SWTOR 7.5 Lethality Operative PvE Guide and Best Builds (2024)

SWTOR 7.0 Lethality Operative Guide (DPS PvE) for beginner players and more experienced veterans: Skills, Choices, Rotations, Gearing, Builds, Tips!

The guide is up-to-date for Patch 7.5

Introduction to Lethality Operative

Lethality Operatives execute their enemies by administering lethal doses of several corrosive poisons and toxins and shivving them with a vibroknife.

Lethality truly excels when it comes to dealing sustained damage, they are one of the best specs in the game in terms of single-target damage output and they’re no slouch when it comes to AoE either. That said, their AoE potential is behind that of Vengeance / Vigilance and Hatred / Serenity.

In terms of survivability, Lethality is finally in a good enough place. They can handle both sustained and spike damage, but does not have a full cheese ability. If you need a cheese, you’ll need to swap to Concealment or rely on Friend of the Force from an Assassin / Shadow tank or Sonic Rebounder from Powertechs / Vanguards.

Lethality’s biggest drawback is their poor group utility. While they do provide good DPS debuffs and the raid buff is nice, that’s really all they offer. They lack things like an off-taunt , any accessible form of in-combat CC, burst, or range likely because BioWare neglected to give them anything to replace the loss of battle and stealth rezzing.

BioWare will likely be making balance changes throughout the first few patches, so be sure to check back to this guide after each update. You can check at the top of the guide to see if the guide has been updated for the most recent patch.

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. Lethality permanently lost access to these abilities:

• Countermeasures (kind of)
• Sever Tendon
• Resuscitation Probe
• Stealth Rez

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. This was done because BioWare made it so stealthing out in Operations no longer actually pulls you out of combat, making stealth rezzing impossible. You can still activate Cloaking Screen to zero out your threat though.

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.

The word Imperial has been replaced with something that is faction-agnostic since Republic Origin Stories now have access to the combat style. Unlike Snipers, Operatives didn’t have any abilities that included the word, but they did have a few passives that now have slightly different names. For example, Imperial Brew was changed to Potent Brew.

Group Composition Tips

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

Lethality is fairly standard as far as group composition dependency goes. It also takes the crown as being the discipline that can be most dependent on the least valuable DPS debuffs in the game, AoE and Ranged, though the DPS gain from those debuffs being present is still pretty small.

Lethality Operative pairs best with Arsenal Mercenary / Gunnery Commando Marksman Sniper / Sharpshooter Gunslinger, and Engineering Sniper / Saboteur Gunslinger because all of these disciplines provide 2 DPS debuffs that the other need for maximum DPS. Each of the ranged burst specs provides the armor and ranged debuffs while Engineering / Saboteur provides AoE and ranged.

It’s absolutely not required that you pair a Lethality Operative with one of those disciplines, but because Lethality is melee DoT while the others are ranged burst (or hybrid), these pairings offer some of the strongest possible compositional synergies in the game. (Good lord, writing that last clause made me feel like a corporate executive.)

Operative DPS in general offers great synergy with its own DPS debuffs as well since it provides both the Tech and Internal / Elemental debuffs.

DPS Mindset

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

Damage over Time Abilities (DoTs) vs Direct Damage

DoTs are not special abilities that let you deal damage when you can’t target the boss with new attacks. Contrary to popular belief, throwing your DoTs on right before you become unable to attack the boss does not result in a DPS increase over an ability that deals the same amount of damage immediately because you’re still spending a GCD to cast the DoT.

I think it’s most helpful to conceptualize DoTs compared to direct damage abilities (regular non-DoT / non-Periodic abilities) by imagining them as dealing all of their damage hitting at the end of their duration instead of being spread evenly throughout, or at least that’s when you’ll get the amount of damage listed on the packaging.

Prior to that point, you’ll be getting less damage out of each GCD equal to the damage dealt per tick times the number of ticks that were left. This is why clipping your DoTs (reapplying them before they’ve expired) is generally considered a bad thing. When you clip your DoTs, you make the last GCD where you applied your DoTs retroactively deal less damage.

In general, DoTs are worse than abilities that deal the same amount of damage immediately because the enemy could become immune, enraged, or dead by the time all of that damage will hit. In order to combat these disadvantages, DoTs tend to deal a bit more damage than direct damage abilities and almost always deal Internal/Elemental damage so they ignore armor.

DoT specs have often been capable of dealing more sustained DPS than burst specs and usually have some sort of sub-30% HP execute window where DoT damage is increased. This helps to compensate for those targets dying before the DoT has finished ticking, though on targets that die quickly, this damage bonus isn’t enough to make it worth reapplying DoTs and makes it no different from clipping your DoTs.

The sub-30% damage increase becomes more than just an equalizing effect on bosses since they usually last multiple DoT applications (and often several minutes) below 30% health, allowing enough time for DPS to actually increase. If DoTs have just fallen off of your target and you know it will die before the DoT completes all of its ticks, you should not reapply them to that target and either use one of your direct damage abilities (usually filler) or apply your DoTs to another target.

Unless an enemy needs to die ASAP, it’s usually okay to switch targets preemptively since the vast majority of your damage contribution will be over in this situation. If you do decide to switch targets before the enemy dies, make sure you verify that the enemy actually died soon after you switched, sometimes the rest of your group might have the same idea and you’re left with an add wandering around with 1% HP left.

Regarding Multi-DoTing

Most DoTs don’t have cooldowns and always deal more damage than DoT spec fillers. For much of the game’s life, applying DoTs to multiple targets in lieu of fillers at the same time has been a reliable way for players to increase their DPS. Manually applying DoTs to multiple targets in lieu of using a filler is called multi-DoTing.

Thanks to changes made to many DoT specs in 6.0 and 7.0, there is now much less of a DPS gain from multi-DoTing than there used to be. In 6.0, tactical items were introduced and the best PvE-oriented ones tend to completely focus on buffing either single-target or AoE damage.

In 7.0, we have new discipline skill tree choices, and the options you have to pick from are structured in a similar way to tacticals where you have to choose to buff either single-target or AoE damage.

Most of the single-target tacticals and discipline choices buff DoT spec damage in ways that do not extend the DPS increases to secondary targets, especially not to targets that received their DoTs through ways other than by DoT spread.

For Lethality, it is still always profitable to multi-DoT by applying Corrosive Dart and Corrosive Grenade instead of Corrosive Assault, though the DPS increase is small, especially while Toxic Blast is active, and will only be a DPS increase if the DoT is able to tick fully. It’s not worth multi-DoTing as Lethality if you have to waste a lot of time target swapping or there’s a lot going on and you need to focus on mechanics.

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

Tactical Advantage

I want to start this section by going over the Tactical Advantage (TA) proc since it is an integral part of playing Operative in general. You can read through the description for it listed alongside your other combat style passives, but it isn’t very helpful in explaining what exactly a TA is. Basically, Tactical Advantage is an additional resource alongside Energy and in order to use some abilities, you have to spend 1 TA. You can gain a TA from the following sources:

• Dealing damage with Lethal Strike initiated from stealth
• Dealing damage with Shiv or Toxic Blast
• Activating Stim Boost or Holotraverse
• Landing the killing blow on an enemy

Since most abilities have cooldowns, this just represents an additional resource to manage, though this essentially functions as the cooldown for your Corrosive Assault ability. The following abilities cost a TA:

• Corrosive Assault
• Toxic Haze
• Tactical Superiority (raid buff)
• Kolto Infusion (without the Quickening proc)

For Lethality, your goal is to generate TAs to the extent that you can use Toxic Haze on cooldown and Corrosive Assault as your only filler so you never have to use Overload Shot. When you have the opportunity to gain a TA, it’s important that you don’t already have the maximum number of TAs, or else you will effectively be wasting it, so you have to predict when you’re about to get one to avoid this.

In addition, the Tactician Legendary Implant allows you to gain 10% crit chance for 10 seconds whenever you generate a TA. Since there’s no longer a rate limit on the effect like there was in 6.0, you don’t have to worry about maximizing its uptime.

Corrosive Grenade

(Tech/Internal/Periodic/AoE/Instant/Poison)
Corrosive Grenade is the first of your primary DoTs that must have 100% uptime on your primary target. Even without Corrosive Assault, Corrosive Grenade deals enough damage to be worth using where it has 100% uptime, so you should apply it to secondary targets when possible.

Corrosive Grenade is considered an AoE attack and one of the only rotational AoE abilities in the game that can benefit from another discipline providing the AoE debuff. Most other rotational AoE is dealt by specs that already provide the AoE debuff. Please note that unlike in Virulence, Corrosive Grenade does not spread Corrosive Dart.

Corrosive Grenade has 1 discipline passive and 1 debuff associated with it that are relevant to your rotation:

Corrosive Microbes
Corrosive Grenade (and Corrosive Dart) have a 10% chance to harm their target twice whenever they deal damage. This damage is unreliable in the moment, but over the course of the whole fight, it will average out to 10% more ticks.

Assailable
Also provided by Corrosive Microbes, Assailable is the Internal/Elemental DPS debuff and is applied by Corrosive Grenade. The Internal/Elemental debuff is considered the second best DPS debuff in the game because it significantly benefits almost all DPS specs as many of the most powerful attacks in the game deal Internal/Elemental damage. For some disciplines, the Internal/Elemental debuff is actually better than the Armor debuff because a greater proportion of the damage dealt is considered Internal/Elemental compared to Energy/Kinetic and both debuffs offer the same effective 7% damage increase.

Since Lethality applies this debuff on an AoE ability, it’s even more valuable because almost all DoTs and DoT spreads in the game deal Internal/Elemental damage and DoT specs provide the most potent AoE in the game thanks to their DoT spreads.

Corrosive Dart

(Tech/Internal/Periodic/Single-Target/Instant/Poison)
Corrosive Dart is the second of your primary DoTs that must have 100% uptime on your primary target. Even without Corrosive Assault, Corrosive Dart deals enough damage to be worth using where it has 100% uptime, so you should apply it to secondary targets when possible. Corrosive Dart has 1 discipline passive associated with it that are relevant to your rotation that I haven’t already mentioned.

Lethal Injectors
Increases the duration of Corrosive Dart by 6 seconds. This passive is now hidden, but the effect remains. Corrosive Grenade lasts 24 seconds, so this passive just makes Corrosive Dart have the same duration.

Corrosive Assault

(Ranged/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
This ability is used in the same manner as a filler and deals similar damage, but it costs a TA to use. If you’ve played Virulence / Dirty Fighting, this ability is basically just a single tick of Cull / Wounding Shots, though it deals more weapon damage and can only ever tick 2 DoTs instead of 3. In that way, it’s more similar to Lethal Shot / Dirty Blast.

Since Corrosive Assault costs a TA, you’re fundamentally limited in how often you can use it, though you can generate enough TAs to use it as often as you need to while still being able to use your more powerful attacks on cooldown.

There is no point in using Corrosive Assault if you don’t have both Corrosive Dart and Corrosive Grenade on the target, and even without the bonus ticks from Corrosive Assault, each DoT is still stronger and cheaper than a single activation of Corrosive Assault.

The fact that Corrosive Assault deals a majority of its damage by ticking your DoTs means that it technically benefits from effects that trigger from or apply to your periodic or poison effects. For example, there is a 10% chance that either Corrosive Dart or Corrosive Grenade can tick a second time thanks to the Corrosive Microbes discipline passive.

That said, it’s still a filler because it is weaker than your other attacks and doesn’t have a cooldown. Corrosive Assault does not have any procs or discipline passives associated with it that are relevant to your rotation that I haven’t mentioned.

Shiv

(Tech/Kinetic/Direct/Single Target/Instant)
This ability’s primary purpose is to generate a TA for you to use on Corrosive Assault, and your goal is to always use Corrosive Assault as a filler instead of Overload Shot. Since dealing damage with Shiv is one of the only ways you can consistently generate TAs, you’ll be using this ability fairly often as well; it’s basically your second filler.

It’s a bit complicated to describe when to use Shiv since it varies depending on what other abilities you have available and how many TAs you have. It deals significantly less damage than any of your other attacks, so it should never be used when you have max TAs.

Since TAs are in relatively short supply, you generally only want to use this ability if you do not currently have 2 TAs and have a GCD that you’d want to use Corrosive Assault in because none of your other abilities are available. Shiv has 1 proc, debuff, and 1 discipline passive associated with it that are extremely relevant to your rotation:

Fatality
Activating Shiv grants Fatality, which makes your next Corrosive Assault refund a TA and cost no Energy. This proc adds a significant amount of complexity to Lethality’s rotation because you want to get this proc as often as possible since it’s basically a free extra TA. There’s no easy way to track when Fatality will come off cooldown in-game, but you can set up a StarParse timer for it if you want.

If you get the Fatality proc when Shiv pushes you up to 2 TAs (so you have 2 TAs + Fatality), you need to be mindful that it will take 2 activations of Corrosive Assault before you have room for another TA because the next activation of Corrosive Assault will keep you at 2 TAs. Consider delaying Shiv by a GCD to use Corrosive Assault such that Shiv would bring you up to 1 TA + Fatality instead of 2 so you don’t have to delay other abilities like Toxic Blast or Stim Boost for more than 1 GCD.

Since Fatality only refunds a TA when Corrosive Assault is activated, you technically can get around this mechanic if you mess up by using Toxic Haze or Tactical Superiority instead if they happen to be available (and they almost certainly won’t be) because they will consume a TA and not Fatality. Still, you should try to avoid this when possible by being thoughtful about when you generate TAs in general.

License to Kill
Dealing damage with Shiv applies Susceptible for 45s, which makes affected targets take 5% more damage from Tech attacks. This is the Tech debuff. It’s incredibly valuable to Mercenaries / Commandos and Snipers / Gunslingers, the tech-based rDPS, because they are the only disciplines that can benefit from it that do not provide it themselves and a considerable proportion of their damage dealt is considered tech damage.

Cut Down
Shiv deals 10% more damage to targets affected by your poison effects. This proc reinforces the fact that maintaining your DoTs typically has a higher priority than activating Shiv. Keep in mind that this is a small incentive and you’d lose more DPS from applying DoTs to something that’s about to die than you would gain from using Shiv against a target that is affected by one of your DoTs.

Toxic Blast

(Ranged/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
This ability deals very little damage on its own but is one of your most powerful attacks in terms of damage per activation because it deals damage anytime one of your poison effects deals damage. Your entire rotation is designed to make your poison effects tick and deal more damage.

Toxic Blast will trigger off of literally any of your attacks that deal poison damage including:

• Corrosive Dart
• Corrosive Grenade
• DoT ticks triggered by Corrosive Assault
• Toxic Haze
• Part of Lethal Strike
• Part of Noxious Knives

If you’ve played Virulence / Dirty Fighting, Toxic Blast is basically the same as Weakening Blast / Hemmhoraging Blast with the added effect that it grants a TA. Toxic Blast has 1 tactical item and 1 discipline passive associated with it that are relevant to your rotation:

Synox Shots
Toxic Blast deals 75% more damage. Whenever Toxic Blast critically hits, it restores 2 Energy. This tactical item makes it so you don’t have to manage your Energy at all and creates a stronger incentive to use Toxic Blast on cooldown.

Devouring Microbes
If a target dies while it is affected by Toxic Blast, the cooldown on Toxic Blast is reset. This discipline passive makes it so Lethality doesn’t lose as much DPS when target swapping because Toxic Blast has a decently long cooldown while making up a considerable portion of your overall damage dealt and functioning similarly to a DoT in terms of how it deals damage.

Please note that it is not worth applying Toxic Blast to a target if it will die within the next GCD, especially if DoTs aren’t even on the target. Toxic Blast requires 6 DoT ticks to surpass Corrosive Assault in terms of damage dealt per GCD, which can come from 2 activations of Corrosive Assault + both DoTs ticking once naturally during that time. The first of those GCDs can (and should) also be Toxic Haze, which will contribute up to 3 DoT ticks.

Toxic Haze

(Tech/Internal/Periodic/AoE/Instant)
Toxic Haze is your main AoE ability, though it deals enough damage to be worth incorporating into your single-target rotation, especially while Toxic Blast is active on the target. It ticks 3 times over its 6s duration (once at the beginning, once halfway through, and once at the end) and is considered a poison effect, so each of those ticks will also trigger Toxic Blast.

To be clear, it is ideal to have each of Toxic Haze’s ticks trigger Toxic Blast and this is easy to do since they have identical cooldowns; however, it is not essential for Toxic Haze to tick Toxic Blast 3 times in order for it to deal more damage than Corrosive Assault.

That said, Toxic Haze does need to hit your primary target all 3 times in order for it to be a single-target sustained DPS increase. If you only manage to land 2 ticks, Corrosive Assault will deal more damage, so make sure that the target will survive or otherwise remain in the AoE for the full 6s duration. Otherwise, use Corrosive Assault instead.

Toxic Haze costs a TA, but it doesn’t trigger or benefit from the 2 TA refunds, Fatality and Corrosive Refund, that Corrosive Assault can. This is annoying when you know those refunds are available, but it is helpful when you have an extra TA you want to spend now so you can activate something that generates a TA like Holotraverse or Stim Boost without having to delay that activation by multiple GCDs.

In other words, Corrosive Assault is more likely to keep you at 2 TAs for multiple GCDs, meaning you can’t use TA generators without wasting the TA. With Toxic Haze, you can force yourself down to 1 TA so you don’t waste a TA. The only other way to do this without losing DPS is with the raid buff, which is basically never available. If you have 2 TAs and are about to use Toxic Blast, it is beneficial to use Toxic Haze first so you don’t waste the TA generated by Toxic Blast.

Toxic Haze also stuns standard and weak enemies for the full duration, making it one of the most powerful abilities in the game in solo content. Toxic Haze has 1 discipline passive associated with it that I haven’t mentioned yet that is relevant to your rotation:

Lethal Proliferation
Toxic Haze spreads Corrosive Dart (but not Corrosive Grenade) to targets it damages if it damages at least 1 target already affected by Corrosive Dart. This is Lethality’s DoT spread for Corrosive Dart. Unlike Virulence / Dirty Fighting, Corrosive Grenade is not involved in the DoT spread of Corrosive Dart at all.

This will desynchronize the applications of Corrosive Grenade and Dart, forcing you to clip Corrosive Grenade on your primary target or skip it on secondary targets, resulting in a single-target or AoE DPS loss. If the adds will die on time without Corrosive Grenade, there’s no reason to clip it on the primary target; otherwise, it’s worthwhile to clip Grenade so the adds die faster.

You can get this clipped GCD back by using Toxic Haze to bounce Corrosive Dart back to the primary target if it is still on secondary targets. However, you can also turn this bounce into a single-target DPS increase if you don’t need

Lethal Strike

(Tech/Kinetic and Internal/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
Lethal Strike is primarily a big hit that deals part of its damage as kinetic (mitigated by armor) and part of it as internal (ignores armor). The internal component is also considered poison damage, so it synergizes with other effects that rely on poison. For example, Lethal Strike’s poison damage will tick Toxic Blast.

When Lethal Strike is used from Stealth, you’ll deal more damage with the attack and generate a TA. Lethal Strike has 1 proc associated with it that is relevant to your rotation that I haven’t mentioned yet:

Augmented Toxins
Activating Lethal Strike grants Augmented Toxins, which increases the critical chance and critical multiplier of your periodic damage and healing abilities by 30% for 6s. This buff is quite powerful, but it’s practically impossible to make the most of it while still using Lethal Strike on cooldown. The attack deals too much direct damage to be worth delaying.

Other Semi-Rotational Abilities

Frag Grenade

(Tech/Kinetic/Direct/AoE/Instant)
Unless your DoTs can be refreshed, this is Lethality’s only semi-rotational attack that can be used if you are more than 10m away from your target and deals a halfway decent amount of damage. Since it costs 20 Energy, be prepared to use Adrenaline Probe, which should be available because you don’t need it for anything else.

Overload Shot

This ability should only ever be used if you are out of TAs because it is objectively worse than Corrosive Assault in every way except for the fact that it does not cost a TA to use. Overload Shot deals less weapon damage than Corrosive Assault, can’t tick your DoTs (nor subsequently trigger Toxic Blast twice), and effectively costs more Energy. It only deals a tiny bit less damage than Frag Grenade, but it’s significantly cheaper, so I recommend using it over Frag Grenade if you’re within 10m of the boss and just out of TAs.

If you do the rotation correctly, you shouldn’t ever have to use Overload Shot, but you will need to use it if you mess up and don’t have enough TAs. Needing to use Overload Shot frequently is one of the best indicators that you need to spend more time practicing on the dummy.

Rifle Shot

(Ranged/Energy/Direct/Single Target/Instant)
Rifle Shot costs 0 Energy, has a 30m range, and technically deals damage, so you can make an argument for using it if you are further than 10m away from your target when Frag Grenade is on cooldown and your DoTs have been applied, but it’s just so weak, it’s better to just spend that GCD on Exfiltrate to get back in range sooner or one of your bigger off-heals, Kolto Probe or Kolto Infusion (only with the Quickening proc), because your healers have stronger GCDs than Rifle Shot.

Kolto Infusion and Kolto Probe

These off-heals will probably be more valuable to your group than Rifle Shot. That said, if you’re spending more than 1-2 GCDs beyond 10m from the boss outside of downtime, you’re probably doing something wrong, so you should almost exclusively use them during downtime.

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.

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.

Fragmentation Grenade

(Tech/Kinetic/Direct/AoE/Instant)
Operatives have a combat style passive called Skirmisher, which buffs Fragmentation Grenade like this: “The AoE damage dealt by Fragmentation Grenade is increased by 50% and it now deals AoE damage to any nearby enemies, even if they are stronger than Weak or Standard.” This makes Frag Grenade useful to Operatives in all AoE situations. It’s difficult to test, but I think Fragmentation Grenade will deal slightly more damage than Noxious Knives, even with the Curbing Strategies ability tree buff.

Noxious Knives

(Tech/Internal and Kinetic/Direct/AoE/Instant)
This is your spammable AoE. It doesn’t deal that much damage, but you can weave it into your general rotation if there are adds up. It matches the damage dealt by Corrosive Assault at 3 targets and surpasses its damage at 4. The poison component of the damage will trigger Toxic Blast if it is present, though this doesn’t affect which ability you should use.

Toxic Haze

(Tech/Internal/Periodic/AoE/Instant)
This is your strongest AoE ability by far since it deals enough damage to be worth including in your single target rotation, covers a massive area, and can spread Corrosive Dart (as well as Toxic Blast if you have Viral Elements equipped). You’re already using it on cooldown as part of the single-target rotation, so keep doing that.

Lethal Strike with Viral Elements

With the Viral Elements tactical, Lethal Strike deals damage to up to what is likely 8 enemies within a 5m radius of the target if the nearby enemy is affected by Toxic Haze. In other words, the Lethal Strike target doesn’t technically have to be in the Toxic Haze, but it will only hit people who are in it and within 5m of the primary target of Lethal Strike.

Lethal Strike is your most damaging attack with the Viral Elements tactical, so it’s worth pairing with every single Toxic Haze, though you should use it on cooldown even without Viral Elements because its Augmented Toxins proc boosts all of your DoTs anyway.

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.

Stim Boost

Stim Boost now grants an additional effect that is unique to each discipline. For Lethality, the additional effects include granting 10 Energy and the Revitalizers utility, which reduces your damage taken by 20% and heals you for 5% of your max HP every 3s for the duration of Stim Boost.

The DPS increase from the alacrity is relatively small, though it can make a bigger difference during a burst DPS check. Over those 15 seconds, you’ll be able to do a single extra ability (12 abilities vs 11) thanks to the shorter GCD.

Since the survivability from Revitalizers is significantly stronger than the DPS increase, I recommend saving it for predictable sources of sustained damage. If there isn’t a predictable source of damage in the current phase, use Stim Boost when it becomes available, provided it will be up for the next DPS check or burst window.

Tactical Overdrive

This cooldown is incredibly potent. It resets the cooldown on several powerful abilities and gives you an additional 20% Mastery for 15 seconds. You want to make sure that all of the abilities whose cooldowns are reset by Tactical Overdrive are already on cooldown to make the most of it, even if you won’t get the maximum benefit.

Since this ability has such a long cooldown, it doesn’t matter too much if you delay it for a little while since it’s unlikely to change the number of uses throughout the fight, though do be mindful of whether or not you are able to squeeze in an extra use before the end of the fight.

For example, you want to use it 4 times in a 10-minute fight. If you delay it for more than a minute combined, you might only get to use it 3 times. Sometimes it can’t be helped though and having it up for a major DPS check or burn phase definitely takes priority over getting as many uses as possible.

Typically, you can use Tactical Overdrive once per phase, just like the Adrenal, so use them at the same time and prioritize maximizing their benefit over using them on cooldown. Make absolutely sure you have this available for burn phases since you can get 30s of Stim Boost + Revitalizers.

Adrenaline Probe

I hesitate to even refer to this as an offensive cooldown for Lethality because Energy management isn’t really a thing for this discipline anymore. The only time you’ll need to pop it is after you get breezed since you’ll have almost no Energy then.

Adrenal

The best time to activate the Adrenal right as you activate Stim Boost (and Tactical Overdrive, if applicable) so that both effects are active over the same 15s period. It’s really convenient to pair Tactical Overdrive with the Adrenal since they both share the same active time and cooldown.

You shouldn’t have to worry too much about timing your Adrenal with a specific point in your rotation since your high-damage abilities have such different cooldowns from each other. Try to apply your DoTs right before activating your Adrenal though since the rest of their ticks will be boosted.

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.

Shield Probe

This ability has a very short cooldown and is relatively weak, so it won’t really protect you from a whole lot on its own. Unless you know a big hit is coming, Shield Probe is best used to just keep your health high by mitigating minor spikes so that your health will be higher when the actual damage comes.

Lethality offers the added perk that once the shield breaks or wears off, you gain 15% DR for 6s. It’s not a lot, but it does help with survivability against sustained damage.

Evasion

As part of the ability pruning process, BioWare chose to make Countermeasures unique to Snipers and Evasion unique to Operatives. The capabilities handled by the pruned ability for each discipline are now granted by the base ability or a specific ability tree option as part of the level 35 choice. As a result, Evasion now does a ton of different things:

• It purges your debuffs and it isn’t on the GCD, so you don’t lose DPS and your healers don’t have to waste their own GCD to cleanse you. Purges are stronger than cleanses because they remove all removable debuffs rather than just two and can remove things that cleanses can’t always remove. The only other purges in the game are Force Shroud and Force Barrier. This purge comes from the Preparedness combat style passive.
• It increases your defense chance by 200%. This effect isn’t incredibly helpful for defensive purposes in raids since DPS don’t have to deal with Melee/Ranged damage too much. The only time you’ll really experience it is if you’re kiting a boss or have to deal with adds that the tanks aren’t able to keep aggro on, and neither situation is likely as an Operative. Furthermore, Melee/Ranged damage tends to last for a lot longer than 3 seconds. The best use of the defense chance is to protect you for a couple of seconds in case you get aggro of something and hopefully, the tanks can taunt it off of you before Evasion wears off.
• Sly Countermeasures now also makes it so Evasion reduces your AoE damage taken by 60% for its duration and last longer. This effect greatly improves Lethality’s survivability in Operations where the vast majority of damage taken is considered AoE damage.
• Evasion functions as your threat drop. Always use Evasion as a threat drop at the beginning of the fight, right after you finish the opener.
• With the Blow for Blow ability tree option, Evasion reflects (but doesn’t absorb) 150% of direct single-target damage. Unfortunately, since Evasion has the purge effect, you can’t use it to reflect everything that you can with other classes’ reactive damage. Remember that you will take any damage that gets reflected, so it’s very dangerous to stand in circles to take unnecessary damage and your healers will hate it.
• The Curative Agent utility effect from prior expansions has been removed completely.

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 and you certainly should never try to use one of your heals before using your Medpac.

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.

Toxin Scan

This is the cleanse for the Operative combat style. Generally, healers are responsible for dealing with most of the cleanses, though there are a few instances where the DPS should help, like on Dread Council with Tyrans’ Death Mark. Never use this on yourself if Evasion is available since that ability is off the GCD.

Your job as a DPS is to spend your GCDs on dealing damage. Your healer’s job is to spend their GCDs on mitigating damage, which includes most cleansing.

Exfiltrate

Exfiltrate is SWTOR’s implementation of a dodge roll. It doesn’t take you as far as most other movement abilities in the game, but its cooldown is shorter than most abilities. Since it’s on the GCD, you shouldn’t use it if you’re within 30m of your target. Reapply your DoTs (if appropriate) or use Fragmentation Grenade instead; it shouldn’t take more than 2 GCDs to get to 10m range.

Holotraverse

This is your gap closer ability. It now has the effects from the Circumvention utility built in. Holotraverse is pretty straightforward; if you’re within 30m of the boss, Holotraverse instantly teleports you to melee range, gives you a 75% movement speed boost for 3 seconds, and grants a TA.

Using Holotraverse as a gap closer takes priority over using it just to generate a TA since you’ll lose more DPS by not being in range than you’ll gain from a single extra TA since you can’t use your most damaging abilities while out of range.

In fights where you know you won’t end up out of range of the boss, feel free to use it as needed for TA generation.

Raid Utility

Tactical Superiority

This is your raid buff. It should be used on cooldown just like any other offensive cooldown unless it needs to be used for a burst phase or DPS check, normally the raid lead will make the call on when these should be used.

Remember, this is not a personal buff for you, it’s something that buffs the whole team. It also only has a 40m range, so be mindful on larger maps that it might not catch everyone and position yourself accordingly so that it catches as many people as possible. Use this on trash mobs if you want to troll your team.

Off-Healing

If you ever have to do this when you could be DPSing, something has clearly gone wrong with the attempt, or someone is not pulling their weight and you should complain to the raid lead and make a big scene about having to off-heal. This game is designed around each role being able to fully perform all of its duties without the need for another off-role’s help.

Besides it not being your job, a lot of bosses have fairly tight enrage timers, so if you’re having to waste your precious GCDs helping out another role because they can’t deal with what they are fully capable of dealing with, you’re gonna end up wiping to an enraged boss later anyway.

If there is downtime though where you can’t do anything else at all, use Kolto Infusion if you have the Quickening proc, and then apply Kolto Probe to yourself, don’t waste time applying probes once the downtime ends though.

Crowd Control and Other Notable Abilities

There are only a handful of instances in operations where CC is required, so I will briefly go over what the Operative has at their disposal along with any other abilities I have not yet covered in this guide.

Debilitate

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.

Distraction

This is your interrupt. For a melee DPS, the cooldown on your interrupt is a little on the long side, at 18 seconds its duration is equivalent to Sorcerer and Sniper interrupts. If you really want to be a clicker, I highly recommend you at least keybind this ability or you will have trouble with some of the shorter casts that need to be interrupted.

Flash Bang

This is your mez, a CC ability that breaks on damage. Usually, if you’re using this in combat, you will want to use it very soon after the enemy spawns. Thanks to the Preparedness combat style passive, this ability can blind up to 7 additional nearby targets, making it quite potent. Since it breaks on damage, it’s best used against adds that you do not intend to kill immediately.

Escape

This is your CC break. Use it when you get CC’dx and are prevented from dealing damage.

Sleep Dart

This ability allows you to CC an enemy from stealth without entering combat. This can help you to skip some sets of trash in between bosses, though it isn’t worth using if you’re progging on that boss since someone is eventually gonna pull them all accidentally.

Stealth

This is a toggle ability that allows you to enter and exit stealth, which allows you to sneak past some enemies. You have to be in stealth in order to use Sleep Dart and Infiltrate. In actual combat, you won’t be using this ability at all and you’ll use Cloaking Screen to stealth out instead, though it’s important to be in stealth when the fight starts so you can deal extra damage with and generate a TA from Lethal Strike.

Infiltrate

This ability allows you to put your entire group in stealth. I have never seen it used successfully in PvE. You might be able to use it to sneak past some groups of trash enemies, but that requires the whole group to be more coordinated than it usually is during trash.

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.

Level 23 Choice – Corrosive Assault Buffs

Corrosive Return

• Effect: If Corrosive Assault would reduce your Tactical Advantage to 0, it is refunded instead. This effect cannot occur more than once every 10s.
• Recommendation: Take this in mostly single-target situations. You’ll be taking this in most fights as it enables you to never have to use Overload Shot as a filler. You should try to trigger Corrosive Return as often as possible, including using it before Shiv if you think it will be available. If the fight has a lot of adds such that you’re reliably getting more TAs than you can use, Corrosive Return isn’t needed to achieve this goal.

Penetrating Strategies

• Effect: Increases the armor penetration, critical hit chance, and critical hit damage of Corrosive Assault by 10%.
• Recommendation: Take this if you consistently find yourself with excess TAs. Corrosive Return is really only useful if you aren’t able to generate TAs from defeating enemies, so in fights with a lot of adds throughout the entire fight or for solo content, Penetrating Strategies is the better option. Please note that these buffs only affect the weapon damage of Corrosive Assault, not the DoT ticks it triggers, so it’s not as big of a buff as it might seem at first glance.

Corrosive Impair

• Effect: Corrosive Assault deals 10% more damage and slows the target.
• Recommendation: Never take this. Both alternatives are considerably stronger than Corrosive Impair. In PvE, most enemies are immune to slows or don’t survive long enough for them to matter anyway.

Level 27 Choice – Curbing Strategies, Debilitate, or Quick Countermeasures

Curbing Strategies

• Effect: Overload Shot and Noxious Knives reduces the movement speed of targets they damage by 40% for 6s. In addition, Noxious Knives deals 25% more damage.
• Recommendation: Never take this. Both alternatives are considerably stronger than Curbing Strategies. It’s not even close.

Debilitate

• Effect: Grants the Debilitate ability, which stuns the target for 4 seconds and deals a small amount of damage. Costs 5 Energy, 4m range, and has a 30s cooldown.
• Recommendation: In PvE, take this in solo content only. The alternatives offer limited benefit in solo content while Debilitate is helpful for survivability. In group content, Quick Countermeasures is essential, so you can’t afford to take Debilitate at all.

Sly Countermeasures

• Effect: Increases the duration of Evasion by 2s. In addition, Evasion reduces your AoE damage taken by 60%.
• Recommendation: Always take this in PVE group content. Sly Countermeasures enables Evasion to last a whopping 6s in Lethality and the 60% AoE RDT component makes the discipline significantly more viable in group content.

Level 39 Choice – Corrosive Grenade Buffs

Critical Grenade

• Effect: Corrosive Grenade increases the critical hit chance of your periodic poison effects by 20% on affected targets.
• Recommendation: Always take this in PvE. Critical Grenade offers the greatest benefit in this tier by far to the extent that I wouldn’t really call this a choice at all.

Corrosive Refund

• Effect: Corrosive Grenade refunds 2 Energy for each target it hits.
• Recommendation: Never take this. You regenerate Energy from DoT ticks already, so there’s literally never a need to take this.

Corrosive Defense

• Effect: Corrosive grenade deals 10% more initial damage and grants 2% DR per target for 10s.
• Recommendation: Never take this in PvE. The 10% damage boost amounts to an extra few hundred damage per target. The DR is nice, but not necessary and too inconsistent.

Level 43 Choice – Tactical Stims, Tactical Offense, or Tactical Overdrive

Tactical Stims

• Effect: The cooldown of Stim Boost is reduced by 15s. In addition, activating Stim Boost purges movement-impairing effects and maxes out your Tactical Advantage.
• Recommendation: Never take this in PvE. Neither effect provides much value.

Tactical Offense

• Effect: Having a stack of Tactical Advantage increases your critical chance, damage dealt, and healing dealt by 5%.
• Recommendation: Almost always take this. Tactical Offense offers the greatest sustained DPS increase at this level by a significant margin. Try to avoid dropping down to 0 TAs if you can help it, though the DPS loss from unnecessarily using Shiv or *shudders* Overload Shot is far more significant than 5%.

Tactical Overdrive

• Effect: Grants the Tactical Overdrive ability, which resets the cooldown of Stim Boost, Lethal Strike, Toxic Haze, and Shield Probe. In addition, your Mastery is increased by 20%. Lasts for 15 seconds. 3 min cooldown.
• Recommendation: Take this in specific fights only. Tactical Overdrive offers superior DPS compared to Tactical Offense only while it is active and superior survivability thanks to the extra activation of Stim Boost, but you’ll be giving up about 1k sustained DPS over the course of the fight. Tactical Overdrive is really only useful for fights with short, painful burn phases that lack significant overall DPS checks.

Level 51 Choice – Infiltrator, Advanced Cloaking, or Chem-resistant Inlays

Infiltrator

• Effect: Increases your movement speed by 15% and your effective stealth level by 3.
• Recommendation: Take this in fights where the boss moves around a lot. If you’re constantly having to chase the boss, Infiltrator makes it easier to keep up with them and maintain high uptime. It’s not super useful in solo content because base stealth is almost always good enough and Sprint offers a greater movement speed boost, so it’s only active during combat, which isn’t super helpful for trash mobs.

Advanced Cloaking

• Effect: Reduces the cooldown of Cloaking Screen by 30s and activating Cloaking Screen increases movement speed by 50% for 6 seconds.
• Recommendation: Take this in specific fights and in solo content. Advanced Cloaking’s movement speed boost is also nice since Operatives are a bit lacking in the mobility department and it lets you purge debuffs even more often. In solo content, Advanced Cloaking is nice because it lets you stealth out more often.

Chem-resistant Inlays

• Effect: Increases damage reduction by 5%.
• Recommendation: Take this in fights where you’re taking a lot of sustained damage. 5% DR isn’t that much, but it’s consistently useful.

Level 64 Choice – Med Shield, Endorphin Rush, or Evasive Screen

Med Shield

• Effect: Your Shield Probe heals you for 5% of your maximum health when it collapses.
• Recommendation: Almost always take this. Med Shield nearly doubles the overall mitigation provided by Shield Probe. Since Shield Probe has such a short cooldown and is (sadly) a significant part of Operative survivability, this effect is pretty valuable and universally useful. The only time you’d want to give it up is if you can use Evasive Screen against a specific huge hit.

Endorphin Rush

• Effect: Adrenaline Probe immediately restores 15 additional Energy.
• Recommendation: Never take this. Use Relentless Blades instead if you need more Energy. You shouldn’t ever need Endorphin Rush and Relentless Blades, so it’s better to take one of the other options in this tier instead.

Evasive Screen

• Effect: Cloaking Screen grants 2 seconds of Evasion.
• Recommendation: Only take this if you need Evasion more often. Since Cloaking Screen now has its purge (beefy cleanse) as a baseline effect, the benefits of Evasive Screen are everything else that Evasion provides, though since Operative survivability is still limited, you should only take Evasive Screen if it will provide more mitigation than 4 uses of Med Shield, equivalent to about 80k damage, which can easily happen if you need to mitigate a specific big hit with the 60% AoE RDT component. The best example of a fight where you’d want to take Evasive Screen over Med Shield is against the Terror from Beyond to mitigate additional slams up top.

Level 68 Choice – Infiltrate, Flash Bang, or Holotraverse

Infiltrate

• Effect: Grants the Infiltrate ability, which cloaks all group members within 10m of you in a temporary stealth field that lasts 15 seconds. Cannot be used while in combat. Only usable while in stealth mode.
• Recommendation: Never take this. You might be able to use it to skip some trash, but I have never seen it actually work. There’s always someone who ends up outside of the stealth field, and that’s assuming that the adds actually respect the stealth field in the first place.

Flash Bang

• Effect: Grants the Flash Bang ability, which mezzes the target for 8 seconds. When Flash Bang ends, it leaves behind Flash Powder, which reduces the target’s accuracy by 20% for 8 seconds. 10m range, 1 min cooldown, (still AoE from Preparedness passive).
• Recommendation: Never take this. The effect is nice, and it’s fine for solo content if you prefer, but I think Holotraverse is more useful. In group content, Flash Bang is almost always useless. If you need more CC, take Debilitate instead.

Holotraverse

• Effect: Grants the Holotraverse ability, which generates a TA and instantly moves you to your target (friend or foe) and increases your movement speed by 75% for 3 seconds. Can be used while immobilized and purges all movement-impairing effects. Does not break stealth and cannot be used against enemy targets in Cover.
• Recommendation: Always take this. You’ll need the TA generation and mobility to deal maximum DPS. It’s really nice for traveling between groups of trash when doing solo content too.

Level 73 Choice – Evasive Imperative, Jarring Strike, or Blow for Blow

Evasive Imperative

• Effect: Each time you get attacked, the active cooldown of your Evasion is reduced by 3 seconds. This effect cannot occur more than once every 1.5 seconds.
• Recommendation: Almost always take this for group content. The cooldown reduction enables you to use Evasion a lot more often, which can greatly improve your survivability if you’re getting hit a lot.

Jarring Strike

• Effect: When used from stealth, Lethal Strike interrupts and knocks down the target for 3 seconds. Player targets are immobilized for 3 seconds rather than being knocked down.
• Recommendation: Never take this. It’s useless in group content because most things are immune and in solo content, you can’t use Lethal Strike out of stealth anyway because it will be on cooldown and not deal AoE damage because Toxic Haze isn’t out (assuming you’re using Viral Elements).

Blow for Blow

• Effect: Activating Evasion grants Blow for Blow, which Reflects 150% of direct single-target Force and Tech damage back to the attacker while Evasion is active.
• Recommendation: Take this for challenging solo content and fights where you take significant, unavoidable, reflectable damage. Please note that unlike other reflects, you do not absorb the damage that gets reflected. With Blow for Blow and Evasion, you either completely avoid the damage (if it’s white damage) or take it and deal it back (if it’s yellow damage). It is impossible to avoid and reflect the same attack with this ability tree buff. In addition, Blow for Blow only triggers off of single-target damage, so the AoE RDT from Quick Countermeasures is never relevant and the only thing Blow for Blow does is add another completely separate use case for Evasion. Use cases in PvE are pretty limited for this ability tree buff. In solo content, Standard enemies typically don’t hit too hard, so it’s less useful outside of challenging solo content like MM Chapters, the Eternal Championship, and Heroics. In group content, the most tantalizing attacks to reflect will probably kill you in the process, so I only recommend taking this when you can reflect damage you can’t avoid taking.

Gearing and Stats Priorities

Tactical Items

Synox Shots
Effect Toxic Blast deals 75% more damage and restores 2 Energy whenever it critically hits.
Recommendation This is your default tactical item. It provides the greatest single-target sustained DPS increase compared to the other Lethality tacticals. Your rotation will be a bit different and more challenging compared to what was done prior to 6.0 or if you are using one of the other tacticals since this one eliminates Energy management. The majority of the guide is written assuming you have this tactical item.

Viral Elements
Effect Toxic Haze spreads Toxic Blast’s effect and Lethal Strike deals damage to all nearby targets affected by Toxic Haze.
Recommendation This is your AoE tactical. It doesn’t increase your single-target damage output but enables you to deal a lot more AoE damage. The extra ticks from your DoTs being on multiple targets will compensate for reduced Energy restoration that would have been provided by Synox Shots, but you will need to use Adrenaline Probe in single-target situations. That said, you shouldn’t really be using this tactical in fights where there’s a significant portion of the fight where you’ll only be doing damage to a single target. Overall, Viral Elements is great for solo content, but I don’t think there are too many boss fights where you’d want to give up so much single-target DPS.

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 Items

BioWare has removed set bonuses from the game and replaced them with Legendary Items, 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 Items you should use as a Operative DPS:

• Tactician – Gaining a Tactical Advantage increases your crit chance by 10% for 10 seconds.
• Locked and Loaded – Ranged and tech damage and healer are increased by 5%.

Tactician and Locked and Loaded are BiS for single-target DPS. Tactician will offer higher sustained DPS, but Locked and Loaded is also BiS for Snipers / Gunslingers, so there’s an argument to be made for buying either one first.

You can learn more from the dedicated Guide to Legendary Items in SWTOR 7.0. It also offers a full list of all currently available Legendary Implants in the game.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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 Lethality Operative Builds in 7.0

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.

Single-Target Sustained DPS Build

Build Essentials:
Sly Countermeasures
Critical Grenade
Tactical Offense
Holotraverse
Evasive Imperative
Synox Shots Tactical

This build is optimized for maximizing single-target sustained damage output while minimizing damage taken in PvE group content. You can improve your effectiveness in some fights by making adjustments to several choices.

Corrosive Return should be your default choice, but you can and should swap to Penetrating Strategies if you are getting enough TAs from add kills throughout the fight.

I also recommend taking Chem-resistant Inlays and Med Shield for maximum survivability, but if you’re encountering more spikes than Evasion can deal with on its own, I recommend switching them to Advanced Cloaking and Evasive Screen respectively so you can use Cloaking Screen for AoE RDT.

Technically, you can give up Evasive Imperative for Blow for Blow, but only do that if there’s a clear instance of reflectable damage and you don’t need Evasive Imperative to have Evasion up in time to mitigate everything you need it to. Likewise, Tactical Overdrive may be better than Tactical Offense in a few specific fights, but you’re almost always giving up way too much DPS.

AoE Sustained Build

Build Essentials:
Penetrating Strategies
Sly Countermeasures
Critical Grenade
Tactical Offense
Holotraverse
Evasive Imperative

This build is basically halfway in between the Single-Target Sustained and Solo Content Builds. There are more required buffs to survivability than you need for solo content. In most group content, you’ll want to use Synox Shots as your tactical, though you can switch to Viral Elements for fights that are pure AoE and don’t have a single-target DPS check.

Solo Content Build

Build Essentials:
Penetrating Strategies
Critical Grenade
Tactical Offense
Med Shield
Viral Elements Tactical

This build is optimized for the best damage and survivability in a solo content setting. Your objective is to spread Corrosive Dart and Toxic Blast with Toxic Haze, and then follow it up with a Lethal Strike. In order to spread Toxic Blast and deal damage to multiple targets with Lethal Strike, you need the Viral Elements tactical.

That combo should be able to take out all standard and weak enemies, so once that’s done, you can focus down the strongs and elites (silvers and golds) with Corrosive Assault and Shiv. Don’t forget to reapply Toxic Blast to those enemies, it will likely fall off shortly after the regular enemies collapse from the poison with the Toxic Blast debuff still active, enabling the cooldown to be reset and for you to have 100% uptime on your primary target.

In heroics on higher-level planets, you may need to use Toxic Haze into Lethal Strike a second time if there are multiple strong or elite enemies, though you should be able to finish off each group of trash before the DoTs have fallen off.

Openers, Rotations, Priorities

Opener

This is the rotation you use at the very beginning of the fight and for burst DPS checks. It can be a little different than the standard rotation because everything is off cooldown, including your OCDs and relic procs. It’s important to get as much damage as possible while all of your damage boosts are available to maximize their impact.

1. Enter Stealth
2. Holotraverse (from Stealth, only if necessary)
3. Stim Boost ▶ Lethal Strike (from Stealth)
4. Corrosive Dart
5. Corrosive Grenade
6. Tactical Superiority (if applicable)
7. Toxic Blast
8. Toxic Haze (if appropriate)
9. Shield Probe ▶ Tactical Overdrive ▶ Lethal Strike (if applicable)
10. Adrenal
11. Corrosive Assault (only with Corrosive Return)
12. Shiv (procs Fatality)
13. Priority System

Start by entering Stealth and getting in melee range of the boss. If you can’t get in range without starting the fight, use Holotraverse (from Stealth) as soon as the fight starts. Holotraverse grants an extra TA that’s hard not to waste though, so try to walk up if you can.

by popping Stim Boost immediately followed by Lethal Strike since Lethal Strike grants a TA and deals more damage when used from Stealth. Technically, you can delay Stim Boost until after Lethal Strike if you’re using Tactical Overdrive, but it really doesn’t matter since you want to use it before DoT application anyway. After that, you’re just doing your high-priority abilities and moving into fillers.

Corrosive Dart and Corrosive Grenade should be used before Toxic Blast and Toxic Haze because you want to keep Toxic Blast and Toxic Haze’s cooldowns synchronized and have the DoTs running for the full duration of Toxic Blast

It would be ideal for you to wait to use Tactical Superiority (raid buff) a bit later, but a lot of other DPS specs have begun using their beefier attacks by the third GCD and we need to spend a TA anyway. If you’re not using Tactical Superiority, you can spend that TA on a Corrosive Assault or swap the order of Toxic Blast and Toxic Haze this time.

You can afford to use Tactical Overdrive later because the buff only applies to us and will boost all of the ticks of damage that go out while Tactical Overdrive is active.

It’s technically optional to use Shield Probe before Tactical Overdrive, but its cooldown is about to be reset by Tactical Overdrive anyway, so there’s really no reason not to use it. The more important part is to use Tactical Overdrive once all of your DoTs are on the target and to reset the cooldown on Lethal Strike.

If you’re using Corrosive Return (and you probably are), you’ll want to throw in a Corrosive Assault before Shivving to get the cooldown ticking on the TA refund from Corrosive Return. Otherwise, you’ll need to spend 3 GCDs before that cooldown starts ticking down. If you’re not using Corrosive Return, you should skip this activation.

Shiv should be used next because it will grant Fatality and apply the Tech debuff. I can’t include any more abilities because what is optimal diverges depending on your specific build. However, I want to note that Tactical Overdrive resets the cooldown on Stim Boost, and you want to activate Stim Boost right before it falls off so the next activation benefits from the alacrity of the previous activation while minimizing the overlap.

Priority System

In Lethality, you use a priority system because it is impractical to use all of your rotational abilities on cooldown, so when multiple high-damage abilities are available at the same time, a priority list is used to determine which one should be used first in order to provide the highest DPS and ensures that your most damaging abilities are being used as frequently as possible.

1. Corrosive Dart ▶ Corrosive Grenade
2. Toxic Blast ▶ Toxic Haze (if appropriate)
3. Lethal Strike
4. Shiv (if you can proc Fatality and have less than 2 TAs)
5. Corrosive Assault (if you have 2 TAs or can trigger Corrosive Return)
6. Shiv (if you don’t have enough TAs to last)
7. Corrosive Assault
8. Overload Shot (you’ve messed up if you need to use this)

Following Lethality’s priority system to the letter is not super essential, so long as you do the following:

• Maintain 100% uptime on Corrosive Dart and Corrosive Grenade without clipping
• Use Lethal Strike, Toxic Blast, and (usually) Toxic Haze on cooldown and prioritize those over Corrosive Assault or Shiv
• Gain the Fatality proc as often as possible
• Generate enough TAs to always be able to use Corrosive Assault instead of Overload Shot

Doing Corrosive Dart ▶ Corrosive Grenade and Toxic Blast ▶ Toxic Haze is generally ideal, but there are instances where you’ll only want to do one or swap the order. You can skip Corrosive Dart if you can bounce it back to the primary target from an add you spread to previously. You may also want to apply Toxic Haze before Toxic Blast if you have 2 TAs, though this is not always available. Remember, only use Toxic Haze to DoT spread or if the primary target will remain in the Haze for the full duration.

You can also separate those ability pairings or offset their applications by a few GCDs in order to minimize or eliminate delays, but this makes the rotation more challenging, offers little additional DPS, and requires high uptime or you end up with pileups of high-priority abilities available anyway as you try to maintain the structure.

Toxic Blast ▶ Toxic Haze has a higher priority than Lethal Strike simply because it deals more damage and you compensate for the delay of Lethal Strike by making it tick from Toxic Blast. Sometimes, it can feel like Lethal Strike gets “stuck” behind Toxic Blast and Toxic Haze, but it will get unstuck as soon as you next reapply DoTs.

Lethal Strike otherwise has a high priority thanks to the Augmented Toxins proc that increases DoT crits. You can’t cater to this too much though because Lethal Strike also just hits super hard and the stars need to align to maximize the benefit of Augmented Toxins.

If all of those abilities are unavailable, you’re in filler territory where you’ll primarily be deciding between Shiv and Corrosive Assault. Shiv deals less damage but grants a TA while Corrosive Assault does the opposite. Typically, you only want to use Shiv when you know it will proc Fatality and have less than 2 TAs or if you know you won’t have enough TAs to spam Corrosive Assaults until your next higher-priority attack becomes available.

If you run out of TAs and have no way to generate them, you must take the L and use Overload Shot, which is a pretty major DPS loss. Your objective is to never have to use Overload Shot, but don’t hesitate to use it if there is no alternative.

Don’t forget about the other sources of TA generation either, like defeating enemies, Corrosive Return (if applicable), Holotraverse, and Stim Boost. If you know that you’ll get a TA from one of those sources, you can delay the non-Fatality Shivs.

In summary, it’s ideal to use Shiv as little as possible and make sure you’re getting the most out of each activation since it deals less DPS, but it’s better to overuse Shiv and have excess TAs than to run out of them and be forced to use Overload Shot instead of Corrosive Assault.