This is what I have settled on after about 5 or 6 different ranged spy expertise layouts.
This one assumes Razor Cat 5 piece set, precision/luck/camo 35's, and is geared for primarily solo-PvP. I currently use 1 camo pup, 1 rifle damage pup and 1 strikethrough chance pup.
Later I'll explain some of my choices, as they may not be obvious but will make perfect sense when considered with the purpose of this expertise and how I play ingame.
Firstly, it is plain that there is more than one way to skin a cat, this expertise is not THE only way to be a bit of a ranged menace, but after quite a while of experimenting, this is the best I have found so far for the way I play the profession, so I will address the skill box choices I made according to my tactics/strategy for playing Spy and maybe it make more sense. So far I really have much more fun pvp'ing since arriving at this expertise selection than all the previous others.
Starting off....the only MUST-HAVE for any expertise setup in my opinion is Without a Trace plus Covert Mastery if you plan on pvp'ing at all (a close second being 2pts in Diversion for your decoys). This not only makes you undetectable for 30secs but you also drop all DoT's AND you do not incur the smokebomb "snare".
Why this is a must is because it allows you to fight all the way down to your last little sliver of health and no matter how many DoT's are stacked on you, they all go poof with your puff of smoke. Without this ability, when you smokebomb to escape combat, your DoT's remain and depending on how low on health you are at the moment of smokebomb, you will need to use a cloaked heal and possibly a health stim AND will need to use Run Its Course to remove the DoT(unless it is fire or acid, or commando DoT, then you are basically screwed).....this basically means you will have to smokebomb out much sooner and therefore will not get as many attacks in. This is problematic because I have found if my crits and strikethru's dont kill a target, the acid DoT stack from Spy Fang will handle them while I am cloaked...unless they have a DoT cure ability themselves. So the extra hits from Spy Fang can really do a lot of DoT damage, I have stacked them up to 1200 dmg per tick many times, once I smokebomb that usually that gives the target about 5secs until incap if they cant remove it somehow or have all heals on cooldown. The anti-snare is a huge bonus because whether you are melee or ranged, if you find that you need to get away then 30secs is plenty of time to put 64m between you and them, or if you are in a city to get Line of Sight to shelter you from AoE damage. I use accaragm 90% of the time I solo pvp so this gives you fast running while cloaked without a need for putting a point in Burst of Shadows, which in my practice I have found to be more useful as an offensive skill and completely overkill as a defensive skill which most tend to think is its purpose.
My Strategy
I want to be able to do as much damage as possible via crits and/or strikethru, and be able to hang in the fight as long as possible before using an escape with this expertise. My time is spent 75% solo pvp popping from planet to planet hunting down imperial SF and attacking. I want to be able to take down an SF even if he is grouped and the group size isnt too large (in which case no expertise will help you since spy is not a tank-worthy profession).
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So lets look at the first window and how it accomplished this
Precision and Camoflage
Precision is the obvious choice here for its bonus to crit chance, strikethru, and block chance. Sure the amount from +50 is insignificant, but every little bit does add up so if I had to pick something it might as well have been precision since I am not stacking agility anywhere else. I hate being revealed, so I take camo. No need to waste points on agility because I am using Avoid Damage.
Cheap Shots & Equilibrium
With 3 pts in Cheap Shots and 1pt in Equilibrium I now stack 15% action cost reduction on top of the 15% ACR from the Razor Cat set, and now any missed attack has zero action cost on top of that. Action cost is heavy in Spy, especially if you use Assassinate, now the only time I ever run out of action is when I rely heavily on Assassinate for particularly tough targets like some jedi and commandos (everyone else I typically primarily go back and forth between Blaster Burst and Spy Fang, mixing in the others here and there during the fight as necessary). Fight or Flight will take care of you if you sart running low on action and let you ride out all your specials for 7 additional seconds which should give you plenty of time to do some serious damage.
Avoid Damage & Preparation
Avoid Damage is an awesome ability. 50% dodge and 75% evasion for 15secs, this stacks on your current stats, with nothing but med buffs I see dodge at 74% and evasion at 85%, this is a big deal. If used at the right time, this skill can be the difference in the fight easily. Without this ability it is exponentially more difficult to take down a single target grouped with others. Preparation gives you several seconds of 30% damage boost and zero action cost for all crits and strikethrus in the duration. I cant see how anyone can pass this up for one point.
Spy Fang and Blaster Burst
I cant see passing on either of these.....I tried once too, these are two quick cooldown attacks with a serious DoT potential with Spy Fang and good damage bonus if Blaster Burst stacks (up to 40% bonus I believe). I seem to have trouble getting Blaster Burst to stack much more than 2 times, but I frequently get Spy Fang to stack 3 or 4 times which is around 600-900ish acid dmg per tick
*Notable Omissions*
Assassin's Mark
Almost every spy I run across uses this, I for the life of me cannot understand why. It will "sometimes" deal and additional default attack when you hit someone. So we are talking about "sometimes" getting an additional 200 or 300 dmg here and there. I cannot notice any tangible difference when I use it and when I dont use it and the combat logs dont seem to reveal any significant boost so I ditched it and put this point into Reveal, a much more useful ability. I have read in Spy forum guides that this is a must have ability, I cant possibly see how anything justifies such a claim. Such small amounts of extra damage only benefit you during long protracted fights, which is not what I am interested in. I dont want to have to fight someone more than two cloaks (decoy plus smokebomb) unless it is to force a BH to burn his shield, a medic to burn his stasis, a jedi to burn his saber block. In these cases I dont see myself winning the fight due to a few extra default attacks.
Sniping
This 6% extra dmg would be nice to have, but I put the points elsewhere, I can recover this extra dmg by utilizing acid and cold weapons
Opportunity, Jagged Edge, & Savagery
This is a pretty stout line......+8% crit chance(4pts), 15% crit hit dmg bonus(3pts), plus another 15% crit hit dmg bonus(for 1pt). It is really hard to pass this up, but it comes at a cost of 8pts. I think this is a judgement call whether you want to go this route to do your heavy damage or use the points elsewhere. What the choice boiled down to for me was do I want to spend action landing specials inorder to stack the effect up before I can reap this bonus later in the fight, assuming I havent already had to use an escape, or do I want to put the points in skills that get the bonus upfront while I am initially spending action so that maybe I dont have to even use an escape? I chose elsewhere mainly because the crit dmg bonus here relies on getting the effect to stack first. if you group pvp alot, your pvp pals will appreciate the savagery buff. I think this line is more conducive to group pvp.
Ok now onto the second expertise window....
Cloaked Heal & Diversion
I cant see passing up an extra heal and 20% heal bonus. You have to spend 4 pts in this tier, 3 here is well spent to keep me alive as long as possible, which with my big ACR bonus means I can do a lot more damage over the course of the fight and stack even more DoT's and states. I use my decoy about 50/50 offensively/defensively.......Using the flanking debuff to pop right back out of cloak and reattack while the target has the trivial hit debuff, or to escape because I am in trouble, use cloaked heal plus a stim and hopefully snipe is cooled down by then and I can reattack with snipe and finish taking down my target in a quick second round of attacks.
Rapid Concealment & Smoke and Mirrors
Rapid Concealment simply makes life easier and pvp more fun, no pvp target that is reasonably pvp-experienced is going to go down with your first round of attacks, especially the ones who have a dozen GCW and other buff-items that stack up via macro so it is necessary to use smokebomb sometimes and try again once those wear off and are all on cooldown. Nobody wants to wait 2 extra minutes for their smokebomb timer to reset in this instance. Smoke and mirrors is great for one reason, sometimes you may find yourself with Snipe cooldown ready and still fighting or you may be able to hang in there and get the kill if you can get one more heal in......this ability lets you get that extra heal by using cloaked heal while uncloaked and lets you hit the target with Snipe which not only does big damage with this expertise, but reduces heals by 50% and applies a nice fire DoT which ticks away with the acid DoT which should be up around 600-1200 per tick by now. Combined with some poison from a trap and you could be causing 1200-1800 dmg per tick in DoT's with minimal luck.
Puncturing Strikes, Cloak and Dagger, Initiative
40% dmg bonus to Snipe is a big deal, these are the points taken from opportunity (8% dmg bonus to all attacks). Combined with Cloak and Dagger, you see 120% increase in Snipe dmg, Initiative brings 60% crit chance on top of your normal crit chance (mine is typically around 28-38% depending on buffs) and Snipe shot will hit for huge dmg. I rarely see it hit below 5-6k and have seen it as high as 10k, and that is only the relatively low % of times I review the combat log after pvp. So this the name of my game, hit very hard right off the bat and continue to hit with big dmg specials while they are debuffed to -50% heals, trying to stack DoT's in the meantime.
Shifty Setup
It took me a long time to finally understand this skill. it sounds counterproductive in its description, until you do the math. This skill is still counterproductive if you do not have 4 pts in initiative. Basically my Covert Operative expertise as you have probably figured out is heavily reliant on Snipe, so this skill is to be used in those certain circumstances where Snipe has a higher likelihood of missing or being blocked/glanced/dodged/parried, which I do not want to happen, namely by the vast majority of Jedi and some Medics who stack a lot of dodge and/or block. OK so i lose 20% crit/ST chance...with 4pts in Initiative I still have 40% bonus on top of my natural crit chance %, which is damn good by any other measure....BUT I have reduced their chance to mitigate by 20%. Your typical jedi will have block/dodge up around 25-40%, very few are higher than that.....with Shifty Setup prior to Snipe I take them down to as low as 5% chance to mitigate the hit and I still am way up around 60-70% crit chance. This is a trade worth making without even considering the debuff and fire DoT from Snipe. Again, I only use this on Jedi and certain medics that I know are tough to kill. You will find that at leats 50% of solo pvp targets these days are Jedi anyway so it is a blessing to be honest. I have come to kick myself for not trying it earlier, it would have saved me a lot of frustration.
Reveal
For me this makes Spy much more fun. Just this 1pt plus Experimental Electrobinoculars from the rebel recruiter and you will be able to reveal 90% of the spies on our server within 20m. You will be surprised how many you can passively detect (see them walking around as if you were grouped with them) as well, I use this skill ALL THE TIME. If you catch another spy with their smokebomb still on cooldown then they are screwed if your specials are ready. Once you reveal them they cannot use decoy for several seconds as the have the debuff which prevents it, and you get to lay into them until they decoy at which point if you stayed close enough to them you may still be able to see them cloaked and continue to hit them. You will be able to pop out 100% of cloaked jedis too and anyone smuggler cloaked, though the smuggler cloak rarely ever happens, but I do pop many jedi who have force run on cooldown and try to escape via cloak. Give it a try, well worth 1pt for the fun factor.
*Notable Omissions*
Burst of Shadows
Ok, so I covered this briefly earlier. This really is more useful as an offensive skill. Nowadays the majoirty of solo SF players are Jedi. They ALWAYS force run away when they get into trouble. With BoS they cannot escape. Yes, it can be used as an escape ability as well, but with Covert Mastery it really isnt necessary at all if you are pvp'ing in Restuss ruins, or any city or terrain that offers Line of Sight shelter...even in open world with no shelter to hide behind to protect from AoE, I use accaragm and can easily run 64m away in a few seconds (you really only need to get 30m or so away to escape any AoE in the game) since the smokebomb movement modifier does not apply. Still a lot of people like to use it, and it is only 1pt so it is up to you. I get more satisfaction out of Reveal.
Run Its Course
Covert Mastery also makes this skill easy to do without. I found that I typically wasnt using it nearly as much during actual combat as much as I was using it once I had cloaked or popped a decoy out. Like BoS, only 1pt so its about personal preference. Keeping the DoT's off while fighting uncloaked will keep you in the fight longer for sure, BUT it does not put out fire or acid DoT's which is 90% of the DoT's I see, so really this is only a valuable skill against other spies.
Assassin's Blade, Vibrogenerator, Resonance
I have spent a LOT of time on my test dummies, and I see negligible difference in damage output between critical hits damage and strikethru damage. Dont get me wrong, nothing bad about strikethru, in fact I stack it elsewhere in all my exotics, one power up, and I keep some flameout on hand just to top it off if i dont think accaragm is necessary (group pvp for example), but at one point I reset my expertise to stack as much ST chance as possible with one ST chance power up (bringing me to roughly 28-32% ST chance and a slightly lower % crit chance) and after hundreds and hundreds of recorded hits on test dummies I have found the 4% extra ST chance from Assassin's Blade makes no tangible difference in overall damage done. The differences in the RL luck of the damage rolls can easily swallow up any gains to be made here, or at least this is my theory why the test dummy data turned out this way. I used to put 2 pts in Assassin's Blade (I didnt have Shifty Setup, and only had 3 pts in Initiative), but now I get much better bang for those 2 expertise points with Shifty Setup plus the 4th point in Initiative. If you really want that 4% I would just get a +16 ST chance power up for cheap. As for the other two skill boxes, I honestly dont understand the what Armor Neglect means, and dont know what the effect of Vibrogenerator actually is (is it just additional ST chance? if so, why not just say so like in the box above it??) Regardless I dont have 6pts extra to sink into it without significantly altering my tactics based on this expertise.
Quiet Steps
I tried this skill, again for those damn Jedi, then I realized, why bother putting 2 pts in a skill that can only be used for one attack (Snipe) and only grants 5% reduction in the target's mitigation chance, when I can put 1pt in Shifty Setup and take down 20% of a target's mitigation chance while retaining a 40% bonus to crit hit chance? This skill is for an expertise that is setup up for a totally different set of tactics than mine.
Crippling Traps
This is really a melee spy thing, the only time I use traps is when someone runs after me to get into range and I drop them in their path not to snare them but to apply the poison DoT which can be nasty if they do not have good absorption/resistance. Since I typically use Accaragm, and the Razor Cat set protects against snares, I dont need to snare them because unless they have force run, they typically won't be able to close in on me. This is a great tactic to force jedi to burn their force run, pop a decoy to apply the flanking debuff and then immediately lay into them again while they trivial hit me for a few seconds and cannot get away with force run.
I know...FLAMEOUT, everyone says flameout, but to be honest 99% of the time the 3% ST chance isn't worth passing up the large movement speed advantage you get from Accaragm. 100% ST chance wont matter if you cant stop someone from getting line of sight shelter from your attacks. Sooo....I use Accaragm 90% of the time, if you do any solo pvp you will soon know why, especially in Restuss and invasions. Again, the huge speed advantage will help greatly to keep people from using line of sight to save their ass when you normally would have them pegged. Accaragm also gives roughly the same bonus to agility. However when I group pvp I typically use the Ghost set, so I then use flameout to recover the 3% ST chance from the Razor cat set, and if I am grouped snare protection should not be that big of a deal especially with an officer, and with an officer and a medic....I couldnt care less about snares then. Vercupti is good too for group pvp with this expertise set, you get a big precision bonus (2% crit hit chance & 1% ST chance) plus an evasion bonus, which you can never get enough evasion during group pvp.
Weapons/Elementals
I use rifles. I also primarily use a kinetic acid rifle. The acid proc gives you a few secs of 50% crit chance. To me this is a better option than 4 pts in Opportunity for the 8% crit chance, yes it isnt a static bonus like the skill box, but if you can watch your opponents status bar for the acid proc and hit him with an assassinate or a blaster burst with a few stacks, the damage is still there in the long run. After acid I use cold. I have never ran a test dummy to see if the cold dmg bonus can make up for the 8% crit chance lost but I suspect that it makes up for a good portion, if not most, of it.
Entertainer buff
I wear a primus layered assault suit. So for the ent buff I choose 750 kinetic protection, 3000 energy protection, 5% critical hit chance, 24% second chance to heal automatically, and the rest into constitution.
The armors will set me at approx 9k and 9.5k armor, the GCW buff and GCW stim will bump that over 10k. The crit hit chance is obviously for stacking purposes. The 24% heal chance is not too common though, a lot of people neglect this buff, but if you do the math it breaks down to the following:
When it fires, it heals for 800. That is a 20% dmg reduction on a 4k hit, most crits are less than that. It should only fire 24% of the time, this is effectively a 5% damage reduction over time if ALL HITS are 4k crits, which we all know they arent so the effective dmg reduction is actually significantly higher and will be fluctuating to a higher and lower % as the luck of the combat rolls hash out. In my opinion this is much more directly productive than 200 in any stat. Outright damage reduction is the whole point of dodging, glancing blows, etc etc so it stands to reason to take it directly via heals.
As for the 60pts in constitution, I cant really see +60 in any other stat doing anything more tangible than a free +480 health. Why someone would pay millions of credits for a +250 health weapon augmentation when they can get the exact same thing for 1pt of an entertainer buff is obviously silly
That's about all I can think of. I hope this helps out anyone who wants to delve into spy before the game ends, and doesnt want to spend the long amount of time it takes learning what works and what doesnt. Half of the time I spent was a direct result of bad info from the SWG Spy Forum Guides and info passed off as truth when in reality it was little more than groundless superstition. The biggest one being how much many people think Assassin's Mark is a valuable skill, and that Flameout is the end-all-be-all of food buffs for spies. Neither could be further from reality. They have their uses but those uses do not apply to all, or even very many, ranged pvp spies.
Feel free to ask about anything I might have forgotten that maybe I could share some insight on, or make any inputs. Again, this expertise works for how I play spy. If you are going to employ a different strategy than mine as I described it, use a different suit and jewelry set, then you will definitely need to adjust several skill boxes accordingly.
Good luck and thanks for reading!
-- Edited by Aqua-Raxal on Wednesday 3rd of August 2011 11:13:36 PM
-- Edited by Aqua-Raxal on Wednesday 3rd of August 2011 11:31:27 PM
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-- Edited by Aqua-Raxal on Thursday 4th of August 2011 12:06:10 AM
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-- Edited by Aqua-Raxal on Thursday 11th of August 2011 11:03:20 PM
