SWTOR 7.7 Dirty Fighting Gunslinger PvE Guide and Best Builds

SWTOR Dirty Fighting Gunslinger PvE Guide (DPS) for beginners and more experienced veterans: Skills, Choices, Rotations, Gearing, Builds, Tips!

Introduction to Dirty Fighting Gunslinger

Dirty Fighting deals strong damage by applying several Bleeds to the target and triggering those Bleeds with specific weapon damage. Throughout this guide, I will reference Bleed damage. It is not an official damage type, like Energy or Internal, but rather acts as a way for BioWare to quickly refer to many of your abilities at the same time.

Dirty Fighting is capable of dealing decent sustained damage, but it’s not as high in practice as what you’ll see from the top dummy parses on Parsely. The spec is able to do a lot of semi-cheesy things because so much of their damage comes from a single ability and their buffs are mostly based on duration rather than stacks.

Some of this cheesiness is possible to do in actual combat, but you’re gonna have a lot harder time with it than you would on a dummy, especially because you have to deal with cover and movement.

Dirty Fighting does offer a small amount of rotational AoE, but it is a lot weaker than what all other DoT specs are capable of to the extent that it overlaps with what some of the strongest burst specs can offer. If you need to do rotational AoE on a Gunslinger, you should play Saboteur. That said, Dirty Fighting can get a single-target damage boost from the extra Energy generated by having its DoTs on multiple targets.

None of this should discourage you from playing the spec, Dirty Fighting is a great option, I just think it’s important to set realistic expectations.

Compared to other combat styles, Gunslingers lost more survivability than many with the release of 7.0, but they remain viable and are the only range combat style that still has access to AoE RDT. Thanks to how the ability tree choices were set up, each Gunslinger discipline is now a bit more unique in terms of damage mitigation.

Out of the 3 disciplines, Dirty Fighting is definitely the best at mitigating sustained damage, and thanks to its sub-30% damage boost and longer duration of Scrambling Field, it is arguably one of the best specs in the game for fights that have tough burn phases.

BioWare will likely be making balance changes throughout the first few patches, so be sure to check back to this guide after each update. You can check at the top of the guide to see if the guide has been updated for the most recent patch. 

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 almost always one of your primary CCs, either the 8s mez or 4s hard stun, though Gunslinger has their hard stun locked away in a different choice instead. 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. Dirty Fighting permanently lost access to 3 abilities: 

• Dodge
• Flourish Shot
• Flash Grenade

Smuggler and Republic terminology have been replaced by more faction-agnostic terms since non-Smuggler Origin Stories now have access to the Combat Style. The most notable change is XS Freighter Flyby > Bombing Run, though it affects the names of a few passives as well.

Battle rezzes in general are now healer-only, but there is no longer a global 5 min lockout on those abilities, so it’s treated just like any other ability, albeit with a much longer cooldown. 

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. 

Group Composition Tips

In order to deal maximum damage, Dirty Fighting requires 3 other DPS debuffs:

DPS Debuff	Presence of debuff increases DPS by approximately
Tech	~2.9%
Armor	~2.9%
AoE	1.7%
Total DPS Gain:	7.5%

Please note that the Tech and Armor values are approximate because StarParse doesn’t separate the Ranged and Tech components. Those numbers assume that Dirty Blast deals exactly half of its DPS from each damage type, which is not accurate. Don’t worry, the possible minor variations in damage type proportionality don’t change my conclusions.

Dirty Fighting is fairly standard as far as compositional dependency goes. It pairs perfectly with Powertech / Vanguard DPS because both parties provide 2 debuffs that the other can benefit from. I want to be clear that a PT / VG is by no means required in order for Dirty Fighting to deal maximum DPS, it just allows maximum compositional flexibility for the other players.

Since the individual amount from each debuff is fairly similar and small, I would try to get at least 1, preferably 2, if possible, but defer to other compositional needs when deciding which one in particular. It doesn’t make much of a difference which debuff you get so long as you get at least 1-2.

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?  

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. 

Check out the SWTOR Damage Types and Damage Mitigation guide.

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

Wounding Shots

(Ranged/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Channeled)
Wounding Shots is the central ability for Dirty Fighting because it causes basically all of your other attacks to deal damage. Your entire rotation is structured around using it as often as possible and getting the most out of each activation. Over the full channel, Wounding Shots will tick 4 times, allowing you to trigger up to 12 DoT ticks (or 8 without the Exploited Weakness tactical), and each of those ticks can individually trigger your Hemorrhaging Blast debuff too.

Wounding Shots also deals weapon damage, but it’s quite weak. Without the new ability tree buffs, it actually deals slightly less damage per activation than Quickdraw over the full duration. Wounding Shots has 1 discipline passive associated with it that is relevant to your rotation:

Nice Try
When Vital Shot and Shrap Bomb end, they are replaced by a lingering version for 5 seconds that only deals damage when Wounding Shots deals damage. You can distinguish these debuffs because they are grayed out rather than in full color and tick down much faster. This effect of Nice Try makes it so you can use Wounding Shots on cooldown without ever having to worry about your DoTs falling off. Rather than reapplying Shrap Bomb and Vital Shot as soon as they fall off, you wait until you do a final (usually fourth) Wounding Shots that will mostly take place while these lingering debuffs are active.

Shrap Bomb

(Tech/Internal/Periodic/AoE/Instant/Bleed)
Shrap Bomb is the first of your primary DoTs that must have 100% uptime on your primary target. Even without Wounding Shots, Shrap Bomb deals enough damage to be worth using where it has 100% uptime, so you should apply it to secondary targets when possible in lieu of your weaker fillers.

Shrap Bomb is considered an AoE attack and one of the only rotational AoE abilities in the game that can benefit from another discipline providing the AoE debuff. Most other rotational AoE is dealt by specs that already provide the AoE debuff. Shrap Bomb has 2 discipline passives and 1 debuff associated with it that are relevant to your rotation:

Extra Shrapnel
Shrap Bomb spreads your Vital Shot to targets it damages, if it damages at least 1 target already affected by Vital Shot. This passive makes Shrap Bomb your DoT spread. Unfortunately, Shrap Bomb is a targeted ability and only has a 5m AoE radius, so it often doesn’t reach far enough to affect the whole group of trash, requiring you to choose between not spreading to the whole group or using it again, desynchronizing your DoTs and not getting as much of a benefit out of the second GCD.

It’s unfortunate that BioWare has never bothered to fix this. AoE abilities with 5m range are almost always placeable while targeted AoEs typically have an 8m radius to compensate for the reduced control. There are other AoE abilities that are targeted with 5m range, but those are universally terrible in part, but not only, because 5m is not enough.

Mortal Wound
Shrap Bomb (and Vital Shot) have a 10% chance to harm their target twice whenever they deal damage. This damage is unreliable in the moment, but over the course of the whole fight, it will average out to 10% more ticks.

Assailable
Also provided by Mortal Wound, Assailable is the Internal/Elemental DPS debuff and is applied by Shrap Bomb. The Internal/Elemental debuff is considered the second best DPS debuff in the game because it significantly benefits almost all DPS specs as many of the most powerful attacks in the game deal Internal/Elemental damage. For some disciplines, the Internal/Elemental debuff is actually better than the Armor debuff because a greater proportion of the damage dealt is considered Internal/Elemental compared to Energy/Kinetic and both debuffs offer the same effective 7% damage increase.

Since Dirty Fighting applies this debuff on an AoE ability, it’s even more valuable because almost all DoTs and DoT spreads in the game deal Internal/Elemental damage and DoT specs provide the most potent AoE in the game thanks to their DoT spreads.

Vital Shot

(Tech/Internal/Periodic/Single-Target/Instant/Bleed)
Vital Shot is the second of your primary DoTs that must have 100% uptime on your primary target. Even without Wounding Shots, Vital Shot deals enough damage to be worth using where it has 100% uptime, so you should apply it to secondary targets when possible in lieu of your weaker fillers. Vital Shot has 1 debuff and 1 discipline passive associated with it that are relevant to your rotation that I haven’t already mentioned.

Open Wound
Increases the duration of Vital Shot by 6 seconds. This passive is now hidden, but the effect remains. Shrap Bomb lasts 24 seconds, so this passive just makes Vital Shot have the same duration.

Crack Shot
Increases the range of Flash Grenade, Quick Shot (abilities you don’t even have anymore), and Distraction to 35m and increases the range of all rifle, probe, and dart attacks by 5m and Vital Shot marks its target for 45 seconds. Marked targets take 5% more damage from Ranged weapon attacks. This combat style passive is responsible for giving Gunslingers their 35m range on damaging abilities and 30m range on CC, as well as giving them one of their DPS debuffs (the individual specs only provide 1 debuff as opposed to 2).

I don’t know why they decided it would make sense from a lore perspective for a Tech attack to apply a Ranged debuff. The only reason I can see is that it’s a debuff that gets used by all 3 specs. Unfortunately, the Ranged debuff is arguably the worst DPS debuff in the game because all the specs that already deal a significant amount of their damage as Ranged damage already provide it themselves. Only a tiny portion of the other specs’ total damage output is considered Ranged damage. It’s still a noticeable DPS increase for the specs that provide it, but as a DPS debuff and piece of raid utility, it doesn’t matter.

The Ranged debuff is slightly more useful in Dirty Fighting because Vital Shot can be spread, allowing you to apply this debuff in an AoE fashion, thereby increasing the damage dealt by Ranged AoE attacks including Sweeping Gunfire, Hemorrhaging Blast (with Airborne Agents), and also the Mercenary / Commando spammable AoE.

Hemorrhaging Blast

(Ranged/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
This is one of your most damaging attacks and while it behaves similar to a DoT, it is not considered Bleed, Periodic, or even Internal/Elemental damage. Hemorrhaging Blast deals Weapon (Ranged) damage, so it doesn’t get buffed by the various discipline passives that boost those types of damage, though it remains a powerful ability.

Since Wounding Shots ticks your DoTs and each DoT tick will individually trigger Hemorrhaging Blast, it’s essential to make sure that Hemorrhaging Blast is active for the entire duration of Wounding Shots. Technically, Hemorrhaging Blast can be used at any point in the rotation so long as it and Wounding Shots are being used on cooldown, but it’s much safer to always use Hemorrhaging Blast immediately before Wounding Shots to minimize the risk of missing out because of downtime. For example, if you don’t keep them synchronized, you could end up with a situation where the boss becomes immune before you have a chance to activate Wounding Shots. Hemorrhaging Blast has 1 discipline passive and 1 debuff associated with it that are relevant to your rotation:

Cold Blooded
Increases the damage dealt by your Bleed effects by 15% on targets that have less than 30% max HP. In addition, if a target is defeated while affected by Hemorrhaging Blast, the cooldown on Hemorrhaging Blast is reset. The sub-30% damage boost is equivalent to a nearly 9% DPS increase, which is pretty average for these sorts of buffs. The sub-30% damage boost allows you to deal more damage against bosses and compensate for the DPS loss if the target dies before all ticks have been harvested from the associated DoT application GCD.

The cooldown reset on Hemorrhaging Blast makes it so you don’t have to worry about wasting or delaying the ability because even if the target dies, you’ll get it back. In fact, it transforms Hemorrhaging Blast into your strongest filler because DoT ticks that occur over the course of a Wounding Shots channel will account for over 60% of the damage dealt by each activation of Hemorrhaging Blast, and Hemorrhaging Blast deals about 4x the damage per GCD of your Dirty Blast, Quickdraw, and Speed Shot, so it’s a significant DPS increase to apply Hemorrhaging Blast to targets that will die because you effectively just did more damage than one of those weaker fillers for free.

By the same token, using Hemorrhaging Blast on a target that is about to die that you have opted not to Wounding Shots can potentially be a DPS loss compared to swapping off that target early or just using a different ability instead. This also helps to reinforce the importance of only using Hemorrhaging Blast immediately before Wounding Shots.

Bloody Mayhem
Hemorrhaging Blast applies Bloody Mayhem to the target, which will trigger a bloody explosion that deals a small amount of single-target Internal damage the next time that target takes damage from Shrap Bomb. This debuff really just gives Hemorrhaging Blast a tiny bit of extra burst and pizzaz, but I wanted to bring it up since it does show up as its own entry in StarParse and point out that Bloody Mayhem is not considered a Bleed.

Dirty Blast

(Ranged and Tech/Energy and Internal/Direct/Single-Target/Casted/Partial Bleed)
Dirty Blast is your main filler ability and will account for nearly half of your GCDs. It has a unique trait where it deals a portion of its damage as regular weapon damage while the other part is Tech and Internal as well as being classified as Bleed damage.

In a vacuum, Dirty Blast would deal less damage than Quickdraw, but thanks to its Bleed component, Dirty Blast is able to benefit from and utilize many of the passives that would otherwise only boost your DoTs, resulting in Dirty Blast typically being your most damaging filler. Dirty Blast has 1 tactical item associated with it that is relevant to your rotation:

Exploited Weakness
Increases the damage dealt by Hemorrhaging Blast by 50%. In addition, Dirty Blast applies a relatively weak Bleed DoT that lasts 18 seconds. The DoT is affected by all of the Bleed buffs just like Vital Shot and Shrap Bomb, allowing each cast of Dirty Blast to double-dip on damage boosts.

Semi-Rotational Abilities

These abilities don’t deal enough damage to be used rotationally, but still occasionally have value. If you want to do the absolute maximum DPS, you’ll need to know when it’s appropriate to use these abilities.

 Quickdraw

(Ranged/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
Quickdraw was once a far more important part of your rotation, but now only deals more damage than Dirty Blast when neither Hemorrhaging Blast nor Blood Sights are active, and even then they will still deal roughly the same damage.

For the sake of simplicity, Quickdraw should only be used when you have to move or if your target will die or otherwise become unavailable to hit by the time Dirty Blast would finish casting. Quickdraw has 1 proc associated with it that is relevant to your rotation:

Dirty Shot
Dealing damage with Wounding Shots has an 80% chance to trigger Dirty Shot, which finishes the cooldown on Quickdraw and makes your next Quickdraw useable on any target and cost 3 less Energy. This proc effectively lets you use Quickdraw once per Wounding Shots and always cost 1 or 2 less Energy than Dirty Blast, but thanks to Hemorrhaging Blast, Blood Sights, the Exploited Weakness tactical, additional Energy regeneration, and the Flourish Burst ability tree buff, Quickdraw will only be worth using when you don’t have enough Energy or need to move.

Speed Shot

(Ranged/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Channeled)
Speed Shot deals significantly less DPS than Dirty Blast and Quickdraw, but it only costs 20 Energy, so you’ll actually gain Energy over the course of the channel thanks to your passive and triggered Energy regen. Speed Shot should only be used in a couple of specific situations:

• You need more Energy. Typically, this will only come up if you aren’t using the Energy Regulators Legendary Implant or you just got revived and Cool Head is on cooldown for some reason.
• You expect your target to die or become immune before you can finish a cast and want to deal a final bit of damage. If you don’t have time to apply your DoTs, Dirty Blast and Quickdraw are better options. Series should only be used as the very final GCD.

Speed Shot does not have any passives associated with it that are relevant to your rotation.

Crouch and Take Cover

When you create a new Sniper or Gunslinger, the ability that gets placed on your bar is called Take Cover. If there’s a cover position in range (denoted by a little green silhouette), you quickly roll to that location and if you aren’t in range, you deploy your portable cover shield where you stand. 

This inconsistent behavior can cause problems in raiding, which is why you should just remove the Take Cover ability from your bar entirely. Thankfully, there is another ability called Crouch, which just always deploys your portable cover shield wherever you are currently standing. This is the only ability you should ever use when entering cover. 

While it used to be the case that you couldn’t use most of your abilities unless you were in cover, nowadays the only abilities you have to be in cover for are Sweeping Gunfire, Pulse Detonator, and Hunker Down. This means that the cover bar isn’t really useful anymore, so feel free to turn it off in the settings (User Interface > General > uncheck Enable Cover Bar). That said, there is still 1 combat style proc and 1 combat style passive that provide significant benefits to you while in cover:

Hold Position
While in cover, Ranged defense is increased by 20%, you cannot be leapt to or pulled, and you are immune to interrupts and ability activation pushback. The most important component of this passive is the pushback protection and in general, this is the most important reason to be in cover at all. You will lose a massive amount of DPS if you can’t be in cover since your APM will be much lower because all of your casts will take much longer to complete. In case you aren’t familiar, pushback is when the progress of your cast is pushed back as a result of taking damage. In-universe, this is supposed to represent that casting things requires more focus; for a Gunslinger, you’re going to have trouble lining up your shot if you’re taking a bunch of damage, so it will take longer. If you want to see it in action, just try to do your rotation on enemies out of cover. This used to be more prevalent back before 3.0 when you had to actually spec into pushback protection, but now every combat style gets a reduction on it as part of some passive.

Ready for Anything
Upon entering cover, your stealth detection level begins to increase gradually, reaching up to 30 additional levels of stealth detection over the following 30 seconds. This effect ends when you leave cover. The only reason I mention this proc is because it will show up on your bar. Stealth detection capabilities generally don’t work correctly in PvE, so don’t rely on the fact that your stealth detection is higher to conclude that there aren’t any enemies in stealth. It would be kind of neat if they put more effort into having this work though since Gunslingers aren’t the only combat style that have something like this.

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. This isn’t terribly relevant for Engi since Energy demands and rotational interdependencies are more important, but it’s still good to know. 

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. 

Sweeping Gunfire

(Ranged/Energy/Direct/AoE/Channeled)
This is your spammable AoE. It’s easily one of the strongest spammable AoE abilities in the entire game. It’s slightly more expensive than Dirty Blast and Quickdraw, but you have sufficient Energy with the Energy Regulators Legendary Implant to use it instead of Dirty Blast. If you want to spam it more than that, you’ll need to make sure to DoT spread.

Using a single full channel Sweeping Gunfire exclusively instead of Dirty Blast will result in a slight single-target DPS loss in exchange for a major AoE DPS gain that effectively becomes rotational AoE.

Bombing Run

(Tech/Elemental/Periodic/AoE/Casted)
This is another of the strongest AoEs in the game, though you are a bit more restricted around its usage. Bombing Run ticks 3 times over 9 seconds and has a delay before the first tick goes out after casting, so adds have to survive a relatively long time in order to get the maximum amount of damage out of this ability.

Since you now have to give up an empowered Scrambling Field to take Bombing Run, I would not recommend taking this ability if you have to worry at all about not getting the absolute maximum damage out of the ability without losing any single-target DPS, so Bombing Run should only be used to replace Dirty Blast.

Shrap Bomb

(Tech/Elemental/Periodic/AoE/Instant)
Shrap Bomb is your DoT spread thanks to the Extra Shrapnel discipline passive. It’s arguably one of the worst in the game because it only spreads 1 DoT (Shrap Bomb is already an AoE) and will disrupt your rotation. Shrap Bomb does not spread Vital Shot the secondary target still has the Lingering Toxins version present in its system. In addition, Shrap Bomb only has a 5m radius, so you may have to use it multiple times if you want to spread to a group of enemies that are spread out.

In order to re-spread Vital Shot, you have to wait until Lingering Toxins wears off of secondary targets, and this will happen 1 GCD after Lingering Toxins falls off of your primary target because Shrap Bomb and Dart get applied at the same time to secondary targets.

In order to get the maximum damage out of your DoT spread when you want to respread it, you have to delay reapplying your DoTs and subsequently Wounding Shots along with maybe Hemorrhaging Blast if it’s available. Alternatively, you can just apply Shrap Bomb a second time knowing it will be wasted on the primary target and desynchronize it from Vital Shot. Both of these options result in a single-target DPS loss. The first option (waiting until Lingering Toxins falls off) should result in a smaller single-target DPS loss.

Alternatively, you can just not respread Vital Shot and just accept lower AoE damage. The damage takes 24 seconds to go out, so it might not even be worthwhile to spread at all unless Blood Sights is active if the adds are only gonna live for a few more seconds anyway. As an AoE, Vital Shot has 1 tactical item associated with it that is relevant to your rotation:

Airborne Agents
Shrap Bomb also spreads Hemorrhaging Blast if it damages at least 1 target already affected by Hemorrhaging Blast. In addition, Dirty Blast deals damage to nearby enemies that are also affected by Shrap Bomb. The Hemorrhaging Blast spread forces you to tweak your rotation by applying Hemorrhaging Blast before Shrap Bomb. The Dirty Blast AoE component enables Dirty Blast to be situationally superior to Sweeping Gunfire. I think Dirty Blast’s AoE only works in a 5m raidus, so Sweeping Gunfire will still be better if you can hit more targets with it.

Thermal Grenade

(Tech/Kinetic/Direct/AoE/Instant)
This is not an AoE ability for endgame PvE. It only deals a small amount of AoE damage to Standard and Weak enemies, which you rarely encounter in group content.

Diversion

This ability technically does not do any AoE damage, but it will only ever be used in AoE situations so I am going to talk about it here. Diversion works wonders against adds and that’s the only thing you can use it against since it doesn’t affect bosses. It’s about as strong as Saber Ward, Deflection, and Explosive Fuel + Oil Slick, which are the strongest DCDs tanks have against adds, though it doesn’t last quite as long. Usually, the raid lead will tell you when they want it or a tank will ask for it, but if you see someone getting hit by a bunch of enemies, chuck this at them. 

Diversion does cost a GCD, so you’ll either have to use it instead of something that doesn’t have a cooldown, or delay something that does. Thankfully, it doesn’t matter too much which approach you take since Diversion has a fairly long cooldown so you won’t lose a tangible amount of DPS from using it. If you are going to use it in place of one of your abilities, try to minimize the amount of damage you lose by replacing one of your weakest GCDs, similar to what you’d do when you need to reapply Interrogation Probe.

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. 

Blood Sights and Smuggler’s Chems

Smuggler’s Luck now has a unique effect and name in each discipline. For Dirty Fighting, the ability is called Blood Sights and has the following effects: Increases the critical chance of your next Wounding Shots or Quickdraw by 100%. Blood Sights grants Smuggler’s Chems, which causes all of your Bleed damage to automatically critically hit. Lasts 10 (or sometimes 20) seconds.

Prior to 7.0, Smuggler’s Luck only increased the critical chance of Wounding Shots’ weapon damage, so Blood Sights is now far more potent as an offensive cooldown for Dirty Fighting. Many of your ability tree buffs and legendary implants synergize with Blood Sights and will enable you to pick between a 10s or 20s duration without changing the overall uptime, so you can optimize the buff to suit your needs.

Blood Sights follows the same rules and ideals as Hemorrhaging Blast. You should always activate Blood Sights immediately before Wounding Shots, ideally where you won’t have to reapply your DoTs while Smuggler’s Chems is active, but it’s best not to delay it at all unless there will be a burst check very soon. This will enable you to get 1 full activation of Wounding Shots and part of the next one alongside (hopefully) 3-4 Dirty Blasts. If Energy permits, you’ll want to skip Quickdraw.

Please note that Hemorrhaging Blast does not synergize with Blood Sights or Smuggler’s Chems at all because Hemorrhaging Blast deals weapon damage, it is not a Bleed effect. There is no need to delay one for the other unless you are doing a burst DPS check.

It is also not worth delaying Blood Sights until after you reapply your DoTs because Dirty Blast’s Bleed damage is the alternative and doesn’t deal that much more damage than an individual DoT tick. You’ll quickly lose more DPS from missing out on additional activations, especially with the 10s/45s CD version, than you would gain by ensuring more ideal Smuggler’s Chems windows. I do think it’s fine to delay Blood Sights by a single cycle in order to synchronize it with other OCDs.

Cool Head

This ability will get different amounts of usage depending on which build you’re using, including not at all in some cases, though in general, you want to use it when you find yourself around 45-50% Energy. The goal is for the initial 25 Energy to get you back up to the maximum Energy regeneration rate and supply you with enough Energy for your next GCD so you don’t fall back into the lower regeneration rate bracket. It’s still necessary to activate Cool Head ASAP if you find yourself below 45 Energy, but it’s less optimal to wait that long if you can help it. 

There should be no need to save Cool Head for emergencies in case you mess up your rotation. You should practice on the dummy if you’re not able to consistently execute the rotation correctly.  Cool Head has 1 discipline passive associated with it that is relevant to your rotation:

Fighting Spirit
Reduces the cooldown of Cool Head by 15s. In addition, dealing damage with a Bleed effect restores 1 Energy. The cooldown reduction is definitely useful when you need to use Cool Head on cooldown, but the more significant impact of Fighting Spirit comes from the Bleed Energy regen effect.

Each of your Bleeds will tick enough times to recoup the Energy cost of their initial application and then some thanks to Wounding Shots, though you’ll still have to worry about the up-front Energy cost since it does take time for the Energy restoration to occur. In addition, multi-DoTing and DoT spreading make Energy management trivial allowing you to get rid of some Energy regen in fights where it’s consistently possible to do either.

Adrenal

The only time you should activate the Adrenal is at the same time as Blood Sights because you want to benefit from the periodic supercrit damage since you’re boosting your critical rating rather than power. It’s fine to delay the Adrenal until Blood Sights is available; it shouldn’t ever result in missing out on additional activations of the Adrenal.

Illegal Mods

Both the 15 Energy regen and 15% increased armor penetration for 10 seconds provide a noticeable benefit. Only energy/kinetic attacks are mitigated by armor and all of Dirty Fighting’s energy/kinetic damage is anything that isn’t Bleed damage, which will be denoted as weapon damage. Weapon damage (white damage) is what the game refers to as Melee/Ranged attacks that you deal and all Melee/Ranged damage is also energy/kinetic.

If that was a bit too confusing, don’t worry. The core idea with Illegal Mods’s damage boost is that it’s equivalent to a 5.25% damage increase for your white damage. Your sources of white damage include:

• Hemorrhaging Blast
• Wounding Shots (not the DoT ticks it triggers)
• Dirty Blast (not the Bleed part)
• Quickdraw
• Speed Shot

The damage boost is small enough that it does not enable Speed Shot to be worthwhile, but you definitely want Hemorrhaging Blast to be active for the full duration since it is by far your most damaging weapon attack and should use Quickdraw in lieu of a Dirty Blast because it deals more weapon damage. You should not activate Illegal Mods during rotation cycles where you have to refresh your DoTs because you won’t sufficiently benefit from Illegal Mods during those GCDs.

In fights with very high uptime, you can’t afford to delay Illegal Mods for longer than it takes for Hemorrhaging Blast to come off cooldown because you will be relying on the 15 Energy to stay afloat. You should only activate Illegal Mods immediately after applying Hemorrhaging Blast.

Illegal Mods also resets the cooldown on Blood Sights, which allows you to get a full 20s of continuous uptime on Smuggler’s Chems. If you use Blood Sights on cooldown with the Improved Targeting Implant, you will be able to activate it twice before Illegal Mods comes off cooldown again. Both abilities should become available at roughly the same time.

Since Smuggler’s Chems lasts slightly longer than Wounding Shots’ cooldown, you have to either clip the duration, delay the second activation of Blood Sights by a cycle, or activate it before Hemorrhaging Blast. In these cases, I recommend the third option: activate Blood Sights before Hemorrhaging Blast instead of Wounding Shots if you plan to reset its cooldown with Illegal Mods.

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.

Hunker Down

Hunker Down now directly provides the 60% AoE RDT (reduced damage taken); there is no utility point required. Without the Lay Low ability tree buff, Hunker Down has 30% uptime if it’s activated on cooldown. This means your average AoE RDT is only 20% compared to most other disciplines which have 100% uptime on 30% AoE RDT.

Even with the inconsistent uptime, you can easily wind up taking less damage than other combat styles since you can control when your mitigation is active to take less damage against big hits. You can also utilize this higher DR so you don’t have to move out of certain circles when other combat styles would. It doesn’t always work, but it’s worth trying to figure out which circles will kill you and which you can survive completely, or at least survive long enough that you can get to a point in your rotation where you will lose minimal DPS from moving.

The vast majority of damage that bosses deal in raids is considered AoE damage. Even if the attack looks like a single-target attack, there’s a good chance that it’s still considered AoE damage. This is why there’s always so much emphasis on the AoE RDT buffs and part of why Gunslingers should generally have very low DTPS. 

Hunker Down also provides CC immunity. This benefit comes up occasionally in PvE, usually during DPS checks, though it isn’t nearly as useful as it is in PvP.

Defense Screen and Concussion

Defense Screen is normally just a very weak DCD that absorbs damage equivalent to about 8% of your max HP, though it has a very short cooldown so it’s up for just about every single hit, which helps to take the edge off even if it’s almost never enough on its own. Dirty Fighting has 1 discipline passive associated with it that is relevant to your survivability.

Concussion
Reduced damage taken by periodic effects by 30%. In addition, when your Defense Screen ends, you gain Concussion, which increases your damage reduction by `15% for 6 seconds. This passive makes Defense Screen significantly more useful at mitigating bigger hits and allows Dirty Fighting to take less damage from DoTs all the time.

Surrender

As of 7.3, the effect that makes activating Surrender increase your movement speed by 75% movement speed for 6s is now baked into the ability and it has been finally decoupled from Speed Shot knockback. The movement speed boost is the primary benefit, but Surrender also functions as your threat drop.

The movement speed boost is best whenever you don’t need to travel as far as Hightail It will take you (18m), are able to keep dealing damage while moving, or if your movement otherwise must be fast and precise. 

Please note that speed boosts do not get added together, only the fastest speed boost is applied, so Reset Engagement it will take effect over Heads Up. Avoid activating both effects at the same time.

Bag of Tricks and Perfect Scheme

This ability resets the cooldowns of all the abilities I have mentioned in this section thus far plus Pulse Detonator. Bag of Tricks works great as your emergency panic button. If you’re out of DCDs and about to take a hit that you’d rather have a DCD for, do not hesitate to activate this ability, but make sure that all DCDs are on cooldown before activating Bag of Tricks.

If you’re able to take Perfect Scheme, you get a nice bit of extra DR for 15 seconds that should help when you find yourself needing to activate Bag of Tricks. 

Scrambling Field

This is not a personal defensive cooldown. It is a raid buff. Use it when the entire raid is taking a lot of damage or may wipe because one of the tanks just died and now the boss is running around whacking random people. 

Since damage intake management is primarily a tank and healer job, this ability is primarily to make their lives easier. If a tank is out of defensive cooldowns and needs another it’s okay to use. Tell them you have it available for them to ask for. Healers are also a lot more focused on the raid frame than you will be as a DPS, so they are far better equipped to know when it will be useful for the raid than you will. Tell them to call out if and when they want it and be ready to activate it. Here are some times when it’s generally a good idea to use Scrambling Field:

• During a burn phase. 
• When one of the tanks or healers just died, pop it instantly, especially if a tank just died, because there’s a good chance that the boss is about to hit someone else or the group really hard.
• If healers call out for players to use their Medpacs or if you find yourself having to use yours and see that the rest of the group could also probably benefit from their Medpac. 
• If everyone’s health is below 40-50%. Get in the habit of taking a quick glance at the raid frame to see people’s health levels. 

Scrambling Field lasts 5 seconds longer (25s vs 20s) in Dirty Fighting than it does Sharpshooter and Saboteur thanks to the Incendiary Mine discipline passive.

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. 

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.

No Cleanse

I just wanted to point out that Gunslingers are one of the two combat styles that do not have any sort of cleanse ability, the other is Powertech / Vanguard. A long time ago, they could cleanse with Dodge, just like Operatives can. 

Hightail It

This ability is both a defensive cooldown and movement ability. As a defensive cooldown, it’s your cheese ability. It gives you 100% defense/resist chance for the duration of the roll, meaning you’re completely immune to taking damage during your roll, provided that it’s damage that is mitigable, so it won’t work against things like 0 damage kills and typeless damage. Since the mitigation is so short, it can be fairly difficult to time, so you may need to practice it a little bit, and don’t be afraid to completely stop DPSing for a moment if there’s something that will kill you if you don’t do the cheese correctly. 

Dirty Fighting can deal a decent amount of damage when activating Hightail It thanks to the Incendiary Mine discipline passive, so if you manage to get the boss inside the AoE, you can make up for the DPS you would otherwise lose from giving up this GCD to roll.

Incendiary Mine is not considered a Bleed effect, so it does not trigger or benefit from things like Hemorrhaging Blast or Smuggler’s Chems, meaning it will always deal less damage than Dirty Blast, so don’t give up another GCD to move into position so you can deal damage when you need to roll.

You may see some players use it in dummy parses when they aren’t taking any sort of increased Energy regen because it deals more damage than Speed Shot and Flurry of Bolts. It can be worth using in specific AoE situations as well since it deals slightly more damage than Sweeping Gunfire.

Hideout

In 6.0, they gave Gunslingers Phase Walk. While it seems pretty identical to Sorcerer / Sage Phase Walk on the surface, there are several key differences:

• Hideout’s cooldown is twice as long as Phase Walk’s.
• The teleporting animation is significantly longer for Hideout because there’s an actual teleportation animation you have to do prior to teleporting but after pressing the button rather than Phase Walk where you just wave your hand and pop up somewhere else instantaneously. This makes it more difficult to escape at the very last second.
• The act of teleporting with Hideout breaks your channel after teleporting, even if you’re still in range while Phase Walk does not break your channels (provided you’re still in range). 
• In general, Hideout’s animations are much smoother and happen more sequentially while Phase Walk’s animations just kind of happen on top of everything else. 

Luckily, the ability is still off the GCD, even though it has a castbar, so you can still use it while the GCD is active for another ability. In addition, you can still teleport while stunned, so even if the button is grayed out, it will still work.

Hideout isn’t always useful as a movement ability, but it’s incredible when you can use it. The best time to use Hideout is when you know of a specific location that you are certain you will want to return to at some point later in the fight that will be generally safe to return to. 

Crowd Control and Other Notable Abilities

There are only a handful of instances in operations where CC is required, so I will briefly go over what this combat style has at its disposal in addition to any other abilities I haven’t yet mentioned. 

Below the Belt

(Tech/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
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. Gunslingers have a slightly shorter cooldown duration on their hard stun than most other combat styles. 

When Below the Belt is used, you get a proc that enables Quickdraw to be used against any target regardless of remaining health and makes that use of Quickdraw deal 15% more damage. Be sure to take advantage of this proc whenever you have to use Below the Belt since it mitigates the DPS loss from having to spend a GCD to stun something.

Distraction

This is your interrupt. Ranged DPS in general tend to have longer cooldowns on their interrupts, than Melee, so if there’s something specific that needs repeated interrupting, a Melee DPS or tank will be assigned to it, though this doesn’t mean you can’t interrupt things as well. 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. 

Pulse Detonator

This is your knockback. Outside of specific mechanics, it’s not usually something at your disposal in group content. A lot of the time things are immune to being knocked back and when they aren’t immune, it’s better that they’re all grouped up to be killed as fast as possible.

Adds are less likely to have CC immunity and you should be careful not to ruin nicely grouped-up adds, but Pulse Detonator is free and off the GCD. This means you can use it to reposition adds slightly without losing DPS when you can’t quite get all of the adds and the boss in the AoE by standing at max knockback range to knock that final add into the AoE, assuming they are vulnerable to knockbacks. 

Technically it’s okay to use this if you genuinely think you will die if you don’t knock the enemies back right now, but honestly, I think the better play is to just let yourself die and then throw a tantrum about why the tanks didn’t keep the adds off of you and why you didn’t get enough heals, though make sure you’ve used your threat drop and all your DCDs already. 

Escape

This is your CC break. Use it when you get CC’d and are prevented from executing a required mechanic, surviving, or dealing damage as a result of being CC’d. It does not matter if it is just a root or a slow, if you can’t remain impeded, use your CC break.

Leg Shot

(Ranged/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
This ability applies a root, which is an ability that stops you from moving but does not stop you from activating abilities directly, it also breaks on damage after 2 seconds. It deals nearly identical damage to Flurry of Bolts, has a 35m range, and the actual root lasts for a fair bit of time, so I could see it getting some use in the same sort of situation that you might use a slow or stun on a Melee add. It would also work as an alternative to stunning one of the Chained Manifestations on Styrak NiM. 

Flurry of Bolts

(Ranged/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
Flurry of Bolts can be used instead of Speed Shot if you see yourself dip below 60 Energy and don’t have Cool Head available, but this shouldn’t typically be an issue.

Thermal Grenade

(Tech/Kinetic/Direct/AoE/Instant)
There is no need to use Thermal Grenade in Dirty Fighting, even as an instant ability while moving because you’ll be able to cast Dirty Blasts instead thanks to Hot Pursuit and all of your other primary filler slot abilities are instant.

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.

Shrap Bomb Buffs – Level 23 Choice

Improvised Tech

• Effect: The initial hit of Shrap Bomb deals 10% more damage. In addition, Shrap Bomb extends the duration of Smuggler’s Chems by 1 second for each target it hits. 
• Recommendation: Take this in solo content and specific fights only. If you’re getting less than 5 ticks out of each activation of Shrap Bomb, which will tend to be the case in solo content and some add fights like Draxus, this option will yield more DPS. I think the duration extension just helps to compensate for minor fluctuations where Improvised Tech would lose out. When using Improvised Tech, activate Blood Sights immediately before applying Shrap Bomb instead of before Hemorrhaging Blast.

Sharp Objects

• Effect: Shrap Bomb increases the critical damage dealt by your periodic Bleed effects by 5% on affected targets.
• Recommendation: Almost always take this in group content. Sharp Objects offers a greater DPS increase than the +10% damage to the initial hit of Shrap Bomb from Improvised Tech as soon as you can get 5 ticks of Shrap Bomb per application (and per target). This means Sharp Objects is superior if you can get a full channel of Wounding Shots on each target or when the DoT deals at least half of its ticks to secondary targets that have not been hit by Wounding Shots. Typically, Sharp Objects will be used when you aren’t taking Dividing Shot, but Improvised Tech will be better with Dividing Shot.

Scrounging

• Effect: Shrap Bomb refunds 2 Energy for each target it hits.
• Recommendation: Never take this. I’ve been wracking my brain trying to think of a situation where you’d want to take Scrounging instead of either Energy Regulators or Critical Compounds, but it just never seems to be worthwhile. I’ll update this section if I learn of a use case for Scrounging.

Dodge Stance, Below the Belt, or Flourish Burst – Level 27 Choice

 Below the Belt

• Effect: Grants the Below the Belt ability, which stuns the target for 4 seconds, deals a small amount of damage, and grants Executioner, which makes Quickdraw usable against any target regardless of remaining health and deal 15% additional damage.
• Recommendation: Never take this in PvE. Flourish Burst is too big of a DPS increase to give up. If something needs to be stunned, someone else in the group can do it.

 Flourish Burst

• Effect: The critical hit damage of Dirty Blast is increased by 20%. In addition, dealing damage with Dirty Blast inflicts Trauma, which reduces all healing the target receives by 20%. Lasts 10 seconds.
• Recommendation: Always take this. Dirty Blast will account for a quarter of your total damage output and nearly half of your GCDs. You can’t afford to give this up.

Dodge Stance

• Effect: Surrender grants Dodge Stance, which increases your chance to dodge Melee and Ranged attacks by 200% and reduces the damage you take from Force and Tech attacks by 75% for 3 seconds. In addition, Surrender resets the cooldown of Hightail It.
• Recommendation: Never take this. Flourish Burst is too big of a DPS increase to give up and you can use Hightail It if you need to cheese an attack.

Wounding Shots Buffs – Level 39 Choice

Wounding Impair

• Effect: Wounding Shots deals 10% more weapon damage and slows the target by 50% for 6 seconds.
• Recommendation: Never take this in PvE. The primary benefit of Wounding Impair is the slow effect. The damage increase is much weaker than the other options.

Dividing Shot

• Effect: Defeating a target during Wounding Shots resets the cooldown of Wounding Shots and deals Bleed damage to nearby enemies if the target was affected by one of your Bleeds.
• Recommendation: Take this in solo content and in fights with frequent target swapping. Dividing Shot is essential in solo content because it allows Wounding Shots to be used against every single enemy. This option should also offer superior sustained DPS in fights with frequent target swapping. You will have to sacrifice a small amount of burst compared to Chemical Sightings, but if you’re playing Dirty Fighting, you’re not providing too much burst to begin with.

Chemical Sightings

• Effect: While Smuggler’s Chems is active, the armor penetration, critical chance, and critical damage of Wounding Shots are increased by 20%.
• Recommendation: Take this in fights with little to no target swapping. The sustained DPS increase from Chemical Sightings is quite small because the buffs only apply to Wounding Shots’s weapon damage, not the DoT ticks it triggers, but Dividing Shot will be useless in fights without frequent target swapping, so this is the next best option.

Focused Fusion, Illegal Mods, or Critical Compounds – Level 47 Choice

Focused Fusion

• Effect: Blood Sights’ cooldown is extended by 30 seconds, but its Smuggler’s Chems effect lasts twice as long.
• Recommendation: Take this if you prefer an easier rotation. Since you can pair the Improved Targeting legendary implant with Focused Fusion, you get higher uptime on Smugglers’ Chems, resulting in a DPS increase; I’ll explain this in greater detail later on. The key takeaway here is that Focused Fusion provides slightly less DPS than you can get with Illegal Mods, but it’s much easier to use at the cost of offering less control, less concentrated burst, and less frequently available burst. As you learn the Dirty Fighting, start with Focused Fusion and see if that rotation is hard enough for you. If it is, keep it. Otherwise, give Illegal Mods a shot.

Illegal Mods

• Effect: Grants the ability Illegal Mods, which immediately restores 15 Energy and finishes the cooldown on Blood Sights. In addition, Ranged and Tech accuracy are increased by 30% and armor penetration is increased by 15%. Lasts 10 seconds.
• Recommendation: Take this if you’re okay with a slightly harder rotation. Everything about Illegal Mods synergizes perfectly with Dirty Fighting. The DPS boost from Illegal Mods conveniently lasts just as long as Hemorrhaging Blast, which happens to be affected by armor. Meanwhile, Blood Sights is strong, so resetting its cooldown is incredibly valuable. Furthermore, while you can almost always get by with no extra boost to Energy, having this ability grants 15 Energy offers a nice bit of extra padding. From my testing, these synergies enable higher sustained DPS as well as superior burst and control compared to the alternative ability tree buffs, though it’s definitely harder to do and if you don’t do it correctly, you’ll only match the alternatives instead of surpassing them.

Critical Compounds

• Effect: Critically hitting with periodic damage generates 1 Energy.
• Recommendation: Never take this. Dirty fighting doesn’t need the additional Energy provided by this ability tree buff, so there’s no way for Critical Compounds to boost DPS at all.

Snap Shot, Ballistic Dampers, or Lay Low – Level 51 Choice

Snap Shot

• Effect: Entering cover makes your next Dirty Blast activate instantly. Cannot occur more than once every 6 seconds.
• Recommendation: Never take this. Since Dirty Blast already costs a GCD to use and you can’t move while in cover, making Dirty Blast instant does not provide a DPS increase on its own. All you’re doing is moving the damage from the end of the GCD to the beginning. The only possible way to increase your DPS with this option is if you manage to get an extra ability into some sort of damage boost window like one of your relic procs or if your Adrenal is about to fall off. The DPS increase from something like that is quite small and very unreliable since you still have a priority to follow. Furthermore, the other two options are far more valuable.

Ballistic Dampers

• Effect: Entering cover grants 3 stacks of Ballistic Dampers, which absorb 30% of the damage dealt by an incoming attack. This effect cannot occur more than once every 1.5s and Ballistic can only be gained once every 6 seconds.
• Recommendation: Take this in fights where you’re moving a lot or aren’t able to use Hunker Down on cooldown. Ballistic Dampers needs to be refreshed by exiting and reentering cover. Some experienced Gunslingers will cover hop, where they jump to exit cover and immediately reenter cover to reapply Ballistic Dampers, but that is annoying to do and can be quite distracting if it isn’t muscle memory for you. If you don’t cover hop and aren’t moving a whole lot, the uptime on Ballistic Dampers is gonna be pretty low and not end up mitigating very much damage.

Lay Low

• Effect: Reduces the cooldown of Hunker Down by 15 seconds and Pulse Detonator knocks targets back an additional 5m.
• Recommendation: Take this in fights where you aren’t moving very much and are able to use Hunker Down on cooldown. The benefit of Lay Low in PvE is 25% increased uptime on your 60% AoE RDT from Hunker Down, resulting in average AoE RDT being increased by 15% when Hunker Down is used on cooldown. This makes it seem like Ballistic Dampers is the obvious winner because it provides twice as much damage absorption, but since Ballistic Dampers can have much lower uptime and Hunker Down can’t always be used on cooldown, it isn’t so clear-cut. Honestly, you kind of need to make this decision on a fight-by-fight basis. Take a look at your DTPS in StarParse with both Lay Low and Ballistic Dampers and use whichever option results in lower DTPS in that fight.

Cool Under Pressure, Efficient Ammo, or Perfect Scheme – Level 64 Choice

Cool Under Pressure

• Effect: While in cover, you heal for 3% for your max health every 2s.
• Recommendation: Almost always take this. The boost to your survivability is equivalent to ~6500 HPS depending on your max HP, which is typically way better than the alternative options in this tier in PvE.

Efficient Ammo

• Effect: Increases the damage dealt by Sweeping Gunfire by 25%.
• Recommendation: Take this in fights where you’re using Sweeping Gunfire. You should only be using Sweeping Gunfire against adds that need to die ASAP; otherwise, leave it to your rotational AoE.

Perfect Scheme

• Effect: Reduces the cooldown of Bag of Tricks by 45 seconds and activating Bag of Tricks grants Perfect Scheme, which increases your damage reduction by 15%. Lasts 15 seconds.
• Recommendation: Take this in fights where you desperately need more damage mitigation or can’t use one of the other options. Perfect Scheme is weak. The cooldown reduction will only ever sometimes result in a single additional use of the ability. The 15% DR is pretty small, but useful in situations where you actually need to use Bag of Tricks, though you won’t get to utilize it too often in actual fights. The big reason to take Perfect Scheme is whenever you need more survivability and self-healing is harmful.

Hideout, Bombing Run, or Scrambling Field – Level 68 Choice

 Bombing Run

• Effect: Grants the Bombing Run ability, which deals a high amount of damage to up to 8 enemies within 8m of the target area. Standard and Weak enemies are knocked down by the blasts. Lasts 9 seconds. 2s cast, costs 20 Energy, 45s cooldown.
• Recommendation: Take this for solo content and in fights with extremely tight burst DPS checks that allow you to pre-cast. For group content, Scrambling Field is too good and Bombing Run is too small of a DPS increase outside of the tightest applicable DPS checks to be worth taking. In AoE situations, it’s flat-out unnecessary. Sweeping Gunfire spam should be sufficient for killing adds.

Hideout

• Effect: Grants the Hideout ability, which allows you to place a mark on the ground that lasts up to 10 minutes. At any point, you can teleport back to that mark if you are within 60m, at which point the ability goes on cooldown for 2 min.
• Recommendation: Take this in solo content and specific fights only. It’s never worth it to give up the massive damage mitigation from Scrambling Field for the DPS increase that comes from mobility but it can be pretty valuable in fights like Mutant Trandoshans to call the train immediately, so only take it in fights where it presents a specific utility for your group. In solo content, I find Hideout to be quite useful if you need to come back the way you came after completing some sort of objective. It also helps to train you to identify situations in group content where Hideout would be useful.

Scrambling Field

• Effect: rants the Scrambling Field ability, which places a shield at your present location that spans 10m and reduces the damage taken by all allies that remain inside by 20%. Lasts 20 seconds, 3 min cooldown.
• Recommendation: Almost always take this for group content. Scrambling Field is fantastic. It helps significantly with recovery when a tank or healer dies unexpectedly and makes heal checks a lot easier. Remember, the goal is to beat the fight, and Scrambling Field helps with that a whole lot more often than Bombing Run.

Hotwired Defenses, Hot Pursuit, or Heads Up – Level 73 Choice

Hotwired Defenses

• Effect: Increases the amount of damage absorbed by Defense Screen by 30%. In addition, when taking damage while Hunker Down is active, the cooldown on Bag of Tricks is reduced by 2s. This effect cannot occur more than once every 3s.
• Recommendation: Only take this in fights where you don’t have to move like at all. The boosts to survivability are pretty small and the other options will almost always be more valuable, but sometimes you don’t need increased mobility and Hotwired Defenses will technically always be beneficial. If you feel you need Hotwired Defenses for survivability, something else is wrong.

Hot Pursuit

• Effect: Upon exiting Cover, you gain 4 stacks of Hot Pursuit, which allow Dirty Blast to be activated and cast while moving. Can only occur once every 20 seconds once a stack has been consumed. Lasts up to 15 seconds. Reentering Cover removes the effect.
• Recommendation: Almost always take this. Hot Pursuit enables you to be completely mobile outside of channeling Wounding Shots, which helps prevent DPS losses from having to move. This allows you to reposition to the boss when you anticipate that you’ll have to roll, so you can hit the boss with Incendiary Mine. Be mindful that while you are out of cover, you do not have any pushback protection, so if you are taking frequent ticks of damage, you may have a tough time getting Dirty Blast casts off. You also won’t be able to benefit from Energy Regulators, so be prepared to use Cool Head. Since there is a 20s rate limit whenever you spend the first stack, try to use Quickdraw as your first ability out of cover in case a single GCD is enough.

Heads Up

• Effect: When Hunker Down ends or you leave Cover while Hunker Down is active, you gain Heads Up, which increases your movement speed by 50% and grants immunity to movement-impairing effects. Lasts 6 seconds.
• Recommendation: Take this in specific fights only. Hot Pursuit will typically be better if you’re just concerned about not losing DPS when you have to move, but sometimes pushback is too intense, making it better to just try and get somewhere faster. Underlurker HM and the Reaches in Brontes NiM are great examples of fights where you might want to take Heads Up instead for the movement-impairing effect immunity so you can avoid the slows.

Gearing and Stats Priorities

Tactical Items

Exploited Weakness
Effect: Hemorrhaging Blast deals 50% more damage. Dealing damage with Dirty Blast causes the target to take a small amount of Internal Bleed damage over 18s.
Recommendation: This is your single-target tactical. The Dirty Blast DoT synergizes with all abilities and passives that interact with periodic Bleed damage, so this DoT will tick from Wounding Shots, trigger Hemorrhaging Blast, benefit from Smuggler’s Chems, and restore Energy along with receiving other basic damage boosts. The fact that the Exploited Weakness DoT restores Energy is significant because it enables you to not have to use Speed Shot nearly as often. Since this DoT deals damage upon application, the effective Energy cost of Dirty Blast becomes 13 rather than 14.

Airborne Agents
Effect: Shrap Bomb now also spreads the effect of Hemorrhaging Blast. In addition, Dirty Blast deals splash damage to all targets affected by Shrap Bomb.
Recommendation: This is your AoE tactical. It doesn’t increase your single-target damage output, but enables you to deal a fair bit more AoE damage. The extra ticks from your DoTs being on multiple targets will compensate for reduced Energy restoration that would have been provided by the Exploited Weakness DoT, but you will have to use Speed Shot more frequently in single-target situations. It probably won’t come up too often in solo content, but Arborne Agents enables Dirty Blast to deal more AoE damage than Sweeping Gunfire per GCD and be cheaper. Overall, Airborne Agents is great for solo content, but I don’t think there are too many boss fights where you’d want to give up so much single-target DPS.

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

Legendary Implants

BioWare has removed set bonuses from the game and replaced them with Legendary Implants, 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 Implants you should use as a Dirty Fighting Gunslinger.

• Locked and Loaded – Ranged and Tech damage increased by 5%.
• Improved Targeting – Reduces the cooldown of Blood Sights by 15 seconds.

Locked and Loaded is always BiS, so it should be the first implant you purchase. Improved Targeting is nice, but not essential to Dirty Fighting. Similarly, Energy Regulators is an implant you should get if you play Saboteur, but it’s not required for Dirty Fighting.

It seems like BioWare’s initial intent with the ability tree buffs and legendary implants might have been to force Dirty Fighting Snipers to take either the Energy Regulators legendary implant or Critical Compounds ability tree buff for Energy management, but the extra Energy is barely valuable on the dummy. In actual fights where there’s forced downtime as well as AoE and multi-DoT potential, it’s flat-out unnecessary.

As a result, you can take Improved Targeting (as well as Locked and Loaded) all the time without ever running out of Energy in Dirty Fighting. When you pair Improved Targeting (instead of Energy Regulators) with the Focused Fusion ability tree buff, you get higher uptime on Smuggler’s Chems compared to Improved Targeting with Critical Compounds (10s/45s is less than 20s/75s), resulting in a DPS increase where there otherwise wouldn’t be one.

Learn more about Legendary Items in SWTOR 7.0 from the dedicated guide, which also includes a full list for all combat styles.

Stat Priority

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

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

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

Augments

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earpiece

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

Crystals

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

Relics

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

Biochem Items

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

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

Regarding the Zeal Guild Perk Alacrity Boost

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

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

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

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

Best Dirty Fighting Gunslinger 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.

It may seem a bit overwhelming that there are a whopping 5 builds, but they’re not super different from one another. You’ll mainly just need to determine if AoE is required and whether or not it’s ideal to have longer, but less frequent, Smuggler’s Chems windows.

Harder Pure Single-Target Sustained

This build is more challenging and focuses on dealing maximum single-target sustained DPS while also offering superior burst control and concentration thanks to Illegal Mods. The presence of Illegal Mods makes the rotation more difficult because you need to precisely time ability activations to see a small, but still noticeable, DPS increase.

When Illegal Mods is available, Blood Sights should be activated right as the cast on Dirty Blast finishes so it boosts that GCD as well as Bloody Mayhem from Hemorrhaging Blast in the following GCD. Illegal Mods should be used right before activating Wounding Shots so that it will be active for the entire Hemorrhaging Blast window. The next Blood Sights should be right before the next Wounding Shots when the previous Smugglers’ Chems is about to fall off.

If you don’t activate the previous Blood Sights slightly early, you’ll clip part of the previous Smugglers’ Chems or be forced to delay the next Blood Sights for an extra cycle where you’ll be reapplying DoTs. Either way, you’re wasting 1-2 precious autocrit GCDs.

Sharp Objects, Flourish Burst, and Chemical Sightings are used because they provide maximum single-target damage output. The other options can be changed depending on the needs of the fight.

Easier General-Purpose Sustained

This build offers an easier rotation and more general-purpose ability tree buffs. If you intend for Dirty Fighting to be a more casual alt spec or don’t want to make changes to your ability tree buffs, this build is what you want. This ease of use comes at the cost of dealing less DPS than you otherwise could be if you optimized your choices for the fight. With this build, you will be a jack-of-all-trades, master of none.

The only thing you really have to worry about is making sure you get the full benefit from Blood Sights. Delay activating it if you don’t think you’ll get the full duration before there’s downtime, if adds are about to spawn, or if there’s an upcoming temporary DPS check.

Heavy Sustained AoE

You should probably (learn to) play Saboteur or some other spec with stronger AoE that doesn’t have to give up so much sustained DPS rather than use this build, but if you only know Dirty Fighting and there’s a ton of AoE required without much of a single-target DPS check, this build is designed offers maximum sustained AoE damage.

You’ll typically be using Improvised Tech because Shrap Bomb will be getting a lot of use, but in fights where adds have high health and you don’t have to spam Shrap Bomb, you can use Sharp Objects instead.

Remember that because you’re using the Airborne Agents tactical, you should use Dirty Blast instead of Suppressive Fire, so there is no need to take Ruthless Efficiency. Similarly, Bombing Run is only a small AoE DPS increase, so the alternatives will typically be more valuable, but if they aren’t essential, don’t feel bad about taking Orbital.

I recommend Illegal Mods so that you can have maximum control over Blood Sights to boost your AoE DPS. Don’t forget to activate Blood Sights right before using Shrap Bomb for DoT spread, especially when using Improvised Tech. 

Solo Content Build

The Solo Content build enables you to poison and weaken every enemy in the immediate vicinity with Vital Shot -> Hemorrhaging Blast -> Shrap Bomb and then pick off each target with a partial channel of Wounding Shots with each death creating a poison explosion. Shrap Bomb only has a 5m radius, so it’s hard to get the entire group with 1 throw, so you might need to lob multiple grenades to spread your Poisons to the whole group. Hopefully BioWare buffs the radius of Shrap Bomb to 8m, but the ability has been this way for the entire lifetime of the game, so it probably won’t happen.

Since Dividing Shot only resets the cooldown of Wounding Shots if you kill during Wounding Shots, you want to start with targets that have the lowest health and work your way up to the ones with the highest health. If there’s a Strong (silver) or Elite (gold) enemy in the group, be sure to activate Blood Sights and Illegal Mods (if applicable) as soon as you apply Hemorrhaging Blast. If you don’t think you’ll be able to snuff the life out of the target by the time Wounding Shots is over, throw in 1-2 Dirty Blasts first.

I recommend switching between Bombing Run and Hideout as needed. As I mentioned before, Hideout is great to teleport back if you just need to get into one area to click on something and then go back the way you came. Bombing Run can be used in the meantime since Hideout has a 2 min cooldown.

Openers, Rotations, Priorities

Group Content Opener

The opener is the rotation you use at the very beginning of the fight and for burst DPS checks, though I don’t recommend using Dirty Fighting 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.

This opener expects that you’ll be using the Exploited Weakness tactical, which is optimal against almost all bosses in group content.

1. Bombing Run (pre-cast only, if applicable)
2. Dirty Blast (pre-cast)
3. Vital Shot
4. Shrap Bomb
5. Blood Sights (1)
6. Illegal Mods (if applicable)
7. Hemorrhaging Blast
8. Adrenal
9. Wounding Shots
10. Dirty Blast
11. Dirty Blast
12. Dirty Blast
13. Dirty Blast
14. Blood Sights (2, if applicable)
15. Wounding Shots
16. Rotation

Bombing Run should be pre-casted only if you can pre-cast, don’t bother using it if someone already pulled. It’s only a DPS increase because it’s practically free damage since the cast time is so long, and the damage doesn’t go out immediately. Conversely, you will always want to use Dirty Blast first with the Exploited Weakness tactical so you can apply the DoT.

Blood Sights and Illegal Mods should be used before applying Hemorrhaging Blast because Smuggler’s Chems would otherwise need to get clipped when you activate it the second time. You’ll also make the Bloody Mayhem hit autocrit, as well as any ticks from DoTs that go out during that GCD. Illegal Mods just buffs weapon damage, including that of Hemorrhaging Blast, so it also makes sense to use before Hemorrhaging Blast but after Blood Sights so you get the cooldown reset.

The Adrenal can be used after Hemorrhaging Blast because it still isn’t that strong of a GCD, and there aren’t as many shenanigans you can pull thanks to its longer duration. Alacrity boosts have more complicated rules, but Virulence doesn’t have any of those, so I won’t talk about that here.

Dirty Blast is used 4 times in a row during the opener, even with Focused Fusion (which you shouldn’t be using), because half of Dirty Blast’s damage is an autocrit thanks to Smugglers’ Chems.

Sustained DPS Rotation and Priority

Dirty Fighting has a sort of hybrid between a rotation and priority system. Your goal is to activate Wounding Shots on cooldown, and then you have 4 GCDs in between Wounding Shots activations to activate other abilities to ensure that your Wounding Shots activations are as powerful as possible, like so:

1. Wounding Shots
2. Filler 1
3. Filler 2
4. Filler 3
5. Filler 4
6. Wounding Shots

The fillers basically come in 2 flavors: the high-priority abilities you can’t use all the time and more standard fillers that don’t do much damage; you use them because you have nothing else.

Your highest-priority ability activations during the 4 filler GCDs are applying Hemorrhaging Blast and reapplying your DoTs. Hemorrhaging Blast will be available right before every other Wounding Shots activation and should only ever be activated immediately before Wounding Shots. Your DoTs will enter their lingering state around the time you activate every 4th Wounding Shots, and you’ll want to reapply them immediately after finishing that Wounding Shots channel.

Since DoT reapplication will happen during the 1st and 2nd GCDs while Hemorrhaging Blast always happens in the 4th, you’ll never have to worry about deciding which ability to activate like you would with a normal priority system.

Priority

It’s still important to look at the Dirty Fighting fillers from the perspective of a priority system

1. Vital Shot and Shrap Bomb (only if not on target)
2. Dirty Blast (only if Exploited Weakness DoT is not on target)
3. Hemorrhaging Blast (only immediately before Wounding Shots)
4. Quickdraw (if needed)
5. Speed Shot (only if between 55-60 on Energy)
6. Dirty Blast

This priority structure is a bit deceptive because most of the time, you’ll be using Dirty Blast, and you basically never have to pick between high-priority abilities to use first. That said, there are common situations where you shouldn’t just spam Dirty Blast.

Reapplying your main DoTs has the highest priority because Wounding Shots doesn’t deal much damage if those DoTs aren’t on your target. Shrap Bomb should typically be used second so it can spread Vital Shot, unless you don’t want to DoT spread like in the second phase of the TFB fight in NiM. Thanks to Lingering Toxins, you can wait until the end of the Wounding Shots channel before reapplication.

Dirty Blast is also important to use before Wounding Shots only if you do not have the DoT from the Exploited Weakness on the target. I think it’s worthwhile to delay Wounding Shots by a GCD since delaying it for this purpose shouldn’t happen that often, and you get 4 additional DoT ticks out of a single channel.

Hemorrhaging Blast should only be used immediately before Wounding Shots so that you can guarantee a full Wounding Shots channel occurs while the Hemorrhaging Blast debuff is applied. Technically, the timing doesn’t matter too much in a dummy parse, but it reduces the chance that you’ll miss out on a Hemorrhaged Wounding Shots due to mechanics and makes it easier to align your damage boosts.

Quickdraw is a superior option to Dirty Blast whenever movement is required because Quickdraw is instant, while Dirty Blast requires a clunky ability tree buff to be usable at all while moving. Quickdraw should also be incorporated whenever Energy management is a concern, which will typically only be when you just got rezzed or are using Illegal Mods. Dirty Fighting’s Energy management does sometimes come down to the difference between 1-2 Energy, so this is important to keep in mind.

Since Energy is spent when the damage goes out and Quickdraw is instant while Dirty Blast is casted, it’s better to use Quickdraw before a salvo of Dirty Blasts (so immediately after Wounding Shots) rather than after a Dirty Blast so that you aren’t spending 30 Energy all at once, potentially dipping below 60% Energy and getting less Energy back with your passive regen.

Speed Shot is weaker than Dirty Blast and Quickdraw, but since it’s a lot cheaper, it’s a far superior option when the alternative is running out of Energy and being forced to use Flurry of Bolts instead. You shouldn’t have to use Series of Shots at all unless you make a major mistake.

Dirty Blast is used when all the other abilities are on cooldown.

Common Filler Quartets

When the priority is executed correctly, there are 3 different filler quartets that you’ll come across. At most, you’ll only ever be deciding between 2 abilities, and the choice is usually pretty obvious since it is governed by factors I mentioned before.

DoT Reapplication
This filler quartet will happen every 4 activations of Wounding Shots as you need to reapply your DoTs. You can also use the first 3 GCDs of this quartet to apply your DoTs to secondary or even tertiary targets.

1. Vital Shot
2. Shrap Bomb
3. Dirty Blast or Quickdraw
4. Dirty Blast or Hemorrhaging Blast

Dirty Blasts
This is the most expensive filler quartet, but it offers stronger DPS than the quartet above. You’ll be using this most of the time, but especially when damage boosts are active or burst is required.

1. Dirty Blast
2. Dirty Blast
3. Dirty Blast
4. Dirty Blast or Hemorrhaging Blast

Energy Regeneration
These days, you’ll hardly ever use this quartet. It’s typically only be necessary if Cool Head is on cooldown and you don’t have either Critical Compounds or Energy Regulators because you made multiple mistakes.

1. Quickdraw
2. Dirty Blast or Speed Shot (start)
3. Dirty Blast or Speed Shot (end)
4. Dirty Blast or Hemorrhaging Blast

Solo Content Opener and Rotation

This opener assumes that you’ll be using the Airborne Agents tactical, which is optimal in solo content and other situations where trash is common.

1. Bombing Run (pre-cast, if applicable)
2. Dirty Blast (pre-cast, situational)
3. Vital Shot
4. Hemorrhaging Blast
5. Blood Sights
6. Shrap Bomb
7. Wounding Shots (repeat as needed)

Bombing Run’s usage is dependent on whether you have the ability available and/or want to use it on that set of trash mobs. I’d recommend saving it for groups that have a stronger enemy. Dirty Blast is in a similar boat. I’d hold off on using it unless there’s an enemy in the group that you think will need a bit more damage to take down. A lot of regular trash can be taken out with just the DoT spread + individual Wounding Shots activations.

Make sure you use Hemorrhaging Blast and Blood Sights before Shrap Bomb so that you can spread the Hemorrhaging Blast debuff and get the duration increase on Smugglers’ Chems from Improvised Tech.

Once you’re done with the opener in solo content, you’ll continue to fire Wounding Shots at each enemy one by one until the whole group is dead. Remember to DoT spread from the target that is most central to the group so you hit the most targets, but when firing Wounding Shots at enemies, start from the enemy with the lowest HP and work your way up. Throw in 1-2 Dirty Blasts if you don’t think you’ll be able to defeat the next enemy by the time the Wounding Shots channel has ended.