Virulence Sniper

Last Updated: 5/31/21

Please see my Gearing Guide for a detailed overview of gearing in 6.x in SWTOR. Please also see my Alacrity Guide for a much more in-depth look at alacrity.

For Virulence Sniper, I gear as follows:

• Set Bonus: Established Foothold

• Tactical: Exploited Weakness for sustained damage fights with minimal/no target swapping, Ultraviolet Blast for fights with frequent target swapping (Airborne Agents for AoE though I rarely swap since AoE DPS is already great)

• Amplifiers: Periodic Intensity

• Mods: Unlettered Lethal Mods

• Relics: Devastating Vengeance & Primeval Fatesealer (Serendipitous Assault & Focused Retribution for Dxun/PVP)

• Stim: Proficient

• Adrenal: Critical (Attack for Dxun only)

For Virulence Sniper, I allocate my tertiary stats as follows:

• Accuracy: 1,585 - 1,630 (anything outside this approximate range and I usually try to re-optimize by swapping around enhancements and augments)

• Alacrity: around 2,350, a secondary option is around 1,500 if running the UV Blast tactical (at least 1,895 in all scenarios if the Zeal guild perk applies)

• Critical: all remaining tertiary points go into Critical

• Shield: None

• Absorb: None

Note - A variety of alternative gearing approaches exist that stack additional alacrity. See advanced rotation discussions below for more details.

From the priorities above, the defined rotation emerges. The best way to think of the Virulence rotation is a collection mini-rotation blocks that form a larger rotation. Each mini-block ends with Cull.

Please note that under some alacrity builds it may be possible to substitute Takedown in slot #1 for Lethal Shot.

Introduction

A big question for Cull Snipers in 6.0 is whether and when to use Takedown due the Exploited Weakness tactical. The short version is I believe Takedown is either a little better or basically the same as Lethal Shot in damage and thus it is usually a DPS increase to use it in the rotation. However, I do not necessarily believe there is a huge difference in DPS between using Takedown or just endlessly spamming Lethal Shot. I will go through my thinking and high level analysis here so give you insight into my perspective, then you can decide for yourself what makes sense for you.

Ability Overview

For us to make a good decision we need to consider all the factors affecting damage for each ability.

Takedown is a straight-forward ability that deals instant damage. It is normally only usable on targets that are below 30% of their max health, but can be procced by Cull via the Lethal Takedown passive ability to make it usable. Takedown has an 80% chance to trigger on each tick of damage by Cull. Since Cull ticks 8 times per channel (4 ticks each with the mainhand and offhand), it has a 99.9997% chance to proc on each full channel of Cull. Takedown normally costs 12 energy but is reduced to 12 by the Lethal Takedown passive when it procs.

Lethal Shot is normally a cast ability that deals weapon damage and bleed damage. Lethal Shot can also be activated instantly via the Snap Shot utility (can instant cast Lethal Shot after entering cover) and Stroke of Genius utility (activating Cover Pulse makes the next Lethal Shot instant). Lethal Shot can also be cast on the move via the Calculated Pursuit utility. Lethal Shot costs 15 energy.

Lethal Shot Analysis & Impact of Weakening Blast and Exploited Weakness

Lethal Shot is trickier to analyze than Takedown due to the additional damage that may be triggered based on the Weakening Blast ability and the Exploited Weakness tactical.

Weakening Blast applies a debuff to the target that deals damage any time the target takes bleed damage. Since Lethal Shot deals bleed damage, it will trigger Weakening Blast to deal extra damage if the debuff is active on the target at that time.

The Exploited Weakness tactical increases the damage dealt by Weakening Blast by 50% (so also increases the tick triggered by Lethal Shot if Weakening Blast is active) and causes Lethal Shot to apply a DoT that deals bleed damage over 18 seconds. The Exploited Weakness DoT ticks every 3 seconds for 6 total ticks of damage. If Lethal Shot is cast on a target that already has the Exploited Weakness DoT, the DoT ticks immediately from Lethal Shot and its duration is refreshed. Thus, the rotation's chain spamming of Lethal Shot will ordinarily mean 1 extra tick of Exploited Weakness (and potentially Weakening Blast) per cast, with extra DoT ticks while other abilities (Weakening Blast, Corrosive Dart, Corrosive Grenade, Takedown, Cull) are being used.

Rankings of Potential Fillers

How does the interaction between Lethal Shot, Weakening Blast and Exploited Weakness work? Lethal Shot's direct tick of damage will trigger damage from Weakening Blast and apply Exploited Weakness, for which each tick of the DoT will also trigger Weakening Blast if active on the target.

I am not a true theorycrafter but did some testing of various scenarios and I came up with the following rankings of abilities based on damage per activation. This assumes that the Lethal Shot DoT from Exploited Weakness has full uptime and so does not give credit for all the ticks from the DoT but only the incremental tick from a single cast.

1. Lethal Shot w/ Exploited Weakness Tactical, Weakening Blast is active - Lethal Shot deals damage plus 1 extra tick of the Exploited Weakness DoT, which together lead to 2 extra ticks of damage from Weakening Blast

2. Takedown - Deals instant and immediate damage, is typically around 1k or so less damage at level 75 than a fully loaded Lethal Shot per #1

3. Lethal Shot w/o Exploited Weakness tactical, Weakening Blast is active - Deals damage plus 1 extra tick of damage from Weakening Blast, is typically at least 2k less than Takedown at level 75

4. Lethal Shot w/ Exploited Weakness tactical, no Weakening Blast - Deals damage plus 1 extra tick of the Exploited Weakness DoT, is typically around the same damage as #3

5. Lethal Shot w/o Exploited Weakness tactical, no Weakening Blast - Deals damage and that's it, is typically around 2k less damage than #3-4 at level 75, 4k less than Takedown and 5k less than a fully loaded Lethal Shot

Conclusion

All of this discussion and analysis leads to a fairly simple filler priority as reflected in the rotation guide above:

1. Lethal Shot when Weakening Blast is active on the target

2. Takedown

3. Lethal Shot w/o Weakening Blast active on the target

As mentioned above briefly regarding gearing, Virulence is an interesting discipline in how alacrity builds can change the rotation slightly. My intention is to discuss the most common high alacrity strategies with which I am familiar, explain how they work and make a few recommendations.

First a big caveat - all the discussion below is intended for rotations without the Zeal perk. The Zeal perk only applies in Story and Veteran Mode content, for which these advanced strategies should not be necessary to pass ANY DPS checks.

If you are using the Zeal perk to run 1,895 alacrity and a 1.3 second GCD, you should be able to get extra ticks of Cull within Weakening Blast without any gearing changes. As for the second strategy, gearing up somewhat in alacrity should still accomplish that goal but I did not extensively test it.

The most common high alacrity build involves high alacrity without the Zeal guild perk. This alacrity build leads to a 1.4s global cooldown (GCD) and has significant extra alacrity above the 1,213 required for the 1.4s GCD without the Zeal perk.

The goal of this build is to get extra ticks of damage from Weakening Blast (WB). WB deals damage during its duration any time the target takes bleed damage, which includes ticks from either Corrosive Dart or Corrosive Grenade, ticks of the Exploited Weakness DoT applied by Lethal Shot, or ticks of all 3 DoTs triggered by Cull.

No change in rotation is required for this strategy as it entirely revolves around how alacrity affects your rotation.

With the rotation above, Weakening Blast is always applied immediately before Cull. With alacrity right at the 1,213 breakpoint for the 1.4 second global cooldown, WB expires immediately before the second Cull. However, with high alacrity we can accelerate our abilities so WB carries over into Cull.

See the Gearing Guide for a detailed discussion of alacrity. Briefly, alacrity speeds up your activities by decreasing the cooldown of abilities and causing them to activate and tick faster. For example, the DoT applied by Lethal Shot normally ticks every 3 seconds for 18 seconds (so 6 total ticks of damage), but with a 1.3s GCD it will tick every 2.6 seconds for 15.6 seconds (still 6 ticks of damage). Note that either way it still ticks and deals damage 6 times, but it does that damage over a shorter time with higher alacrity.

Some abilities and durations are not impacted by alacrity. Weakening Blast has a 10 second duration regardless of alacrity. This means if we have some extra alacrity, we can fit extra ability damage into WB's duration. Since WB normally expires right before Cull and it ticks 4 times, if we can get at least the first tick from Cull in during WB, we will get 3 extra ticks of damage from WB and significant extra damage.

So how much alacrity do you need? A common target quoted on the theorycrafting discord is 2,327 for a player running the 1.4 second GCD without the Zeal perk. That is over 1,100 points of extra alacrity over the 1,213 needed for a 1.4 second GCD.

My experience has been that you can execute this strategy consistently with less alacrity by clipping Cull as discussed below. A player's lag between ability activations and inherent latency will also impact the alacrity required.

My recommendation is to play around with alacrity and parse until you are consistently getting the first tick of Cull within Weakening Blast. I have seen good results with around 1,900 alacrity and usually get the extra tick.

How can you check if you are getting Cull within Weakening Blast?

• Parse on the operations dummy. Applying health or damage modifier buffs does not matter for this purpose.

• Open Starparse and pull up the parse you just completed.

• Navigate to the "Combat Log" tab

• Check the "Actions" and "Buffs given" boxes at the top and uncheck all other boxes

• Scan through your combat log and look for the removal of the Weakening Blast debuff (it will be targeting the Operations Training Dummy and have a red downward arrow indicating the debuff was removed from the target)...does that happen before or after Cull? If it happens after Cull then you likely are getting an extra tick.

• If you want to see more detail, then check the "DPS" box. This will show all instances of damage. Scroll to any instance of Cull as Weakening Blast is expiring and see how many ticks of Weakening Blast you get in the first few hundredths of a second of Cull.

It should also be noted that depending on the tick rate of your existing DoTs that tick independently of the ticks from Cull, over-gearing for alacrity can also lead to a "normal" tick of your DoTs in the first few tenths of a second of Cull under Weakening Blast triggering additional ticks of damage.

Another high alacrity build I have played with involves using around 1,925 points of alacrity and is also focused on getting extra ticks of DoT damage. However, here the goal is to time our use of Takedown to trigger extra ticks of the Exploited Weakness DoT as well as extra ticks from Weakening Blast if it is active. In particular, I am trying to see if it is viable to use Takedown during Weakening Blast unlike the general rotation above.

My brief testing indicates that Takedown's base damage at level 75 is around 1k less than Lethal Shot with WB but it's damage is 2k or so more than Lethal Shot without WB. This reinforces the filler priority above where we use Takedown > Lethal Shot outside WB, but Lethal Shot > Takedown within WB. However, if we can get a bonus tick of Exploited Weakness through careful timing then Takedown becomes a preferred filler in all circumstances since then it will generate a tick of Weakening Blast as well.

For this gearing and rotation strategy, the focus is again on the mechanics for alacrity and the GCD. In this case, we care about how the game system treats instant abilities and cast abilities as well as how the Exploited Weakness DoT ticks.

For cast and channeled abilities, the game system typically rounds up to the hundredth place. With the alacrity described above, Lethal Shot should be a 1.36s cast. However, for instant abilities like Takedown the game system applies the GCD until another ability can be activated and does so while rounding up to the tenth decimal place. With the alacrity described above, Takedown would impose a 1.4s GCD until another ability can be used.

Exploited Weakness normally ticks once every 3.0 seconds. Alacrity reduces its tick rate and rounds similarly to cast time, so with the above alacrity it should tick once every 2.72 seconds. Lethal Shot will automatically tick Exploited Weakness and refresh its timer.

Let's now put this all together.

If we use Lethal Shot / Takedown / Lethal Shot, then the first Lethal Shot will apply Exploited Weakness at the end of the cast. Takedown will activate instantly and take up the 1.4s GCD. We can then cast Lethal Shot over 1.36 seconds, which means the second Lethal Shot will deal damage and tick Exploited Weakness in 2.76 seconds since we deal damage with the first Lethal Shot. That 2.76 second delay is MORE than the 2.72 seconds it takes for Exploited Weakness to tick so it ticks BEFORE the second Lethal Shot deals damage! Lethal Shot will then finish casting and deal damage and tick Exploited Weakness again! If Weakening Blast is active we will get an extra tick from it as well!

This cycle should also work when using Takedown at the beginning of each filler cycle due to the total duration of instant abilities used previously. I like this approach due to its simplicity.

How is this different from using the abilities in a different order? If we cast Lethal Shot / Lethal Shot, then the second Lethal Shot ticks in the middle of the DoT's duration and we only get one tick from the second cast. Even if we try to use Snap Shot or Stroke of Genius to instant cast the first Lethal Shot, the identical treatment of alacrity on the cast time and DoT tick rate means we still only get one extra tick of Exploited Weakness for a second Lethal Shot cast. This only works because Takedown triggers the GCD and rounds to a tenth place while DoTs round to a hundredth place.

With sufficient alacrity, I believe you can use Takedown every rotation block prior to any uses of Lethal Shot and get an extra tick of Exploited Weakness, including during Weakening Blast. The extra tick will happen during the subsequent cast of Lethal Shot but would not otherwise happen if Lethal Shot were used instead of Takedown.

How much alacrity? I can not be precise since lag and individual activation speed will vary between players. I was using a gear set built for using the 1.3s GCD with the Zeal perk (1,925 points to be precise) and found it worked on a highly consistent basis. Your results may vary.

Why so much extra alacrity? Mathematically I would expect that just having slightly more than the cut-off for an alacrity GCD breakpoint would be enough to let you get extra ticks of Exploited Weakness by using Takedown at the beginning of a Lethal Shot spam cycle. However, I noticed in my combat logs there is a little bit of a delay in how some of the mechanics work. A build with 1,925 points of alacrity still had some instances where the "bonus tick" during the Lethal Shot cast following Takedown would trigger 0.01 seconds before Lethal Shot finished casting and ticked damage and the DoT again. As such, I would not want to run less alacrity since it seems much lower and I would occasionally not get the bonus tick, but that may be unique to me or be something I am not doing as well as I could.

Here is a look at the tweaked full rotation:

Another advanced rotation strategy involves clipping the end of the Cull channel. Doing so successfully can increase DPS through higher activation speed, and can lead to Weakening Blast ticking the first tick of Cull without utilizing a very high alacrity build as discussed above.

Let's first define how Cull deals damage. Cull has a channel time of 3.0 seconds prior to the effects of alacrity. As a channelled ability, Cull rounds up to the hundredth of a second as its channel time is reduced by alacrity.

Cull deals damage 4 times over its full channel and each tick also causes a tick of damage from every bleed effect on the target. If Weakening Blast is active on the target then each tick of a bleed also triggers a tick of damage from WB as well. So, if all possible DoTs and buffs are active (Weakening Blast, Corrosive Dart, Corrosive Grenade, Exploited Weakness), then Cull will deal damage 4 times, tick all 3 DoTs 4 times, and ticks Weakening Blast 12 times.

With a 1.4s GCD and having alacrity very close to the breakpoint for that GCD will lead to Cull being a 2.8 second channel. Cull will deal damage after its activation at approximately 0.003 seconds, 0.99 seconds, 1.86 seconds and 2.74 seconds. These times and especially the timing for the third and fourth ticks may fluctuate slightly depending on your level of alacrity, latency and other active or passive effects (e.g., the alacrity relic). For example, if running a 1.3s GCD then the third and fourth ticks should come closer to 1.72 and 2.55 seconds, respectively.

So if we get the fourth tick of damage at 2.74 seconds out of a 2.8 second channel, or 2.55 seconds out of a 2.6 second channel, is it even possible to clip Cull and still get that fourth tick of damage? There appears to be an inconsistency where you can clip Cull slightly earlier and still get the fourth tick of damage. My observations and practice indicates you can active the next ability and interrupt Cull at 0.1s left in the channel and still consistently get the fourth tick of damage.

How much does this matter? It can potentially matter quite a lot.

Recall that Cull deals its first tick of damage in less than a hundredth of a second of activating Cull. Also recall that Weakening Blast's duration typically ends right before Cull. Gaining 0.1 seconds can make the difference between getting up 4 extra ticks of Weakening Blast damage.

My recommendation is to try and clip Cull at 0.1s if you can but make sure to parse to double check you are consistently getting the fourth tick of Cull. This strategy is a DPS loss if you miss the fourth tick.

If you are trying to combine some/all of the above strategies, please note that using Takedown during Weakening Blast will make it more difficult to fit Cull's first tick into Weakening Blast's duration. Each Takedown triggers the GCD and so will consume either 1.3 seconds or 1.4 seconds depending on your alacrity, whereas each Lethal Shot cast can consume slightly less (e.g., 1.29 seconds, 1.36 seconds, etc.) based on its more precise rounding. Depending on your level of alacrity, activation speed and latency it may still be possible but there is not a clear cut "right" answer for every player.

Clipping Cull can help merge these two strategies along with extra alacrity. Play around with all these strategies and see what works for you!

Several boss encounters in operations involve multiple bosses that are too far apart to rely on DoT spread to maintain DoTs ticking on multiple targets. Some examples include Zorn & Toth and Firebrand & Stormcaller in Explosive Conflict, both Tunneling Tentacles in phase 1 of the Terror fight in Terror From Beyond, the Dread Council in Dread Palace, Master and Blaster in Ravagers, Sword Squadron and the Revanite Commanders in Temple of Sacrifice, Aivela and Esne in Gods from the Machine and the Trandoshans in Nature of Progress.

While these bosses are typically too far apart to DoT spread, it is possible to modify the Virulence rotation to replace several Lethal Shots with an extra use of Corrosive Dart and Corrosive Grenade on the secondary target to apply/refresh DoTs. The damage from a DoT application over its full duration is significantly higher than the damage and additional DoT tick from a single Lethal Shot, so this strategy can provide a significant DPS boost.

We have three primary goals when thinking how to optimize this multi-DoT strategy:

1. Only substitute extra DoT applications for uses of Lethal Shot and without delaying key abilities like refreshing DoTs on the main target, Weakening Blast or Cull.

2. If possible, also apply a single use of Lethal Shot to add a third DoT via the Exploited Weakness tactical.

3. Swap DoT applications for Lethal Shot outside of Weakening Blast windows, as during Weakening Blast we want all damage to be on our main target to maximize the ticks of damage from Weakening Blast.

This strategy results in a modified main rotation as follows below, assuming we are following the base rotation and not trying to execute any high alacrity rotations:

Snipers are a cover-based class by design, so we want to avoid movement whenever we can and minimize it when it is unavoidable.

Let's first discuss relevant abilities, passives and utilities that can help Snipers quickly relocate from position to position, then go over some strategic considerations and how those can apply in operations encounters that involve lots of movement.

AoE DPS is very simple and straight-forward as a Virulence Sniper. Corrosive Grenade is an AoE attack that applies its DoT to any targets in its area of effect, while Corrosive Dart is spread by Corrosive Grenade as long as it is already ticking on an affected target.

The normal single target rotation will naturally apply and spread DoTs to enemies near your primary target. This is why the above discussion around rotation always uses Corrosive Dart before Corrosive Grenade so that both DoTs will be spread.

However, a key point to remember is that neither Corrosive Dart nor Corrosive Grenade deal very high damage on their own. Their damage is multiplied through use of Cull that causes each DoT to tick extra times, and it buffs the damage of Weakening Blast. Since Cull and Weakening Blast (unless running the Airborne Agents tactical) only affect one target, this leaves the normal rotation dealing solid AoE DPS while performing a single target rotation but substantially less than on the main target.

Apart from DoT spreading, our main options to boost AoE DPS are Orbital Strike and Suppressive Fire. Orbital Strike is a fairly long cast ability that deals heavy AoE damage over a few seconds and has a relatively long cooldown. It should be used pre-pull but otherwise should only be used for AoE situations. Suppressive Fire is a spammable channel AoE attack that deals heavy damage and has a very large area of effect, but is extremely expensive in energy cost.

Virulence's saving grace for AoE DPS is the Lethal Purpose passive ability, which restores 1 energy any time a bleed effect deals damage. The energy recovery in single target is important but not hugely noticeable but really shines in AoE situations.

Normally you can spam 1 extra Suppressive Fire without compromising your energy or maybe 2 if Entrench is active and you are running Established Foothold. You can potentially do a little more if you have Adrenaline Probe available but that's it. However, if you can DoT spread to 3-4 or more enemies then Fighting Spirit gives you virtually unlimited energy and you can potentially spam Suppressive Fire until needing to refresh DoTs.

When thinking about AoE DPS, there are three options to deal with multiple targets. Let's consider each one and when it should be used.

• Continue single target rotation. As noted above, the single target rotation naturally applies and spreads DoTs to nearby targets. I recommend this approach if the group has other players with DoT spreading, the adds have low health and will die quickly, can ignored until DoT spread steadily kills them, or if the single target DPS check is especially challenging. 80-90% of the time in AoE situations this option is appropriate as there are few (if any) actual AoE DPS checks in operations at any difficulty.

• Modify single target rotation to add an Orbital Strike cast or Suppressive Fire channel to replace 2 Lethal Shots. Most fights do not have continuous add waves but instead feature periodic spawns of adds near the boss or that can be pulled near the boss. For example, if Foreman Crusher in Karagga's Palace is held near the shield then adds spawn next to him at 75% / 50% / 25% of boss health. Another example is the periodic spawning of adds in the Grob'thok encounter in Dread Fortress. In these situations, we might want a little extra AoE to quickly burst them down but want to avoid compromising our single target damage. Swapping a couple Lethal Shots for an Orbital or Suppressive Fire along with DoT spread ticking damage will contribute enough DPS that along with teammates to quickly kill the adds. I suggest this approach for any fights where the single target rotation does not provide enough AoE DPS.

• Apply and spread DoTs, cast Orbital Strike then spam Suppressive Fire. This approach maximizes AoE DPS at the trade-off of dramatically lower single target DPS on the main target. It is only appropriate when there is no main target (i.e., trash pulls) or when a fight has significant AoE DPS requirements and the group composition has no or very little AoE damage (i.e., no DoT spread other than you). For example, if a second wave of adds spawns in Grob'thok and the first wave is still alive then a few extra channels of Suppressive Fire might be appropriate. An even better example is the Dxun Control Center encounter, where overall the focus is single target damage to kill the droids and big adds but being overwhelmed by adds is a real concern. I only suggest this approach in fights when add waves start to accumulate and are not being killed on time, and thus sacrificing single target DPS is desirable to keep tanks and healers from being overwhelmed with adds.