SWTOR’s third 8.0 PTS iteration includes level 85 changes for all 3 Operative | Scoundrel disciplines. We’ll explain what they are and what we think about them.
General Changes Approach
The changes on the PTS are very, very preliminary. Each combat style is getting one of their baseline abilities replaced with a version that adds a unique additional function for each discipline at level 83, like the second ability each class gets at level 15.
None of the unfinished business with ability trees and talent choice design have been fixed (yet), it’s just that new ability and a “new” passive at level 83, though that passive is almost always just that spec’s most popular tactical item.
It seems like they’re intending to make the most popular tactical less ubiquitous, rather than just balancing the alternatives properly, and the fact that they’re doing it this way has the potential to create even more imbalance without eliminating this flavor of the month issue because they’re going off of popularity rather than actual power level or intended use case.
Many players are not even aware that tactical items exist, nor that they’re designed like ability tree choices where they tend to be optimal against a specific enemy and content type, whether it be a boss (fight), trash mob (solo content), or player (PvP).
Some players just pick the one, usually the single-target sustained option meant for boss fights and end up doing worse in other types of content and end up disengaging rather than learning.
Tactical items also cost a lot of Tech Fragments and Credits and take up unnecessary inventory space while acting as an incentive against having alts.
Really, each discipline has ~3 tactical items that should just be migrated to their own new talent choice in the tree. The ones that need rebalancing or refining can be addressed individually.
So far, it feels like they’re trying to use a single size screwdriver to fix a bunch of specific and unique problems, but sometimes that screwdriver just doesn’t fit. I don’t think the same one-size-fits-all approach will work here like it did with Ability Trees because the problems for one spec aren’t shared by another.
Operative and Scoundrel
Scoundrel changes are not on the PTS (yet), but Operative is the mirror to Scoundrel, so the only things we can’t see are the names and potentially changed visuals.
The changes to Operative | Scoundrel add another discipline-specific effect to Stim Boost | Pugnacity at level 83, the same ability that gets a discipline-specific effect at level 15.
In addition, the single-target sustained tactical for each spec, each of which are currently optimal for boss fights, are getting baked into its spec as the level 83 discipline passive.
I’m really not a fan of the additional changes to Stim Boost | Pugnacity. There is no reason to modify the ability twice other than just trying to hastily satisfy an arbitrary and ill-conceived design schema.
These effects can just be added to the upgrade at level 15, but there’s little reason for them to exist as unique effects at all since each buff effectively does the same thing. They all just increase the burst offered by Operative | Scoundrel’s main offensive cooldown in a different way.
This is particularly noteworthy for Lethality | Ruffian and Medicine | Sawbones, both especially if you consider the 8.0 addition given to Viral Targeting | Blood Sights Virulence Sniper | Dirty Fighting Gunslinger, which just causes your poisons | bleeds to tick twice.
Both aforementioned specs could just use the same effect on Stim Boost | Pugnacity “your periodic effects tick twice”, which reduces overall complexity and makes the combat style more accessible.
Furthermore, neither implementation makes any sense in the context of what the ability is actually depicting. How does injecting a stim improve the effectiveness of your poisons or how fast your probes work? They do have more latitude with Pugnacity, but it’s gotta work for both.
The tacticals side is worse. Operative | Scoundrel already has some of the most balanced tactical choices in the game, and choosing to bake the single-target sustained tactical into each spec ruins that balance for boss fights.
On top of all that, these changes don’t address the most pressing issues for Operative | Scoundrel, namely, the survivability discrepancy between boss fights and PvP caused by stealth, and the insane degree to which stealth enables you to side-step so much of combat with little consequence, counterplay, or thought required.
While it isn’t as severe, it’s also worth noting that Operative | Scoundrel implants are a mess. Some are much stronger than others and far too many have role restrictions slapped onto them.
Lethality and Ruffian
At level 83, Stim Boost | Pugnacity will now also boost your poison | bleed crits and you’ll get Synox Shots baseline.
- At level 83, Stim Boost | Pugnacity now also makes Revitalizers increase the critical chance and critical damage of your poison | bleed effects by 20%.
- The Synox Shots tactical is now the level 83 discipline passive for Lethality | Ruffian
- Viral Elements will continue to be optimal for solo eras content and now a consideration for boss fights, alongside Overwhelming Offense and Augmented Holocomm, and Catalyzed Toxins will remain optimal for PvP.
Lethality | Ruffian feels like it was an afterthought in the migration to ability trees in 7.0. It has almost no unique effects in its ability tree and instead has pretty much everything that was left on the cutting room floor while the devs tried to rein in Concealment | Ruffian in PvP.
This can be okay if done right, but the discipline-specific talents are bland, and the level 15 unique effect assigned to Stim Boost | Pugnacity really ruined the survivability of the other two specs in boss fights.
Revitalizers is the essential lifeline for all Operative | Scoundrel disciplines in boss fights, and the devs decided to restrict it to a single spec, likely because it gave too much survivability to Concealment | Scrapper alongside its roll immunity and guarded healers.
Now, they’re making Stim Boost | Pugnacity less useable as a DCD for Lethality | Ruffian by increasing the incentive to use the ability on cooldown for offensive purposes, and that’s not a great plan.
Revitalizers needs to be accessible to all Operatives | Scoundrels, regardless of discipline and Stim Boost | Pugnacity cannot be both a strong DCD and strong OCD at the same time.
The situation isn’t any better for the tactical item. Synox Shots is perfectly balanced alongside Viral Elements and Catalyzed Toxins. Each one is clearly optimal for a given type of content (boss fights, solo eras content, and PvP, respectively).
Concealment and Scrapper
At level 83, Stim Boost | Pugnacity will now amplify the critical damage boost it already provided, allow you to use Backstab | Back Blast far more often, and effectively give you Revealing Weakness | Hot and Ready as a buff. You’ll also get Acid Lash baseline.
- At level 83, Stim Boost | Pugnacity now increases your critical damage dealt by 25% (up from 15%) and also reduces the cooldown of Backstab | Back Blast to 4s, makes it useable while face-to-face with the target, and treats it as though you attacked from stealth.
- The Acid Lash tactical is now the level 83 discipline passive for Concealment | Scrapper
- Explosive Cells will continue to be optimal for solo eras content and now a consideration for boss fights, alongside Overwhelming Offense and Augmented Holocomm, and Volatile Strike will remain optimal for PvP.
The Concealment | Scrapper changes take a piledriver through the pretty perfect balance of the spec’s ability tree talents and tactical items.
Increasing the damage provided by Stim Boost | Pugnacity creates a much greater incentive to use Roll Knife | Rolling Fists (which doesn’t work on the upgrade currently) and Crippling Wounds | Setup Shot together. The former greatly reduces the cooldown on Stim Boost | Pugnacity, and the latter provides an autocrit that can benefit from it.
There’s also the weird insertion of extra conflict-free Backstabs | Back Blasts to content with, and the fact that you can completely waste this significant boost if Backstab | Back Blast is not used right at the beginning of your Stim Boost | Pugnacity window.
Backstab | Back Blast has a 12s cooldown without the upgrade from Stim Boost | Pugnacity, which lasts 15s, so unless you line it up right, or they make Stim Boost | Pugnacity reset the former’s cooldown, you get maybe one free Backstab | Back Blast as opposed to like three.
I think it’s great that Concealment | Scrapper has an easier, more reliable build for boss fights and one that’s harder but has higher potential right now. Maybe Broadsword disagrees.
Broadsword might argue these changes to Stim Boost | Pugnacity are important because it’s presently unclear what the optimal build should be for a given type of content at a glance, and these changes do help to elucidate that, but by the same stroke, they’re invalidating the alternatives that now lack any strong individual use case.
I’m not sure if it’s possible to get both build flexibility and accessibility at the same time, though the latter matters less if any combination works well enough and nothing is overpowered.
I can’t say I’m a fan of the cooldown reduction to Backstab | Back Blast, either. There’s a rhythm you settle into with where you place it in relation to Volatile Substance | Blood Boiler, the number of TAs | UHs you have, and Laceration | Sucker Punch.
The cooldown reduction flows decently well during Stim Boost | Back Blast, but everything gets a little screwed up after and takes a moment to readjust.
Compared to the Stim Boost | Pugnacity upgrade, it’s less defensible to move Acid Lash into the base discipline. Concealment | Scrapper has perfectly balanced tactical items. There’s no need for Broadsword to ruin that. I’d much rather see them get the Trapper Package as their passive instead.
Despite being balanced next to the alternatives based on use case, Acid Lash is not free from problems.
Concealment | Scrapper primarily has 4m range on most of its abilities, and the Acid Blade | Flechette Round DoT requires close to 100% uptime and perfect execution of your rotation to maintain in an actual boss fight.
Making matters more difficult, the DoT can only be applied by a single, high-priority ability that’s on a relatively long cooldown, so if the target is defeated, you’re outta luck until you get it back or you have to delay this powerful ability. Neither option is good.
Acid Lash would also be so much nicer to use if it also extended the duration of Acid Blade | Flechette Round DoT by 2s (giving you another GCD to work with) and made it so the cooldown on Backstab | Backblast was reset if the target dies while Poisoned | Bleeding.
It would also help immensely if Tactical Critical | Upper Critical included a movement speed boost like Carnage Marauder | Combat Sentinel gets with Swiftness to help offset the 4m range limitation as well.
I can’t help but think the minor readjustment and higher demand for precision feed into the reality of surviving bringing a knife to a gun fight or throwing punches at a Sith Lord, so maybe it’s all part of the plan…
Medicine and Sawbones
At level 83, Stim Boost | Pugnacity will enable your HoTs to tick twice, and you’ll get Diagnostics Probe baseline.
- At level 83, Stim Boost | Pugnacity now also grants Double Dose, making your heal over time effects tick twice for 15s.
- The Diagnostics Probe tactical is now the level 83 discipline passive for Medicine | Sawbones
- Regenerative Waves and Critical Surgery will be the optimal choices for Medicine | Sawbones for all content, depending on whether more AoE or single-target healing is required
Taken out of context, these changes to Operative | Scoundrel healer are pretty solid. Doubling the tick rate on all your HoTs is a solid boost to the spec’s burst potential, but it does little to improve the spec’s insufficient survivability in boss fights due to its overreliance on stealth in PvP.
It also doesn’t really help to mitigate the major issue where Medicine | Sawbones can fall behind in healing if its probes fall off, or the fact that you really need third-party software to keep track of your probes in a raid.
The second problem is especially unfortunate when they could easily fix the problem just by making Kolto Probe | Slow-release Medpac apply a benign (stacking) debuff with the same duration as the HoT, similar to Deionized | Force-imbalanced, and the same thing goes for Kolto Shells | Trauma Probes.
The changes I recommend
I don’t think Broadsword can get away with minor tweaks to fix the problems caused by the codependent relationship between the unevenness of stealth broader Operative | Scoundrel survivability and add something new for each discipline.
Nerfing stealth is a bit too far beyond the scope of this article, so we’ll focus here on what needs to happen to Stim Boost | Pugnacity and Tactical Overdrive | Hot Streak.
You may not agree with my exact suggestions, but it’s important to be constructive when providing criticism, and that’s what I’m doing here
- Stim Boost | Pugnacity has been redesigned to amplify survivability and heightened senses | a diploma the school of hard knocks. It is offered as the upgrade at level 83 and now has the following effects:
- Baseline Increases alacrity by 10%, movement speed by 50%, grants Revitalizers, and purges movement impairing effects whenever Revitalizers heals you
- Lethality | Ruffian Increases the range on Corrosive Assault | Brutal Shots to 30m.
- Concealment | Scrapper Attacks fully ignore armor.
- Medicine | Sawbones Halves the GCD and Energy cost for Kolto Probe | Slow-release Medpac, and reduces the activation time of Kolto Injection | Underworld Medicine to 1.5s
- Tactical Overdrive | Hot Streak has been redesigned to amplify combat effectiveness. It is offered as the upgraded ability at level 15 and has the following effects:
- Baseline Increases Mastery by 15%, makes your periodic effects tick twice, and doubles the maximum number of TAs | UHs you can have (but after the effect ends, you cannot gain more TAs | UHs until you go back below the normal limit)
- No longer resets ability cooldowns
- Lethality | Ruffian Eliminates the TA | UH cost of Corrosive Assault | Brutal Shot.
- Concealment | Scrapper Increases critical damage dealt by 15% and attacks fully ignore armor.
- Roll Knife | Rolling Fists now reduces the cooldown of Tactical Overdrive | Stack the Deck instead
- Medicine | Sawbones Grants immunity to pushbacks and interrupts and eliminates TA | UH cost of Surgical Probe | Emergency Medpac, and makes your next Kolto Injection | Underworld Medicine activate instantly
- Baseline Increases Mastery by 15%, makes your periodic effects tick twice, and doubles the maximum number of TAs | UHs you can have (but after the effect ends, you cannot gain more TAs | UHs until you go back below the normal limit)
- Tactical Superiority | Stack the Deck has taken the place of Tactical Overdrive | Hot Streak in the ability tree at level 43
- Swapped the names of the Scoundrel abilities “Hot Streak” and “Stack the Deck” because it makes more sense that way (names in previous bullet points refer to the current name of the ability)
My goal was to improve Operative | Scoundrel playability using two unique cooldown abilities in accordance with the apparent extent of Broadsword’s combat style changes to expand the functionality of these existing abilities while managing to keep their “souls” intact.
