SWTOR 7.0 Mercenary Changes Preview and Analysis (PTS)

BioWare added the Mercenary Combat Style to SWTOR 7.0 PTS. This is an overview of the changes and analyzes how all of this will affect you!

Mercenary and Powertech changes were released to the PTS recently. This article outlines and analyzes the major changes to the Mercenary Combat Style as a whole as well as the changes to the individual Disciplines.

I have also included translations so that Republic players can still follow along.

In addition, Sorcerers / Sages also seem to have received significant changes compared to the last PTS update, so I’ll be covering those soon as well. Expect it late Sunday or early Monday.

Pruned Abilities and General Mercenary and Commando Changes

Mercenaries / Commandos had the most ability bloat out of any of the Combat Styles. Rather than remove a ton of abilities outright, BioWare appears to have locked away 7 abilities behind choices rather than the usual 5. 

Thermal Sensor Override / Reserve Powercell

This appears to be the only ability that was removed outright for Mercenaries / Commandos, meaning they only have Vent Heat / Recharge Cells as a Heat / Energy Cell management cooldown. I’m happy with this change. It was unnecessary to have 2 abilities that served the same function. Furthermore, the optimal usage for TSO / RP for Mercenaries / Commandos was not immediately obvious and somewhat unintuitive.

This does leave Mercenaries / Commandos with one less offensive cooldown (OCD) though, and both DPS specs are currently reliant on utilizing both in order to keep their Heat / Energy Cells in check. It does not appear that any changes have been made to Heat / Energy Cell consumption for any of the specs (yet). Furthermore, Mercenaries / Commandos will now have to choose between Improved Vents / Cell Capacitor and Energy Rebounder / Reflexive Shield, which means choosing between sustained DPS and defensive capabilities. 

BioWare definitely needs to address this issue, otherwise Mercenaries / Commandos will be Rapid Shooting / Hammer Shooting a whole lot more often. BioWare has put themselves in a bit of a tricky spot regarding how to balance this. It’s easy enough for healers, all you’d need to do is give them a second charge of Vent Heat / Recharge Cells, though it’s a bit more complicated for the DPS specs. I would advocate for just making it so you don’t have to use Vent Heat / Recharge Cells during the single-target rotations at all, or at least making it so that ability is all you need, which can be done by increasing the Heat Venting / Energy Cell regeneration done by Supercharged Gas / Cell or by strategically reducing the cost of rotational abilities.

Level 70 Choice

At level 70, Mercenaries / Commandos have a choice between 3 abilities:

• Hydraulic Overrides / Hold the Line (includes the Torque Boosters / Advance the Line utility effect, so it lasts 10 seconds)
• Responsive Safeguards / Echoing Deterrence
• Electro Dart / Cryo Grenade

This is quite an interesting choice! It reinforces the idea that Rocket Out / Propulsion Round is the default movement ability for Mercenaries / Commandos. For PvE, I don’t think this will be too problematic since both Hydraulic Overrides / Hold the Line and Responsive Safeguards / Echoing are fairly situational and a lot of the time you can get by without Hydraulics / Hold the Line even if it is a bit more convenient. That said, it is unfortunate for a few fights where you really want or need both, like Brontes and Huntmaster. In PvP, this is a major nerf since all 3 options are clearly quite valuable. 

I do feel strongly that Electro Net should be swapped with either Hydraulic Overrides / Hold the Line or Electro Dart / Cryo Grenade as one of the ability options for the level 70 choice, so you’d be picking between Responsive Safeguards / Echoing Deterrence, Electro Net, and one of either Electro Dart / Cryo Grenade or Hold the Line while the other becomes permanent. It’d also incorporate Tag and Bag / One Man Army baseline. This solves several problems:

• The current level 70 choice is not very intuitive. It’s hard to tell how good Hydraulic Overrides / Hold the Line and Electro Dart / Cryo Grenade are compared to Responsive Safeguards / Echoing Deterrence due to their differences in uptime duration, and a lot of the time their relative usefulness is dependent on enemy tactics. If you don’t get focused, Responsive Safeguards / Echoing Deterrence is pretty useless while you might be able to benefit more greatly from the other two options, but you definitely want Responsive Safeguards / Echoing Deterrence if you are getting focused. Meanwhile, Electro Net is more equal in terms of power level to Responsive Safeguards / Echoing Deterrence in my opinion. The choice is a lot simpler and becomes “do I want to focus on securing a kill or ensuring my own survival?” and both retain the same difference in the overall scoreboard. 
• Electro Net has clearly always been balanced around only one of them being able to affect a player at a given time due to the cooldown duration of the CC. When multiple Nets are available to be used sequentially on a single player, there is basically nothing that some Combat Styles can do. By making Electro Nets something you have to choose to take, this issue becomes less prevalent and means it isn’t necessary to resort to some nerf to the Hindered debuff like making it interact with Resolve or adding some sort of lockout buff like the Cybertech grenades have.
• It potentially allows players to have both Responsive Safeguards / Echoing Deterrence and Hydraulic Overrides / Hold the Line at the same time, which is important for a few bosses.
• Electro Net is only a small DPS increase, so I don’t think it would be too big of a deal to lose it, and it could easily be made up by buffing Supercharged Gas / Cell slightly.

Level 35 Choice

At level 35, players get to pick between 1 of 2 abilities or a passive:

• Chaff Flare / Diversion, with BOTH of the DCD effects from the DPS specs, so the ability gives you +35% Defense Chance, interrupt immunity, and 2 charges of Force/Tech immunity. This ability needs a rename for pub-side players so it doesn’t have the same name as Diversion for Snipers and Gunslingers.
• Supercharged Celerity (raid buff)
• Power Overrides / Overclock utility effect (2 stacks of Power Surge / Tech Override, and 15s CD reduction on Concussion Missile and and Power Surge / Tech Override)

I’m sorry BioWare, but this is just flat out lazy. It’s clear you guys know that Supercharged Celerity is garbage and rather than bother to fix it, you are effectively just throwing it away because no one in their right mind should ever take the raid buff over one of the other two options. I’d like to see them fully rework the effect so that it no longer ruins some rotations AND no longer consumes Supercharge or at least activates Supercharged Gas / Cell at the same time. It’s ridiculous that for years, Supercharged Celerity has not been a numbers increase for Mercenaries / Commandos and has the potential to be a DPS decrease for some Combat Styles! There are a lot of options for alternative effects, here are just a few examples:

• Increase Armor Rating by X% for 10 seconds
• Increase Critical Damage dealt by X% for 10 seconds
• Reset the cooldowns of all abilities (perhaps damaging and healing ones only, not CDs)
• Increase resource regeneration rate and make abilities free to use for 10 seconds
• Give everyone the heroic moment ability for their class and apply a 10s HoT.

With the current choice, DPS are always gonna choose Chaff Flare / Diversion while healers will be a bit more mixed, but there will definitely still be some instances where they choose the Power Overrides / Overclock utility. No one ever uses the raid buff again. At the end of the day, this choice is just no change in the current status quo. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if this is what we end up with for 7.0, it’s just depressing that it isn’t what it should be. 

I would have preferred if the raid buff choice were just about the raid buff, like it is for Sorcerers and Sages where they pick to have a raid buff or one of two minor passives so only one player has to take it ever and the others don’t have to worry about having a wasted ability.

Level 20 Choice

At level 20, again players are choosing between a passive or 1 of 2 abilities:

• Explosive Dart / Sticky Grenade
• Power Barrier / Charged Barrier utility effect (5% DR)
• Stealth Scan? (tooltip is bugged)

BORING!

Arsenal / Gunnery is the only spec that can reliably maintain the 5% DR, so it will be an obvious choice for them, but the other two disciplines don’t really have a consistently useful choice and it’s not like the other options are very exciting anyway. Stealth Scan is only situationally useful against 2 Combat Styles and Explosive Dart should basically never be used rotationally outside of very specific pre-casting locations for a miniscule DPS increase. At the very least, BioWare should made it so that the DR stacks can also be applied by Rapid Shots / Hammer Shot and Kolto Shot / Med Shot as well, that way it could be maintained more reliably for all 3 specs, or just make it a passive 5% DR like what Operatives / Scoundrels have.

Universal Passive Choices

At the following levels, all 3 disciplines have access to the same selection between 3 passives:

• Level 80: Afterburners / Concussive Force, Gyroscopic Alignment Jets / Parallactic Combat Stims, or Trauma Regulators / Stabilizers
• Level 60: Kolto / Adrenal Surge, Power / Combat Shield, or Thrill of the Hunt / Force March
• Level 50: Improved Vents / Cell Capacitor, Energy Rebounder / Reflexive Shield, or Jet Escape / Tenacious Defense

Those are some huge choices, particularly at level 60 where you have to choose between being able to use your 3s channel abilities while moving or having stronger Kolto Overload / Adrenaline Rush! The theme here seems to be that you have to pick between strong defense or weak offense. Right now, these choices aren’t balanced in the slightest. Either the offensive choices need to be buffed so they’re on par with the defensive options, or some of the power of the strong defensive choices need to be migrated into the base ability. For example, maybe Kolto Overload / Adrenaline Rush now heals you up to 50% while the passive choice only gives you 10% extra healing as opposed to 25% but still gives the extra 2 seconds of active time and increased healing rate. Alternatively, perhaps Improved Vents / Cell Capacitor reduces the cooldown on Vent Heat / Recharge Cells every time you take damage. 

I’m on the fence about which approach would be better. On the one hand, it’s nice to have powerful buffs to pick between since it makes your choices feel more consequential and makes you more exciting to fight against since you have to figure out their weakness. On the other hand, it creates a bad relationship between DPS and healers since DPS will want to take all the DPS things which makes healers’ lives harder. Also, more impactful choices are harder to balance and can make people feel like they’re missing out. Perhaps it’s best to have a mix of both and probably err on the side of having less impactful choices.

Other Notable Changes and Observations

• AoE DR was not given to Mercenaries / Commandos. Now that it seems we have a full picture of all the changes, it looks like AoE DR has only been given to the DPS specs for Warriors / Knights, Assassins / Shadows, and Powertechs / Vanguards. It seems they’re only giving AoE DR to pure melee specs. Operative / Scoundrel are left out perhaps because healing is ranged. I can see how this makes sense for PvP where the ranged players have to actually utilize their range to stand out of AoEs, and it also makes sense if you hold an antiquated understanding of PvE damage profiles where the thinking is that melee take more damage, but it does not make sense for modern raiding in SWTOR where the vast majority of damage dealt to everybody is AoE damage and there aren’t a whole lot of melee-exclusive sources of damage. Hopefully they’re rebalancing raid damage and making these AoE DR passives only apply to player damage. 
• Building Supercharge stacks with your out-of-combat regen ability is now built-in. I remember hearing something about the same being true for Fury / Centering for Marauders / Sentinels as well, but that doesn’t appear to be working yet.
• Class buffs appear to be passives, rather than being abilities you have to apply every hour. This means your buff bar will have 4 fewer icons in 7.0! For those of you who don’t yet have all 4 class buffs, there will be a Double XP event soon, so make sure to take advantage of it. 

Final Thoughts on Mercenary and Commando Ability Pruning

Overall, Mercenaries / Commandos will only have access to a fraction of the tools that they currently have access to at a given time, though the vast majority of the currently available options will remain accessible in 7.0, so while you won’t be able to use everything in a single fight, you can still choose to use everything you have access to. 

The current slate of choices on the PTS do give you the impression that you’re picking between (sometimes) powerful tools to have in your arsenal and often, you’re having to pick between buffing either your offensive or defensive capabilities, which isn’t as much the case for other Combat Styles where there is a clearer choice for a given scenario. 

With Mercenaries and Commandos, the question is very much about where you want to allocate your power for all content, while for many other Combat Styles, it tends to be more about “What sort of content are you doing? Here’s your option for that”. This gives Mercenaries / Commandos a bit of cover in PvP since opponents will still need to be cautious when attacking since they don’t know what an individual Mercenary / Commando will be capable of, at least initially. 

Unless they make it so you will be able to make different choices in between rounds in PvP, I imagine that Mercenaries and Commandos probably won’t get focused during the first round so the enemy can observe you and see what you’re capable of and then you will be pretty high priority in the second and third round once the enemy knows what your weakness is. Could be pretty cool too if you can manage to win without popping everything so you can still have a secret weapon for the next round.

I like how all of this reinforces the idea of Bounty Hunters and Troopers specializing and getting the right tool for the job, though I hope they make the choices a bit more balanced since right now a lot of the options seem pretty clear-cut, which largely defeats the point of creating choices like this in the first place.

If I Were BioWare…

If I were BioWare, I’d do the following (please note this list is my opinion, I already went over the current actual choices available on the PTS):

• Level 80: Energy / Combat Shield incorporating a weaker version of Trauma Regulators / Stabilizers baseline and the Trauma Regulators / Stabilizers choice tweaked to have a weaker version of the current effect that, when chosen, brings the overall power up to the current effect. Buff Gyroscopic Alignment Jets / Parallactic Combat Stims to increase damage / healing dealt by next Tech ability by 50% rather than 10%. Afterburners / Concussive Force remains the same. 
• Level 70: Responsive Safeguards / Echoing Deterrence, Electro Net, or Explosive Dart / Sticky Grenade, buffed up to be on the level of those two abilities, perhaps incorporating the Magnetized Shrapnel tactical, dealing a ton of damage, having a longer CD, and applying some sort of CC effect, something fun and flashy for PvE.
• Level 60: Give Thrill of the Hunt as a base effect and swap it out for Adhesive Supplements / Sticky Mods + Torque Boosters / Advance the Line. Swap Power / Combat Shield with Supercharged Defense + Pyro / Electro Shield. Migrate part of the effect of Kolto / Adrenal Surge to the base ability like how I explained earlier.
• Level 50: Add the Smoke Screen proc effect to Jet Escape / 
• Level 35: Supercharged Celerity (fixed and with defensive effect), Power / Charged Barrier (improved), or Stealth Scan (includes Battlefield / Suppression Protocols)
• Level 20: Power Overrides / Overclock + Power / Combat Shield, Chaff Flare, Electro Dart / Cryo Grenade (this reinforces the offensive / defensive idea, but emphasized for PvP only)
• Hydraulic Overrides now given as baseline ability instead of Electro Net, though without its utility effect.

These choices are different, and probably aren’t quite in line with the overall balance of the Combat Style afforded by what’s on the PTS, though I think overall the individual options at each level are far more comparable to each other. It also creates a clearer set of builds. With my set of choices, Mercenaries and Commandos could choose between builds that specialize in having higher mobility at the cost of being a bit squishier; being much tankier, but not having nearly as much mobility; or boosting damage at the cost of defensive capability. The sources of damage increases are also fairly situational, so PvE players will still end up with a balance of offensive and defensive passives to suit the needs of the fight.

Individual Discipline Changes

In this section, I’ll be outlining and analyzing changes made to individual disciplines. There are less choices relegated to individual disciplines compared to other Combat Styles, this is partly due to the fact that Mercenaries / Commandos have 7 abilities locked away behind choices as opposed to 5, though as I was talking about in the previous section, the kinds of choices you have access to are more versatile and less tailored to a specific type of content. 

Mercenaries / Commandos only have 2 discipline-specific choices, and each choice buffs a discipline-specific ability in some way. These choices currently appear to be pretty incomplete. 

Bodyguard and Combat Medic

The first ability that gets a buff choice is Healing Scan / Advanced Medical Probe:

• The first option appears to grant a proc, though it isn’t clear if the proc does anything yet. While you have the proc, it shows the same animation as when you get 10 stacks of Surging Shots in IO. It doesn’t get consumed upon activating any abilities and doesn’t seem to have any other effects. 
• Healing someone with Healing Scan / Advanced Medical places a yellow puddle around the target, currently using the same animation as the puddles used by Dread Master Bestia as well as Dread Guards Ciphas and Kel’Sara. The puddle does not appear to do anything yet. 
• The third option does not appear to do anything yet.

The other ability that gets a buff choice is Kolto Shell / Trauma Probe. None of the options seem to do anything yet. I really hope they change the sound effect that plays when a stack of Trauma Probe is consumed. The current ringing sound is super annoying. I also hope that BioWare adds some sort of debuff to help track Kolto Shell / Trauma Probe stacks more easily, similar to how Sorcs and Sages have Deionized / Force-Imbalanced. It’s ridiculous that we have to rely on wrangling an overlay in StarParse that doesn’t even work consistently in order to efficaciously apply Kolto Shells / Trauma Probes. 

Arsenal and Gunnery

The abilities that will have choices are Tracer Missile / Grav Round and Heatseeker Missiles / Demolition Round. Unfortunately, none of the choices on the PTS are implemented in any way.

I hope that once they do make changes, they tweak the discipline in a couple ways (my opinion here, not actual changes):

• Make Priming Shot / Vortex Bolt grant a stack of Power Surge / Tech Override rather than its own proc. This would make it so you can’t double-consume the proc for Tracer Missile / Grav Round and Power Surge / Tech Override at the same time without greatly impacting the balance since the only other things it can apply to are Concussion Missile / Charge and Rapid Scan / Medical Probe. 
• Rework Supercharged Gas / Cell to have a more impactful effect. The alacrity boost would be pointless even if it gave the full effect immediately. It’s just too weak for too short of a time. Switch it to crit chance or something, or get rid of it and increase the armor penetration. 
• Make it so Rapid Shots / Hammer Shot never needs to be used rotationally. We’re 95% of the way there with the Apex Predator set, but we need to go just a little further. 

Innovative Ordnance (IO) and Assault Specialist (AS)

Just like the other two specs, the discipline choices are not implemented yet. The two abilities you will choose buffs for are Incendiary Missile / Round and Thermal Detonator / Assault Plastique.

IO / AS is in desperate need of some QoL improvements because the rotation is super fragile and its heat management is very unforgiving. There’s no reason it has to be that finicky and challenging, especially considering that other specs are easier and don’t have such problems. If BioWare were to do the following, I think IO / AS would be in a much better place than it is right now (to be clear, these are not on the PTS, they’re just my ideas):

• Rework the Innovative Particle Accelerator / Ionic Accelerator proc to the following: “Unload / Full Auto and Thermal Detonator / Assault Plastique finish the cooldown Mag Shot and make your next Mag Shot free. This change would protect the IO / AS rotation from getting ruined due to sudden changes in alacrity or disruption.
• Make Serrated Shot / Bolt instant and eliminate the Speed to Burn / Blazing Celerity proc. This proc is less problematic if IPA / IA is tweaked, but it’d still be nicer to always have instant Serrated Shot / Bolt rather than rely on a proc which would do the same thing.
• Reduce the cost of Power Shot / Charged Bolts to 5 Heat / Energy Cells. This should make it so players only have to use Rapid Shots / Hammer Shot in specific situations but should be able to exclusively use Power Shot / Charged Bolts in purely single target situations.
• Slightly rework the Volatile Warhead / Hyper Assault Round proc. Its new effect should be: “Dealing periodic damage to a target that has less than 30% health grants Volatile Warhead / Hyper Assault Round, which makes your next Missile Blast / Explosive Round generate 1 stack of Supercharge, cost 5 Heat / Energy Cells, and deal 75% more damage. Cannot occur more than once every 15 seconds.” The purpose of this change is to make the rotation more consistent regardless of health level with regard to resource management and make it so you don’t get less Supercharged Gas / Cell uses sub-30%. It will result in a slight DPS increase against sub-30% targets. If BioWare does not want that, they could easily just reduce the damage increase from the proc to counteract it. 
• 30M FLAMETHROWER ABILITY INSTEAD OF UNLOAD LET’S GO!!! In all seriousness, it would probably look a little ridiculous but would be AMAZING! I envision a 3 second channel targeted ability with a 15 second cooldown just like Unload is but would also function as a conal/cleave like the old Flamethrower ability. Taking damage from Flamethrower should apply Combustible Gas Cylinder’s effect and act as a DoT spread and it would be usable while moving just like Unload / Full Auto. Essentially, it would work like a 3 second channel of Dual / Twin Saber Throw. Even if this doesn’t happen for Mercs, it looks like PT tanks will be getting an option for a channeled Flamethrower ability. 
• Power Barrel / Hyper Barrels should be renamed and reworked. Its new name could be something like Innovative Missile Silo / Hyper Grenade since it only affects Fusion Missile / Plasma Grenade and has nothing to do with barrels. If they don’t give us 30m Flamethrower, which they probably won’t, its effect should be changed to the following: “Fusion Missile / Plasma Grenade’s cooldown is reduced 12.5 seconds and 5 Heat / Energy Cells is/are refunded for each target it hits.” This makes it so IO / AS benefits a little more from managing to actually spread DoTs like many other specs do and compensates for the loss of Explosive Dart / Sticky Grenade functioning as a secondary DoT spread. At 3 targets, this makes it so Fusion Missile / Plasma Grenade costs 5 Heat / Energy Cells, same as what Power Shot / Charged Bolts.

You can read the full SWTOR 7.0 Innovative Ordnance PvE Guide to learn the fine details of how to play this spec to its full potential solo and in group content. It also features the best builds you should play for specific scenarios.

Conclusion

I’d take the current changes with a grain of salt. The Mercenary / Commando changes seem pretty unfinished right now, so I doubt they will be permanent. The reason I believe this is because the Sorcerer / Sage changes seemed to be far more complete when they were announced with the last PTS update, and yet they got a pretty significant rework with this update. BioWare has been releasing these PTS updates about every 3 weeks, and I think they weren’t quite ready but decided to release what they had. 

The Combat Style-wide changes could definitely use some tweaks, though they do seem to be in line with the changes to other Combat Styles in terms of overall balance, which means nerfs across the board. It is unfortunate that BioWare will almost certainly be sticking with the whole locking a bunch of abilities away behind the new choices system, but given that they have deviated a little bit from their always 5 abilities rule by locking away 7 abilities for Mercenary / Commando and only locking away 4 for PT / VG, I have hope that they might go back and de-prune some abilities for the other Combat Styles.

I’d definitely be more okay with abilities getting locked away behind choices if there was a major balance improvement to doing so, or in some cases, eliminating extreme ability bloat. Going even further with that thinking, I’m completely okay with some Combat Styles having more abilities locked away than others, so long as their overall toolkit still feels pretty complete and we aren’t left with major gaps in capabilities for some classes as we are now. 

Since we can see the direction for the Combat Style changes for everyone, the nerfs feel less problematic as well since the playing field does feel a little more level overall. Like yeah a given Combat Style is definitely weaker when comparing it to everything available on the live server, but compared to all the other Combat Styles as they will be in 7.0, it’s not quite so bad. Just so we’re clear, I’m still not okay with arbitrarily locking abilities away, especially if they’ll end up effectively never getting used again as a result, but it doesn’t seem like 7.0 will be quite as bad as it seemed like it would be when they first began announcing these changes. 

The biggest concern I have going forward is making sure that NiM / MM operation bosses remain doable since they often rely on having access to a diverse range of abilities and effects. 

You can also read my article for the Powertech / Vanguard 7.0 changes.

You can also follow along with our full SWTOR Update 7.0 coverage, starting from the Legacy of the Sith Expansion Reveal and all the rest of the updates to PTS and announcement from BioWare.