for madness on paper in theory probably the tactical that boosts demolish 25% and 2nd force leech and the set bonus to lower cooldown on polarity shift -that is the one that is useful, maybe you can mix it with a generic mastery or some other offensive boost set bonus as the other set boni are worthless? anyways until you can see that polarity shift is off cooldown can't really test it precisely.

then off course use recklessness on deathfield/double leech in the windows you can and integrate force speed into rotation lol. maybe something like that.

 

bummer that on tests so far everyone says the new Volt ability is useless and dps loss.

Ok so, Lightning is much better than madness is all aspect: DMG reduction, DMG output, control of your enemies and keeping distance from enemies. Please work on making madness a viable option compared to their counterparts

So, as a Lightning Sorc on Live, I have some input:

 

Gathering Storm Set Bonus: Really didn't affect my play style. Force speed into Polarity shift is a pain, and just felt clunky. Just found myself ignoring the set bonus altogether to fuss with the tacticals, and really didn't seem to make much of an impact to me. Not a good start if the intent is to "play my way"- not feeling much use for this.

 

Elemental Convention: THIS I got. So this was impactful for me. Granted Volt Rush could stand to do more damage. But at least with this I could feel a rotation I could use. Force Storm->Chain Lightning->Volt Rush x3. With some damage tweaking to Volt Rush, I can see this as a viable path, especially for those who want to clear trash.

 

Stormwatch: Ok, but not really feeling it. May spend more time with it, but at this point I am thinking of respecing to madness to see what it has to offer.

 

 

Really Elemental Convention is the only one I really liked because it actually allowed me to change my play style and had an obvious focus once I tried it out.

Volt Rush is clunky garbage. 3 freaking GCDs for nothing.

 

Ok so, Lightning is much better than madness is all aspect: DMG reduction, DMG output, control of your enemies and keeping distance from enemies. Please work on making madness a viable option compared to their counterparts

That's for sure. But BioWare have no idea of the META in their own game, so lower your expectations.

 

DPS set bonuses

I feel like our feedback is being ignored. Set bonuses for Sorcerer and especially for Madness are very underwhelming, clunky and too situational.

 

Writhing Terror Tactical

This or Wrath Rushdown should be a discipline passive, not a tactical.

Edited July 24, 2019 by EmperorRus

tactical ideas

 

tactical - force lightning can we used while moving, but channels 30% slower

tactical - force barrier pushed all nearby enemies 30m back when activated

tactical - force barrier is now an instant activation instead of a channel and give you 90% damage reduction for 10 seconds.

 

I LOVE your third suggestion to force barrier.

The boost to same stat from different setbonuses currently doesn't stack. For example 2 pieces decelerator set with 2 pieces endless offensive doesn't give a 4% increase in alacrity, just a 2%. Is this intended? If yes, maybe make it clear on the sets descriptions.

Madness/Balance seriously needs some love. It already is the lowest parsing sustained DPS spec and now you want Lightning to be above it? Hello?

 

Volt Rush has no use for Madness at all. Moreover, there are pretty much 0 tactical items that are even remotely useful for Madness. The only 2 that are kind of good (force storm does more damage on targets with Death Mark and Demolish does 20% more damage + reset on Force Leech) are simply number bumps. Are there going to be no changes in the rotation whatsoever?

 

Another tactical that I don't think is on PTS but was mentioned in the post - Wrath stacks affect Volt Rush. That simply replaces Lightning strike with Volt rush. That's not a "build defining" tactical item...

 

P.S. If you are pushing Lightning/Telekinetics to be the best sorc/sage spec in everything, can we at least have Turbulence animation fixed? Currently, if you follow up Turbulence with any instant cast like TK Wave, TK Gust (which happens almost every time in the rotation) you literally do not get an animation for Turbulence. No projectile flying to the target. Nothing. Just a number appearing on the enemy. Thundering Blast on sorc doesn't have that issue.

Edited July 24, 2019 by Equeliber

Hi everyone,

 

I was lucky enough to have the day off when the PTS went live, so I spent the majority of the day online just playing around with the various specs, set bonuses, and what not. Here are my findings:

 

Disclaimer: I know that per the Devs the numbers themselves are far from finalized, and that this was meant as more of a way to test all of the specs how they would play more than how the damage would play into it just yet, so I will do my best to avoid talking about that while I can. Also, there are a medley of technical bugs in the game currently that are standard for anything that is in testing, so if I don't mention those, that's because that's not what this forum is for. Also, I am a PVE player, so that's where my focus will be for this post.

 

Set Bonuses:

 

To start it off, I tested quite a few of the DPS set bonuses and how they would work in conjunction with the Tac slots. My eye was immediately caught by the Berserker's set bonus, and in its current state (confirmed through several tests) this is by far best in slot. The fact that it is only a 4 piece allowed me to pick up a sorc 2 piece, and with Relic procs and adrenals up I was well north of 20k power. Due to how good this is I have to expect there to be a substantial nerf, so I won't spend much time talking about this. My thoughts on it were: "Big, shiny numbers make boom-boom real nice!", and that was that.

 

Moving on, the next set bonus that caught my eye was The Gathering Storm. I think that this added a few tweaks to the all-too-standard Madness rotation, and if it were to be brought up a little in some way I really think it has potential to be the one that I would use. I had a lot of fun trying to find ways to use this with the Mystic's Ruthless Blade Tac and get 5 Force Leaches into one opening.

 

Pros: Adds interesting ideas to current Madness (and to a smaller degree, lightning) Meta, while not fundamentally changing the way that the specs interact with Polarity Shift.

 

Cons: There is starting to be an over-reliance (especially in Lightning) of using Force Speed as an offensive CD. The issue that I have with this is the prevalence of fights that require me to chose between using it to re-position or using it to increase DPS. At this point, delaying Force Speed during any part of the fight is a DPS loss, just because of how big of a deal all the things that it will do for you are; potentially stopping the thing FS was designed to do in the first place.

 

Currently those were the only two sets that I had any interest in using, and I have no interest in putting force slow back on my bar. Aside from attempting to divine a new opening for Madness, I must admit the majority of my time was spent over in Berserker's.

 

Tac Items:

 

I ran quite a few different tests with each of the Tac items and I intend on running more in the coming days, but these are my findings so far.

 

Stormwatch:

 

This is two-fold. Let me begin by saying that this is obviously over-performing and needs to be brought down at least a little. Now that I have gotten the disclaimer out of the way, WOW is it fun to just blast things with a true cascade of lightning. I've played Lightning off and on since launch and this is the first time that I've ever physically smiled at the amount of seizure-inducing light/sound show that this Tac provides.

 

While it is currently too strong, as I stated earlier, this is the most fun that I had testing all day today. Just the visceral feel of lightning coming from every angle to strike the training dummy or my Juggernaut friend when he wanted to test his new defensives. I've never felt burstier than calling down lightning from Zeus and from my fingers at the same time.

 

I know that this has to be brought down a little, but I really do hope that the feel of this is retained, if that makes any sense.

 

Ticking Force Bomb

 

Honestly, a little boring. in opposition to Stormwatch, this really gives no indication that anything has changed. You just run the regular lightning rotation and occasionally Crushing Darkness makes an additional noise.

 

Mystic's Ruthless Strike

 

This one was, as I mentioned in my set bonus review, the most fun I had while trying to figure out Madness. It was really interesting to try and fit as many Demolish casts into a Polarity Shift window as possible for constant leeching. I parsed on this likely less than I should have, but the low DPS numbers kind of turned me off to it.

 

Tempest of Rho

 

This one really has potential. Alas, the RNG really makes it the Devil's play-thing. I was finding that compared to the steady Damage that MRS provided, this would usually underperform or perform at level depending on procs. I like the addition of lightning strike procing it as well, but I feel this still has a ways to go before it is viable.

 

Much like Ticking Force Bomb though, this one really doesn't change much about the spec. Now you're just a slightly higher DPS Madness Sorc.

 

Volt Rush

 

Right off the bat I want to say that I know it will likely be changed, but the point of this PTS is to get constructive criticism on the changes, so criticize I shall.

 

I hate just about everything about this ability. I love the sorc, and I found a lot of these changes were really nice and a lot of fun to play around with, but that was after I had dragged Volt Rush off of my bar.

 

Currently, Volt rush in Madness is woefully force negative, does less damage-per-activation than Lightning Strike (And vastly less than Force Lightning) and feels awfully clunky to put anywhere near the rotation. In lightning it is even worse because a spammed Lightning Bolt was out-DPSing it, costs less force, procs Forked Lightning, and gives a ton of other buffs to the class.

 

Also, and this is the last on the list for a reason, but the fact that it sounds so quiet just adds to the feel that I am using a Force-Joy-Buzzer. To go from the booming of Thundering Blast and Crushing Darkness and the cracking of Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning to this piddly bzz noise is disheartening.

 

Here comes the constructive part: How does Kerplunk suggest we fix it?

 

Here goes. Take it off the GCD. Done. Next problem?

 

For real though, take it off the GCD, and vastly increase the Force cost (something like 70 per tick) so that it is a choice. Sure, it is a DPS gain to throw that sucker in on CD and even more if you're at 3 Stacks, but can your Force handle that constantly? Absolutely not. Make it something to the effect of Shoulder Cannon on the PT where it has a GCD, just a separate one from other abilities. That way you can't just throw out all three in an eye-blink, but it also doesn't ruin your rotation.

 

Most importantly for this ability is the way that it feels to use it rotationally. For me, even if it was doing monstrous damage, I would still be quite disappointed with how it doesn't synergize well with either spec, and just breaks up the action.

 

Overall, this testing has already given me a lot of excitement for 6.0, and I hope that this doesn't come across as too negative. I just want this to launch in its best possible way and these are thoughts from someone with over 200 days played on the Sorc. I love the Sorc, and the game and just want the best for them both Thanks for reading all of this.

By the way, one thing I want to add. I was watching some twitch stream (don't remember which one, Koggy or Shek). Matt (the Swtor dev) was in the chat. He said that the Combat Team lead does not intend Volt Rush to even go into your rotation without using some tactical item for it. Take from that what you will.

By the way, one thing I want to add. I was watching some twitch stream (don't remember which one, Koggy or Shek). Matt (the Swtor dev) was in the chat. He said that the Combat Team lead does not intend Volt Rush to even go into your rotation without using some tactical item for it. Take from that what you will.

Well, if everything is going to be like that then there will be no point in taking it for Madness at all. And it's not going to be so fun to experiment

He said that the Combat Team lead does not intend Volt Rush to even go into your rotation without using some tactical item for it

Phase Walk for Agents, 25 percent damage buff for Warriiors, useless garbage for Sorcerers. Fair enough /s

After having a night to sleep on it, a couple of suggestions 4 volt Rush if I may:

 

One suggestion would be to up the DPS. Leave everything else as is but allow it to do more damage. However, if this cannot be done for balance reasons, may I suggest option number two?

 

Option number two would be for each application of volt Rush to apply a debuff to the target. First hit would apply blind, second hit would apply slow, third hit would apply stun.

 

All of these would stack on a single Target. If Elemental convention is applied as a tactical, then these debuff would rotate, and the previous debuff would drop off as the next one is applied.

 

At least then volt Rush has a utility function to it in terms of applying debuffs, provided the DPS cannot be bumped up on it.

holy moly not only does volt rush deal no relevant damage at all, it also looks bad....animation 1/10 & damge 2/10

Volt rush, 3 charges, when applied to target, the targets energy is drained and applies a slow effect at 20% base with each charge applied, the 20% stacks. With each stack applied this also engerzies the appilier and increases movement speed by 5%.

Volt rush, 3 charges, when applied to target, the targets energy is drained and applies a slow effect at 20% base with each charge applied, the 20% stacks. With each stack applied this also engerzies the appilier and increases movement speed by 5%.

 

This could be a tactical for madness, and would make it somewhat usable.

Ok so, Lightning is much better than madness is all aspect: DMG reduction, DMG output, control of your enemies and keeping distance from enemies. Please work on making madness a viable option compared to their counterparts

 

Looks like madness sorc is about to be the new PT (i.e. terrible) in solo ranked in 6.0.

Edited July 24, 2019 by JediMasterAlex

Looks like madness sorc is about to be the new PT (i.e. terrible) in solo ranked in 6.0.

 

I hope not, I prefer madness over lightning.

I wish all the tacticals were as cool as stormwatch. Edited July 26, 2019 by ottffsse

very rough parses on pts (can't avoid hitting multiple dummies sometimes but all else was same so this is a strict comparison between the two dps specs and not a conclusive number of what they can parse single target in new gear):

 

 

 

 

berzerker 4 piece+2 piece alacrity set bonus

madness - 19K give or take (old rotation pretty much) , used the +20% to demolish damage tactical

lightning, no tactical/ slightly foobared my opening too - 18-18,5K

lightning, with stormwatch tactical - 20,8K

 

that is my observation - with equipment/ set above stormwatch adds almost 2K dps)

 

 

 

The easiest way to parse on the pts is to go to fleet, unlock the Rishi stronghold, the patrol carrier or w/e the ship is called and then the training room where you'll be able to set up an individual dummy + buy the armor debuff and HP modules. Helps with lag too.

What about Sorcerer healer. Where developers have lost CD Innervate from bonus set - 1.5sec??? And what about force regen set bonus, management has become worse even in the new set i think, not to mention that this is currently the only actual set.

And I'm not screaming that the sorcs are weak (its just first wave of PTS). Just want to understand, the developers have forgotten about the CD of the main rotational ability or they are trying to impose a new rotation?

Edited July 25, 2019 by iEarl_ololo

Hello, feedback from quick, initial testing a Corruption sorc with various tacticals and bonus sets:

 

1. The (2) Set bonus (2% increase of Power) for Gathering Storm and Soulbender do not stack. Is this intentional?
   
2. The Stimulated Set adds 100 Mastery bonus - not exactly bad, but is this enough of a bump to justify choosing this set over others? It didn't feel like it, maybe bump it up some? Or see the next item:
   
3. I honestly don't understand the point of (4) set bonuses. It would seem like either another piece (maybe offhand) should be added to the set bonus count so one can stack two (4) sets together. Or these should be reduced to a single (3) set bonus. This would allow the player to choose/stack set bonuses in more flexible/creative ways. Otherwise, and this may not necessarily be true, but it will feel like one is not fully gearing out by choosing a 4 set bonus vs a 6 set bonus.
   
4. What happens to the original/current set bonus items that are attached to armor mods? Do these go away? Or can I put 252 armor mods into these shells and get both sets of bonuses?
   
5. I could not tell if the Entertainer set was working or not - do you have to be in a group to see this effect? Why does it state it affects allies and not you and allies? Can it be used solo?
   
6. I'm going to kick myself for stating this, as it was pretty sweet, but the Luck Always Changes tactical does affect healing abilities. Thus, as long as my healer does not attack anything, every heal ended up be a crit (max crit, btw, turned out to be 137.59%).
   
7. The Berserker set bonus may be a little OP for a sorc; my damaged reduction was only reduced by 0.7% compared to the 25% increase in power...
   
8. Krall's Accord is interesting but ultimately useless. For example, as a healing sorc I will never want bonuses to absorption, shield, accuracy or defense - or 50% of the usage of this tactical. So why would I ever slot it?
   
9. Is the 100K to augment going to be the final cost? Any chance of reducing this?
   
10. I could not achieve my current 15.5% alacrity with the new 307 gear, fully augmented. Please don't make us regrind gear to wind up having lower stats than what we started with (and currently my sorc healer is not even in full 252 gear...).
    
11. The new ability as a healer sorc was OK - gave a nice, small instant attack for taking out a mob with low HP but otherwise aa a healing sorc had no real use that I could see - there were no utilities for this new ability and the corruption tree did not display anything beyond level 70.
    
12. I did not PVP but clearly some bonuses were geared towards PVP. My only question: does adding 2 seconds to the stun also increase resolve? Or do you really think players want more stun lock in PVP??
    
13. Overall, I think it is a good and cool direction, but as a healing sorc and with no ability to double stack some of the smaller set bonuses it felt limited. Add in cost to augment and it feels like ultimately I would settle on one set and tactical for PVE and maybe one set for PVP - kinda where we started with gear many years ago...
    

 

Anyway, just my two cents. Thanks for listening!

Edited July 25, 2019 by dracmor
Corrections

The following feedback is coming from one of the like 5 sorc DPS main nightmare raiders on SS, I've been playing since launch and have cleared all of NiM (outside of GOTM) with my sorc without the help of 258. Currently, the sorc has many problems on the PTS but their are other more general issues with the PTS. Cooldowns are very often not showing up properly as in you press an ability and it activates and goes on cooldown but you can't see the cooldown animation and it looks like the ability is available for use again. This makes it incredibly difficult to test rotations. There's also not currently a way to get a level 75 ops dummy with the armor reduction and health modifications that make it difficult to test. Also across the board, cooldown reductions and resets on tacticals just break rotations. These effects need to be reworked. I don't like how you continue to tie stuff to Force Speed either, it has its own usefulness! Make new abilities if you want new effects!

 

I do like a lot of the tactical items, though I feel like these would be better as discipline passives or even utility points instead of being things you have to choose between. It just feels like unecessary added gear complexity and along with the Amplifiers, it feels like you're trying to make it a lot more like Anthem in terms of gearing.

 

Volt Rush

This ability has several major issues that make it not useful for any of the specs to use rotationally.

1. It does not deal enough damage. Right now, it only ends up surpassing Lightning Bolt's damage after the third use of the ability but only by a little bit and not enough to make up for the other two needing to be worse. This is on top of not providing any of the lightning bolt benefits like forking or the damage reduction and force regeneration procs. The only time I would use this ability is if I still needed to use an ability on the move and everything was on cooldown except for Force Slow. The same goes for Madness with Force Lightning and Lightning Strike. For Corruption, the ability does less damage than Crushing Darkness and Affliction and less damage than Force Lightning, Shock, and Lightning Strike, some of which make Dark Heal instant. Some might recommend that Volt Rush would be better if it were off the GCD, but I feel that with the casts sorc has as a ranged class and the 5 second energize proc duration that it will be difficult to use among the many casted abilities, make everything too difficult. The animations would also be ridiculous with the forks in lightning. When you fix it, it needs to mesh better with the disciplines too instead of being tacked on or being only connected with tacticals.
   
2. The animation looks very lame (this is true for the assassin as well). Why not do something more flashy and interesting like the Dark Ritual ability that Valkorion can use in one of the last chapters? That would make more sense as something energizing too.
   
3. Rotations become awkward and clumsy when attempting to incorporate this ability. Lightning Bolt procs and their incredibly short durations causing the procs to fall off will remain an issue even if the damage output is fixed. Madness also doesn't have room in its rotation for additional abilities though even now the optimal rotation requires the final tick of each of your DoTs to be clipped. For healing, there's really no point to using it without the tactical item.
   
4. Charges don't really make sense for this ability. It feels like it has charges for the sake of having charges because it's best to use all three in quick succession because you only have 5 seconds for the energize proc.
   

 

I'm not entirely sure how to fix Volt Rush with the current rotation structure. Making the energize proc longer defeats the purpose of having charges but keeping it short means it will get delayed. All the procs that aren't directly buffing an ability or making it do something it otherwise can't (like the DR and force regen stacks from lightning bolt) should become pure discipline passives (this should happen for all disciplines) and not clutter up the buff bar or at the very least have 20-30 second durations so they don't fall off during your normal rotation. I think you could turn Volt Rush into something more dark ritual-y by making the energize increase all damage and healing dealt instead of just for Volt Rush. The other alternative would be to make it some sort of priming ability on enemies and allies that makes them take increased damage or healing. None of the specs need another filler DPS ability though.

 

Tacticals

They are incredibly unbalanced. Stormwatch seems to be the best tactical item available to anyone by far. It was contributing about 500k damage and can be the highest damaging component of your rotation or very close to Thundering Blast and Lightning Bolt. This is contributing to a 4-5k DPS increase over other tacticals. The effect looks really cool but the strength needs to be balanced better, I also think that the crushing darkness one should be changed to some other benefit that isn't a single target DPS increase because Stormwatch looks way cooler and I will feel sad if I have to use the lame crushing darkness one if it deals more DPS, maybe make it something that makes target swapping easier for Lightning, like have Affliction deal up-front damage like Retractable Blade and Incendiary Missile or make it so Affliction only needs to be active on any target for Thundering Blast to autocrit at all or just remove the affliction requirement entirely for the autocrit. The convection one is nice for PvP though it doesn't seem to be fully increasing the damage dealt by Thundering Blast and Lightning Bolt and it's unclear how these work, like does Thundering Blast need to consume the 3 stacks of Convection for the damage increase or is it just while you have any charges.

The Demolish/Force Leech one for Madness breaks the rotation because Leech is never used right before Demolish so you have to do very weird things to get it to work. The Creeping Terror tick increase is boring.

The healer ones all seem to be inferior to the extra roaming mend charge one and the all for one/one for all don't seem to be doing anything but even so, you get the versatility of both with the extra mend charge.

The volt rush tacticals just don't make much sense right now, especially the one for Madness. It totally doesn't fit in the rotation and allows your 8% DoT crit chance to fall off. Healing Volts could be good in certain fights if it healed for more than it seems to, but I feel like it has to be part of the healer discipline as a passive so you will actually use the ability as a healer.

Dark Return was the only universal passive I thought was an awesome idea but it's super underwhelming. I would not ever pick that as a tactical because the others are better. Crank up the damage, make people fear the phase walk spot on the ground! It also needs to have an actual new animation that is not the old overload animation or at the very least it needs to be more opaque with more particle effects so it looks less like something that knocks you back (though it should also knock you back). There are so many cool force explosion animations in the game, you guys can do better. The other universal sorc tacticals are lame and no one will ever pick them.

 

Set Bonuses

Most of them did not feel helpful to me as a sorc in PvE and I ended up going with the Death Knell two piece that gave the +2% accuracy and the berserker universal 4-piece with the +25% power and less armor (this set is also something that really is for the sorcs and assassins with how damage reduction is balanced across the classes). The primary PvE one for sorc makes you use force speed on cooldown to reduce the polarity shift cooldown and extend its duration. Don't bring force speed into this please, just make Polarity Shift last longer and have a shorter cooldown if you want. Other classes seemed to have more valuable set bonuses.

[*]The animation looks very lame (this is true for the assassin as well). Why not do something more flashy and interesting like the Dark Ritual ability that Valkorion can use in one of the last chapters? That would make more sense as something energizing too.

.

 

Yea, I completly agree with this statement. Its already in the game files also so it cant be that much work lol.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS1jOuvIyfM

2:03 mark for dark ritual ability.

 

They could even steal the idea of phase jump also. The abilites are already there, they just need to utilize it so that players can have access to it.

Edited July 25, 2019 by Delani

 

[*]The animation looks very lame (this is true for the assassin as well). Why not do something more flashy and interesting like the Dark Ritual ability that Valkorion can use in one of the last chapters? That would make more sense as something energizing too.

 

finally someone else mentioned this, the animation looks like a low budget lightning bolt .

hell there's barely any animation at all......

also damage output sucks, lightning bolt is way better.

Yea, I completly agree with this statement. Its already in the game files also so it cant be that much work lol.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS1jOuvIyfM

2:03 mark for dark ritual ability.

 

They could even steal the idea of phase jump also. The abilites are already there, they just need to utilize it so that players can have access to it.

 

hell, why not copy/paste valkorions dark blast animation? looks amazing .