SWTOR 7.7 Innovative Ordnance Mercenary PvE Guide and Best Builds

SWTOR Innovative Ordnance Mercenary PvE Guide (DPS) for beginners and more experienced veterans: Skills, Choices, Rotations, Gearing, Builds, Tips!

Introduction to Innovative Ordnance Mercenary

Innovative Ordnance Mercs deal their damage through a combination of blood, fire, explosives, and blaster shots. While all of that definitely is amazing, IO has ridiculously strict and unforgiving Heat management. Outside of the filler slots, you really can’t deviate from or mess up the rotation much at all or you will overheat and your DPS will drop like a rock and stay that way for quite some time, though the spec does help to compensate for this by making other aspects of the game a little bit easier. 

IO Mercs have vastly superior mobility compared to most other ranged specs. You won’t wreck your rotation just because you have to move and if needed, you can do almost your full rotation while moving; there’s only 1 GCD where you are required to stand still. Target swapping is incredibly easy for IO as well because it doesn’t have very much interdependent damage so you can just keep chugging along in your rotation whenever you need to swap targets without skipping a beat.

The advantages don’t stop there either. As a DoT spec, IO features potent AoE damage, but even compared to other DoT specs, IO has a particularly good DoT spread, Fusion Missile. The ability just barely doesn’t deal enough damage to be used rotationally, so it’s available on-demand in your filler slots, and won’t really cause you to lose DPS. It also shares a cooldown with the duration of your DoTs, so it’s incredibly easy to use. Furthermore, you’ll have the exceedingly rare opportunity to actually gain single-target DPS in fights that have lots of add, but I’ll get into that later on. 

In terms of survivability, Mercenaries got nerfed slightly with the release of 7.0 thanks to the complete removal of their AoE RDT and effective loss Kolto Surge (65% Kolto Overload), though Chaff Flare now has both the effects of Arsenal and IO baseline while Trauma Regulators (Energy Shield heal stacks) and Energy Rebounder (Energy Shield CD reduction) remain accessible, so Mercenaries should still be able to handle anything that comes their way.

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. Mercenary is one of the exceptions here though. Thermal Sensor Override was the only ability that was fully removed from the Combat Style and there aren’t any new baseline effects, but 7 abilities were locked away behind 3 choices instead of the usual 5. 

Battle rezzes in general are now healer-only (so Onboard AED is now  restricted to Bodyguard), 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. 

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. 

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?  

Group Composition Tips

DPS Debuff	Presence of debuff increases DPS by approximately
Tech	3.3%
Armor	3.5%
Total DPS Gain:	6.8%

IO is somewhat dependent on other disciplines for debuffs. You will lose a fair bit of DPS if you decide to just plop it into a group that doesn’t offer the debuffs that IO needs.

Innovative Ordnance Mercenary pairs best with Advanced Prototype Powertechs / Tactics Vanguards since both disciplines provide the only two DPS debuffs needed by the other. Operative / Scoundrel is the only other Combat Style that provides the Tech debuff but also the Internal / Elemental debuff, so it’s slightly redundant. 

The armor debuff is provided by a myriad of other disciplines, but there isn’t much optimization to do with respect to IO if you don’t use an AP PT, so your optimization for which discipline provides the armor debuff for your group should be determined by the rest of your composition. 

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

Mag Shot

(Ranged/Energy/Direct/Single Target/Instant)
Mag Shot is one of your most powerful and cheapest attacks. The rest of your rotation is structured in part around being able to use this ability as often as possible. Mag Shot has 4 procs that are relevant to your rotation:

Innovative Particle Accelerator (IPA)
Dealing damage with Power Shot, Unload, and Sweeping Blasters finish the cooldown on Mag Shot and make the next Mag Shot generate no Heat. Cannot occur more than once every 7s. It can only proc off of the first tick of Unload and Sweeping Blasters.

IPA has to be procced as often as possible, which means you will be able to use Mag Shot twice per rotation cycle. Without IPA, Mag Shot only costs 15 Heat, so if it happens to be off cooldown without the proc, this ability takes the highest priority as a filler ability. Generally, this will only happen during the opener or after some downtime.

The timing on the internal cooldown of IPA is pretty tight, and you must be consistent about when you proc it or you’ll end up not proccing it when you need to. This is most relevant when it comes to the fact that Power Shot deals its damage at the end of the GCD (unless it’s instant) while Unload and Sweeping Blasters deal their damage at the beginning of the GCD. I’ll cover this in greater detail in the rotation section.

Superheated Shot
Mag Shot ignores 30% of the target’s armor, always triggers Combustible Gas Cylinder, and if Mag Shot is used against a burning target, you vent 5 Heat. Your target should always be burning since Incendiary Missile and the burning DoT from Combustible Gas Cylinder should always be on the target.

IPA and Superheated Shot make Mag Shot free and vent 5 heat, making the ability not only important as a damaging ability, but also as a tool for helping to keep your Heat down.

Speed to Burn
Dealing damage with Mag Shot grants Speed to Burn, which makes your next Serrated Shot or Power Shot (or Rapid Scan) activate instantly. Cannot occur more than once every 15 seconds. This effect will only be able to trigger with every other Mag Shot, so you’ll only be able to use it once per cycle.

Speed to Burn will almost exclusively be used with the Power Shot in between Mag Shots since it enables you to use that Power Shot while moving so it won’t be vulnerable to interruption and can’t ruin your rotation.

Unfortunately, since this proc applies to several different abilities, including a filler, it can get desynchronized from that Power Shot and that can cause other problems. It’s not the end of the world if it gets used on Serrated Shot instead, but you will have a harder time getting that second IPA proc consistently.

Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to resynchronize it with the Power Shot. All you need to do is insert 2 additional GCDs into the filler section of your rotation in the next cycle such that the first Mag Shot of that cycle doesn’t happen until 2 GCDs later than normal. This will come with a slight DPS loss, but it’s a lot better than your rotation getting ruined as a result of missing an IPA proc.

Incendiary Missile

(Tech/Elemental/Periodic/Single Target/Instant)
This is the first of your two main DoTs. Since it deals a relatively high amount of damage, it should have 100% uptime. The most notable feature of this DoT is that it is instant, so it can always be used while moving. Incendiary Missile has 1 discipline passive, 1 debuff, and 1 ability associated with it that are relevant to your rotation: 

Relentless Ordnance
Periodic damage dealt is increased by 30% on targets below 30% max health. This includes damage dealt by Incendiary Missile, Serrated Shot, Combustible Gas Cylinder, Supercharged Burn, Early Ignition, and Electro Net. About 44% of your damage dealt is considered periodic, so this is a massive increase to your damage dealt. 

Sweltering Heat
Incendiary Missile provides the internal/elemental damage debuff. This is the second most valuable DPS debuff in the game because almost every single spec deals some kind of internal/elemental damage. For other DoT specs, it can even be more valuable than the armor debuff.

Supercharged Gas
Supercharged Burn applies to the next target you use a ranged attack on that is burning from your Incendiary Missile. This will probably not be relevant very often, but it’s important to know when target swapping since you don’t reapply your DoTs immediately like you often do for other DoT specs but you do tend to use Supercharged Gas as often as possible.

Hold off on using Supercharged Gas if your current target doesn’t have Incendiary Missile until you can apply it to your current target or switch back to whatever does have the DoT right before doing your next ranged attack and activate Supercharged Gas so that target gets Supercharged Burn.

Serrated Shot

(Tech/Internal/Periodic/Single Target/Casted)
This is the second of your two main DoTs. Serrated Shot and Incendiary Missile deal nearly identical damage, though their damage types are slightly different. The most notable difference between the two is that Serrated Shot is a casted ability. Serrated Shot has 1 discipline passive and 1 debuff associated with it that are relevant to your rotation that I haven’t already mentioned:

Flaming Wound
Your elemental (fire) attacks deal 3% more damage to bleeding targets. Basically, this DoT makes the rest of your DoTs deal slightly more damage, so it’s important that you have 100% uptime on Serrated Shot so that you maintain this damage boost.

Ordnance Expert
Serrated Shot provides the ranged debuff. Unfortunately, the ranged debuff is arguably one of the worst DPS debuffs. You’ll still get some use out of it in IO, but all of the other specs that would greatly benefit from this debuff already provide it themselves while the ones that can utilize it but don’t provide it don’t do that much ranged damage in the first place.

Thermal Detonator

(Tech/Kinetic/Direct/Single Target/Instant)
Thermal Detonator is a complex and powerful attack. Thanks to buffs made throughout 7.0, it can no longer be considered a quasi-filler like in past expansions as it’s now consistently your most damaging GCD.

That damage is spread over 3 components and none of it goes out immediately, despite the attack being instant. The first component of Thermal Detonator’s damage comes from the explosion when it detonates. The explosion happens 3s after you’ve thrown Thermal Detonator. Since there is this delay, it’s important to avoid throwing it at something that’s about to die.

The other 2 components of Thermal Detonator’s damage come from the proc and legendary implant associated with the ability:

Early Ignition
Mag Shot and Power Shot cause targets with a primed Thermal Detonator to combust early. In addition, whenever Thermal Detonator combusts, it deals a small amount of additional burn damage over 6 seconds. To be clear, the DoT applies regardless of when or how Thermal Detonator explodes, you don’t need to hit it early for the DoT to apply, though you’ll almost always do this anyway.

The DoT from Early Ignition is the second component of Thermal Detonator’s damage. It is considerably weaker than the damage dealt by the initial explosion, but the proportion is still significant.

Overcharged Cells Implant
Dealing damage with Thermal Detonator generates 3 stacks of Supercharge. Cannot occur more than once every 15s. This implant was introduced in 7.3 as a redesign and replacement of the Random Charge implant. Statistically, there’s no difference in the number of Supercharge stacks generated, but their generation is now completely predictable.

Since the Supercharged Burn DoT deals 100k damage, each stack generated contributes ~10k damage. Technically, it’s more since Supercharged Gas has other damage-boosting effects beyond applying the DoT, but we can ignore those for now. The key takeaway is that because Thermal Detonator builds 3 stacks of Supercharge, it is effectively responsible for dealing an additional 30k damage per activation.

These Supercharge stacks are the third component of Thermal Detonator’s damage and are responsible for sending the GCD’s effective damage to the top of IO’s damage totem pole.

Power Shot

(Ranged/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Casted)
Power Shot is your strong filler while Rapid Shots is your weak filler. Power Shot is considerably weaker than your rotational abilities; it’s not even close. Due to the amount of Heat generated by your other rotational abilities, this will generally only be used as a filler when you have Vent Heat available, or if you happen to have very little Heat as a result of downtime, though it does still need to be used once (typically twice) per rotation cycle to proc IPA. Power Shot has 1 proc associated with it that is relevant to your rotation that I haven’t already mentioned:

Surging Shots
Dealing periodic damage grants 1 stack of Surging Shots, increasing the damage dealt by your next Power Shot or Sweeping Blasters by 1%. Stacks up to 10 times. These stacks usually build fairly quickly, but the damage increase of an individual stack is too weak to care about, so you should use Power Shot when appropriate and ignore how many stacks of this you have.

Rapid Shots

(Ranged/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
This is your weak filler ability, though you will still be using it quite often because your rotational abilities generate so much Heat. Since it is instant, it can be used while moving.

As a result of the Random Charge implant being replaced by Overcharged Cells, Rapid Shots has returned to its status of being decisively weaker than Power Shot, though you’ll still be using it quite often since it’s free and you don’t have that much Heat to spare on nonessential Power Shots. Rapid Shots has 1 class passive that is associated with it that is relevant to your rotation:

Combustible Gas Cylinder
Ranged weapon attacks have a 30% chance to deal additional elemental damage over 6 seconds. Cannot occur more than once per second. You won’t ever do anything specifically for the purpose of applying this DoT, but it should have very high uptime and you’ll see it in StarParse as one of the Burning debuffs.

Missile Blast

(Tech/Kinetic/Direct/AoE/Instant)
This ability description will be a bit different from the others because Missile Blast is an absolutely horrible ability in PvE for all Merc disciplines unless you have the Volatile Warhead proc. 

Without the proc, it deals very little damage and costs way too much Heat to ever be worth using, so I am going to explain the proc now because it only makes sense to ever use it when you have said proc.

Volatile Warhead
Dealing periodic damage to a target with less than 30% health grants Volatile Warhead, which reduces the Heat generated by your next Missile Blast by 10, increases the damage it deals by 75%, and makes it grant 2 stacks of Supercharge. Cannot occur more than once every 15 seconds. 

In short, this proc makes Missile Blast better than Power Shot as a filler in practically every way. Whenever you have the Volatile Warhead proc,

You also need to be careful about watching how much time is left on the proc because Missile Blast’s travel time is quite slow and the proc isn’t consumed until you actually deal damage with the ability. 

There aren’t too many things in SWTOR that are more soul-crushing than watching the Volatile Warhead proc fall off while the missile is still soaring through the air. When this happens, it means you just threw 20 Heat out the window to deal very little damage. Make sure that you don’t use Missile Blast if the proc will fall off in the next GCD. 

Since Volatile Warhead triggers when a DoT ticks on something that has less than 30% health, you’ll end up getting the proc a lot more often in fights with a bunch of adds, especially when you get to DoT spread, so make sure you don’t waste the proc. Missile Blast does not have any other procs or passives associated with it.

Unload

(Ranged/Energy/Direct/Single Target/Channeled)
Unload’s direct damage per activation is on par with your other non-filler abilities though they only cost 1 GCD instead of 2, which causes the actual the DPS of Unload to plummet into filler territory. While it deals the most direct damage out of all your fillers and can proc IPA, Unload cannot generate any stacks of Supercharge, which causes its sustained DPS potential to plummet below that of Power Shot.

As a result, the only time you should use Unload is if you need to proc IPA and cannot use Power Shot or if you won’t be able to benefit from the Supercharge that would be generated by another ability. The former typically comes up if you need to move while the latter will come up if you have 7 stacks of Supercharge and no Volatile Warhead proc going into your third filler slot in the rotation.

Keep in mind that IPA will only proc off of Unload when Unload is activated, so if IPA becomes available after you’ve already activated the ability, you’ll have to wait until the channel ends and then cast Power Shot to get the proc, causing your rotation to get ruined, but I’ll cover this in greater detail later on.

Unload has 1 hidden discipline passive associated with it that is relevant to your rotation that I haven’t already mentioned.

Thrill of the Hunt
Thrill of the Hunt allows Unload to be channeled while moving. Previously, this was a utility and then ability tree buff that also affected other discipline-specific abilities, but now it’s a hidden effect that DPS get for free.

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. 

I mention filler slots a few times in this section. I’ll explain what those mean in the Rotation section of the guide.

Fusion Missile

(Tech/Kinetic and Elemental/Direct and Periodic/AoE/Casted)
This ability is your DoT spread. If there are other enemies out that need to die, this takes the highest priority in your filler slot and should be used on cooldown. Thanks to the Power Barrels discipline passive, the Heat cost is reduced to 15 and its cooldown is reduced to only 15 seconds, making it as expensive as a Power Shot and usable once per cycle.

Only use your other AoE abilities if this DoT spread is insufficient because your other AoE attacks are extremely expensive. You can use Fusion Missile in the first filler slot instead of Power Shot and still get the IPA proc on time, but you’ll need to channel Unload or Sweeping Blasters for at least a GCD in the second filler slot.

Due to the limited amount of spare Heat at your disposal, if you’re using Fusion Missile throughout the fight, you can’t really afford to do any other AoE than a half channel of Sweeping Blasters as your IPA proc ability because you’ll be using Vent Heat on cooldown.

Death from Above

(Tech/Kinetic/Direct/AoE/Channeled)
This is your strongest direct AoE ability, though it has a fairly long cooldown, so you can’t spam it. If Fusion Missile’s DoT spread is insufficient to take care of the adds or they need to die ASAP, you can use this ability for your third and fourth filler slots. 

Be mindful that Death from Above costs 30 Heat over the duration of the channel, which is the same cost per GCD as Power Shot. In a rotation cycle where you’ll also be using Fusion Missile, you’ll be spending 15 Heat for every single filler slot GCD, so you can really only afford to use Death from Above if you have Vent Heat available, and even then only if you don’t plan on using Fusion Missile again for quite a while.

In other words, only use Death from Above if you have Vent Heat available and you won’t need to use Fusion Missile again for a while.

Sweeping Blasters

(Ranged/Energy/Direct/AoE/Channeled)
This is your spammable AoE. It deals less damage and costs more Heat than Death from Above. Sweeping Blasters is so expensive and you have higher priority AoEs that already max out your Heat, so you won’t be using it too much. Unless you’re using the Continuous Fire tactical, you should only ever channel Sweeping Blasters for a single GCD if you need to proc IPA and can hit at least 3 targets.

Sticky Dart

(Tech/Kinetic/Direct/AoE/Instant)
Explosive Dart got a slight redesign in 7.0 and is now called Sticky Dart. It is no longer worth using in PvE because it no longer spreads DoTs and deals too little damage given that it costs as much Heat as your other AoEs.

Since your Heat is so limited, you’re not even gaining burst DPS to pre-cast it because you’d be forced to use a Rapid Shots instead of a Power Shot and the damage difference between your strong and weak filler is about the same as the damage you’d gain from using Sticky Dart. In other words, you’d be forced to use Rapid Shots later on instead of Power Shot if you use Sticky Dart, so you’re not gaining any DPS even by pre-casting.

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. 

Vent Heat

Repeat after me: “Vent Heat is an offensive cooldown, not something I save and only use when I mess up my rotation and overheat.” It may be a bit strange since it isn’t as straightforward as some of the other offensive cooldowns are, but rest assured that it is still an offensive cooldown. If you’re a bit confused, let’s imagine that you have two parses that are identical in every way but one: the only difference is that in one parse, you used Vent Heat 3 times, which let you use 13 extra Power Shots instead of Rapid Shots.

As we’ve already established, Rapid Shots deals a lot less damage than Power Shots, so the parse that managed to replace 13 Rapid Shots with 13 Power Shots will have higher DPS because it got to use the higher-damaging ability more often. This applies in burst situations as well, because as soon as a burst DPS check happens, you stop using Rapid Shots at all and use Power Shots instead, even when this causes you to overheat, because you can use Vent Heat to come back down to sub-40 Heat.

It’s a bit tricky to get the maximum benefit from this ability, especially in IO, since you want to return to the maximum Heat Dissipation Rate, but at the same time, you don’t want to go over 40 Heat with your next ability or go down to 0 Heat either since in both scenarios, you’d be wasting Heat. Your goal is to get as close to 0 Heat as possible without hitting 0. Luckily, this is pretty easy to control with the number of Power Shots you use. 

With 7.0, BioWare decided to combine Vent Heat and Thermal Sensor Override, which removed a ton of the finesse required to get the maximum benefit out of either ability. Vent Heat no longer triggers until an ability is activated that would generate Heat. It is best used right before you activate a 3s channeled ability like Unload, Sweeping Blasters, or Death From Above because this maximizes the amount of time where you’re still dealing damage but aren’t generating any Heat, allowing you to utilize a bit of passive Heat dissipation. 

Vent Heat is also grayed out until you have enough Heat to utilize the effects. It’s difficult to fully benefit from both components, so just activate right before your next ability that costs at least 15 Heat when you have 65-80 Heat. It doesn’t matter if you save it for a 3s channeled ability anymore since you won’t be venting that much Heat at that point anyway.

Supercharged Gas

Unlike Arsenal, Supercharged Gas is ridiculously strong in AS. It costs 10 Heat, increases periodic damage dealt by 10%, gives an autocrit to your next Mag Shot (thanks to the Concentrated Fire legendary implant), and most importantly, provides the Supercharged Burn DoT, which is your most damaging attack by far, even more than Electro Net. It’s incredibly important to activate Supercharged Gas as soon as it becomes available so you can gain all of these effects as often as possible. 

Different abilities generate different amounts of Supercharge:

This Ability	Generates This Many Supercharge Stacks
Thermal Detonator	3
Missile Blast	2
Power Shot	1
Rapid Shots	1
Kolto Shot	1
Rapid Scan	1

The table makes Supercharge stack generation seem weird and arbitrary, though it’s basically just your fillers and Thermal Detonator.

Since Supercharged Burn deals ~100k damage, you can think of each stack of Supercharge effectively being worth an extra 10k for the GCD that grants it. For example, Missile Blast contributes an extra 20k damage per activation beyond what it says on the tin since it applies 2 stacks of Supercharge.

In addition, it just so happens that 10k damage is the damage difference between Power Shot and Rapid Shots, so wasting a stack of Supercharge is effectively the same as using Rapid Shots when you could have afforded to use Power Shot. In other words, it’s equally important to not waste Supercharge stacks as it is to maximize your usage of Power Shot as fillers.

Since Kolto Shot generates a stack of Supercharge, doesn’t require a target, and costs no Heat, you can effectively store up 10k damage per GCD whenever you can’t hit anything. This comes up when you’re out of combat and during downtime mid-fight. You can also use your out-of-combat regeneration ability to build up Supercharge stacks before pulling a boss.

Finally, I want to mention that whenever you gain a stack of Supercharge, you gain the Relentless Ordnance buff which increases your critical chance by 10% for 10 seconds. The proc has a 10s rate limit, and you shouldn’t change your rotation to boost its uptime, but I just wanted to point it out since it will show up on your bar.

Electro Net

(Tech/Energy/Periodic/Single-Target/Instant)
While this ability isn’t technically an offensive cooldown since it’s still on the GCD, you should still think of it as one since it deals a pretty high amount of damage and has a long cooldown. Against non-player enemies, builds up to 5 stacks that each increase the damage taken by Electro Net by 20% (100% total) and these stacks apply automatically over the first 5 seconds after application and are not dependent on whether or not the target moves, unlike in PvP. 

Since it is still an attack, make sure you aren’t wasting this extra damage on an add. It also deals periodic damage, so the periodic damage boosts you get from Supercharged Gas and Relentless Ordnance will affect this ability.

It’s also okay to wait a little bit to use this until you can apply it while Supercharged Gas is active because that ability has higher uptime compared to the other disciplines thanks to the Energized Charges tactical and Random Charge legendary implant. Don’t wait more than a full cycle though since the damage boost is still small.

Due to the introduction of the Overcharged Cells implant, it is more impactful that Electro Net does not generate a stack of Supercharge, so remember to factor that into your planning. It’s okay to delay Electro Net by a rotation cycle if using it would throw off your Supercharge stack generation.

Adrenal

Make sure to pair the Adrenal with Electro Net and Supercharged Gas. The Adrenal should be active for the full duration of both abilities. It is highly unlikely that a fight will last long enough where this delay will be enough to where it will result in missing out on a use of the Adrenal. This is done because the effects synergize such that the DPS increase is greater from using the effects together than using them separately. 

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.

Energy Shield

This is your most reliable defensive cooldown. It will mitigate all damage that can be mitigated because it provides flat damage reduction. Along with your armor and Power Barrier ability tree proc, you will have 58.57% damage reduction against Kinetic / Energy damage and 41% damage reduction against Internal / Elemental damage. 

Thanks in part due to its long duration, Energy Shield is best when trying to mitigate damage that you’re supposed to be taking, though you’re not going to be able to cheese anything with this ability. Thankfully, you have other DCDs to cheese with, though they aren’t completely reliable. 

Chaff Flare

Chaff Flare reduces your current threat against all enemies by 25% and grants Unshakable, +35% Defense Chance, and 2 charges of Decoy for 6s. Unshakable is just interrupt immunity. Prior to 7.0, Chaff Flare had different additional effects unique to each discipline, but those effects were combined as part of the shift to ability trees.

The defensive buffs work against different types of damage, so a single effect will only ever apply to one type of ability. 

The +35% defense chance effect means your chance to completely avoid the damage from melee/ranged attacks (AKA weapon damage) is increased. Since it only improves your odds, this effect is not reliable against large singular hits, though heavier hits tend to be Force/Tech damage anyway.

The Decoy charges enable you to completely absorb the damage from the next two direct (non-DoT) Force/Tech attacks. While it isn’t specified in the description, this effect does not work against AoE damage, though I believe it used to when Decoy was only available to Arsenal. 

Unfortunately, as of 7.0, Mercenaries lack access to a foolproof cheese ability unlike nearly all other combat styles, as most boss attacks are AoE damage. Responsive Safeguards has the same vulnerability, and Rocket Out doesn’t grant damage immunity for its duration like the other dashes and rolls.

Still, most of the stuff you really need to cheese is single-target damage, so it works most of the time against that and is only unreliable as a general-purpose DCD.

Responsive Safeguards

Responsive Safeguards is one of the best DCDs in the game. It absorbs all the damage, heals you, and reflects the damage back at the attacker. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work on everything; it only mitigates direct, single-target attacks, so it won’t do anything against DoTs and AoE damage, though remember that in raids, damage types don’t always match their appearance. 

Since this ability does completely absorb the damage, Responsive Safeguards should never be used at the same time as another defensive cooldown. You’ll either take no damage or all of it. If you take any amount of damage, this DCD did absolutely nothing and you just wasted it. 

Unfortunately, most damage you’ll be taking in raids is AoE damage, so there aren’t too many attacks that Responsive Safeguards works against and there are many fights where this isn’t usable at all. 

This isn’t a major problem though since you can almost always survive while only using Kolto Overload, Energy Shield, and Chaff Flare. Since it’s so often useless against damage you’re meant to take, it’s best to seek out attacks that you can reflect with this ability in order to deal extra damage. 

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 (and I hope you know that Unnatural Preservation is not included in this rule). 

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.

Cure

This is the cleanse for Mercenaries. 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. Before you use this on yourself, make sure that you don’t get Responsive Safeguard ticks off of whatever you’re trying to cleanse 

Try to avoid using this as your cleanse, a lot of the cleanses that DPS are responsible for can be removed with an ability that is off the GCD like the CC break or Hydraulic Overrides thanks to the movement-impairing effect purge. 

Unless the debuff is going out to many members of your group at the same time, your healers are responsible for cleansing you. 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.

Hydraulic Overrides

The movement speed boost provided by this ability is rather small for Mercenaries, so it’s far more useful for its CC immunity, which allows you to cheese mechanics and prevent yourself from getting interrupted due to getting knocked around, so you won’t lose DPS. 

You should prioritize using Rocket Out if you have to move, but don’t hesitate to use this ability as well to help you get back into range even faster, provided you aren’t saving it for a mechanic. It also tends to be better for movement than Rocket Out if the whole group is moving with the boss since you can still deal damage during this ability while each use of Rocket Out costs a GCD.

Rocket Out

Unlike other, similar abilities like the Agent’s Roll and Mad Dash, you do not gain any sort of damage mitigation during this ability, so it can only be used for mobility. Rocket Out does cost a GCD to use, so you should avoid using this if you can safely get where you need to go without using it. This means you should be reserving it for moving long distances and getting out of fairly large circles. Do not use Rocket Out if you only need to take a step or two to get out of a circle. 

Even though this ability costs a GCD, it won’t disrupt the flow of your rotation. Just keep going and use Rocket Out as needed.

It is possible to use Rocket Out to move forward by doing some fancy maneuvering with rotating your character. If you plan to regularly play Mercenary, you need to get good at this because it’s your only real mobility tool for long distances. If you somehow end up a mile away from the boss, you have to be able to get back ASAP, and you need to be able to move forward using this ability to do that. 

If you can’t or are unwilling to use Rocket Out for forward movement, you will lose a ton of DPS on some bosses and should pick a different Combat Style for group content. 

It’s not too hard, it just takes some practice so you can do it quickly without having to think about it. The key is to start walking in the direction you want to go and then quickly rotate your camera and character 180 degrees using your mouse (holding right click), then as soon as you finish rotating, activate your ability and rotate back during the animation. Other people may comment with different methods, I know there are a few ways to do it, but that’s what I do. Regardless of your method, it needs to be muscle memory. A great time to practice this is while running back to the boss after a wipe.

Power Surge

Power Surge makes your next ability with a cast time instant, allowing it to be used on the move. It does not provide a tangible DPS increase when used on abilities that have a 1.5s cast time because the GCD is also 1.5s long, so you don’t save any time by using it on those abilities. 

It does provide a DPS increase when used on abilities that have a cast time longer than 1.5s, like Concussion Missile. Usually, Power Surge will be activated in order to make Serrated Shot instant so you can use it while moving or Fusion Missile so you can get your DoT spread off ASAP.

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 Merc has at their disposal in addition to any other abilities I haven’t yet mentioned. 

Jet Boost

This is your 360-degree knockback. Due to its short range, it can be rather difficult to use against some mechanics, like the Chained Manifestations on Styrak NiM, but it does knock them pretty far away. Also, please do not ruin everybody else’s day by using this ability for its AoE damage. 

Electro Dart

This is your hard stun, meaning it does not break on damage. In PvE, this will generally only be used for specific mechanics since most things you’d care about stunning are immune. Be sure to pay attention when something is stunnable though, because that often means you’re intended to stun it.

Disabling Shot

This is your interrupt. Mercenaries get the honor of having the interrupt with the longest cooldown in the game at 24 seconds! This usually isn’t a huge problem, there are really only a couple instances in the whole game that require a shorter cooldown, and generally a melee DPS takes that, even over other ranged DPS. 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. 

Concussion Missile

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, though usually healers are assigned this responsibility when possible. This is also one of the best abilities to pair with Power Surge since it goes from being a 2 second cast to instant, meaning it’s only a GCD, so you won’t lose as much DPS that way. 

Since Mercenaries are now the only combat style that gets their 60s in-combat mez by default, be prepared to use it as requested.

 Hunter Killer Droid

This ability is a redesign of Stealth Scan, but it offers very little benefit in PvE. Stealthed enemies aren’t super common and the effect doesn’t work against bosses that stealth out. The most theoretically useful effect in PvE is the 30% reduction in damage taken while stunned, but it’s not gonna change the outcome of a fight, so it’s not worth using.

Hunter Killer Droid provides significantly more value in PvP, but this is a PvE guide and the ability is locked away in the ability tree, so I won’t be elaborating.

Determination

This is your CC break. Use it when you get CC’d and are unable to DPS as a result of getting CC’d. 

Raid Utility

Unfortunately, IO doesn’t really offer any special PvE raid utility anymore. The best thing they’ve got is the Internal / Elemental debuff. 

Supercharged Celerity

Mercs unfortunately have the worst raid buff by far. Disciplines that use the 1.4s GCD (which includes all DPS specs besides Arsenal, Lightning, and Carnage) do not actually get to use an extra ability during this window because the alacrity increase isn’t significant enough. It is effective at all other GCD tiers though, so it’s an HPS increase for healers and DPS increase for tanks (lol).

This raid buff is also helpful in increasing the tick rate of infinitely refreshable DoTs that are applied at the beginning of the fight, like Lightning’s Affliction and AP’s Retractable Blade, though you can’t really benefit from this in fights where these DoTs need to be frequently reapplied. 

Since Supercharged Celerity boosts alacrity for a short time, it also has the potential to mess up some specs that use fairly strict rotations (including Innovative Ordnance) since it can desynchronize their cooldowns, which may be dependent on each other. You won’t get to vent the 10 Heat either if you use this instead of Supercharged Gas.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter that much anymore because no Mercenary or Commando is ever gonna take this over Chaff Flare.

Off-Healing

Your three off-healing abilities are Kolto Shot, Emergency Scan, and Rapid Scan. If you ever have to use these when you could be DPSing, something has clearly gone wrong with the fight, 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 in PvE unless you think you will literally die if you do not receive healing right now and the pull is still salvageable and the same goes for healing someone else. 

If there is downtime though where you can’t do anything else at all, it’s okay to heal yourself with Emergency Scan (make sure you can get down to 0 Heat though) and Kolto Shot, but really make sure there’s nothing you can do at all that would increase your damage output first. 

Besides it not being 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. 

I would like to be clear that building stacks of Supercharge outside of the fight or during downtime with Kolto Shot is strongly encouraged, though I don’t consider that to be off-healing though since the purpose is not to gain health and it’s not being done when you could be DPSing.

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 – Incendiary Missile Buff

Eruptive Flames

• Effect: Periodic damage from Incendiary Missile has a 60% chance to erupt, burning up to 4 additional targets within 5m of the primary target.
• Recommendation: Take this in solo content and in fights with a lot of adds. Since Eruptive Flames causes damage to echo, it can actually provide a considerable single-target DPS increase in addition to significantly boosting your AoE damage dealt. It doesn’t work everywhere though because the adds need to survive for a decent chunk of time and actually be near the boss. It isn’t enough if a lot of adds are only alive for a brief moment or can’t stay near the boss. I also want to note that the fact that each tick only affects 4 targets isn’t that much of a detriment because every add is gonna have that DoT and affect a unique set of 4 targets. The poster children of fights where you’d want to use Eruptive Flames are Grob’thok and Corruptor Zero because they have a bunch of adds up for most of the fight.

Incendiary Ignition

• Effect: Targets affected by your Incendiary Missile take 35% more damage from your Combustible Gas Cylinder DoT.
• Recommendation: Take this in fights where you DoT spread frequently, but can’t make use of Eruptive Flames. Incendiary Ignition provides the weakest overall effect, but it always works without requiring anything extra from you and offers a DPS increase in both single-target and AoE situations. It’s best in fights where you DoT spread a fair bit, but can’t make good use of Eruptive Flames because there aren’t many secondary targets or they don’t stay stacked up for long enough. This option is probably best in a fight like Dread Master Brontes because you’ll be getting lots of Volatile Warheads already and have some opportunities to DoT spread to Kephesses, but you’re mostly hitting 1 target at a time, and in most of burn, you’ll have Volatile Warhead proccing naturally anyway.

Volatile Cinders

• Effect: Periodic Damage from Incendiary Missile has a 50% chance to trigger Volatile Warhead, regardless of the target’s health percentage. This effect cannot occur more than once every 10 seconds.
• Recommendation: Take this in fights that are mostly single-target. As of 7.1, Volatile Warhead makes Missile Blast grant 2 stacks of Supercharge, which is enough to make Volatile Cinders the strongest option in pure single-target situations, though this option comes with a few trade-offs, particularly that it doesn’t synergize with DoT spreading because you can’t afford to consistently use both Missile Blast and Fusion Missile as fillers and will get some Missile Blasts as adds drop below sub-30% anyway. The rotation is also a bit more difficult as you have to think more about Heat management than you would if you just always used Rapid Shots, though I wouldn’t let this deter you from taking Volatile Cinders; the big reason not to take it is how often you DoT spread. Be careful when your target drops below 30% not to use more than 1 Missile Blast per rotation cycle unless you have Vent Heat available. You can’t afford to use 2 per cycle for very long.

Level 27 Choice – Sticky Dart, Power Barrier, and Hunter Killer Droid

Sticky Dart

• Effect: Grants the Sticky Dart ability, which detonates after several seconds, dealing slightly more damage per GCD than Sweeping Blasters to up to 8 nearby enemies and slowing them by 60% for 10 seconds. Standard and weak enemies enter a state of panic while the dart is active and are knocked down by the blast. 15s cooldown, costs 15 Heat.
• Recommendation: Take this for solo content and when AoE is the priority. Sticky Dart deals less damage and has less range than Fusion Missile, but it does offer slightly higher AoE damage than Sweeping Blasters while also fitting better into your single-target rotation. Unfortunately, Sticky Dart no longer spreads your DoTs.

Power Barrier

• Effect: Power Shot and Rapid Scan generate a stack of Power Barrier, which increase damage reduction by 2% per stack for 15 seconds. Stacks up to 3 times.
• Recommendation: Take this for most group content. The 6% DR is nice, but it can be difficult to maintain since Power Shot is sometimes only used once every 15 seconds, meaning that any sort of disruption can remove the buff.

Hunter Killer Droid

• Effect: Grants the ability Hunter Killer Droid, which reveals stealthed opponents and roots them for 2s, slows all enemies within its 8m radius by 30%, and grants Droid Overwatch for 15s. Droid Overwatch reduces your damage taken while stunned by 30%. 20s cooldown.
• Recommendation: Never take this in PvE. Many stealthed enemies in PvE content just ignore this ability, and while the stun RDT is nice, it costs a GCD and you’re giving up 6% DR, which diminishes the value in the few fights where you do get stunned.

Level 39 Choice – Thermal Detonator Buff

Impact Explosives

• Effect: Thermal Detonator deals 50% more kinetic damage, but no longer deals elemental damage and Power Shot and Mag Shot cannot detonate it early.
• Recommendation: Take this in mostly single-target fights with frequent disruptions, target swapping, or downtime. Impact Explosives provides barely less single-target DPS than Slow Burn, but deals all of its damage much sooner, so you’ll get more damage out of it whenever Slow Burn isn’t able to tick completely. This usually happens if a target dies or becomes immune. If you don’t want to bother changing things around on a per-fight basis, it’s also fine to just stick with this option all the time.

Heavy Shrapnel

• Effect: Thermal Detonator can hit up to 8 additional enemies within 8m of the primary target for a quarter of the damage it deals to the primary target.
• Recommendation: Take this for solo content and when AoE is the priority. It is the only buff to Thermal Detonator that increases your AoE damage. If you can’t consistently hit at least 3 additional targets, you’ll deal more sustained DPS with either of the other options. Please note that this option will not cause you to build more than 3 stacks of Supercharge per activation with the Overcharged Cells implant.

Slow Burn

• Effect: Periodic damage from Thermal Detonator is 30% stronger and burns for 6 seconds longer.
• Recommendation: Take this in mostly single-target fights where the associated DoT is consistently able to tick completely. Thanks to a slight buff in 7.1, Slow Burn is barely stronger than Impact Explosives if you can consistently benefit from the full duration. Slow Burn will also be slightly better in a lot of fights with burn phases because the Thermal Detonator DoT is affected by the sub-30% Relentless Ordnance damage boost, so it will be active for most burn phases.

Level 43 Choice – Chaff Flare, Supercharged Celerity, and Power Override

Chaff Flare

• Effect: Grants the Chaff Flare ability, which reduces your threat by a moderate amount and applies several effects that last 6 seconds: Melee and Ranged defense chance is increased by 35%, interrupt immunity, and 2 charges of Decoy. Each charge of Decoy intercepts and absorbs an incoming direct Force or Tech attack.
• Recommendation: Always take this. The defensive components of this ability are a bit different than they were in the past. Now all Merc disciplines have access to the DCD effects provided by both Arsenal and IO. For those of you that played Merc DPS in past expansions, you may notice that the individual DCD components are a bit weaker. The defense chance from IO only applies to melee / ranged damage and Decoy only lasts 6 seconds, though it’s still a great DCD and having both effects makes up for these shortcomings. Unfortunately, neither effect applies to AoE damage, making it extremely inconsistent in boss fights.

Supercharged Celerity

• Effect: Grants the Supercharged Celerity ability, which requires and converts 10 stacks of Supercharge to increase you and your Operation group’s alacrity by 10% for 10 seconds.
• Recommendation: Never take this. The Merc raid buff is the worst one by far. For disciplines that use the 1.4s GCD, the alacrity increase isn’t strong enough to provide an additional ability use in the 10s window. Its biggest benefit is increasing tick rates on refreshable DoTs, but that effect is greatly diminished whenever DoTs have to be reapplied.

Power Overrides

• Effect: Reduces the cooldowns of Concussion Missile and Power Surge by 15 seconds each. In addition, Power Surge grants a second stack.
• Recommendation: Never take this. Chaff Flare is a far better option.

Level 51 Choice – Improved Vents, Energy Rebounder, and Jet Escape

Improved Vents

• Effect: Vent Heat now immediately vents an additional 15 Heat and grants 10% alacrity for 6 seconds.
• Recommendation: Never take this. The effect is nice, but Energy Rebounder is a lot more helpful. The alacrity lasts just long enough that it can easily ruin your rotation without yielding any noticeable DPS increase.

Energy Rebounder

• Effect: When you take damage, the active cooldown of Energy Shield is reduced by 3 seconds. This effect cannot occur more than once every 1.5 seconds. In addition, when taking damage, you have a 20% chance to emit an Energy Redoubt, which lasts up to 6 seconds and absorbs a small amount of damage. This effect cannot occur more than once every 10 seconds.
• Recommendation: Always take this. The Energy Shield cooldown reduction adds up rapidly and the little Energy Redoubt is a nice bonus to your mitigation. Without AoE DR, it’s more essential to have Energy Shield available as often as possible.

Jet Escape

• Effect: Reduces the cooldowns of Jet Boost by 5s and Determination by 30s. In addition, the duration of Hydraulic Overrides is increased by 4s.
• Recommendation: Never take this. Both of the other options are much stronger.

Level 64 Choice – Kolto Surge, Power Shield, and Tag and Bag

Kolto Surge

• Effect: Kolto Overload triggers at and can heal you up to 60% of your maximum health. Additionally, Kolto Overload lasts 2 seconds longer and heals for twice as much time each time it restores health.
• Recommendation: Almost always take this as a DPS. Kolto Surge significantly increases the reliability of Kolto Overload such that it will protect you from all but the deadliest attacks without needing to pair it with something else. The only drawback of Kolto Overload, and subsequently this talent, is its ridiculously long cooldown.

Power Shield

• Effect: Energy Shield now further decreases ability activation pushback by 30% and increases all healing received by 20% and makes you immune to interrupts.
• Recommendation: Never take this. The other two options are far better than this one.

Tag and Bag

• Effect: Activating Supercharged Gas lowers the cooldown of Kolto Overload by 5s. In addition, hindering a target with Electro Net increases your alacrity by 15% for 9s.
• Recommendation: Take this in specific fights only. I have reworded the effect to emphasize the more useful part. You can shave off up to a minute of Kolto Overload’s cooldown with Tag and Bag as an Innovative Ordnance Mercenary, which is technically helpful if you find yourself needing ability on cooldown and can tolerate its base effectiveness. However, I don’t think the cooldown reduction is significant enough to be valuable all that often. Furthermore, the Alacrity boost is worthless. Reducing your GCD from 1.4s to 1.3s for 15s doesn’t change the number of whole abilities you can activate in that time; it’s still 7, regardless. It also requires the target to be hindered, and the most lucrative targets for Net, bosses, are almost always immune, meaning the effect doesn’t apply at all.

Level 68 Choice – Rocket Out, Responsive Safeguards, Electro Dart

Rocket Out

• Effect: Grants the Rocket Out ability, which makes you jet backward 20m. While jetting, you are immune to CC. Rocket Out also grants Smoke Screen, which makes you immune to leaps, pulls, pushback, and interrupts for 4s. Taking Melee or Tech damage while Smoke Screen is active refreshes the cooldown on Rocket out. Smoke Screen can only granted once every 40s. Cannot be used while hindered. 17s cooldown.
• Recommendation: Almost always take this in PvE. Rocket Out is your only real way to cover great distances in a short period of time because the movement speed boost from Hydraulic Overrides is barely noticeable, doesn’t last very long, and isn’t available as often as it’s typically needed. The only time you should give this up is if you need to reflect or hard stun something.

Responsive Safeguards

• Effect: Grants the Responsive Safeguards ability, which absorbs all incoming direct single-target damage for the next 6 seconds, reflecting 50% of the absorbed damage back at the attacker, and healing you for 5% of your maximum health each time an attack is absorbed. Can be used while stunned. 2 min cooldown.
• Recommendation: Take this if you need it to survive. This is a super strong DCD, but not every fight has something you can reflect and often you can live without it. Meanwhile, Rocket Out will consistently provide a ton of value in almost all fights, so the only time you should take it is if you need a cheese.

Electro Dart

• Effect: Grants the Electro Dart ability, which stuns the target for 4 seconds and deals a small amount of direct damage.
• Recommendation: Take this if there’s something that needs to be stunned. Mercenaries have to pick between pretty valuable abilities in this tier though and some disciplines get their hard stun as a baseline ability, so see if one of those Combat Styles can do that mechanic instead.

Level 73 Choice – Afterburners, Gyroscopic Alignment Jets, and Trauma Regulator

Afterburners

• Effect: Missile Blast immobilizes the target for 4 seconds. Direct damage caused after 2 seconds ends the effect. This effect can only occur once every 8 seconds. In addition, Jet Boost’s knockback effect is stronger and pushes enemies 4m further away.
• Recommendation: Never take this. The effects are incredibly useful in PvP but have almost no benefit in PvE. Sadly, Trauma Regulators is ridiculously strong, so it’s hard to justify ever taking anything else.

Gyroscopic Alignment Jets

• Effect: You vent 20 Heat when stunned, immobilized, knocked down, or otherwise incapacitated. Additionally, your next Tech ability deals 10% extra damage or healing.
• Recommendation: Take this when you can benefit from it, but not Trauma Regulators. The DPS increase is pretty small, but it’s better than nothing. Always take Trauma Regulators instead if you can get a bunch of stacks from it though.

Trauma Regulators

• Effect: While Energy Shield is active, you generate a stack of Trauma Regulators each time you take direct damage. Stacks up to 10 times. When Energy Shield expires, each stack of Trauma Regulators instantly heals you for 4% of your maximum health.
• Recommendation: Take this when you can benefit from it. The defensive effect can be pretty strong. At 10 stacks, you heal for 40% of your max health when Energy Shield ends. It doesn’t work in every situation though. A lot of the time when you want to use Energy Shield, it’s to mitigate a single big hit or two, and Trauma Regulators won’t offer that much healing in those cases.

Gearing and Stats Priorities

Tactical Items

Energized Charges
Effect: The duration of Innovative Ordnance’s Supercharged Gas and Supercharged Burn are doubled and their effectiveness is improved.
Recommendation: This is your default tactical item. It provides the greatest single-target DPS increase compared to the other IO tacticals and synergizes very well with the Concentrated Fire set bonus since it allows you to get Supercharged Gas more often, so you’ll end up having about 70% uptime on it after you get your Legendary Implants. Supercharged Burn becomes incredibly strong with this tactical as well, becoming one your most damaging abilities.

Continuous Fire
Effect: Sweeping Blasters and Death From Above refresh and tick your Incendiary Missile burn and Serrated Shot bleed. This effect can only occur once every 2.5 seconds.
Recommendation: This is your AoE tactical item. It makes it so that each full channel of your AoE abilities will tick both of your DoTs twice. You should only use this tactical over Energized Charges if your DoT spread damage without this tactical is insufficient and you find yourself using Sweeping Blasters and Death From Above frequently throughout the fight, though please remember that single target DPS checks generally take priority. Continuous Fire doesn’t provide quite as much of an AoE damage increase as some of the other AoE damage tacticals out there that other specs have access to, but it does come with a rather rare trait. Unlike most other AoE tacticals, Continuous Fire does help to noticeably increase single target DPS, though not as much as Energized Charges. In order to do this, you do need to use a different rotation that replaces Power Shots and your DoT applications with Sweeping Blasters and Death From Above. I will cover this tactical in far greater detail in its own section later on.

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 Items

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 an Innovative Ordnance Mercenary.

• Concentrated Fire – Activating Supercharged Gas makes your next Mag Shot or Emergency Scan critically hit or heal.
• Overcharged Cell – Thermal Detonator builds 3 stacks of Supercharge. Cannot occur more than once every 15s.

This is the only viable pair of implants for Merc DPS. Both are valuable to IO, but it’s better to purchase Overcharged Cell first specifically for IO. Also, please don’t waste your autocrit from Concentrated Fire on Emergency Scan unless you can’t deal damage and won’t be able to before the proc falls off.

You can learn more from the dedicated Guide to Legendary Items 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 GCDs. However, as you approach 7.15%, you actually start getting a mix of 1.4s and 1.5s GCD, 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 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 Serendipitous Assault (SA) for all PvE content. Each relic offers a proc; FR’s proc boosts your Mastery, whereas SA’s proc increases your Power stats. If you have the choice, purchase the Relic of Focused Retribution first because in equal amounts, and only in equal amounts, Mastery offers more of a DPS gain than Power.

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 Innovative Ordnance Mercenary 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.

Pure Single-Target Build

This build is meant for fights that are mostly single-target. Volatile Cinders is only valuable when you aren’t DoT spreading very often because you’d otherwise be getting Volatile Warhead procs from your DoTs ticking on adds that have dropped below 30%. Likewise, Slow Burn technically provides the most DPS, but only if that DoT is able to tick fully most of the time.

Moderate AoE Build

This build is meant for situations where you’ll be DoT spreading fairly often, but there aren’t enough targets or they aren’t grouped up properly to benefit from Eruptive Flames and Heavy Shrapnel.

f adds are grouped up enough to benefit from Eruptive Flames for the majority of the fight, but perhaps are lower priority, consider taking Eruptive Flames instead.

In general, I recommend Incendiary Ignition over Volatile Cinders because you should be using this build only when you’re already getting Volatile Warhead procs throughout the fight from adds and it’s difficult to afford more than 1 Missile Blast per cycle when you’re DoT spreading that often.

Solo Content and Heavy AoE Build

This build is meant for solo content and fights with major AoE potential where you can take full advantage of Eruptive Flames and Heavy Shrapnel. If you find yourself using Sweeping Blasters in group content, switch to Continuous Fire, but in both solo and group content, I’d default to using Energized Charges. 

Openers, Rotations, Priorities

I’m going to start this section by going over the rotation since everything else you’ll be doing is basically just the rotation with some fillers that will be slightly different from what you’re normally using. When swapping targets, all you do is keep going with wherever you’re at in the rotation.

Due to the strictness of the rotation with regards to Heat management, proccing IPA, and using everything on cooldown, you can’t easily start over. Do not interrupt your rotation to reapply your DoTs. If your DoTs are already on the primary target when you switch back, I recommend that you just clip them unless you’re able to continuously respread your DoTs with Fusion Missile.

Energized Charges Tactical

The Energized Charges Tactical is what you’ll have equipped the vast majority of the time. When players talk about IO, they’re almost always assuming that you’re using Energized Charges because it’s so rare that you need to switch. Typically, if you need more AoE, someone can bring a class with stronger AoE that doesn’t have to give up single-target performance for it.

Energized Charges Rotation

With Energized Charges, you use a rotation because it is possible to use all of your core abilities on cooldown without multiple high-damage abilities being available at the same time. Rotations are usually pretty consistent, though there can be some decision-making for a few GCDs, and there is for this tactical. 

1. Incendiary Missile
2. Serrated Shot
3. Filler GCD 1 (typically Power Shot)
4. (proc IPA here)
5. Filler GCD 2 (use Unload here if you need to proc IPA)
6. Filler GCD 3 (typically Missile Blast or Rapid Shots)
7. Filler GCD 4 (typically Missile Blast or Rapid Shots)
8. Thermal Detonator
9. Mag Shot (procs Speed to Burn)
10. Power Shot (instant, procs IPA)
11. Mag Shot

It’s important to practice this on a dummy at least until you can execute it without having to constantly look at your bar. I’ll be explaining the non-filler abilities first since it’s a lot more straightforward.

The actual order of the abilities doesn’t matter all that much so long as you have 100% uptime on Incendiary Missile and Serrated Shot, are proccing IPA on cooldown, and using Unload and Thermal Detonator on cooldown. There are a couple of variants out there, so don’t feel pressured to switch to this one if your rotation still meets those requirements.

The benefits of doing Thermal Detonator ▶ Mag Shot ▶ Power Shot ▶ Mag Shot is that it gives you 6 seconds of burst. You can actually start the rotation from Thermal Detonator if you like and IPA will still work properly, though this is unwise in the opener because it’s harder for the tanks to keep aggro and wastes time on Supercharged Gas.

A lot of players like to use Serrated Shot and then Incendiary Missile because it allows you to precast Serrated Shot. The DPS increase from doing this is incredibly small and comes with a significant drawback for the rest of the fight because you’re generating a ton of Heat all at once.

For casted abilities, Heat is generated at the end of the cast while for instant abilities, Heat is generated at the beginning of the GCD (as soon as you press the button), so when you use Serrated Shot followed by Incendiary Missile, you end up generating 30 Heat all at once. This can easily push you over the 40 Heat threshold that makes your Heat dissipation less efficient and eventually causes you to overheat.

The most important thing in the rotation is to make sure that you are proccing IPA on time. So long as you don’t do anything that will mess up the timing, you can do whatever you need to for the sake of mechanics until it’s time to proc IPA again and then at that point, you just need to be mindful of when you do end up proccing it (so knowing that Power Shot, Unload, and Sweeping Blasters will proc it) and know that once that happens, you either need to get back to doing the rotation or keep very precise track of when IPA will be available again. 

It’s important that you keep your APM is consistent. It can be tempting to wait like a half second so you passively vent 5 Heat so your next ability doesn’t put you over 40, but this will end up causing more problems with future IPA procs.

If there is downtime during a fight, remember to immediately start spamming Kolto Shot to build Supercharge; it’s free DPS. Don’t forget you can often place your DoTs on shortly before the boss can actually take damage too. You won’t get the entirety of the damage of your DoTs but you also won’t have to spend a GCD to apply them when the boss is vulnerable, so you will end up dealing more damage.

The key to being a great DPS is to always be DPSing. Using any damaging ability is better than just standing there not doing anything. Some DPS is better than zero DPS. Even if you mess up, keep doing the rotation! Unless there’s a mechanic that prevents you from dealing damage or forces you to stop DPSing, you should not stop DPSing. 

If a tank is telling you to stop DPS or hold off for a few seconds because they can’t keep aggro, don’t listen to them, they’re the one that doesn’t know the proper way to keep aggro. Tell them to git gud and read a tank guide!

Energized Charges Filler GCD Priority

This is the priority system you’ll be using for the 4 filler slots in your rotation after applying Incendiary Missile and Serrated Shot.

1. Mag Shot (unprocced only)
2. Power Shot (only to proc IPA in Filler GCD 1, must be hard-casted)
3. Unload (only to proc IPA in Filler GCD 2)
4. Missile Blast (only with Volatile Warhead)
5. Fusion Missile (only for DoT spread)
6. Electro Net (if Supercharge stacks allow)
7. Unload (only for not generating Supercharge or as strong filler on the move)
8. Power Shot (as strong filler)
9. Rapid Shots

Unprocced Mag Shot really only ever comes up in the very beginning of the fight or after long periods of downtime and it’s not the end of the world if you miss it. In dummy parses, this literally never happens outside of the opener, so you’ll still do fine if you never do this and while you’re still learning, you will probably be better off ignoring it entirely.

Your first objective in the filler segment is to proc Innovative Particle Accelerator at the end of the 1st filler GCD or the beginning of the 2nd filler GCD. Typically, you’ll accomplish this by hard-casting Power Shot in the first filler slot, but sometimes circumstances make that impossible or suboptimal.

If you can’t or don’t want to proc IPA in the first GCD with Power Shot, that’s fine, you can just do Unload (or Sweeping Blasters) in the second GCD. Technically, you can just always proc it this way, but you’ll end up having less flexibility with your GCDs, be more limited by Heat, and have lower DPS outright.

The next order of business to attend to is Missile Blast, assuming Volatile Warhead is available. Missile Blast’s urgency is dependent on how soon you next expect it to proc because you don’t want to miss out on. You can delay it in favor of something else if you know you won’t get the proc for at least 1 GCD and separating Missile Blast from Power Shot with a Rapid Shots helps with Heat management so you aren’t generating 25 Heat all at once, but don’t hesitate to use Missile Blast if you think you’ll get the proc refreshed before the GCD is over

Remember, the rate limit on Volatile Warhead proccing from dealing periodic damage sub-30% is separate from the rate limit for Volatile Cinders ability tree buff, so if the boss or an add is sub-30, or the current proc has only a third of its duration remaining, you can’t afford to delay Missile Blast beyond the 2nd filler slot. You can also use Unload in the 2nd filler slot for IPA if you really don’t want to miss out on a Missile Blast.

It’s fine to do 2 Missile Blasts per cycle, but you’ll typically only be doing 1. The proc from Volatile Cinders only has a 50% chance to proc from Incendiary Missile, so it won’t proc at a consistent spot in your rotation. Sometimes, you’ll get it late in one cycle and early in the next one, which will enable you to fire 2 Missile Blasts in the same cycle, likely followed by 0 in the next cycle.

After you’ve gotten your IPA proc and as you’re firing Missile Blast, you need to determine if you’re gonna overshoot on the Supercharge stacks when Thermal Detonator explodes since you’re gonna get 3 stacks all at once.

The key thing to look out for is if you hit 7 stacks of Supercharge going into the 3rd Filler slot and you aren’t expecting to be able to fire Missile Blast again in that cycle. IF you’re at 7 stacks at that point, you only have 2 GCDs until it’s time to use Thermal Detonator, so if you were to use Rapid Shots or Power Shot, you’d end up at 9 stacks going into Thermal Detonator and either have to delay it by a GCD to hit 10 beforehand or waste 2 stacks of Supercharge.

The solution to this 7-stack issue is to channel Unload for those final 2 GCDs so you remain at 7 stacks of Supercharge and hit 10 with the explosion of Thermal Detonator You use Unload because it deals more direct damage than Power Shot per GCD but doesn’t generate any stacks of Supercharge. It’s not the end of the world if you mess this up, but you should try to avoid it.

In my experience, delaying Thermal Detonator to hit 10 stacks beforehand and then going up to 3 with Thermal Detonator’s explosion will just cause to you perpetuate the cycle where you’ll end up at 7 stacks going into the 3rd filler again.

Remember that in fights with frequent downtime, you can try to be more aggressive with using Power Shot over Rapid Shots because you will have time to passively vent your Heat during that downtime. I wouldn’t recommend going over 50 Heat though unless the downtime is extremely long.

Common Filler GCD Quartets for Energized Charges

I just went through what are effectively exceptions to what you’ll be doing the vast majority of the time. These are common filler GCD quartets you’ll be using with the rotation. The ability order 1-4 here for each quartet corresponds to Filler GCDs 1-4 up in the Energized Charges rotation.

Keep in mind that these are just examples, a big part of IO’s challenge and skill expression is figuring out the correct quartet each cycle.

Main Sequence
This is what you’ll be doing most of the time. You can think of the quartets as deviations from this one.

1. Power Shot (procs IPA)
2. Missile Blast (only with Volatile Warhead) or Rapid Shots
3. Missile Blast (only with Volatile Warhead) or Rapid Shots
4. Missile Blast (only with Volatile Warhead) or Rapid Shots

The core idea is Power Shot will always be first for your IPA proc and then ideally you’ll do Rapid Shots ▶ Missile Blast ▶ Rapid Shots, but it depends completely on the status of your Volatile Warhead proc.

Proccing IPA with Unload
You’ll be doing something like this whenever you determine that you need to spend Filler GCD 1 on something other than a hard-casted Power Shot.

1. Mag Shot (unprocced only) or Other Instant Ability
2. Unload (first GCD of channel, procs IPA)
3. Unload (second GCD of channel)
4. Missile Blast (only with Volatile Warhead) or Rapid Shots

Typically, you’ll be proccing IPA with Unload if Mag Shot is off cooldown without IPA being procced or if you need to move during that GCD. You can use Sweeping Blasters instead of Unload if you can hit 3+ targets for the full duration of the channel.

Excess Supercharge Prevention
You’ll be using this quartet if you hit 7 stacks of Supercharge after Filler GCD 2.

1. Power Shot (procs IPA)
2. Missile Blast (only with Volatile Warhead) or Rapid Shots
3. (you now have 7 Supercharge)
4. Unload (first GCD of channel)
5. Unload (second GCD of channel)

Remember, if you hit 7 Supercharge when you have no way to reach 10 Supercharge by the time you activate Thermal Detonator, you need to incorporate Unload for the remaining Filler GCDs so that you don’t waste any stacks. This quartet is fairly Heat-intensive, so you may spike above 40 Heat and need to use Vent Heat.

DoT Spread or Strong Filler
This is the quartet you’ll be using if you need to DoT spread or can otherwise afford to replace Rapid Shots with your strong filler, Power Shot.

1. Power Shot (procs IPA)
2. Missile Blast (only with Volatile Warhead)
3. Fusion Missile (only for DoT spread) or Power Shot (strong filler)
4. Rapid Shots

This quartet is similar to the Main Sequence, you’re replacing 1 of your Rapid Shots with either Fusion Missile for more DoT spread or Power Shot for more single target damage. You can do everything but the Power Shot in any order, the key thing to remember is that you should only be turning what would have been a Rapid Shots into Fusion Missile or Power Shot.

This will cost more Heat than you can sustain for very long, so make sure you have Vent Heat available now or in the next ~15s.

Classic Style and Easy Mode
You can still use the old style indefinitely, but I don’t recommend it because it offers less DPS and more challenging Heat management.

1. Missile Blast (only with Volatile Warhead) or Rapid Shots
2. Unload (first GCD of channel, procs IPA)
3. Unload (second GCD of channel)
4. Missile Blast (only with Volatile Warhead) or Rapid Shots

The idea is to just always use Unload to proc IPA in the second Filler GCD instead of sometimes using Power Shot in the first. It is sustainable and the DPS loss isn’t huge (~1000), but you have to use Vent Heat on cooldown and can’t afford to do anything else like DoT spreading without overheating unless you give up your Missile Blast or interrupt your channel of Unload.

The DPS loss comes from occasionally being forced to waste stacks of Supercharge, resulting in less frequent Supercharged Gas activations, and Unload dealing less DPS than Power Shot + 1 Supercharge stack.

Energized Charges Opener

This is the rotation you use at the very beginning of the fight and for burst DPS checks. It’s important to get as much damage as possible while all of your damage boosts are available to maximize their impact. 

1. Recharge and Reload (to build 10 Supercharge stacks)
2. Incendiary Missile + Supercharged Gas
3. Serrated Shot
4. Adrenal
5. Mag Shot (unprocced)
6. Unload (first GCD of channel, procs IPA)
7. Unload (second GCD of channel) or Missile Blast (only with Volatile Warhead)
8. Electro Net
9. Thermal Detonator
10. Mag Shot
11. Power Shot (procs IPA)
12. Mag Shot
13. Rotation

The opener is mostly the same as your regular rotation, though there are a few differences.

Since we have an unprocced Mag Shot, we need to do that as Filler GCD 1, so we’ll have to proc IPA with Unload in Filler GCD 2. There is still more than enough time left on Supercharged Gas to buff the full duration of Electro Net.

If Missile Blast procs from Volatile Cinders midway through the Unload channel, you can break said channel to fire it before Electro Net. Otherwise, you just have to wait until after

It doesn’t matter too much when exactly you use your Adrenal since the full rotation is 15 seconds. You just want to make sure that the Adrenal buffs the entire duration of Electro Net and is only active while Supercharged Gas is active.  You can’t avoid having to refresh your DoTs once while the Adrenal is active, but don’t worry about that.

There are a couple of things you can do to crank your opener even higher, and you’ll see them being used in top dummy parses on Parsely, but they’re less practical to do in actual combat.

First and foremost, since Supercharged Gas lasts a while and Supercharged Burn deals so much damage, it’s possible and worthwhile to activate Supercharged Gas as a pre-cast, then rebuild Supercharge stacks with your regen ability before the fight starts so you get 2 full applications of the Supercharged Burn DoT during the opener.

Supercharged Gas should fall off right around the time you use Thermal Detonator, but the goal is to just activate it as soon as Supercharged Gas ends. This is annoying to do in actual boss fights because it requires pretty exact timing, so again, it’s fine to skip it if you don’t want to bother.

It is not possible to proc IPA out of combat with Sweeping Blasters and get the double Supercharged Gas, and the double Supercharged Gas provides significantly more DPS.

The other thing you can technically do is swap Serrated Shot and Incendiary Missile in order to pre-cast Serrated Shot, but you’re gaining less than a GCD over the course of the whole fight, so I don’t recommend bothering to do that either.

Continuous Fire Tactical

The Continuous Fire tactical is unlike most other classes’ AoE tacticals because it actually works okay for single-target DPS as well as AoE whereas most other classes’ AoE tacticals do absolutely nothing to increase single-target DPS. It is worth noting though that this comes at a cost: you won’t reach the same crazy AoE numbers that other specs offer. 

There are several reasons why Continuous Fire increases single-target DPS substantially over not using a tactical at all. Power Shot and Rapid Shots deal very little damage compared to the rest of your rotation; meanwhile, Death from Above is competitive with Power Shot even at 1 target in terms of DPS.

Sweeping Blasters isn’t too far behind either though it does cost more Heat, so the fact that they get to refresh and tick your DoTs twice over the course of the channel (once per GCD) easily pushes them over the edge. Sweeping Blasters also works the same way as Power Shot in terms of proccing IPA and benefitting from Surging Shots.

Two whole GCDs are freed up by not having to reapply your DoTs. This is really where the biggest flat damage increase comes from. Very little damage is dealt by Serrated Shot and Incendiary Missile upon application, so you get extra GCDs now that can actually be used to deal damage. 

The fact that Sweeping Blasters doesn’t generate a stack of Supercharge is not nearly as relevant because half of the power of Supercharged Gas in the normal rotation relies on you equipping the Energized Charges tactical, which you have to give up to use Continuous Fire.

Continuous Fire Rotation

With Continuous Fire, you use a rotation because it is possible to use all of your core abilities on cooldown without multiple high-damage abilities being available at the same time. Rotations are usually pretty consistent, though there can be some decision-making for a few GCDs, and there is for this tactical. 

1. Unload (first GCD of channel, procs IPA)
2. Unload (second GCD of channel)
3. Mag Shot
4. Thermal Detonator
5. Filler GCD 1
6. Sweeping Blasters (first GCD of channel, procs IPA)
7. Sweeping Blasters (second GCD of channel)
8. Mag Shot
9. Filler GCD 2
10. Filler GCD 3
11. Repeat

Just like the standard single-target rotation, this one is structured around being able to proc IPA as often as possible. In this rotation, IPA will be procced exclusively by Unload and Sweeping Blasters. This gives more room for AoE abilities. 

Continuous Fire Filler GCD Priority

This is the priority system you’ll be using for the 3 filler slots in your rotation after using Thermal Detonator (1) and the second Mag Shot (2+3).

1. Fusion Missile (AoE only)
2. Death from Above (Filler GCD 2 + 3 only)
3. Electro Net
4. Missile Blast (only with Volatile Warhead)
5. Sweeping Blasters (if below 10 Heat)
6. Rapid Shots

Death from Above should only be used during Filler 2 and 3. You will be able to do it every 3 cycles, but make sure your Heat is below 10. Remember, Death from Above does not proc IPA, so it’s important that you only use Sweeping Blasters in Rotational GCDs 6 and 7 (after Filler GCD 1). 

With the Continuous Fire tactical, Sweeping Blasters always deals more damage than Power Shot, so Power Shot is never used if you have that tactical equipped. 

It’s a bit harder to manage your Heat precisely due to the additional channeling that you will be doing. Unless you’re doing Fusion Missile, Filler 1 will usually be Rapid Shots.

Continuous Fire Opener

This is the rotation you use at the very beginning of the fight and for burst DPS checks when using the Continuous Fire tactical. It’s important to get as much damage as possible while all of your damage boosts are available to maximize their impact.

1. Recharge and Reload (to build 10 Supercharge stacks)
2. Incendiary Missile + Supercharged Gas
3. Serrated Shot
4. Electro Net
5. Adrenal
6. Mag Shot (unprocced)
7. Unload (procs IPA)
8. Unload (procs IPA)
9. Mag Shot
10. Thermal Detonator
11. Filler
12. Sweeping Blasters (proc IPA)
13. Sweeping Blasters (proc IPA)
14. Mag Shot
15. Death from Above (first GCD of channel)
16. Death from Above (second GCD of channel)
17. Continuous Fire Rotation

The only thing different about the opener from the regular Continuous Fire rotation is just applying your DoTs + unprocced Mag Shot + Electro Net + OCDs . After that, it’s just the Continuous Fire rotation where I have factored in what will be available.

I recommend using Electro Net outside of the filler slot so that it can fully benefit from your Supercharged Gas and Adrenal. You aren’t on the clock yet with regards to proccing Mag Shot and you should still have 1 GCD left before Incendiary Missile needs to be refreshed when it’s time to use Sweeping Blasters to proc IPA, so you’re not really missing out on anything by using Electro Net there.

The single filler slot will be Fusion Missile if you can already DoT spread. Otherwise, it’s kind of a wash. I wouldn’t recommend using a single GCD of Sweeping Blasters there because you’ll be robbing yourself of a set of DoT ticks in the full channel so Power Shot would be technically better. You might also want to use Rapid Shots instead.

Damage over Time Abilities (DoTs) vs Direct Damage

DoTs are not special abilities that let you deal damage when you can’t target the boss with new attacks. Contrary to popular belief, throwing your DoTs on right before you become unable to attack the boss does not result in a DPS increase over an ability that deals the same amount of damage immediately because you’re still spending a GCD to cast the DoT. 

I think it’s most helpful to conceptualize DoTs compared to direct damage abilities (regular non-DoT / non-Periodic abilities) by imagining them as dealing all of their damage hitting at the end of their duration instead of being spread evenly throughout, or at least that’s when you’ll get the amount of damage listed on the packaging. 

Prior to that point, you’ll be getting less damage out of each GCD equal to the damage dealt per tick times the number of ticks that were left. This is why clipping your DoTs (reapplying them before they’ve expired) is generally considered a bad thing. When you clip your DoTs, you make the last GCD where you applied your DoTs retroactively deal less damage. 

In general, DoTs are worse than abilities that deal the same amount of damage immediately because the enemy could become immune, enraged, or dead by the time all of that damage will hit. In order to combat these disadvantages, DoTs tend to deal a bit more damage than direct damage abilities and almost always deal Internal/Elemental damage so they ignore armor. 

DoT specs have often been capable of dealing more sustained DPS than burst specs and usually have some sort of sub-30% HP execute window where DoT damage is increased. This helps to compensate for those targets dying before the DoT has finished ticking, though on targets that die quickly, this damage bonus isn’t enough to make it worth reapplying DoTs and makes it no different from clipping your DoTs. 

The sub-30% damage increase becomes more than just an equalizing effect on bosses since they usually last multiple DoT applications (and often several minutes) below 30% health, allowing enough time for DPS to actually increase. If DoTs have just fallen off of your target and you know it will die before the DoT completes all of its ticks, you should not reapply them to that target and either use one of your direct damage abilities (usually filler) or apply your DoTs to another target. 

Unless an enemy needs to die ASAP, it’s usually okay to switch targets preemptively since the vast majority of your damage contribution will be over in this situation. If you do decide to switch targets before the enemy dies, make sure you verify that the enemy actually died soon after you switched, sometimes the rest of your group might have the same idea and you’re left with an add wandering around with 1% HP left.