Welcome to our weekly column dedicated to everything Consular and Inquisitor. If you have a suggestion for a topic you’d like covered in this column, drop us a line!
This week I want to talk a little about attack rotations for the Jedi Sage, and some tips for you to keep in mind.
Note that these rotations are covering the earlier levels for the Jedi Sage (up to level 25). In a future article I will discuss the higher level ones.
Firstly it’s important to know which attacks are instant casts, and which ones take time to cast.
It’s vital to have a handle on this so you are not wasting time casting at the wrong times. They say time is money. Well in SWTOR time you can save optimising your rotations can be the difference between life and death.
Generally I would recommend you put up your Force Armor first, as it protects you from damage until the shield is destroyed. Once you have done that, send in your companion to attack, and then while he/she is on the way, cast Mind Crush which has a 2 second timeframe to cast (before modifiers).
If you time this right, your Mind Crush will be hitting your enemy around the time your companion makes their first attack. Ideally you want the Mind crush to hit a fraction of a second after the companion hits to ensure the enemies first attack is at the companion and not you.
Mind crush does a moderate amount of damage but then more damage over 6 seconds (which is a long time in battle). What’s best is its casting range is 30m, allowing you to keep well away from the action. The cooldown of 9 seconds means you can often get to re-cast it during a battle for the more powerful foes you face. All Jedi Consulars get this ability at level 14 and I think it’s a very important one to add to your rotation.
Weaken Mind is a good one to cast next because it’s instant, does damage over time, has the same range as Mind crush but only requires half the force.
Another useful ability is Force Potency, which increases the force critical chance of your direct attacks (and heals!!) by 60% as well as increasing the range of Telekinetic Throw to 30 meters. This is a good ability to have up when you can (it lasts for 20 seconds and grants 2 charges, each time you critically hit or cast Telekinetic Throw you lose a charge), but it has 90 second cool down so you will probably only get to cast it once in a typical fight.
Project can be used as it’s an instant cast and you do not have to stand still while casting it. But relatively speaking the damage is low and the force cost high. In my rotations I typically use Project when the enemy is down to about 10% health and I am on my way to begin looting their corpse – yes I like to plan ahead!
If you are being attacked from multiple enemies (you or your companion), Force Wave is excellent since it’s a knock-back. It does a reasonable amount of damage and knocks back all enemies within 8 meters. Standard/weak enemies actually get knocked down for 3 seconds. This is useful if you or your companion are close to death and you want to either heal up or run away (get a bit of a head start).
Disturbance is a good ability as it has no cooldown and expends a moderate amount of Force. It does however have a cast time of 1.5 seconds. I typically use this after many of the other attacks have been used at least once.
The priority should be to keep your dots (damage over time) abilities up at all time. This requires a keen eye on screen to check when they are available to be re-cast.
This is one area that that nameless game starting with W had nailed – being able to create custom addons to easily see this information on screen – I hope Bioware allow us to create addons for the game at some point by releasing the necessary API information and tools.
I haven’t talked directly about healing this week, as I went into some detail about that last week. Suffice to say make sure you heal your companion and yourself (in that order) as needed.
The final ability I want to mention is Whirlwind as from what I can see many people overlook or do not use it at all.
This allows you to trap an enemy for about 60 seconds. Note that they heal rapidly while in the whirlwind, so it’s best use is at a start of a fight to take one enemy out of the fight until another (or many) enemies are eliminated. Otherwise you are effectively healing an enemy which may not be your intention!
Make sure the enemy you are proposing to use this ability on, is sufficiently out of range of any attacks on other players (area of effect, etc) because damage causes the effect to end immediately.
This is particularly important in Flashpoints and group fights, so make sure you make it clear to every party member which enemy is not to be attacked – you can use the tag ability to put a skill or other marker on the enemy in this situation. Normally I indicate at the start of the Flashpoint that a particular identifier (skull or whatever) is a do not attack, or a star is the enemy to be taken out first, etc.
I’ve even done this to players in PVP – it’s funny how long a player can stay stuck in a whirlwind in PVP – likely because everyone playing on the other side knows not to attack and while that player is caught in the whirlwind they are effectively outnumbering the opposition.
The image below shows the whirlwind in action. The guy on the right hand side is powerless while my companion and I attack the other two:
Well that’s me done for another week – let me know if you have any questions and I’ll be back same time, some bat-channel (website) next week!
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