#fucking. maybe i should try berserker instead of marauder actually. get some Stop Damaging Me that doesnt rely on hitting her. lol

[corvuscorona]

the chaos advent fight is so good.. I spent like 2h getting my ass kicked just now & for real did not feel any meaningful emotion except :D :D :D haha wheee!! SoP rly puts its best foot forward . and then also behind that one, and also behind that one &cetera. for the whole game

[forcemelt]

PTS 7.1 annihilation / watchman

gonna go over some things I have personally noticed on the PTS for 7.1 for the annihilation marauder and watchman sentinel disciplines as there are some things that made me go 👀

I will try to make this coherent so that even people who don’t play anni get this as long as you sorta know how marauders tend to work like though I'll try to explain some stuff for context. i say this but it'll still make no sense lol

wrote this before the new iteration of the pts came out today, no idea if anything changed bc i don’t have the time to check.

anyway, posting it under the cut, it’s honestly way too long

hemorrhage / plasma blades tooltip

so shortly after 7.0 launched there’s already been some early datamined stuff for 7.1 - in particular i saw a spreadsheet that included some changes to certain abilities/utilities’ tooltips and from what I heard some of it actually went live since then even? not too sure now.

either way, to explain what the hemorrhage passive does, here’s its current tooltip description:

the important part to focus on is the last sentence; that’s some self healing! anyway;

this ^ is the tooltip for hemorrhage now on the pts (and this was also in the very early 7.1 datamined stuff I mentioned). what could this mean? are they removing anni heals?

after a quick test (really didn’t require any deep look on that one lol) I’m still most definitely doing basically the same amount of healing as on live.

need to point out that plasma blades, the watchman mirror for the passive still has the text about healing included on the pts. of course discrepancies between the supposedly mirror disciplines are not a new thing at all, anni and watchman literally have that on live right now with blood fury / burning zen for example.

either way i’m gonna lean towards the new hemorrhage tooltip being some kinda mistake or a leftover of the devs considering removing anni heals but dedicing to just get rid of aoe dr instead. or at least that’s my working theory but honestly who fucking knows lol, but like they would definitely include this in a dev post if they were to remove something like that anyway heh.. maybe in 7.2 🤯

blood fury / burning zen

ok, so this the one main thing I wanted to talk about, but i wanna explain some stuff first.

blood fury is one of the three utility choices you can make once you’re level 43. besides that, there’s also furious power (a rotational ability back in 6.X, now rendered useless as we don’t have the descent of the fearless set bonus) and then theres a choice called bleeding center, the latter of the two actually being the usually recommended choice for that level - what it does is that when one of your dots critically hit you build 2 fury, even during berserk - this is very very handy as annihilation currently wants to have berserk (an ability that becomes available once you get 30 stacks of fury which you build by using rage spending abilities) up for use before force rend (one of anni’s dots) come off cooldown, since now it will do 4x more damage on the initial hit if berserk is also active (it’s like a 40-50k hit - thats a lot of damage at once for a dot spec)

so if burning center tends to often be the recommended choice, why am I talking about blood fury?

simple as - it’s a dps increase. the reason people don’t always recommend it is because it makes the rotation harder to manage and its not viable on fights with a lot of target swapping for example, as you won’t be be able to build your fury stacks as fast and you might end up having force rend off cooldown before berserk becomes available, meaning you have to either delay it or use it without the buff, which is something you should avoid. but as an anni main that loves high parsing numbers this won’t stop me from taking it to a lot of fights (same for a whole lot of other anni maras out there ofc). plus i actually quite like the additional difficulty it introduces to anni, since with the dispatcher’s challenge legendary implant it no longer really has rage issues as much, so blood fury is like a bit of additional fun.

ok, so anyway, there are some interesting things to note about blood fury:

1) first off, “effect cannot occur more than once per second” my ass. happens on each hit with your weapons. you know how the ravage ability is like several hits on the target with both of your lightsabers in just one gcd? yeahh, you get a whole bunch of blood fury hits from it

of course, when people noticed this discrepancy, the question was; so what is the intended effect here? the way it works on anni or watchman? lot of people assumed that the way it is on watchman is the intended effect but it’s not like we couldn’t be sure...

2) and now the funny part - on live there’s currently a discrepancy between how blood fury works on annihilation marauder vs how it works on watchman sentinel (called burning zen there). so what exactly happens is; blood fury only occurs during berserk - when you use berserk, you get 6 charges of it - over the course of a few seconds those charges are consumed by your dots (aka “bleeds” on anni) that are on the target and berserk makes it so they are a crit hit. however - on annihilation, blood fury hits don’t consume berserk charges, but hits of burning zen DO eat berserks (called “zen” on watchman), which... isn’t really something you want. god forbid you pop zen one gcd early and place blade barrage in there, which is all nice and well on annihilation, but on watchman say bye bye to your buffed force melt because your zen charges will be eaten by barrage lmao.

anyway, great news! there’s a new addition to the blood fury / burning zen tooltip on the pts server:

turns out it is not supposed stacks of berserk! and after testing, it does work properly on both disciplines too this time.

but to my surprise, this wasn’t all! I decided to try some parsing on the pts despite my ping being less than ideal. and suddenly my crit is way higher? WELL - as it turns out, blood fury is now an autocrit too! and this actually makes sense - since it’s labeled as bleed damage it means it should technically also be a crit like the other dots are in the berserk window, and it actually does that right now on watchman on live too  - I just never noticed since the fact that the charges get consumed so quickly renders it useless and mostly a dps loss despite the crit.

so yeah, it might do even more damage. I’ve only done a few parses on the pts, but I was able to get even 1k dps increase out of blood fury alone so far and was able to hit 31k dps on the dummy without too much trouble (still one of my luckier parses though, its not like every parse on live i do is 30k). i’m tempted to play around with it more but my ping on the pts really isnt the greatest. on parsely.io there’s someone who was able to do 31.8k even - unsure whether they weren’t able to farm some of the new gear tiers already though.

but either way - top parse on live right now is 31.1k, blood fury making up ~1k of that damage there. doesn’t seem unlikely that you could then parse 32k with annihilation if blood fury will amount for double the dps it does now, so I wonder what kinda implications could this have. would be hilarious if all the former anni players who switched to fury at the start of 7.0 would now switch back bc it can suddenly parse really high (though it depends on just how big the upcoming fury nerf affects its overall dps - and again, not every anni plays with blood fury)

anyway i talked too much so huge props who actually read this tehee