The Lightning Playstyle

I used to have a very angsty paragraph here about how lightning is bad in 7.0, but honestly props to Shabir, this spec has begun to earn its place back as a fairly squishy, but tactical jack-of-all trades spec with the ability to perform to the level of its user. Make no mistake, if you hear things about sorcs being overpowered or broken, they are referring to madness, and at difference to that spec, you will actually have to play well to do well on this one. However, the gaps between specs are closing and I'm honestly quite satisfied with how the class balance is turning out. So, if you're bored of facerolling the queue on madness, or you enjoy the brutal sounds of shooting lightning bolts at your enemies with every GCD, or you just aren't an asshole, I'll show you how to play the sorc spec that requires actual user input. In my view, lightning is by far the most interesting spec in the game due to its versatility and interactivity (play well, perform well; play badly, not so much), and hopefully with a little nudging you'll come to enjoy it as much as I do.

Lightning has benefitted majorly from its buffs since the expansion's launch, but make no mistake—it still requires a tactical, conservative playstyle involving outplaying defensive cooldowns, choosing your opportunity windows, and reducing your damage taken by way of positioning. If you want to feel like Emperor Palpatine and effortlessly destroy any enemies in your path with torrents of force lightning, you'll likely want to respec to madness and never look back.

Viable Lightning Builds

There are essentially only two ways to build lightning without becoming worm food every time a rage jugg so much as looks at you, which we'll take a look at in a second. Both will use the same gear and legendary implants, though with different tacticals.

Stim

Use Advanced Kyrprax Versatile Stim. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars.

Gear and Set Bonus

The gearing strategy is actually quite simple. For legendaries, you want Gathering Storm Package and Unmatched Haste Package, in that order. Without Gathering Storm, Unmatched Haste barely does anything for you, so prioritize getting Gathering Storm first.

For regular gear, you want the best item level gear you can get at any point in time. I recommend using the 1.3 GCD alacrity build, which will require 6 alacrity pieces, one of which is your Gathering Storm implant. Thus, in addition to your legendaries, you will need to get 5 alacrity enhancements and 3 critical enhancements. The moddable gear vendor Hyde and Zeek is far and away the easiest way to do this, it isn't worth bothering with any other method.

Lightning Stats (332)

Lightning Stats (332)

Sorc DPS Implants

Sorc DPS Implants

Augments

If you use the build I've prescribed, all of your augments should be crit augments. If you're freestyling, you'll want to use augments to reach the proper stat thresholds, that being 3209 alacrity (for 1.3 second GCD) or 560 alacrity (for 1.4 second GCD); the rest of your stats go into crit. Do not use accuracy on a sorcerer in PvP, it is a complete waste of stats.

The Burst Build

The first is a tactical, burst-cannon build with a lot of roots and control to attempt to minimize the uptime enemy players have on you, as compared to you on them. With this build you will essentially have to duel anyone that tabs onto you in order to force them to disengage or die.

Tactical Item

You will be running the Eyrin's Haste tactical, and using the instant Thundering Blast it provides as a root, with a bit of burst damage baked in on top.

Discipline Tree

Discipline Tree (Lightning)

Discipline Tree (Lightning)
Discipline Tree (Telekinetics)

Discipline Tree (Telekinetics)

You can swap Halted Offensive for either of the other options in that tier if you have a use for Chain Lightning (good AOE potential for example).

The Cleave Build

The second build is a very tanky, but support-reliant and immobile setup with the potential to output devastating AOE damage and destroy an entire team. While on 90% of occasions I recommend playing the first build, if you find yourself with a competent tank and healer, this build can output catastrophic pressure. It was mostly used for group ranked, but it's worth documenting here because it can be a premade-buster with proper support. With this build you should be using Unnatural Preservation and Chain Lightning as soon as they are available, and using Cloud Mind to supplement your already high passive damage reduction when major burst is on the way. You should also use Force Speed and Overload to create distance and take cover from enemy ranged fire, as always, but you will have limited opportunities to do so with this build, and you will be reliant on support from your team.

Tactical Item

You will be running the Elemental Convection tactical, which will reset the cooldown of Chain Lightning when you use Volt Rush.

Discipline Tree

Discipline Tree (Lightning)

Discipline Tree (Lightning)
Discipline Tree (Telekinetics)

Discipline Tree (Telekinetics)

Rotational Adjustment

With this build you will want to adjust your rotation to use Chain Lightning and Volt Rush in sequence immediately after every Thundering Blast. This will ensure you never delay the proc, always do maximum cleave damage, and proc your Unnatural Preservation quicker. If there are multiple consistent targets, you will also want to apply Affliction to all of them, as you will passively refresh it resulting in more damage.

Offense

Abilities

Lightning has six rotational rotational attacks which you will use frequently. These are Affliction, Thundering Blast, Lightning Flash, Crushing Darkness, Chain Lightning or Halted Offensive, Shock, and Lightning Bolt.

There are also two non-rotational abilities that you may use for niche purposes or with certain builds (such as the cleave build). These are Force Lightning and Volt Rush.

Pre-Rotation: Apply Affliction

Before attacking a target, ensure that it has your Affliction applied to it. Turning on "Highlight Personal Debuffs" in the UI editor is a very easy way to track this (it will glow gold.) Your affliction will refresh, so you don't need to use it in rotation, but attacking a target without it on is very very bad. Affliction causes your Thundering Blast to autocrit, which accounts for a great deal of your burst damage. Do not forget it!

Offensive Cooldowns

You have two offensive cooldowns on sorc, these are Recklessness and Polarity Shift.

Recklessness will make your next two abilities crit, guaranteed, but it won't increase their critical bonus damage like a normal autocrit would. The exception to this rule, however, is Thundering Blast. Since Thundering Blast already autocrits on targets that have your Affliction on them, Recklessness will just increase that damage by 60%. That is a large number, and it stacks with your other offensive cooldowns. As a rule of thumb, you want to use Recklessness with the first Thundering Blast available after it comes off cooldown, and then use one more hard-hitting ability to consume the second charge. Typically the second charge will be spent on Chain Lightning or Halted Offensive since these do the most damage per activation after Thundering Blast, but you can also use it with Lightning Flash or Unnatural Preservation depending on your health level and the procs you have available.

Polarity Shift does a couple of things. First, literally just increase all your damage by 20% for 20 seconds. Pretty nice. Second, makes you immune to being interrupted or having your casts slowed in any way. Very nice. Third, it increases your alacrity (as in, your cast and GCD speed) by 20%. Oh and did I forget to mention? It doubles your movement speed. Just casual. Basically, this is your godmode button. It can turn the tide of duels, let you kite out enemies so badly you literally break combat and regen to full, get you kills on unsuspecting stealthers… the possibilities are truly endless. That said, you'll normally use it in the opener to hit like a goddamn truck, and after that you can find creative uses for it the second time it comes up. Push this button off cooldown while doing damage.

Rotation

The "rotation" for Lightning is just a priority system. Select the attack highest up in the list that's available at any given time, provided the stated conditions apply.

  1. Affliction — if not already on target
  2. Polarity Shift and Recklessness — read above
  3. Thundering Blast
  4. Halted Offensive — if you just used Recklessness
  5. Lightning Flash
  6. Crushing Darkness — only with proc from Lightning Flash
  7. Shock — only with Crushing Darkness on the target
  8. Chain Lightning or Halted Offensive — only with proc from Thundering Blast
  9. Lightning Bolt

Target Selection

As an arena player, your first target should obviously be any that comes in egregiously unprepared and doesn't pop their defensive cooldowns properly. However, barring a situation like that, it's useful to know which classes are easiest for you to hit in this spec. These will be as follows:

  1. Snipers. Already in 6.0 Lightning Sorcs could destroy snipers through pretty much all of their cooldowns, and in 7.0 the only thing that's changed is that they have fewer of them. Watch for rolls and avoid hitting your major burst into them, but otherwise a sniper is basically a parse dummy. Important to note, in 7.3 sniper received some passive healing while sitting in cover, but as long as you're able to keep up with the sniper your damage will far outpace this healing and force them to run (and therefore not receive said healing). Just don't relent in your pressure (and remember to chase phase walk) and the sniper is dead meat.
  2. Mercenaries. Mercs don't actually have bad defensives, but the damage toolkit you get as Lightning is essentially a hard counter to their best protections. Since Chain Lightning / Halted Offensive is counted as AOE (area of effect) damage by the game's internal mechanisms, it can be hit through a merc's reflect for the full damage, and without healing the merc. It also will not give the merc healing stacks on Energy Shield. The ideal combination to hit through either of these cooldowns is a hardcasted Chain Lightning / Halted Offensive, followed by a full Force Storm, followed by another Chain Lightning / Halted Offensive. You can also apply Polarity Shift to the entire combination, and Recklessness after the hardcast in order to cause additional devastation. After this combo you can go into casting Thundering Blast since at this point the DCD will be over by the time the cast finishes. The ideal situation to surprise a merc in this way is to hold your offensive cooldowns (or even wait to open) until they have popped reflect, and then use the combination above to drop them at least 200k HP through it. Kolto Overload, on the other hand, cannot be easily counterplayed unless the merc pops it at too low of a health percentage, so it's generally best to swap targets when it is popped (only for the 8 seconds though).
  3. Concealment Operatives (note: make sure you know their spec.) The root profile of Lightning's attacks is ideal for making a conc op's life hell. When hitting a conc op, make sure to delay your GCD a bit (like 0.1s) in order to determine whether they will spend their GCD on a roll (which will resist whatever you use), and then if and only if they use it on something else (like an attack of their own, or a kolto probe), use offensive abilities on them. If they roll, you can use a heal on yourself or a teammate to pass the empty GCD, or Consuming Darkness to regenerate some force (only if you are low on it.) Ensure that you keep the operative rooted with Thundering Blast and Overload so that you can use casted attacks on them. Generally you will want to start with Thundering Blast because its cooldown is shorter, and re-root with Overload if the operative purges the effect via Evasion or Holotraverse. If the operative breaks the second root, you can apply a third whenever your Thundering Blast comes off cooldown, and then have your way with the operative. It is also fairly safe to stun an operative while they are rooted, as they cannot roll it. To maximize control, I recommend using one casted attack while the operative is rooted, and following it with Electrocute and 3 more hard-hitting attacks. See the "Locking Down" section below for one very effective way to chain your controlling effects (of several possible).
  4. Powertechs. PT defensives are almost entirely armor-based, which means that your Thundering Blast will hit straight through them for full damage. You can mostly parse on a powertech like a training dummy, but there are a few things to watch out for. If the powertech pops Emergency Power (the glowing white bubble around themselves), treat it like an operative rolling for 2 GCDs (ignore them, do something else that's useful), and then go back to dumpstering. In a situation with healers or tanks, you're unlikely to kill a PT through Energy Shield (the blue bubble), so it's worth swapping off. Otherwise, you can go straight through with no concern. The treatment of Kolto Overload, however, depends on the spec of the PT. In AP, if they pop Kolto Overload at high health, they will most likely live through it, so you should swap targets for 8 seconds. If they pop it at low (sub-20%) health, you can definitely kill them through it if your team has eyes, so full speed ahead. If the PT is pyrotech (which you'll know because there will be fire everywhere), however, they have a passive that grants them ridiculous damage reduction while kolto is running, and you will need to swap off. Killing a powertech is slow, but you will almost always succeed. PTs are much more of a defensive than an offensive problem. It should be noted, however, that killing a pyro PT through any kind of support is miserably slow due to their cooldown reduction on Kolto Overload, and their damage profile is generally tame enough to warrant choosing another target in this situation.
  5. Juggernauts. Juggs are like PTs but with more healing and less potential to kill anything. You can go them and much like PTs they will eventually die, but normally your team will kill them anyway and it's more useful to use your damage profile on something that's a bigger threat. That said, if your teammates are ignoring a jugg that's low or has spent DCDs, certainly don't just let it heal.
  6. Assassins. Killing sins takes forever. They have three health bars and normally will hide in stealth until getting a fourth. However, they are such an offensive threat that normally it is actually advantageous to sacrifice that damage in order to take them off the playing field. It can be equally useful to just peel them off when they first come out of stealth and deny their autocrit window, however, without wasting damage on them (which they will just heal).
  7. Marauders. Killing maras is a nightmare for your damage profile. They have great ways to reduce and negate the types of damage sorcs deal, and will most likely attempt a regen once they are finally low as well. You must chase and deny them this regen or your odds of winning the round plummet. Arena teammates almost never assist with chasing, so this can be a brutalizing exercise since marauders are a faster class than sorcs. It can be done with enough persistence, however.
  8. Lethality Operatives. Don't waste your damage, they will just heal through all of it.

Chasing

When you start investing damage into a target, it's incredibly important that you do not then allow this target to escape and heal, wasting all of the resources you spent damaging them. If you are not the enemy team's focus target, it is your responsibility to chase down players that attempt to run away from your team, such as marauders using their camouflage, or snipers and other sorcs using Phase Walk. There are very common locations on each map where players go to try and heal, but until you learn these there are a number of ways to track these players down by hand.

Minimap

The minimap will show a red dot for each enemy player in combat with you. If one of these is far to one side, chances are it is a player trying to escape combat, and you should chase it down.

Name-Clicking

Camouflage will forcibly remove a player from your target, making them difficult to find again. However, spam clicking their name in the enemy players frame can counteract this, causing you to re-target them as soon as they reappear. You can then do a quick walk in all four directions, and whichever one makes the number of meters between you and them (shown on the player frame) decrease is the direction you should head in order to chase them.

Seeing Dots

Seeing as we are applying a permanent dot to our targets before hitting them, it is also quite common to see yellow flytext numbers through walls or in remote parts of the map. This means an enemy player is hiding behind said wall, and you should finish them off.

Locking Down

When a player runs from you, the majority of the time they will attempt to keep running once you reach them. Since we are speccing into two different roots, the following combination of abilities will allow you to prevent a player from moving for an obscene amount of time, and may also cause them to throw a rage fit. You can also stun them afterward with Electrocute if you have it available in order to get maximum lockdown value.

  1. Overload
  2. Affliction (if it's fallen off) or Lightning Flash or Dark Heal (if your health is under 100%) or Any Instant Attack
  3. Thundering Blast
  4. Crushing Darkness
  5. Chain Lightning or Halted Offensive

Getting Owned

If you are a new player chasing down a more experienced one, there is a good chance they will be able to turn it around on you, even with a significant health disadvantage. If that happens, it's advisable to disengage in order to survive—a stalemate is better for your team than being down a player. However, you should take note of what happened and how they managed to do what they did. There are a million niche kiting tricks in this game and the only way to learn them is going head-to-head with better players. Remember: being beaten is not the same thing as throwing. Throwing would be not attempting to chase the player at all. Just recognize when you've been beaten, learn from your mistakes, and you will improve dramatically in a short period of time.

Defense

If you've ever watched very good sorcs like Durmoth and Lyala play in 5.0 and 6.0, you will notice they play with a very peculiar style—they play slowly, tactically, control their opponents extensively, use line-of-sight objects to minimize incoming damage, and only expose themselves to fire when their targets are particularly vulerable, having no defensive cooldowns active. This is the prototypical way to play a sorcerer. You have no particularly notable defensive cooldowns of your own, only repositioning tools and stun breakers, so you must play intelligently and leverage your positioning and your ability to move while not stunned in order to outplay the DCDs of your opponents. In 6.0 this playstyle was essentially optional. It was advantageous, but you could fare pretty well just pretending to be a marauder and charging in nose-first. In 7.0, if you wish to play Lightning, it is absolutely mandatory. Your positioning is critical because your ability to regenerate health is extremely limited, so taking unnecessary damage can cripple you for the remainder of the round. Likewise, since your health and force pool is so limited, when opportunities to break combat and regenerate them with Seethe present themselves, they are invaluable.

Unnatural Preservation

Before we even get into the macro-gameplay of sorc defensives, let me introduce you to my number one pet peeve when watching other sorcs play. This is my friend Unnatural Preservation. What Unnatural Preservation does, is heal you. No strings attached. It does not cost force, it does not use a GCD, it has a very short cooldown, and you can even spend Recklessness on it to make it heal more. The sooner you use it, the faster it comes off cooldown, and the sooner you can use it again. By delaying this you are literally wasting healing for no reason, and also causing me to despise you on a personal level. In short, if you are below 90% health, PUSH THIS FUCKING BUTTON IMMEDIATELY. While we're at it, do the same thing with Static Barrier, even if you're at 100%. It's a shield so it can't over-heal.

Stun Debuff

As of 7.4, targets that you stun with your Electrocute do 25% less damage for 10 seconds. This is a lot of damage reduction and it lasts for a long time. You very much want to make sure this is applied to whoever will do the most damage on the enemy team, as soon as it comes off cooldown. If there is a powertech, use it on the powertech and he will cry. If there are multiple powertechs, use it on the best powertech and you will cry slightly less about being the target of multiple powertechs.

Major Defensive Cooldowns

As a sorc, you have three (two and a half, really) defensive cooldowns that will help you out of big trouble. These are Phase Walk, Force Barrier, and Unbreakable Will. The ideal cooldown rotation would have you use Phase Walk the first time you are stunned, Unbreakable Will some time later if you are caught up to and stunned again, and Force Barrier on whitebar if you are restunned after that. This is ideal, but not always possible, so at minimum make sure to use all three of these before you die. Major cooldowns are really only necessary when you are caught in a stun (or a very nasty root), however, so when you are un-stunned you should be using Force Speed to repositioning yourself to safety.

Kiting

Your primary defensive strategy on sorc is the art of positioning yourself in such a way that you take as little damage as possible from enemy players. This art is called kiting. In some instances, kiting is very simple. For example, a concealment operative cannot do damage to you if he cannot come within 4 meters of you. Therefore, stay out of that range most of the time and you are safe. Likewise, an arsenal merc can do very little damage to you if he cannot see you through a wall. Therefore, put an object between you and the merc and you should be alright. These are the basic premises for kiting melee and ranged classes—against melee compositions, you want to place a lot of distance between you and the enemy. Against ranged compositions, you want to place an object between you and the enemy.

Mixed Comps

In situations where the enemy team is a mixed composition of melee and ranged classes, however, the issue becomes much more complicated. Ideally, you want to place both distance, and an LOS object between yourself and the enemy. Generally the way to do this is to time your usage of Force Speed such that you can use it to run away, and then turn a corner of some kind. Some maps are great for this, and others are abysmal. In the latter case, you will have to use some creativity in tandem with the strategies described below in order to escape a tricky situation where you would take unnecessary damage.

Baiting Knockbacks

One of the greatest ways to juke a team of bad players is to bait them into being knocked off a ledge they can't easily climb again. The way to execute this is generally to use Force Speed to take you to a place on the edge of a ledge, and then turn your camera and quickly use Overload on the group of enemies that follows. Excellent spots for this include the vent landing area on Mandalorian Battle Ring, the ramps on Orbital Station, and the hut doorways overlooking the pit on Tatooine Canyon.

Grouping Enemies

If there are multiple players chasing you, you always want to be hitting the closest one in order to slow it down, and keep the enemies in a nice neat clump. Clumps allow you to use knockbacks, crowd control, or even the AOE slow from your Chain Lightning on multiple targets at once, multiplying their effectiveness.

Crowd Control

Speaking of which, another great set of tools to ditch chasers are crowd control effects. Since we've lost Whirlwind with the launch of 7.0, a sorc's CC kit essentially consists of Electrocute and Seismic Grenades, which you can buy from the GTN. Electrocute should generally be used when there is a single leading chaser catching up to you in order to keep him in line with the pack, while Seismic Grenades can be used to incapacitate the entire pack at once while you make a getaway. However, if a player instantly breaks your Electrocute stun, you can immediately follow it with a Seismic Grenade knowing they will then have to sit for its entire duration, and you can use this time to create distance or heal yourself (the former is recommended).

Phase Walk Usage

While the rest of these tools are alright, Phase Walk is by far the best defensive ability sorcerers have. Since its cooldown is the shortest of our major DCDs, we would prefer to use it first in order to get a second one off before dying, and in order to do that we need to have it in a solid position before we ever head into combat. This means we cannot sit in spawn like juggernauts or powertechs like to, as being caught without phase walk set is a death sentence.

When starting off a round as the kill target, the ideal opening is to set Phase Walk at a high level, drop to a lower level, have the enemy team follow you down, and then activate Phase Walk and leave them sitting on the bottom floor like idiots, wasting their entire opening volley of damage (which usually is more than they will do for the rest of the match). This late into the game's life-cycle, however, people are beginning to get wise to Phase Walk strategies, so after activating it you are likely to be chased. For this reason, ideal Phase Walk spots are both at high altitude, and allow you to escape in multiple directions depending which the enemy team tries to chase you from. From here you can just run farther away and preserve the distance you've created until you drop combat and can Seethe yourself to full. This is an ideal situation and will not be possible every time, but at least try to leave yourself room to run away from your phase in the event it gets camped or chased.

TL;DR: Don't Phase Walk into a corner, and don't Phase Walk where you can be leapt to. I leave the rest up to your imagination.

Self-Healing

As a Lightning Sorc you have several ways to heal yourself apart from the aforementioned Unnatural Preservation, however, neither is very effective on its own. On one hand, Resurgence will heal you for a pretty pitiful amount of health, but it can be used on the move and the small amount does add up, so it's worth using when you don't have anything better to do. Similarly, Dark Heal will heal you for a slightly less, but still, pitiful amount of health, but must be casted and costs an absolute dick ton of force. I honestly do not recommend stopping to cast this unless no one is following you. On the surface, the options seem a little bleak, and they are.

Fortunately, in 7.1, Lightning received a bit of a saving grace in the form of a passive which makes our Thundering Blast proc Dark Heal, making it heal for 30% more and activate instantly. This means if you are rooting people properly, you should have these banked up in order to help you recover from any mistakes you might make in terms of avoiding damage. (Note: it is still not enough to attempt to sit in the thick of things and face-tank, though.)

Force Management

Now, spamming dark heal procs of course raises the issue that it completely annihilates your force. There are two ways to manage this, and most people will do a combination of both. The first is to be extremely religious about avoiding damage, thus minimizing the need to heal and maximizing the frequency of combat drops, allowing you to regenerate force with Seethe. This requries a great deal of experience and skill to pull off, however, and also generally relies on your opponent(s) being somewhat garbage.

The second strategy is much simpler—while you are running away and don't have other instant-cast abilities to use, spam Consuming Darkness a bunch of times to give you force back. It isn't the cleanest solution, but it will save your life and improve your winrate, so you may as well do it.

General Positioning

In addition to active kiting, it is also important as a sorc to be prepared to begin kiting at any second. Being caught out of position (meaning out of range of your Phase Walk or away from any objects you could use to break line-of-sight) can quickly get you killed, or at best force you to spend your defensive cooldowns in an order that greatly reduces your lifespan. Therefore, positioning responsibly while you play sorc entails knowing your Phase Walk range, moving your Phase Walk if you need to chase out of that range, and always staying near an object you can use to break casts and channels targeting you (unless you are in the middle of Force Speed).

Pole-Knocking

One last trick which can be very helpful is what I call pole-knocking, that is, getting around a pole, and then doubling back to knock away an enemy that tries to follow. This is a very specific technique but its potential is high, so here is a video to demonstrate me doing it to a jugg.

Damage Reduction

At difference to the other sorc specs, Lightning in particular has a fair bit of passive damage reduction which you can use to soften incoming attacks if you maintain it properly. In 6.0 and 7.0, damage reduction is always much less important than damage avoidance, as you will be hit for more damage by exposing yourself than you will be able to reduce, but if you are able to have both then you should do so.

Lightning has three sources of passive DR:

Some quick napkin math tells us that maintaining all this properly will increase our damage reduction by 25%. That's as much as a powertech's energy shield, except we get it with 100% uptime and no cooldown. Maintaining this DR is critical in prolonged engagements or when support roles are involved, and plenty nice to have the rest of the time as well.

The easiest way to maintain your DR is to use all three instant-cast Lightning Bolts procced by Force Speed in the opener, and then another Lightning Bolt each time that Subversion is procced. This effectively means, use three in the opener and then hit Lightning Bolt whenever it randomly glows gold. The remainder of your Convection procs from Force Speed can be spent on Thundering Blast, which will also glow gold.

In addition to this passive DR, which should be active at all times, the builds I have recommended have access to active DR every 45 seconds by way of Cloud Mind. Cloud Mind grants 25% additional damage reduction (total: 50%) for 6 seconds, and should be used when you anticipate big incoming burst damage. This is an intuition you will develop as you play, but a good rule of thumb is that whenever you are snared or rooted (whenever it's hard for your character to move freely), big damage is on the way shortly.

Surviving Net

Many new sorcs think they have everything figured out and then suddenly find all their major DCDs grayed out and themselves globaled. This is the result of an ability that Mercenaries have called Electro Net. Electro Net lasts 9 seconds, deals a great deal of damage over time, and disables Force Speed, Phase Walk, and Force Barrier. It can be dispelled by using Unbreakable Will, but you will have to save your breaker for this purpose. The ideal maneuver when dispelling net in this way is to then Force Speed to a safe location and heal through the dot damage.

An alternative strategy is to try and tank the net without using breaker by stepping behind the line-of-sight object that you should have handy, and using all your heals and damage reductions at once. It will generally also require stunning, CCing, or pole-knocking one or more of the players attacking you during this time to pull off as well. I do not recommend this strategy to new players, especially because in this spec your ability to regenerate those resources is extremely limited, but you should be aware of the possibility in case of emergency (or multiple nets). If there are multiple nets you should try to tank the first one so you can break the second.

Playing With Supports

Finally, having support roles on your team will change the way in which you kite. Since the supports need to be able to guard or heal you, you will need to stay within their effective range in order for this to work, which is quite a small arena to play in. Therefore, we will need to make some adjustments to our kiting style.

Kiting With Tanks

With a tank on your team, you should play as if the enemy team is entirely ranged (regardless of what it actually is). Guard does not require line of sight to function, and thus you should make yourself impossible to catch by playing ring-around-the-rosy with an object and applying slows to the players chasing you in order to reduce the rate of incoming damage.

Kiting With Healers (or Both)

Healing, on the other hand, does require line of sight on the target, so when you have a healer you should (almost always) play entirely in the open field. In order to mitigate melee damage you will still be running away, but this time do so in a circle so that you never actually end up too far from your healer to be healed (or break his casts with line of sight objects). The diameter of said circle should be about 20 meters.

There are two exceptions to this rules, those being:

  1. If the enemy team is entirely ranged, play is if you had a tank instead of a healer. You will mitigate more damage in this way than you will healing, although a bad healer will rage at you and probably cause a loss in this case. Which brings us to…
  2. If your healer is shit, play as if you do not have one (that is, if there's a tank, play it like tank games, and if there isn't a tank, play it like all-DPS games.)

Playing Around DCDs

I've touched on this briefly before, but it is important, so let's cover it again. As an arena player of any kind, it's advantageous to only expose yourself to damage when you can do something productive. That is to say, hide behind a wall or an object when a player pops major defensive cooldowns. There are two ways to play this, depending if you are taking damage or not. If you are taking damage, which you most likely will when you are new, it's helpful to time your escapes (your Phase Walk and Force Barrier) with major enemy DCDs, like a merc or PT's Kolto Overload, or a marauder's Undying Rage. This way, your target can't get free damage on you without taking any themselves. It also makes it so that if they spend time chasing you, they essentially kite out their own DCD, which is also advantageous for your team.

The second situation to consider is when your target pops a major defensive cooldown, and you are not the target (this is called freecasting). In this instance, you should just swap to the second target until the first target's DCD expires in order to avoid wasting damage. As Lightning, target swapping barely impacts your damage as long as you swap back in time to refresh Affliction on the first target, which you can do with Chain Lightning / Halted Offensive (instant) or Crushing Darkness (casted).

Advanced Topics

Don't pay too much mind to these concepts when you're first starting out, but coming back to them may help you win more fights in the future once you've got the basic hang of this spec.

Empty GCD Usage

A fundamental premise of SWTOR is that someone who makes use of all their GCDs (presses an ability as soon as possible) will always have a significant advantage over someone that does not. This is what we call "wasting globals". Since in this spec you will frequently be taking cover to avoid burst damage, here is the ability priority during those GCD windows where you aren't in line-of-sight to attack anyone.

  1. Static Barrier
  2. Resurgence
  3. Dark Heal (Only if it is proc'd or you are below 30% health) — skip if you have full health.
  4. Consuming Darkness (Use sparingly unless you are low on force.)

Conversely, to the maximum extent permitted by the situation you're in, try to break line-of-sight with any enemy players targeting you while you use these abilities naturally, in order to avoid taking unreciprocated damage.

Optimizing for Gathering Storm

As you may have noticed, your Gathering Storm implant includes a nifty buff which increases the damage of the next ability after your Force Speed by 20%. Since Chain Lightning / Halted Offensive operates on a system of procs, rather than having its own cooldown, it is ideal for your damage to delay this ability until immediately after you activate Force Speed, which regardless of what you are doing you will likely be doing on cooldown.

It is important to note that there are many instances in which it is not advisable to utilize this optimization, however. For example, when you have Recklessness active, when you are the other team's kill target, or when you are chasing a moving target that you cannot stand still to cast Thundering Blast on, this advice should be completely ignored. This is because under Recklessness, you will want to use your two hardest-hitting abilities immediately, regardless of the status of Force Speed, and because using this optimization will oftentimes force you to use your Eyrin's Haste buff on an instant-cast Lightning Bolt, rather than an instant-cast Thundering Blast. This is actually a net improvement to your damage, but it comes at a steep cost in terms of mobility, which is your highest priority when kiting or chasing a target.

Team Ranked with Convection

Yes I'm aware team ranked has been removed, but the term is still useful to identify competitive tank/heal arenas with good players on both sides. In this style of play, you're unlikely to be allowed to freecast Thundering Blast and Crushing Darkness at will, outside of Polarity Shift. Therefore we will need to make some adjustments to our priority in order to ensure we keep cleave damage and survivability going out without delay, preventing ourselves from being shut down and easily killed.

The first thing to note, which will be obvious to experienced sorc players: save Polarity Shift to be used on whitebar, unless you literally are not being stunned. A stun chain can easily keep you inert during your interrupt immunity and damage boost window, which is a massive penalty to your damage. In more scrappy contexts we will normally use polarity immediately in the opener to hit the target for an 80k Thundering Blast before they have the chance to react. This is far less effective in team ranked because ultimately this mode is about sustained damage and sustained mitigation. Also, your initial 80k will be healed off almost immediately while you sit a pull/double carb for the rest of your polarity shift window, if you get it off at all. Therefore, your opener is more likely going to look like placing Affliction on all 4 targets (or 3, if one of the non-primary targets will continuously purge it, like a leth op), getting pulled into the group, and breaking the carbonize (which should whitebar you) to Force Speed out of the group and THEN AND ONLY THEN pop Polarity Shift to do a nuclear opener into the unguarded target. If you want to be cheeky, you can use a Volt Rush in the air as you're getting pulled in to get a free Chain Lightning proc that you can spend your Gathering Storm buff on as you sprint out of the group.

Damage Priority

  1. Proc Chain Lightning with Thundering Blast, Lightning Bolt, or Force Storm every 9 seconds
  2. Spend natural Chain Lightning proc and re-proc with Volt Rush
  3. Keep Static Barrier on cooldown
  4. Maintain Fulgrous Fortification (DR) stacks with Lightning Bolt
  5. Thundering Blast if you can successfully cast it (use judgement)
  6. Re-Affliction targets where it's dropped
  7. Lightning Flash
  8. Volt Rush-procd Chain Lightning
  9. Lightning Bolt

You can float your second Chain Lightning proc from Volt Rush fairly freely in order to prioritize other abilities, but always spend it before re-proccing. You may also notice that Crushing Darkness does not make an appearance here. That's because the damage it does is simply not worth the incoming damage you take to stand still and cast it, considering that if the dot is purged, the initial damage is less than that of Lightning Bolt, and that if it gets interrupted it does zero damage. You may want to occasionally send one out, such as under Polarity Shift, in order to apply the vulnerable debuff to targets, but this is of very little importance in the grand scheme.

The Triple Chain Lightning Rotation

If you, for some reason, do not find yourself to be one of the targets in a team ranked situation, or you happen to be playing warzones in AOE spec, your job is to do an unfathomable amount of damage to the enemy team, which will result in their healer panicking and everybody dying. Fortunately, there is an easy static rotation which can be followed for maximal damage in this circumstance. Unlike the other rotations in this guide, this is not a priority system. Do the steps in order and then repeat.

  1. Keep Affliction on all targets without a purge.
  2. Chain Lightning (not proc'd—hardcast this)
  3. Thundering Blast
  4. Chain Lightning
  5. Volt Rush
  6. Chain Lightning
  7. Three abilities of your choosing. This is a meaningless portion of your damage. Even offhealing would not be a bad bet here. You can also build DR with Lightning Bolts, or eek out a little bit more damage with some combination of Volt Rush and Force Storm (don't do the Force Storm second or you'll accidentally proc Chain Lightning early, though.)