* Why fist/pistol?
*Builds/discussion
*Rotation
*Gear

Fist is a well rounded healing weapon focusing on HoTs. It doesn’t have the damage mitigation of Blood Magic barriers or the AoE heal capacity of Assault Rifle but it can be made to work in a lot of situations. You do need a bit of gear, especially crit rating, for this to build to work. There are quite a few nice abilities in the fist/pistol combo but they are rather long in its cooldowns and you need to be able to keep people alive between the cooldowns.

Pistol brings the Deadly Aim buff, which give the entire group 40% crit chance for 8 seconds. This is a huge DPS boost, especially if you are healing in an optimized group where everyone is bringing something to the party: Deadly Aim, Breaching Shot, Short Fuse to name a few. The nice thing about Deadly Aim is that there is no buff lockout like Short Fuse, so you can have another DPS carrying Deadly Aim as well. On our nightmare runs, our DPS can spike to 3k DPS easily with all the group buffs and bosses just melt.

The other thing nice about Pistol is the cleansing options. Pistol has a lot of cleanses but the range and the number of players it can cleanse is rather limited. This is something to keep in mind and for more serious cleanse encounters like Machine Tyrant we typically have DPS using the shotgun elite Cleanup as it is far more reliable.

There is no set stone build that works for all fights. Unless you are aiming for the NM dungeon achievement that reward you for not changing builds, adjust to the fight is always a good idea.

Actives

Cauterize
Surgical Steel
Empathy
Firedup
Hair Trigger
Deadly Aim
Backup Drone

Passives

Healing Sparks
Shadow Medic (from AR line)
Empowerment (elite passive)
Making Amends
Mad Skills/Hot Iron/Brawler (Hammer passive)
Calling the Shots (reduces Deadly Aim to 60s CD)
Ready for more (your cleanse passive)

Mad skills is what I usually use as I am a sucker for crit. Mad Skills won’t activate on critical heals but will activate if you crit while shooting mobs with your Hair Trigger. Each stack give you 30 crit so if you get all 5 stacks (you can get to 5 stacks pretty quick ~700 crit rating) you will get 150 additional crit rating for a whole 8 seconds. Also, the stacks just don’t fall off at once , they fall off one by one so you can enjoy the benefit of added crit for a short duration if you need to focus on heals.

Since Hair Trigger builds resources for both Fist and Pistol, you will have a Surgical Steel ready if your tank suddenly take a large hit.

If you find yourself in situations where you don’t have the time to pew pew with Hair Trigger, then consider Hot Iron/Brawler. One give you a 50% extra direct heal every 7 direct heals and the other give you 15% more crit power.

Deadly Aim and Backup Drone are healing CDs. The really nice thing about DA is that it also benefits everyone else in the group. With DA buff running, your Empowerment will essentially proc nonstop if you have HoTs running. You can also couple DA with Fired Up for intensive group heals. Backup Drone has a super long cooldown (90s) but lasts for 15s. I typically activate it right before a phase where I know the tank will take heavy damage.

Actives

Cauterize
Surgical Steel
Empathy
Firedup
Hair Trigger
Deadly Aim
Cleanse

Passives

Healing Sparks
Shadow Medic (from AR line)
Empowerment (elite passive)
Making Amends
Mad Skills/Hot Iron/Brawler
Calling the Shots (reduces Deadly Aim to 60s CD)
Ready for more (your cleanse passive)


Havn’t run into many encounters where I needed more than the passive cleanse from Hair Trigger + Ready for More but just in case, here is a build with one extra cleanse (you swap out Backup Drones for it). You have quite a few cleanse options.

Bond, Strong Bond – much like the Ready for More passive, other people need to be near you for this ability to cleanse them. It is on a 4 seconds cooldown so has a shorter CD than Ready for More and you have more control over it.

Cleansing Drone – This one is typically used to cleanse the tank/melee DPS as it is a drone summoned on the offensive target and cleanse players near the offensive target. This is handy for Polaris last boss for example where the tank takes Bleeding damage from getting penetrated by Ur-Draug.

Win Win – This one doesn’t require an offensive target nor any pistol resources. Only downside is the 45s CD and reported to not work on NM Polaris’s depth charge where bubbles appear in the water (for that, either use Cleanup or Sleight of Hand).

You can either swap out Hair Trigger or Backup Drone (depending on tank damage). If you swap out Hair Trigger, make sure to take off Mad Skills as well and Ready for More. Put on either Vigour or Shelter.

Actives

Cauterize
Surgical Steel
Empathy
Firedup
Hair Trigger
Deadly Aim
Vigour/Shelter

Passives

Healing Sparks
Shadow Medic (from AR line)
Empowerment (elite passive)
Making Amends
Mad Skills/Hot Iron/Brawler
Calling the Shots (reduces Deadly Aim to 60s CD)
Ready for more (your cleanse passive)

The rotation is fairly simple. Spam Cauterize so you have HoTs running on the tank, then use Surgical Steel + Empathy if the tank is taking a big hit. If the tank is taking some serious beating and you don’t think you can recover from it with just Surgical Steel + Empathy, pop either 1) Deadly Aim 2) Backup Drone or 3) Fired Up.

If the tank isn’t taking too much damage, get close and use Hair Trigger on the boss (assuming you have the Mad Skills passive) for the crit rating buff. For little things like Bleeds from adds you can easily stand next to the tank and just shoot at things. The passive will cleanse it off him/her.

Crit Rating

As I mentioned before. this build uses high crit rating to proc Empowerment. How high of a crit rating should you aim for and when does diminishing returns kick in? Diminishing returns seem to start after you reach the ~20% crit chance mark and seems to get worse as you get into the 30% range.

Here are some data I collected. If you are comparing this with previous pre-1.1 data, here are some things to keep in mind 1) They fixed the World Domination buff, previously it was giving out 0.56% crit chance per PvP objective, now it correctly giving out 1% 2) They fixed the crit gadgets, previous it was giving something like 150, now it is giving out 506, as the description states.

The base crit chance without any PvP objective in control is 5.0. This data is obtained with 0 PvP objective in control but should not affect the calculations. Just change the y-intercept accordingly.

The equation for data up to 750 (20.1%) is 0.0206x + 5, where 5 is the base crit chance (with 0 PvP objective in control) and x is the crit rating. Therefore it is safe to say that this is the equation for crit rating to crit chance conversion <= 750 crit rating is 0.0206x + y where y = your base crit chance + # of PvP objectives and X is the crit rating. There does not appear to be any significant diminishing returns up to this point.

You can see that the data points after 750 do not follow this equation at all and trail off significantly towards the end. The equation predicts 1839 crit rating to convert into 42.88 but instead we get 33. That is roughly a 10% crit chance gap.

Look at it another way, the jump from 1333 to 1839 is roughly 500 crit rating. The equation predicts ~ 10-11% for this jump but instead we get a 33-28.4 = 4.6% jump. It is effectively halved.

I don’t have enough data to calculate the exact diminishing returns but roughly we can say that the crit rating to crit chance conversion after 30% or 1300-1400 crit rating is halved.

I am still in favor of stack crit rating past 30% but it is also worthwhile to look into crit power at this point as you might get better returns there.

Upgrade Weapons or Talisman?

When you start running Nightmares, the question people often ask is if they should upgrade weapons or talisman. Both weapons and talisman costs 30 Bullions to purchase but weapons take 40 bullions to upgrade while talisman only takes 20 bullions. This means that you can upgrade a talisman twice for the same cost as upgrading a weapon once.

Upgrading your head talisman twice will make a jump of 77 heal rating while upgrading your major talisman twice will make a jump of 70 heal rating. As you can see, each time your upgrade it, the difference gets slightly bigger.

The difference with each tier seems to get smaller with each upgrade.

I don’t have any solid data on this and the calculation I done is based only on one spell. We do not know at this point if there is a diminishing return to heal rating and weapon power either and if every spell have a different coefficient based on weapon power/heal rating to determine how much they heal.

1 point in Empathy = 7.41 Heal Rating

1 point in Empathy = 0.65 Weapon Power

7.41 / 0.65 = 11.35

1 point in Fired Up = 9 Heal Rating

1 point in Fired Up = 0.8 Weapon Power

9 / 0.8 =11.25

1 point in Surgical Steel = 42 Heal Rating

1 point in Surgical Steel = 4.26

42/ 4.26 = 9.8

Keep in mind that for smaller heals like Surgical Steel, the calculations are less accurate as the small numbers are more affected by rounding.

The data here would indicate that it is generally better to upgrade weapons first rather than your talisman. Again, keep in mind that this isn’t the best data and the results may be inaccurate.