#Sentinel tank force update

There will be a LOT of spam of Blade Rush, which is the toughest thing to get used to with Fanged God Form. This leads usually to an alternating cycle of 3 Blade Rush (for rotation cycles where Precision is buffed by Zen to get a third charge and Zealous Strike is used to generate energy) and a cycle of 5 Blade Rush (Precision only has 2 charges without Zen and Zealous Strike is still on cooldown or not needed). With Fanged God Form, the only ability used outside of Precision window is Zealous Strike. My initial testing indicate it is spot-on so it is largely produced below though with my own thinking and analysis around why it is ideal.Ībsent Fanged God Form, the rotation would utilize Twin Saber Throw and even Blade Barrage outside the Precision window. He passed along some theorycrafting from Dantiko, Reshari and Luna analyzing key elements of the rotation. My good friend and guildmate Zaroaster / KhazadSanci was a valuable resource to point out how certain elements of the Fanged God Form rotation should work in 6.1 after the Hyper stack bug was fixed.

Impact on Rotation: If using Fanged God Form, it is critical to string together as many uninterrupted chains of Blade Rush as possible to maximize the benefit of Hyper stacks.įirst, let me provide credit where it is due.

#Sentinel tank force update

When originally released in 6.0, off-GCD abilities served to remove the Hyper stacks but thankfully that was fixed in update 6.1. Early testing of the updated rotation reflects that this additional energy generation can easily support use of unprocced Dispatch in the execute phase, which is a further DPS increase.Īnother easily overlooked aspect of this tactical is that the critical chance buff from Hyper stacks is removed after using an ability other than Blade Rush, but this means that the first non-Blade Rush ability still receives the +10-30% critical chance buff! Ensuring that the rotation always uses this feature to buff Clashing Blast with +30% critical chance (and a comparable buff to critical hit damage) is a huge benefit. In fact, once the Hyper stacks have reduced the ability cost to zero, the Focused Slash passive ability (refunds 1 Focus) makes Blade Rush generate energy. The energy cost reduction for any consecutive uses should also enable a skilled player to avoid any use of a basic attack.

As such, having a consistent increase to critical chance of 10-30% is very helpful. The BIS tactical as of 6.1 appears to be Fanged God Form, which shakes up the rotation significantly though in a way that greatly simplifies the rotation through introducing LOTS of Blade Rush spam.Īnalysis: Blade Rush is by far the most commonly used ability in the typical Combat rotation. They also received stronger tacticals for both sustained single target, burst and AoE DPS. Both other disciplines get a bigger benefit from the set bonus due to having DoTs tick that increase the chance of generating charges of Force Clarity to buff an individual ability’s damage by 25% and apply a 10% overall damage buff for 10 seconds. Unfortunately, the developers short-changed Combat in comparison to the other Sentinel disciplines. The discipline also got access to an interesting mix of tactical items to let it flex in various ways to meet specific content challenges whether that is through higher sustained DPS or additional AoE capability. The discipline got access to a great set bonus in Descent of the Fearless that provides some strong overall and ability-specific DPS buffs. The discipline remains capable of good sustained DPS and very strong burst DPS, making it viable in all content. Combat DPS was the weakest of the Sentinel DPS disciplines in 5.X and that appears likely to continue in 6.0.