I feel like Crackling Energy (CE) does not scale very well at all.
I’ve equipped the paragon board suited for CE, invested in +CE damage and the Legendary nodes.
After spending many hours running Nightmare dungeons to get one of my glyphs to tier 15. Gear with CE damage, lightning damage, crit damage, stunned damage and total damage.
With 4.3k damage and 196.1% CE damage
In a Tier 20 Nightmare dungeon on a level 73 normal mob it hits for just a pathetic 1,320 damage.
Really?
Having to run both Spark, Chain lightning (CL) just so I can get the most amount of crackling energy spawned, hurts the build even more as CL is another poor performing skill.
On top of that you have to wait for the Unstable Currents cooldown to do anything remotely noticeably and even then its awful.
I can honestly say this mechanic hasn’t been optimized at all. Considering the whole premise of a lightning sorc is to create CE with abilities like Spark, CL, enchantments and paragon boards. This synergy just doesn’t work.
Getting to Torment I’ve just about lost all interest in CE and Sorc altogether now.
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I would have to disagree. Crackling energy scaling is prob the one part of my Sorc i’ve been really happy with investing into.
I also went the CE paragon board, currently level 70 in world T4 with 235% CE bonus and it just absolutely shreds packs of mobs. A lot of packs with elites i can just run around picking up energy and it will kill the pack while i finish off the strong ones with chain lightning.
Of note is that the legendary aspect that allows CE to chain to an additional enemy is massively important and boosts it so so much.
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Its possible that crackiling energy works slightly differently because it isn’t actually a skill. So shock skill damage for instance would not be applicable, and it might even be skill damage in general that you get from intelligence. I haven’t tested this though but it might explain the scaling issues.
It would be nice if CE was a lightning shield rather than a pickup.
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There’s definitely something wonky with it. It’s not an accident that the best lightning builds use Arc Lash and not an actual lightning spender using the crackling energy mechanic.
At the end of the day, if you’re goal is to somehow make Chain Lightning, a spell that costs actual mana that does less damage than Arc Lash in most gameplay situations and attacks slower than Arc Lash, you’re facing a losing battle.
Yup sad to see it really Katie. Dont get how a basic can out perform a core skill.
I’ve got 447% damage on cackling now, doing about 5k a tick. Still not impressive at WT4 as it doesnt even shift an Elites bar lol. Hopefully it gets improved in a future season or they add uniques that increase its damage or increase how much damage you do based on how many cackling energy you have stored.
I'm still missing the unique amulet which does AoE damage when you pick up a CE but I’ve heard that is very small too 
Would you mind posting your build? Thanks!
Crackling Energy does almost no real DPS and only works as a cooldown reduction mechanic for other skills. Very dissapointing and underwhelming. Mostly I ignore getting it as in a large fight picking it up instead of using basic attacks is a DPS loss.
Crackling Energy is massively underpowered on it’s own. It takes the same spot as Burn for pyro or Vulnerability for frost.
The thing is CE deals flat damage while Burn scales with everything and Vulnerability is separate multiplier.
Majority of budget is consumed by CDR, but that’s locked behind various features.
Crackling Energy needs some additional scaling
At least what I can tell is blizzard wants CE to be mana/cd kit to pickup for lighting sorc. It wasnt meant to be the source of your dmg.
But I am still confused, why there is an affix to increase CE dmg…
The more I play, the more confident that I can tell Blizzard never tests sorc in real endgame. And it explain why sorc sucks.
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I might test crackling energy with 1.1.1 patch but need to know
Does crackling energy crit?
Does crackling energy have lucky hit chance?
Crackling energy scales with what?
Based on my limited experienced with a Crackling Energy build, it does not crit and it scales with at least weapon damage and probably int. Outside of that, it’s unclear.
It’s mostly used for cooldown reduction.
No vul, it’s like missing out 3-6x dmg. Which is huge. Whatever dmg u see on the screen, now imagine it 3-6x bigger. Also dmg reduction from vul enemies.