How does shadow compare to fire right now?

[CaIiber]

General rule for gunner was that fire does burst but shadow beast fire in a sustained damage i.e DPS is higher for shadow in a fight that lasts 5min(?) or longer. Is this still true? After buffs to unload in the fire build, fire gunners prefer cosmic soul and so their sustained damage ends up being pretty high. I am yet to see a shadow gunner beat a fire gunner in sustained dps in this meta.

[SilverFoxR]

For the most part, this is still the case. It's just that there aren't many situations currently in the game where you have long fights... other than raids, of course.

[Racingwind]

On 16/05/2018 at 4:11 AM, CaIiber said:

General rule for gunner was that fire does burst but shadow beast fire in a sustained damage i.e DPS is higher for shadow in a fight that lasts 5min(?) or longer. Is this still true? After buffs to unload in the fire build, fire gunners prefer cosmic soul and so their sustained damage ends up being pretty high. I am yet to see a shadow gunner beat a fire gunner in sustained dps in this meta.

 

40 minutes ago, SilverFoxR said:

For the most part, this is still the case. It's just that there aren't many situations currently in the game where you have long fights... other than raids, of course.

From what I've seen, in terms of overall DPS they are both pretty equal with fire slightly on top. Though if you look at damage graph plotted over time, you would see a big difference between the two in terms of fluctuations. Shadow would have smaller fluctuations while fire would have large fluctuations.

 

Fire is more susceptible to bad rng strings than shadow. If you don't proc triple shot enough, you'd have alot of dead time. Ideally unload should be #1 dmg, then bullet storm, then quickshot. You know you've ran into bad strings when quickshot overtakes bullet storm. This can happen, and there's nothing you can do about it. Shadow is less prone to this due to their damage is all in one basket, darkshot, but a very reliably basket at that, especially when you get the imperator ring that recovers focus on hit.

 

Fire is also more punishing in the sense that bullet storm is a large amount of your dmg mark up, if you mess it up (IE missed buff window, can't get the full 5 set out, delayed it too long due to mech), your dps just tanks. Shadow doesn't really suffer from this restriction. That said, fire is vastly superior to killing adds than shadow, precisely due to bullet storm. When your raid isn't wiping due to low combined DPS but rather adds aren't dying fast enough, save your bullet storm for it and be a hero.