This is up-to-date for Patch 7.5
The video version of this guide is available on my YouTube channel here:
Lethality is a hybrid DPS class that offers some of the best area of effect (AoE) damage in the game. On top of that, it has access to stealth and can support its teammates with off-heals. Lethality is a damage-over-time (DoT) combat style, which revolves around spreading your Corrosive Dart and Toxic Blast to as many targets as possible and buffing them with Lethal Strike.
Tactical
Viral Elements is the tactical of choice. It allows Toxic Haze to spread your Toxic Blast, which amplifies your DoT damage on all affected targets. Also, it turns Lethal Strike into an AoE against targets affected by Lethal Haze. That’s why you want to combine the two abilities whenever enemies are stacked up.
Synox shots can be useful for Single-Target DPS, but other classes are still better at that, even if you run this tactical, so you might as well play to your strengths and run Viral Elements instead.
For Huttball you can run Augmented Holocomm, which gives your Holotraverse a second stack. Very OP for scoring the ball and then jumping back to your healers!
The best legendary implant is Tactician, which grants you an extra 10% critical hit chance as long as you have a stack of Tactical Advantage. This just buffs your overall damage and we can almost always have it up, so you always run this.
IMPORTANT: There is another Operative Implant called “Tactician’s Focus”. (Good job on the clear naming, Bioware!) Don’t confuse them!!!
Tactician buffs all your damage, especially your dots!
Tactician’s Focus only gives you an auto-crit on a filler, which doesn’t even do great damage to begin with. So don’t waste your tech frags!
For your second legendary, I recommend running Locked and Loaded. The tooltip on that one is wrong. It will give you an extra 5% BONUS damage, which is less than 5% extra overall damage (different modifier). But it’s still a bit more damage, so it’s a good implant.
The final implant that I have been playing with after watching Operative healers pull 50k HPS in PVE is called Aggressive Treatment. This one gives you a free rotational heal (meaning you don’t need to waste a GCD and aren’t losing DPS) in an 8-m radius for up to 8 targets. It heals for 3 ticks per target and can crit for upwards of 10k per tick, so the AoE potential is insane if people are stacking. Use this instead of Locked and Loaded if your healers are bad and the enemy has a lot of melee.
Gear & Stats
Critical: 4814
Alacrity: 2158
Accuracy: 1113
You want to get your alacrity rating to around 2150. That's one alacrity enhancement and three superior (golden) alacrity augments on top of your legendary implants.
Since your Toxic Blast is a ranged attack (aka white damage), which amplifies your DoT damage by a significant amount, we need to run with 5% accuracy. To reach that, equip one accuracy enhancement, two augments, and the Advanced Kyrprax Proficient Stim.
Once you have that, you want to get your critical rating to around 4800. For that, you need the remaining 5 enhancements, earpiece, 9 critical augments as well as the aforementioned stim.
Warzone Build
Level 23: Corrosive Return has been nerfed in one of the recent patches. It used to be extremely overpowered since it extended the duration of your stim boost (which is a heal, damage reduction, and alacrity buff). Now, it only makes it so Corrosive Assault refunds your Tactical Advantage (TA) once every 10 seconds. Since TA is very important for keeping the Tactician Buff up, this is the best option for overall DPS. Alternatively, you can consider trying Corrosive Impair for the 50% slow if you are comfortable with not letting your TA stacks fall off.
Level 27: Sly Countermeasures gives you an extra 2 seconds of Evasion for a total of 7 seconds (wtf!). Oh, and you get a free 60% AoE damage reduction on top of it. This makes you close to immortal against Marksman and Virulence Snipers, Marauders, Juggernauts, and Mercenaries, which makes this the overall best choice for Warzones.
Level 39: Critical Grenade. A 20% extra DoT crit chance that you can always keep up by spamming Grenade? How OP is that? Paired with your Tactician’s Package, your DoTs should be close to always critting.
Level 43: There are three interesting options, but in my opinion, Tactical Overdrive is the best for PVP. The second use of your Toxic Haze + Lethal Strike combo as well as Stim Boost + Shield Probe comes in very handy and means that oftentimes, you can win fights by simply outlasting the enemies by chaining together your defensive cooldowns.
Level 51: Chem-resistant inlays is the best choice if you want to stay in the fight for longer. Advanced Cloaking can be better for defending nodes though.
Level 64: Med Shield can add some nice HPS since you have Shield Probe up so often. But you can also Evasive Screen to make sure to get a clean stealth-out without needing to use Evasion.
Level 68: Here you have two options. Do you want to be a f*cking asshole who gets off on Flashbanging people in the face or do you want to do TOP DPS and actually be able to play Huttball? In the first case, go Flashbang, in the second, you need to run Holotraverse.
Level 73: I like both Blow for Blow and Evasive Imperative. The first makes it so AP PowerTechs one-shot themselves on you. The second makes you immune to white damage more often. Tough choice this one! Best to scout out the enemy team before the match and decide according to the enemy team's composition.
Arena Build
For Arenas, you will usually not be the first target. Taking advantage of that, we are making some changes to the build.
Level 27: In Arena, the first kill is super important since it turns the rest of the match into a 3v4. That’s why we take Debilitate and aim to stun the kill target (ideally after they have used their CC breaker).
Level 64: In case you do need to stealth out, you want to make sure you can safely get away and don’t randomly pop out because of a lingering DoT on you. In a Warzone, one death is not that bad, but in Arena it means you are out of the match and are forced to watch your teammates chase the enemies around for up to 5 minutes, while you inspect the integrity of the arena floor. Instead, I recommend that you take Evasive Screen, heal to full, and make them pay.
Level 73: As mentioned in the Warzone build, this one depends on the classes you face. Both options can be useful here!
Main Damage Combo
The combo below is how you usually want to start a fight. Of course, you cannot always follow this “rotation” because PVP is dynamic, people kite, they use defensives, etc. so you will need to react and change your combo to counter your opponents.
In general, you want to start the fight with Corrosive Dart.
Next, you walk up and put Toxic Blast on your target.
Now, that target ideally stands in the middle of his teammates, so you use Toxic Haze to spread Dart and Blast on all enemies within 8 meters.
Follow that up with an AoE Lethal Strike, which buffs your DoT critical chance AND crit damage by 30% for 6 seconds!
Now we spam Corrosive Grenade on everyone and their mother.
Once everyone is fully dotted up, use Corrosive Assault and Shiv as fillers and repeat the combo.
If all of the above are on cooldown and everyone has Corrosive Grenade on them, you can throw in a Frag Grenade for extra AoE. You should never really need to manage your resource as Lethality since simply dealing damage with DoT abilities gives you energy back.
Shield probe does not break stealth, so pop it before you open into 8 people to mitigate incoming damage.
Use Noxious Knives to detect enemy stealthers that have just vanished.
Hololocate does not trigger a global cooldown so you can combo Hololocate into Debilitate stun or Hololocate into Toxic Haze for the surprise 8-man dot spread.
Lethal strike does extra damage when used from stealth, so for max DPS, you can use your Cloaking Screen offensively and combo it with Lethal strike.
Easy classes to face
Advanced Prototype PowerTechs: Simply wait until they pop their burst on you, hit Evasion, and watch them one-shot themselves on your reflect. Also, they are a decent target to spread dots off, as they will usually run into the middle of the fight.
Juggernauts have the Force Choke stun, which can be annoying, but other than that, they are prime targets to spread your dots. Vengeance can’t play the game against your Evasion DoT cleanse with a baked-in 60% AoE reduction. Watch them slowly rot away as you revel in the superiority of your chosen combat style.
Hard classes to face
Madness Sorcerers are a hard class to face because they will never stand in range for a DoT spread and can passively outheal your DPS. Their roots can be annoying but they also should not be able to kill you easily, since you have a passive 30% DoT damage reduction. (Because, of course, you do!)
Other Operatives can be annoying to face for a similar reason. Lethality is unkillable 1v1, Concealment will just roll around and permanently cleanse your DoTs and Medicine can outheal your DPS better than the other healers, while you don’t have the burst to kill them by yourself.
Synergies
The best class to play with Lethality is Pyro PT. They profit from the 7% extra internal/elemental damage debuff that you bring on Corrosive Grenade because of your Level 51 passive. You profit from the Pull/Carbonize combo, which can set up some game-winning DoT spreads.
That’s all for this guide. Have a question? Let me know in the comments below!
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