SWTOR 7.5 Arsenal Mercenary PvE Guide and Best Builds (2024)

SWTOR 7.5 Arsenal Mercenary PvE Guide (DPS) for beginners and more experienced veterans: Skills, Choices, Rotations, Gearing, Builds, Tips!

The guide is up-to-date for Patch 7.5

Introduction to Arsenal Mercenary

Arsenal Mercenary is capable of dealing gargantuan amounts of damage with individual missile attacks and high-velocity blaster bolts that can penetrate armor. Unfortunately, these massive bursts are inconsistent and do not translate to high sustained DPS.

Arsenal is weaker in the sustained DPS department, but don’t let this discourage you from playing what you want. Yes, you will have to work a bit harder compared to your mDPS peers in group content to pull viable numbers, but you should still be able to clear almost all content with Arsenal, and even without massive crits, throwing out missiles like candy is still extremely fun.

The Thermonuclear Fusion tactical from 6.0 was integrated into the ability tree, and combined with the fact that Arsenal has weaker single-target ability tree buffs than many other disciplines, it effectively has easier access to fairly potent rotational AoE, particularly compared to other burst DPS specs which lost a ton of AoE power in 7.0.

In terms of survivability, Mercenaries got nerfed somewhat heavily thanks to the complete removal of their AoE DR. That wouldn’t be so horrible if not for the fact that so many of their DCDs and related buffs don’t work against AoE damage at all either, having the same limitations as reflect abilities.

No other combat style has such a restriction on so many of their abilities, and it causes their performance to be far more unreliable and inconsistent in boss fights compared to other types of content. Honestly, it feels like an oversight it’s so out of place.

Still, PvE endgame content is easier than it’s been in a long time, so you can survive just fine in the vast majority of fights.

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 always one of your primary CCs, either the 8s mez or 4s hard stun. 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. Mercenary is one of the exceptions here though. Thermal Sensor Override was the only ability that was fully removed from the Combat Style and there aren’t any new baseline effects, but 7 abilities were locked away behind 3 choices instead of the usual 5.

Battle rezzes in general are now healer-only (so Onboard AED is now restricted to Bodyguard), 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.

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?

Group Composition Tips

In order to deal maximum damage, Arsenal requires 2 DPS debuffs provided by other disciplines:

Arsenal is pretty independent as far as group composition goes. Powertech / Vanguard and Operative / Scoundrel are the 2 Combat Styles that provide the Tech debuff. Operative synergizes a bit better with Arsenal since it also provides the Internal / Elemental debuff and can benefit from both debuffs that Arsenal provides, but PT is still a great option and neither makes that big of an impact on Arsenal’s DPS anyway.

So long as each DPS is given the debuffs they need (or at least the most impactful ones), you’ll be fine. Don’t fixate on having a 100% ideal composition.

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

Tracer Missile

(Tech/Kinetic/Direct/Single Target/Casted)
This is your main filler ability. Generally, it will be one of the first abilities you use on a new target. While it is technically a filler, Tracer Missile interacts in some way with almost every ability you use rotationally, and this greatly impacts when you should use it. Tracer Missile has 2 procs and 2 debuffs associated with it that are relevant to your rotation:

Heat Signature
This debuff counts as a DoT for the purposes of Rail Shot and increases the damage dealt by Heatseeker Missiles. Basically, your options are more limited as to what you can actually do to a target before you’ve hit them with a Tracer Missile, including not being able to deal damage with some of your most powerful abilities.

Sunder
This is the armor debuff. While all DPS specs provide two debuffs that increase the recipient’s damage taken in some way, the armor debuff is almost always the most useful of the debuffs since it affects the greatest number of abilities. The actual damage taken increase is still effectively 7% per attack though since bosses have 35% DR from armor and the debuff reduces armor by 20%.

The armor debuff represents a significant part of Arsenal’s raid utility. Most of the other debuffs are still nice, but you really notice when you don’t have an armor debuff in the group. The only damage that ignores armor is Internal/Elemental damage, which tends to mostly be reserved for DoT specs and a few other heavy-hitting attacks.

Tracer Lock
2 stacks of this buff are granted per use of Tracer Missile. Each stack increases the damage dealt by your next Rail Shot (or also Rapid Scan) by 6%. In addition, thanks to the Honed Lock discipline passive, Tracer Lock also increases the critical chance of your next Rail Shot (or Rapid Scan) by 3% per stack. This effect stacks up to 5 times, resulting in a 30% damage increase and 15% critical chance increase. The stack generation is weighted, so while you need to do 3 Tracer Missiles to get all 5 Tracer Locks, you’ll still have 80% of the effect if you mess up and only do 2 casts before using Rail Shot.

If I ever find out that you deliberately used your Tracer Lock on Rapid Scan in PvE, I will personally hunt you down and destroy you. Your job is to DPS, not throw away your GCDs on healing! I might make an exception if all your DCDs and medpac are on cooldown and you will literally die if you don’t use Rapid Scan, but you better follow that up with the biggest tantrum of your life because unless that pull was going to be a wipe that you were trying to salvage, your healers and tanks weren’t doing their job and they need to hear about it! Tracer Lock is for Rail Shot ONLY! (does not apply in PvP)

Barrage
Tracer Missile (and Sweeping Blasters) finish the cooldown on Blazing Bolts. This effect cannot occur more than once every 8 seconds. This proc used to be quite challenging to keep track of because it doesn’t align nicely with any other ability. Thankfully, it’s now much easier thanks to the Primed Ignition tactical.

I’ll get more into it later on when I talk about Blazing Bolts, but the basic idea is that when you use Priming Shot (which applies the DoT), you want to have one Blazing Bolts available for use at the very beginning of the DoT and one available for use sometime after, so generally you’ll proc one right at the beginning or in the short downtime in between DoTs and then proc the second about halfway through the DoT.

Blazing Bolts

(Ranged/Energy/Direct/Single Target/Channeled)
This ability is one of your harder-hitting attacks, though it is slightly weaker than Rail Shot and Heatseeker Missiles in terms of direct per-GCD damage. It’s also one of your cheapest rotational abilities, it only costs 8 Heat per GCD.Since it’s so cheap and deals a fair bit of damage, it needs to be used often, but not always as soon as it becomes available. Your primary constraint is that it needs to be used before you are able to proc Barrage again. Blazing Bolts has 1 hidden passive and 2 tactical items associated with it that are relevant to your rotation:

Thrill of the Hunt
Thrill of the Hunt allows Blazing Bolts to be channeled while moving. Previously, this was a utility and then ability tree buff that also affected other discipline-specific abilities, but now it’s a hidden effect that DPS get for free.

Primed Ignition
Primed Ignition makes it so Priming Shot applies a DoT and Blazing Bolts, Tracer Missile, and Heatseeker Missiles all tick its damage. Since Blazing Bolts itself ticks 4 times, it is responsible for a significant proportion of your Primed Ignition DoT ticks, so it’s very important to use Blazing Bolts at the right time and as often as possible. So when exactly is the right time to use Blazing Bolts? Only use it if you can complete the channel before the Primed Ignition DoT falls off.

If the DoT is not on the target or will fall off mid-channel, delay using Blazing Bolts until the beginning of the next DoT. It’s possible to get two uses of Blazing Bolts per DoT application. In order to accomplish this, you need to use the first Blazing Bolts within the first couple of GCDs and then have the second one procced and activated while there are still at least 2-3 seconds left before the DoT falls off.

In practice, the first Barrage proc will happen anywhere between the end of the previous DoT and the first GCD or two of the current application of the DoT. The earlier you proc the first use, the earlier you are able to proc the second use, though it will typically proc somewhere around the time that the DoT has about half its duration left.

You can delay activating Blazing Bolts once it’s procced, though you need to activate it before Barrage can be procced again, provided the Primed Ignition DoT is up, of course.

Priming Shot’s cooldown does not divide evenly into the rate limit of Blazing Bolts, so along with the fact that you also have other priorities, particularly Rail Shot, Heatseeker Missiles, and managing your Heat, when exactly you use it will fluctuate and occasionally you will only get a single Blazing Bolts during one application of the DoT.

When this happens, your second use of Blazing Bolts on the next application will be pretty early, usually about halfway through the DoT. This is fine since you’ll be set up to get the first proc for the next application pretty early as well and will have no trouble activating the second use in time.

If you are already a master at proccing Blazing Bolts as often as possible, you probably won’t notice much of a difference in DPS and can continue to proc and use Blazing Bolts without considering the Primed Ignition DoT and play the spec as you did prior to the release of the tactical in 6.0. If you aren’t as proficient with proccing and using Blazing Bolts, the Primed Ignition DoT serves as excellent scaffolding for the rest of the rotation.

Burning Bright
This tactical makes it so that dealing damage with Blazing Bolts increases the damage dealt by your next Priming Shot by 25% and stacks up to 4 times (up to 100%). Without the scaffolding from Primed Ignition, your rotation will be harder. Furthermore, doubling the damage dealt by Priming Shot, even with the new ability tree buff, isn’t enough to make it deal more sustained damage than Primed Ignition.

The key advantage of Burning Bright is that you don’t have to worry about losing DPS because of target swapping and get all of that damage immediately instead of over 15s, though 15s is still short enough to get a full application during a burst check so in PvE, all you get is epic flytext (which is a completely valid reason to use it in solo content).

Rail Shot

(Ranged/Energy/Direct/Single Target/Instant)
This ability is another of your hardest-hitting attacks. In terms of normal hits, it does almost the same amount of damage as Heatseeker Missiles, though thanks to the autocrit from the Concentrated Fire Legendary Item, it contributes to a larger amount of damage.

As I previously discussed, Tracer Missile interacts with this ability in a couple of key ways. First, the Heat Signature debuff counts as a DoT, fulfilling the requirement that Rail Shot can only be used against a target that is incapacitated or suffering from periodic damage. Second, Tracer Missile grants stacks of Tracer Lock, which increase the damage dealt by 30% and critical chance by 15% at 5 stacks.

You should only be using Rail Shot when you have 5 stacks of Tracer Lock due to these significant buffs, though it isn’t the end of the world if you accidentally use it at 4 stacks, especially against trash if you think you can defeat the enemy without having to cast another Tracer Missile to get that 5th stack.

Since Rail Shot is such a hard-hitting ability, you should be using it on cooldown as often as possible. This means you need to make sure that you are getting your 5 Tracer Lock stacks before Rail Shot comes off cooldown, and you will be cutting it close sometimes, though it’s less of an issue now that BioWare has made Heat management easier for Arsenal.

Not losing Tracer Lock stacks is the biggest reason to use Rail Shot first if you have both Heatseeker Missiles and Rail Shot off cooldown at the same time. If you’re using the Concentrated Fire Legendary Item, Rail Shot always has a higher priority during Supercharged Gas than Heatseeker Missiles since the increased damage provided by the autocrit gets compounded by the increased armor penetration from Supercharged Gas, giving you more flat damage.This extra damage isn’t a whole lot though, not enough to be worth delaying Rail Shot over.

Rail Shot is also one of the best abilities to use outside of the Primed Ignition DoT window since Rail Shot doesn’t tick the DoT, so if you find yourself in a situation where you only have one GCD before Priming Shot comes off cooldown and both Heatseeker Missiles and Rail Shot available, it’s better to use Rail Shot first because it doesn’t tick the DoT while Heatseeker Missiles does. Rail Shot has 1 additional discipline passive associated with it that is relevant to your rotation:

Terminal Velocity
The Heat generated by Rail Shot is reduced by 10. In addition, you vent 2 Heat every 1.5 seconds. Even without the additional passive venting, this passive brings the Heat cost of Rail Shot down to only 5 Heat, making it neutral in terms of Heat generation since you vent more than 5 Heat every second passively. You still should try not to use this ability while over 40 Heat, but it’s not nearly as bad as using one of your other abilities at that level.

Heatseeker Missiles

(Tech/Kinetic/Direct/Single Target/Instant)
This is normally your hardest-hitting rotational attack, though the Concentrated Fire legendary implant autocrits will make Rail Shot surpass it. Before you use Heatseeker Missiles on a target, you first need to make sure that you’ve applied a Heat Signature from Tracer Missile, since damage dealt by Heatseeker Missiles is increased by 25% when there is a Heat Signature on the target.

There really isn’t much more to this ability, it just hits hard and you want to use it as often as possible. While Heatseeker Missiles hits harder than Rail Shot, if you only have one GCD before you have to use Tracer Missile, it’s best to use Rail Shot first so that you don’t waste the stack of Tracer Lock it would generate, though if you can use them back to back, it’s better to use Heatseeker Missiles first. Heatseeker Missiles does not have any additional procs, debuffs, or discipline passives associated with it that I haven’t already mentioned.

Priming Shot

(Ranged/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
When paired with the damage provided by the DoT from the Primed Ignition tactical, Priming Shot is consistently your most damaging GCD by a considerable margin. Even with the burst tactical, Burning Bright, Priming Shot is still your hardest-hitting rotational ability, so the priority doesn’t change depending on which tactical you use, though I’ll still mostly be focusing on Primed Ignition here.

The DoT that Primed Ignition applies is so strong that the rest of the rotation is structured around getting the most out of it, though you should think of this as a benefit, not a drawback since it’s fairly difficult to do things optimally without this added structure because there’s nothing in the rotation that allows you to easily keep track of when you can proc Blazing Bolts.

Since each tick of Blazing Bolts ticks the DoT, you want to make sure that you exclusively use Blazing Bolts while the DoT is active to maximize the number of ticks. Tracer Missile also ticks the DoT while Rapid Shots doesn’t, so it’s ideal to only use Rapid Shots in the 2 ish GCDs where the DoT is not active.

Try not to use Priming Shot on something that’s about to die and delay it if you are about to have to hit something else. You want to use Priming Shot against whatever you expect to be attacking for the next 13ish seconds. Priming Shot has 1 implant, 1 proc, and 1 debuff associated with it that is relevant to your rotation that I haven’t already mentioned:

Overcharged Cells
Priming Shot generates 3 stacks of Supercharge. This implant is a redesign of Random Charge and helps to make Supercharge generation more consistent and better integrate Priming Shot into the rotation. Due to Priming Shot’s already high priority, it’s unwise to delay Priming Shot even if you will waste a stack of Supercharge.

Usually, it’s not an issue and unless you plan on maining the spec, you can completely ignore this bit of nuance. It’s hard to say for sure, but it seems that the fact that Electro Net doesn’t generate Supercharge is what throws everything off, so you need to be strategic about when you use it so that Electro Net doesn’t ruin any of your procs.

You can technically use Death From Above or even Sticky Dart as single-target abilities instead of Tracer Missile if you’re at 7 stacks with 1-2 GCDs left on Priming Shot’s cooldown, but this will cause you to lose DPS directly as a result of those attacks dealing less damage, costing more Heat, and not building up stacks of Tracer Lock, so I don’t recommend it.

Tracer Beacon
This proc is granted by Priming Shot itself and makes your next Tracer Missile instant. Since Tracer Missile already has a 1.5 second cast time, this does not provide any tangible DPS increase since it’s still on the GCD, which also lasts 1.5 seconds, though it does allow you to use the ability while moving, which increases Arsenal’s mobility.

Please make sure to consume this proc before activating Power Surge, or don’t activate Power Surge until after this proc has been consumed, because a single Tracer Missile will consume both procs.

This is an unfortunate bug that has existed for all procs of this nature since these procs were released. I really wish Priming Shot would just grant a charge of Power Surge instead since the only other thing you can even use this on in Arsenal is Fusion Missile and combining the two would eliminate this problem, but I digress.

Marked
Priming Shot marks its target. Marked targets take 5% more damage from ranged weapon attacks. Unfortunately, the ranged debuff is one of the least useful of DPS debuffs because it doesn’t affect a very significant portion of abilities and damage output in the game outside of a couple of specs.

Furthermore, the specs that don’t provide it for themselves but can still benefit from it primarily deal Tech damage, not Ranged. That said, it does affect about half of Arsenal’s damage, so at least you will always benefit from it even if the rest of your group doesn’t.

Rapid Shots

(Ranged/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
This is your weak filler ability. It deals extremely low damage. You should only be using this ability to manage your Heat and as a last resort to use while moving. Thanks to the Heat cost reductions from 7.1, you can often completely avoid using Rapid Shots in your single-target rotation.

It’s your responsibility to remember how much Heat each ability costs, and several of them have changed with 7.1. That information can be found in the description for each ability. Typically, you should only have to use Rapid Shots if you got rezzed and don’t have Vent Heat available, do some sort of AoE, or are trying to do sustained DPS outside of the sustained DPS build.

You will rely on Supercharged Gas on cooldown to keep your Heat where it needs to be, but whenever you see yourself spike above 45-50 Heat and Vent Heat isn’t available, use Rapid Shots until you drop back down to about 25-35 Heat such that you’ll be able to activate your next ability without going over 40 Heat. Rapid Shots does not have any additional procs, discipline passives, or debuffs associated with it that are relevant to your rotation.

AoE Damage

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.

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.

Death from Above

(Tech/Kinetic/Direct/AoE/Channeled)
This is your strongest AoE ability, though it has a fairly long cooldown, so you can’t spam it. Death From Above’s damage per GCD surpasses the following abilities after the following number of targets are hit with one use of the ability:

• Rapid Shots : 1 target
• Tracer Missile, Blazing Bolts, Priming Shot: 2 targets
• Heatseeker Missiles, Rail Shot: 3 targets

Please note that Heatseeker Missiles and Rail Shot are both right on the cusp of only needing 2 targets. Rail Shot needs 3 on average, though it will work out that autocrits will require 3 targets while regular hits only require 2 targets.

I have also not factored in Primed Ignition for Priming Shot since you won’t be causing as many DoT ticks when using frequent AoE and may be using a different tactical altogether.

Sweeping Blasters

(Ranged/Energy/Direct/AoE/Channeled)
This is your spammable AoE. It always deals less damage than Death from Above, though thanks to the Blazing Barrels discipline passive that increases Sweeping Blasters’ critical chance and critical damage, the actual DPS loss isn’t quite as significant as it may seem at first glance.

This ability costs slightly more than Death from Above, so you should never use this ability if Death from Above is off cooldown. Sweeping Blasters also procs Barrage, and you should definitely use Blazing Bolts each time it procs since it will help with managing Heat. Sweeping Blasters’ damage per GCD surpasses the following abilities after the following number of targets are hit with one use of the ability

• Rapid Shots : 1 target
• Tracer Missile, Blazing Bolts, Priming Shot: 2 targets
• Heatseeker Missiles, Rail Shot: 3 targets

Since this ability deals almost the same damage as Death from Above, it also surpasses your other abilities with the same number of targets.

Fusion Missile

(Tech/Kinetic and Elemental/Direct and Periodic/AoE/Casted)
This ability always deals less damage and costs more Heat than Sweeping Blasters. The only time you should ever use it in Arsenal is if you are using the Thermonuclear Fusion ability tree buff and even then only if you need to spread Heat Signature to additional targets, in which case it should be used ASAP.

It does affect an 8m radius compared to only 5m for Death from Above and Sweeping Blasters, but since you can’t place it, this benefit is less valuable since you are often able to hit the same number of targets by placing the reticle for the AoE in a way that hits all of the targets.

Sticky Dart

(Tech/Kinetic/Direct/AoE/Instant)
Explosive Dart got a small upgrade in 7.0 and is now called Sticky Dart. It’s slightly cheaper and less damaging than a single GCD of Sweeping Blasters (the damage difference comes from the Blazing Barrels passive), but you can use it while moving and for pre-casting. It also has a 60% slow that’ll be helpful in PvP. You shouldn’t ever use it for AoE purposes in PvE group content, but it’s fun to use in solo content. I like to shoot it at the melee adds that run to me.

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.

Vent Heat

With 7.0, BioWare decided to combine Vent Heat and Thermal Sensor Override, which removed a ton of the finesse required to get maximum benefit out of either ability. Vent Heat no longer triggers until an ability is activated that would consume Heat or a channel finishes. It is best used right before you activate a 3s channeled ability like Blazing Bolts, Sweeping Blasters, or Death From Above because this maximizes the amount of time where you’re still dealing damage but aren’t generating any Heat.

Vent Heat is also grayed out until you have enough Heat to utilize the effects. It’s difficult to fully benefit from both components, so just activate when you use your next 3s channeled ability past 65 Heat or with your next ability that costs 15 Heat if you’re above 75 Heat.

With the changes BioWare made in 7.1, you will only need to use this occasionally in single-target sustained situations. Though you’ll get more use when you are doing a lot of AoE damage because those abilities are more costly.

High Velocity Supercharged Gas

The biggest benefit of this “cooldown” is that it vents 10 Heat. The other effects last 12s and are incredibly weak. The 6% alacrity will only help to slightly reduce the cooldowns of your abilities and increase your Heat Dissipation Rate, but you’re certainly not going to get an extra ability in that window. The 15% armor penetration is a little bit better, but it’s still a pretty small improvement; it’s only equivalent to a 5.25% damage increase for your Kinetic / Energy attacks, though 15% is enough to make some of your attacks like Rail Shot completely ignore armor because of other armor pen passives.

You still want to use it as often as possible, though make sure you have it for any burst DPS checks and make sure you’re building Supercharge stacks when you can’t do any DPS. Please note that if you happen to be close to 40 Heat shortly before the burst DPS check, it may be better to use Supercharged Gas before you go over 40 Heat so your Heat Dissipation Rate is never reduced, rather than save it for the burst check.

There are several abilities that generate stacks of Supercharge, including Tracer Missile, Rapid Shots, Rapid Scan, and Kolto Shot as well as Priming Shot with the Overcharged Cells implant. It can also finally be done with your Recharge and Reload ability (or equivalent item from the Cartel Market) since they made that a baseline passive for Mercenaries. No more having to spam Kolto Shot before pulling!

Don’t forget that you can also use Kolto Shot in-combat during periods of downtime where you can’t DPS anything in order to generate extra stacks of Supercharge.

Electro Net

(Tech/Energy/Periodic/Single-Target/Instant)
While this ability isn’t technically an offensive cooldown since it’s still on the GCD, you should still think of it as one since it does a pretty high amount of damage. Against non-player enemies, builds up to 5 stacks that each increase the damage taken by Electro Net by 20% (100% total) and these stacks apply over the first 5 seconds after application automatically and are not dependent on whether or not the target moves, unlike in PvP.

Since it is still an attack, make sure you aren’t wasting this extra damage on an add. It also deals energy damage, so the increased armor penetration you get from Supercharged Gas will affect this ability, though I wouldn’t save it if I still needed to generate more than a stack or two. If you’re doing a burst DPS check or happen to have both abilities usable at the same time, apply Electro Net first, then Supercharged Gas because the first tick is the weakest and the last is the strongest.

Adrenal

Make sure to activate the Adrenal right before you use Priming Shot so you get a full duration of the Primed Ignition DoT during your Adrenal. Then, you should use Electro Net so that you have another high-damage attack to get boosted in lieu of a Tracer Missile. It’s fantastic if you can also use Supercharged Gas while the Adrenal is active, but don’t delay anything to make that happen. It’s better to use damage boosts at the same time because the effects synergize such that the DPS increase is greater from using the effects together than using them separately.

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.

Energy Shield

This is your most reliable defensive cooldown. It will mitigate all damage that can be mitigated because it provides flat damage reduction. Along with your armor and Power Barrier ability tree proc, you will have 56.7% damage reduction against Kinetic / Energy damage and 41% damage reduction against Internal / Elemental damage.

Thanks in part due to its long duration, Energy Shield is best when trying to mitigate damage that you’re supposed to be taking. You’re not going to be able to cheese anything with this ability, but you have other abilities that work well as cheeses.

Kolto Overload

Kolto Overload’s greatest strength is in its ability to reliably keep you alive through constant damage, generally, the kind you’ll find in burn phases as well as damage that you know will be coming soon but don’t know exactly when. Very few other DCDs in the game can do this as well as Kolto Overload, though the ability isn’t without limitations.

Kolto Overload is one of the worst DCDs in the game at helping you to mitigate big hits since it provides its mitigation through constant small heals, which requires you to take the damage and survive. This ability isn’t going to do a thing if an attack takes away the final 36% of your health.

Responsive Safeguards

Responsive Safeguards is one of the best DCDs in the game. It absorbs all the damage, heals you, and reflects the damage back at the attacker. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work on everything; it only mitigates direct, single-target attacks, so it won’t do anything against DoTs and AoE damage, though remember that in raids, damage types don’t always match their appearance.

Since this ability does completely absorb the damage, Responsive Safeguards should never be used at the same time as another defensive cooldown. You’ll either take no damage or all of it. If you take any amount of damage, this DCD did absolutely nothing and you just wasted it.

Unfortunately, most damage you’ll be taking in raids is AoE damage, so there aren’t too many attacks that Responsive Safeguards works against and there are many fights where this isn’t usable at all.

This isn’t a major problem though since you can almost always survive while only using Kolto Overload, Energy Shield, and Chaff Flare. Since it’s so often useless against damage you’re meant to take, it’s best to seek out attacks that you can reflect with this ability in order to deal extra damage.

Chaff Flare

This ability works a bit differently compared to past expansions. It now provides a slightly weaker version of both the IO and Arsenal DCD effects. From Arsenal, the 2 stacks of Force / Tech absorption only last 6 seconds. From IO, the defense chance only applies to Melee / Ranged damage. The result is that the ability is overall stronger and useful against any type of attack.

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 and you certainly should never try to use one of your heals before using your Medpac (and I hope you know that Unnatural Preservation is not included in this rule).

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.

Cure

This is the cleanse for Mercenaries. Generally, healers are responsible for dealing with most of the cleanses, though there are a few instances where the DPS should help, like on Dread Council with Tyrans’ Death Mark. Before you use this on yourself, make sure that you don’t get Responsive Safeguard ticks off of whatever you’re trying to cleanse

Try to avoid using this as your cleanse, a lot of the cleanses that DPS are responsible for can be removed with an ability that is off the GCD like the CC break or Hydraulic Overrides thanks to the movement-impairing effect purge.

Unless the debuff is going out to many members of your group at the same time, your healers are responsible for cleansing you. Your job as a DPS is to spend your GCDs on dealing damage. Your healer’s job is to spend their GCDs on mitigating damage, which includes most cleansing.

Hydraulic Overrides

The movement speed boost provided by this ability is rather small for Mercenaries, so it’s far more useful for its CC immunity, which allows you to cheese mechanics and prevent yourself from getting interrupted due to getting knocked around so you won’t lose DPS.

You should prioritize using Rocket Out if you have to move, but don’t hesitate to use this ability as well to help you get back into range even faster, provided you aren’t saving it for a mechanic. It also tends to be better for movement than Rocket Out if the whole group is moving with the boss since you can still deal damage during this ability while each use of Rocket Out costs a GCD.

Rocket Out

Unlike the Agent’s rolls and Mad Dash, you do not gain any sort of damage mitigation during this ability, though you do still get CC immunity, so it can be used for mobility. Rocket Out does cost a GCD to use, so you should avoid using this if you can safely get where you need to go without using it. This means you should be reserving it for moving long distances and getting out of fairly large circles. Do not use Rocket Out if you only need to take a step or two to get out of a circle.

It is possible to use Rocket Out to move forward by doing some fancy maneuvering by rotating your character. If you plan to regularly play Mercenary, you need to get good at this because it’s your only real mobility tool for long distances. If you somehow end up a mile away from the boss, you have to be able to get back ASAP, and you need to be able to move forward using this ability to do that.

If you can’t or are unwilling to use Rocket Out for forward movement, you will lose a ton of DPS on some bosses and should pick a different Combat Style for group content.

It’s not too hard, it just takes some practice so you can do it quickly without having to think about it. The key is to start walking in the direction you want to go and then quickly rotate your camera and character 180 degrees using your mouse (holding right click), then as soon as you finish rotating, activate your ability and rotate back during the animation. Other people may comment with different methods, I know there are a few ways to do it, but that’s what I do. Regardless of your method, it needs to be muscle memory. A great time to practice this is while running back to the boss after a wipe.

Power Surge

This ability makes your next ability with a cast time instant, allowing it to be used on the move. It does not provide a tangible DPS increase when used on abilities that have a 1.5 second cast time because the GCD is also 1.5 seconds long, so you don’t save any time by using it on those abilities.

Power Surge can provide a DPS increase when used on abilities that have a cast time longer than 1.5 seconds, like Concussion Missile. Usually, Power Surge will be activated in order to make Tracer Missile instant so you can use it while moving. Make sure that you don’t have the Tracer Beacon proc from Priming Shot though if you plan to use this ability since a single Tracer Missile will consume both buffs simultaneously.

Crowd Control and Other Abilities

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

Jet Boost

This is your 360-degree knockback. Due to its short range, it can be rather difficult to use against some mechanics, like the Chained Manifestations on Styrak NiM, but it does knock them pretty far away. Also, please do not ruin everybody else’s day by using this ability for its AoE damage.

Electro Dart

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.

Disabling Shot

This is your interrupt. Mercenaries get the honor of having the interrupt with the longest cooldown in the game at 24 seconds! This usually isn’t a huge problem, there are really only a couple instances in the whole game that require a shorter cooldown and generally a melee DPS takes that, even over other ranged DPS. 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.

Concussion Missile

This is your mez, a CC ability that breaks on damage. Usually if you’re using this in-combat, you will want to use it very soon after the enemy spawns, though usually healers are assigned this responsibility when possible. This is also one of the better abilities to use with Power Surge since it goes from being a 2s cast to instant, meaning it’s only a GCD, so you won’t lose as much DPS that way.

Mercenaries (and Commandos) and Operatives / Scoundrels are the only combat styles in the game that have default access to a mez, and Mercenaries / Commandos are the only ones with default access to one that lasts 60s against NPCs, so be prepared to get assigned to CC duty.

Hunter Killer Droid

This ability is a redesign of Stealth Scan, but it offers very little benefit in PvE. Stealthed enemies aren’t super common and the effect doesn’t work against bosses that stealth out. The most theoretically useful effect in PvE is the 30% reduction in damage taken while stunned, but it’s not gonna change the outcome of a fight, so it’s not worth using.

Hunter Killer Droid provides significantly more value in PvP, but this is a PvE guide and the ability is locked away in the ability tree, so I won’t be elaborating.

Determination

This is your CC break. Use it when you get CC’d and can no longer deal damage as a result of being CC’d.

Missile Blast

This ability deals more damage than Rapid Shots, but less than Tracer Missile. The key benefit here is that it’s instant, allowing you to deal damage while moving. It also does a small amount of AoE damage, but it isn’t ever worth using this ability for that purpose.

Unfortunately, it costs 20 Heat and doesn’t generate a stack of Supercharge, so it’s never worth using for Arsenal. I really wish that it did generate Supercharge and cost 15 Heat so the only thing you’d be giving up is a little bit of damage when you have to move just like Shock for Sorcerers.

Until they change it, the only time this ability should ever be used in PvE is if you’re a Merc is if you’re playing the other DPS spec, Innovative Ordnance, and even then, they only use it when they get a proc when their DoTs tick on something that’s below 30% health.

Additional Raid Utility

I have already covered some aspects of Arsenal’s raid utility, like the armor debuff, burst, and target swapping. Here I will cover the rest of it.

Supercharged Celerity

Mercs unfortunately have the worst raid buff by far. Disciplines that use the 1.4s GCD (which includes all DPS specs besides Arsenal, Lightning, and Carnage) do not actually get to use an extra ability during this window because the alacrity increase isn’t significant enough. It is effective at all other GCD tiers though, so it’s an HPS increase for healers and DPS increase for tanks (lol).

This raid buff is also helpful in increasing the tick rate of infinitely refreshable DoTs that are applied at the beginning of the fight, like Lightning’s Affliction and AP’s Retractable Blade, though you can’t really benefit from this in fights where these DoTs need to be frequently reapplied.

Since Supercharged Celerity boosts alacrity for a short time, it also has the potential to mess up some specs that use fairly strict rotations since it can desynchronize their cooldowns, which may be dependent on each other. You won’t get to vent the 10 Heat either if you use this instead of Supercharged Gas.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter that much because no Mercenary is ever gonna take this over Chaff Flare.

Off-Healing

Your three off-healing abilities are Kolto Shot, Emergency Scan, and Rapid Scan. If you ever have to use these, something has clearly gone wrong with the fight, or someone is not pulling their weight and you should complain to the raid lead and make a big scene about having to off-heal.

This game is designed around each role being able to fully perform all of its duties without the need for another off-role’s help. You should not ever off-heal yourself unless you think you will literally die if you do not receive healing right now and the pull is still salvageable and the same goes for healing someone else.

If there is downtime though where you can’t do anything else at all, it’s okay to heal yourself with Emergency Scan (make sure you can get down to 0 Heat though) and Kolto Shot, but avoid using Rapid Scan if you have any stacks of Tracer Lock, but really make sure there’s nothing you can do at all that would increase your damage output first.

Besides it not being your job as a DPS, a lot of bosses have fairly tight enrage timers, so if you’re having to waste your precious GCDs helping out another role because they can’t deal with what they are fully capable of dealing with, you’re gonna end up wiping to an enraged boss later anyway.

I would like to be clear that building stacks of Supercharge outside of the fight or during downtime is encouraged. I would not consider that to be off-healing though since the purpose is not to gain health.

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.

Level 23 Choice – Tracer Missile Buff

Proficient Tracing

• Effect: Reduces the activation time of Tracer Missile by 0.2 seconds and the Heat it generates by 2.
• Recommendation: Never take this. Signature Shot offers a greater sustained DPS increase that is far easier to take advantage of in boss fights. Now that the activation frequency of Supercharged Gas is more consistent thanks to Overcharged Cells and its duration is longer, Arsenal is no longer reliant on the additional Heat efficiency provided by Proficient Tracing. This option also desynchronizes the amount of Supercharge stacks you have with Priming Shot, making it more likely that you’ll waste stacks.

Signature Shot

• Effect: Targets affected by your Heat Signature take 50% more damage from Priming Shot and 10% more damage from Rail Shot.
• Recommendation: Take this in single-target situations. Signature Shot offers the greatest single-target DPS boost out of these options and does not cause issues with Heat Management thanks to the consistent frequency and longer duration of Supercharged Gas. That said, you will likely need to use Vent Heat or, if necessary, use Rapid Shots a few times if you waste even a couple of Supercharge stacks.

Triple Trace

• Effect: Tracer Missile fires up to 2 additional half-strength missiles at other enemies within 5m of the primary target.
• Recommendation: Take this in solo content and in fights where you can consistently hit 2 additional high-priority targets. A single Tracer Missile with Triple Trace offers roughly the same sustained DPS as the damage boost to Priming Shot by Signature Shot and also applies Heat Signature to more targets, which synergizes with other AoE effects. However, in boss fights, concentrating more damage onto the primary target is more important, and Fusion Missile can almost always adequately spread Heat Signatures with Thermonuclear Fusion when necessary.

Level 27 Choice – Sticky Dart, Power Barrier, and Stealth Scan

Sticky Dart

• Effect: Grants the Sticky Dart ability, which detonates after several seconds, dealing comparable damage to 1 GCD of Sweeping Blasters to up to 8 nearby enemies and slowing them by 60% for 10 seconds. Standard and weak enemies enter a state of panic while the dart is active and are knocked down by the blast. 15s cooldown, costs 15 Heat.
• Recommendation: Take this for solo content only. The knockdown and panic effects are fun, and the slow means that you’ll have an easier time keeping enemies in your AoE. Sticky Dart deals more damage than a Triple Trace Tracer Missile if you can hit at least 4 targets. You can use it for a small amount of additional pre-casted burst in boss fights as well, but Power Barrier is typically more valuable.

Power Barrier

• Effect: Tracer Missile and Rapid Scan generate a stack of Power Barrier, which increase damage reduction by 2% per stack for 15 seconds. Stacks up to 3 times.
• Recommendation: Always take this for group content. The other two options aren’t all that useful in PvE group content while 6% DR is consistently useful and effortless for Arsenal to maintain.

Hunter Killer Droid

• Effect: Grants the ability Hunter Killer Droid, which reveals stealthed opponents and roots them for 2s, slows all enemies within its 8m radius by 30%, and grants Droid Overwatch for 15s. Droid Overwatch reduces your damage taken while stunned by 30%. 20s cooldown.
• Recommendation: Never take this in PvE. Many stealthed enemies in PvE content just ignore this ability, and while the stun RDT is nice, it costs a GCD and you’re giving up 6% DR, which diminishes the value in the few fights where you do get stunned.

Level 39 Choice – Heatseeker Missiles Buff

Customized Warhead

• Effect: Increases the critical chance and critical damage of Heatseeker Missiles by 10%.
• Recommendation: Take this in fights with lots of downtime. Customized Warhead offers less single-target sustained DPS and isn’t as consistent as Tracing Residue, but not by much, nor does it require high uptime. Since Heatseeker Missiles has a long cooldown, most of the DPS you’ll lose will be from your filler, Tracer Missile, making Tracing Residue less effective. Still, I’d only take it in fights with frequent downtime, like Operator IX in TFB.

Tracing Residue

• Effect: Heatseeker Missiles apply a Tracing Residue to the target, increasing your Tracer Missile damage against the target by 10%.
• Recommendation: Take this in most single-target situations. Tracing Residue offers the greatest and most reliable single-target sustained DPS increase, even without Proficient Tracing. However, it relies on high uptime and restricts target swapping, so if either of those presents an issue, switch to one of the other options.

Thermonuclear Fusion

• Effect: Fusion Missile spreads your Tracer Missile’s Heat Signature to the targets it damages, if it damages at least one target already affected by your Heat Signature. Heatseeker Missiles fire additional quarter-strength missiles at up to 8 enemies within a 20m radius of you centered on your target.
• Recommendation: Take this option for solo content and in boss fights with multiple enemies. Thermonuclear Fusion performs really well in just about any multi-target situation, and it becomes better than Tracing Residue and Customized Warhead as soon as you can consistently hit at least 1 additional target with almost every use of Heatseeker Missiles. Since Heatseeker Missiles only deals full damage to the primary target, make sure to target the enemy with the most health.

Level 43 Choice – Chaff Flare, Supercharged Celerity, and Power Overrides

Chaff Flare

• Effect: Grants the Chaff Flare ability, which reduces your threat by a moderate amount, grants several effects that last up to 6s:
  • Chaff Flare: Melee/Ranged defense chance is increased by 35%
  • Unshakeable: Immune to interrupts.
  • Decoy (2 stacks): Each stack of Decoy absorbs 100% of the damage dealt by the next direct single-target Force/Tech attack and consumes a stack.
• Recommendation: Almost always take this. The unique defensive components of Chaff Flare previously given to the DPS specs have been slightly reworked and rolled into the base ability. Notably, the defense chance no longer applies to Force/Tech, and Decoy doesn’t last nearly as long. Keep in mind that the in-game description is slightly inaccurate. It does not mention that Decoy only absorbs single-target damage, so it won’t work against AoE damage (or Melee/Ranged or periodic). In essence, it works against the same attacks as reflect abilities.

Supercharged Celerity

• Effect: Grants the Supercharged Celerity ability, which requires and converts 10 stacks of Supercharge to increase you and your Operation group’s alacrity by 10% for 10 seconds.
• Recommendation: Never take this. The Mercenary raid buff is the worst one by far. Supercharged Celerity does not sufficiently increase your alacrity to alter the number of abilities you can activate over its duration, specifically at the 1.4s GCD. It only gives you enough of a boost at all other GCD threshold. Since the vast majority of disciplines use the 1.4s GCD, the alacrity does not provide a tangible benefit, will lower your damage output since you can’t activate Supercharged Gas, and disrupt some rotations. The only way Supercharged Celerity can possibly boost group DPS is by increasing tick rates on refreshable DoTs, assuming they never fall off, and/or by lowering the cooldown of OCDs, potentially allowing them to be activated an additional time over the course of the fight or within the same phase, though that is extremely situational. Keep in mind that you will need to activate Supercharged Celerity before those DoTs and OCDs are activated in order for it to do anything.

Power Overrides

• Effect: Reduces the cooldowns of Concussion Missile and Power Surge by 15 seconds each. In addition, Power Surge grants a second stack.
• Recommendation: Take this in specific fights only. Chaff Flare is typically a vastly superior option, but it doesn’t work in every boss fight, as most boss attacks deal AoE damage, even if they don’t look like it. In those fights, you can take Power Overrides instead to boost your mobility.

Level 51 Choice – Improved Vents, Energy Rebounder, and Jet Escape

Improved Vents

• Effect: Vent Heat now immediately vents an additional 15 Heat and grants 10% alacrity for 6 seconds.
• Recommendation: Never take this. The additional Heat only ever amounts to an extra half-channel of Sweeping Blasters every 2 mins, and the alacrity boost is too weak to do anything. Energy Rebounder is ridiculously strong anyway.

Energy Rebounder

• Effect: When you take damage, the active cooldown of Energy Shield is reduced by 3 seconds. This effect cannot occur more than once every 1.5 seconds. In addition, when taking damage, you have a 20% chance to emit an Energy Redoubt, which lasts up to 6 seconds and absorbs a small amount of damage. This effect cannot occur more than once every 10 seconds.
• Recommendation: Always take this. The Energy Shield cooldown reduction adds up rapidly, and the little Energy Redoubt is a nice bonus to your mitigation. Without AoE DR, it’s more essential to have Energy Shield available as often as possible.

Jet Escape

• Effect: Reduces the cooldowns of Jet Boost by 5s and Determination by 30s. In addition, the duration of Hydraulic Overrides is increased by 4s.
• Recommendation: Never take this. Energy Rebounder is in a league of its own and reigns supreme in all content. This choice is not balanced.

Level 64 Choice – Kolto Surge, Power Shield, and Tag and Bag

Kolto Surge

• Effect: Kolto Overload triggers at and can heal you up to 60% of your maximum health. Additionally, Kolto Overload lasts 2 seconds longer and heals for twice as much time each time it restores health.
• Recommendation: Always take this. Kolto Surge significantly increases the reliability of Kolto Overload such that it will protect you from all but the most deadly attacks without needing to pair it with something else. The only drawback of Kolto Overload is its ridiculously long cooldown.

Power Shield

• Effect: Energy Shield now further decreases ability activation pushback by 30% and increases all healing received by 20% and makes you immune to interrupts.
• Recommendation: Never take this in PvE. The other two options are far better than this one.

Tag and Bag

• Effect: Activating Supercharged Gas lowers the cooldown of Kolto Overload by 5s. In addition, hindering a target with Electro Net increases your alacrity by 15% for 9s.
• Recommendation: Never take this. I have reworded the effect to emphasize the more useful part. You can shave off up to ~45s of Kolto Overload’s cooldown with Tag and Bag as an Arsenal Mercenary, which is technically helpful if you find yourself needing the ability on cooldown and can tolerate its base effectiveness. However, I don’t think the cooldown reduction is significant enough to be valuable. Furthermore, the alacrity boost is worthless. Reducing your GCD from 1.4s to 1.3s for 15s doesn’t change the number of whole abilities you can activate in that time; it’s still 7, regardless. It also requires the target to be hindered, and the most lucrative targets for Net, bosses, are almost always immune, meaning the effect doesn’t apply at all.

Level 68 Choice – Jet Escape, Responsive Safeguards, Electro Dart

Rocket Out

• Effect: Grants the Rocket Out ability, which makes you jet backward 20m. While jetting, you are immune to CC. Rocket Out also grants Smoke Screen, which makes you immune to leaps, pulls, pushback, and interrupts for 4s. Taking Melee or Tech damage while Smoke Screen is active refreshes the cooldown on Rocket Out. Smoke Screen can only be granted once every 40s. Cannot be used while hindered. 17s cooldown.
• Recommendation: Almost always take this in PvE. Rocket Out is your only real way to cover great distances in a short period of time because the movement speed boost from Hydraulic Overrides is barely noticeable, doesn’t last very long, and isn’t available as often as it’s typically needed.

Responsive Safeguards

• Effect: Grants the Responsive Safeguards ability, which absorbs all incoming direct single-target damage for the next 6 seconds, reflecting 50% of the absorbed damage back at the attacker, and healing you for 5% of your maximum health each time an attack is absorbed. Can be used while stunned. 2 min cooldown.
• Recommendation: Take this if you need it to survive. This is a super strong DCD, but not every fight has something you can reflect, and even the ones with something reflectable damage can typically be mitigated by Chaff Flare. Meanwhile, Rocket Out will consistently provide a ton of value in almost all fights, so the only time you should take it is if you need another cheese or can deal a boatload of damage with the reflect.

Electro Dart

• Effect: Grants the Electro Dart ability, which stuns the target for 4 seconds and deals a small amount of direct damage.
• Recommendation: Take this if there’s something that needs to be stunned. Mercenaries have to pick between extremely valuable abilities in this tier. Other disciplines get their hard stun as a baseline ability or otherwise don’t have to give up nearly as much, so see if one of those Combat Styles can do that mechanic instead.

Level 73 Choice – Afterburners, Gyroscopic Alignment Jets, and Trauma Regulator

Afterburners

• Effect: Missile Blast immobilizes the target for 4 seconds. Direct damage caused after 2 seconds ends the effect. This effect can only occur once every 8 seconds. In addition, Jet Boost’s knockback effect is stronger and pushes enemies 4m further away.
• Recommendation: Never take this in PvE. The effects can be incredibly useful in PvP, though so can Trauma Regulators.

Gyroscopic Alignment Jets

• Effect: You vent 20 Heat when stunned, immobilized, knocked down, or otherwise incapacitated. Additionally, your next Tech ability deals 10% extra damage or healing.
• Recommendation: Never take this. You can’t make use of the additional Heat, while the damage boost is small and more likely to boost the damage dealt by a Tracer Missile than a Heatseeker Missiles. Trauma Regulators is more useful.

Trauma Regulators

• Effect: While Energy Shield is active, you generate a stack of Trauma Regulators each time you take single-target direct damage. Stacks up to 10 times. When Energy Shield expires, each stack of Trauma Regulators instantly heals you for 4% of your maximum health.
• Recommendation: Always take this. At 10 stacks, you heal for 40% of your max health when Energy Shield ends, which is quite significant. Unfortunately, it doesn’t mention the stacks building only from single-target damage either, so it works the same as Responsive Safeguards and Chaff Flare’s Decoy.

Gearing and Stats Priorities

Tactical Items

Primed Ignition
Effect: Priming Shot causes its target to burn for 12 seconds. Blazing Bots, Heatseeker Missiles, and Tracer Missile all tick its damage.
Recommendation: This is your default tactical item. It provides the greatest single-target DPS increase compared to the other Arsenal tacticals and is in general one of the strongest tactical items in the game. Unfortunately, the large damage increase comes in the form of a 12 second DoT, which significantly hampers Arsenal’s otherwise exceptional target swapping capabilities. It still does some damage as a DoT, but the bulk of it will come from the additional ticks from your abilities that cause it to tick, so if you have to target swap very frequently, it will be difficult to get as much of a benefit out of it. That said, the incredible DPS increase provided by this tactical means you’ll still use it in all group content. As I’ve already mentioned, Primed Ignition also provides a great cornerstone around which you can structure the rest of your rotation by helping you to keep track of your Barrage proc.

Gyroscopic Stabilizers
Effect: Reduces the cooldown of Death from Above by 20s. In addition, Death from Above deals 25% more damage to targets affected by your Heat Signature.
Recommendation: This is your AoE tactical item. It makes Death From Above useable a lot more frequently and powerful enough to deal considerably more damage per GCD than Tracer Missile, though not nearly enough to match the single-target DPS increase of Primed Ignition. I would strongly consider using it in solo content, but that’s about it.

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 Items

BioWare has removed set bonuses from the game and replaced them with Legendary Items, 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, though unfortunately, we don’t really get to experience the benefit of this customization as Arsenal. Here are the Legendary Items you should use as an Arsenal Mercenary:

• Concentrated Fire – Activating Supercharged Gas makes your next Rail Shot or Emergency Scan an autocrit.
• Overcharged Cells – Priming Shot builds 3 stacks of Supercharge.

Both implants are similarly valuable to Arsenal, though Innovative Ordnance benefits more from Overcharged Cells, so you might want to pick up that one first. Also, please don’t waste your autocrit from Concentrated Fire on Emergency Scan unless you can’t deal damage and won’t be able to before the proc falls off.

You can learn more from the dedicatedGuide to Legendary Items in SWTOR 7.0. It also offers a full list of all currently available Legendary Implants in the game.

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 GCD, 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. Please note that this discipline gets +3% Alacrity from their stance, so you don’t need as much to reach the desired threshold, and it is more practical to go for the 1.3s GCD if you decide to use the Zeal (Cyan) Alacrity Guild Perk Set Bonus.
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. For reference, it takes ~6.5 blue 276 augments to offer the same amount of tertiary stat as a single piece of purple 340 gear. The number of augments required to match the tertiary stat provided drops by ~1 with each rarity and rating boost.

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 276-300 iRating augments released back in 6.0 are still BiS. There are 3 different rarities to consider for augments. 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 276 augments are pretty cheap.

Almost everyone should buy the blue 276 augments because they provide the greatest bang for the buck, but you do have multiple options:

• Gold 300 augments (Superior [Type] Augment 77 + Augmentation Kit MK-11). These are overall best-in-slot (BiS). Equipping a complete set of gold augments instead of a complete set of purple augments nets you an extra 2.7 purple augments worth of stats. However, unless you need them to reach a stat threshold or are doing MM content, you’re basically just buying jewelry.
• Purple 286 augments (Advanced [Type] Augment 74 + Augmentation Kit MK-11) are the mid-tier augments. Equipping a complete set of 14 purple augments instead of a complete set of 14 blue augments will net you an extra 2 blue augments worth of stats.
• Blue 276 augments ([Type] Augment 73 + Augmentation Kit MK-11) offer the most bang for the buck. Almost everyone should get this tier of augments.Compared to purple augments, they provide ~88% of the benefit for ~7% of the cost. Compared to gold augments, the blues provide ~73% of the benefit for ~0.7% of the cost. Spend your hard-earned credits on something else.

Each tier is about 10x more expensive than the one below it, so you can get a full set of 14 augments from the next tier down for about as much as it costs for a single augment of the tier above it. For example, 14 purple augments cost about as much as 1 gold augment.

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 Serendipitous Assault (SA) for all PvE content. Each relic offers a proc; FR’s proc boosts your Mastery, whereas SA’s proc increases your Power stats. If you have the choice, purchase the Relic of Focused Retribution first because in equal amounts, and only in equal amounts, Mastery offers more of a DPS gain than Power.

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 Arsenal Mercenary 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.

Boss Fight Build

Build Essentials:

Signature Shot
Power Barrier
Chaff Flare
Energy Rebounder
Kolto Surge
Primed Ignition Tactical

In boss fights, your top, coequal priorities are executing mechanics and dealing maximum, typically single-target, sustained DPS. The talents in this build enable maximum sustained DPS, though sometimes you will need to adjust to account for specific mechanics or provide utility to your group.

You’ll also be taking talents that increase your survivability and active mobility because you can’t deal damage or do mechanics if you aren’t alive or in range.

The boss build is inferior against regular enemies because your AoE is weaker and less immediate in exchange for being more efficient and sustainable. You’re relying on your target to be alive for an extended period of time to deal damage, and enemy health typically doesn’t line up with a full-fledged boss rotation.

This build is not as performant in PvP because your CC is primarily limited to whatever you get for free, and your instantaneous burst will be weaker or outright non-existent.

There’s nothing flashy about Arsenal’s boss fight build and it’s quite similar to what was available in 6.0. You may want or need to switch to Responsive Safeguards, Thermonuclear Fusion, Customized Warhead, or Power Overrides depending on the makeup of the boss fight.

Solo Content Build

Build Essentials:

Triple Trace
Sticky Dart
Thermonuclear Fusion
Chaff Flare
Energy Rebounder
Kolto Surge
Trauma Regulators
Gyroscopic Stabilizers Tactical

In story content, on planets, and in flashpoints, you’ll almost exclusively encounter regular enemies AKA trash mobs. While you can technically use DPS to measure performance against trash, it is far more appropriate to think in terms of how many GCDs it takes to defeat each enemy and a whole group, and which talents get you over the threshold and actually reduce the number of hits to kill.

As of 7.0, SWTOR now offers dedicated talents and tactical items that are designed and balanced for use specifically against trash mobs.

These talents almost always have effects that trigger when you specifically defeat an enemy or when you enter or exit combat. They expand single-target attacks into powerful AoEs or reset cooldowns on specific abilities, often with a massive yet short-lived, damage boost attached to it.

These factors come together to create a truncated rotation that incentivizes a high APM and deals enough damage to defeat an entire group of trash in a flashy way in a matter of seconds.

Yes, trash mobs pose no threat to someone more invested in the game like you, dear reader. The advantage of making such a build is that they genuinely deal more DPS. My testing with Assassin showed a ~25% reduction in TTK, and the combat experience was a lot more fun.

These effects aren’t suitable in boss fights because their effects last such a short time and can only trigger reliably when you are in a small group and are fighting enemies that have a small amount of HP.

These same deliberate limitations also prevent them from being effective in PvP because it’s so difficult to predict exactly when your opponent will die, and such buffs aren’t useful after the fact anyway. Furthermore, you often have to give up effects that are more useful in PvP to take these talents.

Buckle up! Arsenal’s solo content will have you firing lots of missiles at everything! Make sure you have Heat Signatures on everything and then unleash your Heatseeker Missiles. Don’t target the enemy with the most health when using Heatseeker Missiles.

I recommend using Gyroscopic Stabilizers as the tactical because it will help you take out groups of ads faster, while the other single-target options are often excessive. Death from Above deals more single-target damage than Tracer Missile with that tactical, but consider if it would be off cooldown in time for your next AoE opportunity if you decide to use it against a single target.

Openers, Rotations, Priorities

Opener

This is the rotation you use at the very beginning of the fight and for burst DPS checks. It can be a little different than the standard rotation because everything is off cooldown, including your OCDs and relic procs. It’s important to get as much damage as possible while all of your damage boosts are available to maximize their impact.

1. Tracer Missile (pre-cast)
2. Electro Net
3. Supercharged Gas
4. Adrenal
5. Priming Shot
6. Heatseeker Missiles
7. Blazing Bolts
8. Tracer Missile
9. Tracer Missile (should proc Blazing Bolts)
10. Rail Shot
11. Chaff Flare (for threat drop)
12. Blazing Bolts
13. Priority System

Arsenal’s opener is basically just following the priority system when you have all of your abilities available to you. I do want to point a few things out:

This opener assumes that you are using the Primed Ignition tactical. If you aren’t, you’ll want to delay Priming Shot. If you’re using the Burning Bright tactical, you’ll want to delay Priming Shot until after your first Blazing Bolts, which you can use immediately after Heatseeker Missiles.

The second Tracer Missile after the first Blazing Bolts should proc your next Blazing Bolts, but it’s okay to delay it because it also gives you your 5th stack of Tracer Lock, which fully buffs the damage of the next Rail Shot and we want to get that on cooldown as soon as possible.

Supercharged Celerity and the Primeval Fatesealer Relic are used prior to Electro Net so that the cooldown on Electro Net is reduced, but Supercharged Gas and the Adrenal are used afterwards because you’ll only be missing out on a tick of buffed damage while those abilities have the potential to buff a whole extra ability if they’re used after. Try to wait to activate them until the end of Electro Net’s GCD if you can.

Chaff Flare is used there for the purpose of reducing your threat. Tanks have 12 seconds at the beginning of the fight where the boss is forced to attack them when using their single and AoE Taunts back to back. This assumes that tanks will be their taunts immediately, and that won’t be the case but exact timing will vary depending on which tank classes your group has and what fight you’re doing (tanks can’t always afford to use their Taunts like this), so this will give you a little bit of wiggle room. The taunt itself will likely fall off some time during your Blazing Bolts channel, but you can ask your tanks after how many GCDs they do their first Taunt and then wait that many GCDs after my recommended placement to use Chaff Flare as well, but this is a nice rule of thumb.

Single-Target Priority

In Arsenal, you use a priority system because it is impossible to use all of your rotational abilities on cooldown, so when multiple high-damage abilities are available at the same time, a priority list is used to determine which one should be used first in order to provide the highest DPS and ensures that your most damaging abilities are being used as frequently as possible.

Primed Ignition Priority

1. Priming Shot
2. Blazing Bolts (only if there are about ~3 seconds left of Primed Ignition DoT or if it’s almost time to proc again)
3. Tracer Missile (if you’re running late on proccing Blazing Bolts or Heat Signature isn’t applied)
4. Heatseeker Missiles and Rail Shot (with 5 stacks of Tracer Lock)
5. Electro Net
6. Rapid Shots (if you have too much Heat)
7. Blazing Bolts (only if Primed Ignition DoT is applied or it can be immediately reprocced)
8. Tracer Missile

This priority assumes that you are using the Primed Ignition tactical. In my opinion, it is much easier to execute in practice, even though it may look a little more confusing at first glance. Here are some additional notes and rationale about the priority:

In the grand scheme of things, a few seconds delay on Electro Net isn’t going to reduce the number of uses you get during a fight, but delaying your other abilities by a few seconds will add up more quickly. It still is one of your most damaging abilities though, so you don’t want to delay it too long.

Heatseeker Missiles and Rail Shot deal similar amounts of damage, though if you want to be super duper optimal, Heatseeker Missiles does slightly more damage. However, you’ll get more damage out of an autocrit Rail Shot as the last GCD in a Supercharged Gas window than you will out of a Heatseeker Missiles, so it really depends on the situation regarding which one you use first.

You’ll find the Tracer Lock proc to be in short supply sometimes, so if you only have 1 GCD to spare before you have to use Tracer Missile to proc Blazing Bolts because you’re running late, it’s better to use Rail Shot first there as well. Rail Shot is also cheaper to use, so if your Heat is high, it’s probably better to use Rail Shot first. If you don’t want to think about this stuff at all, you’re not gonna miss out on much DPS either way.

Really the only things that need a Heat Signature are Heatseeker Missiles and Rail Shot (and Death from Above with Gyroscopic Stabilizers), and while the armor debuff is nice to have, missing out on having it for a single ability will have less of an impact than delaying your abilities too much.

If you have a choice between using Heatseeker Missiles/Rail Shot and Blazing Bolts and there’s only about 3 seconds left on the Primed Ignition DoT, you’ll deal slightly higher damage by using Blazing Bolts than you would if you delayed Blazing Bolts by a GCD and only got half of the ticks to trigger the DoT. Also, the alternative will be to delay Blazing Bolts for 3 more GCDs, until the next Primed Ignition DoT, which is far too long. At that point, you’ll have missed out on a whole Blazing Bolts proc, which is not a good idea.

Priming Shot should be used on whatever you plan to be attacking for the next 12 seconds. If you’re about to switch, it’s okay to delay Priming Shot for a GCD or two until you switch, otherwise you should hold off on switching if you can at least until after your Blazing Bolts if possible.

It’s important that you’re doing something in every single GCD. Don’t wait around to see if Blazing Bolts got procced (you need to be able to anticipate it, which takes practice) or if one of your abilities is about to come off cooldown. You will not get to use all of your abilities on cooldown. Some of them will be delayed. This is completely okay and it’s why this spec has a priority system and not a rotation.

Due to the number of things that Tracer Missile does, you have to be opportunistic and preemptive with your Heat management in AoE situations because your AoE attacks are more expensive.

The fewer benefits you get out of Tracer Missile, the more important it becomes to use that GCD on Rapid Shots instead so you are able to use Tracer Missile on the the GCDs where it does the most without having to worry about overheating. Tracer Missile can do the following things:

• Generate Tracer Lock stacks
• Proc Blazing Bolts
• Tick Primed Ignition DoT

It’s important to practice executing the priority system on a dummy at least until you can execute it without having to constantly look at your bar.

If there is downtime during a fight, remember that you can precast things and often place your DoTs on shortly before the boss can actually take damage. You won’t get the full damage of your DoTs but you also won’t have to spend a GCD to apply them when the boss is vulnerable, so you will end up dealing more damage.

The key to being a great DPS is to always be DPSing. Using any damaging ability is better than just standing there not doing anything. Some DPS is better than zero DPS. Even if you mess up, keep doing the rotation! Unless there’s a mechanic that prevents you from dealing damage or forces you to stop DPSing, you should not stop DPSing.

If a tank is telling you to stop DPS or hold off for a few seconds because they can’t keep aggro, don’t listen to them, they’re the one that doesn’t know the proper way to keep aggro. Tell them to git gud and read a tank guide!