Streaking in public: a MagSorc materials farming build

Major_Lag

Here's something... unusual. And fun

We all know that various stamina-based "materials farm builds" exist; they are based on sets such as Coward's, Fjord's and/or Darkstride. All medium armor, stam regen glyphs.
So you just get automatic Major Expedition while sprinting, and a large stam pool + stam regen to sustain it for extremely long distances and rapidly recover stamina while picking up materials.

However, I consider that quite boring... who wants to just sprint everywhere? Meh.
I play magicka characters exclusively, and wanted my farming build to also be magicka-based.
Luckily, Sorcs have access to one of the fastest means of non-mounted movement in the game: Streak (which also happens to be my favorite movement skill!)

Unfortunately, Streak is subject to a brutal progressive (and unbounded!) cost increase with each consecutive cast, rendering it highly unsustainable as a means of rapid movement over long distances.
But can anything be done about it? As it turns out, the answer is: yes

Here's what I came up with (tested on the PTS):
5pc BTB, 5pc Seducer, 2pc Willow's Path.
7x Light, all Divines with max magicka enchant; 3x mag regen glyph on Infused jewelry.
Green mag regen buff food. (but Ghastly Eye Bowl might work even better here)
50+ CP into Arcanist.
Edit: Atronach mundus. 64 attribute points into Magicka.

Skill loadout:
Streak, Siege Shield, Purge, Guard, Revealing Flare, Barrier ulti
(the Support skills are there to passively increase mag regen by a huge amount!)

With the above setup, I got a bit over 30k max magicka, and 6k magicka recovery.
This lets me Streak seven times in a row (casting every consecutive GCD) before running out of magicka; a maximum of 10x in a row if I wait 3 seconds before each cast, but of course that's much slower overall.
Over long distances, the optimal "rotation" appears to be 4-5 consecutive Streaks, then sprint for the next 4 seconds to reset the cost increase penalty (and recover the magicka spent). Repeat.

This build only has ~550 stamina recovery - but thanks to the sprint cost reduction in Dragonhold update (and with some CP into Sprinter), this is easily more than enough, without having to use Dark Deal for stamina sustain.

For a practical long-distance test, I tried covering the distance from the east end of the northern bridge out of Belkarth (standing by the lantern on the main road), to the Seeker's Archive wayshrine.
Using a fully upgraded horse with Rapid Maneuver active, it takes about 24 seconds to cross that distance, from a standing start.
With this build, Streaking the same distance takes about 30 seconds... good enough for me

Edit:
Possible improvements:

• Instead of 2pc Willow's, use 1pc Chokethorn and (mismatched) 1pc monster set with a max magicka 1pc bonus, for a little more max magicka.
• Replace one of the Support skills with Boundless Storm (or just put it on backbar), for Major Expedition during the sprinting phases. (it also looks 30% cooler )
• ???

chrightt

Not to say this doesn’t work but I think I’ll just ride my mount.

Major_Lag

chrightt wrote: »

Not to say this doesn’t work but I think I’ll just ride my mount.

While farming materials?
It defeats the purpose, you end up wasting a lot of time in the mounting/dismounting animations, since the nodes tend to be relatively close together.

chrightt

Major_Lag wrote: »

chrightt wrote: »

Not to say this doesn’t work but I think I’ll just ride my mount.

While farming materials?
It defeats the purpose, you end up wasting a lot of time in the mounting/dismounting animations, since the nodes tend to be relatively close together.

But he made a build for long distance travel according to his tests. Since nodes are relatively close I don’t need that kind of build to streak when picking close clusters resets mana cost and not seeing any close material point means mounting is better especially with assist rapid riding.

Major_Lag

The idea here is that Streak is, AFAIK, the fastest means of movement in the game, that does not require a target to cast (gapclosers, Warden vine) or require pre-casting at some previously visited position (NB shade).

From my testing, it's abundantly clear that continuous Streaking is actually much faster than a fully upgraded horse + Rapids, never mind the additional time it takes to mount/dismount.
Theoretical maximum speed is 15 meters per second, or 54km/h.
Consider that I was streaking only about 60% of the time, yet it was only slightly slower than the horse.

Unfortunately, from my PvP experience, "normal" builds don't cut it when it comes to such Streak abuse - with only 1-2k mag regen you will be constantly out of magicka, that much I know from practice.

Sure, 6k may be slightly overkill...but sadly I was unable to test this in an actual farming situation on the PTS - all the nodes there are unharvested (available), which is completely unrealistic.
Going with a reasonable guesstimate, 3-4k regen would be the bare minimum for this to be viable.

Joinovikova

Nerf sorc?...

Royaji

You forgot to address the fact that streak works poorly on uneven terrain. You just can't streak uphill at all. Most of my farm circles include traversing some rough terrain where streak would be unreliable at best. I'd rather stick to Ford's.

Major_Lag

Joinovikova wrote: »

Nerf sorc?...

They see me streakin', they hatin'

Royaji wrote: »

You forgot to address the fact that streak works poorly on uneven terrain. You just can't streak uphill at all. Most of my farm circles include traversing some rough terrain where streak would be unreliable at best. I'd rather stick to Ford's.

Yes, I'm well aware of that.

However, in practice I tend to follow a random path when farming, so I can easily adjust as to avoid such troublesome terrain.
I tried following "optimized" paths calculated by HarvestMap... but since so many of the nodes have already been harvested by someone else, the nodes per minute ratio was no better than randomly selecting the next available node.

Edit: oddly enough, most of the uphill slopes in Craglorn work perfectly fine with Streak... the only ones that cause problems are those which consist of 2 separate slopes, where the shallower slope abruptly transitions into a steeper slope.

fred4

I agree about not using a horse.

Have you considered Prisoner's? Should work on magsorc or stamsorc. Streak, streak, streak, then sprint with sprint cost reduction and gain magicka back.

The alternative is a perma-cloaking magblade. It IMO beats everything, because you don't draw aggro. Building one properly is fairly involved, but see here:

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/6426169#Comment_6426169

You can get to +95% of normal running speed in cloak. I am at +85% in PvP and keep up with streaking sorcs there.

Valykc

You’d get even more Regen if you go vampire with supernatural recovery passive right? Or have they changed that since I came back to the game?

Major_Lag

Update:
I've put together a watered-down version of this build on Live server, got up to about 4.5k mag recovery that way, mostly by reusing various sets I already had lying around in my storage.
Then I went to Craglorn a few times and did some serious farming in representative conditions; both in primetime as well as during early morning when it's fairly empty in there.

Over the usual between-node distances, it is THE fastest means of movement available, bar none.

Based on my testing, I'd say that 4k mag recovery is the bare minimum for Streak farming to be actually viable. When my buff food ran out and mag recovery dropped to ~2.5k, I would immediately notice that without even looking at the buff tracker.
Having higher max magicka helps offset the lower mag recovery, to some degree at least, but only 2.5k recovery is just not viable.

It was VERY satisfying to sucessfully "race" other farmers to nodes; a few times I've had others just give up halfway on their way to the node and turn around right away, when they realized they can't possibly make it in time
Especially since I can easily Streak over many obstacles and bodies of water.

fred4 wrote: »

I am at +85% in PvP and keep up with streaking sorcs there.

PvP is different, in there you can't do stupid things like build for >6k mag recovery and still expect to be capable of surviving, let alone doing any actual fighting.
Also the PvP Sorcs have to actually manage their resources so as not to be "caught with their pants down" so to speak, whereas for farming you can safely drain all your magicka with a 7x Streak penalty stack and not worry about it.

fred4 wrote: »

Have you considered Prisoner's? Should work on magsorc or stamsorc. Streak, streak, streak, then sprint with sprint cost reduction and gain magicka back.

Based on my testing with regular sustain sets, Prisoner's would not be useful for Streak farming.
I was not sprinting nearly as much as I expected I would be, and in any case the resulting regen would be far inferior to what I obtain passively by using sustain sets.
The Sprint cost reduction is also not needed: sprinting for 4 seconds hardly costs anything since the recent Sprint mechanic overhaul.

Gundug

This seems like a nice setup for a relatively level ground place like Craglorn. I think being able to jump over certain obstacles is probably one of the stronger aspects of using streak.

I would say that for horse based farming, only the mounting up time is slow due to animation. Dismounting is instantaneous by crouching directly into a sprint a tiny distance from any node. I’ve run against sprint speed harvesters, and while they do get the jump over a short distance, it’s not very far before they are left behind. I have never compared against someone streaking overland.

Major_Lag

Gundug wrote: »

This seems like a nice setup for a relatively level ground place like Craglorn. I think being able to jump over certain obstacles is probably one of the stronger aspects of using streak.

Yes, it works quite well for rapidly crossing many bodies of water.
Also, I've noticed that I can Streak successfully through some ground geometry that looks like it should stop me dead in my tracks (some rocks, debris, etc.) - flaky collision detection? Works in my favor though, so I'm not complaining

Gundug wrote: »

I would say that for horse based farming, only the mounting up time is slow due to animation. Dismounting is instantaneous by crouching directly into a sprint a tiny distance from any node.

Correct, a fully maxed horse (with Rapids) is second only to Streak in terms of the resulting ground speed, quite a bit faster than the maximum possible (hard capped) on-foot sprint speed.

Gundug wrote: »

I’ve run against sprint speed harvesters, and while they do get the jump over a short distance, it’s not very far before they are left behind. I have never compared against someone streaking overland.

When considering distances of 90 meters or less, on relatively flat ground (no significant downhill drops or steep uphill slopes), Streak wins by a long shot if using consecutive Streaks every GCD.
There's also the benefit that you waste no time waiting for the mounting animation - you can be on the move again immediately after harvesting the node.

For distances >90 meters, it's not practical - or even possible for >105 meters - to Streak consecutively without sprinting for 4 seconds to reset the Streak penalty periodically; in practice this results in about 15-20% speed penalty vs using a horse (averaged over a very long distance).

However, as it happens, I found that the vast majority of my trips between nodes in Craglorn were short enough to ignore the Streak cost penalty stacking.

Also, incidentally, the distance between nearby nodes is often such that 1/2/3 Streaks will land you almost exactly on the next node.... coincidence?

Finally... arguably, farming is an activity which is inherently rather low on the "fun" scale; for me this is a great way of making farming fun again

malistorr

Boundless Storm

30% speed increase and you can listen to that annoying grunt/growl/moan/yell/howl thing over and over again...