SWTOR 7.7 Madness Sorcerer PvE Guide and Best Builds

SWTOR Madness Sorcerer PvE Guide (DPS) for beginners and more experienced veterans: Skills, Choices, Rotations, Gearing, Builds, Tips!

Introduction to Madness Sorcerer

Madness Sorcerers drive their victims insane with mind tricks that have been corrupted by the dark side while electrocuting them with unlimited Force Lightning. They manage to cheat death by leeching away the tortured soul’s life force.

Madness is one of the weaker specs in terms of single-target sustained DPS, but they are still capable of pulling viable numbers and offer significantly stronger burst potential than what most DoT specs can do, especially when pre-casting is possible. 

Meanwhile, this discipline’s AoE potential is pretty average for a DoT spec; it manages to keep up with all of the other DoT specs in the game, really only falling behind compared to disciplines with ridiculously overpowered AoE, Vengeance / Vigilance and Hatred / Serenity. Since most AoE capability was removed or heavily constrained from burst specs in 7.0, Madness is in the upper echelon compared to all other DPS specs.

Madness truly excels when it comes to survivability. Their exceptional damage reduction and self-healing mean that healers can largely ignore them outside of heal checks, and even then, they’ll probably be fine with just the AoE healing.

Major Changes in 7.0

Utility points are gone! Instead, there is a new system called the Ability Tree. Each discipline has 8 choices where they pick 1 of 3 options. The options have several similarities across the Combat Styles:

• 2 choices buff a discipline-specific ability (2 abilities, 1 choice each).
• 3 choices which are just old Utility effects. These choices are almost always the same for all disciplines. 
• 2 choices where you’re picking between 1 ability or 1 of 2 passives. One of the ability choices tends to be an offensive cooldown (OCD). The other seems to be related to PvP balance, but there isn’t a clear pattern beyond the choice forcing players to decide which of 3 capabilities they want to keep.
• 1 choice where you’re picking 1 of 3 abilities. One of the abilities is always one of your primary CCs, either the 8s mez or 4s hard stun. Another of the abilities is the movement ability with the longest cooldown. The third option is less consistent, it seems to be there as an extra balance lever for BioWare since some abilities that got locked away are more impactful than others. The 3 abilities are almost always the same for each discipline.

This means almost all disciplines had 5 abilities locked away behind choices with the option for players to keep up to 3 of them. In addition, many extremely situational abilities were pruned entirely. Madness permanently lost access to 2 abilities: 

• Force Slow
• Reanimation

Battle rezzes in general are now healer-only (so Corruption still has Reanimation), but there is no longer a global 5 min lockout on those abilities, so it’s treated just like any other ability, albeit with a much longer cooldown

Guarding is now a tank-only ability, which is the logical next step since the nerf to Guard for DPS partway through 6.0 was ineffective at stopping its ubiquity in PvP. 

Group Composition Tips

In order to deal maximum damage, Madness requires 2 other DPS debuffs:

DPS Debuff	Presence of debuff increases DPS by approximately
Internal / Elemental (sometimes)	4%
Armor	3%
Total DPS Gain:	7% (sometimes only 3%)

It is more common for Force wielders to provide the armor debuff, while it is more common for Tech wielders to provide the Internal / Elemental damage debuff. 

For Force Wielders, you’re best off bringing a Juggernaut / Guardian since they provide the armor debuff and can benefit from both debuffs Madness provides. For the Tech wielders, you’re best off bringing an Operative / Scoundrel, which can provide both the Internal / Elemental debuff for Madness and the Tech debuff for any other Tech class. Both of these options enable the 4th player to bring whatever they would like and everyone will have full DPS debuffs. 

If you’re using the Death Brand ability tree option, Madness provides the Internal / Elemental debuff instead of the AoE debuff, meaning they’re more independent in terms of debuffs and only require the armor debuff. In this case, an Advanced Prototype Powertech / Tactics Vanguard can be used instead of the Juggernaut / Guardian and the Operative / Scoundrel is no longer necessary. 

To be clear, the disciplines and Combat Styles I mentioned above are by no means required and are not the only ones that provide the DPS debuffs required by Madness, they are just the most efficient and allow the 4th player to bring whatever they want. 

So long as each DPS is given the debuffs they need (or at least the most impactful ones), you’ll be fine. Don’t fixate on having a 100% ideal composition. 

DPS Mindset

How can I do as much damage as possible in each GCD (global cooldown, 1.5 second duration before you can activate another ability) given the constraints of the fight? Which ability do I use right now that will provide me the most DPS? How can I maximize my uptime on the boss? If I’m not activating an ability right now, why not? Can I finish this cast before I need to move? What happens if I don’t have time to finish a cast before moving? Can the healers deal with it without too much stress?  

Check out the SWTOR Damage Types and Damage Mitigation guide for more details on how they differ from each other and how to determine which attack does what damage!

Our in-depth analysis and breakdown of the relationship between mechanics and strategy in boss fights in SWTOR may also help you perform better in group content.

Abilities Explained

Please have the game open while reading through the next few sections. I will not be writing out ability descriptions and I will only be transcribing the components of discipline passives that directly relate to the ability and rotation. This forces you to read through what everything does so that you can understand what all of your passives and abilities do as well as locate these abilities in-game. Make sure you place all of these abilities on your bar in an order that makes sense to you. 

Single-Target Rotational Abilities, Attributes, and Important Procs

Force Leech

(Force/Internal/Direct/Single-Target/Casted)
This ability’s signature trait is that it heals you for as much damage as it deals, and it deals quite a bit of damage, making it one of your most important abilities both offensively and defensively. 

Force Leech has a slightly shorter cooldown than Death Field and Demolish. While this difference is somewhat made up by the cast time, it still ends up having a slightly shorter cooldown than those two abilities, so you’ll still only use it once per rotation cycle. When using the priority system, you’ll end up having the opportunity to take advantage of this shorter cooldown and use it more frequently.

Force Leech also deals 30% more damage when used on a target affected by Affliction. In addition to affecting the damage output of one of Madness’ best abilities, this also influences the healing you receive since Force Leech heals you according to how much damage it does. Make sure Affliction is always on the target before you use this ability. Force Leech has 2 discipline passives associated with it that are relevant to your rotation: 

Parasitism
Increases the life stolen by Force Leech by 100%. This additional healing is not reflected in the ability tooltip but you will see it in the flytext. Parasitism also increases the healing dealt for some of your other abilities and plays a major contributing factor in your defensive capabilities as a Madness Sorc.

Creeping Death
Force Leech restores 15 force when used on a target affected by your Deathmark. Resource management is not something you have to worry about for Madness unless you get battle-rezzed or spend a lot of GCDs on abilities outside of your single-target rotation. That said, even if your Force gets too low, Force Leech is strong enough that you shouldn’t consider this component when deciding to use it.

Force Mobility
You wouldn’t know it unless you read the 7.3.1 patch notes because the game doesn’t tell you, but Force Mobility, which makes Force Leech castable while moving, is now built into the discipline. In other words, you can now always cast Force Leech while moving, no need to take anything extra.

Death Field

(Force/Internal/Direct/AoE/Instant)
This ability deals slightly less damage than Force Leech and has the distinction of being one of the only rotational placeable AoE DPS abilities in the game. You might have trouble placing this ability when you’re far away from large bosses if you double-click to place instead of positioning manually. The range on your AoE abilities is calculated based on how far away the center of the reticle is from the player. When you try to place your reticle on a large enemy when you’re close to 30m away, sometimes the center of the reticle doesn’t reach the center of the boss so you can’t double-click to place. 

In practice, this means that Madness often has a closer max range than 30m. For especially large bosses, you can’t be further than 25-27m away from the boss to be able to activate Death Field. This used to not be an issue when Death Field had an 8m radius, but now it’s only 5m. 

While this was done for balance reasons, the issue could be fixed without having a noticeable effect on balance by giving Death Field a 35m range (or just giving them back the 8m radius). Lightning’s 35m range feels so much more valuable than it might seem because the range difference is actually closer to 8-10m, not 5m, unless you’re okay with manually placing your AoEs. Death Field has 2 debuffs, 1 proc, and 3 discipline passives associated with it that are relevant to your rotation:

Deathmark
The next 15 ticks of your periodic abilities will deal 15% additional damage. This is a major contributing factor to Death Field’s high priority and there are a couple of other things that are dependent on Deathmarks being present, like Killing Field and Devour. Deathmarks do not get consumed on other Sorcs’ DoTs (though they used to).

Pestilence
Death Field spreads your Affliction and Creeping Terror to targets it damages as long as it damages targets already affected by these abilities. In addition, Death Field overwhelms its targets for 45 seconds, causing them to take 10% more damage from AoE abilities. This is your DoT spread. I’ll go into greater detail about this later on.

Disintegration
Death Field grants Vitiate’s Malice, which makes Force Lightning heal you for 15% of the damage it deals for the next 12s. This proc was introduced in 7.1.1 and adds about 750 HPS to Madness’ maximum healing. Since Death Field should be used on cooldown, Vitiate’s Malice will end up having about 85% uptime including always being active whenever you’d want to channel Force Lightning, and creates an incentive to prioritize Force Lightning over Lightning Strike, even with the Wrath proc.

Dark Echo
Targets hit by Death Field have a 50% chance to emit a Dark Echo, damaging itself and up to 7 targets within 5m for a small amount of internal damage. This passive helps to extend the reach and slightly increase the damage dealt by the ability. Dark Echo does not spread DoTs, but it does provide a small amount of self-healing.

Devour
Each time a charge of your Deathmark is consumed, you gain 2 Force. This means if you hit 3 targets with Death Field, it will effectively be free. As I mentioned before, it’s not super important to care about this since Madness has almost no resource management.

Affliction

(Force/Internal/Periodic/Single-Target/Instant)
This DoT is one of your harder-hitting abilities. Affliction should be the second ability you use on any new target immediately following Creeping Terror. This DoT is used second because it is the weaker of the two and gives you more time to activate Force Leech before Affliction falls off when using the priority instead of the rotation. Often, Force Leech will come off cooldown right before Creeping Terror falls off. Affliction doesn’t have any procs or discipline passives associated with it that are relevant to your rotation that I haven’t already mentioned.

Creeping Terror

(Force/Internal/Periodic/Single-Target/Instant)
This DoT is another of your harder-hitting abilities and is slightly stronger than Affliction. Be mindful of the 2s root it applies when you intend to DoT spread from a moving target since it can separate that enemy from the rest of the group if it is vulnerable to roots. In order to mitigate this, try to target an add at the front of the pack or apply Affliction first when DoT spreading to minimize the resulting desynchronization.

Creeping Terror is also the sole beneficiary of the Tempest of Rho, our default tactical item for single-target situations. You’ll actually get more ticks triggered by Tempest of Rho than you will from the base ability! Creeping Terror does not have any procs or discipline passives associated with it that I have not already explained. 

Demolish

(Force/Kinetic/Direct and Periodic/Single-Target/Casted)
Demolish is a somewhat unique ability, it deals a very high amount of damage overall but doesn’t synergize well with some of the buffs provided by some Madness and general Sorc buffs. 

It deals both Direct and Periodic damage with the initial hit being Direct and the DoT component being Periodic damage. This makes Demolish a very poor candidate for use with Force Speed and Recklessness because only the relatively weak, initial hit will benefit from these abilities or any others that only affect direct damage. 

It also ticks every second, so the damage dealt by each individual tick is a little smaller than it is for Creeping Terror and Affliction, making it a worse candidate for Deathmarks (there aren’t enough to boost all of your DoT ticks), not that you can help it since it still hits really hard so it needs to be used on cooldown. 

Demolish doesn’t spread unless you equip the Killing Field tactical, and then it automatically applies to all targets with Deathmarks that are near the primary target. Demolish “spreads” regardless of whether or not the initial target is affected by your Deathmark, so if you miss one of your targets with Death Field but they’re all sufficiently grouped up, it’s best to apply it to the target without Death Field since it will still spread but also deal damage to that additional enemy. Demolish has 1 proc that is relevant to the rotation that I haven’t mentioned yet:

Wrath
Dealing damage with Force Lightning produces a stack of Wrath. At 4 stacks, Wrath causes your next Demolish (or Lightning Strike) to activate instantly, consume 50% less Force, and deal 25% more damage. This is the most important proc in your rotation. You need to make sure that you have it before Demolish comes off cooldown so you don’t have to delay it.

Throughout this guide, I refer to the Wrath proc as something you get and you’re done instead of it having 4 stacks. Wrath is not useful until it has 4 stacks which is why I refer to it in this way. You can get all 4 stacks of Wrath from a single full channel of Force Lightning since Force Lightning ticks 4 times.

Force Lightning

(Force/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Channeled)
Force Lightning is your standard filler ability. It’s responsible for generating the Wrath proc, usually heals you for a small portion of the damage it deals, and can trigger your Tempest of Rho tactical item. On average, each use of Force Lightning will result in 2 additional Creeping Terror ticks from Tempest of Rho. Force Lightning has 2 procs and 3 discipline passives associated with it that are relevant to your rotation that I haven’t already mentioned:

Madness
Force Lightning no longer has a cooldown. In addition, Force Lightning ticks 33% faster and deals 20% less damage. The first effect allows Force Lightning to be spammable and function as a filler ability. Outside of the Madness discipline, Force Lightning has a 6s cooldown.

The second effect increases the damage dealt by Force Lightning and is responsible for making it a ~2s channel instead of a 3s one, desynchronizing the ability from your GCD.

Lightning Efficacy
Each time your Force Lightning deals damage, you recover 2% of your total Force. This is a major contributor to why Madness does not have any resource management. Each channel of Force Lightning gives you back more Force than it costs to use the ability.

Lightning Burns
Force Lightning has a 20% chance (and Force Leech has a 60% chance) to restore 2 Force and deal a small amount of energy damage to the target. This is basically just a minor effect that gives the discipline a little more zest.

Fulminating Current
Dealing damage with Force Lightning increases the critical chance of your periodic effects by 3% for 10 seconds, stacks up to 4 times (12% total). It’s fairly easy to have 100% uptime on this proc in your single-target rotation. However, you’ll cut things close if you use the priority system and need to put effort into maintaining it when spamming Force Storm because Broadsword has opted to not make Force Storm apply and benefit from the same effects as Force Lightning.

Lightning Strike

(Force/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Casted)
Lightning Strike is your second filler ability. It can be boosted by Wrath, but even with the buffs from the proc, Lightning Strike deals slightly less damage per GCD than Force Lightning and never provides any self-healing, so it’s not worth using if you can help it. However, since Wrath makes Lightning Strike instant, it is usable while moving unlike Force Lightning, so it’s a DPS increase over doing nothing, but it should only be used when you have to move and can’t use Shock instead. Lightning Strike does not have any additional discipline passives associated with it that I haven’t already mentioned.

Shock

(Force/Energy/Direct/Single-Target/Instant)
Shock is pretty weak on its own; it only deals about as much as Lightning Strike without the Wrath proc and can’t trigger Tempest of Rho. It is instant though, which means it’s a good ability to use while moving. Shock doesn’t have any procs or passives associated with it, but I’ll have a lot more to say about the ability later on because it gains new functionality and has an essential place in the priority system thanks to a powerful ability tree buff called Plague Master.  

Plague Master makes it so Shock finishes off all of your DoTs (including Demolish), dealing their remaining damage immediately. This gives Madness actual burst capability, a ton of control, and additional mobility, resulting in a considerable potential DPS increase and enabling a unique new priority system that eliminates many of the problems with the rotation.

The benefits of Plague Master come at a great cost. The ability tree buff makes the resulting priority system significantly more challenging to execute as you need to make constant judgments about whether or not to use Shock.

You want to be able to reapply your DoTs immediately without delaying anything else, but you also don’t want to let Fulminating Current fall off. Most importantly, you need to consider if you need to pull it out of your “rotation” and use it against an add that’s about to die or earlier than you’d otherwise like against a boss that is about to become invulnerable.

Finishing off DoTs with Shock + Plague Master does not alter their damage types at all, so you can think of them as just being gigantic DoT ticks in terms of buff synergies. The DoTs will heal you for 10% of the damage they deal thanks to Parasitism, will consume single Deathmarks, and cannot benefit from or consume Recklessness or Force Speed, though they’ll still affect Shock.

AoE Abilities

The formula for determining how much damage an AoE ability does per GCD such that it can be compared to single-target abilities is: (Damage Dealt/Number of GCDs) x Number of Enemies. An AoE ability’s place in the priority is as high as it can be until it reaches a single-target ability that deals more damage than the AoE will deal to all enemies in the GCD. 

AoE damage is considered fluff if the adds do not need to die or if you are otherwise shirking your main responsibilities to deal more damage to adds. The best example of this for Sorcs is placing your Force Storm on just a couple of the Ugnaughts that are away from Grob’thok. It’s pretty easy to tell what is and isn’t fluff, don’t be greedy and don’t hurt your group’s chances of beating the boss. Your incredibly fluffy numbers mean nothing if you wipe. 

Force Storm

(Force/Energy/Direct/AoE/Channeled)
This is your spammable AoE. Force Storm’s damage per GCD surpasses the following abilities after the following number of targets are hit with one use of the ability:

• Force Lightning: at least 2 targets 
• Force Leech: at least 4 targets

Keep in mind that Force Storm is not the AoE version of Force Lightning. Force Storm does not build stacks of Wrath or Fulminating Current, regenerate Force, trigger Lightning Burns, heal for a portion of the damage it deals, or even have the same channel time as it does for the other specs.

Death Field

(Force/Internal/Direct/AoE/Casted)
This ability is already used rotationally, but it should not be used on cooldown when you need to use it for AoE purposes because Death Field is your DoT spread and has a 15s cooldown while Creeping Terror and Affliction last 18s. 

DoT spreading to a target that still has your DoTs active does not refresh or extend the duration in any way, so if you use Death Field on cooldown, you’ll only maybe spread your DoTs back to the enemy who you initially spread from and then the rest of the enemies won’t get respread to until the next Death Field. 

Unlike other DoT specs, Madness really only gets one shot per rotation cycle to get their spread off, so make sure you don’t activate Death Field until the DoTs have fallen off of all the enemies you’re spreading to. Usually, you want to spread from whichever enemy has the highest health and continue spreading from that one until it dies for consistency. When DoT spreading, you will have a standard rotation:

1. Force Lightning (only if Fulminating Current has fallen off)
2. Affliction
3. Creeping Terror
4. Death Field
5. Demolish (only with Killing Field)
6. Force Leech (only if there are fewer than 4 targets)
7. Force Storm x2
8. Repeat

It’s important to know the single-target priority list that I mentioned earlier since it’s difficult to transition between the single-target and AoE rotations and often fights that require AoE have it intermittently. It’s okay to delay Death Field in your single-target rotation for quite a while if you know you’ll have to DoT spread soon, just make sure that you aren’t delaying it so long that you completely miss out on using it for a cycle.

It’s also okay to get started with generating your Wrath proc and applying your DoTs before the adds have been fully grouped up, just don’t use Death Field until they’re close enough for DoT spread.If you don’t DoT spread in the GCD immediately following the application of Affliction and Creeping Terror, make sure to continue delaying Death Field in future GCDs until the DoTs have fallen off the targets that the DoTs were spread to.

Offensive Cooldowns

All offensive cooldowns (OCDs) should be used as frequently as possible under the conditions stated here or if they need to be saved for a DPS check/burst window, but don’t start delaying them for that until you see that you have to. 

Polarity Shift

Thanks to our Unmatched Haste and Gathering Storm legendary items, Polarity Shift is one of the strongest offensive cooldowns in the game because it boosts your damage dealt by 20% and increases your alacrity to where you have the 1.2s GCD, enabling you to activate more abilities during that window than you otherwise would be able to. When it’s used on cooldown, Polarity Shift will have ~17% uptime.

In Madness, the only thing you need to consider about Polarity Shift is timing it with your DoTs. Regardless of whether or not you’re using the static rotation or priority system, you can activate Polarity Shift immediately after applying Creeping Terror and Affliction.

If you’re using Plague Master and you need all the burst you can muster, you can also apply all 3 of your DoTs (Demolish last), then use Polarity Shift immediately followed by Shock. The cooldown on Shock is reduced by just enough that you’re able to use it again as your very last GCD during Polarity Shift, though the timing is super tight.

This structure enables you to get a lot more DoT damage boosted by 20% than would otherwise be possible, though it typically comes at the cost of only being able to use 1 of each of Death Field and Force Leech when you could otherwise get 2, which reduces the difference between the approaches.

Recklessness

Recklessness is an incredibly quirky ability that boosts the critical chance of your next 2 direct Force attacks by 60%. In Madness, always use the stacks of Recklessness on Death Field and Force Leech. 

Recklessness only increases the critical chance of direct damage abilities, so it won’t work on Affliction, Creeping Terror, or the DoT component of Demolish. This means that you can activate it before applying Affliction and Creeping Terror, but make sure you don’t use it on Demolish. 

Death Field will consume both charges if it hits multiple enemies. Make sure to use Force Leech first in this case.

Whenever your critical chance is below 40%, as is the normal case with optimal gear for Madness in 7.0, there is a small chance that Recklessness won’t cause your next attack to critically hit. The stack of Recklessness won’t get consumed, but you’re forced to use it suboptimally.

While it can contribute to supercritical damage, Recklessness never causes a supercrit. Supercrits only occur when an individual buff single-handedly boosts the critical chance of an attack by 100%; when this happens, all of your other critical chance is added to your critical damage.

Force Speed

This ability increases the damage dealt by your next direct Force attack by 20% thanks to the Gathering Storm legendary implant and it also reduces the cooldown of Polarity Shift by 5 seconds thanks to the Unmatched Haste legendary implant, so you need to use this as often as possible in order to maximize the cooldown reduction and number of damage increases. 

You should always use this on either Death Field or Force Leech since they are your most damaging direct attacks by far. Force Speed never buffs the damage dealt by Creeping Terror or Affliction and only boosts the initial hit of Demolish, just like Recklessness.

Technically, it’s better to use Force Speed on Force Leech since it deals slightly more single-target damage, and the self-healing is indirectly increased as well. However, Death Field is the superior choice as soon as you can hit multiple targets. If you’re using the priority system, it’s better to use Force Speed as often as possible instead of timing it specifically with Force Leech.

Force Leech does have a travel time, so if your APM is high, you can still use Force Speed immediately after the cast of Force Leech finishes and it will get consumed on Force Leech.

Adrenal

Make sure this item is always used immediately after activating Polarity Shift, even if you have to delay it a while. It is highly unlikely that a fight will last long enough where this delay will be enough to where it will result in missing out on a use of the Adrenal and most of the delay will end up being counteracted by the Alacrity increase from Polarity Shift anyway. 

It’s important you do this because you will get more abilities off during the Adrenal window thanks to your higher APM thanks to the alacrity and the damage increase will compound with the stat increase from the adrenal. 

If you’ll only get one more use of the adrenal before the boss dies and it comes off cooldown around 40%, you’re better off saving it for the next Polarity Shift that occurs below 30% so you can also benefit from the Devour discipline passive damage boost. 

Defensive Cooldowns and Mobility

Defensive cooldowns (DCDs) are not used just to stop you from getting killed, they’re there to minimize overall damage taken. For any Combat Style in any fight, your most effective DCDs should be mapped to the most damaging attacks in the fight while weaker DCDs should be used against weaker attacks. 

Don’t pop all of your DCDs at once or only use them when your health gets low. You should be attempting to mitigate as much damage as possible by using your DCDs against predictable damage.

In fights where you’ll be taking a high amount of sustained damage, it’s important to use your DCDs in the order that maximizes your overall uptime. If you can tweak the order that you use your DCDs where it allows you to get an extra use out of one of them over the course of a long burn phase, you should definitely do that instead of activating your potentially stronger DCDs first.

It’s good to have 1 emergency panic button too, but everything else should be used to prevent your health from getting low in the first place. Part of knowing a fight is understanding how much damage you take and what you can do to mitigate that damage. 

Unnatural Preservation

This ability is not off-healing. Do not consider it as off-healing. Consider it a defensive cooldown just like any other that just so happens to work by providing you with a bit of HP.

The traditional wisdom with Sorcerer survivability, and now with Madness especially, is that they can take big hits and survive because they will almost always be at higher HP than all other classes such that if someone else uses another defensive cooldown with lower health, they won’t lose as much health overall but since the Sorc was at higher health before they took the hit thanks to proactive use of Unnatural Preservation, they’ll be dropped to the same health level as the other class.

In other words, you should use Unnatural Preservation as soon as you can make full use of the heal (so when you’re lower than ~90% HP) or know you won’t be taking more damage for another ~30s. Don’t agonize about getting every last drop of healing out of each activation, just use it proactively to keep your health high.

Force Barrier and Enduring Bastion

This ability works by giving you +20,000% defense chance, so if an attack cannot be dodged/deflected/parried/resisted, Force Barrier will not work. In most fights, this ability doesn’t get used and is more of an emergency button unless it’s getting used to cheese something deliberately like Doom from Ciphas (TFB) or Ion Cutter from Master (Ravagers). 

Since you aren’t dealing any damage while channeling this ability, it is absolutely critical that you do not channel it for longer than you need to. Unless you’re buying time for DoT ticks and such, there’s not too much of a point to channeling for longer than 6 seconds anyway, which is when you get the fourth and final stack of Enduring Bastion which absorbs a massive amount of damage (though usually not massive enough if you need the 4 stacks). Each stack of Enduring Bastion absorbs as much damage as your Static Barrier, so at 4 stacks of Enduring Bastion, you basically have 4 bubbles on you at the same time.

Force Barrier does not cost a GCD to use and functions as a CC break. It’s okay to use it as a CC break if there is no predictable source of damage you can take that will require its use. In other words, using it to mitigate damage takes priority over rising it as a CC break.

If you take the Surging Speed ability tree buff (and you almost always will), Force Barrier also resets the cooldown on Force Speed. Just like with using it as a CC break, only use Force Barrier to reset the cooldown on Force Speed if there’s no attack you’re saving it for. Sometimes resetting the cooldown on Force Speed can enable you to survive or pass a mechanic that you otherwise wouldn’t have been able to.

I do not recommend resetting the cooldown on Force Speed just so you can benefit from your legendary implants to boost another attack’s damage by 20% and lower the cooldown of Polarity Shift by 5s. Force Barrier is too valuable and has too long of a cooldown while the DPS increase is literally negligible.

The deciding factor for beating a boss is far more likely to be surviving long enough with Force Barrier over the full channel than getting an extra Force Speed or two throughout the fight and if you get killed when Force Barrier is on cooldown because you used it as a DPS increase instead, you’re gonna lose a whole lot more DPS by being dead. 

Please note that most enemies will also stop attacking you when you activate this ability, so you can’t use it when you have to temporarily tank something. They will come back as soon as you finish channeling though. 

Static Barrier

Each combat style now has one ability that gains a unique effect or otherwise functions a bit differently with each discipline. For Sorcerer, that ability is Static Barrier, which gains the following effect while in the Madness discipline: 

Your Static Barrier, Force Barrier, and Enduring Bastion heal you for 1% of your maximum health every second for as long as they last. The healing dealt by Enduring Bastion is increased by 1% for each stack of Enduring Bastion.

Even with these added effects, Static Barrier still isn’t different from any of your other off-healing abilities like Resurgence and Dark Heal because it costs a GCD to use, though it is leagues stronger than your other heals if it is able to tick for a while.

Static Barrier should only be used as an off-heal (so instead of a DPS ability) if you think you or someone else will die if you don’t use it, and when I say die, I mean it, I do not mean take a giant hit, I mean actually die. If your healers can heal you back up and you don’t have the Lightning Barrier ability tree buff, don’t use it unless there is downtime where you can’t do any DPS. 

As of 7.3.1, you will be able to take Lightning Barrier quite often, but the amount of value you get per activation depends on the difficulty of the content you’re doing. Due to its damage per tick, you only ever want to use it instead of a non-essential Force Lightning (only when you already have the Wrath proc) or Lightning Strike and want to prioritize using it during downtime.

It takes about 2 ticks of Lightning Barrier in order to match the damage dealt per GCD of Force Lightning and Lightning Strike (with Tempest of Rho). In harder content, many attacks will consume your bubble in a single hit, so it is often a DPS loss to use unless you need to move or can pre-cast it during downtime. However, in easier content, you can get tons of ticks from a single activation.

Medpac

Don’t save it for a rainy day because today is that rainy day! Unless you get hit by a one-shot mechanic (which you shouldn’t), you should never let yourself die while your Medpac is still available and you certainly should never try to use one of your heals before using your Medpac (and I hope you know that Unnatural Preservation is not included in this rule). 

If everyone’s health is getting low or there’s a heal check in the current phase, do not hesitate to use your Medpac if you can take full benefit of the health provided or need to be above a certain health level to survive an imminent mechanic.

If you think Medpacs are too expensive, it’s time to get Biochem on one of your alts or even better, your raiding toon so that you can make your own or get reusables. Choosing not to use a Medpac for financial reasons and subsequently dying is not a valid excuse.

Expunge

This is the cleanse for the Sorcs. Generally, healers are responsible for dealing with most of the cleanses, though there are a few instances where the DPS should help, like on Dread Council with Tyrans’ Death Mark. Before you use Expunge on yourself, make sure that you don’t get Lightning Barrier ticks off of whatever you’re trying to cleanse. 

Try to avoid having to cleanse yourself with this ability. A lot of the cleanses that DPS are responsible for can be removed with an ability that is off the GCD like the CC break or the Emersion ability tree option and unless the debuff is going out to many members of your group at the same time, your healers are responsible for cleansing you. 

Force Speed

This ability is easily the best ability for movement in the game because it allows you to keep DPSing while moving an incredible distance very quickly. Unfortunately, now we don’t really get to use it for movement since we need it for our legendary implants, though if you come across a situation where you will likely die if you don’t use it, save it for that situation but try to rely on Phase Walk as much as possible if those situations can be predicted and make sure to use Force Speed during downtime to keep reducing the cooldown on Polarity Shift. 

Phase Walk

Since our legendary implants require us to use Force Speed on cooldown, our mobility is reduced significantly and it becomes more important to rely on Phase Walk for movement. This ability can be activated off the GCD even though it has a cast, the only reason it has one at all is to prevent you from placing it in the air or while you’re moving. Phase Walk can also be activated in the middle of channels (including Force Barrier), not casts though, without interrupting the cast so long as you stay in range of whatever you’re hitting and can be used while CC’d, even though the button will be grayed out if you try to use it while CC’d. 

If you try to teleport while in the air, sometimes it doesn’t work, and sometimes there is a whole lot of lag before it teleports you so be mindful of that. When thinking about different spots to place Phase Walk, ask yourself: is there a specific location I know I will want to return to at some point later in the fight? Is that position going to be generally safe to return to? Ask yourself this in every single fight and consider that its usefulness may be different in each phase.

Raid Utility

Unlimited Power

Hopefully, another Sorcerer or Sage in the group will be able to provide this. If you do have to take Unlimited Power, it should be used on cooldown just like any other offensive cooldown unless it needs to be used for a burst phase or DPS check. Normally the raid lead will make the call on when this should be used. 

This is not a personal buff for you, it’s something that buffs the whole team. It also only has a 40m range, so be mindful on larger maps that it might not catch everyone and position yourself accordingly so that it catches as many people as possible.

Extrication

This is the famed Sorc pull! While it is primarily used for trolling to great effect, especially when paired with Phase Walk to jump off ledges while pulling an unsuspecting victim to their doom while you teleport back safely, it does still have some utility in combat. If you are 100% certain that someone will die if you don’t pull them, do it; if you are 99% certain they will die, probably don’t pull them. You will probably get yelled at if you mess up. 

You should have a very good idea of where this ability is on your bar because if you have to waste time finding it, you’ll probably end up sending a corpse soaring through the air instead of saving someone’s life and at that point, you’re better off just removing it from your bar. Try to minimally disrupt the other person’s rotation since it will interrupt their cast and communicate with them beforehand if there’s time.

Off-Healing

If you ever have to do this, something has clearly gone wrong with the attempt, or someone is not pulling their weight and you should complain to the raid lead and make a big scene about needing to off-heal. Standard group compositions in SWTOR’s PvE are balanced around each role being able to fully perform all of its duties without the need for another off-role’s help. 

Healers are fully capable of keeping everyone alive without anyone needing to use off-heals. You should not ever off-heal yourself unless you literally think you will die if you do not receive healing right now and the pull is salvageable. 

You should also not waste your time healing another player with Resurgence or Dark Heal, just bubble them and go back to DPSing because the other heals do not do enough to save someone’s life. If there is downtime where you can’t do anything else at all, it’s okay to heal yourself and others with these abilities, but really make sure there’s nothing you can do at all that would increase your damage output first. 

Besides it being not your job, a lot of bosses have fairly tight enrage timers, so if you’re having to waste your precious GCDs helping out another role because they can’t deal with what they are fully capable of dealing with, you’re gonna end up wiping to an enraged boss later anyway.

In Madness, Resurgence gives you 30% armor while the HoT is active, but this is insignificant. It only brings your damage reduction up to 23.76% from 19.77%, and that’s only against Kinetic/Energy attacks. An additional 4% DR isn’t gonna save you. Don’t waste the GCD.

Crowd Control and Other Abilities

There are only a handful of instances in operations where CC is required, so I will briefly go over what the Sorcerer has at their disposal.

Overload

This is your (conal) knockback. The only fight it’s important for right now is Styrak in NiM where you have to knock back the Chained Manifestations. It now has Electric Bindings as a built-in feature. Also, please do not ruin everybody else’s day by using this ability for its AoE damage. 

Electrocute

This is your hard stun, meaning it does not break on damage. In PvE, this will generally only be used for specific mechanics since most things you’d care about stunning are immune. Be sure to pay attention when something is stunnable though because that often means you’re intended to stun it.

Jolt

This is your interrupt. At 18 seconds, its cooldown is longer than what most melee specs have, but isn’t the longest for ranged specs. That honor goes to the Mercenary, which has a 24s cooldown on their interrupt (and it was the only class that didn’t have one at launch). If you really want to be a clicker, I highly recommend you at least keybind this ability or you will have trouble with some of the shorter casts that need to be interrupted. 

Whirlwind

This is your mez, a CC ability that breaks on damage. If you’re using this in combat, you’ll usually want to use it very soon after the enemy spawns.

Unbreakable Will

This is your CC break. Use it when you get CC’d and are unable to deal damage as a result of being CC’d. 

Consuming Darkness

This ability recovers 40 Force at the cost of reducing your Force regen rate by 2 for 10s, effectively giving you back 20 Force per activation. That’s less Force than most of your abilities cost, so it’s really only useful if your Force is ridiculously low after dying and you need a jump-start because you can’t even afford to finish a Force Lightning channel.

In fights with a lot of downtime where you have the opportunity to off-heal at lot, your Force may get low and it can be worthwhile to spam Consuming Darkness towards the end of the downtime, but it’s not essential. You can get away with never using this ability in PvE, and previous versions of my guide didn’t even mention it.

Volt Rush

This is your last resort as an ability that you can use while moving if everything else is unavailable. Its damage output only surpasses Shock if used with 2 stacks of Energized, but the average DPS across all 3 activations will be lower.

Cloud Mind

This used to be your threat drop and bread-and-butter defensive cooldown, providing you with decent damage reduction for a short period of time. It still is for the other Sorcerer disciplines, but it’s now locked away behind a better choice, meaning it’s never worth taking Cloud Mind as a Madness Sorcerer anymore.

Ability Tree Choices

Level 23 Choice – Death Field Buffs

Unrelenting Affliction

• Effect: Deathmarks have a 50% chance to be refunded when consumed.
• Recommendation: Take this in most fights. The Death Field buffs are all about trading survivability and damage output. You get to pick 2 of the following: increased survivability, increased DPS, and DoT spread. Unrelenting Affliction increases your single-target DPS while enabling you to DoT spread at the cost of potentially reduced survivability. Please note that this option does not inherently increase your AoE DPS alone. It only you DoT spread and increases your single-target DPS by giving you more Deathmarks. You need to take either the Downfall ability tree buff or Killing Field tactical to boost AoE damage output with Unrelenting Affliction because Creeping Terror and Affliction only consume 12 Deathmarks without any influence from other optional effects, so you’re only missing out on what amounts to 3-4 Demolish ticks. However, since Plague Master doesn’t work correctly, Unrelenting Affliction is more valuable as it enables you to have 100% uptime on Deathmarks and those Plague Master ticks get a major boost.

Death Brand

• Effect: Replaces Death Field with a single-target version of the ability that deals about 20% more damage, heals for 50% of the damage dealt, applies the Internal/Elemental debuff instead of the AoE debuff, and slows the target by 50% for 6s. Once the slow effect expires, there is a 30% chance for the slow to be reapplied and cause Death Brand to deal damage again.
• Recommendation: Take this in specific fights only. This option offers additional survivability but forces you to give up your DoT spread and sacrifice some of your own boss DPS, though you might enable your group to make up for it. The damage dealt by reapplication of the slow should be enough to catapult Death Brand into being the strongest option for single-target sustained DPS, but because bosses are immune to slows, this component of Death Brand never applies outside of solo content and PvP, resulting in Unrelenting Affliction + Downfall offering higher single-target sustained DPS. The DPS difference would be small if Plague Master worked correctly, only about 600 DPS, and that can easily be made up by providing the Internal/Elemental debuff for the group. The additional survivability in single-target situations and full 30m range on the ability are also quite valuable, so Death Brand would be worth taking in fights where you don’t need a DoT spread if Plague Master worked correctly.

Sustained Corruption

• Effect: When a Deathmark is consumed, you are healed for 1% of your maximum health. Cannot occur more than once every 3 seconds.
• Recommendation: Take this if you want access to a DoT spread and favor survivability over damage output. The actual effective healing is roughly the same as what you get from Death Brand, meaning the choice to take Sustained Corruption is all about how much you value survivability vs DPS when you can DoT spread.

Level 27 Choice – Critical Movement, Overloaded Strike, or Plague Master

Critical Movement

• Effect: Dealing periodic damage reduces the cooldown of Force Speed by 3 seconds. This effect can only occur once every 5 seconds
• Recommendation: Take this if you want to use the static rotation and in fights with little to no downtime or target swapping. Critical Movement contributes to enabling you to use Force Speed as often as possible, which allows you to gain more from your Gathering Storm and Unmatched Hasted legendary implants. On its own, the cooldown reduction from Critical Movement lets you choose whether to apply the Force Speed buff to either Death Field or Force Leech every time, eliminating the old desynchronization issue and enabling you to take Unnatural Vigor instead of Surging Speed at level 51.

Overloaded Strike

• Effect: Replaces Lightning Strike with an AoE version that deals the same damage, but can hit up to 2 additional targets within 10m of the primary target.
• Recommendation: Never take this. Overloaded Strike does enable Lightning Strike to deal significantly more damage per activation than Force Lightning, but there’s not really a situation where you can benefit from Lightning Strike hitting multiple targets. In solo content, spreading Demolish with the Killing Field tactical will take out standard enemies, so the damage is wasted. If anything is left standing, you’re better off channeling Force Storm than Force Lightning, so you shouldn’t typically have a Wrath proc to spare in AoE situations. In group content, you’ll want Plague Master or Critical Movement. The key advantage of Overloaded Strike is that it synergizes specifically with Tempest of Rho to trigger more ticks of Creeping Terror, but by the time you get to Overloaded Strike, the adds are most likely dead, and if you’re taking Tempest of Rho over Killing Field, you probably care too much about single-target DPS to be able to afford giving up Critical Movement or Plague Master.

Plague Master

• Effect: Shock finishes off all of your DoTs, dealing their remaining damage. The cooldown of Shock is increased by 12 seconds.
• Recommendation: Almost always take this right now. Plague Master is bugged, causing it to be less effective than intended, but ability damage distribution for this spec is also messed up, and Plague Master is essential to the abomination that is the current optimal rotation. These are the bugs that Broadsword has continued to ignore:
  • Plague Master does not take into account the level 60 discipline passive Lightning Burns, which extends the duration of Demolish by 3s, causing it to tick 3 additional times since it ticks once per second. You can only ever get up to 6 ticks worth of damage by finishing it off instead of 9 if you were to let it tick.
  • The damage source for Demolish is the initial direct damage component rather than the DoT, causing it to be misclassified as direct damage when it should be periodic. This is problematic because it bypasses the 30% damage reduction that most DoT specs have against other DoTs.
  • When Creeping Terror is finished off by Plague Master, that finished Creeping Terror “tick” cannot benefit from the level 39 talent Eternal Torment, hurting overall damage potential and preventing what should be a build synergy.
• Even without the bugs, or if you choose to ignore the rotation and use a priority system, Plague Master is still a great option because it enables you to finish off freshly applied DoTs on enemies that are about to die or deal all of your damage before the boss goes immune. It also significantly improves burst potential and allows you to reduce DoT clipping and get those final ticks off, though that’s super difficult.

Level 39 Choice – Creeping Terror Buffs

Creeping End

• Effect: Dealing damage with Creeping Terror reduces the cooldown of Recklessness by 2 seconds. This effect can only occur once every 3 seconds.
• Recommendation: Take this in single-target fights only. The effect is decent, but the rate limit prevents it from scaling well with the number of targets present beyond more frequently dealing more damage with Death Field. You should only and always be taking this alongside Death Brand.

Eternal Torment

• Effect: Creeping Terror has a 30% chance to deal damage to up to 4 targets within 10m of the initial target.
• Recommendation: Take this in fights where you can consistently hit at least 3 targets with Death Field. Eternal Torment is stronger than Downfall in terms of AoE damage when you can consistently get at least 1 tick of Creeping Terror to damage at least 3 targets, which will happen when you can DoT spread among 3 targets. Creeping Terror ticks from Eternal Torment do not trigger off Tempest of Rho, nor can they benefit from or consume Deathmarks, though they will heal you thanks to Parasitism.

Downfall

• Effect: Dealing damage with Creeping Terror can consume and benefit from an additional Deathmark.
• Recommendation: Only take this if you’re also taking Unrelenting Affliction. Deathmarks are already finite because of Demolish, Tempest of Rho, and Killing Field, so Downfall isn’t a single-target DPS increase on its own unless you can increase the number of Deathmarks, which you can only do with Unrelenting Affliction. Downfall + Unrelenting Affliction effectively offers a 15% DPS increase to Creeping Terror with additional boosts to targets damaged by Demolish or Tempest of Rho coming from Unrelenting Affliction.

Level 43 Choice – Cloud Mind, Corrupted Defense, or Unlimited Power

Corrupted Defense

• Effect: Dealing critical damage with your DoTs grants Corrupted Defense, which increases your damage reduction by 5% for 10 seconds. Stacks up to 3 times and lasts 10 seconds.
• Recommendation: Almost always take this. 15% DR with virtually 100% uptime is incredibly strong, especially when paired with the self-healing you get from Madness. Even in situations where healing is light, this DR will enable your healers to use additional DPS abilities that will result in greater damage output than you’d be able to get out of the additional Force Speed activations from Critical Movement.

Cloud Mind

• Effect: Grants the Cloud Mind ability which increases damage reduction by 25% for 6 seconds and reduces your threat.
• Recommendation: Never take Cloud Mind as Madness. I’m not sure that he was referring to the 7.3.1 Level 43 Madness Sorcerer ability tree choice, but the Donald put it best when declared, “This has been the worst trade deal in the history of trade deals, maybe ever.” It’s never worth giving up 15% passive DR for a threat drop and what amounts to only an extra 10% DR for 6s every 45s. The mitigation provided is too small to make a consequential difference against spike damage and short enough to quickly become worse against sustained damage.

Unlimited Power

• Effect: Grants the Unlimited Power ability which increases Mastery, Endurance, and Presence by 10% for you and your Operation group members within 40m for 10 seconds.
• Recommendation: Only take this if you’re the only Sorcerer or Sage in the group and you’re not meeting a DPS check. Madness has very strong alternatives in this tier. Lightning and Corruption’s options are much worse, so if you have non-Madness Sorcerers / Balance Sages in the group, make them take the raid buff instead because they aren’t giving up as much. Unlimited Power isn’t worth taking if there isn’t a significant burst DPS check to use it on.

Level 51 Choice – Lightning Barrier, Torturous Tactics, or Defiance

Lightning Barrier

• Effect: Your Static Barrier crackles with electricity, shocking attackers for about half the damage of your fillers whenever it absorbs direct damage to you. This does not affect Static Barriers placed on or by allies and cannot occur more than once each second.
• Recommendation: Almost always take this. Since Force Mobility is now baked into Force Leech, we can actually consider the alternatives at level 51! Lightning Barrier is typically the best option because it can enable you to bubble yourself without losing DPS. However, Madness’ fillers deal a lot more damage than Lightning’s, so you need to be able to get 2 ticks out of a single activation in order for it to not be a DPS loss. With the removal of AoE RDT from Sorcerers, it’s a lot harder to stack DR to get a ton of ticks by standing in something, so just concentrate on getting 2 ticks. However, the bubble itself still provides a significant amount of survivability even if it isn’t able to stay active for very long, so it’s absolutely worth using if you’re taking Lightning Barrier.

Torturous Tactics

• Effect: The cooldown of Electrocute is reduced by 10s. In addition, when the stun from Electrocute wears off, the target deals 25% less damage for 10s.
• Recommendation: Take this in specific fights only. Torturous Tactics is typically useful whenever you have to stun an add, especially if it hits hard like the ones you face in Dxun. This option lets you stun enemies more often and provides additional survivability for the whole group.

Defiance

• Effect: Increases damage reduction by 3%.
• Recommendation: Take this whenever you can’t make use of the other two. Lightning Barrier and Torturous Tactics aren’t useful in every fight and make the spec a bit more challenging to play. If you can’t get 2 ticks out of Lightning Barrier consistently and there isn’t much downtime nor is there anything to stun, or if you know you’re just gonna forget to use either, Defiance provides a smaller improvement to your survivability that always works.

Level 64 Choice – Unnatural Vigor, Surging Speed, or Backlash

Unnatural Vigor

• Effect: Unnatural Preservation increases your damage reduction by 15% for 6 seconds and the cooldown of Unnatural Preservation is reduced by 5 seconds.
• Recommendation: Take this if you’re taking Critical Movement in group content. You don’t need Surging Speed if you’re taking Critical Movement, and Unnatural Vigor offers a nice survivability boost. It’s worthwhile to use Unnatural Preservation for the DR prior to taking the hit if you expect to take more than ~300k damage (~75% of max HP) from that hit, though if you’re taking that much damage, consider using Force Barrier instead…

Surging Speed

• Effect: Reduces the cooldowns of Force Speed by 5 seconds and Force Barrier by 30 seconds. In addition, Force Speed lasts 0.5 seconds longer, Polarity Shift increases your movement speed by 100% while active, and activating Force Barrier finishes the cooldown on Force Speed.
• Recommendation: Take this if you’re taking Plague Master in PvE group content. The cooldown reduction on Force Speed makes this option a substantial DPS increase thanks to the Gathering Storm and Unmatched Haste Legendary Implants, but it’s redundant if you’re taking Critical Movement. I’ll explain why at the end of the builds section.

Backlash

• Effect: Static Barriers you place on yourself erupt in a flash of light when they end, mezzing up to 8 nearby enemies for 3 seconds.
• Recommendation: Take this in solo content in PvE only. Most enemies in group content are immune to CC, but the effect is incredibly powerful in solo content.

Level 68 Choice – Whirlwind, Phase Walk, or Volt Rush

Whirlwind

• Effect: Grants the Whirlwind ability, which mezzes the target for 8 seconds. If the effect ends prematurely, the target is stunned for 2 seconds. Strong, Elite, and Champion enemies heal rapidly
• Recommendation: Take this when there’s an add that needs to be CC’d. Phase Walk is nice, but it isn’t essential. CCing specific enemies is almost always more valuable than moving somewhere faster. You don’t have to give up anything essential to take your mez, so you should be volunteering first if something needs to get CC’d, like a Stalker in the Red fight in Dxun.

Phase Walk

• Effect: Grants the Phase Walk ability, which allows you to place a mark on the ground that lasts up to 10 minutes. At any point, you can teleport back to that mark if you are within 60m, at which point the ability goes on cooldown for 60s.
• Recommendation: Take this by default. It’s the most consistently useful ability out of these 3 options in raids, though if there isn’t a strong need to take this ability, feel free to swap it out for one of the other two.

Volt Rush

• Effect: Deals a small amount of damage to your target and grants Energize, which increases the damage (and healing, if applicable) dealt by Volt Rush by 30%. Stacks up to 3 times and lasts 5 seconds.
• Recommendation: Never take this. Volt Rush is balanced around requiring a tactical item in order to be viable and Madness lacks such a tactical item (The Rushdown tactical is garbage). You have sufficient mobility with Plague Master.

Level 73 Choice – Emersion, Corrupted Flesh, or Conspiring Force

Emersion

• Effect: Force Speed grants Emersion, purging all movement-impairing effects and granting immunity to them for the duration.
• Recommendation: Take this in solo content and in fights where you get slowed. Adds tend to apply slows more frequently than bosses, but slows aren’t super common in raiding. Emersion can also be used to cleanse certain DoTs that have a movement-impairing component like Horic’s grenade in S&V NiM.

Corrupted Flesh

• Effect: Reduces periodic damage taken by 15%.
• Recommendation: Take this in fights where enemies deal periodic damage to you. Corrupted Flesh isn’t that great, 15% reduced damage taken (RDT) against a single type of damage that usually comes from a single attack, if the boss even has one to begin with. It’s better than nothing and that’s about it. Sadly, there isn’t a consistently useful alternative in this tier for raiders.

Conspiring Force

• Effect: Targets affected by your Affliction are slowed by 30% for its duration.
• Recommendation: Never take this. Bosses can’t be slowed and for enemies that you can be slowed, you have other rotational slows that are more than sufficient.

Gearing and Stats Priorities

Tactical Items

Tempest of Rho
Effect: Lightning Strike and Overloaded Strike have a 100% chance and Force Lightning has a 50% chance to cause Creeping Terror to tick an additional time whenever they deal damage. Does not trigger additional healing.
Recommendation: This is your single-target tactical. In StarParse, the extra ticks will show up as their own entry called “Tempest of Rho” and will end up accounting for more of your total damage output than Creeping Terror itself.

Killing Field
Effect: Demolish hits all nearby targets affected by your Deathmarks.
Recommendation: This is your AoE tactical. Since Demolish is one of your strongest attacks, this is a gargantuan AoE DPS increase, though it doesn’t boost single-target DPS at all, so Killing Field should only be used in fights that lack a single-target DPS check. Outside of boss fights, Killing Field is incredible and there’s basically no reason to use anything else.

In our Catalog of all Tacticals in SWTOR you will find information about all other Tacticals that we didn’t list in this guide. You may find something adequate that is also cheaper and easier to obtain for your needs while you work on getting the recommended one for your combat style and build.

Legendary Implants

BioWare has removed set bonuses from the game and replaced them with Legendary Implants, which are just implants with old 4 or 6-piece set bonus effects on them, so rather than needing to collect 4 pieces of a gear set to get the 4-piece set bonus, or 6 pieces for the 6-piece, you’ll get either a 4 or 6-piece set bonus effect on an implant. 

This was done to improve customization (now you can mix and match set bonus effects), make them easier to obtain, and consume less inventory space. Here are the Legendary Items you should use as a Madness Sorcerer.

• Gathering Storm – Force Speed makes your next direct Force attack deal 20% more damage and you deal 20% more damage while Polarity Shift is active.
• Unmatched Haste – The duration of Polarity Shift is increased by 5 seconds and using Force Speed reduces the active cooldown of Polarity Shift by 5 seconds. 

Gathering Storm should be purchased first since it offers a far more substantial damage increase. Unmatched Haste really only serves to improve the effectiveness of Gathering Storm. If you happen to play an Assassin or Shadow, you can also use the Force Training Legendary Implant. It offers almost the same DPS increase for Madness.

Stat Priority

As a DPS, you’ll need to care about 3 different stats: Accuracy, Alacrity, and Critical Rating. There are thresholds associated with Accuracy and Alacrity, so you need to prioritize reaching those thresholds to get the full benefit from each stat point.

1. Accuracy to 110.00% – Before investing in any other stats, make sure you hit 110% Accuracy because attacks that miss deal 0 damage, and no other stats matter if the attack doesn’t land. Furthermore, many procs require you to actually deal damage, not just activate the ability, so you can mess up your rotation if an attack misses. You need 110% Accuracy in PvE and not just 100% because bosses have a 10% chance to dodge/resist player attacks, and any percentage over 100% reduces this chance. Anything over 110% is not helpful in PvE, so you do want to go over 110%, but with as little excess as possible.
2. Alacrity to ~7.5% – Once your Accuracy is above 110.00%, it’s time to think about Alacrity. It has the second-highest priority because you do not get the full benefit of the stat unless you surpass one of the GCD thresholds. It’s less important than Accuracy because your attacks still need to hit. You need 7.15% Alacrity to get from the 1.5s GCD to the 1.4s GCDs. However, as you approach 7.15%, you actually start getting a mix of 1.4s and 1.5s GCD, resulting in an experience that feels clunky and inconsistent. You need roughly 0.4-0.5% more Alacrity past the exact threshold to effectively eliminate those 1.5s GCDs.
3. Critical gets the rest – After you’ve got your thresholded stats sorted out, you can start investing in crit. To be clear, Critical Rating is still valuable; it just has the lowest priority because it does not have a threshold associated with it that you need to meet to get the most out of each point of stat as the other tertiary stats you care about do. Critical Rating increases both your Critical Chance and Critical Damage. If you have a single effect that increases your Critical Chance by 100% all on its own (it can’t be from multiple effects combined), all of the Critical Chance percentage for that attack gets added to your Critical Damage percentage, causing the attack to deal supercritical damage.

Find out which mods to purchase from Hyde and Zeek in SWTOR on the Fleet to minimize spending and optimize your build. The dedicated guide contains tips for all roles in both PvE and PvP.

Augments

Augments allow you to put additional stats on every piece of gear except tactical items. Since Augments allow you to put additional stats on every piece of gear except tactical items. Since the stats come in much smaller amounts, augments allow you to fine-tune your gear to provide almost as much of each total stat as you want.

To equip an augment, you must first use an Augmentation Kit that matches the crafting grade of the augment (ex. Grade 11 augments require MK-11 Kits).

The 296, 302, 310, and 318 iRating augments released with 7.6 and 7.7 are BiS. The higher the iRating, the more stats they offer and the more expensive they are to make or buy, though most of the benefit is provided by having augments at all, and the base-rarity blue 296 augments are the cheapest.

Almost everyone should buy the blue 296 augments because they provide the greatest bang for the buck, but you do have multiple options:

• Gold 318 augments (Superior [Type] Augment 86). These are overall best-in-slot (BiS) and offer ~25% more stat than gold 300 augments, which is roughly equivalent to 4 additional gold augments. They’re extremely expensive and completely unnecessary for all content in the game, so I only recommend them to the wealthiest individuals. 
• Purple 310 augments (Advanced [Type] Augment 86). They offer ~13% more stat than gold 300 augments, which is roughly equivalent to 2 additional gold 300 augments worth of stat. They are cheaper than the gold 318s, but they’re in the same price bracket in terms of affordability, so there’s no reason for anyone to use them at this point.
• Blue 302 augments ([Type] Augment 76) are the mid-tier augments. For all intents and purposes, these are equivalent to the gold 300 augments from 6.0. I only recommend them if you’re close to a stat threshold or don’t already have gold 300 augments and want something a bit better than the blue 296s.
• Blue 296 augments ([Type] Augment 83) are the most basic tier of augments for level 80 players. They are pretty cheap as only the schematic comes from the associated lair boss, Propagator Core XR-53. You don’t need any Corrupted Bioprocessors to craft these augments.

Check out our 7.7 Augments Guide for everything you need to know about augmenting gear!

Earpiece

Which Earpiece you use will depend on what specific tertiary stats the rest of your gear and augments provide. Typically, you’ll need to use either an Accuracy (Initiative, yellow icon) or Alacrity (Quick Savant / Nimble, green icon) Earpiece.

Crystals

Advanced Eviscerating Crystals are the best. They are the only type of crystal that increases one of your tertiary stats. Since the stat pool for tertiary stats is much smaller than that of primary or secondary stats, adding 41 is a more significant upgrade than it would be if you were to add 41 to one of the primary or secondary stats (mastery, power, or endurance).

Relics

I recommend the Relic of Focused Retribution (FR) and Relic of Serendipitous Assault (SA) for all PvE content. Each relic offers a proc; FR’s proc boosts your Mastery, whereas SA’s proc increases your Power stats. If you have the choice, purchase the Relic of Focused Retribution first because in equal amounts, and only in equal amounts, Mastery offers more of a DPS gain than Power.

Biochem Items

I recommend the Advanced Kyrprax Proficient Stim, Advanced Kyrprax Medpac, and Advanced Kyrprax Attack Adrenal for all PvE content. Grade 11 Biochem items from the crafting tier released with 6.0 remain BiS. Since they haven’t been updated to level 80, their effects are weaker than they should be, though they can still have an impact.

You should use the Proficient Stim as a DPS because it provides 2 tertiary stats that you need, Accuracy and Critical Rating, and tertiary stats are harder to come by and what you build your gear around. You should use the Attack Adrenal because it provides Power, which typically provides the greatest DPS increase, though it’s also more consistent, which is what you need for DPS checks.

Regarding the Zeal Guild Perk Alacrity Boost

If your guild uses the Zeal (cyan) guild perk set bonus, which gives a passive +5% Alacrity boost, you won’t need nearly as much Alacrity stat to reach your desired Alacrity threshold. My recommendations do not factor in these boosts, so if you have one, you’ll need to pay attention to percentage thresholds rather than the stat amounts. Just keep adding one augment at a time until you reach the desired percentage.

Guild leaders, I recommend using the Fortune (yellow) guild perk set bonus instead. It grants +5% Critical Chance and also boosts the Critical Rate and Time Efficiency of all Crew Skills by 2%. The reason for this is that you don’t have to change the way you gear in order to benefit from the effect.

Neither effect works in MM raids or PvP, so if you or your guild members do either of those activities, you’ll need to tweak your gear to reach the desired threshold depending on the activity, which I find super tedious. Even if your guild doesn’t do those activities, leaders still need to actively maintain the set bonus because your gear will become suboptimal on top of losing the bonus, whereas it’s not a big deal if your crit is a little lower for a bit.

The Alacrity boost is much stronger than the Critical Chance boost. Still, PvE content isn’t balanced around these guild perk set bonuses anyway, so I find it better to have a smaller boost I don’t have to worry about than a larger boost I have to manage.

Best Madness Sorcerer Builds in 7.0

These are the builds that I recommend for different types of content and situations. The Build Essentials are what I consider to be the core components that make the build viable. Without them, the build no longer accomplishes its primary function. 

Build Essentials can include important ability tree buffs, a tactical item, and even legendary items occasionally. The ability tree buffs that aren’t listed as Build Essentials can be changed as needed without compromising the integrity of the build, though I have included a full set of default choices that will be most consistently helpful in accomplishing what the build sets out to do.

Just Use This for Group Content Right Now Build

After going through and testing the other builds for 7.3.1, I learned that the spec is still in shambles. From a top-level view, the spec can perform adequately in most, but not all, content, but I don’t think any spec has ever been as dysfunctional as this one is right now in the entirety of the game’s history.

There are long-standing structural issues with Madness pertaining to Force Lightning’s non-GCD channel time and the overall lack of synchronization between its DoT durations and ability cooldowns, which I discuss in far greater detail in the above-linked article.

However, I recently became aware that several discipline effects do not actually work as described. I assumed they did when coming up with my recommendations for 7.3.1 because I don’t have the time (nor willingness) to validate whether every single effect in the game actually works as described. Game developers literally have entire departments dedicated to this task, called Quality Assurance (QA) or Quality Verification (QV).

These are the other issues I am now aware of that warp and defile what should be the optimal rotation:

• Plague Master does not take into account the 3s/3-tick increase from the Lightning Burns (previously Lingering Nightmares) discipline passive. When you Shock a target with Demolish, you now lose DPS because the counter for Plague Master is counting down from 6 ticks instead of 9, meaning the max damage from Shocking to finish Demolish is like 4-5 ticks worth of damage instead of 7-8 (a tick will go out before you can Shock.
• Downfall has a hidden effect that makes Creeping Terror deal an additional hit of damage when it is applied to a target that is affected by your Deathmark. The damage is stronger than a regular DoT tick, though I’m not sure if it is a DoT tick or direct damage.
• Affliction deals more damage when finished off by Shock than ticking passively due to having a different, higher modifier from normal ticks.
• The damage dealt by your 18s DoTs surpasses Force Lightning + Tempest of Rho after 3 ticks, so it is worthwhile to reapply DoTs, then Shock, and immediately reapply DoTs as soon as Shock comes off cooldown, and this DPS increase is enough to make Plague Master the strongest option at level 27.

These bugs turn what should be actual choices into an illusion of choice that warps what ends up being optimal to the extent that it defies basic game conventions.

Static Rotation and Standard Group Content Build

This build is optimized for group content and requires you to use the static rotation since Plague Master is not being used. You’ll be utilizing the pairing of Downfall and Unrelenting Affliction to give you maximum single-target sustained DPS while retaining the capacity to DoT spread. If you just want to always stick with a single build for group content, this is the best option.

Since you have to take Unrelenting Affliction, your survivability will be lower than what is possible with Madness unless you are able to DoT spread to a bunch of adds and steal life from a bunch of targets. That said, Madness’ survivability is still exceptional even in fights without a whole lot of adds.

I recommend taking Lightning Barrier and Phase Walk by default, but remember to swap those out based on the needs of the group.

You may think to take Critical Movement and Surging Speed at the same time because more Force Speed = more DPS, right? However, I don’t think it’s worthwhile to combine them because the DPS gain is tiny and the costs are huge in comparison. I will explain my rationale in far too much detail at the end of the builds section.

Pure Single-Target Sustained Build

This build is optimized for group content. It trades the capability to DoT spread and a bit of single-target DPS for additional survivability and additional group utility thanks to Death Brand. You should only use this build in pure single-target situations unless AoE is fully covered by other group members. If your group lacks the Internal/Elemental debuff, being able to provide it with Death Brand will typically increase your group’s overall DPS by significantly more than you’ll lose by taking Death Brand.

Remember, the survivability increase is only consequential in single-target situations because the HPS provided by Death Field and DoT spreading scales linearly with the number of targets. In fights with a lot of AoE, Death Brand will not provide more survivability than Death Field.

Technically, you can take Plague Master and/or Surging Speed with this build, but there’s often something to DoT spread to in fights where you’d want to use Plague Master, so I don’t think that’s super relevant.

As I mentioned before, you can combine Critical Movement and Surging Speed for maximum Force Speed, but I don’t think it’s worth it for such a tiny DPS increase, and I’ll go into more detail at the end of this section.

Plague Master Group Content Build

The Plague Master build differentiates itself from other builds by requiring you to take Plague Master and Surging Speed. Plague Master enables you to finish off your DoTs at far more opportune times than would normally be possible so that you don’t lose DPS from them not ticking because the target is dead or immune.

Surging Speed reduces the cooldown of Force Speed so that you can use it with most activations of either Death Field or Force Leech. This is mandatory because you have to give up Critical Movement to take Plague Master.

You have to execute a challenging priority system instead of the static rotation with this build, but you are rewarded with more burst, potentially higher sustained DPS, better mobility, and superior control over your damage output.

Like the other group content builds, you are free to make different choices at levels 51 and 68 depending on the needs of the fight. Technically, this also applies to the choices at levels 43 and 73, but you’ll almost never change those.

Solo Content Build

This build offers extremely potent AoE damage that you’ll be able to benefit from quite often in solo content, especially heroics. You are unlikely to feel the loss of single-target sustained damage because you can use Force Leech, Polarity Shift, Recklessness, and Shock to finish off higher-health enemies in a timely manner. The loss of sustained DPS really only starts to become apparent in boss fights in group content.

Your first goal in combat is to spread Creeping Terror and Affliction by applying each of them and then using Death Field to spread them to every enemy in the target area. Then use Force Lightning to build 4 stacks of Wrath followed by Demolish and watch as legions collapse from insanity.

I used to offer 2 solo content builds for Madness with one focused wholly on survivability and the other offering a more balanced selection of ability tree buffs, but after the 7.3.1 changes, I opted to combine them into a single build that I feel takes the strongest and most synergistic option in each tier.

Feel free to take Overloaded Strike, Critical Movement, Surging Speed, and/or Sustaining Corruption + Eternal Torment if you prefer. I recommend Unrelenting Affliction + Downfall because it still offers a consistent AoE damage boost, but performs significantly better against stronger enemies and the survivability you get without Sustaining Corruption is sufficient.

Why You Shouldn’t Combine Critical Movement and Surging Speed

Let me be clear up front. You absolutely can take and make use of Critical Movement and Surging Speed at the same time. It will allow you to get maximum use out of Force Speed and sometimes increase the number of Polarity Shift activations in a given fight, but I don’t think it’s worthwhile.

The DPS gain is incredibly small and can quickly evaporate if you aren’t on top of your APM. A single microdelay can easily negate the DPS gain from the extra Force Speed you get. A 20% damage boost is effectively the same thing as 20% of a GCD, and 20% of the 1.4s GCD you’ll be using with Madness is 0.28s.

If you delay something for a quarter of a second to pair it with Force Speed, or disruptions cause Force Speed to come off cooldown out of sync with an ability that it’s worth buffing, you effectively miss out on that extra Force Speed activation, meaning the combination didn’t do anything.

If you do combine Critical Movement and Surging Speed, you’ll end up with Force Speed “floating” around such that it comes off cooldown at different points in your rotation. The Force Speed buff gets consumed on your next tick of direct damage, so it’s pretty worthless with Demolish, Force Lightning, and Force Storm. It’s really only worth using with Death Field, Force Leech, and, to a MUCH lesser extent, Lightning Strike.

Since each ability tree buff is enough on its own to buff either Force Leech or Death Field each cycle, the extra Force Speeds provided by the combination are pretty much exclusively going to buff Lightning Strike. This severely constricts the overall DPS gain and means the boost primarily comes from reducing the cooldown on Polarity Shift, which takes a while to build up and gets lost if ever you delay the activation, even for a rotation cycle.

On top of all that, you have to give up the additional survivability from Unnatural Vigor while the rotation ends up being a little more complicated in a way that’s a lot more distracting. You have to keep a close eye on the Force Speed cooldown and quickly determine which ability you’ll be pairing it with next. That includes deciding whether you’ll be using Force Lightning or Lightning Strike in the second and third filler slots.

Take Unnatural Vigor. Combining Critical Movement and Surging Speed just isn’t worth it.

Openers, Rotations, Priorities

There are two main approaches to Madness, one is the static rotation that’s similar to what was optimal in past expansions, the other is the priority system that requires Plague Master.

There is also an approach that takes the bugs into account that is completely static but doesn’t have very much staying power.

Just Use This For Group Content Right Now

Props to Draemn for cooking up this gameplay atrocity. His static rotation capitalizes on the DPS that can be gained from Broadsword’s helpful bugs while avoiding the ones that reduce your DPS. It offers at least 1-1.5k more DPS than the other rotations I recommended.

Learn it if you want to do maximum DPS right now, but know that Broadsword will try to fix it (eventually). If you don’t play the spec very often or don’t want to bother learning a new rotation that won’t stick around (eventually), it’s fine to just use one of the others in this section.

1. Force Speed
2. Recklessness (if applicable)
3. Death Field
4. Force Leech
5. Force Lightning (builds Wrath)
6. Creeping Terror (clip previous application)
7. Affliction (clip previous application)
8. Polarity Shift (if applicable)
9. Adrenal (if applicable)
10. Shock (finishes fresh/recently clipped 18s DoTs)
11. Demolish (instant, only with Wrath)
12. Creeping Terror (fresh)
13. Affliction (fresh)
14. Force Lightning (builds Wrath)
15. Lightning Strike or, if applicable, Lightning Barrier
16. Repeat

It is impossible to derive this as the optimal rotation based on the information you are given from the discipline because it defies convention. You don’t use most of your strongest abilities on cooldown and actively clip DoTs halfway through their duration in service of abusing a single specific ability tree buff.

The downside that results from the divergence of optimization and convention is that you can’t rely on convention to figure out how to recover from mistakes or adapt to the fight. In other words, you can’t look to see if your DoTs have fallen off to know that you need to reapply them or see that a strong ability is available and know that you need to activate it. You can’t rearrange things as easily because they work differently than described.

“There is no thinking, there is only taking a ride on a conveyor belt.”

My Sixth Line to the Jedi Code

Your primary objective is to use Shock to finish off fresh 18s DoTs as often as possible and use Demolish immediately after to minimize its delay and avoid giving up damage by finishing it off with Shock. You use Polarity Shift (and Adrenal) immediately before Shock so that you get 2 activations while the window is open.

You use Death Field and Force Lightning shortly before this to ensure that you have Deathmarks and Fulminating Current in order to maximize the damage dealt by Plague Master.

Force Leech is used after Death Field because there’s time, the cooldown + cast time of Leech lines up, it’s your best ability with Recklessness, and your Force consumption is a bit more relevant, so you want to make use of the cost reduction.

You can also use Force Lightning as the final GCD instead of Lightning Strike or Lightning Barrier, but you’ll want to clip it at the final tick since Death Field and Force Leech are off cooldown. Remember you need to get 2 ticks of damage out of Lightning Barrier in order for it to be a DPS increase over Lightning Strike or Force Lightning.

Everything in between is fillers and DoT applications. Typically, if there’s a bit of downtime or you mess up, I find it easiest to start from clipping DoTs and using Shock. It’s typically off cooldown by that point.

Static Approach, WITHOUT Plague Master

Without Plague Master, both your opener and rotation are completely static. In single-target sustained DPS situations, the Plague Master priority can only match the damage output provided by the static rotation, but the static rotation is A LOT easier to execute, giving you more freedom to focus on mechanics.

Static Rotation

This is the static rotation for Madness that does not utilize Shock + Plague Master. It’s super easy to do but doesn’t have the potential to deal as much damage as the priority system, or the high skill floor.

1. Demolish (instant, only with Wrath)
2. Creeping Terror
3. Affliction
4. Death Field + optional Force Speed (AoE only)
5. Force Leech + optional Force Speed (single-target only)
6. Force Lightning (builds Wrath)
7. Force Lightning or Lightning Strike (only with Wrath)
8. Force Lightning or Lightning Strike (only with Wrath)
9. Force Lightning (guarantees Wrath)
10. Repeat

This rotation does involve clipping Creeping Terror and Affliction. There isn’t a way to do the rotation without delaying something unless you clip them without taking Plague Master. Normally, you do not want to clip DoTs because it results in a DPS loss, but it actually results in slightly higher single-target DPS to do this rotation than trying to do a more convoluted one that involves occasionally delaying abilities (without Plague Master).

It’s easier to think about this rotation as two sections:

• DoT Reapplication and Strong Abilities – This is the half of your rotation where you are completely mobile. If you know you’ll have to move soon, do it preemptively during this part of the rotation if you can. 
• Fillers – This half of the rotation has you doing Force Lightning repeatedly while your DoTs tick and strong abilities are on cooldown. It’s much harder to move during this portion of the rotation. Use Shock, Lightning Strike (with Wrath), or Lightning Barrier if you need to move. 

Demolish will come off cooldown slightly before your final Force Lightning is finished channeling. I would personally recommend finishing the channel since the final tick will have a chance to trigger your Tempest of Rho tactical but it doesn’t seem to have a very noticeable effect on your DPS either way. This overshoot comes from the fact that Force Lightning is not synchronized with the GCD. If you apply Lightning Barrier there, you’ll be right on time.

If there is downtime during a fight, remember that you can place your DoTs on shortly before the boss can actually take damage and sometimes even precast something. You won’t get the full damage of your DoTs but you also won’t have to spend a GCD to apply them when the boss is vulnerable, so you will end up dealing more damage.

Finally, I want to clarify a few things that I think people are gonna agonize over that really don’t matter specifically for this rotation and opener in sustained DPS situations:

• Force Lightning and Lightning Strike + Wrath are interchangeable. The only things that actually matter are:
  • Not delaying Demolish because you didn’t have Wrath as a result of using it on Lightning Strike
  • Not letting Fulminating Current fall off as a result of using Lightning Strike
• Using Recklessness only while Polarity Shift is active. It does not significantly impact sustained DPS though it can be more impactful for burst checks.
• Caring about pairing Force Speed with Force Leech or Death Field
• Combining Critical Movement with Surging Speed does not provide a tangible DPS increase.

Some of this stuff has a small, but mostly theoretical benefit, but it’s far more important to focus on the fight, learning mechanics, and executing them correctly than worrying about these minuscule details.

The vast majority of the time, your luck with critical hits and whether you had to sneeze during that pull is gonna have a greater impact than all of those factors combined. Don’t miss the forest for the trees. Don’t make mountains out of molehills.

The key to being a great DPS is to always be DPSing. Using any damaging ability is better than just standing there not doing anything. Some DPS is better than zero DPS. Even if you mess up, keep doing the rotation! Unless there’s a mechanic that prevents you from dealing damage or forces you to stop DPSing, you should not stop DPSing. 

If a tank is telling you to stop DPS or hold off for a few seconds because they can’t keep aggro, don’t listen to them, they’re the one that doesn’t know the proper way to keep aggro. Tell them to git gud and read a tank guide!

Static Opener

This is the opener you use without Plague Master. It’s quite similar to the static rotation, though the filler section is a bit different as you have time for an extra Lightning Strike.

1. Static Barrier (pre-apply)
2. Demolish (pre-cast, without Wrath)
3. Creeping Terror
4. Affliction
5. Polarity Shift
6. Recklessness + Adrenal
7. Unlimited Power (if applicable)
8. Death Field
9. Force Leech + Force Speed
10. Force Lightning
11. Lightning Strike (only with Wrath)
12. Force Lightning
13. Lightning Strike (only with Wrath)
14. Force Lightning
15. Force Lightning (only if Demolish is still on cooldown)
16. Rotation

You want to activate all of your buffs immediately after applying your DoTs, but before activating your strong direct attacks. Polarity Shift must be first because the alacrity reduces the cooldown of the others. It’s rare that you’ll be able to hit multiple enemies with your first Death Field, but if you can, use Force Leech before Death Field instead so that you don’t waste a stack of Recklessness and pair Force Speed with Death Field.

The main difference with this opener is that you have enough time to use Lightning Strike after both Force Lightning activations thanks to the extra alacrity from Polarity Shift. At the very beginning of the fight, because Demolish is hard-casted instead of being instant, it will take an extra GCD to come off cooldown.

For mid-fight activations of Polarity Shift, you will not need to wait for Demolish and won’t have to use that extra Force Lightning. However, because of the alacrity, your next Demolish will come off cooldown a GCD early, but you just keep doing the 4 filler abilities like normal. If you do use Demolish early, you’ll cause it to float around or end up clipping your DoTs too early or waiting for Death Field to come off cooldown anyway.

Using Plague Master

This is the opener and priority system you’ll be using with Plague Master. It is significantly more challenging (and fun) and has the potential to offer more DPS in actual combat, though on the dummy and in single-target sustained situations, it won’t surpass what you can get with the static rotation.

Plague Master Priority System

This priority system you use to determine which ability you should activate at a given time during combat, it requires that you incorporate Shock with the Plague Master ability tree buff. Unlike a pure priority system, you shouldn’t have to delay anything if you execute it properly.

1. Shock (only as a finisher)
2. Creeping Terror ▶ Affliction
3. Force Leech
4. Death Field
5. Demolish (only with Wrath)
6. Shock (only if you have time to reapply DoTs)
7. Lightning Strike (only with Wrath, and only if it won’t cause a delay)
8. Force Lightning (spam)
9. Lightning Barrier (only if you expect to get 2 ticks of damage out of it)

It’s important to practice this on a dummy at least until you can execute it without having to constantly look at your bar. I know it looks pretty simple, but there’s a surprising amount of complexity. If you execute the priority correctly, you shouldn’t ever have to reapply Creeping Terror and Affliction at the same time as your other abilities come off cooldown.

Outside of Polarity Shift, you can completely ignore the state of Demolish’s DoT when deciding whether to use Shock. Demolish will always tick fully before it comes off cooldown, so finishing the DoT early doesn’t really offer an inherent sustained DPS increase since its damage type is no longer modified.

In essence, Shock ▶ Creeping Terror ▶ Affliction becomes another filler block when there aren’t other targets. The whole point of doing this is to prevent delaying other abilities without having to clip your DoTs. You won’t be using Shock on cooldown, and you’re probably using it too much if you’re letting Fulminating Current fall off, but don’t take that as gospel.

The whole priority system is, fittingly, chaotic, meaning it is incredibly dependent on initial conditions. In this case, those initial conditions are the exact order in which you activate abilities in your opener. In other words, as you execute the priority system, Madness will feel kind of like a rotation, but exactly how you’re able to follow the priority will be defined by the opener. 

Since you get the most benefit out of Plague Master when there’s frequent downtime and target swapping, you won’t really be able to settle into an actual rotation unless the fight is super consistent.

The most challenging part of this priority system is making sure you only use Shock to finish off your DoTs when you have enough time to reapply them without delaying one of your other attacks while prioritizing Shock as a finisher to get all your existing DoT damage off before the target dies or becomes immune.

To reiterate, using Shock to finish off your DoTs is only a sustained DPS increase because it prevents you from needing to delay any of your attacks with cooldowns while still getting the full benefit from your DoTs. Without Shock + Plague Master, you either have to delay some of your powerful attacks or clip your DoTs. So long as you are able to squeeze the full duration out of your DoTs without delaying any of your abilities that have a cooldown, you won’t lose any DPS.

However, there is more DPS to be gained by finishing off DoTs on a target that is about to die or become immune, and it’s okay to delay everything else to finish those DoTs off on that target.

Keep in mind you’ll lose more DPS because you have no abilities you can use while moving or your target will no longer take damage as a result of being immune or dead than you will by having to slightly delay other abilities to reapply your DoTs. 

Since your DoTs only have slightly longer durations than the cooldowns on your high-damage abilities, it takes several rotation cycles for the need to clip or delay to arise. In actual fights, you can leverage this to save Shock for specific situations like when you need to move, focus down an add that doesn’t have much HP, or finish off your DoTs before the target becomes immune.

It takes 3 GCDs (4.5s) to activate Shock and reapply your DoTs, so you need to check if the cooldown on Force Leech or Death Field is less than that. If it is, you don’t have time to do Shock without delaying something. You will frequently have to cut it close though, especially with Force Leech.

Demolish should be used after Death Field so that all Demolish ticks can get buffed by Deathmarks and you don’t have to change habits when switching to Killing Field, but both abilities rarely come off cooldown at the same time.

To be clear, Creeping Terror and Affliction have a higher priority than your other strong attacks, they should not need to be refreshed when another ability is off cooldown. They still take priority though if it does happen because they are your most damaging pair of attacks and most of your other abilities either buff their damage or are dependent on their presence.

Affliction should be used after Creeping Terror because once in a while, Force Leech will come off cooldown right as your DoTs are about to fall off. Since Force Leech deals 30% more damage against targets affected by Affliction, you want to make sure that one has an extra GCD before it falls off just in case. In other words, if you do Affliction ▶ Creeping Terror, Affliction will occasionally fall off before the cast on Force Leech completes, robbing you of 30% of the damage (and healing) that would be dealt by Force Leech.

Force Leech has a higher priority than Death Field and Demolish because otherwise, Force Leech will eventually end up getting “stuck” behind them where Force Leech ends up perpetually delayed because the cooldown + the cast time of Force Leech is equal to the cooldown of Death Field and Demolish.

Using Force Leech first allows it to float around as it needs to and actually be used on cooldown. It’s okay to delay Death Field by a GCD to make sure that Force Leech continues to float. It doesn’t happen often enough to cause a DPS loss. 

Force Speed should exclusively be paired with your next activation of Death Field or Force Leech, and thanks to Critical Movement, you should always have Force Speed available for your next activation of one of those abilities each cycle. Remember to buff Death Field in multi-target situations and Force Leech in single-target situations.

When all of your abilities are on cooldown, you’ll be spamming Force Lightning until something becomes available. Lightning Strike can technically be used instead of Force Lightning if you need to move and have time to use Force Lightning again to regenerate 4 stacks of Wrath before Demolish comes off cooldown.

Lightning Strike can also be useful if you know you’ll need to delay an attack slightly if you use Force Lightning. However, you have enough on your plate already, so be super cautious about using Lightning Strike. Until you feel confident with Plague Master, just use Lightning Barrier in those situations instead, even if you can’t get a second tick out of it.

Plague Master Opener

This is the rotation you use at the very beginning of the fight and for burst DPS checks while using Plague Master. The opener is simply an execution of the priority system from a state where everything is off cooldown, including your OCDs and relic procs. It’s important to get as much damage as possible while all of your damage boosts are available to maximize their impact. 

1. Static Barrier (pre-apply)
2. Lightning Strike (pre-cast)
3. Creeping Terror
4. Affliction
5. Recklessness + Force Speed
6. Unlimited Power (if applicable)
7. Force Leech
8. Death Field
9. Force Lightning (if you don’t have Wrath and Fulminating Current)
10. Demolish
11. Polarity Shift
12. Adrenal
13. Shock
14. Creeping Terror
15. Affliction
16. Priority System

Lightning Strike is pre-casted instead of Demolish so that you can use your other strong abilities much earlier and get all of Demolish’s damage buffed by Wrath, Fulminating Current, and Polarity Shift.

The first applications of your DoTs are getting finished early by Shock, so there is no benefit to accelerating their tick rate by applying them while Polarity Shift is active. Since DoT ticks get individually boosted by OCDs that are active when the individual ticks go out, it’s actually detrimental to apply DoTs after OCDs have been activated.

In the case of Creeping Terror and Affliction, those GCDs are effectively getting wasted because they only deal ~17% of their damage in that initial GCD whereas you could get 100% of the damage from using other GCDs under Polarity Shift instead, even if those attacks are weaker. 

I recommend using Unlimited Power earlier outside of Polarity Shift at the beginning of combat because most other specs start using their strongest attacks at the second or third GCD, including Madness, which will still be applying to your Recklessness-empowered Death Field and Force Leech. Furthermore, you’ll still be able to get the first Polarity Shift-empowered Shock inside the window.

If you’re mid-fight and your opener is starting with Shock and you’re using Death Field and Force Leech early inside that window, use Unlimited Power at the same time as Polarity Shift.

Meanwhile, the Adrenal has the exact same duration as Polarity Shift, so you should use them at the same time. Make sure to use the Adrenal after Polarity Shift, not before, so that it gets affected by Alacrity.

You can also use Recklessness on the next activation of Force Leech and Death Field, but with the priority system, those abilities don’t always come off cooldown at the same time, so you have to be more opportunistic.

It’s beneficial to use Force Lightning before Shock in the opener because you’ll be able to generate 4 stacks of Fulminating Current, which will increase the critical chance of your DoTs by 12%, and that’s absolutely valuable while all of your OCDs are active.

Plague Master doesn’t change damage types (anymore), so it’s only going to deal the remainder of the damage dealt by your DoTs anyway, meaning it doesn’t matter if they tick before Shock goes off.

Rationale
It’s impossible to have your cake and eat it too with the Plague Master opener. You’re forced to either delay an ability or use something else without a buff. There are a ton of variations and I can’t test them all, so I am not certain that this opener is actually the absolute best, but it should get you pretty far.

This opener in particular focuses on minimizing the delay of as many strong abilities as possible while prioritizing abilities that others are dependent on and maximizing the damage dealt during Polarity Shift, which is your strongest OCD. Force Leech and Death Field should come off cooldown before Polarity Shift ends, so you’ll still get an activation of each while Polarity Shift is active, and you’re not missing out on practically whole GCDs like you would be if you opted not to open and close the window with Plague Master.

The main drawback is that you don’t apply the Force debuff for quite some time because Demolish is the last of your strong abilities to be activated. That said, it is helpful to create some distance between your applications of Death Field and Demolish so that you have more flexibility when executing the priority system. It’s only 1 ability, and something else would have to get delayed to that degree instead.

All the alternatives I can think of require you to delay strong abilities for far longer or otherwise cause you to miss out on multiple sources of damage, which is why I believe this is likely the best, but I will update the guide with a new opener if I am incorrect.

Damage over Time Abilities (DoTs) vs Direct Damage

DoTs are not special abilities that let you deal damage when you can’t target the boss with new attacks. Contrary to popular belief, throwing your DoTs on right before you become unable to attack the boss does not result in a DPS increase over an ability that deals the same amount of damage immediately because you’re still spending a GCD to cast the DoT. 

I think it’s most helpful to conceptualize DoTs compared to direct damage abilities (regular non-DoT / non-Periodic abilities) by imagining them as dealing all of their damage hitting at the end of their duration instead of being spread evenly throughout, or at least that’s when you’ll get the amount of damage listed on the packaging. 

Prior to that point, you’ll be getting less damage out of each GCD equal to the damage dealt per tick times the number of ticks that were left. This is why clipping your DoTs (reapplying them before they’ve expired) is generally considered a bad thing. When you clip your DoTs, you make the last GCD where you applied your DoTs retroactively deal less damage. 

In general, DoTs are worse than abilities that deal the same amount of damage immediately because the enemy could become immune, enraged, or dead by the time all of that damage will hit. In order to combat these disadvantages, DoTs tend to deal a bit more damage than direct damage abilities and almost always deal Internal/Elemental damage so they ignore armor. 

DoT specs have often been capable of dealing more sustained DPS than burst specs and usually have some sort of sub-30% HP execute window where DoT damage is increased. This helps to compensate for those targets dying before the DoT has finished ticking, though on targets that die quickly, this damage bonus isn’t enough to make it worth reapplying DoTs and makes it no different from clipping your DoTs. 

The sub-30% damage increase becomes more than just an equalizing effect on bosses since they usually last multiple DoT applications (and often several minutes) below 30% health, allowing enough time for DPS to actually increase. If DoTs have just fallen off of your target and you know it will die before the DoT completes all of its ticks, you should not reapply them to that target and either use one of your direct damage abilities (usually filler) or apply your DoTs to another target. 

Unless an enemy needs to die ASAP, it’s usually okay to switch targets preemptively since the vast majority of your damage contribution will be over in this situation. If you do decide to switch targets before the enemy dies, make sure you verify that the enemy actually died soon after you switched, sometimes the rest of your group might have the same idea and you’re left with an add wandering around with 1% HP left.