This will be long but should be informative for those with the patience to bear with it.
I've been a Min/Maxer in every game I've played so the opportunity to do some testing on PTS where there are no embedded diminishing returns on stats and being able to spend legendary enchants and craft gear, as well as reset skills and champion points without consideration to expense was a perfect opportunity for me to find the next build that I will use.
My first approach was using the same relative build and playstyle that I use in live. I found some success against many of the players but overall I found I was less effective less survivable than I am on live. I wasn't able to effectively fighting multiple players at once and come out on top unless they were really bad players. Part of the success behind my survivability on live is having a large health pool. 3600 hitpoints ensures you don't get burst down and when I switch to my sword and board my defenses are decent against physical damage and unlike while using spell shields your armor means something, especially with a shield equipped. On live the benefits of health with it's 50% bonus (on gear and enchants) was well worth it when the alternative was a far less substantial increase to magicka since it was so easy to hit the soft cap without trying. I designed my stats to stay just under the magicka softcap and dump everything else into health. Basic min/max philosophy. Also keep in my mind that my impenetrable was eliminating the majority of crits against me on live, while on test the same gear was only reducing the bonus damage of crits against me by a relatively small number.
Another big change a sorc will find between live and PTS is you can't dodge roll nearly as much and doing so will run you out of stamina fast. This is also a key to my survivability and I found that my inability to dodge roll as much when needed was getting me killed. People always think that Bolt Escape is all you need to survive as a sorc but knowing when to dodge roll while escaping is what often separates a living sorc from a dead one. When you run out of stamina and are stunned on PTS with multiple people attacking you you will die almost instantly.
Initially with Champion points I took a spread out approach. I tried to maximize the effectiveness of my point spend by putting 5-10 points into each of the abilities that had a benefit that was useful to me so I would get the most overall benefit from my point spend. Magicka reduction, Dodge roll reduction, Elemental Damage, Magick Damage, Crit damage reduction, Crit Damage, Elemental Damage reduction, Magick damage reduction, Spell Piercing, Spell Resistance. I had the "Champion Point Sampler" and while I was getting decent benefits out of a ton of abilities, it just wasn't very impactful.
Next I got an EP friend to meet with me and we did some serious testing of the game mechanics, of champion points, of *everything*. For 3-4 hours I tested about every assumption I had of how the game worked (or used to that is) and broke out the relative math behind the mechanics. Now I'm not going to share all of my discoveries as you'll have to do testing of your own if you want to understand everything but I will share some of the major things I discovered and my observations.
The first thing to understand is that the protection offered by light armor is worthless. When people do damage to your health whether with spells or physical damage they will do full damage to you or close enough that it doesn't matter. You can max out points in damage reduction abilities, and crit damage reduction abilities, add those to your impenetrable and you're not going to make a noticeable difference.
So I switched gears and did something that I've always found to be somewhat foolish in the past. I dumped every shred of stat points, enchants and gear into Magicka at the expense of health. If our actual defenses in light armor are going to be worthless why bother trying to bolster them? Plus health was seriously nerfed with the loss of bonus stats (used to be +50%) and the removal of the magicka cap. We already have access to an ability that *can't be crit* so why waste champion points and traits on your armor making the crit damage done to you smaller? This same ability can't be affected by armor, can't have the damage done to it reduced so why not instead focus on making it as powerful as possible? I'm talking about Conjured Ward and to a lesser extent Healing Ward and Harness Magicka. The sorc's Shield-stacking Trifecta. With all 3 shields active I was able to absorb between 22-40K points of damage depending on my health and the damage type.
I tested this shield stacking out while assaulting a keep. I was able to bolt through the front door with *every* NPC focused on me, made it all the way upstairs, through the archers back down stairs on the opposite side and all the way back out the front door with relatively little risk. On live if I had tried this I would almost certainly be dead.
In combat with other players I was able to take several players beating on me without breaking through my shields or putting a serious strain on my mana. All the while by maximizing my magicka I was increasing my damage and freeing up valuable champion points for other more useful abilities like damage. I made certain to only use my stamina on break-free and used the immunity provided after instead of using unstoppable or blocking.
This brings me to my next observation. As a Sorc at least, Crit damage bonus points are far less useful than bonus damage points themselves and unlike Crit damage bonus, base damage can't be reduced by crit damage reduction abilities and traits.
The downside is that as a sorc we're faced with a painful choice for damage abilities. We can choose between a constellation that gives us bonus to our elemental damage (Fire, frost and shock) and has some great perks like 12% Spell crit and 100% crit after blocking 3 spells(decent and with timing can be lined up with a boosted crystal fragment proc) or a constellation that increases our magick damage which includes fragments, curse, and a host of other non-elemental damage. The downside is the perks in the magick damage constellation are practically worthless.
I chose to go 30 into the elemental damage to get the 12% crit perk and 15 into the magic damage ability. This coupled with my gearing choices and mundus stone allowed me to crit players with a "boosted" crystal fragment for 14K. By boosted I mean a Fragment proc that gets a native 20% damage boost, Empower from refreshing my magelight, and a Major Sorcery buff. You can get major sorcery from Entropy, Spell Power Potions, or Surge.
Using this and some other findings I found I was able to burst people down easier and with greater survivability than in live. I'm pretty happy with what I've seen so far. I've chosen to keep a few of my findings to myself but I'll share some other things I noticed with specific abilities.
- The benefit provided by Minor Breach (final light armor passive) is practically useless compared to what it used to provide in penetration.
- Entropy Spell power bonus is great, but it doesn't stack with the bonus provided by a spell power potion/Surge and the dot ticks (I'm pretty certain) use up the Empower buff provided by casting a mage ability.
- Power Surge doesn't have an increase duration on the tooltip but the ability still seems to last for 40 seconds (I couldn't use a spell power pot for 40 seconds after casting PS).
- Ultimate generation is far slower compared to live. (The nice thing about this is there is now even less of a reason to focus on crit than ever. Most people wont be using Crit surge for healing and without the bonus ult and relatively more expensive cost of adding crit in PTS, going spellpower and bonus damage is far more powerful)
- Dark Exchange - I don't like the new mobile version, the old version was much easier to break after a single tick (sometimes your stamina was at 100% and your magicka was something less and it made sense to use a tick). With magicka seeming to last much longer and stamina being more valuable I find myself using this much less...I may end up replacing it with another ability on my bar.
- Impenetrable Trait - Just to Reiterate Impenetrable even at Legendary status is no longer really useful for a shield stacker. 100 Penetration rating reduces the Crit bonus damage done to you by 1.563%. This means that if someone crits you with a 5000 damage ability where they normally would normally do 7500 damage they now do 7422 damage. The reduction is linear so the effectiveness against people stacking crit damage will never increase or be reduced, it is just a flat modifier. I'd much rather have an extra 250 magicka or so from an Infused trait on my large pieces at very least. On small pieces it may make sense to go for divines depending on the mundus you choose. Remember shields cannot be crit so impenetrable doesn't help you while your shields are up.
- Power overload - in 1.61 it is getting a 50% *base* damage increase. This is just disgusting to those of us stacking magicka/spell power. I'll post some testing numbers when I get home.
- Spell Cost Reduction Formulas (lots of maths) - Figuring out how additional cost reduction will affect you is no longer easy or clear. I've been able to create a formula that fits the model within a couple of spell points but it isn't exact like my understanding of this on live. From my testing I've determined that each spell now has a base cost that can't be reduced. This base cost is anywhere between 11-14% of the actual cost of the spell. To figure out what a spell will cost you'll need to figure this base number out. For Bolt Escape for example the base number is 411. So if you take the base cost of the spell (3351) and subtract 411 from it you get the reducible portion of the spell (2940). Multiply this by 1 - .x where X is your total spell cost reduction percentage (excluding the champion reduction which I'll get to). As a sorc wearing full light armor you'll automatically get 36% reduction to your lightning spells so 2940 * .64 = 1881.6. You then add your unreducible cost to this total (411) to get 2293. Many of these numbers I are fractions so the actual cost is 2294. Now if you have 5% reduction from champion points you'd subtract this percentage from this cost so you'd be at 2179. Champion point reduction is calculated after the base cost reduction calculations are done so it is point per point less powerful than those things. Jewelry enchant reductions are another matter altogether. I think I have to modeled out but it is so complicated I'm assuming that the true calculation is much more simple and need to test more. On live I have 3 pieces of jewelry with spell cost reduction. 2 pieces are pre-1.5 patch before VR14 enchants existed which bumped the *tooltip* from 20 to 21 spell cost reduction yet this isn't reflected in the actual reduction of spells. When these items transferred over to PTS the -20 reduction converted to -188 reduction and the -21 converted to -200 reduction yet they ALL provided -211-212 cost reduction per enchant. Basically you can't trust tool tips with any reliability any more (if you ever could). I'm starting to suspect that instead of truly converting every item to a true 1.6 item they just ran some conversion scripts with health/magicka/stat multipliers against every stat and item in the database which turned whole integers into a lot of fractional numbers. This will ensure that an already inefficient code base will run even slower as floating point calculations are expensive. Just my theory from what I've seen of the changes so far.
I'll continue adding to this thread as more information becomes available to me.
Permanently banned from the forums for displaying dissent:
ESO - The Year Behind
Too Much Bolt Escape - banned for "hacking the game to create movement not otherwise permitted by in game mechanics."
Ezareth VR16 AD Sorc - Rank 36 - Axe NA
Ezareth-Ali VR16 DC NB - Rank 20 - Chillrend NA
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