SWTOR 7.1 Carnage Marauder and Combat Sentinel Changes Announcement and Analysis

BioWare has announced balance changes for Carnage Marauder and Combat Sentinel coming with SWTOR 7.1 as well as a tactical item to replace Fanged God Form, which was removed with the launch of 7.0. This article has been updated with information from the PTS.

Carnage and Combat’s Current Standing

Carnage / Combat is currently one of the weakest DPS specs in the game including offering the lowest DPS out of any of the melee combat styles. It does have the capacity to gain a bit of DPS in combat without giving anything up, but it’s hard to compare that to other dummy numbers.

The new ability trees and legendary implants in 7.0 actually did quite a lot to fix the various issues with the discipline without the degeneracy that came with the Fanged God Form tactical. Rotationally, it’s now in a better place than ever in my opinion, though this is coming from someone who always loathed the clipping that was required with the original Ferocity / Precision window.

I know some people still miss being able to clip like that, but it was really impossible to balance something like that because it required a lot more game knowledge than your average player possessed and was just plain challenging to execute from a technical perspective. That left BioWare in a difficult spot where they could either balance the spec around what they thought the average player could do, which would result in Carnage / Combat being way too strong in the hands of skilled players or they could balance according to what was possible with clipping, resulting in the spec being garbage in the hands of the majority.

Under this framework, the only real issue that persists is the lack of sustained DPS.

BioWare’s Announced Changes for 7.1

Marauder and Sentinel

Bloodthirst / Inspiration is now granted at level 51 instead of level 60.
The Defensive Roll ability tree buff has been redesigned to do the following:
- “Increases internal/elemental damage reduction by 3%. In addition, activating Bloodthirst / Inspiration reduces the AoE damage you take by 30% for 20 seconds.”
  This passive is only accessible to Carnage / Combat and Annihilation / Watchman. Fury / Concentration got something different.

Carnage and Combat

Increased the damage bonus from Execute / Opportune Attack to Devastating Blast / Clashing Blast from 5% to 10%.
The Quickness ability tree buff has been redesigned to do the following:
“Dealing damage with an Ataru Form strike reduces the cooldown of Rage / Focus-spending offensive abilities by 1 second. Ataru Form deals 3% more damage.”
Redesigned the Blood Frenzy / Combat Trance ability tree buff to do the following:
“When Execute / Opportune Attack is consumed, you build 1 Rage / Focus. In addition, you are immune to interrupts and all controlling effects for 6 seconds after activating Ferocity. The immunity effect cannot occur more than once every 30 seconds.”
Previously, only the Rage / Focus component existed for Carnage / Combat.
Introduced the tactical Shard of Mortis, which is designed to replace Fanged God Form, and has the following effect:
“Using Massacre / Blade Rush adds Hyper Stacks to you, increasing your critical chance by 25% per stack and increasing the cost of your next Massacre / Blade Rush by 1 Rage / Focus per stack. Stacks up to 3 times. When you deal damage with another ability, Hyper is removed.”

Practical Implications and Analysis

These changes have pretty far-reaching effects across both PvE and PvP. Unfortunately, it isn’t clear if any of these changes will actually result in a sustained DPS increase besides the 300 DPS buff to Devastating Blast / Clashing Blast.

Quickness and Shard of Mortis

The buff to the Quickness ability tree choice will hopefully introduce a more viable build that emphasizes increased sustained DPS by having weaker, but far more frequent Ferocity / Precision windows. Quickness doesn’t increase your movement speed either, forcing you to get less out of Frenzied Blade / Valor Blade.

It’s still unclear to me where the new Shard of Mortis tactical will fit into these new builds. Since it increases the cost of Massacre / Blade Rush rather than decreases and Rage /Focus is already super limited, I can’t imagine it being used without Quickness, but that ability tree buff increases DPS by reducing the duration of your filler segment, which Shard of Mortis tries to buff.

I’m especially concerned that Shard of Mortis may still create a perverse incentive to use a more clunky rotation in order to get the most benefit out of the additional crit chance to your next ability. That said, thanks to the extreme Rage / Focus constraints and Dispatcher implant, it’s possible that players will just end up alternating Massacre / Blade Rush with existing abilities as is done now with Swiftness so you effectively just mostly derive the 25% crit chance you would have gotten with Swiftness from Shard of Mortis instead and are left with the increased frequency of Ferocity / Precision windows to compensate for the actual less than 25% crit chance.

I’ll update this article after doing some testing on the PTS once it becomes available.

AoE Reduced Damage Taken

Marauders and Sentinels were borderline overpowered in terms of defensive capabilities anyway compared to everyone else thanks to Cloak of Pain / Rebuke, so even without it, I think they’ll still do fine. Carnage / Combat and Annihilation / Watchman will still have access to AoE RDT for a significant portion of basically all burn phases, but some fights are already pretty intense without AoE RDT, so more retuning of fights would be nice.

I really like how the new passive helps to clue the player in on when it’s a good time to activate Bloodthirst / Inspiration because it can be a bit confusing when thinking about when you should activate your raid buff. I also like that the level 51 choice seems far more balanced. You’ll have a reason to take each buff now.

PvP

Carnage / Combat now has Gravity Vortex baseline! This is a pretty huge change that should make the discipline a lot stronger in PvP. It was a major contributor to Fury / Concentration being considered the strongest PvP Marauder / Sentinel discipline for a long time.

It’s very fitting for Carnage and should help players to feel more like Darth Malgus when he defeated Kao Cen Darach, Satele’s master, on the space station above Korriban at the very beginning of the Great Galactic War.

I do wish that triggering the effect was a little more closely linked to Carnage / Combat. Perhaps instead it triggered off of Berserked Ferocities / Zen Precisions and only lasted as long as Ferocity / Precision, but had no rate limit. This is just a small nit-pick, and removing the rate limit could potentially be unbalanced, even if the effect doesn’t last as long.

Recommendations for BioWare

I just want Carnage / Combat’s sustained DPS to be higher. If Shard of Mortis and/or Quickness allow this to happen, that’s fine by me, so long as it doesn’t require a clunky rotation. If it isn’t enough, I would like to see Ravage / Blade Barrage get buffed so that it is consistently a better option than Massacre / Blade Rush during Ferocity / Precision.

This could be accomplished by bringing back the Ravage / Blade Barrage channel that all Warrior / Knight combat styles can once again fit into their rotation, but I don’t think that is very likely to happen. More realistically, making it so that each tick of Ravage / Blade Barrage can trigger an Ataru Form Strike (ignoring the rate limit) would definitely be enough to make it stronger and still fit thematically. This would result in about 600 additional DPS, maybe a little more.

If Ravage / Blade Barrage were to be buffed to be usable during Ferocity / Precision, it would need to generate 1 Rage / Focus so you don’t miss out on the cost reduction for Massacre / Blade Rush from Efficient Strikes.

That wouldn’t be enough to give the spec the additional 2500 DPS it needs. The rest could come from buffing damage dealt by Ataru Form strikes by 35%, Battering Assault by 50%, and Dual Saber Throw by 25%, assuming my math is correct. These changes should have little impact on balance beyond increasing sustained DPS.

I’d also like to see the duration of the Swiftness and Massacre buffs increased by 1.5-2 seconds, just as a quality of life and consistency improvement. The current durations are fine for the dummy, but are a little too short for actual combat.

From the PTS

The buff to Devastating Blast / Clashing Blast does seem to result in a very minor DPS increase, resulting in me being able to pass 27k for the first time, but 300 DPS is still very small so it’s hard to verify the exact amount of the increase.

With Quickness, the rotation feels hectic and clunky as the Ferocity / Precision window has its cooldown reduced, but not Battering Assault / Zealous Strike, Ravage / Blade Barrage, or Dual Saber Throw. Shard of Mortis just adds another layer of complexity where it’s very hard to keep track of how much Rage / Focus you need at any given time. It will take far too long for me to test to give a timely update, but I was able to hit 25k with lots of mistakes, so it seems like Shard of Mortis + Quickness might be comparable or even superior to Swiftness + Andeddu’s Malevolence if you know what you’re doing.

Carnage / Combat still needs a more significant DPS increase to bring it in line with the other melee DPS specs and actually utilizes the elegant rotation BioWare designed with Swiftness + Andeddu’s Malevolence.

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

Carnage and Combat’s Current Standing