Energy cost, but you can run out of Energy if you aren’t executing your rotation correctly, and your DPS will go down faster than the blue water in an airplane toilet if you don’t keep your Energy in check. With Relentless Blades, you can afford to use Toxic Haze and Corrosive Dart as much as you want while still not having to worry about Energy, so the rotation is a lot more manageable. In general, you’ll have a much easier time with Relentless Blades compared to Roll Knife.

I also want to say that I know that my statements on Roll Knife and Relentless Blades may sound condescending, and want to be clear that I don’t mean to cause offense. Concealment is the most difficult DPS spec in the game. Even I, the author of this guide, will only take Roll Knife in the easiest fights that I know by heart where I get to stand still and focus completely on DPS. If I’m progging or have to do any significant amount of movement or mechanics, I’ll definitely be taking Relentless Blades.

Level 27 Choice – Curbing Strategies, Debilitate, or Quick Countermeasures

Curbing Strategies

• Effect: Overload Shot and Noxious Knives reduces the movement speed of targets they damage by 40% for 6s. In addition, Noxious Knives deals 25% more damage.
• Recommendation: Never take this. Both alternatives are considerably stronger than Curbing Strategies. It’s not even close.

Debilitate

• Effect: Grants the Debilitate ability, which stuns the target for 4 seconds and deals a small amount of damage. Costs 5 Energy, 4m range, and has a 30s cooldown.
• Recommendation: In PvE, take this in solo content only. Since stunned targets can’t move, using Debilitate will give you time to move behind a target for a Backstab when they don’t have Revealing Weakness. In group content, Quick Countermeasures is essential, so you can’t afford to take Debilitate at all. Someone else will need to hard stun the add.

Quick Countermeasures

• Effect: Reduces the cooldown of Evasion by 15 seconds. In addition, Evasion reduces your AoE damage taken by 60% and increases your movement speed by 100% while active.
• Recommendation: Always always always take this in PVE group content. This is one of the most essential talents in the whole game. The 60% AoE RDT component makes Concealment significantly more viable in group content while the other parts of the effect just make Evasion better in general.

Level 39 Choice – Crippling Slice Buffs

Crippling Throw

• Effect: Replaces Crippling Slice with an upgraded version of the ability that grants a TA and has a 10m range.
• Recommendation: Don’t take this in PvE. You don’t need 10m range on an ability that deals so little damage. If you need to hit something that is 10m away, you can use one of your semi-rotational abilities instead. The TA generation is nice, but an autocrit on your strongest attack is worth more than a TA.

The Best Defense

• Effect: Crippling Slice heals you for 100% of the damage it deals and applies The Best Defense to the target, which makes it deal 20% less damage to you for 6s.
• Recommendation: Never take this. The effects may seem nice at first glance, but it’s pretty bad when you take a closer look. If Crippling Slice is used on cooldown, the mitigation component will only have 40% uptime, meaning it’s roughly equivalent to 8% DR on average, whereas the heal will offer ~1500 HPS. If you want to save it as a DCD, you have to give up a little DPS to use Rifle Shot for Energy management instead of relying on Crippling Slice. When examined from the perspective of a DCD, it’s garbage, easily the worst in the game. The ability is on the GCD, grants a relatively small amount of mitigation that doesn’t last very long, and only protects you against a single target. Furthermore, Crippling Slice already prevents your target from moving or turning for 4s, so you can take literally 0 damage by just standing behind them for 66% of the uptime.

Crippling Wounds

• Effect: Crippling Slice applies Crippling Wounds, which causes your next direct damage attack against that target to automatically critically hit. Lasts up to 10 seconds.
• Recommendation: Always take this. It’s the strongest talent in this tier for PvE and effectively eliminates the DPS loss from needing to use Crippling Slice for Energy management while also offering stronger and more consistent burst damage. It synergizes quite well with Stim Boost’s critical damage boost too.

Level 43 Choice – Tactical Critical, Advanced Stealth, or Tactical Overdrive

Tactical Critical

• Effect: Critically hitting with a direct damage attack applies a stack of Tactical Critical to you, which increases your critical chance by 2%. Stacks up to 5 times (10% total) and lasts 8 seconds. In addition, activating Stim Boost purges movement-impairing effects and grants 5 stacks of Tactical Critical.
• Recommendation: Take this for PvE group content. Tactical Critical offers the greatest sustained and burst DPS by a considerable margin, though it takes time for the effect to build, so it’s less useful in solo content.

Advanced Stealth

• Effect: Gaining a Tactical Advantage with an attack that breaks stealth grants Active Stealth. While you are in Active Stealth, your chance to dodge Melee and Ranged attacks is increased by 200% and your next direct damage attack automatically critically hits. Lasts up to 6s and dealing or taking damage breaks Active Stealth.
• Recommendation: In PvE, only take this for solo content. The actual effect of Active Stealth is a little bit confusing. If you exit stealth with Backstab or Veiled Strike (your only abilities that can ever generate a TA), you gain the Active Stealth proc, which lasts for up to 6 seconds. While it’s active, you’re immune to Melee/Ranged damage and your next direct damage attack is an autocrit. Once you deal direct damage, the proc is consumed. Direct damage comes from any attack that isn’t Periodic (DoT) damage, so you won’t consume Active Stealth with Corrosive Dart ever or with Volatile Substance (until it detonates). In summary, you pop out of stealth with Backstab or Veiled Strike, can apply either Volatile Substance or Corrosive Dart, and then utilize the autocrit on Laceration (or Veiled Strike or Backstab if one of those is unused). Even if you could stealth out in Ops and FPs, the autocrit would be too infrequent to offer a competitive sustained DPS increase compared to the other options, but you can make good use of Advanced Stealth in solo content.

Tactical Overdrive

• Effect: Grants the Tactical Overdrive ability, which resets the cooldown of Stim Boost, Volatile Substance, Backstab, and Shield Probe. In addition, your Mastery is increased by 20%. Lasts for 15 seconds. 3 min cooldown.
• Recommendation: Never take this. There’s no reason to take Tactical Overdrive as Concealment because it never offers a superior DPS increase compared to Tactical Critical, and Active Stealth offers a lot more value in solo content.

Level 51 Choice – Infiltrator, Advanced Cloaking, or Chem-resistant Inlays

Infiltrator

• Effect: Increases your movement speed by 15% and your effective stealth level by 3.
• Recommendation: Take this in fights where the boss moves around a lot. If you’re constantly having to chase the boss, Infiltrator makes it easier to keep up with them and maintain high uptime, which is especially valuable since most of your attacks only have 4m range. It’s not super useful in solo content because base stealth is almost always good enough and Sprint offers a greater movement speed boost, so it’s only active during combat, which isn’t super helpful for trash mobs.

Advanced Cloaking

• Effect: Reduces the cooldown of Cloaking Screen by 30s and activating Cloaking Screen increases movement speed by 50% for 6 seconds.
• Recommendation: Take this in specific fights and in solo content. Cloaking Screen offers several benefits in PvE, so reducing its cooldown can be helpful if you find yourself wanting to use the ability more often than the 2 min cooldown allows, though you should only take Advanced Cloaking if the 30s cooldown reduction enables you to use it when you otherwise wouldn’t be able to. For example, if you would need to use Advanced Cloaking every 1 min and 15s, this option won’t help because the cooldown reduction is insufficient. Advanced Cloaking’s movement speed boost is also nice since Operatives are lacking in the mobility department. Keep in mind that if you pair this option with Evasive Screen, 4 out of the 6s will be overwritten by the speed boost from Quick Countermeasures, so it’s less valuable specifically for this purpose in PvE for Concealment. In solo content, Advanced Cloaking is nice because it lets you stealth out more often.

Chem-resistant Inlays

• Effect: Increases damage reduction by 5%.
• Recommendation: Take this in fights where you’re taking a lot of sustained damage. 5% DR isn’t that much, but Concealment does struggle with mitigating sustained damage like you’d find in a burn phase, and since Chem-resistant Inlays is a passive, it will help with that.

Level 64 Choice – Med Shield, Endorphin Rush, or Evasive Screen

Med Shield

• Effect: Your Shield Probe heals you for 5% of your maximum health when it collapses.
• Recommendation: Almost always take this. Med Shield nearly doubles the overall mitigation provided by Shield Probe. Since Shield Probe has such a short cooldown and is (sadly) a significant part of Operative survivability, this effect is pretty valuable and universally useful. The only time you’d want to give it up is if you can use Evasive Screen against a specific huge hit.

Endorphin Rush

• Effect: Adrenaline Probe immediately restores 15 additional Energy.
• Recommendation: Never take this. Use Relentless Blades instead if you need more Energy. You shouldn’t ever need Endorphin Rush and Relentless Blades, so it’s better to take one of the other options in this tier instead.

Evasive Screen

• Effect: Cloaking Screen grants 2 seconds of Evasion.
• Recommendation: Only take this if you need Evasion more often. Since Cloaking Screen now has its purge (beefy cleanse) as a baseline effect, the benefits of Evasive Screen are everything else that Evasion provides, though since Operative survivability is still limited, you should only take Evasive Screen if it will provide more mitigation than 4 uses of Med Shield, equivalent to about 80k damage, which can easily happen if you need to mitigate a specific big hit with the 60% AoE RDT component. The best example of a fight where you’d want to take Evasive Screen over Med Shield is against the Terror from Beyond to mitigate additional slams up top.

Level 73 Choice – Infiltrate, Flash Bang, or Holotraverse

Infiltrate

• Effect: Grants the Infiltrate ability, which cloaks all group members within 10m of you in a temporary stealth field that lasts 15 seconds. Cannot be used while in combat. Only usable while in stealth mode.
• Recommendation: Never take this. You might be able to use it to skip some trash, but I have never seen it actually work. There’s always someone who ends up outside of the stealth field; and that’s assuming that the adds actually respect the stealth field in the first place.

Flash Bang

• Effect: Grants the Flash Bang ability, which mezzes the target for 8 seconds. When Flash Bang ends, it leaves behind Flash Powder, which reduces the target’s accuracy by 20% for 8 seconds. 10m range, 1 min cooldown, (still AoE from Preparedness passive).
• Recommendation: Never take this. The effect is nice, and it’s fine for solo content if you prefer, but I think Holotraverse is more useful. In group content, Flash Bang is almost always useless. If you need more CC, make someone else take their hard stun or mez instead.

Holotraverse

• Effect: Grants the Holotraverse ability, which generates a TA and instantly moves you to your target (friend or foe) and increases your movement speed by 75% for 3 seconds. Can be used while immobilized and purges all movement-impairing effects. Does not break stealth and cannot be used against enemy targets in Cover.
• Recommendation: Always take this. You’ll need the TA generation and mobility to deal maximum DPS. It’s really nice for traveling between groups of trash when doing solo content too.

Level 73 Choice – Evasive Imperative, Jarring Strike, or Blow for Blow

Evasive Imperative

• Effect: Each time you get attacked, the active cooldown of your Evasion is reduced by 3 seconds. This effect cannot occur more than once every 1.5 seconds.
• Recommendation: Almost always take this for group content. The cooldown reduction enables you to use Evasion a lot more often, which can greatly improve your survivability if you’re getting hit a lot.

Jarring Strike

• Effect: When used from stealth, Backstab interrupts and knocks down the target for 3 seconds. Player targets are immobilized for 3 seconds rather than being knocked down.
• Recommendation: Take this for solo content only. Jarring Strike synergizes with the Explosive Cells tactical to apply Revealing Weakness to every enemy damaged by Volatile Substance. Since Revealing Weakness treats your next Backstab as if you activated it from stealth, you’ll get to knock over every enemy you Backstab.

Blow for Blow

• Effect: Activating Evasion grants Blow for Blow, which Reflects 150% of direct single-target Force and Tech damage back to the attacker while Evasion is active.
• Recommendation: Take this in fights where you take significant, unavoidable, reflectable damage. Please note that unlike other reflects, you do not absorb the damage that gets reflected. With Blow for Blow and Evasion, you either completely avoid the damage (if it’s white damage) or take it and deal it back (if it’s yellow damage). It is impossible to avoid and reflect the same attack with this ability tree buff. In addition, Blow for Blow only triggers off of single-target damage, so the AoE DR from Quick Countermeasures is never relevant and the only thing Blow for Blow does is add another completely separate use case for Evasion.

Gearing and Stats Priorities

Tactical Items

Acid Lash
Effect Laceration damage triggers Acid Blade damage and refreshes its duration.
Recommendation This is your sustained DPS tactical item. It provides the greatest single-target sustained DPS increase compared to the other Concealment tacticals. Your rotation will be a bit different and more challenging compared to what was done prior to 6.0 or if you are using one of the other tacticals. The majority of the guide is written assuming you have this tactical item.

Explosive Cells
Effect When Volatile Substance triggers, it deals damage to all enemies around the primary target and spreads its effects.
Recommendation This is your AoE tactical item. It is most useful in solo content and will allow you to apply Revealing Weakness and the Internal/Elemental debuff to the entire group. Applying Revealing Weakness to everything means you can Backstab with reckless abandon.

Volatile Strike
Effect Veiled Strike automatically critically hits targets affected by your unexploded Volatile Substance and triggers it immediately. Dealing damage this way causes your next Backstab to automatically critically hit.
Recommendation This tactical is meant for PvP, as it allows you to concentrate a ton of damage into a single GCD. Volatile Strike is not a good option for any PvE content as it does not offer competitive sustained or AoE damage and will wreck your rotation.

In our Catalog of all Tacticals in SWTOR you will find information about all other Tacticals that we didn’t list in this guide. You may find something adequate that is also cheaper and easier to obtain for your needs while you work on getting the recommended one for your combat style and build.

Legendary Implants

BioWare has removed set bonuses from the game and replaced them with Legendary Items, which are just implants with old 4 or 6-piece set bonus effects on them, so rather than needing to collect 4 pieces of a gear set to get the 4-piece set bonus, or 6 pieces for the 6-piece, you’ll get either a 4 or 6-piece set bonus effect on an implant. 

This was done to improve customization (now you can mix and match set bonus effects), make them easier to obtain, and consume less inventory space. Here are the Legendary Items you should use as a Concealment Operative:

• Tactician – Gaining a Tactical Advantage increases your crit chance by 10% for 10 seconds.
• Locked and Loaded – Ranged and tech damage and healer are increased by 5%. 

Tactician and Locked and Loaded are BiS for single-target DPS. Tactician will offer higher sustained DPS, but Locked and Loaded is also BiS for Snipers / Gunslingers, so there’s an argument to be made for buying either one first. You may also want to consider swapping Locked and Loaded out for Tactician’s Focus in PvP.

It would be more beneficial to use Aggressive Treatment for survivability, and you can use it instead of Locked and Loaded in fights where you’d use Toxic Haze anyway. However, TA management is already complicated enough, and it does not deal enough single-target damage to be worth using on cooldown, so it’s hard to justify for Concealment.

You can learn more from the dedicated Guide to Legendary Implants in SWTOR 7.0. It also offers a full list of all currently available Legendary Implants in the game.

Stat Priority

As a DPS, you’ll need to care about 3 different stats: Accuracy, Alacrity, and Critical Rating. There are thresholds associated with Accuracy and Alacrity, so you need to prioritize reaching those thresholds to get the full benefit from each stat point.

1. Accuracy to 110.00% – Before investing in any other stats, make sure you hit 110% Accuracy because attacks that miss deal 0 damage, and no other stats matter if the attack doesn’t land. Furthermore, many procs require you to actually deal damage, not just activate the ability, so you can mess up your rotation if an attack misses. You need 110% Accuracy in PvE and not just 100% because bosses have a 10% chance to dodge/resist player attacks, and any percentage over 100% reduces this chance. Anything over 110% is not helpful in PvE, so you do want to go over 110%, but with as little excess as possible.
2. Alacrity to ~7.5% – Once your Accuracy is above 110.00%, it’s time to think about Alacrity. It has the second-highest priority because you do not get the full benefit of the stat unless you surpass one of the GCD thresholds. It’s less important than Accuracy because your attacks still need to hit. You need 7.15% Alacrity to get from the 1.5s GCD to the 1.4s GCD. However, as you approach 7.15%, you actually start getting a mix of 1.4s and 1.5s GCDs, resulting in an experience that feels clunky and inconsistent. You need roughly 0.4-0.5% more Alacrity past the exact threshold to effectively eliminate those 1.5s GCDs.
3. Critical gets the rest – After you’ve got your thresholded stats sorted out, you can start investing in crit. To be clear, Critical Rating is still valuable; it just has the lowest priority because it does not have a threshold associated with it that you need to meet to get the most out of each point of stat as the other tertiary stats you care about do. Critical Rating increases both your Critical Chance and Critical Damage. If you have a single effect that increases your Critical Chance by 100% all on its own (it can’t be from multiple effects combined), all of the Critical Chance percentage for that attack gets added to your Critical Damage percentage, causing the attack to deal supercritical damage.

Find out which mods to purchase from Hyde and Zeek in SWTOR on the Fleet to minimize spending and optimize your build. The dedicated guide contains tips for all roles in both PvE and PvP.

Augments

Augments allow you to put additional stats on every piece of gear except tactical items. Since the stats come in much smaller amounts, augments allow you to fine-tune your gear to provide almost as much of each total stat as you want.

To equip an augment, you must first use an Augmentation Kit that matches the crafting grade of the augment (ex. Grade 11 augments require MK-11 Kits).

The 296, 302, 310, and 318 iRating augments released with 7.6 and 7.7 are BiS. The higher the iRating, the more stats they offer and the more expensive they are to make or buy, though most of the benefit is provided by having augments at all, and the base-rarity blue 296 augments are the cheapest.

Almost everyone should buy the blue 296 augments because they provide the greatest bang for the buck, but you do have multiple options:

• Gold 318 augments (Superior [Type] Augment 86). These are overall best-in-slot (BiS) and offer ~25% more stat than gold 300 augments, which is roughly equivalent to 4 additional gold augments. They’re extremely expensive and completely unnecessary for all content in the game, so I only recommend them to the wealthiest individuals. 
• Purple 310 augments (Advanced [Type] Augment 86). They offer ~13% more stat than gold 300 augments, which is roughly equivalent to 2 additional gold 300 augments worth of stat. They are cheaper than the gold 318s, but they’re in the same price bracket in terms of affordability, so there’s no reason for anyone to use them at this point.
• Blue 302 augments ([Type] Augment 76) are the mid-tier augments. For all intents and purposes, these are equivalent to the gold 300 augments from 6.0. I only recommend them if you’re close to a stat threshold or don’t already have gold 300 augments and want something a bit better than the blue 296s.
• Blue 296 augments ([Type] Augment 83) are the most basic tier of augments for level 80 players. They are pretty cheap as only the schematic comes from the associated lair boss, Propagator Core XR-53. You don’t need any Corrupted Bioprocessors to craft these augments.

Check out our 7.7 Augments Guide for everything you need to know about augmenting gear!

Earpiece

Which Earpiece you use will depend on what specific tertiary stats the rest of your gear and augments provide. Typically, you’ll need to use either an Accuracy (Initiative, yellow icon) or Alacrity (Quick Savant / Nimble, green icon) Earpiece.

Crystals

Advanced Eviscerating Crystals are the best. They are the only type of crystal that increases one of your tertiary stats. Since the stat pool for tertiary stats is much smaller than that of primary or secondary stats, adding 41 is a more significant upgrade than it would be if you were to add 41 to one of the primary or secondary stats (mastery, power, or endurance).

Relics

I recommend the Relic of Focused Retribution (FR) and Relic of Devastating Vengeance (DV) for all PvE content. Each relic offers a proc; FR’s proc boosts your Mastery, whereas DV’s proc increases your Critical Rating. Compared to the third option, Serendipitous Assault (SA), Devastating Vengeance is superior because Critical Rating offers a greater DPS increase per point specifically for this discipline.

Biochem Items

I recommend the Advanced Kyrprax Proficient Stim, Advanced Kyrprax Medpac, and Advanced Kyrprax Attack Adrenal for all PvE content. Grade 11 Biochem items from the crafting tier released with 6.0 remain BiS. Since they haven’t been updated to level 80, their effects are weaker than they should be, though they can still have an impact.

You should use the Proficient Stim as a DPS because it provides 2 tertiary stats that you need, Accuracy and Critical Rating, and tertiary stats are harder to come by and what you build your gear around. You should use the Attack Adrenal because it provides Power, which typically provides the greatest DPS increase, though it’s also more consistent, which is what you need for DPS checks.

Regarding the Zeal Guild Perk Alacrity Boost

If your guild uses the Zeal (cyan) guild perk set bonus, which gives a passive +5% Alacrity boost, you won’t need nearly as much Alacrity stat to reach your desired Alacrity threshold. My recommendations do not factor in these boosts, so if you have one, you’ll need to pay attention to percentage thresholds rather than the stat amounts. Just keep adding one augment at a time until you reach the desired percentage.

Guild leaders, I recommend using the Fortune (yellow) guild perk set bonus instead. It grants +5% Critical Chance and also boosts the Critical Rate and Time Efficiency of all Crew Skills by 2%. The reason for this is that you don’t have to change the way you gear in order to benefit from the effect.

Neither effect works in MM raids or PvP, so if you or your guild members do either of those activities, you’ll need to tweak your gear to reach the desired threshold depending on the activity, which I find super tedious. Even if your guild doesn’t do those activities, leaders still need to actively maintain the set bonus because your gear will become suboptimal on top of losing the bonus, whereas it’s not a big deal if your crit is a little lower for a bit.

The Alacrity boost is much stronger than the Critical Chance boost. Still, PvE content isn’t balanced around these guild perk set bonuses anyway, so I find it better to have a smaller boost I don’t have to worry about than a larger boost I have to manage.

Best Concealment Operative Builds in 7.0

These are the builds that I recommend for different types of content and situations. The Build Essentials are what I consider to be the core components that make the build viable. Without them, the build no longer accomplishes its primary function. Build Essentials can include important ability tree buffs, a tactical item, and even legendary items occasionally.

The ability tree buffs that aren’t listed as Build Essentials can be changed as needed without compromising the integrity of the build, though I have included a full set of default choices that will be most consistently helpful in accomplishing what the build sets out to do.

Single-Target Sustained Build for Mains

If you plan to main Concealment Operative, I recommend using this build. The rotation is harder and less forgiving as you’ll have to contend with less predictable TAs and manage Energy, but the reward is dealing more damage.

All of this is caused by Roll Knife, which allows Stim Boost to have far higher uptime, greatly increasing your critical damage dealt and providing a bunch of TAs. You shouldn’t need to use Corrosive Dart hardly at all, not that you can afford it anyway.

In general, you’ll want to drain your TAs completely before using Veiled Strike. At times, all of your heavy hitters will be on cooldown and Stim Boost is either active or recently fell off. This is the time to prioritize Veiled Strike. Otherwise, let your TAs hit zero.

If you waste TAs by gaining one when you’re already maxxed, you’re using Veiled Strike too often and will likely run out of Energy.

If you have a GCD with nothing available, you probably didn’t use Veiled Strike when you should have. In these cases, you’ll need to use Rifle Shots, the free filler. If you have to do this too often or run out of Energy, you will end up dealing less damage than you would with Relentless Blades.

Single-Target Sustained Build for Alts

This build offers great single-target sustained DPS. It’s not the maximum possible DPS, but unless you feel extremely comfortable with Concealment, you’ll pull better numbers with this build than the other sustained DPS build.

Relentless Blades makes it so you don’t have to manage your Energy and get your TAs at far more predictable times, making the rotation easier and more forgiving. You’ll almost always want to prioritize Veiled Strike over Laceration, though you will still need to insert Corrosive Dart periodically.

If you want to give up more DPS to make things even easier, you can take Crippling Throw instead of Crippling Wounds. This way, you don’t even have to worry about the Volatile Substance block and can just to Volatile Substance ▶ Crippling Throw back-to-back.

The non-essential points can be swapped out depending on the needs of the fight, but by default, I recommend improvements to sustained damage mitigation.

I also want to note that the Relic of Serendipitous Assault is stronger specifically for this build. Without the higher uptime on Stim Boost or predictable autocrits after a period of downtime, Devastating Vengeance ends up offering worse performance.

Solo Content Build

This build is structurally similar to what I recommend for sustained DPS, but it’s better suited to frequent trash pulls. As I mentioned, Advanced Stealth can’t match Tactical Critical in terms of sustained DPS; it’s not even close, but Advanced Stealth is much more useful when you’re able to enter stealth as frequently as you can between trash pulls. 

Remember that Volatile Substance only detonates when the target takes damage from a poison effect after 3s have elapsed since application, so you’ll need to make sure that the target you apply Volatile Substance to gets hit by Corrosive Dart, Toxic Haze, or Acid Blade after those 3s are up.

Since Volatile Substance deals AoE damage with Explosive Cells, it will apply Revealing Weakness to all enemies it damages, meaning you don’t have to worry about which direction you’re facing for Backstab.

Jarring Strike will enable these revealing Backstabs to knock down enemies, which is pretty fun and helps with survivability. Keep in mind that Jarring Strike will CC Strong and Elite enemies, but Toxic Haze and Fragmentation Grenade will only incapacitate Standard and Weak enemies.

PvP Build

Disclaimer: I have not tested this build, but I have applied the same principles I use coming up with a PvP build for any class where I prioritize options that boost survivability, CC, and spike damage.

I am certain that you’ll do better in PvP with this build than you would if you used one designed for PvE, though it may not be optimal from a PvP standpoint. In addition, the rest of this guide ignores PvP considerations, and you do need to use some abilities differently in PvP.

This build is more tailored to PvP by maxing out your survivability, stealth, spike damage, and CC capabilities.

I recommend Med Shield, Flash Bang, Blow for Blow, and Tactician’s Focus by default, but there are strong arguments to be made for Evasive Screen, Holotraverse, Evasive Imperative, and Second Wind.

Holotraverse is super important in Huttball as you can use it to teleport to an ally or enemy in the endzone. However, Flash Bang is one of the most powerful CC abilities in the game, and Holotraverse is on quite a long cooldown for being just a leap.

Either way, you’ll pop out of stealth to unleash a devastating series of autocrits enabled by Active Stealth, Volatile Strike, Tactician’s Focus, and Crippling Wounds while keeping the enemy debilitated with various CC effects.

To survive, you’ll need to carefully time Exfiltrate and Evasion to mitigate incoming spike damage, maintain 2 stacks of Kolto Probe, and stealth out to recuperate if you’re going to lose. Keep an eye on enemy cast bars.

Openers, Rotations, Priorities

Opener

This is the rotation you use at the very beginning of the fight and for burst DPS checks. It can be a little different than the standard rotation because everything is off cooldown, including all of your OCDs and relic procs. It’s important to get as much damage as possible while all of your damage boosts are available to maximize their impact. 

1. Stealth
2. Backstab (from stealth, +1 TA)
3. Corrosive Dart
4. Volatile Substance
5. Stim Boost (+1 TA) ▶ Adrenal
6. Tactical Superiority (if applicable, -1 TA)
7. Laceration ( Tactical Opportunity refunds TA)
8. Crippling Slice
9. Veiled Strike (+1 TA)
10. Laceration (-1 TA)
11. Laceration (-1 TA)
12. Backstab (+1 TA b/c Revealing Weakness)
13. Veiled Strike (+1 TA)
14. Laceration ( Tactical Opportunity refunds TA)
15. Laceration (-1 TA)
16. Laceration (-1 TA)
17. Veiled Strike (+1 TA)
18. Rotation

Backstab must be used first because you rely on being in stealth to grant the TA and deal increased damage since you don’t have the Revealing Weakness debuff on the target yet. Corrosive Dart is used second, right before all of your OCDs, because it’s damage that will get buffed by them without consuming one of those few GCD slots.

It would be nice to include that initial buffed Backstab with your OCDs, but you’d waste a GCD of your OCDs with Volatile Substance anyway since that attack breaks stealth, and it’s a DPS gain to apply Corrosive Dart before your OCDs anyway.

Since Tactical Superiority consumes a TA, you will have an additional TA to work with if you don’t use it at the beginning of the fight. For the most part, this will only influence when you need to use Holotraverse or reapply Corrosive Dart. The remainder of the opener is just the regular rotation.  

Standard Rotation

The Sustained DPS build has a mini-rotation component and a priority component. The rotation component is structured that way because Volatile Substance and Crippling Wounds have unwaveringly strict timing requirements. The priority component exists because each cycle varies so much as it is dependent on your TA level and floating cooldown.

Mini Rotation Component

If you opt for Crippling Throw, you can skip this part, though I still recommend using Volatile Substance and Crippling Throw back-to-back.

1. Volatile Substance
2. Backstab OR Laceration
3. Crippling Slice
4. Priority

Volatile Substance is the first ability because it’s our most damaging attack and enables Backstab to deal more damage. This entire sidebar exists because Volatile Substance is so unique in how it deals damage and interacts with Crippling Wounds.

You need to insert a GCD in between Volatile Substance and the Crippling Wounds-applying Crippling Slice because Volatile Substance takes a moment to “set in” before detonating when the target takes damage from Poison.

You must use either Backstab or Laceration because there’s a high chance that Acid Blade needs to be refreshed in order to remain active for the following 2 GCDs.

Technically, you can sometimes get away with using something that doesn’t refresh Acid Blade if you refreshed it immediately before applying Volatile Substance and are able to refresh it again immediately after Crippling Slice, but that’s not guaranteed and requires you to remain in melee range for a significant period of time.

You’ll find that Backstab will either become synchronized with Volatile Substance, where you’ll end up using it a lot in the Mini-Rotation component, or it won’t quite line up, and you’ll almost never use it here.

Crippling Slice is third because it grants an autocrit to your next direct damage ability, which happens to be when Volatile Substance detonates, assuming there is poison on the target that ticks during that GCD. Since it’s free, Crippling Slice also helps to offset the higher Energy cost of Volatile Substance, and this is essential if you’re using Roll Knife.

Just so we’re clear, Crippling Slice can’t detonate Volatile Substance, it just gets triggered at the same time that you’ll be activating Crippling Slice. Crippling Slice only grants the autocrit to your next direct damage attack, so it’s crucial that you execute the rotation without pausing between abilities. 

If you mess up, you’ll end up making something else autocrit instead, which is typically DPS loss unless your next attack happens to be Backstab in a single-target situation.

If you don’t have a spare TA for Laceration and have no way to earn one, you can use Veiled Strike in that GCD instead, but you’re better off delaying Volatile Substance to use Veiled Strike first. If Acid Blade falls off before Volatile Substance has detonated, apply Corrosive Dart immediately after using Crippling Slice.

This will cause Volatile Substance to detonate because 3s have elapsed and Corrosive Dart is a poison effect. Volatile Substance will still get the autocrit because Crippling Slice only makes direct attacks autocrit and Corrosive Dart deals periodic damage.

If Corrosive Dart is already on the target without the Acid Blade DoT, you get put in an unfortunate spot where the DoT may not tick to detonate Volatile Substance before your next GCD.

There’s no way to not give up some DPS if you get in this position. Rather than try and minimize DPS loss, I think it’s best to keep going with the rotation as if Volatile Substance detonated normally so you can get back on track.

Priority Component

1. Laceration (only if Acid Blade DoT will fall off)
2. Veiled Strike (only as a last resort for 1 TA)
3. Mini Rotation Component
4. Backstab (usually)
5. Veiled Strike (only if you have less than 2 TAs)
6. Laceration
7. Corrosive Dart (Energy-dependent)
8. Fragmentation Grenade (Energy-dependent and situational)
9. Overload Shot (Energy-dependent)
10. Rifle Shot

The Mini-Rotation Component enables Backstab to deal more damage and generate a TA, includes your most damaging attack, and features a GCD dedicated to Energy management.

Typically, Backstab will be your first priority unless your Poison from Acid Blade would fall off if it is not refreshed immediately, or you absolutely must build a TA with Veiled Strike first for the second GCD of the Mini-Rotation Component.

Outside of essential maintenance and setup for the Mini-Rotation Component, Backstab is typically your individual highest-priority ability. It applies the Acid Blade DoT, never costs a TA (while often generating 1), and is one of Concealment’s most damaging attacks.

Backstab should almost always be used on cooldown unless Volatile Substance is also available, in which case you’ll use it during the Mini-Rotation Component.

Keep in mind that the poison from Acid Blade is superior to that from Corrosive Dart or Toxic Haze because it is the only poison that buffs the damage dealt by Laceration and has a higher tick rate.

You will lose DPS if you don’t have Acid Blade on your current target. Consider delaying Backstab and the entire Mini-Rotation Component if you’re about to switch targets, or switch a little early.

If Backstab is not available and the Acid Blade DoT will fall off before your next opportunity to refresh it, Laceration should be prioritized.

For example, if it’s the final GCD before Acid Blade falls off, but you currently only have 1 TA, and Veiled Strike will come off cooldown, you’d want to use Laceration first even though it would normally be ideal to use Veiled Strike instead.

This adds a bunch of complexity to the priority system because you don’t want the Acid Blade DoT to fall off, but you also don’t want to delay other abilities if you don’t have to since they deal more damage or perpetuate the rotation.

If Acid Blade will not fall off in the next GCD and you have a TA, you’re safe to enter into the Mini-Rotation Component. Do not enter the Mini-Rotation Component if Backstab isn’t available or you do not have a spare TA to refresh Acid Blade.

Most of the time, Backstab and Volatile Substance are on cooldown, so you’ll have to decide between using Veiled Strike and Laceration. Veiled Strike should be used if you don’t have max TA and you have at least 1 GCD before Acid Blade falls off.

Laceration must be used if you have max stacks of TA (or if it’s the final GCD to refresh Acid Blade before it falls off) or Veiled Strike is unavailable and you have at least 1 TA.

It’s important to use Veiled Strike to generate a TA whenever you don’t have to use Laceration. The longer you delay Veiled Strike, the fewer times you’ll be able to use it over the course of the fight, meaning you’ll have fewer TAs overall and be forced to use your weaker, semi-rotational abilities instead.

Corrosive Dart deals almost as much damage as the Laceration GCD  (Laceration + Collateral Strike + Acid Blade tick), so they are functionally interchangeable in terms of immediate priority when using the Acid Blade tactical and Sustained DPS build.

There are some small factors that can add up over the course of an entire fight that will result in slightly lower sustained DPS, so you should still prioritize using Laceration when possible.

Overload Shot should only be used if all appropriate targets already have Corrosive Dart and there’s more than half of the duration remaining on Corrosive Dart on your primary target.

Overload Shot deals a little more than half the damage compared to Corrosive Dart, so it’s technically profitable to clip it if you’re out of TAs and can’t generate more, but only if there’s less than half of the DoT duration left.

Don’t expend too much mental effort to determine if you can clip Corrosive Dart, if it isn’t immediately clear to you, just use Overload Shot instead. That said, if you need to use Overload Shot and Corrosive Dart this often, you need to spend more time on the dummy.

Fragmentation Grenade can also be used instead of Overload Shot if you are more than 10m away from the boss. It even deals more damage than Corrosive Dart if you can hit at least 3 targets. However, you should only use it alongside Relentless Blades.

Using Roll Knife

If you’re using Roll Knife instead of Relentless Blades, you’ll care about Energy, and you can’t afford to use any semi-rotational ability besides Rifle Shot if you have less than 80 Energy, unless Adrenaline Probe is available.

Again, do not use Overload Shot or Fragmentation Grenade without Relentless Blades. Only use Corrosive Dart and Rifle Shot as your semi-rotational abilities.

You shouldn’t have to use Corrosive Dart nearly as often because Stim Boost provides a lot of TAs, but you can’t afford to use it that much either. Unless you’re pre-casting for Stim Boost ▶ Adrenal, I only recommend using it when it will offer some other additional benefit on top of dealing damage, like applying a Poison effect

If you’re wasting TAs by granting them when you already have 2, you will likely run out of Energy. If this is happening, you’re likely using Veiled Strike too often.