SWTOR 7.0 Pyrotech Powertech PvE Guide (DPS) for beginners and more experienced veterans: Skills, Choices, Rotations, Gearing, Builds, Tips!

The guide is up-to-date for Patch 7.1a.

Welcome to my guide for Pyrotech Powertech! Pyro is a DoT spec that attempts to kill things with fire by utilizing high-tech gauntlets as weapon platforms for a flamethrower, incendiary missile launcher, and railgun. They also use a special type of combustible gas so that their blaster shots can more easily set their foes ablaze.

Pyro PTs 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 Pyro’s versatility, but this versatility comes at a cost. Pyrotech is only competitive with the top burst and DoT specs during 15s windows while the Explosive Fuel ability is active, and that ability has a 2min cooldown. Outside of those windows, Pyro is considerably weaker than most DoT specs in terms of AoE, and thanks to the 2 minute cooldown, Pyro can’t offer huge burst damage nearly as frequently as all burst specs can.

Assuming Explosive Fuel is used as often as possible, Pyrotech is capable of competitive 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 Thermal Yield, Pyro 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.

Pyrotech 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.

Powertech DPS in general offers 3 major pieces of raid utility including the ability to off-tank thanks to having a taunt; Sonic Rebounder, which can be used to cheese numerous mechanics; and an AoE stun.

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:

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. Pyrotech permanently lost access to 2 abilities: 

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. 

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

Pyrotech 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 Pyrotech 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 Pyro PT.

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 Pyrotech. In addition, it’s far less important for Pyro 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.

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 the SWTOR Damage Types and Damage Mitigation guide.

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. 

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

The Combustible Gas Cylinder makes it so your ranged attacks (so exclusively Rail Shot and Rapid Shots) 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 attacks. Combustible Gas Cylinder has 3 discipline passives associated with it that is relevant to your rotation:

Volatile Igniter Flaming Fist, Flame Burst, and Flame Sweep have a 100% chance to trigger Combustible Gas Cylinder to enemies they damage. Strangely, Searing Wave, Immolate, Incendiary Missile, and Scorch are not included in this buff and cannot trigger Combustible Gas Cylinder despite being flame attacks, but I digress. This component of Volatile Igniter 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 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 vent 2 Heat 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 Explosive Fuel is active (assuming you have the Superheated Fuel tactical equipped).

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

(Tech/Elemental/Direct/Single-Target) Flame Burst is your higher-cost, higher-damage filler ability; for those of you familiar with the concept, it is Pyrotech’s strong filler. Flame Burst 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 Flame Burst while dealing 50-400% more damage.

The DPS increase that results from spending 15 Heat on Flame Burst over using Rapid Shots for free is incredibly small, so if you do overheat as a result of using Flame Burst 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 Flame Burst is so expensive and weak, so you don’t have too many opportunities to use Flame Burst in the first place while the profit you get off of those activations over Rapid Shots is low, at least on the dummy.

Thanks to Close and Personal, Thermal Yield, 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 Flame Burst instead of Rapid Shots. While Thermal Yield is active in actual combat where you can build more than 1 stack of the buff, it will sufficiently reduce the cost of Searing Wave and Immolate such that you will not go over 40 Heat if you spam Flame Burst. Make sure you get back down below 40 Heat by spamming Rapid Shots though before using Flame Burst in this capacity if you happen to go over accidentally.

You can also afford to exclusively use Flame Burst during Explosive Fuel because you’ll be using Vent Heat soon anyway. Thanks to the Superheated Fuel tactical, the DPS increase is more substantial because Flame Burst will autocrit while Rapid Shots won’t. Flame Burst has 1 proc associated with it that is relevant to your rotation that I haven’t already mentioned:

Flame Barrage Activating Immolate makes your next Flame Burst (or Flame Sweep) cost 0 Heat. This proc offers another instance where you should use Flame Burst and guarantees that you’ll always be able to get 2 stacks of Superheated Flamethrower proc for each Searing Wave even if you accidentally cause yourself to overheat a bit.

You’ll get your first stack of Superheated Flamethrower from Immolate, which you’ll never want to skip because it’s cheap and super powerful, while the other stack will come from a Flame Burst (or Flame Sweep) that becomes free by activating that Immolate.

(Ranged/Energy/Direct/Single-Target) Rapid Shots deals half the damage of Flame Burst, 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 Missile (your other 30m ability) to the target.

Even ignoring the ability’s long range, you’ll be using Rapid Shots quite often in Pyrotech because the alternative filler that also doesn’t have a cooldown, Flame Burst, is quite expensive.

The DPS difference between Flame Burst and Rapid Shots 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 Rapid Shots instead of Flame Burst. Remember to still use Flame Burst in the specific situations I mentioned earlier where you don’t have to worry about Heat though.

Since Rapid Shots hits 10 times, it’s practically guaranteed to apply the Combustible Gas Cylinder 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 Combustible Gas Cylinder has a 1s rate limit.

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

(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 Flame Burst while costing the same Heat and having 30m range. Your target only needs to survive for at least 9s so the third tick gets off where Incendiary Missile will result in a DPS increase over Flame Burst. 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 Jet Charge. With Hydraulic Overrides active, you can do Incendiary Missile from 30m and be within 10m by the time the GCD is up to apply Scorch or Searing Wave. Incendiary Missile does not have any additional procs, debuffs, or discipline passives associated with it that I haven’t already mentioned.

(Tech/Elemental/Periodic/Single-Target) Scorch 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 Scorch is only limited by its (low) Heat 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 Scorch instead of using Flame Burst, even if the ability isn’t able to jump, because you’ll break even in terms of damage dealt while spending 5 less Heat per target. 20% corresponds to about 3s of Scorch. If you manage to get 2 ticks, you’ll break even; at 3 ticks, you’ll surpass Flame Burst.

Scorch can eventually surpass all of your other more-powerful attacks in terms of damage per GCD, except for DoT spreading with Searing 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 Scorch a GCD earlier.

Unlike most other DoTs in the game, Scorch cannot be spread. This makes sense because it would really just be too powerful. Instead, if a target dies while it was affected by Scorch, the DoT will jump to the nearest target that does not have Scorch 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 Scorch to a target right before an existing Scorch would jump to that target anyway. While it doesn’t take long for Scorch to be a superior GCD to Flame Burst, you’ll get far more damage out of your prior GCD where you last manually applied Scorch, and you’re giving all that potential damage up by spending another GCD on manually reapplying it.

It’s ideal for Scorch 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 Scorch if you think it will jump somewhere juicy.

Please note that there is a limit to how often Scorch 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. Scorch has 1 discipline passive and 1 debuff associated with it that are relevant to your rotation:

Burnout Scorch costs 5 less Heat. This component of Burnout is what enables Scorch to be slightly cheaper than Flame Burst and Flame Sweep, allowing it to be more easily applied to multiple targets in quick succession.

Susceptible (Tech Debuff) Scorch 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.

(Tech/Elemental/Direct/AoE) As far as abilities go, Searing Wave is pretty straightforward. Without any of its powerful discipline boosts, it’s basically just a conal AoE version of Flame Burst that manages to deal the same damage per target at the cost of 5 more Heat. 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 Pyrotech discipline.

Since Searing 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 Immolate, Flame Burst, Scorch, or Rail Shot, then Searing Wave won’t hit either. Searing Wave has 1 proc, 2 discipline passives, and 1 debuff associated with it that are relevant to your rotation:

Superheated Flamethrower Activating Flame Burst, Flame Sweep, or Immolate grants 1 stack of Superheated Flamethrower. Each stack increases the damage dealt by your next Searing 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 Superheated Flamethrower for every activation of Searing Wave.

Since you gain stacks off simply activating Flame Sweep, 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 Searing Wave once you can actually attack the boss.

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

Since Incendiary Missile has a 15s duration and Searing 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 Pyro’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 Missile and Searing Wave, but that can be difficult, especially in fights with multiple targets.

Volatile Igniter Reduces the cooldown of Searing Wave by 3s. This passive is less relevant now that Pyrotech is the only discipline that actually has access to Searing 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.

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

Overwhelmed (AoE Debuff) Provided by the Flame Barrage discipline passive, Searing 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 Firestorm vs Searing Wave This isn’t a discipline passive, but I wanted to offer an explanation to those of you that are curious about why Shield Tech Powertechs got Firestorm, the upgrade to Searing Wave, instead of Pyrotech. 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.

(Tech/Elemental/Direct/Single-Target) Immolate 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. Immolate is your most damaging direct attack and second only to Scorch when periodic damage is factored in. It’s also slightly cheaper than most of your other attacks, costing only 12 Heat compared to the usual 15. Immolate has 1 proc associated with it that is relevant to your rotation:

Burnout Activating Searing Wave grants Consuming Flames, which makes your next Immolate deal 40% more damage. Since Searing Wave and Immolate both have 15s cooldowns and deal similar damage (with 2 stacks of the Superheated Flamethrower proc), there’s no reason to ever use Immolate before Searing Wave if you don’t have the proc. You always want to use Immolate after Searing Wave.

(Tech/Elemental and Kinetic/Direct/Single-Target) Flaming Fist is the upgraded version of Rocket Punch 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, Flaming Fist remains your strongest filler thanks to its high damage and low cost.

The biggest drawback of Flaming Fist is that it’s Pyrotech’s only ability that has a 4m range. All of Pyro’s other attacks have at least a 10m range. Since Flaming Fist 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).

Flaming Fist 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. Flaming Fist does not have any passives, procs, or debuffs associated with it that I haven’t already mentioned.

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

Rail Shot 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 Pyro 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. Rail Shot has 1 proc and 1 combat style passive associated with it that are relevant to your rotation:

Charged Gauntlets Activating Flaming Fist grants Charged Gauntlets, which makes your next Rail Shot 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 Rail Shot as a Pyro PT, but its direct damage as an autocrit is still on part with that of other DoT spec autocrits at around 40k.

Since Flaming Fist has a shorter cooldown than Rail Shot and is your highest priority “filler” while the proc lasts a full 15s, there’s no excuse to not have this proc before Rail Shot comes off cooldown. Since Flaming Fist is also guaranteed to apply the Combustible Gas Cylinder DoT, you should be more reliably able to activate Rail Shot against any target at any time.

Puncture Rail Shot ignores 60% of the target’s armor. This combat style passive enables Rail Shot’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 Rail Shot or 14% without the armor debuff.

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. 

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

While Immolate technically can’t ever deal AoE damage, the Flame Barrage proc can make your next Flame Sweep free, so you should still use Immolate on cooldown. Flaming Fist 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 Combustible Gas Cylinder significantly.

Rail Shot is the only attack that never offers any sort of AoE DPS increase, but the priority changes depending on whether or not the Combustible Gas Cylinder 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 Flame Sweep itself, though Rail Shot’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 Rail Shot on cooldown on the primary target and you’ll be fine, so Flame Sweep should only ever take the place of Flame Burst.

(Tech/Elemental/Direct and Periodic/AoE and Single Target) Searing Wave is your DoT spread, but it’s a bit weaker than many other DoT spreads because it only spreads 1 DoT (Incendiary Missile) and has a 15s cooldown, though Searing Wave’s high damage dealt and the fact that Flame Sweep can apply the Combustible Gas Cylinder DoT help to compensate for this.

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

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

Due to Deadly Onslaught’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 Flame Sweeps and Rapid 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 Thermal Yield since you will overheat eventually if you don’t.

Since Deadly Onslaught costs 30 Heat and has a 3s channel, it’s also technically your best ability to pair with Vent Heat, though this isn’t always possible.

It’s also fine to use Deadly Onslaught while Explosive Fuel is active because half of the damage dealt by the ability is considered fire 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 Flame Burst will benefit more from Superheated Fuel since it affects the entire 2 GCDs instead of just half.

(Tech/Elemental/Periodic/Single-Target) Scorch 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 Scorch will jump around incinerating all the little ones while each of the big ones will get their own dedicated DoT the whole time.

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. 

Pyrotech Powertechs 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.

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 Explosive Fuel 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 Explosive Fuel is active, you should not use any Rapid Shots as your filler and make sure to time its initial activation to be right after you apply Incendiary Missile and Scorch so you don’t have to waste extra precious GCDs applying DoTs.

With the launch of 7.0, the effect of Thermal Sensor Override was combined with Vent Heat where activating Vent Heat makes your next attack that costs Heat free and as soon as that buff is consumed, you begin venting 50 Heat over 3s.

This ability should typically only be used shortly after Explosive Fuel as a way to enable you to exclusively use Flame Burst instead of Rapid Shots as your filler.

It’s ideal to use Vent Heat right before you activate Searing Wave when you have 60-70 Heat since that attack costs 20 Heat instead of 15, but any ability that costs 15 Heat is fine too and preferred if you’re about to go above 70 Heat.

In fights where you have close to maximum uptime on Thermal Yield, you can get away with not using Vent Heat after Explosive Fuel and just save it for when you inevitably overheat from using Deadly Onslaught too much.

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 Explosive Fuel where you activate it before Explosive Fuel comes off cooldown so you have time for all 4 missiles to load and then fire them all while Explosive Fuel 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 Explosive Fuel. Usually, Shoulder Cannons will come off cooldown about 30s before Explosive Fuel 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 Explosive Fuel, you will have enough time to load and fire them all before Explosive Fuel 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 Explosive Fuel in boss fights because they have roughly the same cooldown as Explosive Fuel, but benefit from the crit chance provided by Explosive Fuel, 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 Explosive Fuel, 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.

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

If the Adrenal is available and you think the boss will die before Explosive Fuel comes off cooldown, you should use the Adrenal without Explosive Fuel 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 (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.

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

Thanks in part due to its long duration, Energy 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. Energy Shield has 1 combat style passive associated with it:

Close and Personal Increases the duration of Energy Shield by 3s. In addition, suffering direct AoE damage heals you for 2.5% of your max HP and vents 2 Heat. 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 Energy 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 Heat venting are pretty nice too. The heal helps to soften the blow from any AoE hit (that doesn’t kill you) while the 2 Heat venting makes resource management a fair bit easier. Keep an eye out for when your Heat is dissipating faster than usual for an extended period of time, especially if you’re taking damage so you can leverage it into additional Flame Bursts.

Kolto Overload’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 Kolto Overload, though the ability isn’t without limitations.

Outside of Pyrotech, Kolto Overload 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. Kolto Overload has 1 discipline passive associated with it:

Automated Defenses While Kolto Overload is active, your DR is increased by 30%. In addition, the cooldown of Kolto Overload is reduced by 6s whenever you are attacked. Cannot occur more than once per second. PT defenses are set up where Pyro gets increased availability and more potent Kolto Overload while AP gets increased availability on Energy Shield along with additional survivability from activating Sonic Missile.

The boost to Kolto Overload from Automated Defenses 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 Kolto Overload.

While Kolto Overload + 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 Kolto Overload will prevent you from dying, it’s not great to drop that low in the first place if something like Energy Shield or Thermal Yield is available to stop you from taking so much damage at all. Typically, Kolto Overload 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.

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

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

Thermal Yield also received a new effect in 7.0 where the Heat cost of Searing Wave and Immolate are each reduced by 5 per stack of Thermal Yield. It takes 4 stacks for Thermal Yield to make Searing Wave free and 3 stacks for Immolate.

Be sure to factor these reduced costs into your Heat management. There’s no point in using Vent Heat on Searing Wave if it’s free. Consider pairing it with Incendiary Missile or Rail Shot instead if your Heat is high.

At 5 stacks of Thermal Yield, 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, Thermal Yield 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 Pyro either thanks to the Flame Suit 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 Thermal Yield 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.

As a DPS, this is your threat drop. In PvE as Pyrotech, 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 Missile 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:

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.

Hitman Activating Sonic Missile grants Hitman, 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 Missile so you can mitigate the damage you might take from a cleave. Don’t forget that Sonic Missile requires a target to activate, though it doesn’t matter what you target because the buff gets applied to you.

Boiling Point Activating Kolto Overload grants Boiling Point, which boosts and is consumed by your next activation of Thermal Yield or Sonic Missile. Boiling Point makes your next Thermal Yield able to gain an additional stack and return damage to attackers. Alternatively, Boiling Point makes your next Sonic Missile will heal all allies within 8m of the area of impact for ~5k and grant you 10% DR for 10s.

Thermal Yield is typically the superior option for Boiling Point, but the proc only lasts 30s and the boost to Sonic Missile is pretty decent as well, so don’t let the Boiling Point proc go to waste just because you won’t be able to use it with Thermal Yield.

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

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.

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

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

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

It’s unclear why BioWare couldn’t just give Jet Charge 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.

This ability offers a movement speed boost as well as substantial CC immunity. It has both the Overdrive and Torque Boosters 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 Hydraulic Overrides to ignore knockback mechanics, slows, and roots. If one of those has the potential to make you lose DPS, make sure to pop Hydraulic Overrides.

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

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. 

Carbonize 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 example is when adds have the Steadfast (physics immunity) buff instead of Boss Immunity alongside Unshakeable (interrupt immunity).

Don’t forget that Carbonize 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.

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 Carbonize, you won’t be using Electro Dart much at all.

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 Hitman 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 and can share that responsibility with another discipline

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

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.

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 Missile, 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. 

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.

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 a Pyrotech Powertech:

Shock Trooper is easily one of the strongest Legendary Implants in the game and it’s pretty essential to do sustained DPS because of the Heat cost reduction to Flaming Fist. Definitely buy that one first. Mandalorian Armaments should be your second implant. It is better than Veteran Ranger because you’ll get 6 Shoulder Cannon missiles instead of 2 on average.

The earpiece is the only piece of gear that you really get to pick your tertiary stats for. It will need to grant either Accuracy (Initiative, yellow icon) or Alacrity (Quick Savant / Nimble, green icon), depending on your mix of augments. 

Advanced Eviscerating Crystals are still the best because +41 stat is a more significant upgrade for critical rating since your overall stat pool for tertiary stats is much smaller than it is for the alternative stat increases from crystals, which increase primary and secondary stats including mastery, endurance, and power. 

I recommend the Relic of Focused Retribution and Relic of Serendipitous Assault for all content. Equip whichever version of these relics that has the highest item rating. Thankfully, we don’t have to bother with carrying around a second set of relics anymore because all endgame content is being balanced for level 80.

Since there is no new crafting tier being released with the launch of 7.0, the Biochem items from 6.0 remain BiS. I am recommending the Advanced Kyrprax Proficient Stim, Advanced Kyrprax Medpac, and Advanced Kyrprax Critical Adrenal.

The Critical Adrenal is specifically better for Pyrotech because you’ll only be using it while Explosive Fuel is active and thanks to the Superheated Fuel tactical, you will exclusively be autocritting, so all of the crit rating provided by the adrenal will directly translate into critical multiplier, yielding higher DPS than would be provided by the Attack Adrenal. The DPS difference isn’t too huge though, so if you don’t want to fork over tens of millions of credits, the Advanced Kyrprax Attack Adrenal is also fine. 

Since there isn’t a new crafting tier yet, there aren’t any new tiers of augments yet either, so just like with Biochem items, you’ll be using stuff from 6.0. There are 3 different tiers to consider. If you played in the last expansion, hold onto whatever you have, though it is unlikely that you’ll be able to salvage all of them. 

Just like in 6.0, augments are largely about how much you want to spend. Most of the benefit can be had for pretty cheap, but if you need that extra performance boost and are willing to fork over the credits, you do have access to more powerful gear. Almost everyone should buy the blue 276 augments because they provide the greatest bang for the buck. Here are all your options:

Since we don’t have access to moddable gear, we’ll be completely dependent on augments to balance out the stats BioWare gives us. You’ll probably need a lot more accuracy and alacrity augments to reach the associated stat thresholds. 

Find out which mods to purchase from Hyde and Zeek in SWTOR on the Fleet to minimize your spending and optimize your build. The dedicated guide contains tips for all roles in both PvE and PvP.

If your guild is using the Zeal (cyan) guild perk set bonus 5% alacrity boost, you won’t need nearly as much alacrity stat to reach your desired alacrity threshold, so focus on the percentage thresholds rather than the stat amounts. Just keep adding one augment at a time until you reach the desired percentage.

Guild leaders, I personally recommend using the Fortune (yellow) guild perk set bonus instead, which 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 do either of those activities, you’ll need to tweak your gear to reach the desired threshold, which I find to be super tedious. The alacrity boost is much stronger than the critical chance boost, but content isn’t balanced around these guild perk set bonuses anyway, so I find it better to just have a smaller boost I don’t have to worry about as opposed to a larger boost that I have to interact with.

These are the builds that I recommend for different types of content and situations. The Build Essentials are 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.

Build Essentials Heatstroke Jet Charge Primed Rail Shot Boiling Point Hitman Hydraulic Overrides

This build should be used for almost all Operations because it will yield maximum single-target sustained DPS, which is almost always the most important factor in a raid. AoE potential is lower, but still sufficient for most fights, especially if you have another DoT spec in the group.

Usually, you’ll want to take Sonic Rebounder, Hitman, and Pyro Shield, but those options aren’t useful in 100% of boss fights. I distinguished Hitman as a Build Essential, but if DTPS is low or your other DCDs are wholly sufficient, you can swap it out for Reflective Armor.

Build Essentials Open Flame Jet Charge Hitman Hydraulic Overrides

This build sacrifices a lot of single-target damage for AoE. It’s well-suited to Flashpoints and fights that almost exclusively contain adds. The sustained DPS loss is less significant in FPs because boss fights tend to be much shorter, so Explosive Fuel with the Superheated Fuel tactical will be able to compensate for lower single-target since it will be active for a greater proportion of the fight.

I have recommended Enhanced Paralytics and Chilled Retribution as defaults over Sonic Rebounder and Boiling Point because adds tend to be vulnerable to CC, so beefing up Carbonize can be more valuable.

Build Essentials Open Flame Jet Charge Whistling Birds Chilled Retribution Pyro Shield Reflective Armor Hydraulic Overrides Efficient Suit

The Solo Content build is extremely similar to the Sustained AoE build, though build essentials are more tailored towards what you’ll be dealing with in solo content compared to group content.

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 Explosive Fuel and Shoulder Cannons for particularly challenging foes like Elites and Champions.

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.

I know you’re probably thinking “wow, that’s super long”, but don’t panic. The burst from Explosive Fuel + Adrenal + Shoulder Cannon ends about halfway through. The opener is actually a bit easier than the regular rotation because it is just the regular rotation except you don’t really have to care about Heat.

While Explosive Fuel is active, all of your Rapid Shots will be replaced by Flame Bursts and you’ll use Vent Heat 1 cycle after to get back to a reasonable amount of Heat, but as soon as Explosive Fuel ends, you’ll need to incorporate Rapid Shots again. Before using Vent Heat, you can just alternate using Rapid Shots in between GCDs that cost Heat.

You can also shift Rail Shot to be before Immolate or Searing Wave, which will enable you to get the full DoT off inside the Explosive Fuel window, but I think it’s best to start Explosive Fuel with Searing Wave because it means the full duration of a DoT spread will autocrit and you can barely fit a second activation of Searing Wave inside the window thanks to the cooldown reduction from alacrity if you were able to do your opener perfectly.

Immolate is technically the best option if you want to get that second activation. Still, it’s only 20k extra damage over Searing Wave specifically in single-target situations, so I don’t think it’s worthwhile to learn a whole new opener just for that.

Pyrotech features a sort of hybrid structure between a rotation and priority system that’s reminiscent of the old single-target Vengeance Juggernaut / Vigilance Guardian rotation where you’ll be alternating between using a powerful ability that has a long cooldown and a filler ability from a priority list.

This rotation component provides the basic structure of your rotation. Each of the non-filler abilities deals a considerable portion of damage, so you want to use them all on cooldown while making it as easy as possible to manage your Heat and not lose your place in the rotation.

I recommend not having a filler slot between Incendiary Missile and Searing Wave so that you never have to worry about DoT spread not working. Immolate should only be used after Searing Wave so you never have to worry about missing out on the Consuming Flames. Rail Shot comes last because there’s really no need for it to come sooner outside of maybe missing a tick of the Burning Shot DoT during Explosive Fuel and doing it later gives ample time to always get the Charged Gauntlets autocrit proc from Flaming Fist.

Beyond that, there’s a fair bit of flexibility in the actual order in which you activate these core abilities, and while I don’t personally recommend it, you can insert a filler slot in between Incendiary Missile and Searing Wave. You can also omit the filler slot in between Searing Wave and Immolate, though both of these actions just have the effect of moving a Filler Slot from or to the multi-filler section after Rail Shot.

Alternating filler slots makes Heat management easier because you only have to worry about whether or not the next rotation attack will put you over 40 Heat. However, incorporating a lot of alternations makes the rotation less stable because it’s easier for disruptions to cause you to lose your place, causing unnecessary delays.

The only reason you need to somewhat cater to this alternating structure is that Flaming Fist’s cooldown doesn’t align with the cooldown of any other ability, causing it to float around in all the slots like Shatter / Plasma Brand.

It’s impossible to never delay Flaming Fist while still using all of your other abilities on cooldown. In other words, no matter how many alternations you use, you’ll always have to delay Flaming Fist a little bit.

Why do we care so much about Flaming Fist? While it is weaker than your other abilities with longer cooldowns, it deals significantly more damage and costs less Heat than Flame Burst. Since we have a lot of filler slots, a big part of dealing maximum DPS is using Flaming Fist as often as possible.

This is the priority system you’ll use when deciding which ability to use in

If you have 100% uptime, Scorch will typically always be used right before every other activation of Incendiary Missile, though it can also take the place of other fillers when you can multi-DoT. You will typically need to delay Flaming Fist to apply Scorch 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.

Outside of maintaining Scorch on your primary target, Flaming Fist should typically have the highest priority. You shouldn’t feel like you’re losing DPS when you use Flaming Fist instead of Scorch on a secondary target. You will have ample opportunities to apply Scorch to all secondary targets while still using Flaming Fist as often as possible and each of the ability tree buffs for Flaming Fist are quite strong.

Scorch vs Flaming Fist really doesn’t come up all that often though. Most of the time, you’ll be deciding between Flaming Fist, Flame Burst, or Rapid Shots. Flaming Fist always wins out when it’s available, and then it comes down to Heat when deciding between Flame Burst and Rapid Shots.

Use Rapid Shots if your next attack would put you over 40 Heat, so typically when you have more than 25 Heat going into the Filler Slot in question; otherwise, use Flame Burst. In other words, use Flame Burst if you can afford it, but use Rapid Shots if you can’t.

You can and should also swap out Flame Burst for Deadly Onslaught or Flame Sweep if you can hit at least 2 targets. Remember, Deadly Onslaught deals basically the same single-target damage per GCD as Flame Burst, though it’s more difficult to manage its Heat cost while you’ll barely make a profit by hitting 2 targets with Flame Sweep, so if it isn’t essential for the adds to go down immediately (think about Grob’thokk’s Dreadful Ugnaughts vs Dash’roode’s Voracious Xuuvas), don’t bother using Flame Sweep unless you can hit 3+ targets.

This is a collection of new Guides dedicated to specific new ore redesigned/revamped gameplay features, new mechanics and game systems. If you are looking for information on what Combat Styles are, how Loadouts work, what are Legendary Items and how to get them, what Galactic Seasons are and EndGame Gearing advise, this is the place to check!

Complete list of all SWTOR 7.0 Class Guides for PvE and PvP for the Legacy of the Sith Expansion, ordered by Combat Style and Discipline!

In this guide, you’ll learn more about the SWTOR 7.0 Combat Styles: what they are and how to choose a second Combat Style for your character!

This guide explains what is the Loadouts System in SWTOR 7.0, how it works, and shares tips on how to take full advantage of it!

SWTOR EndGame Gearing Guide for 7.0 explaining the available new tiers of gear, how to obtain them and what to look for based on your Combat Style!

In SWTOR 7.0 Legendary Items carry set bonuses. This guide shows you how to unlock them and contains also a full list of all available Legendary Implants for all classes!

Complete guide to the SWTOR Galactic Seasons system, released with Update 6.3 – what is it, how to access and use it, what rewards you earn!

Guide to the R-4 Anomaly Operation in SWTOR for Story Mode and Veteran Mode. Overview of the operation and structure of boss encounters!

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How to unlock and complete Eden Ring Station under Manius’s Sanctum in AC Valhalla to get The Blazing Sword

Witcher 3 GOTY vs Original Edition: which one to choose

How to Level Up Quickly in New World – A Beginner’s Guide

Cyberpunk 2077 Update 1.6 New Weapons Locations Guide

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