It’s Total Galactic War week again on Live, which ordinarily I would be all-in for. However, due to a general feeling of apathy towards all the games which I am currently involved with (one of which is certainly due to burnout, so very much looking forward to taking a much-needed break after ten or so weeks of focus!) I’m not going to be all too involved with it this week.
Mercifully, the monotony has been broken up somewhat by BioWare updating the PTS to include my current favourite class (or at least its Imperial equivalent), the Sorcerer, and its combat style sibling, the Assassin. In this post, I shall only be covering the Sorcerer as I do not play Assassin. I don’t want to try and take guesses about what may or may not work without even a baseline understanding of how their abilities work.
I may be in an "I enjoy learning new things!" phase, but I do have limits.
Additionally, and more crucially, level 80 is now available
in a limited form! It’s nice to see more things coming out, especially as now
character-copy is enabled again. Yay for being able to get more of a grasp of
how these things will probably work!
Let’s get started!
~~~
General
With level 80 now being available for testing for the first time, with it comes our first simplified look at gearing and the revised
level-scaling options.
For gearing, the only level 80 option open to us right now
is an unmodifiable set of purple 328-rating gear. Since gear levels and the
like have yet to be established properly, it’s unknown whether 328 being purple
quality is to be expected on Live or whether this is just a PTS thing. If 328 truly
is going to be purple when it hits Live, we’re looking at gold gear being not
too much higher. I wouldn’t necessarily mind having fewer gear tiers to chase
through, I can tell you that much!
For level-scaling, I have actually struggled to find many places
where it was enabled. They commented that it was available on planets and daily
zones alongside chapters and SM FPs, yet the locations where I have been to
(Tatooine, Voss, and Onderon) have us still set at 80 with no scaling down. When
I ran into Legacy of the Rakata, scaling worked there and I was scaled
down to 55 with 30 stacks of Veteran’s Edge (despite evidently not being in the
best quality gear at 80).
I wouldn’t mind Veteran’s Edge still being a thing in 7.0,
as I think it works nicely on planets and in various bits of group content. It
means that gearing up still matters somehow despite us being scaled down to
match the planet’s level, and is a nice evolution of the quite limited nature
of SWTOR’s scaling methods.
This brings me to operations. BioWare have frequently
referred to level scaling with regards to operations, which suggests to me that
they are once again going to sync players down whenever they enter an instance.
This likely means that everything that’s at 70 will stay at 70, Nature of
Progress will be scaled at 75, and only R-4 Anomaly will be at level
80. Since they are actively working on rebalancing fights based on the
reduction of defensives, I am at least hopeful that these operations will not
have the very spiky tuning which is currently available on Live. We shall see!
There isn’t really a lot else to say about level 80 stuff until
we see the sets and level-scaling is introduced to more areas. Right now, it’s
just an extra thing that wasn’t there before. It’s nice to see, don’t get me
wrong, but it does leave you wanting more.
~
Sorcerer
General
Unlike Operatives, which for the moment have lost their raid
buff entirely, Sorcs still get to keep theirs but only as an option at level 35.
For Sorcs, level 35 is a mixed bag between personal defensives, group utility, and
some really quite bizarre options for damage / healing. For example, Corruption
Sorcs get a passive which causes the next Reanimation or Dark Infusion to be
instant if a friendly player dies while Resurgence is active on them. What a
weird passive that is! I mean, sure, the Reanimation one could be handy as a “burst
revive” but speaking as someone who’s in a raid-group with someone renowned for
reviving as soon as a player goes down (occasionally leading to wipes when
someone more important dies who could have held the group together) I’m
actually quite concerned that this will be the option that player picks to
maximise their already-extreme revive potential.
Since we don’t yet know exactly how level-scaling is going
to work in operations, it’s entirely possible that the Sorc raid-buff will
continue to be situationally-useful at best. Sure, it’s 10% to all stats, but
that 10% is probably going to be wasted outside of R-4 Anomaly and the
Elom flashpoint, just as it’s only really useful currently as a heal to anyone
below 100% HP. As such, while I’m on the fence about losing the raid-buff it
could be entirely possible that it just isn’t a practical option to take in the
majority of content.
Certainly, for PvP, the defensive options look to be the
better option in this tier. With Innervate giving a 6% damage-reduction boost to
healers, Static Barrier absorbing 10% more damage for Lightning, and critical
hits from DoTs giving a 15% damage-reduction boost for Madness, there are some
quite nice options to increase survivability that could also be useful in PvE.
Speaking of PvP functionality, how about that level 70 tier!
Force Barrier, Extrication, and Volt Rush! Obviously, we’re all going to be so
cut up about the loss of Volt Rush that we just can’t carry on and need to
delete our Sorcs… okay, I can’t carry on with that line of thought and keep a
straight face. Fare thee well, you mostly-useless Volt Rush!
With all seriousness, the choice between Extrication and
Force Barrier is going to be an interesting one. For healer Sorcs in PvP, the
choice is now essentially between you being selfless or selfish in various
tiers. I can see it now: a close Huttball match ends in a loss because that
Sorc was running Force Barrier and couldn’t pull a stunned ball carrier out of
the fire; a Sorc utterly melts in Civil War because they took all the selfless Huttball-friendly
options and just couldn’t withstand the damage.
I don’t necessarily mind this being a thing, as I quite like
the idea of PvP-speccing being a strategic, thus risky, thing and, even as a
previously-avid player of one in this field, I do feel that Sorcs have had it
very easy in PvP for quite a while now. Pulls, teleports,
invulnerability-bubbles, speed boosts. Sorcs are great fun, don’t get me wrong,
but they also have an insanely powerful toolkit for certain PvP areas. I feel
dialling that back a bit will be useful. It won’t stop various Sorcs just
dominating the playing field in certain situations, but it will mean that they’d
need to be very careful in what they pick and how to play to counter their
newfound weaknesses.
Oh, and Force Mobility is now an option at level 80. Have
fun in midbie PvP without it!
~
Corruption
While I do mainly focus on Madness, I have occasionally
dabbled in Corruption throughout 6.0. Due to not feeling confident in the role
(and for good reason), my experiences in this role tend to be limited to Master
Mode flashpoints and Story Mode operations, with one Veteran Mode operation
(TFB) under my belt. As such, I do feel that I have enough of an understanding
on the core mechanics of the discipline to comment on the changes.
On the whole, the incoming active / passive choices look…
intriguing. Since the Sorcerer is the only healer whose Discipline does not
include an AoE heal as one of its first two abilities (a.k.a. the abilities
which BioWare are creating morphs for), both Dark Infusion and Innervate
will now have AoE options available to them, although they are only situationally
useful I think.
‘Rally’ for Dark Infusion causes Infusion to hit one
additional target within 10 metres, while ‘Dark Resurgence’ for Innervate
causes Innervate to spread Resurgence around to nearby allies.
Rally could certainly have its uses, but I believe that as a
PvE option for Dark Infusion it pales next to ‘Sustained Corruption’, which
causes Infusion to place a 12-second HoT on its target. As an option for
raiding, it currently makes more sense to me that the HoT would be the go-to
choice here. In the basic 328-rating gear, the total healing from the HoT tends
to heal for just a little bit less than the standard hit (approx. 22k), so it’s
quite a powerful option for focusing on the tank.
The third option, ‘Haste’, is more of a burst-healing tool. Whenever
you use Dark Infusion, you gain the buff Haste which causes your next Dark Infusion
to activate instantly. This can only occur once 10 seconds. I would personally
choose either of the other two morphs, but I can certainly see some Sorcs out
there really enjoying this!
Dark Resurgence, meanwhile, is quite the powerful beast. In
my testing, it appears that Resurgence can be spread around within a 19-metre
radius, although I have admittedly yet to find a full limit for it. Still, 19m
is quite an impressive range for that! In terms of single-target healing, a
decent option exists in ‘Corrupted Bastion’ which generates stacks of itself
during Innervate, with each stack increasing the healing of your next Dark Heal
or Dark Infusion by 3%.
The third option, ‘Polarized’, just isn’t worth taking at
the moment. It causes Polarity Shift to increase the healing of Innervate by
3%. Woohoo? I mean, sure, it’s more healing, but in comparison to spreading a
HoT around or getting 9% extra healing from Dark Heal and Dark Infusion? Consider
also that Polarity Shift only lasts 10 seconds and has an almost 2-minute
cooldown (this is assuming that the Gathering Storm set will be removed come
7.0). That just isn’t worth it!
As for everything else, Corruption has quite a tough choice
at level 20. Dark Speed (+50% speed boost to targets of Dark Heal), Cloud Mind
(the threat drop, now with the damage-reduction utility built in), and a new
option, ‘Dark Power’ (Dark Heal having a 50% chance to cause Resurgence to tick
twice) are all on the same tier. Of these three, to me Dark Power seems like
the throwaway option, but the other two can be really useful in both PvE and
PvP. Since Force Barrier is now an option at level 70, foregoing Cloud Mind in
PvE is not necessarily an issue if you still take Barrier, since that is by
design a threat-drop. Not ideal use of Barrier, though!
I'm intrigued to learn what my fellow guildies and friends who do main Sorc-healer make of these changes. I think they look decent, but I'm very much a novice compared to some, so they may see merit in some of the things I dismiss in favour of others.
~
Madness
This is my main spec, and the only other one I play for Sorcerer.
As such, I shall not be touching on Lightning in this post as, much like Assassin,
I do not feel that I can begin to comment on what’s changing.
So, for Madness, one of the things which I came up with when
thinking about potential morphs for various combat styles was a single-target
Death Field. “What use is that?” you may be thinking? Well, let me break it
down.
Since Death Field is an AoE ability, it is of course purely
reliant on your ability to place it or to use the
sticky-ground-targeting-reticule option. For the majority of fights the latter
works well enough and it’s a great QoL option, but there are some fights where
it is impractical. Namely, Toth and Zorn. The bigger the enemy, the closer you must
stand within maximum-range to be able to use the sticky reticule. So, for Zorn,
I need to stand about 27 or so metres from him to be able to use Death Field
reliably without manual targeting.
Notice the potential issue yet? No? Well, this is where one
of Zorn’s abilities in Veteran Mode and beyond – Fearful – comes in. If you are
standing approximately 28 – 29m away from him, it won’t affect you, but any
closer and you get hit. This ability causes you to take damage every time you
attempt to damage Zorn, and this also impacts DoTs. So, in the current system,
Madness lends itself very easily to the risk of the player being affected by
Fearful, therefore almost certainly dying as a result. Sure, this issue could also
be rectified by manual targeting the Death Field, but that’s also quite a
clunky option and does require you to be both quick and accurate (and for the
tank to not move the bastard as I’m trying to Death Field him). I’m certainly
not both of these.
Similar to Toth and Zorn, the Tyrans fight in Nightmare is
quite impractical for Madness with how my group handles the ranged-DPS
platforms. I’ve seen my guild’s resident Balance Sage MM DPS officer standing
ahead of the rest of the DPS, simply because much like the two drouks, you
realistically need to be within 28m of Tyrans to be able to Death Field him without
manual targeting.
Plus, then you get fights like Firebrand and Stormcaller or
Kephess in Veteran Mode when an accidental “sorry, it’s a reflex!” use of Death
Field can cause fatalities. It shouldn’t happen, but if it does… yeah. Not
pleasant. Then you get fights like the Terror in TFB where automatic DoT-spreading to the boss may not be too helpful, or fights like Revan when you can't even use the automatic sticky reticule to use Death Field on the Core (the same also applies to the Terror in "Tantrum" phase).
All-in-all, it has more use than you might think from a PvE perspective!
So this was one of the things which I was hoping to see come
in for Madness, and I’m very pleased to see that a single-target option (‘Death
Brand’) has been introduced. The other two morphs for Death Field both look
great as well for different reasons. The first, ‘Unrelenting Affliction’, gives
Death Marks a 50% chance to not be consumed, and the second, ‘Sustained
Corruption’ (I haven’t gone mad, there are two different Sorc ability morphs
with this name!) causes Death Marks to heal you for 1% of your maximum HP
whenever they are consumed.
For PvE, I would probably take Unrelenting Affliction in most
fights. In specific fights, I would definitely choose Death Brand, but
Unrelenting Affliction has some interesting synergy with a later passive that I
think could be really useful for most fights. Sustained Corruption is something
I would pick if I knew I would be taking lots of damage while also being sure
that I could spread Death Marks to as many foes as possible. Essentially, if
ever I were to do PvP in 7.0, this would be my pick!
Creeping Terror gets some decent morphs, but my eye is drawn
to ‘Down Fall’. This causes Creeping Terror to consume two Death Marks, dealing
increased damage whenever it does so. For AoE fights this has appeal because
Death Marks on other targets are never consumed all in one sitting on Live unless
you have the tactical which spreads Demolish to other targets. More ticks, more
damage, we’re golden. However, this is where Unrelenting Affliction comes back
in. These additional stacks of Death Mark consumed by Creeping Terror through
Down Fall are also subject to the 50% chance to not be consumed, making both
options powerful regardless of the situation.
The other options for Creeping Terror are so-so. ‘Critical
Movement’ causes critical hits from the initial hit of Creeping Terror to
reduce Force Speed’s active cooldown by 3 seconds, while ‘Creeping End’ causes the
application of the DoT (once every five seconds) to reduce the cooldown of
Recklessness by 2 seconds. Force Speed’s cooldown is neither here nor there for
me as, even if the damage boost from Gathering Storm stays in somehow, I would
still only use it before Force Leech and not take advantage of it being available
3 seconds sooner. Shortening the cooldown on Recklessness is quite appealing,
but I do feel that Down Fall is just an all-around better pick.
Our level 20 choices alongside Cloud Mind are okay. They’re
not great, but I can see some people enjoying them. ‘Overloaded Strike’, replacing
Lightning Strike, hits two targets within 10 metres, while ‘Finish Them’ causes
Shock to finish the duration of any DoTs on the target and deal their remaining
damage to them. I can certainly see these abilities having some use, but I for
one feel that Cloud Mind is just the better option. I don’t really care for
finishing DoTs in one go, as I quite enjoy keeping track of them in real-time,
while Overloaded Strike just doesn’t seem worth it.
Of course, it could have decent synergy with one of our
level 35 options, ‘Over Whelming Force’, which gives Lightning Strike a 25%
chance to cause the next Crushing Darkness (which obviously should be Demolish
for Madness, but it’s the PTS, I imagine that’ll be sorted before this hits Live)
to be a critical hit. I’d still choose the morph that gives us max. 15% damage
reduction from DoT critical hits, but I can imagine that together the Strike /
Force options could yield interesting results.
I really like some of these options, and I'm very excited to see what sort of potentials this could yield for Madness when 7.0 hits Live!
~~~
Conclusion
On the whole, the Legacy of the Sith PTS is shaping
up alright at the moment. September’s release is reasonably big, although
perhaps not quite as big as I had originally been hoping for. Since we’re still
looking at a December release, the PTS will be going down for good at some
point in November. October, therefore, needs to be the month when we’ll be
seeing a lot more of this content be test-ready.
Of course, they might not be actively testing absolutely
everything. Their main goal with introducing scaling to flashpoints and operations
was to minimise the amount of work they needed to do in future expansions, so if
they just update the scaling in-theory they only need to ensure that everyone
is scaled correctly when they enter. Of course, this was before all the tuning
issues that arose throughout 6.0 and their new “reduce the defensives”
philosophy, which is almost certainly why it’s taking them so long to implement
the operations this time around.
As a result, it could well be that all they want us to test,
as far as the older operations are concerned, is how certain fights feel,
whether the scaling still works, and… not much else. Of course, R-4 Anomaly
still requires more substantive testing but, beyond that, the other operations
shouldn’t really require too much work if they’re just leaving the scaling in
place.
Certainly, I am very much of the opinion now that if all
operations and flashpoints were to be boosted to 80 that we’d have seen a far
faster push to get level 80 to us followed by operations being September’s
thing. We don’t have all that long at this point to test revised mechanics and
an entirely new tuning system to account for five extra levels!
I intend to stick around with this phase of the PTS for
another week or so. Get some guildies in again and go run the three level-75
MMFPs with level-75 characters to get more of a feel for how things feel on-level
(since scaling isn’t in yet for anything beyond Story Mode). I’m still eager to
see more, but I’m still pretty content with what we’ve seen in recent weeks.
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