SWTOR 7.1 Arsenal Mercenary and Gunnery Commando Changes Announcement and Analysis

BioWare has announced buffs for Arsenal Mercenary / Gunnery Commando coming with SWTOR 7.1 as well as a tactical item intended to replace Thermonuclear Fusion, which was removed at the end of 7.0. This article has been updated with information from the PTS, you can see my additional comments at the end of the article.

Arsenal and Gunnery’s Current Standing

Arsenal / Gunnery is the worst-performing spec in the game at the moment and is likely the weakest a spec has ever been compared to the top-performing specs. If your raid group had 4 Fury Marauders / Concentration Sentinels (currently the strongest spec in the game), you’d need 5.5 Arsenal Mercenaries / Gunnery Commandos to match the same amount of combined damage output!

Arsenal / Gunnery has many factors working against them that make the spec weaker than other combat styles.

Ability tree choices are an area where Arsenal / Gunnery’s offerings are far behind weaker than what other specs can get. Marauders / Sentinels offer excellent comparisons because they are structurally similar.

For example, the Customized Warhead / Customized Round ability tree buff boosts the critical chance and critical damage dealt by Heatseeker Missiles / Demolition Round by 10%. Meanwhile, Fury / Concentration has one choice that boosts the critical chance and damage dealt by your next 4 abilities by 15% and another that gives you an autocrit to your next ability! This completely ignores the part where many of Arsenal / Gunnery’s choices are just flat-out boring.

In terms of Legendary Implants, most other combat styles have one that gives a flat 3-5% damage increase to attacks with some sort of condition like damage type or uptime whereas Mercenaries / Commandos get one that only results in an effective 1% damage increase without any other benefits.

Arsenal / Gunnery does have other options, but they’re centered around boosting Supercharged Gas / Supercharged Cell, which is a fairly weak ability for this discipline.

Mercenary / Commando also lacks a build capstone level 43 choice in order to make room for locking away 7 abilities in the ability tree instead of the usual 5. Not all combat styles have this, but the ones that do are almost always stronger than the ones that don’t. The combat styles with build capstones do have an offensive cooldown locked away, but what they can get in return typically offers superior sustained DPS.

Just to add insult to injury, combining Vent Heat / Recharge Cell with Thermal Sensor Override / Reserve Power Cell made Heat / Energy Cell management worse, though it did make the ability easier to use. In my opinion, resource management needs to be far more clearly defined. With a proper rotation, at least in single-target situations, it shouldn’t be an issue.

How is Arsenal / Gunnery supposed to compete when it has so many disadvantages?

BioWare’s Announced Changes

Increased the critical damage bonus given by Target Tracking / Deadly Cannon from 15% to 30%. This discipline passive currently boosts the critical damage dealt by Heatseeker Missiles / Demolition Round, Rail Shot / High Impact Bolt, and Priming Shot / Vortex Bolt by 15%.
Increased the critical hit chance given by Riddle / Rotary Cannon from 5% to 10%. This discipline passive currently boosts the critical chance of Blazing Bolts / Boltstorm and Priming Shot / Vortex Bolt by 5%.
Blazing Bolts / Boltstorm’s cost has been reduced from 20 down to 16 Heat / Energy Cells.
Priming Shot / Vortex Bolt’s cost has been reduced from 12 down to 10 Heat / Energy Cells.
Introduced a tactical called Unstable Fusion, which makes it so activating Supercharged Gas / Supercharged Cell deals elemental damage and applies Heat Signature / Gravity Vortex to up to 8 enemies within 8m of you. This tactical is meant to replace the Thermonuclear Fusion AoE tactical, which was removed with the launch of 7.0 because its effects were rolled into the discipline.

Practical Implications and Analysis

BioWare’s buffs to Arsenal / Gunnery are substantial. By my calculations, they could result increase DPS by about 1200 on average when using Primed Ignition tactical, and ability tree options that buff Tracer Missile. They have the potential to offer a more significant burst DPS increase with the Burning Bright tactical and ability tree buffs to Heatseeker Missiles / Demolition Round and Priming Shot / Vortex Bolt, but I’m not sure that such a build would be sustainable in terms of Heat / Energy Cell management. In addition, the extra DPS would get canceled out by the existing sustained DPS loss from using such a build.

I also want to clarify that I made a couple of assumptions during my calculations like assuming that we get a best-case scenario where the need to use Rapid Shots in the single-target rotation is completely eliminated. The DPS increase from this change is tricky to calculate accurately because there are a lot of knock-on effects beyond just the difference in damage output between Rapid Shots / Hammer Shot and Tracer Missile / Grav Round.

I think there’s a good chance that the buffs will end up being greater than 1200 DPS, but we’ll just have to wait and see until we can test things on the PTS.

These changes potentially address Heat / Energy Cell management and help to compensate for Arsenal’s other issues, but 1200 DPS is way too small. It would still be about 1,000 DPS behind Marksmanship / Sharpshooter, which is also performing poorly, so Arsenal / Gunnery would continue to be the worst spec in the game, just by a smaller margin.

I can’t see the Unstable Fusion tactical being taken very often unless the elemental damage is a bit absurd, probably at least 30k+ per target in order to surpass Primed Ignition’s damage at 3 targets and because Arsenal / Gunnery is a ranged spec with poor and especially imprecise mobility. Radiating damage out from your toon is just not going to come up very often outside of very specific fights and I guess in solo content.

Recommendations for BioWare

To reiterate, Arsenal / Gunnery’s disadvantages come from the following main sources:

Ability tree buffs are considerably weaker across the board.
Mercenaries / Commandos lack a “build capstone” level 43 choice.
Legendary Implants are relatively weak and do not synergize with the discipline.
Heat / Energy Cell management was nerfed.

The existing buffs that BioWare has announced will only affect the base discipline, they don’t interact with the disadvantages I listed above.

BioWare needs to buff ability tree choices and consider reworking the level 43 choice by giving Chaff Flare / Diversion as a baseline ability to all Mercenaries and Commandos and offering an alternative passive instead.

Buffing Supercharged Gas and Supercharged Cell

The Legendary Implant issue can be solved by just buffing Supercharged Gas / Supercharged Cell so that the existing Random Charge and Concentrated Fire implants are more worthwhile. Since High Velocity Gas Cylinder / High Velocity Cell already emphasizes increased armor penetration, why not lean into that by having the ability make it so all major attacks completely ignore armor and send alacrity to the moon?

15% is already sufficient to do this for Blazing Bolts / Boltstorm and Rail Shot / High Impact Bolt, but not the other abilities which need an extra 30% because they don’t benefit from that component of the Advanced Targeting / Target Lock combat style passive. I’d also like to see it grant an autocrit to at least Heatseeker Missiles / Demolition Round, if not also Priming Shot / Vortex Bolt for more consistent and reliable burst.

Improving Ability Tree Choices

Perhaps these changes could fill the gap left by Chaff Flare / Diversion as: “While Supercharged Gas / Supercharged Cell is active, Heatseeker Missiles / Demolition Round and Priming Shot automatically critically hit and their armor penetration is increased by an additional 30%.” Power Overrides / Overclock would become a little too weak, but could easily be rebalanced and renamed to Supercharged Overrides / Supercharged Overclock and combined with the old effects of Supercharged Defense.

Finally, the alacrity boost should be a whole lot more substantial. By having Supercharged Gas / Supercharged Cell give a 30% boost over 8 seconds, we get the 1.1s GCD that enables 2 additional abilities to be activated during those 8 seconds.

Arsenal / Gunnery would be exceptional during short burst checks, but it wouldn’t extend quite so well to slightly longer checks. I must confess that I don’t know exactly where such changes would leave Arsenal / Gunnery in terms of sustained DPS either. I absolutely do not think this burst would be broken because many specs are capable of far more frequent and concentrated burst.

As a final note, I’d appreciate if BioWare would swap Kolto Surge / Adrenal Surge and Trauma Regulators / Trauma Stabilizers. This shouldn’t have too much of an effect on PvE, but will help make Kolto Overload / Adrenaline Rush more useful in PvE. It would also be nice if Priming Shot / Vortex Bolt granted a stack of Power Surge / Tech Override instead of its own proc so you didn’t have to worry about consuming both at the same time.

From the PTS

The changes to Heat / Energy Cell costs make resource management feel extremely similar to 6.0 with the Apex Predator set. You should have barely enough Heat / Energy Cells to exclusively spam Tracer Missile / Grav Round in actual combat but will have to use Rapid Shots / Hammer Shot once or twice on the dummy or if you use any amount of AoE.

Being able to omit Rapid Shots / Hammer Shot is sustainable exclusively with the Proficient Tracing / Efficient Gravitation ability tree buff that was already optimal for sustained DPS. It’s so fun that it’s optimal to use some of the most boring passives in the game!

In terms of actual DPS gain from these changes, it seems my math was correct that it’s about a 1200 DPS increase, maybe a little less. The increases to critical damage dealt are hindered by the fact that Arsenal / Gunnery doesn’t have a way to sufficiently increase critical chance like some other specs do. 25k vs 60k damage is just too much variability for abilities that have 15s+ cooldowns.

We can also see that the Unstable Fusion tactical is absolutely horrible. 6400 damage per target is basically nothing. Even if you somehow ever manage to hit 8 targets, you’ll only match the damage dealt by a single application of the Primed Ignition DoT, and you apply that DoT over 60% more often than you activate Supercharged Gas / Supercharged Cylinder.

UPDATE: The Arsenal Mercenary and Gunnery Commando PvE Guides are now updated with the changes from Update 7.1!

You can check out the overview and analysis for all other Class Changes coming with SWTOR 7.1: