A question for you magicka sorcs.

Mr_Koh

Do you guys use crystal blast? Like does it have a purpose at all? I've been playing stam sorc and I have a sweet idea for a morph but I don't feel it's completely necessary, and would Def not be worth it if it took from magicka sorcs. So what I'm asking here is if most of the magicka sorcs care for the morph crystal blast.


Will not post the idea yet because I want the subject to be on crystal blast and not the validity of my idea.

Peel_Ya_Cap_517

Well.. its basically the only offensive, damaging spell we have... So, yea, its useful but I personally don't use it.

RoyJade

When the crystal proc, it deal great amount of damage (+20%), instant cast and low cost. With a force shock rotation in pve, this skill give a little bonus to dps, unless you don't have any luck.
In pvp, this skill is very powerful.

Wisler89

Sorcs use Crystal Fragments (and I don't think there exists a competitive Sorc build without them) but outside of some gimped fun builds I have never seen anyone use Crystal Blast.

Darlon

RoyJade wrote: »

When the crystal proc, it deal great amount of damage (+20%), instant cast and low cost. With a force shock rotation in pve, this skill give a little bonus to dps, unless you don't have any luck.
In pvp, this skill is very powerful.

He's asking about crystal blast, not crystal fragments (the morph with the instant proc)

RoyJade

Oh yeah, I read too fast.
Crystal blast is a totally useless skill.

Dyride

The only person I ever see defend Crystal Blast is @Zsymon and @Emma_Eunjung. I would like to have a Stam morph.

Mr_Koh

Yeah I don't mean crystal frags I mean the other morph crystal blast which I never see used.

Darlon

Mr_Koh wrote: »

Yeah I don't mean crystal frags I mean the other morph crystal blast which I never see used.

I see it rarely... It's basically useless

Sublime

The proc chance is far too high and strong (20% dmg increase) to allow a small AOE to make up for the cast time.

AhPook_Is_Here

There are a few who use it, not me, but it was more popular before 1.6. The main attraction was that since it was an AOE it wasn't reflect-able, making it useful against scale/def-stance users. Since reflect builds are less popular the conditional upside has diminished.

cschwingeb14_ESO

Would probably be a great addition to a turret overload build. Assuming you defend your turret area well enough. Det, curse, fury, blast, rune prison

Even if they dodge the blast, none of that is reflect able. But having enough skills left for defense would be tough

Emma_Overload

Mr_Koh wrote: »

Do you guys use crystal blast? Like does it have a purpose at all? I've been playing stam sorc and I have a sweet idea for a morph but I don't feel it's completely necessary, and would Def not be worth it if it took from magicka sorcs. So what I'm asking here is if most of the magicka sorcs care for the morph crystal blast.


Will not post the idea yet because I want the subject to be on crystal blast and not the validity of my idea.

Don't believe the haters! Crystal Blast does great single target AND AOE damage, so it's great when you don't have much room on your bar because you've got so many toggles and buffs.

Here's what the haters don't tell you:

1) They are Stamina Sorcs who suck at PvP (for whatever reason).

2) They see Magicka Sorcs ganking successfully with Crystal Frag procs.

3) They want a Stamina version of of Crystal Frags so they can gank, too.

Stamina Sorcs have a lot of legitimate problems, but lack of a high damage single target spell is NOT one of them. They already have Focused Aim, Wrecking Blow and Rapid Strikes! These guys don't really need to hijack the Crystal Blast morph, but they want those gimmicky Crystal Frag procs.

Erock25

Emma_Eunjung wrote: »

Mr_Koh wrote: »

Do you guys use crystal blast? Like does it have a purpose at all? I've been playing stam sorc and I have a sweet idea for a morph but I don't feel it's completely necessary, and would Def not be worth it if it took from magicka sorcs. So what I'm asking here is if most of the magicka sorcs care for the morph crystal blast.


Will not post the idea yet because I want the subject to be on crystal blast and not the validity of my idea.

Don't believe the haters! Crystal Blast does great single target AND AOE damage, so it's great when you don't have much room on your bar because you've got so many toggles and buffs.

Here's what the haters don't tell you:

1) They are Stamina Sorcs who suck at PvP (for whatever reason).

2) They see Magicka Sorcs ganking successfully with Crystal Frag procs.

3) They want a Stamina version of of Crystal Frags so they can gank, too.

Stamina Sorcs have a lot of legitimate problems, but lack of a high damage single target spell is NOT one of them. They already have Focused Aim, Wrecking Blow and Rapid Strikes! These guys don't really need to hijack the Crystal Blast morph, but they want those gimmicky Crystal Frag procs.

You missed number four

4. The cost reduction, damage increase, and instant cast proc chance makes crystal frag absolutely a must have spell for all magicka sorcs.

Alucardo

If you were serious, no I don't, nor do I ever intend to use blast.

Jar_Ek

@Emma_Eunjung By that argument, all magicka sorcerers need for single target damage is Force Shock... All sorcerers have access to weapon skills lines, most weapon skills lines include both aoe and single target abilities. That does not mean that a class based damaging ability that procs some class passives wouldn't be very useful for stamina builds. Now there may be debate as to how that could be achieved, but that is far from stamina sorcerers being haters... In fact I would argue that the vast majority are not haters as they actively seek magicka sorcerer opinion of possible impact of proposed change. Magicka sorcerers that offer options that would support stamina builds are in the minority however... generally preferring to be critical or negative rather than provide considered alternatives and suggestions. There are exceptions to that generalisation of course.

Sharmony

I hate to say this but even in a game such as ESO that tries to accomodate for 'you can play anything' - Stamina Sorc is the most uncompetitive, unrealistic and unbalanced class / stat / role combination in ESO for both PvE and PvP. Even recent changes to abilities will definitely not change this what-so-ever. Consequently, I would strongly suggest a Nightblade, Templar and Dragonknight in that order for PvE and PvP if you wish to play Stamina builds. Moreover, if you were to create a new stamina morph for crystal blast this would make the build more competitive in PvP (arguably overpowered (Snipe+Crystal Proc)) but still would not be feasible in PvE.

Emma_Overload

Jar_Ek wrote: »

@Emma_Eunjung By that argument, all magicka sorcerers need for single target damage is Force Shock... All sorcerers have access to weapon skills lines, most weapon skills lines include both aoe and single target abilities. That does not mean that a class based damaging ability that procs some class passives wouldn't be very useful for stamina builds. Now there may be debate as to how that could be achieved, but that is far from stamina sorcerers being haters... In fact I would argue that the vast majority are not haters as they actively seek magicka sorcerer opinion of possible impact of proposed change. Magicka sorcerers that offer options that would support stamina builds are in the minority however... generally preferring to be critical or negative rather than provide considered alternatives and suggestions. There are exceptions to that generalisation of course.

No, your comparison is just plain WRONG. Force Shock sucks for damage and is not at all comparable to Snipe, Wrecking Blow or Rapid Strikes. The closest stamina equivalent to Force Shock is probably Poison Arrow in the Bow skill line. It's useful, but it does NOT do enough damage to DPS by itself.

The fact is this: Stamina builds have THREE weapon skill lines to choose from to do heavy damage, whereas Magicka builds only have ONE, the Destruction skill line, which is totally inferior to Bow, 2H and DW for single target damage and inferior to DW for AOE. As a result, Magicka builds depend more heavily on our class skills, so don't expect all Magicka Sorcs to be thrilled at our morphs being "appropriated".

Zsymon

Magicka builds were meant to mainly use class skills, stamina builds were meant to mainly use weapon skills. To be honest they never should have given NBs a stamina-based Surprise Attack, but withhold a stamina morph of Whip and a stamina based class attack for Sorcs, it just created a lot of envy and imbalance.

Imo they should make all Sorc pets scale with whatever is the highest, stamina or magicka. That way stamina builds can make good use of class abilities without it costing anyone a magicka skill such as Crystal Blast. Just because the vocal forum posters here are in a majority of wanting to ditch this skill, doesn't mean no one in-game uses it. Us people posting here are just a tiny scratch of the people actually playing.

It is THE greatest AoE ability in the game. It does more AoE DPS than Impulse, has a very large radius, does a ton of single target DPS on top, and has a 28m range. It's amazing for spamming at a boss and blasting all the adds along with it for example. Sure it is useless for PvP and Trial bosses, but that doesn't mean it sucks, I see a ton of people use it as I level.

Alucardo

To actually contribute a little more to this discussion other than a meme, I'll explain the PvE setup I'm using and why I'd never use crystal blast. My whole setup revolves around frags.. that's pretty much it. I dual wield daggers, use liquid lightning and mages wrath to proc frags then toss it at the target with the most health. I also roll with a pet and use drain essence when I need to, though I very rarely need to rely on it. Resto bar has wards and roots, more of a defensive bar. No healing really required thanks to wards and drain essence. I spend very little time on this bar except to cast wards for harder fights. Being a vamp I spam annulment against pyros which helps a great deal. Ultimate is, of course, devouring swarm.
Not using a staff may seem a little strange to some other PvErs, but god dang it's a beast of a setup. I've never gone below 75% magicka since ditching the staff. Why? Liquid lightning and mages wrath is peanuts to cast, and I'm only using frags when it procs which = 50% cheaper to cast. I run 5 pc seducer set, CP's, and all Breton passives.. so I guess that helps too.. but he's only level 33 at the moment, and I don't think I've ever had a character that low be so well off on resources, even in large fights. To say I'm happy would be an understatement.
Depending on how quickly frags procs, and it procs pretty quick for me, will determine the length of a fight. Using a staff might be quicker, but I'm finding dual wielding a lot more fun, and the difference in spell power contributed to me wetting myself.
So, in conclusion: Staves suck, dual wielding is great, and frags is boss. Of course there will be people who disagree with me, but that's the beauty of eso. There's no one cookie cutter build. Roll with one you like, so if you enjoy crystal blast, use it. But personally I don't find the pitiful AoE damage that good compared to the perks you get from frags.. not to mention the cast time.

olsborg

Make it a stamina morph and rename it to crystal sword or something, melee based like wrecking blow but somewhat different ofcourse.

Jar_Ek

@Emma_Eunjung And all of those weapon skills have a cast time, plus let's not get into stamina have 3 damage lines, magicka have 1. As magicka has a heal line and 28 magicka class abilities and stamina have 2. The point is that other classes have a stamina class damage morph. Now personally I am not a huge fan of replacing crystal blast with a stamina morph - my preference would be for a mages fury morph as that makes better use of class passives and I understand that magicka users do use crystal blast. However I don't agree that stamina users shouldn't have a class based damage ability.
Also I think that pets should scale with highest resource personally.

Dymence

Nope, I've never ever used it. Even back when I was a newbie leveling my way up for the first time I had the common sense not to take this garbage morph.

Tankqull

even though crystal blast is rather seldomly used i dont feel its the appopriate skill to be changed as a stamina sorc.

what i would preferr is an attempt to kill two birds with one stone wich would be like this:

all types of sorcs suffer from not having a spammable dmg class ability - the only ability that aims in that direction is actually mage´s fury.

[as reference - compleatly unbuffed v14 liveserver sorc]


so my suggestion would be to transfer roughly 40-50% of the dmg dealt by the executioner proc into its base dmg to create this spammable ability that than would match CS/force pulse dmg wise - while the overall maximum executional dmg would not be touched (and be still inferior to any other executioner dmg wise).

the second moprh wich grants an absolutly laughable ae-dmg increase could be renamed from mages wrath in mages grip and be a comparable 3-7m(up to discussion) range stamina version with the same dmg and stamina refill upon killing sth with it.

Jar_Ek

Sold to @Tankqull

Emma_Overload

CheeseDivinity wrote: »

To actually contribute a little more to this discussion other than a meme, I'll explain the PvE setup I'm using and why I'd never use crystal blast. My whole setup revolves around frags.. that's pretty much it. I dual wield daggers, use liquid lightning and mages wrath to proc frags then toss it at the target with the most health. I also roll with a pet and use drain essence when I need to, though I very rarely need to rely on it. Resto bar has wards and roots, more of a defensive bar. No healing really required thanks to wards and drain essence. I spend very little time on this bar except to cast wards for harder fights. Being a vamp I spam annulment against pyros which helps a great deal. Ultimate is, of course, devouring swarm.
Not using a staff may seem a little strange to some other PvErs, but god dang it's a beast of a setup. I've never gone below 75% magicka since ditching the staff. Why? Liquid lightning and mages wrath is peanuts to cast, and I'm only using frags when it procs which = 50% cheaper to cast. I run 5 pc seducer set, CP's, and all Breton passives.. so I guess that helps too.. but he's only level 33 at the moment, and I don't think I've ever had a character that low be so well off on resources, even in large fights. To say I'm happy would be an understatement.
Depending on how quickly frags procs, and it procs pretty quick for me, will determine the length of a fight. Using a staff might be quicker, but I'm finding dual wielding a lot more fun, and the difference in spell power contributed to me wetting myself.
So, in conclusion: Staves suck, dual wielding is great, and frags is boss. Of course there will be people who disagree with me, but that's the beauty of eso. There's no one cookie cutter build. Roll with one you like, so if you enjoy crystal blast, use it. But personally I don't find the pitiful AoE damage that good compared to the perks you get from frags.. not to mention the cast time.

Your build sounds good, but you're wrong about the AOE damage from Crystal Blast. When my Impulse tooltip shows around 3000 DP, my Crystal Blast shows 3700 DP! That's close to 25% more damage per second, and that's not even counting the one mob that's getting hit with the full strength of the single target damage. In comparison, Sorcerers' next best AOE, Lightning Splash, only does about 1600 DPS.... less than HALF the AOE DPS of Crystal Blast. The radius of the Crystal Blast AOE is decent, too... it looks like it's at least 5 meters.

Emma_Overload

Tankqull wrote: »

even though crystal blast is rather seldomly used i dont feel its the appopriate skill to be changed as a stamina sorc.

what i would preferr is an attempt to kill two birds with one stone wich would be like this:

all types of sorcs suffer from not having a spammable dmg class ability - the only ability that aims in that direction is actually mage´s fury.

[as reference - compleatly unbuffed v14 liveserver sorc]


so my suggestion would be to transfer roughly 40-50% of the dmg dealt by the executioner proc into its base dmg to create this spammable ability that than would match CS/force pulse dmg wise - while the overall maximum executional dmg would not be touched (and be still inferior to any other executioner dmg wise).

the second moprh wich grants an absolutly laughable ae-dmg increase could be renamed from mages wrath in mages grip and be a comparable 3-7m(up to discussion) range stamina version with the same dmg and stamina refill upon killing sth with it.

This is a MUCH better suggestion. Now that magicka sustain is not much of an issue anymore, many of us who were using Endless Fury have switched to Mage's Wrath, anyway. Endless Fury would be a fine candidate for a stamina morph. If ZOS did something like this, I hope they would "transfer roughly 40-50% of the dmg dealt by the executioner proc into its base dmg" for BOTH the stamina and the magicka morph.

RoyJade

I would like a pure damage dealing mage fury. The attack is beautiful and sit well to a sorcerer.
With such an increased damage and a stamina morph (even more close range, but more powerful or aoe based like flag guards), sorc will finally have a spammable class ability.
But I'm afraid about pvp balance.

Dymence

Tankqull wrote: »

even though crystal blast is rather seldomly used i dont feel its the appopriate skill to be changed as a stamina sorc.

what i would preferr is an attempt to kill two birds with one stone wich would be like this:

all types of sorcs suffer from not having a spammable dmg class ability - the only ability that aims in that direction is actually mage´s fury.

[as reference - compleatly unbuffed v14 liveserver sorc]


so my suggestion would be to transfer roughly 40-50% of the dmg dealt by the executioner proc into its base dmg to create this spammable ability that than would match CS/force pulse dmg wise - while the overall maximum executional dmg would not be touched (and be still inferior to any other executioner dmg wise).

the second moprh wich grants an absolutly laughable ae-dmg increase could be renamed from mages wrath in mages grip and be a comparable 3-7m(up to discussion) range stamina version with the same dmg and stamina refill upon killing sth with it.

I'd like to keep my execute, thank you very much.

EDIT: It seems like I misunderstood. Do you intend to have this ability be both a spammable damage ability AND an execute? I wouldn't mind having that, but that's a bit ridiculous.

Emma_Overload

Dymence wrote: »

Tankqull wrote: »

even though crystal blast is rather seldomly used i dont feel its the appopriate skill to be changed as a stamina sorc.

what i would preferr is an attempt to kill two birds with one stone wich would be like this:

all types of sorcs suffer from not having a spammable dmg class ability - the only ability that aims in that direction is actually mage´s fury.

[as reference - compleatly unbuffed v14 liveserver sorc]


so my suggestion would be to transfer roughly 40-50% of the dmg dealt by the executioner proc into its base dmg to create this spammable ability that than would match CS/force pulse dmg wise - while the overall maximum executional dmg would not be touched (and be still inferior to any other executioner dmg wise).

the second moprh wich grants an absolutly laughable ae-dmg increase could be renamed from mages wrath in mages grip and be a comparable 3-7m(up to discussion) range stamina version with the same dmg and stamina refill upon killing sth with it.

I'd like to keep my execute, thank you very much.

EDIT: It seems like I misunderstood. Do you intend to have this ability be both a spammable damage ability AND an execute? I wouldn't mind having that, but that's a bit ridiculous.

Why not? That's exactly what the 2H execute is like. Executioner does WAY more damage than Mage's Wrath on targets with more than 20% health.

Tankqull

Dymence wrote: »

Tankqull wrote: »

even though crystal blast is rather seldomly used i dont feel its the appopriate skill to be changed as a stamina sorc.

what i would preferr is an attempt to kill two birds with one stone wich would be like this:

all types of sorcs suffer from not having a spammable dmg class ability - the only ability that aims in that direction is actually mage´s fury.

[as reference - compleatly unbuffed v14 liveserver sorc]


so my suggestion would be to transfer roughly 40-50% of the dmg dealt by the executioner proc into its base dmg to create this spammable ability that than would match CS/force pulse dmg wise - while the overall maximum executional dmg would not be touched (and be still inferior to any other executioner dmg wise).

the second moprh wich grants an absolutly laughable ae-dmg increase could be renamed from mages wrath in mages grip and be a comparable 3-7m(up to discussion) range stamina version with the same dmg and stamina refill upon killing sth with it.

I'd like to keep my execute, thank you very much.

EDIT: It seems like I misunderstood. Do you intend to have this ability be both a spammable damage ability AND an execute? I wouldn't mind having that, but that's a bit ridiculous.

it would be in no way different to the DK "finisher", the fact that radiant destruction is worth to be used above 50% target-life, the stamina-jab executionesque morph. or the flat 25% dmg increasement by 2hs executioner.