SWTOR 7.5 Plasmatech Vanguard PvE Guide and Best Builds (2024)

SWTOR 7.0 Plasmatech Vanguard 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 Plasmatech Vanguard
Abilities Explained
Ability Tree Choices
Gearing and Stats Priorities
Best Plasmatech Vanguard Builds in 7.0
Openers, Rotations, Priorities

Introduction to Plasmatech Vanguard

Plasma is a DoT spec that attempts to melt through their opponent’s armor by zapping them with pulses of ionized plasma. Their rifle’s power cell also utilizes this plasma so that their blaster shots can more easily set their foes ablaze.

Plasma VGs now have a fairly unique capacity to do powerful burst damage rivaling that of actual burst DPS specs alongside being able to deal considerable AoE damage that is competitive with what the best other DoT specs are capable of.

No other DPS discipline in the game can match Plasma’s versatility, but this versatility comes at a cost. Plasmatech is only competitive with the top burst and DoT specs during 15s windows while the Battle Focus ability is active, and that ability has a 2min cooldown. Outside of those windows, Plasma is considerably weaker than most DoT specs in terms of AoE, and thanks to the 2 minute cooldown, Plasma can’t offer huge burst damage nearly as frequently as all burst specs can.

Assuming Battle Focus is used as often as possible, Plasmatech is capable of single-target damage output that is competitive with what is offered by other mDPS. They are a bit behind in terms of DPS rankings on the dummy, but they can gain a considerable amount of DPS from taking damage thanks to abilities and buffs like Durasteel Armor, Electro Shield, and Reflective Armor. In addition, almost all of their rotational abilities have a range of at least 10m, which makes it much easier to maintain high uptime on bosses.

Plasmatech also features some of the best survivability in the game and they are especially adept at mitigating sustained damage like you often find in burn phases because all of their DCDs last an incredibly long time while having relatively short cooldowns. Their only real weakness when it comes to damage mitigation is the fact that they lack easy access to a cheese DCD unless they want to give up one of their DPS implants in favor of a tank implant that comes with useless stats.

When paired with their competitive damage output, Vanguard DPS in general offers an absurd amount of group utility that typically makes them the best combat style to bring to a raid. The most significant pieces of raid utility include:

The ability to off-tank thanks to having a taunt
Sonic Rebounder, which can be used to cheese numerous mechanics
Access to the only AoE hard stun in the game
The shortest interrupt in the game
The capacity to apply an accuracy debuff on-demand

Right now, Plasmatech is considerably stronger than Tactics in terms of damage output while having slightly better survivability. Vanguard DPS has been considered the flavor of the month for several expansions now, so if you’re looking to do the hardest content in the game or help out your raid team, I highly recommend learning how to play it.

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. Plasmatech permanently lost access to 2 abilities:

Guard (now tank-only)
Flak Shell (the other 2 disciplines still have it, Tactics lost Ion Wave)
Reserve Powercell (merged with Recharge Cells)

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.

Battle rezzes in general are now healer-only, 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.

Group Composition Tips

In order to deal maximum damage, Plasmatech requires 3 other DPS debuffs:

DPS Debuff	Presence of debuff increases DPS by approximately
Internal / Elemental	5.3%
Armor	1.7%
Ranged	0.6%
Total DPS Gain:	7.6%

Plasmatech is a bit on the needy end when it comes to group composition dependence and takes the crown as being most dependent on a debuff it doesn’t provide by gaining a disgusting 5.3% from the Internal / Elemental debuff being present. For reference, all other dependencies max out in the low to mid-4% range, so Plasmatech is about 20% more dependent on the Internal / Elemental debuff being present than any other discipline is on the most valuable debuff they don’t have, including specs that need someone else to apply the armor debuff.

In real numbers, if you’re used to doing 28k DPS in single-target sustained situations with the Internal / Elemental debuff present, that’s gonna drop down by a whopping 1500 to 26.5k! The moral of the story here is to make sure someone is providing the Internal / Elemental debuff if you plan to bring a Plasma VG.

Technically, you can provide it yourself, but you have to give up about 10% of single-target sustained DPS and the capacity to DoT spread, so it’s practically never worth it unless your group consists of 4 DoT specs and you somehow still don’t have the Internal / Elemental debuff.

Thankfully, there are a lot of popular disciplines that provide the Internal / Elemental debuff and almost all disciplines can at least somewhat benefit from it. Virulence Sniper / Dirty Fighting Gunslinger and Innovative Ordnance Mercenary / Assault Specialist Commando pair best because both disciplines provide 2 debuffs that the other needs to deal maximum damage, though you’ll still need to get someone else to provide the armor debuff.

Just so we’re clear, you don’t have to bring one of those disciplines specifically, they just offer the most synergy with Plasmatech. In addition, it’s far less important for Plasma to have access to the armor or ranged debuff, so once your group has the Internal / Elemental debuff, focus on making sure the needs of your other DPS are met.

DPS Mindset

How can I do as much damage as possible in each GCD (global cooldown, 1.5s 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?

Check out theSWTOR Damage Types and Damage Mitigationguide.

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

Plasma Cell

(Tech/Elemental/Periodic/Single-Target)
I’m going to start this section by going over Plasma Cell, which is a discipline passive that used to be an ability a long time ago alongside Ion Cell (now exclusive to Shield Tech) and High Energy Cell (now exclusive to Tactics).

The Plasma Cell makes it so your ranged attacks (so exclusively High Impact Bolt and Hammer Shot) have a 30% chance to apply a DoT to their target. In StarParse, the name of this DoT is called Burning, and it will end up accounting for a considerable portion of your overall damage output that is comparable to the damage dealt by your other strong fire and plasma attacks. Plasma Cell has 3 discipline passives associated with it that are relevant to your rotation:

Ionized Ignition
Shockstrike, Ion Pulse, and Explosive Surge have a 100% chance to trigger Plasma Cell to enemies they damage. Strangely, Ion Wave, Plasma Flare, Incendiary Round, and Plasmatize are not included in this buff and cannot trigger Plasma Cell despite being flame attacks, but I digress. This component of Ionized Ignition is essential to the Burning DoT having practically effortless 100% uptime by enabling all of your most frequently-used abilities to apply it.

Burnout
Increases your Elemental damage dealt by 10% against targets that have less than 30% of their max HP remaining. This is your sub-30% DPS boost. It’s relevant to most of your attacks, so I’m choosing to mention it here. Burnout provides one of the strongest in the game and basically boosts all of your fire and plasma damage by 10%, resulting in a sustained DPS increase of about 7.5% against low-health targets.

When fighting regular enemies, this boost merely helps to compensate for the fact that your DoTs won’t finish ticking before the target dies, but against enemies with higher HP, like bosses, the damage boost is more substantial because you can apply your DoTs multiple times while the boss is sub-30%.

Insulated Mats
Increases the critical hit chance of elemental attacks by 3% and you automatically regenerate 2 Energy Cells every 1.5s. The first part is a pretty generic DPS boost that affects all of your non-weapon damage and does get converted to supercrit while Battle Focus is active (assuming you have the Superheated Fuel tactical equipped).

The second part about the passive Energy Cell regeneration is more important. It effectively increases your Energy Cell regeneration rate by 1.33/s, which does make a noticeable difference, especially during periods of downtime by enabling you to push your Energy Cells a bit harder if you know you’ll have time to get down to a safe level by the time downtime ends.

Ion Pulse

(Tech/Elemental/Direct/Single-Target)
Ion Pulse is your higher-cost, higher-damage filler ability; for those of you familiar with the concept, it is Plasmatech’s strong filler. Make no mistake, Ion Pulse is still incredibly weak, especially compared to all of your other rotational abilities that have a cooldown or duration which tend to cost as much or less than Ion Pulse while dealing 50-400% more damage.

The DPS increase that results from spending 15 Energy Cells on Ion Pulse over using Hammer Shot for free is incredibly small, so if you do overheat as a result of using Ion Pulse too much, there’s a high chance you’ll lose more DPS than you would have gained, had you

The source of this limited impact mostly has to do with the fact that Ion Pulse is so expensive and weak, so you don’t have too many opportunities to use Ion Pulse in the first place while the profit you get off of those activations over Hammer Shot is low, at least on the dummy.

Thanks to Into the Fray, Durasteel Armor, and forced downtime, it’s easier to use in actual combat compared to on the dummy, and the greater number of opportunities enables you to get more of a DPS increase. That said, you still have to be careful because it’s really easy to spiral out of control and end up not being able to do enough damage when you need to.

There are a few instances where you can and should exclusively use Ion Pulse instead of Hammer Shot. While Durasteel Armor is active in actual combat where you can build more than 1 stack of the buff, it will sufficiently reduce the cost of Ion Wave and Plasma Flare such that you will not go under 60 Energy Cells if you spam Ion Pulse. Make sure you get back above 60 Energy Cells by spamming Hammer Shot though before using Ion Pulse in this capacity if you happen to go over accidentally.

You can also afford to exclusively use Ion Pulse during Battle Focus because you’ll be using Recharge Cells soon anyway. Thanks to the Superheated Fuel tactical, the DPS increase is more substantial because Ion Pulse will autocrit while Hammer Shot won’t. Ion Pulse has 1 proc associated with it that is relevant to your rotation that I haven’t already mentioned:

Plasma Barrage
Activating Plasma Flare makes your next Ion Pulse (or Explosive Surge) cost 0 Energy Cells. This proc offers another instance where you should use Ion Pulse and guarantees that you’ll always be able to get 2 stacks of Pulse Generator proc for each Ion Wave even if you accidentally cause yourself to overheat a bit.

You’ll get your first stack of Pulse Generator from Plasma Flare, which you’ll never want to skip because it’s cheap and super powerful, while the other stack will come from a Ion Pulse (or Explosive Surge) that becomes free by activating that Plasma Flare.

Hammer Shot

(Ranged/Energy/Direct/Single-Target)
Hammer Shot deals half the damage of Ion Pulse, but it’s free and has 30m, so you can basically always use it. Anytime you’re more than 10m away from the boss and can’t leap in, you should spam this while you figure out if you should apply Incendiary Round (your other 30m ability) to the target.

Even ignoring the ability’s long range, you’ll be using Hammer Shot quite often in Plasmatech because the alternative filler that also doesn’t have a cooldown, Ion Pulse, is quite expensive.

The DPS difference between Ion Pulse and Hammer Shot is extremely small, so if you don’t want to worry about overheating in sustained DPS situations, it’s completely fine to just exclusively use Hammer Shot instead of Ion Pulse. Remember to still use Ion Pulse in the specific situations I mentioned earlier where you don’t have to worry about Energy Cells though.

Since Hammer Shot hits 10 times, it’s practically guaranteed to apply the Plasma Cell DoT to the target, though only 2 of the ticks can ever possibly apply it in a single GCD and only if the first tick happens on one of the first few ticks since Plasma Cell has a 1s rate limit.

Hammer Shot does not have any procs, debuffs, or discipline passives associated with it that are relevant to your rotation that I haven’t already mentioned.

Incendiary Round

(Tech/Elemental/Periodic/Single-Target)
This is your main DoT. Compared to other DoTs in the game, it’s quite weak, but it still deals ~50% more damage than Ion Pulse while costing the same Energy Cells and having 30m range. Your target only needs to survive for at least 9s so the third tick gets off where Incendiary Round will result in a DPS increase over Ion Pulse. It’s risky to directly apply it to an add directly instead of DoT spreading, but it’s great for multi-DoTing other bosses.

Since the ability has 30m range, it’s a great first ability to use whenever you target swap, especially if you can’t or don’t want to use Storm. With Hold the Line active, you can do Incendiary Round from 30m and be within 10m by the time the GCD is up to apply Plasmatize or Ion Wave. Incendiary Round does not have any additional procs, debuffs, or discipline passives associated with it that I haven’t already mentioned.

Plasmatize

(Tech/Elemental/Periodic/Single-Target)
Plasmatize is one of the most powerful single-target attacks in the game. Some burst specs can match or surpass it in terms of damage dealt per GCD with specific builds, but all of those attacks have a cooldown whereas Plasmatize is only limited by its (low) Energy Cell cost. BioWare has managed to balance such a powerful attack by making it a 30s DoT, which also makes it the longest-lasting DoT in the game.

So long as the target will live for 20% of the duration of the ability, it’s worthwhile to apply Plasmatize instead of using Ion Pulse, even if the ability isn’t able to jump, because you’ll break even in terms of damage dealt while spending 5 fewer Energy Cells per target. 20% corresponds to about 3s of Plasmatize. If you manage to get 2 ticks, you’ll break even; at 3 ticks, you’ll surpass Ion Pulse.

Plasmatize can eventually surpass all of your other more-powerful attacks in terms of damage per GCD, except for DoT spreading with Ion Wave, but given its low cost and the fact that you have so many filler slots already, it’s not really a DPS gain to delay other powerful abilities just so you can apply Plasmatize a GCD earlier.

Unlike most other DoTs in the game, Plasmatize cannot be spread. This makes sense because it would really just be too powerful. Instead, if a target dies while it was affected by Plasmatize, the DoT will jump to the nearest target that does not have Plasmatize that is within 10m.

The duration of the DoT is fully reset when it jumps, though if things are already dying, it’s unlikely you’ll get the full duration on whichever target it jumps to, but this helps to give the attack a bit of AoE potential and makes it more likely that you’ll actually get your money’s worth out of the GCD you spent to apply it.

It isn’t worthwhile to apply Plasmatize to a target right before an existing Plasmatize would jump to that target anyway. While it doesn’t take long for Plasmatize to be a superior GCD to Ion Pulse, you’ll get far more damage out of your prior GCD where you last manually applied Plasmatize, and you’re giving all that potential damage up by spending another GCD on manually reapplying it.

It’s ideal for Plasmatize to jump from an add to the boss (or a beefy add) right before the DoT would have ended anyway and you should look out for instances where this can happen. Typically anytime you have to focus an add down, like Kephess Clones during Brontes, Jealous Males during Writhing Horror, and Monsters or Tentacles during Bestia, are great instances where you may want to wait to reapply Plasmatize if you think it will jump somewhere juicy.

Please note that there is a limit to how often Plasmatize can jump, and the jump has a travel time, so if the next target dies too soon, it will disappear, and you’ll have to reapply it. Plasmatize has 1 discipline passive and 1 debuff associated with it that are relevant to your rotation:

Burnout
Plasmatize costs 5 fewer Energy Cells. This component of Burnout is what enables Plasmatize to be slightly cheaper than Ion Pulse and Explosive Surge, allowing it to be more easily applied to multiple targets in quick succession.

Susceptible (Tech Debuff)
Plasmatize applies Susceptible, which lasts 45s and makes the target take 5% more damage from Tech attacks. The Tech debuff is one of the more valuable debuffs in the game because half of SWTOR’s DPS specs can benefit from it, but only Powertech / Vanguard and Operative / Scoundrel DPS provide it, and Operative / Scoundrel DPS isn’t too popular in PvE.

Ion Wave

(Tech/Elemental/Direct/AoE)
As far as abilities go, Ion Wave is pretty straightforward. Without any of its powerful discipline boosts, it’s basically just a conal AoE version of Ion Pulse that manages to deal the same damage per target at the cost of 5 more Energy Cells. The discipline boosts do make the ability considerably more powerful, enough to make it what I consider to be the core ability of the entire Plasmatech discipline.

Since Ion Wave does not require you to have an active target, it is possible for you to actually miss, so make sure you’re within 10m of your target before activating it. Be careful activating it without a target in general, and if it doesn’t say you can activate other 10m abilities like Plasma Flare, Ion Pulse, Plasmatize, or High Impact Bolt, then Ion Wave won’t hit either. Ion Wave has 1 proc, 2 discipline passives, and 1 debuff associated with it that are relevant to your rotation:

Pulse Generator
Activating Ion Pulse, Explosive Surge, or Plasma Flare grants 1 stack of Pulse Generator. Each stack increases the damage dealt by your next Ion Wave by 50% and causes it to slow targets it damages by 45% for 3s. Stacks up to 2 times for +100% damage, 90% slow, 3s total. Given how little effort it takes for such a significant benefit, it’s essential that you always have 2 stacks of Pulse Generator for every activation of Ion Wave.

Since you gain stacks off simply activating Explosive Surge, you can ensure you’ll have 2 stacks before the fight starts and can build or maintain them during downtime so you don’t have to delay Ion Wave once you can actually attack the boss.

Rain of Fire
Ion Wave spreads Incendiary Round to targets it damages, so long as it damages at least 1 target that is already affected by Incendiary Round. This makes Ion Wave the exclusive DoT spread of Plasmatech Vanguards and unlike other DoT spreads, it can only spread 1 DoT rather than 2-3.

Since Incendiary Round has a 15s duration and Ion Wave has a 15s cooldown, you can DoT spread once per DoT application, but lack any real capacity to bounce DoTs as some other disciplines can. While this does reduce Plasma’s maximum damage output in multi-target fights, you won’t have to worry about the DoT still being active on some targets after a spread so long as you activate them back-to-back.

Technically you can do this so long as you keep the number of GCDs consistent between your application of Incendiary Round and Ion Wave, but that can be difficult, especially in fights with multiple targets.

Ionized Ignition
Reduces the cooldown of Ion Wave by 3s. This passive is less relevant now that Plasmatech is the only discipline that actually has access to Ion Wave, but I still want to point it out because it enables your rotation to be on a 15s cycle since all of your rotational abilities have a 15s cooldown or duration.

Plasmatize and Shockstrike are outliers, but a 30s duration for Plasmatize means it can be applied once every other cycle while you have enough filler slots to still mostly use Shockstrike on cooldown.

Overwhelmed (AoE Debuff)
Provided by the Plasma Barrage discipline passive, Ion Wave applies Overwhelmed which lasts 45s and makes affected targets take 10% more damage from AoE attacks. This is the AoE debuff. It’s provided by most disciplines that have fully rotational AoE with the only exceptions being Vengeance Juggernaut / Vigilance Guardian, Lethality Operative / Ruffian Scoundrel, and Virulence Sniper / Dirty Fighting Gunslinger.

Since rotational AoE only ever comes from a single ability and difficult AoE DPS checks are exceedingly rare, the AoE debuff is one of the least valuable in the game. The fact that it offers a 10% boost instead of 5% or 7% is wholly insufficient, especially considering how likely it is that you’ll have it for any fight where AoE DPS is required since so many specs provide the debuff to begin with. In other words, if the AoE debuff were rarer, it would become more valuable.

A Note on Ion Storm vs Ion Wave
This isn’t a discipline passive, but I wanted to offer an explanation to those of you that are curious about why Shield Specialist Vanguards got Ion Storm, the upgrade to Ion Wave, instead of Plasmatech. The answer has to do with how things were back in 3.0 where a lot more abilities were shared between disciplines.

BioWare’s primary goal with the upgrades was just to separate the abilities used by each discipline so the game would be easier to balance. They could more easily make direct changes to a specific ability without having side effects for other disciplines that also used said ability.

Some disciplines still use a lot of shared abilities like Innovative Ordnance Mercenary / Assault Specialist Commando and as a result, it’s considerably more challenging for BioWare to balance those disciplines effectively.

BioWare implemented this change by giving each discipline an upgraded version of a single shared ability. Over the years, other balance changes have occurred and some shared abilities were pruned and are now wholly unique to a given discipline. The best example of this is probably Depredating Volts / Cascading Debris, which used to be the upgraded version of Force Lightning / Telekinetic Throw that all Inquisitors / Consulars once had access to.

Plasma Flare

(Tech/Elemental/Direct/Single-Target)
Plasma Flare is pretty low-tech as far as Star Wars is concerned, you’re just spraying your target with fuel and then igniting them, but sometimes the simplest attacks are most effective. Plasma Flare is your most damaging direct attack and second only to Plasmatize when periodic damage is factored in. It’s also slightly cheaper than most of your other attacks, costing only 12 Energy Cells compared to the usual 15. Plasma Flare has 1 proc associated with it that is relevant to your rotation:

Shockstrike

(Tech/Elemental and Kinetic/Direct/Single-Target)
Shockstrike is the upgraded version of Stockstrike that converts some of the kinetic damage to elemental, and that elemental portion counts as flame damage, allowing the attack to partially synergize with the rest of the discipline. While the elemental damage component is still small, only about a quarter of the total damage dealt, Shockstrike remains your strongest filler thanks to its high damage and low cost.

The biggest drawback of Shockstrike is that it’s Plasmatech’s only ability that has a 4m range. All of Plasma’s other attacks have at least a 10m range. Since Shockstrike is used fairly frequently, you can’t be at 10m range all the time unless you take the Flying Fists tactical (which you shouldn’t).

Shockstrike further differentiates itself from your other abilities because it does not have a cooldown duration that can be synchronized with the rest of the rotation. All other abilities are on a 15s cycle, so when you actually do the rotation, this ability will float between several different spots. Shockstrike does not have any passives, procs, or debuffs associated with it that I haven’t already mentioned.

High Impact Bolt

(Ranged/Energy/Direct/Single-Target)
This ability hits considerably harder than Ion Pulse while costing the same amount of Energy Cells (15) and having the same 10m range, so there’s no reason not to use it on cooldown and prioritize it over your fillers.

High Impact Bolt only has 1 minor limitation; it can only be used against targets suffering from some sort of active debuff like a DoT or CC, but this shouldn’t ever be an issue for Plasma because your main goal with the discipline is to light the enemy on fire. You only need 1 of your DoTs to be on the target, though you’ll typically have all 3 when it’s time to activate this ability. High Impact Bolt has 1 proc and 1 combat style passive associated with it that are relevant to your rotation:

Hyper Assault Cell
Activating Shockstrike grants Hyper Assault Cell, which makes your next High Impact Bolt automatically critically hit. As far as autocrits go, don’t expect crazy damage like you can get with burst specs because there is no boost to critical damage dealt for High Impact Bolt as a Plasma VG, but its direct damage as an autocrit is still on part with that of other DoT spec autocrits at around 40k.

Since Shockstrike has a shorter cooldown than High Impact Bolt and is your highest priority “filler” while the proc lasts a full 15s, there’s no excuse to not have this proc before High Impact Bolt comes off cooldown. Since Shockstrike is also guaranteed to apply the Plasma Cell DoT, you should be more reliably able to activate High Impact Bolt against any target at any time.

Focused Impact
High Impact Bolt ignores 60% of the target’s armor. This combat style passive enables High Impact Bolt’s damage to behave more like an elemental attack without being one for discipline passive purposes. When combined with the armor debuff, boss armor will only mitigate 7% of the overall direct damage dealt by High Impact Bolt or 14% without the armor debuff.

AoE Abilities

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. This isn’t terribly relevant for Engi since Energy demands and rotational interdependencies are more important, but it’s still good to know.

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.

Explosive Surge

(Tech/Elemental/Direct/AoE)
This is your spammable AoE. It deals a bit over half the damage of Ion Pulse per target, though since it’s also the only way to apply Plasma Cell to multiple targets at the same time, the first activation of Explosive Surge will end up being significantly more powerful against secondary targets. A single tick of the Plasma Cell DoT will match the damage dealt by Ion Pulse against that secondary target, and you’ll still get 2 more ticks out of that DoT before it falls off.

While Plasma Flare technically can’t ever deal AoE damage, the Plasma Barrage proc can make your next Explosive Surge free, so you should still use Plasma Flare on cooldown. Shockstrike only sometimes offers direct AoE damage with an ability tree buff, but you’ll still want to use it on cooldown anyway because the other strong alternative boosts the damage dealt by Plasma Cell significantly.

High Impact Bolt is the only attack that never offers any sort of AoE DPS increase, but the priority changes depending on whether or not the Plasma Cell DoT is applied to secondary targets since that will deal a little over 15k per target over 6s which is more than the direct damage dealt by Explosive Surge itself, though High Impact Bolt’s damage fluctuates considerably based on which ability tree buff you take, so we need to factor that in as well.

Honestly, it’s not worth the effort to try and think about all these different factors for just a single GCD, so just use High Impact Bolt on cooldown on the primary target and you’ll be fine, so Explosive Surge should only ever take the place of Ion Pulse.

Ion Wave and Incendiary Round

(Tech/Elemental/Direct and Periodic/AoE and Single Target)
Ion Wave is your DoT spread, but it’s a bit weaker than many other DoT spreads because it only spreads 1 DoT (Incendiary Round) and has a 15s cooldown, though Ion Wave’s high damage dealt and the fact that Explosive Surge can apply the Plasma Cell DoT help to compensate for this.

DoT spreading with Ion Wave will always have the highest priority in general because it’s your most powerful attack.

Artillery Blitz

(Tech/Elemental/Direct/AoE)
Artillery Blitz actually deals slightly more single-target damage per GCD than Ion Pulse, but it’s unsustainable to use on cooldown because you can’t always afford to spend 30 Energy Cells on fillers in a single rotation cycle even if you never use Ion Pulse as a filler (except when it’s free, of course).

Due to Artillery Blitz’s long cooldown, it’s unlikely you’ll get to use it twice on the same set of adds, so it should only ever replace unprocced Explosive Surges and Hammer Shots even though it deals a fair bit of damage. If you do find yourself needing to use it on cooldown, make sure that you’re getting good use out of Durasteel Armor since you will overheat eventually if you don’t.

Since Artillery Blitz costs 30 Energy Cells and has a 3s channel, it’s also technically your best ability to pair with Recharge Cells, though this isn’t always possible.

It’s also fine to use Artillery Blitz while Battle Focus is active because half of the damage dealt by the ability is considered fire and plasma damage, so it will fully benefit from the Superheated Fuel tactical while the other half will still benefit from the base ability. Only use it in this capacity if you will hit multiple targets because 2 GCDs of Ion Pulse will benefit more from Superheated Fuel since it affects the entire 2 GCDs instead of just half.

Plasmatize

(Tech/Elemental/Periodic/Single-Target)
Plasmatize doesn’t deal any AoE damage outright, but thanks to its ability to jump when the current target is defeated, a single activation can end up dealing damage to multiple targets, so it’s absolutely worth using in multi-target situations.

It’s too hard to think about how many targets it’s worth applying to, so I generally just apply it to 1 of the weaker adds and all of the stronger ones and then go back to more traditional AoE so that the 1 Plasmatize will jump around incinerating all the little ones while each of the big ones will get their own dedicated DoT the whole time.

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.

Plasmatech Vanguards have several different offensive cooldowns, but they should always get used at roughly the same time because they have strong synergy and share roughly the same cooldown duration.

Battle Focus

Thanks to the Superheated Fuel tactical, all of your attacks (except for Shoulder Cannon) will autocrit. Since all of the sustained DPS that would have been provided by your tactical has been concentrated into 15s bursts, it is essential that you make the most out of this ability by activating it as often as possible while still making sure it’s available when higher DPS is most valuable (typically burst checks and burn phases).

Be careful not to activate Battle Focus when you won’t be able to get the full effect either. You want to minimize downtime while this ability is active, so don’t use it if your target is about to die or some sort of downtime will occur in the next 15s.

While Battle Focus is active, you should not use any Hammer Shots as your filler and make sure to time its initial activation to be right after you apply Incendiary Round and Plasmatize so you don’t have to waste extra precious GCDs applying DoTs.

Recharge Cells

With the launch of 7.0, the effect of Reserve Powercell was combined with Recharge Cells where activating Recharge Cells makes your next attack that costs Energy Cells free and as soon as that buff is consumed, you begin recharging 50 Energy Cells over 3s.

This ability should typically only be used shortly after Battle Focus as a way to enable you to exclusively use Ion Pulse instead of Hammer Shot as your filler.

It’s ideal to use Recharge Cells right before you activate Ion Wave when you have 30-40 Energy Cells since that attack costs 20 Energy Cells instead of 15, but any ability that costs 15 Energy Cells is fine too and preferred if you’re about to go below 30 Energy Cells.

In fights where you have close to maximum uptime on Durasteel Armor, you can get away with not using Recharge Cells after Battle Focus and just save it for when you inevitably overheat from using Artillery Blitz too much.

Shoulder Cannon

Shoulder Cannon is quite unique as far as abilities go and its usage will be different depending on the type of content you do. In PvP, it’s useful to interrupt players trying to cap an objective rather than for burst, but this is a PvE guide so I won’t go into more detail than that.

In boss fights, it should always be used as an offensive cooldown that is paired with Battle Focus where you activate it before Battle Focus comes off cooldown so you have time for all 4 missiles to load and then fire them all while Battle Focus is active.

The cooldown on Shoulder Cannons plus the time it takes to use them plus loading time is roughly equal to the cooldown on Battle Focus. Usually, Shoulder Cannons will come off cooldown about 30s before Battle Focus so you’ll be fine to let them load and often have a few seconds after they’ve finished loading. Get in the habit of loading them as soon as you see them come off cooldown.

Since it takes 20s to load Shoulder Cannons, so as long as you have at least 2 missiles loaded before you activate Battle Focus, you will have enough time to load and fire them all before Battle Focus ends. Pre-load them before a fight starts as well, but buff only lasts 5 mins, so remember to right-click the buff off if you don’t think they’ll be ready in time for the pull.

Shoulder Cannons should be used at the same time as Battle Focus in boss fights because they have roughly the same cooldown as Battle Focus, but benefit from the crit chance provided by Battle Focus, so they’ll do more damage on average when used at the same time.

The DPS increase from Shoulder Cannons relies on the fact that they are on a separate rate limit from the GCD, so they can only be fired once every 1.5s, but firing one does not cause a GCD. They are weaker than most of your attacks though, so you will lose DPS if your APM (actions per minute) is not high enough to fire a Shoulder Cannon and activate another ability in the same GCD.

I recommend just alternating each ability with a Shoulder Cannon until they’ve all been depleted. Make sure you keybind them to a button that’s easy for you to press at the same time as your other abilities.

Outside of boss fights, you likely won’t get to use all of them on a single group of trash, especially if you use them during Battle Focus, so it’s better to use them if you just need a little bit of extra damage to finish off a specific enemy or as a separate source of burst.

Adrenal

The Adrenal should always be paired with Battle Focus since they both last 15s, boosting your big burst window even more. It’s fine to delay the Adrenal until Battle Focus is available, but sometimes the boss will die before Battle Focus comes off cooldown.

If the Adrenal is available and you think the boss will die before Battle Focus comes off cooldown, you should use the Adrenal without Battle Focus so you don’t waste it. You can also fire Shoulder Cannons as they load during this time. You’ll see this happening on the dummy right now once you get the hang of the rotation.

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.

Reactive 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 Insulated Augs passive, you will have 51.3% damage reduction against Kinetic / Energy damage and 40% damage reduction against Internal / Elemental damage while Reactive Shield is active.

Thanks in part due to its long duration, Reactive Shield is best when trying to mitigate damage that you’re supposed to be taking, but you’re not going to be able to cheese anything with it. Reactive Shield has 1 combat style passive associated with it:

Into the Fray
Increases the duration of Reactive Shield by 3s. In addition, suffering direct AoE damage heals you for 2.5% of your max HP and regenerates 2 Energy Cells. Cannot occur more than once every 3s.

An extra 3s may not seem like much, but that’s a 25% increase to the duration of the ability. It can make a considerable difference, particularly in burn phases and when you have to temporarily off-tank something. It’s a lot more common for boss attacks to be on 15s intervals instead of 12s too, so sometimes that extra 3s will enable Reactive Shield to be active for the entire duration of a painful event or be active for 2 big hits (assuming you time it right).

The 2.5% heal and 2 Energy Cell regeneration effects are pretty nice too. The heal helps to soften the blow from any AoE hit (that doesn’t kill you) while the 2 Energy Cell regeneration makes resource management a fair bit easier. Keep an eye out for when your Energy Cells are regenerating faster than usual for an extended period of time, especially if you’re taking damage so you can leverage it into additional Ion Pulses.

Adrenaline Rush

Adrenaline Rush’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 Adrenaline Rush, though the ability isn’t without limitations.

Outside of Plasmatech, Adrenaline Rush 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. Adrenaline Rush has 1 discipline passive associated with it:

Adrenaline Fueled
While Adrenaline Rush is active, your DR is increased by 30%. In addition, the cooldown of Adrenaline Rush is reduced by 6s whenever you are attacked. Cannot occur more than once per second. VG defenses are set up where Plasma gets increased availability and more potent Adrenaline Rush while Tactics gets increased availability on Reactive Shield along with additional survivability from activating Sonic Round.

The boost to Adrenaline Rush from Adrenaline Fueled is considerable because the DR seems to be granted preemptively if the hit would drop you below 35% HP, so you get the mitigation against the hit that triggers Adrenaline Rush.

While Adrenaline Rush + the 30% DR is active, you’re virtually unkillable except from huge hits where 30% DR is insufficient protection at ~35% HP; you’ll be able to live through just about any ticking damage in the game.

Keep in mind that while Adrenaline Rush will prevent you from dying, it’s not great to drop that low in the first place if something like Reactive Shield or Durasteel Armor is available to stop you from taking so much damage at all. Typically, Adrenaline Rush should be the first ability you use to protect yourself from dying (especially if you can trigger its cooldown reduction), but the last ability you use to keep DTPS low.

Durasteel Armor

With 7.0, each combat style had 1 of its abilities changed to have a unique additional effect for each discipline. For Vanguards, that ability is Power Yield, and the Plasmatech version was renamed to Durasteel Armor.

Durasteel Armor incorporated part of the Combustion Chamber utility that allows the ability to last up to 30s and Plasmatech is now the only discipline that can have up to 30s of Power Yield, the other 2 only get the base 10s.

Durasteel Armor also received a new effect in 7.0 where the Energy Cell cost of Ion Wave and Plasma Flare are each reduced by 5 per stack of Durasteel Armor. It takes 4 stacks for Durasteel Armor to make Ion Wave free and 3 stacks for Plasma Flare.

Be sure to factor these reduced costs into your Energy Cell management. There’s no point in using Recharge Cells on Ion Wave if it’s free. Consider pairing it with Incendiary Round or High Impact Bolt instead if you’re running low on Energy Cells.

At 5 stacks of Durasteel Armor, you’ll have +200% armor and +10% damage dealt, and that 200% armor is equivalent to about 25% DR (so 5% DR per stack), but exclusively for Energy / Kinetic attacks. Remember, DoTs tend to deal Internal / Elemental damage, so while they may be great for letting you quickly build and maintain 5 stacks, Durasteel Armor likely won’t mitigate any of the damage you take from most DoTs.

You don’t have to be as worried about DoT damage as Plasma either thanks to the Assault Frame discipline passive that makes you take 30% less periodic damage.

Since damage types aren’t always clear in PvE content, you’re better off relying on another DCD to mitigate damage from a specific attack unless you’re super confident that it will work. I recommend primarily using Durasteel Armor to benefit from the damage boost, so use it when you think you’ll get a lot of stacks and think of the armor as more of a secondary benefit.

Sonic Round

As a DPS, this is your threat drop. In PvE as Plasmatech, that’s all it does baseline, but it has 3 ability tree buffs and 1 discipline passive associated with it that require some explanation:

Sonic Rebounder
Sonic Round grants Sonic Rebounder to all allies within 8m of the area of impact, excluding you. Sonic Rebounder absorbs and reflects the next single-target direct attack back at the attacker. Lasts up to 15s.

Sonic Rebounder almost exclusively gets used to cheese things, though it does require a bit of risky coordination to pull off because the juiciest things to reflect are typically attacks that you’re meant to avoid. Here is a list of the best attacks to use with Sonic Rebounder:

Eternity Vault: n/a
Karagga’s Palace: n/a
Explosive Conflict:
- Warlord Kephess: Pulsar Droids
Terror From Beyond:
- Dread Guards: Doom (spare cheese for other PTs / VGs, Operative / Scoundrel), Force Leech (cast only)
- The TFB: Tentacle Slams (Phase 1 only)
Scum and Villainy:
- Thrasher: Snipers’ basic attacks
- Oasis City: Terminate (bonus DCD to give to tanks)
- Olok: Missile Blast (he typically does this right after exiting stealth)
- Cartel Warlords: Various attacks throughout the fight, use on cooldown
- Styrak: Suffering (large ghost during Chained Manifestation, let 1 tick go off, then interrupt), Force Lighting explosion (should activate right after Force Pull in case you get put into a Nightmare)
Dread Fortress:
- Nefra: Cleaves before or after Nightmare Twin Attack
- Corruptor Zero: Missile Barrage, Anti-Gravity Field (only if someone gets stuck)
- Brontes: Use on the final droid in Clock Phase right before the droid dies so the group has Rebounders against Fingers, though you’ll want to take Efficient Tools for that fight instead.
Dread Palace:
- Calphayus: Inevitability
- Raptus: Force Execution (reflect lines, not circle)
- Dread Council: Styrak’s Suffering channel, Burn Phase damage
Ravagers: n/a
Temple of Sacrifice:
- Revanite Commanders: Lord Kurse’s Soaring Smash (purple circle)
- Revan: Heave
Gods of the Machine:
- Nahut: Energized Slice (as bonus DCD to give to tanks)
Dxun: n/a
R-4 Anomaly:
- IP-CPT: Refraction Array
- Watchdog: Polarized Beam
- Lord Kanoth: n/a
- Lady Dominique: Devastation

If a boss isn’t listed, it means there isn’t a notable attack where the group can greatly benefit from Sonic Rebounders, though there might be some small benefit for individual players. Some of these attacks are not present in lower-difficulty modes, but that’s fine because SM groups typically aren’t coordinated enough to pull off such a thing anyway.

In order to use Sonic Rebounder to effectively cheese the attacks I listed, you need to make sure that everyone you plan to give rebounders stacks up on the target and then stands wherever they need to stand to get hit by the attack I mentioned above. Since you do not get rebounders yourself, you should not let yourself get hit by the attack in question.

Frontline Defense
Activating Sonic Round grants Frontline Defense, which reduces the AoE damage you take by 60% for 15s. All danger circles are considered AoE damage, but the majority of boss attacks are considered AoE damage as well, even if they don’t look like it, so this is one of the most powerful DCDs in the game for boss fights. It’s far less useful in solo content and PvP where AoE damage is far less frequent.

If you have to stand in a circle or stand in front of the boss, preemptively pop Sonic Round so you can mitigate the damage you might take from a cleave. Don’t forget that Sonic Round requires a target to activate, though it doesn’t matter what you target because the buff gets applied to you.

Reactive Plating
Activating Adrenaline Rush grants Reactive Plating, which boosts and is consumed by your next activation of Durasteel Armor or Sonic Round. Reactive Plating makes your next Durasteel Armor able to gain an additional stack and return damage to attackers. Alternatively, Reactive Plating makes your next Sonic Round will heal all allies within 8m of the area of impact for ~5k and grant you 10% DR for 10s.

Durasteel Armor is typically the superior option for Reactive Plating, but the proc only lasts 30s and the boost to Sonic Round is pretty decent as well, so don’t let the Reactive Plating proc go to waste just because you won’t be able to use it with Durasteel Armor.

Insulated Augs
The cooldown of Sonic Round is reduced by 10s. This cooldown reduction was introduced a long time ago back before Plasma had all these busted effects linked to Sonic Round.

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.

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.

No Cleanse

I just wanted to point out that Vanguards are one of the two combat styles that do not have any sort of cleanse ability, the other is Gunslinger.

Storm

This is your primary gap-closer ability. When you activate it, you immediately reach your target and deal slightly more damage than Hammer Shot, but less than Ion Pulse. It also immobilizes and interrupts the target for 2s, just like Force Charge.

Likely in an effort to make Storm more unique from Force Charge, it also comes with the old Battering Blitz utility effect built-in that makes it so Storm grants a proc called Battering Blitz that lasts 6 seconds and increases your movement speed by 30% and enables Storm to be activated again where it will deal 50% more damage but not trigger a root, interrupt, or Battering Blitz again.

It’s unclear why BioWare couldn’t just give Storm a second charge, boost its base damage dealt by 25%, and make each activation increase your movement speed by 30% for 6s instead of incorporating an antiquated, overcomplicated, confusing proc. Maybe it was easier to just copy the effect over that does roughly the same thing.

Hold the Line

This ability offers a movement speed boost as well as substantial CC immunity. It has both the Charge the Line and Advance the Line utilities built-in so it lasts 10s and increases your movement speed by 75% instead of 30% like it does for Mercenaries. It also has the 10s cooldown reduction that was previously part of the Iron Will utility.

The only types of CC you’ll be vulnerable to while the ability is active are hard stuns and mezzes, so you can use Hold the Line to ignore knockback mechanics, slows, and roots. If one of those has the potential to make you lose DPS, make sure to pop Hold the Line.

The movement speed boost is also quite powerful, one of the best in the game, but Storm usually gets the job done while Hold the Line can be used for CC immunity, so try to only use it for mobility if Storm is unavailable or otherwise unsuitable and save Hold the Line as a back-up.

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 this combat style has at its disposal in addition to any other abilities I haven’t yet mentioned.

Suppression Droid

Suppression Droid replaced Stealth Scan with the release of 7.3, it is a redesign that keeps the core functionality of revealing stealthed enemies intact while increasing the overall usability of the GCD. The old VG pred effect has been removed from the game and has been replaced with an effect that reduces an enemy’s accuracy by 20% and their movement speed by 30% for as long as they remain in the area of effect. The droid remains active for 15s and has a 20s cooldown.

While it is intended for use in PvP, it does still work on non-Champion adds in Operations. Against ticking damage, particularly from the basic attacks that adds tend to spam most of the time, the 20% accuracy reduction is effectively a 20% reduction in damage dealt to the entire group.

Suppression Droid’s high uptime (75%) enables it to migitate significantly more damage than abilities with similar effects like Diversion or Oil Slick / Riot Gas, which have 13.3% and 16.6% uptime respectively.

The fact that it costs a GCD to use Suppression Droid is irrelevant. In add-heavy fights, DPS checks tend to not matter nearly as much and there are typically more periods of downtime in between wave spawns than your average fight, so you can throw it out when there isn’t anything to hit.

As a Vanguard, you can also just use Suppression Droid instead of Hammer Shot, since they both cost no Energy Cells and the latter deals basically no damage anyway. Furthermore, your healers can easily make up the lost GCDs with their own off-DPS, which they will be able to do since any semblance of a heal check is eliminated.

Neural Surge

Neural Surge is the only AoE hard stun in the game. Since it stuns multiple targets, it only lasts 2.5s instead of 4, but it’s still frequently useful against adds that tend to be immune to mezzes, interrupts, and/or knockbacks, but not stuns. The most common examples are when adds have either the Alertness (mez immunity) or Steadfast (physics immunity) buffs instead of Boss Immunity (full CC immunity).

Don’t forget that Neural Surge does cost a GCD, so only use it if you will mitigate a lot of damage, interrupt an important cast, want to stop the adds from moving for a moment to line something up, or can’t DPS anyway.

Cryo Grenade

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.

Since you have to give up one of the best movement abilities in the game to take it but still have access to Neural Surge, you won’t be using Cryo Grenade much at all.

Riot Strike

This is your interrupt. Normally, it has a 12s cooldown, which matches the Warrior / Knight interrupt as the shortest cooldown in the game, and the Frontline Defense ability tree buff that you’ll usually take will bring it down even further to 10s! With such a short cooldown, you are capable of handling some interrupt mechanics completely on your own or are capable of sharing it with only a single other player instead of multiple.

Tenacity

This is your CC break, use it when you are prevented from DPSing because you are CC’d.

Harpoon

This is your pull. Pulls in general are pretty uncommon and Assassin / Shadow tanks are the only other discipline in the game that has access to one that can pull enemies. It’s typically only useful for positioning specific adds since most enemies in Operations are immune to CC in general.

The most notable place where you should know how to use it is during Dread Master Brontes’ burn phase where you can pull Energy Spheres into the shield so they detonate while everyone is immune to their damage.

Neural Jolt

This is your Taunt. It forces your target to attack you for 6 seconds and puts you at the top of the threat table. Only use this if a tank or raid lead specifically tells you to use it or if the boss is running rampant because one or both of the tanks are dead. Make sure that you have a DCD ready or there isn’t too much of a point to Taunting as you’ll probably get killed pretty quickly. If you’re going to use Sonic Round, make sure you activate it right before you Taunt so you don’t accidentally lose aggro after 6 seconds.

If one tank dies in a fight with a tank swap mechanic, a common strategy is to have a DPS Taunt and hold aggro only for enough time to get the stacks or get hit by the attack that forces the tanks to actually swap and then have the actual tank take the boss back immediately after. This isn’t always possible, but it’s important to be aware of.

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.

Shockstrike Buffs – Level 23 Choice

Heavy Plasma Round

Effect: Shockstrike leaves traces of Ignition Fuel on the target, causing your next Plasma Flare or Ion Pulse to deal 30% more damage. This effect can only occur once every 30 seconds.
Recommendation: Never take this in PvE. The DPS increase is definitely more immediate and bursty, which is helpful in PvP, but the other options will always perform better in PvE content.

Tactical Strike

Effect: Shockstrike deals damage to up to 4 enemies within 5m of the primary target.
Recommendation: Take this in solo content and in fights that lack a primary target. Most trash mobs tend to be 3-4 targets, so Shockstrike should hit the entire group if they’re relatively close to each other. This option doesn’t offer any sort of single-target DPS increase though, so it’s not as well-suited to boss fights where you almost always have a boss to focus your DPS on.

Suppressive Heat

Effect: Dealing damage with Shockstrike builds a stack of Suppressive Heat, increasing the damage dealt by your Plasma Cell by 25%. Stacks up to 4 times and lasts up to 30s.
Recommendation: Almost always take this for Operations. The DPS increase is considerable and applies in both single-target and AoE situations since Explosive Surge can apply Plasma Cell to multiple targets, though it’s less powerful in pure AoE situations than Tactical Strike and takes much longer to ramp up. Due to both of these factors, Shockstrike typically has the highest priority as a filler and should be the first ability you use each time you arrive at a new target or come back from downtime.

Gap Closing – Level 27 Choice

Blazing Harpoon

Effect: Harpoon applies Blazing Harpoon to the target, which slows the target and a minuscule amount of Elemental damage over 6s.
Recommendation: Never take this. The DoT is really small and you’re already rooting them for half the duration of the slow, so an extra 3s of slow isn’t worth it, especially next to the other options.

Reserved Cables

Effect: Harpoon gets 2 charges and activating Harpoon finishes the cooldown on Shockstrike.
Recommendation: Never take this in PvE. This is technically the more useful Harpoon buff out of the options here, but Storm is far more useful in all PvE content.

Storm

Effect: Grants the Storm ability, which deals a small amount of kinetic damage, interrupts the target and immobilizes them for 2 seconds. Cannot be used against targets in cover. Using Storm grants Battering Blitz, which enables Storm to be used again and increases your movement speed by 30% for 6 seconds. Battering Blitz causes Storm to deal 50% more damage but does not cause an additional interrupt or immobilization. This effect cannot occur more than once every 15 seconds.
Recommendation: Always take this in PvE. Even without all the bells and whistles, Storm offers the greatest mobility increase because Harpoon’s cooldown is just too long. In Operations, most enemies are immune to Harpoon anyway, so this is the only viable option.

Incendiary Round Buffs – Level 39 Choice

Armor Piercing Round

Effect: Replaces Incendiary Round with an ability that deals the same amount of damage as Incendiary Round, but all of the damage is dealt up front as direct damage. In addition, Armor Piercing Round provides the Internal/Elemental debuff. 15s cooldown, costs 15 Energy Cells.
Recommendation: Never take this in PvE. You’re forced to give up far too much DPS and your capability to DoT spread just for the Internal/Elemental debuff and a little bit of extra burst. To be clear, the DPS increase from the Internal/Elemental debuff is significantly less than the DPS you’d lose from not taking Heated Bolt. If Armor Piercing Round just weakened the Incendiary Round DoT by 75%, instead of eliminating it completely, it would be a far more enticing choice, though even then Heated Bolt would offer a bit more single-target DPS.

Heated Bolt

Effect: When you deal damage with Incendiary Round, your next High Impact Bolt applies Burning Shot, which is a 12s DoT that deals roughly the same damage as High Impact Bolt’s initial autocrit hit. Can only occur once every 10s.
Recommendation: Almost always take this in group content. The DoT from Heated Bolt is extremely beefy; it’s stronger than the DoT from Incendiary Round while dealing that damage over a shorter duration.

Primed Det Packs

Effect: Incendiary Round deals a puny amount of damage to up to 4 targets and applies a detonator to each target it hits. When targets are hit by your Ion Wave, each detonator explodes, dealing a small amount of damage to its target.
Recommendation: Take this in solo content only. It takes 5 targets for the damage from Primed Det Packs to surpass the damage dealt by the Heated Bolt DoT, but Primed Det Packs can only make Incendiary Round apply the effect 4 times. It’s still fine if you want to spread that damage to multiple targets, especially if the targets will die before the DoT from Heated Bolt would finish ticking, but you’ll never turn a profit in group content.

Reactive Plating, Elite Vanguard, and Stealth Scan – Level 43 Choice

Reactive Plating

Effect: When activating Adrenaline Rush, you gain Reactive Plating for 30s, which makes your next Durasteel Armor able to gain an additional stack and return damage to attackers or your next Sonic Round to heal allies and grant you 10% damage reduction for 10s.
Recommendation: Take this in fights without dangerous adds. Both effects are consistently useful, though you can only choose 1 per activation of Adrenaline Rush. The way I see it, the proc is best used with Durasteel Armor and you should only use it on Sonic Round if Durasteel Armor won’t be available in the next 30s. The additional damage boosts provided by buffing Durasteel Armor are fairly small, but that extra 40% armor is often the difference between needing to pop an additional DCD or not. There’s nothing wrong with using Reactive Plating in solo content either, but I think Elite Vanguard will be more useful outside of group content.

Elite Vanguard

Effect: When Reactive Shield is activated, you gain Elite Vanguard, which increases your movement speed by 25% and provides immunity to incapacitating effects for 6 seconds. In addition, when taking direct damage, the cooldown on Neural Surge is reduced by 2 seconds. This can only occur once every 3 seconds.
Recommendation: Take this in solo content and in specific fights where you want to use Neural Surge more often than its cooldown allows. In solo content, the CC immunity is especially useful for dailies when you know you’re about to fight an enemy that will stun you. The Neural Surge cooldown reduction is more valuable in group content, but don’t take it unless you can identify a consistent spot where you’d like to Neural Surge but can’t because it’s still on cooldown.

Suppression Droid

Effect: Grants the ability Suppression Droid, which fires off a series of Suppression Droids to scan the area for 15s, revealing stealthed opponents and immobilizing them for 3s. In addition, all enemies inside the field have their accuracy reduced by 20% and are slowed by 30%. 20s cooldown.
Recommendation: Take this in fights with dangerous adds. It doesn’t work on Operation bosses, but it does work against non-Champion adds, which can make fights a bit easier, especially those with frequent ticks of damage or heal checks. Its short cooldown and long duration result in a ridiculously high potential uptime (75%) that effectively eliminates any heal check that is present. Even though it costs a GCD, it is by far the strongest ability in this tier, if it will be useful.

Electro Shield, Parallactic Combat Stims, and Iron Will – Level 51 Choice

Electro Shield

Effect: Reactive Shield deals a minuscule amount of elemental damage to attackers when they deal direct damage to you. Cannot occur more than once per second.
Recommendation: Almost always take this. Electro Shield is almost always gonna do something, but you need to be getting hit constantly while it’s active in order for it to do anything significant, and even then, an extra 80-90k damage max every 2 mins is pretty negligible. It’s more valuable in solo content because you will be getting hit consistently by trash and that damage is concentrated into 15s.

Parallactic Combat Stims

Effect: You recharge 20 Energy Cells when stunned, immobilized, knocked down, or otherwise incapacitated. Additionally, your next Tech ability deals 10% additional damage.
Recommendation: Take this whenever you can benefit from it. The effect is strong, but only some fights have mechanics that can trigger it. You also need to leverage these extra Energy Cells into additional Ion Pulses in order to actually get much of a DPS increase, so if you aren’t gonna bother with that, there’s no point in taking it.

Iron Will

Effect: Reduces the cooldown of Tenacity by 30 seconds and Recharge Cells by 15 seconds.
Recommendation: Never take this in PvE. In Plasma, the cooldown of Recharge Cells already matches the cooldown of Battle Focus, so it’s already available as often as you need it to be. As for the cooldown reduction on your CC break, it’s extremely rare for a fight to require you to use your CC break on cooldown. The only 2 fights I can think of where you might be able to benefit from this are HM Torque and HM Monolith, but you’d probably want to take Parallactic Combat Stims instead.

Reflective Armor, Frontline Defense, and Entangling Tools – Level 64 Choice

Reflective Armor

Effect: When Into the Fray is triggered, it will also deal a minuscule amount of Elemental damage to the attacker if the attacker is within 10m.
Recommendation: Take this for solo content and in specific fights only. The DPS definitely adds up quickly, but the extra survivability provided by Frontline Defense is typically more valuable. Only take this if you already have DCDs to spare for the fight and there’s lots of AoE damage going out.

Frontline Defense

Effect: Reduces the cooldown of Riot Strike by 2 seconds. In addition, activating Sonic Round grants Frontline Defense, which reduces your AoE damage taken by 60% for 15s.
Recommendation: Almost always take this in PvE group content. The vast majority of damage dealt by bosses is considered AoE damage, even if it doesn’t look like it, so in group content, this is roughly equivalent to 60% RDT (reduced damage taken). Make sure Frontline Defense is active whenever you anticipate that you’ll be hit directly by the boss, typically whenever the boss is facing you (or if you’re standing in front of the boss).

Entangling Tools

Effect: Ion Pulse and Explosive Surge reduce the movement speed of affected targets by 25% for 3s. In addition, Neural Jolt slows the target by 50% for 6 seconds.
Recommendation: Never take this in PvE. Slows just aren’t necessary for PvE content and in group content, most enemies are immune to them anyway.

Guard Cannon, Hold the Line, and Cryo Grenade – Level 68 Choice

Guard Cannon

Effect: Damaging a target with your Shoulder Cannon missiles heals you for 3% of your total health.
Recommendation: Never take this in PvE. Guard Cannon isn’t terrible, thanks to the Mandalorian Armaments legendary implant, you’ll heal for 30% of your HP with each use of Shoulder Cannon + Autocannon, but it’s not good enough next to Hold the Line and Cryo Grenade.

Hold the Line

Effect: Grants the Hold the Line ability, which increases your movement speed by 75% and provides immunity from immunity movement-impairing effects, knockdowns, and physics for 10 seconds. 35s cooldown.
Recommendation: Almost always take this. Since all of the VG utility effects were combined into the base ability, Hold the Line has become one of the best movement abilities in the game. It lasts a long time, has a relatively short cooldown, offers a strong movement speed boost, and provides partial CC immunity.

Cryo Grenade

Effect: Grants the Cryo Grenade ability, which stuns the target for 4 seconds and deals a small amount of damage. 60s cooldown, 10m range, and costs 5 Energy Cells.
Recommendation: Only take this if it’s absolutely necessary. Hold the Line is usually not essential thanks to Storm, but it’s still one of the best movement abilities in the game, so you should only give it up and take Cryo Grenade if Neural Surge (with Elite Vanguard and Paralytic Augs) is insufficient.

Paralytic Augs, Sonic Rebounder, and Efficient Tools – Level 73 Choice

Paralytic Augs

Effect: Increases the stun durations of Neural Surge by 0.5 seconds and Cryo Grenade by 1 second.
Recommendation: Consider taking this anytime you find yourself using Neural Surge. Usually, whenever you want to stun something, it’s better for it to be stunned longer, so if you find yourself needing to use Neural Surge (or Cryo Grenade), there’s a good chance Paralytic Augs will help. Typically, Sonic Rebounder is not as useful in fights with a lot of adds while Neural Surge is basically only useful when adds are present, so there aren’t many fights where you’ll have to give up a lot to take Paralytic Augs.

Sonic Rebounder

Effect: Sonic Round grants Sonic Rebounder to all friendly targets within 8m of the primary target, excluding you, which reflects the next direct, single-target attack back at the attacker. Lasts up to 15 seconds.
Recommendation: Almost always take this in group content. Since it doesn’t affect you, Sonic Rebounder is pretty useless in solo content, but in group content, it’s an arguably overpowered piece of raid utility that can enable you to cheese a bunch of different mechanics and help mitigate and deal a fair bit of damage. Refer to the section on Sonic Round for more information on how to make the most of Sonic Rebounder.

Efficient Tools

Effect: Allows Adrenaline Rush to be activated while stunned and causes Adrenaline Rush to purge stun effects when activated. In addition, the range of Harpoon and Shoulder Cannon are increased by 10m, and Neural Surge and Cryo Grenade no longer cost Energy Cells.
Recommendation: Take this for solo content and specific fights only. The 10m range increase on Harpoon and extra CC break are super nice in solo content, but rarely useful in boss fights since most enemies are immune to pulls and it’s typically not worth activating Adrenaline Rush just to break out of a stun. The extra range on Harpoon is required to pull Energy Spheres into the Hands’ shields on Brontes though, and the extra CC break is nice to have for Torque.

Gearing and Stats Priorities

Tactical Items

SWTOR 7.5 Plasmatech Vanguard PvE Guide and Best Builds (58)

SWTOR 7.5 Plasmatech Vanguard PvE Guide and Best Builds (59)

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 Implants

BioWare has removed set bonuses from the game and replaced them with Legendary Implants, 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. Here are the Legendary Implants you should use as aPlasmatech Vanguard:

Shock Trooper – The Heat cost of Shockstrike is reduced by 4. In addition, activating Shockstrike increases your damage dealt by 10% for 15s. Cannot occur more than once every 30s.
Mandalorian Armaments – When Shoulder Cannon is put on cooldown, it applies Autocannon to you for 60s, automatically firing a Shoulder Cannon missile at your current target whenever you deal direct damage. This additional missile can fire once every 10s.

Shock Trooper is easily one of the strongest Legendary Implants in the game, and it’s pretty essential to the rotation because of the Energy Cell cost reduction to Shockstrike. Definitely buy that one first.

In contrast, Mandalorian Armaments should be your second implant because it is one of the weakest implants in the game. It is better than Veteran Ranger because you’ll get 6 Shoulder Cannon missiles instead of 2 (on average). Amazingly, Mandalorian Armaments also manages to be barely superior to the Stimulated and Entertainer generic Legendary Implants.

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.

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.
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.
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 Plasmatech Vanguard Builds in 7.0

These are the builds that I recommend for different types of content and situations. TheBuild Essentialsare 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.

Group Content

SWTOR 7.5 Plasmatech Vanguard PvE Guide and Best Builds (62)

Build Essentials:

Suppressive Heat
Storm
Heated Bolt
Frontline Defense

Many of the ability tree buffs in this build are almost exclusively valuable in situations where you’ll be in combat for an extended period of time, namely bosses, because the damage output that these options yield takes time to build up. They don’t offer a valuable amount of damage in the short term.

You’ll almost always want to take Reactive Plating, Sonic Rebounder, Frontline Defense, Electro Shield, and Hold the Line, but those options aren’t optimal or essential in all boss fights. I opted to distinguish Frontline Defense as a Build Essential because it offers a massive boost to your survivability. However, if DTPS is low and your other DCDs are wholly sufficient, feel free to swap it out for Reflective Armor for a small DPS increase.

Solo Content

SWTOR 7.5 Plasmatech Vanguard PvE Guide and Best Builds (67)

Build Essentials
Tactical Strike
Storm
Primed Det Packs
Elite Vanguard
Electro Shield
Reflective Armor
Hold the Line
Efficient Tools

The Solo Content build uses ability tree buffs that don’t offer viable sustained DPS over the long term in favor of concentrating that damage into valuable immediate bursts to multiple targets. Since most enemies you’ll be encountering are vulnerable to CC, it’s also worthwhile to take the options that enhance such capabilities.

Make sure to focus on the enemy with the most HP in the group and let your built-in AoE and CC take care of the fodder below your pay grade. Save Battle Focus and Shoulder Cannons for particularly challenging foes like Elites and Champions.

Openers, Rotations, Priorities

Opener

The opener is the rotation you use at the very beginning of the fight and for burst DPS checks. It’s important to get as much damage as possible while all of your damage boosts are available to maximize their impact.

Shoulder Cannon (pre-cast to load missiles)
Explosive Surge (spam while out of combat for procs)
Storm (optional)
Plasmatize
Shockstrike
Incendiary Round
Ion Pulse
Durasteel Armor (if possible)
Battle Focus + Adrenal
(begin firing Shoulder Cannons)
Ion Wave
Ion Pulse
Plasma Flare
Shockstrike
High Impact Bolt
Ion Pulse (free with Plasma Barrage)
Ion Pulse
Ion Pulse
Incendiary Round
Ion Pulse
(finish firing Shoulder Cannons)
Ion Wave
Shockstrike
Plasma Flare
Ion Pulse (free with Plasma Barrage)
High Impact Bolt
Hammer Shot
Plasmatize
Rotation

I know you’re probably thinking, “Wow, that’s super long!” but don’t panic. The region demarcated by firing Shoulder Cannons is the actual portion where the burst is, and it’s just 10-11 GCDs, the length of Battle Focus.

The opener does have a significantly higher APM requirement, but you don’t have to worry about managing Energy Cells at all while Battle Focus is active, so there’s not as much thinking required. Instead of incorporating Hammer Shot to manage Energy Cells, you’ll just use Ion Pulse (or Artillery Blitz and Ion Pulse if AoE is required).

You’ll rely on Recharge Cells to compensate for the additional Energy Cells you spent using Ion Pulse instead of Hammer Shot during Battle Focus by activating it right before an ability that costs 15+ Energy Cells once you reach approximately 30+ Energy Cells.

With Superheated Fuel, you’ll typically want to use Recharge Cells right before your next Ion Wave. With Flame Dissipation, you can wait a bit longer, often until your next High Impact Bolt or Energy Cell-consuming Ion Pulse. You will not need to use Recharge Cells if Durasteel Armor is active with multiple stacks.

Advanced Modifications to the Opener

Many players prefer to make 2 modifications to this opener in order to optimize for single-target DPS. The relative order of your important abilities for the entire rotation then becomes Incendiary Round ▶ High Impact Bolt ▶ Ion Wave ▶ [ Battle Focus, etc.] ▶ Plasma Flare. I don’t think it’s worth the effort and will explain why.

Battle Focus Before Plasma Flare

Activate Battle Focus + Adrenal and subsequently begin firing Shoulder Cannons immediately before using Plasma Flare instead of Ion Wave.

Since your strongest direct attacks have 15s cooldowns pre-Alacrtity and Battle Focus lasts 15s post-Alacrity, you can barely fit an additional activation of 1 of those attacks inside your Battle Focus window as the very first and very last ability in the window. Plasma Flare is the most damaging single-target attack of the bunch.

With Superheated Fuel, Plasma Flare is guaranteed to critically hit (not supercrit) during Battle Focus because your critical chance with all elemental attacks is 90%. Still, Plasma Flare gets a +10% chance to critically hit as part of the Burnout discipline passive, so it will always benefit from the +10% critical damage provided by Hyper Assault Cell, unlike Ion Wave and others, which have a chance not to.

Both of these points are moot whenever you can hit a second target with Ion Wave because the overall gains are small and not even guaranteed. In order to get that 11th ability off during Battle Focus, your APM needs to be Mary Poppins-level, that is, practically perfect in every way.

Given that it’s already spiking significantly with Shoulder Cannons, and there’s a decent chance you need to use other off-GCD abilities like taunting or DCDs, I don’t think it’s realistic to rely on getting a second Plasma Flare inside of Fuel. Furthermore, if such a small amount of DPS matters, even during a burst check, either your group or the fight has far bigger problems on their hands that you’re attempting to compensate for.

I think it makes more sense to just always use Battle Focus before Ion Wave where it will have a more consequential impact and focus your attention on matters that will have a greater impact on success.

High Impact Bolt Before Battle Focus

Shift High Impact Bolt ▶ Ion Pulse to immediately follow Incendiary Round ▶ Ion Pulse.

This enables the Heated Bolt DoT to be already active on the target when Battle Focus is active, thereby allowing you to get several extra ticks during the very first Battle Focus window and application of High Impact Bolt against that target.

I expect you can already see the cracks starting to form. The High Impact Bolt DoT itself lasts 12s, so this only makes a difference in the very first rotation cycle against that target, but they require you to separate Incendiary Round’s duration from the activation of Ion Wave, making DoT spreading less reliable, especially if there’s downtime.

You can fix this by also moving Ion Wave and its Ion Pulse to be before High Impact Bolt, but that is ridiculously suboptimal for DoT spreading since Incendiary Round also needs to tick before High Impact Bolt is activated, or it doesn’t apply the DoT at all.

The Shock Trooper proc from Shockstrike can also become desynchronized from Battle Focus at the beginning of the fight because you have an incentive to use it as your first filler ability. Otherwise, you’d need to delay it for almost a full cooldown’s worth.

Finally, these extra DoT ticks account for a tiny amount of damage dealt while Battle Focus is active and a completely negligible amount of sustained DPS over the course of the whole fight. Just like with Plasma Flare, these extra ticks don’t consistently offer a relevant DPS increase and come at the cost of more significant downsides.

Hybrid Rotation and Priority

Plasmatech can make use of a hybrid structure that is somewhere in between a rotation and a priority system. You’ll be alternating between using a powerful ability that has a long cooldown and a filler ability from a priority list. It’s effectively just a more complicated version of the single-target Vengeance Juggernaut / Vigilance Guardian rotation.

Rotation Component

The rotation component provides the overall structure of each cycle. Each of the non-filler abilities deals a considerable amount of damage and, with the exception of Plasmatize, has an effective 15s cooldown. This structure makes it as easy as possible to manage your Energy Cells and not lose your place in the rotation. It also allows you to use all of your abilities on cooldown, assuming you have 100% uptime.

Plasmatize (primary target only) OR Filler
Filler
Incendiary Round
Filler
Ion Wave (should have Pulse Generator x2)
Filler
Plasma Flare (should have Overcharged Plasma)
Filler
High Impact Bolt (should have Hyper Assault Cell + Incendiary Bolt)
Filler
Repeat

The core proc dependencies make it most forgiving and reliable to do Incendiary Round (gets spread by) ▶ Ion Wave (procs Plasma Flare) ▶ Plasma Flare in that order in relation to each other. Technically, High Impact Bolt and Plasmatize are a bit more flexible, but inserting them elsewhere requires you to pay more attention to your rotation so you can make on-the-fly fixes as needed.

Putting High Impact Bolt at the end will maximize the chance that you’ll have used Shockstrike beforehand and guarantee that Incendiary Round will have ticked recently so that you don’t have to check if you’ve done either.

Putting Plasmatize at the beginning/end gives a clearer gap as something that’s outside of that core quartet of heavy hitters. You’ll feel it whenever it’s skipped and be prompted to check if it’s active on the current target. You also have some wiggle room to treat it as a filler for a cycle without delaying another strong ability.

Filler Slot Priority Component

This is the priority system you’ll use when deciding which ability to use in the Filler slots, as outlined above.

Shockstrike
Ion Pulse or Explosive Surge (only with Plasma Barrage)
Hammer Shot (only if the following attack would put you below 60 Energy Cells)
Plasmatize (only to secondary targets)
Artillery Blitz (only if you’ll hit at least 2 targets)
Incendiary Round (only to secondary targets)
Explosive Surge (only if you’ll hit at least 3 targets)
Ion Pulse

The vast majority of the time, you’ll be using either Shockstrike, Ion Pulse, or Hammer Shot. If Shockstrike is available, you should always use that. Otherwise, you’ll typically be deciding between Hammer Shot and Ion Pulse.

The answer comes down to whether you can afford to use Ion Pulse (or Explosive Surge) without falling below 60 Energy Cells when you activate your next heavy-hitter in the following GCD. You don’t want to drop below 60 Energy Cells unless Battle Focus is active. The rotation is only sustainable over the long term if you remain above 60 Energy Cells.

Even if you omit all Ion Pulses in favor of Hammer Shot, you are only delaying the inevitable. If you remain below 60 Energy Cells and continue using your heavy hitters, you will spiral out of control and run out of ammo. You’ll be trapped in a prison of your own making for an extended period of time, where you end up dealing a non-viable amount of DPS.

Anytime you dip below 60 Energy Cells, even for a single GCD, you should compensate for the period of reduced-efficiency passive Energy Cell regeneration by using an additional Hammer Shot in a future cycle in lieu of an Ion Pulse, even if you could have remained above 60 Energy Cells for the next GCD.

The remaining abilities on the Filler Priority List can be treated the same as Ion Pulse in terms of Energy Cell cost and typically only come up when there are secondary targets. Artillery Blitz and Plasmatize have additional considerations.

Realistically, Artillery Blitz should only be used every other cycle and one of its GCDs should encompass the filler slot that does not need to be used for Plasmatize in the current cycle. A complete channel doesn’t fit anywhere else, and you will run out of ammo if you use it more often than that anyway.

I recommend just using Plasmatize on secondary targets instead of another filler instead of having a higher priority. This way, you still get the vast majority of the benefit without losing DPS on your primary target, where your damage output tends to matter a whole lot more.

Plasma Flare and the free Ion Pulse / Explosive Surge are what give you your guaranteed 2 stacks of Pulse Generator. I view the latter as rotational just as everyone views the former. I value getting that second stack out of the way and recommend you do the same before Plasmatizing the Shielded Data Cores, Operator IX hologram, and the other players’ color orbs.

Integrating the Flame Dissipation Tactical

By this point in the guide, I hope most of you can derive how to adapt the rotation to the Flame Dissipation tactical. That said, the tactical itself is worded poorly, has an unnecessarily complex effect, and has a bug, so I want to make sure we’re all on the same page.

Explosive Surge, or Plasma Flare, you’ll gain a stack of Flame Dissipation, which reduces the cost of Ion Wave by 3. That cost reduction stacks all the way up to 15 (out of 20), and then once you activate Ion Wave at 5 stacks, you’ll consume all stacks, get a new buff, also called Flame Dissipation, that increases your damage dealt, and have to rebuild those stacks again.

Take note that you only gain a stack of Flame Dissipation when activating one of those abilities if you already have 2 stacks of the main Ion Wave proc, Pulse Generator, or gain the second stack with the activation.

However, the tactical is bugged such that sometimes you’ll get the 10% damage boost proc if you activate Ion Wave while you have only 4 stacks of the cost reduction proc. In combat, it only seems to do this until you let the damage boost fall off, so it may have something to do with both procs sharing the same name.

In practice, you can’t build 5 stacks in a single rotation cycle because you just don’t have that many filler slots available, and it’s too expensive to use that many Ion Pulses unless you have Durasteel Armor active or can use Recharge Cells. You would have to delay Ion Wave and destabilize your rotation if you wanted to get 100% uptime on the damage boost proc.

Flame Dissipation makes it harder to squeeze the most damage out of your rotation since you can afford to use more Ion Pulses, and some of the DPS gain is derived from using your strong filler more often. At the same time, resource management is more forgiving because your most expensive ability is consistently one of your cheapest, so you run the risk of running out of Energy Cells more frequently, but it is cheaper to regenerate them.

Durasteel Armor is also less valuable with Flame Dissipation since you can’t lower the cost of Ion Wave below 0. It may be the case that Superheated Fuel provides more sustained DPS in fights where you have high or maximum uptime on Durasteel Armor, though this requires an impractical amount of testing to confirm.

Regardless, your resource costs will be significantly more variable and less clear-cut than they are with Superheated Fuel, so it’s more important to stick to the fully alternating version of the rotation where you follow every single strong ability with a filler.

Priority System

Due to the length and alternating nature of the rotation, it can be impractical to execute in many fights and phases. You can easily and quickly end up losing far more DPS than you’d gain by inserting fillers between every single one of your heavy hitters.

When multiple strong abilities are off cooldown at the same time, you’ve already lost some DPS to delays, but the only DPS you ever lose as a result of condensing the static rotation into a priority system is a minor delay from Shockstrike and slightly less efficient Energy Cell management.

Due to the variable Energy Cell costs and the need to leverage those spare Energy Cells into additional Ion Pulses, I do not recommend using Flame Dissipation in fights where you rely heavily on this Priority System.

Shockstrike
Plasmatize (primary target only)
Incendiary Round
Ion Wave (only with Pulse Generator x2)
Plasma Flare (only with Overcharged Plasma)
High Impact Bolt (only with Hyper Assault Cell + Incendiary Bolt)
Ion Pulse or Explosive Surge (only with Plasma Barrage)
Hammer Shot (only if the following attack would put you below 60 Energy Cells)
Artillery Blitz (only if you’ll hit at least 2 targets)
Plasmatize (only to secondary targets)
Explosive Surge (only if you’ll hit at least 3 targets)
Incendiary Round (only to secondary targets as 30m ability)
Ion Pulse

If you have 100% uptime, Plasmatize will typically always be used right before every other activation of Incendiary Round, though it can also take the place of other fillers when you can multi-DoT.

I do not recommend prioritizing Plasmatize on secondary targets over rotational abilities on your primary target. There are rarely more adds in the room than you have filler slots, and the ability jumps to another target anyway, so there’s little value in applying it to everything.

In some situations, the DPS gain over Explosive Surge or Ion Pulse is tiny because the target isn’t gonna live for much longer anyway and does not have another thing to jump to, or you might spend a GCD dealing little damage as you travel to your next Plasmatize target.

You will sometimes need to delay Shockstrike to apply Plasmatize to your primary target. This is fine and mostly unavoidable in single-target situations, but be careful not to let procs fall off when multi-DoTing.

Due to the nature of the priority, Plasmatize will get applied every other cycle right before Incendiary Round, and the top half of the list will get used in sequence while the bottom half will be the actual priority while you wait for the top half to come off cooldown.

I prefer to tweak this priority into the following quasi-rotation that’s far easier to digest:

Plasmatize (primary target only)
Incendiary Round
Ion Wave (only with Pulse Generator x2)
Plasma Flare (only with Overcharged Plasma)
Shockstrike OR Ion Pulse (with Plasma Barrage)
High Impact Bolt (only with Hyper Assault Cell + Incendiary Bolt)
Shockstrike OR Ion Pulse (with Plasma Barrage)
Ion Pulse
Hammer Shot
Ion Pulse
Hammer Shot
Shockstrike (sometimes) or Filler (Energy Cell-dependent)
Repeat

Those Ion Pulses and Hammer Shots can absolutely be used for other abilities as needed. I like this approach because you can front-load your beef and then have this large block of fillers where you can do whatever you want or the group needs.

I still recommend using Hammer Shot if your next attack would put you under 60 Energy Cells, but it’s a little harder to see how that works out, and you have a concentrated period where you must spend a bunch of Energy Cells.

In practice, so long as you’re above 80 Energy Cells going into Ion Wave, or 75 Energy Cells going into Incendiary Round, you’ll make it to fillers without dipping below 60 Energy Cells. During the filler section, alternate Hammer Shot with every other ability that normally costs Energy Cells. The cycles with Plasmatize become more expensive, so you often have to throw in an extra activation of Hammer Shot.

Sometimes, Ion Pulse will come off cooldown at the same time that you need to Plasmatize or in the middle of the pack of heavy hitters. That’s why I recommend inserting that filler slot in between Plasma Flare and High Impact Bolt. It minimizes the delay to Shockstrike and guarantees that your High Impact Bolt will autocrit.

If Shockstrike wasn’t used immediately before High Impact Bolt, it would be useable immediately after, so whichever of that and the free Ion Pulse or Explosive Surge that you didn’t use in the slot before High Impact Bolt will get used in the slot afterward.

You can also use this quasi-rotation that emerges from the pure Priority System as an opener, just replace Hammer Shots with Ion Pulses and pop Battle Focus immediately after Incendiary Round.

SWTOR 7.5 Plasmatech Vanguard PvE Guide and Best Builds (2024)

Table of contents

Introduction to Plasmatech Vanguard

Major Changes in 7.0

Group Composition Tips

DPS Mindset

Abilities Explained

Single-Target Rotational Abilities, Attributes, and Important Procs

Plasma Cell

Ion Pulse

Hammer Shot

Incendiary Round

Plasmatize

Ion Wave

Plasma Flare

Shockstrike

High Impact Bolt

AoE Abilities

Explosive Surge

Ion Wave and Incendiary Round

Artillery Blitz

Plasmatize

Offensive Cooldowns

Battle Focus

Recharge Cells

Shoulder Cannon

Adrenal

Defensive Cooldowns and Mobility

Reactive Shield

Adrenaline Rush

Durasteel Armor

Sonic Round

Medpac

No Cleanse

Storm

Hold the Line

Crowd Control and Other Abilities

Suppression Droid

Neural Surge

Cryo Grenade

Riot Strike

Tenacity

Harpoon

Neural Jolt

Ability Tree Choices

Shockstrike Buffs – Level 23 Choice

Gap Closing – Level 27 Choice

Incendiary Round Buffs – Level 39 Choice

Reactive Plating, Elite Vanguard, and Stealth Scan – Level 43 Choice

Electro Shield, Parallactic Combat Stims, and Iron Will – Level 51 Choice

Reflective Armor, Frontline Defense, and Entangling Tools – Level 64 Choice

Guard Cannon, Hold the Line, and Cryo Grenade – Level 68 Choice

Paralytic Augs, Sonic Rebounder, and Efficient Tools – Level 73 Choice

Gearing and Stats Priorities

Tactical Items

Legendary Implants

Stat Priority

Augments

Earpiece

Crystals

Relics

Biochem Items

Regarding the Zeal Guild Perk Alacrity Boost

Best Plasmatech Vanguard Builds in 7.0

Group Content

Solo Content

Openers, Rotations, Priorities

Opener

Advanced Modifications to the Opener

Battle Focus Before Plasma Flare

High Impact Bolt Before Battle Focus

Hybrid Rotation and Priority

Rotation Component

Filler Slot Priority Component

Integrating the Flame Dissipation Tactical

Priority System