I’ve seen some debate over the Surging Speed utility and its usefulness in parsing and in raids. I know in most Lightning Sorc guides that it’s stated that instant cast Lightning Bolt provides no DPS increase unless it falls inside a relic proc or adrenal but this is not quite correct. For whatever reason, the time between casts of procced Lightning Bolt is less than the global cooldown timer. I’ve done a lot of testing and looked at various parses and calculated time between Lightning Bolt casts and found that each activation of Force Speed will save about .2-.4s on your next 2 Lightning Bolts. The difference is pretty substantial and over the course of a fight this can add some much needed DPS. Take a look at any of my parses and you’ll find that using this trick I’m able to fit in an extra Lightning bolt in my rotation before my second Thundering Blast. To do this my opening rotation looks like this.

Precast Force Speed -> Precast Force Barrier -> Precast Crushing Darkness -> Polarity Shift + Affliction -> Unlimited Power + Adrenal + Recklessness + Thundering Blast -> Chain Lightning -> Lightning Flash -> Shock -> Lightning Bolt x2 -> Force Speed + Lightning Bolt x2

And yes I will actually precast Force Barrier just to reset my Force Speed cooldown in many Ops fights. I do recommend you’re running at least 1300 alacrity (one of the biggest things I’ve seen among most sorcs is there APM isn’t high enough to be putting out the DPS they should be).

Just thought I could help out my fellow sorcs who are still playing as right now we need all the help we can get. Let me know how this opening works for you.

I can't tell for sure, but looking through your parses, it actually seems to be a real bug.

It seems the game applies all your alacrity bonuses twice. Once for the global cooldown, once for a non-existing activation time. That's why the duration is shorter by about 0.15s after triggering Convection via Force Speed => twice your normal alacrity... and why it's much shorter as long as Polarity Shift (+20% alacrity) is still active => twice the Polarity Shift bonus.

If you like, you can confirm // refute this hypothesis by repeating your parse with zero alacrity.

Yes its a bug.

Happens on Merc as well when using Power Surge to make a cast ability instant. The GCD of the ability you use it on is cut short.

No it doesn't seem to happen at low alacrity.

The only reason I noticed this is from the 10GCD IO rotation where it can cut the rotation short so you end up using a proc generating ability before the proc cooldown is done and the rotation falls flat on its face.

Yes its a bug.

 

Happens on Merc as well when using Power Surge to make a cast ability instant. The GCD of the ability you use it on is cut short.

I made a few checks. It seems to happen to all classes with abilities that bypass the activation time of skills. I can't believe the developers at BioWare are so dumb they didn't even had a few minutes to write a test case that checks their very core functionality. Unbelievable!

I can't tell for sure, but looking through your parses, it actually seems to be a real bug.

 

It seems the game applies all your alacrity bonuses twice. Once for the global cooldown, once for a non-existing activation time. That's why the duration is shorter by about 0.15s after triggering Convection via Force Speed => twice your normal alacrity... and why it's much shorter as long as Polarity Shift (+20% alacrity) is still active => twice the Polarity Shift bonus.

 

If you like, you can confirm // refute this hypothesis by repeating your parse with zero alacrity.

Can confirm!

I’ve seen some debate over the Surging Speed utility and its usefulness in parsing and in raids. I know in most Lightning Sorc guides that it’s stated that instant cast Lightning Bolt provides no DPS increase unless it falls inside a relic proc or adrenal but this is not quite correct. For whatever reason, the time between casts of procced Lightning Bolt is less than the global cooldown timer. I’ve done a lot of testing and looked at various parses and calculated time between Lightning Bolt casts and found that each activation of Force Speed will save about .2-.4s on your next 2 Lightning Bolts. The difference is pretty substantial and over the course of a fight this can add some much needed DPS. Take a look at any of my parses and you’ll find that using this trick I’m able to fit in an extra Lightning bolt in my rotation before my second Thundering Blast. To do this my opening rotation looks like this.

 

Precast Force Speed -> Precast Force Barrier -> Precast Crushing Darkness -> Polarity Shift + Affliction -> Unlimited Power + Adrenal + Recklessness + Thundering Blast -> Chain Lightning -> Lightning Flash -> Shock -> Lightning Bolt x2 -> Force Speed + Lightning Bolt x2

 

And yes I will actually precast Force Barrier just to reset my Force Speed cooldown in many Ops fights. I do recommend you’re running at least 1300 alacrity (one of the biggest things I’ve seen among most sorcs is there APM isn’t high enough to be putting out the DPS they should be).

 

Just thought I could help out my fellow sorcs who are still playing as right now we need all the help we can get. Let me know how this opening works for you.

Why? First of all I know sorc is the weakest dps right now but we still have potencial... Lightning easy can break aggro from tanks on fight start... So why we should use only thing what keeps us alife before even start encounter?

Second thing... Surging Speed is pretty useless in both PvE and PvP... Maybe healers can use it on PvP but I doubt it it's just waste utillity point...

My main is Lightning Sorcerer from close beta tests so I belive I can say I know this class pretty well and trust me Surging Speed is useless and gives you nothing to Sorcerer dps... (I'm running fully 242 by now and have 1368 alacrity and it's give us 0 dps increased... On dummy it's give u maybe 200 but on Boss fights it's useless) Even if you gain 200 dps on dummy it's still not worth it...

Why? First of all I know sorc is the weakest dps right now but we still have potencial... Lightning easy can break aggro from tanks on fight start... So why we should use only thing what keeps us alife before even start encounter?

Second thing... Surging Speed is pretty useless in both PvE and PvP... Maybe healers can use it on PvP but I doubt it it's just waste utillity point...

My main is Lightning Sorcerer from close beta tests so I belive I can say I know this class pretty well and trust me Surging Speed is useless and gives you nothing to Sorcerer dps... (I'm running fully 242 by now and have 1368 alacrity and it's give us 0 dps increased... On dummy it's give u maybe 200 but on Boss fights it's useless) Even if you gain 200 dps on dummy it's still not worth it...

I start off using Force Speed + Force Barrier for fights which shouldn’t require me to use it anyways. Sorcs already have great survivability with Cloud Mind and Unnatural Preservation and should consistently have the lowest DTPS and highest healing out of most DPS classes. Force Barrier is the emergency button and if I’m having to use that within the first 2 minutes of a fight, usually something has gone horribly wrong. If other DPS can manage without having an invulnerability to everything for 8s then sorcs should be able to do it better. As you said, sorcs do have potential but sadly we have to sacrifice some survivability sometimes to pull the DPS required for NiM/MM operations. Using it as an opener in every fight is not optimal but knowing what fights you can use it on may help squeeze out just an extra bit of damage.

I wouldn’t actually recommend Surging Speed for PvP as I’ve found Emersion to be a better utility in that category. Taking Surging Speed in PvE though allows you to be more mobile with more instant cast Lightning Bolts and since there is a bug with how alacrity works with those instant casts, it ultimately results in higher DPS from more Lightning Bolt casts overall.

I wouldn’t actually recommend Surging Speed for PvP as I’ve found Emersion to be a better utility in that category. Taking Surging Speed in PvE though allows you to be more mobile with more instant cast Lightning Bolts and since there is a bug with how alacrity works with those instant casts, it ultimately results in higher DPS from more Lightning Bolt casts overall.

Both Emersion and Surging speed are pretty much must on that tier. Currently sorc, especially lightning, depends only in its ability to kite and get away to self-heal to survive for most of the fights. I'd love to take backlash, insta ww or overload binding, but chance are you'll have dot ticking on your target, so any mez are less interesting as defensive in my opinion.

Lightning doesnt need much more to be competitive even in Arenas. A way to deal with focus efficiently that isnt shut down by electronet, and a slightly better ability to dps under pressure (can be via dcd or better kiting tools. Has to be built in the tree and not utilities to avoid healer having access to it).

One massive issue I have currently is fighting good deception sin, since they just low slash every time you run away and calmly walk to you. Also, a lot of classes gained total damage immunity in their gap closer, which while it balance out in the ranged heavy meta that we are in with sniper and merc, sorc dps is very vulnerable to fast jumping guardian with warmonger (which is a tier 1 ability for some reason) as you are 100% sure they will jump faster than you can run off, even with Surging Speed, and especially rage is hard to pin down and regularly kite from the anti-kiting tools and numerous movement impairing break they have.