Balance Observations/Requests: The Sorcerer.

Soloeus

Improvements to make to Sorcerer: Sorcerer is a strong class. However it relies too much on Impulse, Bolt Escape and Crystal Blast. This is because everything else is lacking greatly. There are great abilities all over the place for Sorcerers but within their own class, there are some issues. These are my suggestions to improve the Sorcerer.

Rune Prison to instant cast (which still wouldn't make me use it, but it would make it viable). This ability just isn't good in its current form.

Daedric Prison and its morphs; Increase the Stun time one second. It would make ALL the difference. Daedric Tomb is actually the only "form" of this spell worth taking. With every passive you get 2.4 second stun. I would either increase the damage or increase the time to 3 seconds.

Conjured Ward and morphs: Make it last last 40 seconds like Power Surge. That would make it pretty useful, actually.

Curse (and its morphs): after you cast it, make it so you cannot recast it until the boom. This prevents the annoyance of accidentally casting it again, canceling the first cast of it. I almost never use Curse because I do this too often.

Lightning Splash: Increase Radius to 10 or 12m. Make it last two seconds longer. It really agitates me that this spell never gets to shine because most people don't press X when they need to. That said, this is one of the worst spells. It is only good inside a Keep or other enclosed area with little room to move and a lot of allies running around to increase the someone might press X chance.

Destro Staff: Destro Staff is the primary weapon of Many sorcerers.

Crushing Shock: Clean the language. Does it provide all 3 elemental effects and damage or only the one I am using? To be blunt, a little bit more damage wouldn't hurt either.

Wall of Elements and its morphs: They are just no good. Increase time to 4 seconds. Apply Bolt Escape nerf. This makes it worthwhile to cast, and acceptable but costly to spam. It can be fun to spam once in a while but Impulse and Daedric Tomb are always better. Only Lightning Splash is worse!

Elemental Weakness is just bad. It looks good, and against Single Targets can turn the tide. In vet content where almost 80% of everything is in a group of 3, this spell is of very limited value. The only redeeming factor is enemies aren't alerted/aggro when you cast it on them from a distance. I would make it cost more mana, apply bolt escape nerf to it, and make it an AoE.

The Sorcerer is a good class, so its flaws and shortcomings are often unspoken. Some people are happy enough spamming Impulse, Crystal Blast and Mages Fury over and over and over to not care about the other abilities. Others don't care because they found a powerful combination within the class.

This is about correcting some of the design choices regarding Sorcerers, and improving some of their lacking abilities to make the class more fun and engaging to play without making it overpowered.

shieldwolf

Yeah I agree that the sorcerer could be improved. Good suggestions.

ShADoW0s

I dont think Sorcerers are a priority right now.

Magdalina

Soloeus wrote: »

Improvements to make to Sorcerer:
Conjured Ward and morphs: Make it last last 40 seconds like Power Surge. That would make it pretty useful, actually.

Errr, why? Did you ever get it to last more than 10 seconds? In vet zones it usually survives 1 heavy or 2 LIGHT attacks only and is gone in 3 seconds top if there's more than one mob. That said, I actually love the skill, it's awesome and recasting it often helps me survive the figt.

Soloeus wrote: »

Curse (and its morphs): after you cast it, make it so you cannot recast it until the boom. This prevents the annoyance of accidentally casting it again, canceling the first cast of it. I almost never use Curse because I do this too often.

I very much agree here.

Everything else I don't really mind enough to comment, don't use most of these abilities:) I also never use Bolt Escape - unlocked it, tried it a couple of times, died every time because it wouldn't activate when needed most, never used again.

EDIT: And as it's already been said - I don't think sorcerers have a problem right now. At least MOST of our skills work as intended(which is just fine).

Soloeus

Magdalina;

Sorcerers don't have a gaping problem like an automatic win button or being weak. The problem we do have is that quite a few of our abilities are, well, totally worthless. There are good reasons why you (and many others) don't use these abilities; you try them in every combination, realize they are really bad and when you respec you never choose it again.

I would like it if my Conjured Ward lasted longer. It isn't very useful because as you said, one heavy or 2 light attacks breaks it and you can't just run backwards blocking and recasting over and over and expect to win. But you can do that with Impulse! Conjured Ward however does last longer on my summons than on me.

While Empowered Ward is on them it gives them improvements to damage. This ability is burdensome to continue recasting and therefore you never really "get" to use the benefit of it.

I want all abilities to be meaningful choices that are good. Our class is balanced well on terms of the role it plays. What it isn't good at is having anything to do other than Crystal Blast in solo situations and Impulse in group situations because much of everything else you can do, well, isn't very good.

The other things we DO have going for us (Inner Light, Volcanic Rune, to name a few) aren't even Skills from our class.

NordJitsu

Here's how you fix Sorc.

Fix BE. The nerf was bad.

Make Lightning Pool do viable damage without the synergy.

Increase the single target damage or AoE damage/range of Curse (but not both.)

Make pets hit harder and have more health across the board. Also make pets cost only 1 ability slot, rather than the current double ability slots.

Give Rune Prison some damage allowance, so its not broken so easily.

Daedric Mines....I don't even know. Just fix it or replace it with something useful.

Conjured Ward, like all damage shields, should take into account armor and spell resistance when it comes to calculating the damage shield.

As for your Destro Staff feedback, you're fairly spot on. Crushing Shock and Wall of Elements should both hit harder. Weakness to Elements is currently trash (adds about 10 damage in high end builds). Destructive Touch is way too expensive. Impulse is the only good skill.

But D-Staff has got nothing to do with Sorc.

Zabalah

ShADoW0s wrote: »

I dont think Sorcerers are a priority right now.

Actually, you can not balance classes without considering the global effect any changes on one individual class will make. There are consequences in ignoring change effect on other classes.

In reality, ALL classes share an equal priority in balance adjustments, because you can't have one without the other.

crislevin

agree with lightening splash, it has great paper damage, but w/o a cc to go with it, it mostly does 1/3 of its paper damage.

Soloeus

Destro Staff isn't "part" of the sorcerer but a lot of questions remain.

1. Does Power Surge "make stronger" Destro Staff Abilities like Impulse, or only Crystal Fragments?
2. Do abilities like Disintegrate Passive from stormcalling work with Lightning Staff abilities or pretty much just for Mages Fury and Overcharge?

Lightning Splash... To be honest it either needs a 2 second knockdown, or to last 30 seconds or to remove the synergy and just let it deal its damage. Maybe have a synergy for CC.

NordJitsu

@Soloeus‌

There's no question about Surge.

Surge increases weapon power, which means any of your weapon abilities will hit harder. This includes light/heavy attacks and skills. So Impulse, Force Shock, ect. all hit harder (incidentally so do your heals from the Restoration staff.)

It will not increase damage on Crystal Fragments which is governed by Spell Power but if you have Critical Surge and you crit with Fragments, you will of course still get the heal.

Hypertionb14_ESO

ok A: Lightning Splash is one of the best DPS abilitys in the game, With my Vet 6 Sorcerer able to deal 200DPS per enemy with it completly effortlessly. With the Lightning Flood Evolution its extremely powerful with a good area of effect too, probably even to the point its too much so. The Liquid Lightning Morph is a bit less than useful tho. Maybe have that one boost the synergy instead.

B: Rune Prison is the single best "sleeper" spell in the game currently. able to take any mob out of the equation long enough to recover almost completely, and combined with Dark Exchange more than enough time. Upgraded to Rune Cage the effect lasts 25 seconds. if any ability like this should be made instantly cast, it should be the Night Blade version called Agony.

C: Conjured Ward is actually in line with similar spells atm, the duration is much longer than the Ward in Restoration staff. Its only designed to help your pets, not really so much for you.

I 100% agree on the annoyance of Deadric Curse over writing...

E: Sorcerer does not have a skill called "Daedric Prison" if you are talking about Daedric Mines then the real issue at least in my opinion is the insane cost of the spell and yes, i agree the immobilize is a bit underwhelming to the point of this skill being useless.

F: Destruction Staff is not class specific, any changes should be made with all classes in mind. Most of your points here have merit tho. as a additional note, Force Shock(and its morphs) does indeed do each elements damage, resulting in a 3 hit strike from one cast. another note, you cant stack the damage of multiple casts of wall of elements, only spread out more places where your enemies can take the damage.


overall i actually will say that Sorcerer has no real need for buffs atm. more likely is the addressing certain ability's like Critical Surge, which has since Beta been considered OP by the general community.

With Critical Surge, Thunderous Presence, Lightning Flood, Elemental Ring, my sorcerer deals 500 damage per target nearby per second and heals around 250-300 per nearby target. Its proven EXTREMELY easy to just run into a group and use this to hit 2k dps / 1k hps in public dungeons. the potential dps of this is 3k.

Single target, i usually just spam Crystal Fragments. since this move crits for 750 generally i will mix in Lightning Flood and the Curse. I can break 1k if i do everything right.

I honestly can say that Sorcerer has almost no issues in this game currently, Tho it would be nice if the non class abilitys in this game were given some real attention. All i have shown here is the glaring issue reguarding to how strong Magicka builds are atm.. A similar Stanima build can barely hold even half this capability, ending up totally pointless in compairison.

ArRashid

This is not just sorcerer. Every class has abilities that are just not viable for ANY spec with some difficulty (aka not fighting mobs 30+ levels lower).

Most of the time at least 2 out of 5 abilities of a skill line are completely unusable.

But I disagree on one spell - Blockade is just fantastic. I've been using it since I unlocked it on my DK pyro and haven't stopped since (I'm VR4 now). On a single target, it has better effectiveness than Impulse (having almost 2/3 higher cost but dealing 2x+ more damage on a single cast - one tick of 200 vs four ticks of 115). In an AoE situation, it can easily hit almost whole room, unlike Impulse which has rather tiny radius.
I just wasn't able to figure out whether you deal more damage when you spam it (like Impulse), or if only the visual effect stays and previous copy no longer deals damage.


Would be nice of you if you copied the sorcerer insights into
Study: How to balance without ruining classes

Hypertionb14_ESO

ArRashid wrote: »

This is not just sorcerer. Every class has abilities that are just not viable for ANY spec with some difficulty (aka not fighting mobs 30+ levels lower).

Most of the time at least 2 out of 5 abilities of a skill line are completely unusable.

But I disagree on one spell - Blockade is just fantastic. I've been using it since I unlocked it on my DK pyro and haven't stopped since (I'm VR4 now). On a single target, it has better effectiveness than Impulse (having almost 2/3 higher cost but dealing 2x+ more damage on a single cast - one tick of 200 vs four ticks of 115). In an AoE situation, it can easily hit almost whole room, unlike Impulse which has rather tiny radius.
I just wasn't able to figure out whether you deal more damage when you spam it (like Impulse), or if only the visual effect stays and previous copy no longer deals damage.


Would be nice of you if you copied the sorcerer insights into
Study: How to balance without ruining classes

the stacking of Elemental wall was something i tested to death a while back. Generally it seemed visually as if it stacks, but the damage values being done dont increase with the overlapping visuals. This was proven with the readouts from addons.

Ragekniv

Really?

Last time I checked, Sorcs and DKs were still the OP FOTM!

Next round of nerfs please!

eliisra

I agree. Most sorcerer skills are rubbish, close to 80% aren't worth slotting.

What's even the point of of all these class skills, if we gimp our characters by using them?

But the class is still strong and very capable, due to best passives in the game and great synergy with other skill lines. Also comes with a few great utility spells.

Boring part is that you're forced to play restodestro Crit Surge + Pulsar spam, half the time. There isn't many viable builds or play styles.

Than again most classes suffer from this dilemma. They do whine a lot more about it than sorcerers, I guess mostly due to popular archetypes. When I made a Sorcerer I sort of expected to be running around in dresses and wielding wooden sticks and puffing out fire. I don't think it comes as natural for other classes.

Soloeus

The strong part about sorcerer which should be applied to all classes is having passive synergies with other skill lines.

Soloeus

Hypertionb14_ESO wrote: »

ok A: Lightning Splash is one of the best DPS abilitys in the game, With my Vet 6 Sorcerer able to deal 200DPS per enemy with it completly effortlessly. With the Lightning Flood Evolution its extremely powerful with a good area of effect too, probably even to the point its too much so. The Liquid Lightning Morph is a bit less than useful tho. Maybe have that one boost the synergy instead.

B: Rune Prison is the single best "sleeper" spell in the game currently. able to take any mob out of the equation long enough to recover almost completely, and combined with Dark Exchange more than enough time. Upgraded to Rune Cage the effect lasts 25 seconds. if any ability like this should be made instantly cast, it should be the Night Blade version called Agony.

C: Conjured Ward is actually in line with similar spells atm, the duration is much longer than the Ward in Restoration staff. Its only designed to help your pets, not really so much for you.

I 100% agree on the annoyance of Deadric Curse over writing...

E: Sorcerer does not have a skill called "Daedric Prison" if you are talking about Daedric Mines then the real issue at least in my opinion is the insane cost of the spell and yes, i agree the immobilize is a bit underwhelming to the point of this skill being useless.

F: Destruction Staff is not class specific, any changes should be made with all classes in mind. Most of your points here have merit tho. as a additional note, Force Shock(and its morphs) does indeed do each elements damage, resulting in a 3 hit strike from one cast. another note, you cant stack the damage of multiple casts of wall of elements, only spread out more places where your enemies can take the damage.


overall i actually will say that Sorcerer has no real need for buffs atm. more likely is the addressing certain ability's like Critical Surge, which has since Beta been considered OP by the general community.

With Critical Surge, Thunderous Presence, Lightning Flood, Elemental Ring, my sorcerer deals 500 damage per target nearby per second and heals around 250-300 per nearby target. Its proven EXTREMELY easy to just run into a group and use this to hit 2k dps / 1k hps in public dungeons. the potential dps of this is 3k.

Single target, i usually just spam Crystal Fragments. since this move crits for 750 generally i will mix in Lightning Flood and the Curse. I can break 1k if i do everything right.

I honestly can say that Sorcerer has almost no issues in this game currently, Tho it would be nice if the non class abilitys in this game were given some real attention. All i have shown here is the glaring issue reguarding to how strong Magicka builds are atm.. A similar Stanima build can barely hold even half this capability, ending up totally pointless in compairison.

1. I will assume you play with players who use Teamspeak or some other third party software that isn't part of the game. This is because the gameplay you are describing relies on a coordinated team. People who press X when you need them to, for example.

2. I would like to know a little bit more about your playstyle because it is relevant to the topic that you get so much strong use out of some of the "trash abilities" that I listed. Are there any abilities I didn't list you feel are trash?

Very good feedback.

fredarbonab14_ESO

Very good info.

/Low-level Sorcerer

Hypertionb14_ESO

Soloeus wrote: »

Hypertionb14_ESO wrote: »

ok A: Lightning Splash is one of the best DPS abilitys in the game, With my Vet 6 Sorcerer able to deal 200DPS per enemy with it completly effortlessly. With the Lightning Flood Evolution its extremely powerful with a good area of effect too, probably even to the point its too much so. The Liquid Lightning Morph is a bit less than useful tho. Maybe have that one boost the synergy instead.

B: Rune Prison is the single best "sleeper" spell in the game currently. able to take any mob out of the equation long enough to recover almost completely, and combined with Dark Exchange more than enough time. Upgraded to Rune Cage the effect lasts 25 seconds. if any ability like this should be made instantly cast, it should be the Night Blade version called Agony.

C: Conjured Ward is actually in line with similar spells atm, the duration is much longer than the Ward in Restoration staff. Its only designed to help your pets, not really so much for you.

I 100% agree on the annoyance of Deadric Curse over writing...

E: Sorcerer does not have a skill called "Daedric Prison" if you are talking about Daedric Mines then the real issue at least in my opinion is the insane cost of the spell and yes, i agree the immobilize is a bit underwhelming to the point of this skill being useless.

F: Destruction Staff is not class specific, any changes should be made with all classes in mind. Most of your points here have merit tho. as a additional note, Force Shock(and its morphs) does indeed do each elements damage, resulting in a 3 hit strike from one cast. another note, you cant stack the damage of multiple casts of wall of elements, only spread out more places where your enemies can take the damage.


overall i actually will say that Sorcerer has no real need for buffs atm. more likely is the addressing certain ability's like Critical Surge, which has since Beta been considered OP by the general community.

With Critical Surge, Thunderous Presence, Lightning Flood, Elemental Ring, my sorcerer deals 500 damage per target nearby per second and heals around 250-300 per nearby target. Its proven EXTREMELY easy to just run into a group and use this to hit 2k dps / 1k hps in public dungeons. the potential dps of this is 3k.

Single target, i usually just spam Crystal Fragments. since this move crits for 750 generally i will mix in Lightning Flood and the Curse. I can break 1k if i do everything right.

I honestly can say that Sorcerer has almost no issues in this game currently, Tho it would be nice if the non class abilitys in this game were given some real attention. All i have shown here is the glaring issue reguarding to how strong Magicka builds are atm.. A similar Stanima build can barely hold even half this capability, ending up totally pointless in compairison.

1. I will assume you play with players who use Teamspeak or some other third party software that isn't part of the game. This is because the gameplay you are describing relies on a coordinated team. People who press X when you need them to, for example.

2. I would like to know a little bit more about your playstyle because it is relevant to the topic that you get so much strong use out of some of the "trash abilities" that I listed. Are there any abilities I didn't list you feel are trash?

Very good feedback.

LONG POST >.>

My main setup in is Elemental Ring, Lightning Flood, Thunderous presense, Critical Surge, Inner Light. i have over 50% crit chance on spells.

Lightning Flood, the 2meter wider evolution of Lightning Splash has a base damage of about 75 dmg on my sorc when i have MP food capping that stat, the crits hit for about 100 or so. it does this for 3 seconds for very little mp to cast.

The Key with Lightning Splash and its morphs is it does its damage twice each second, unlike Wall of elements or even DK standard.. the only other move that does AOE damage twice a second (that is worth mentioning) is veil of blades, a morph of a NB ultimate.

Entering battle against a group, I start by casting Critical Surge then Thunderous Presense. I then cast Lightning flood on the groups center while running into and use Elemental Ring twice. Lightning flood generally Crits for 100 damage each tick which it does every 1/2 second. Elemental Ring crits for 340-370 or so. even Thunderious presence will crit for 50+ damage. the damage combines around 500 per target hit.

With Critical Surge, 65% of all crit damage i deal like this is restored to my HP. So Lightning flood which is hitting 200 damage on a each target each second with crits is effectively restoring 100 HP as well. at full DPS this means i am healing 250 HP per second per enemy nearby.

because of this, when i am fighting the AOE cap of 6 mobs, i can max out at around 3k damage per second overall while still healing for 1.5k hp persecond or so. Its enough to wipe clean massive groups with no concern for personal safety generally. Without Lightning Flood, this would be 1.2k less.

Even without the healing, the damage all this does is quite enough to clear out a room before you take enough damage to die with HP maxed as well as MP. You can block while casting impulse, negating most damage.

---

Rune Prison has proven one of my favorite abilitys, the disorient will last untill you attack, with the rune cage evolution it will stun when the disorent ends, either from the time running out or you attacking. This move effects alot more mobs than you might expect. I have soloed world bosses by simply spamming Crystal fragments untill my MP is low, then using Rune Cage to have the mob take a snooze while i Dark Exchange and recover to start spamming the crystal again.

I owe this spell soloing mobs that can deal 1k+ damage to me in a single hit. only the really big mobs like Titans, Giants, Mammoths and Dungoen bosses generally cannot be slept by the spell. it really opens a lot of options and lets you fight on your terms, simply using it to take a break when ever you want.

of course casting it can be a issue, so i usually just cast right after a fragments has knocked w/e i am fighting down. Generally if i cant knock them down with fragments i cant sleep them either so i do a differant tactic, usually my AOE build.

To me, Rune Prison was never anything beyond a sleep spell. as long as i am good on HP i can usually survive any attacks i might take while casting. It is currently the epitome of Single target control.


Btw, Power bash acts very similar to Rune Prison. it is not as long lasting but you can just stand on a lot of mobs and bash their face if the twitch for quite a long time. i actually get a sort of cruel enjoyment out of doing that =P

---

Conjured ward, has always been redundant and kind of pointless to me. its best and really only use is better served simply by using a healing staffs spells the pets..

Daedric mines is generally too inviting of trouble to use vs simply AOEing with Crit surge. its not a bad spell but imo its the most weak of all the spells Sorcerer currently has. Generally i am served better repeatedly knocking a target with Fragments with a Curse thrown in and sleeping the mob if i run out of mp to dark exchange. doing this mobs generally dont even get in range for the Tomb morph to have any benefit for its casting cost.

these 2 skills i dont even have unlocked anymore. Various testing just showed them to not be worth having on the skill bar.



I will state that Overload is likley the most underestimated ultimate in the game... on average i can hit 400-500 on crits on the heavy attack of it, which only costs 40 ultimate points total. overload for 25 seconds with 1k ultimate doing 450 average damage each heavy attack can deal a total of about 40-50k damage vaired by how much crit you actually get.

compare this to the ultimate cost DK standard, which only costs 200 ultimate atm. the over all damage done would be very close with only a few thousand differance... the main differance being that it would only take 6-7 seconds for Overload to more damage than DK standard can over its full 15 second duration. some math would get about 16k or so from a single DK standard cast with a 50% or so crit rate on spells and a base damage of 150. We can see that for the ultimate cost DK standard does more total damage, but Overload does damage Much faster, and can potentially do so much longer with enough ultimate.

SilverWF

Ragekniv wrote: »

Really?

Last time I checked, Sorcs and DKs were still the OP FOTM!

Next round of nerfs please!

I dunno what and when you are checked, but from this thread http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/110503/sorcerer-have-1500-dps-seriously
sorc have 1k+ DPS only if using common weapon skills, ultimate gain bugged and with pets, while NB have 1k+ DPS without(!) this stuff!
So, where is our "OP"?