Sorc 1.6.3 Preview (From Livestream)

Snit

Wrobel addressed Sorc changes in the upcoming PTS patch. Three major points:

Lightning Splash duration will be increased. The two morphs will be six and ten seconds, respectively. That is their solution to increasing sorc sustained DPS without increasing burst. PvE gets buffed without impacting PvP in a significant way.

Next, he said the Expert Mage passive will change. It will now increase spellpower for each class ability slotted on the hotbar. This will scale our nukes, but not our pets (pets do not scale with spellpower, only max magicka)

I think these are both clever buffs. We'll see if they're sufficient, but I like the careful thought process. If the spellpower buff is sufficient, that alone will make our class skills outshine Mage Guild abilities with duplicative effects. Maybe

Last, Damage Shields will be nerfed 15% in Cyrodiil, and they can (probably) be critcally hit.

Nothing for stamina sorcs, though.

He also mentioned the Crushing Shock nerf. He believes the Force Shock morph gives you the 10% damage back, making this good for PvE. It does not, however. That's now a bug (and it does not appear they know of it).

Other Points:

- Light Armor is about to get more spell penetration. PvE monsters have changed, too, so they now have significant armor and spell resist to penetrate
- Sorcs are not getting a new, instant nuke. Crystal Shard and its morphs are meant to be it. He thinks it will be more useable in Cyrodiil as people move away from Crushing Shock
- They will keep looking at the AoE damage pets take in boss fights. It's conceivable that pets could become immune to it, if they are eating too much of the area heals.

Lussura

Sadly this fixed nothing.

Flaminir

Well its been quite a show.... I win the Nord figurine ... and then some Sorc buffs (Kinda).

Not 100% sure how I feel about these yet... I think we'll need to see what the passive increase is for the spell power, and exactly how lightning splash works in practice...

The passive idea is a good one...

But the fact they think Frags is meant to be our spammable damage ability in PvE is worrying.

And good to hear about light armor getting a buff too from a DPS perspective.

The shield thing.... I think we got away lightly there... they could have nerfed hardened ward on its own, at least its all damage shields not just ours.

EDIT: Having now thought about all the announced changes.... seems more nerfs than any useful buffs.... the only good thing was their willingness to want to do something.... they're just still getting that 'something' wrong!

Snit

My own comments and concerns:

- Does Eric Wrobel think that Crystal Fragments can proc itself? It sounded like he does. It can't
- Similarly, Eric thinks that Force Pulse gets a damage buff relative to Crushing Shock or the base skill, Force Shock. It does not, at least not at rank 1.
- The Expert Mage spellpower buff has to compete with the excellent mage guild passives. I wonder if they'll be aggressive enough to make that happen. Otherwise, all the mage guild skills that duplicate sorc spells will remain supreme
- Eric mumbled through some stuff on damage shields. It sounds like they can be critically hit now. If so, that's probably the last time I can handle PvP one-on-one folks I can handle. There are other ways to spend one's time

I did think the buffs were well thought out. They're managing to buff nuke specs without making pets even more powerful. We just don't know how much yet.

XEVENEX

I respect him for doing that. To be honest, as long as they fix shard procs on streak and encase, I think I'll be ok with Sorc in 1.6.

@ZOS Please fix that, and reconsider the damage shield nerf.

Oughash

These are good, steadier-paced changes than they have made previously.

I think the 15% dmg shield reduction for Cyrodiil will help a little. Guess I'll have to fuss around and see.

Snit

XEVENEX wrote: »

I respect him for doing that. To be honest, as long as they fix shard procs on streak and encase, I'll be ok with Sorc in 1.6.

He didn't mention that.

I hope a whole bunch of us /bug'd it.

Gyudan

Snit wrote: »

Lightning Splash duration will be increased. The two morphs will be six and ten seconds, respectively. That is their solution to increasing sorc sustained DPS without increasing burst. PvE gets buffed without impacting PvP in a significant way.

1.6.3 Sorcerer preview:

/splash
Lady Elariel used SPLASH.
But nothing happened!

Nihil

Lussura wrote: »

Sadly this fixed nothing.

.... this has the potential to be very helpful. We will get a boost to a skill that can work great against stationary boss'.

Spell power also increases all our abilities and make us better with staves and mage guild skills. This could be really nice for magicka sorcs. Stamina sorcs are getting minimual love (although thundering presence will now deal slightly more damage).

Snit

One nice thing about the Lightning Splash buff: Unlike Impulse, you can put Splash on your Overload bar. Now, it may be worth doing so.

olsborg

Id like to see the cast time on twilight greatly reduced, with how fast it dies, you cant keep resummoning it for 1.5 seconds every 5 seconds, you end up just not using it after a while.

Dracane

Snit wrote: »

- Sorcs are not getting a new, instant nuke. Crystal Shard and its morphs are meant to be it. He thinks it will be more useable in Cyrodiil as people move away from Crushing Shock
.

Uhm wait, what ? O.o So they want us to ignore crushing shock ? Uhm.... yes.....
Crystal shard is never going to replace anything.

angelyn

Snit wrote: »

Wrobel addressed Sorc changes in the upcoming PTS patch. Three major points:

Lightning Splash duration will be increased. The two morphs will be six and ten seconds, respectively. That is their solution to increasing sorc sustained DPS without increasing burst. PvE gets buffed without impacting PvP in a significant way.

Next, he said the Expert Mage passive will change. It will now increase spellpower for each class ability slotted on the hotbar. This will scale our nukes, but not our pets (pets do not scale with spellpower, only max magicka)

I think these are both clever buffs. We'll see if they're sufficient, but I like the careful thought process. If the spellpower buff is sufficient, that alone will make our class skills outshine Mage Guild abilities with duplicative effects. Maybe

Thanks @Snit for summing these up, and to @ZOS for listening to feedbaack:D I would be interested to know by how much our spell power is increased by slotting something from the storm calling line. Do we know if they added this to the cost reduction or replaced the cost reduction with it? I feel excited to try out the changes..I mean I will try anything at the moment!

Snit wrote: »

He also mentioned the Crushing Shock nerf. He believes the Force Shock morph gives you the 10% damage back, making this good for PvE. It does not, however. That's now a bug (and it does not appear they know of it).

Clearly as you say he is unaware of it, I even remember seeing people suggest splitting the morphs so that one has extra damage and one has an interrupt. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.

Snit wrote: »

Light Armor is about to get more spell penetration. PvE monsters have changed, too, so they now have significant armor and spell resist to penetrate

Light armor was struggling already, so if they added spell penetration as well as spell resistance to mobs that evens out, then light armour will still struggle..if that makes sense. (since we are saying it needs more now when mobs have less armour/spell penetration)

Snit wrote: »

- Sorcs are not getting a new, instant nuke. Crystal Shard and its morphs are meant to be it. He thinks it will be more useable in Cyrodiil as people move away from Crushing Shock-

I have to say that this was perhaps the most dissapointing to hear, since I don't believe that Crystal shards is an instant cast. I know he mentioned curse, but that's not an instant damage ability either. Even with the 10% nerf to crushing shock, I doubt many people will replace it with Crystal Shard.However, if force pulse is indeed suffering from a bug- and should have 10% more damage then this isn't too bad as we can still rely on our trusty ole' favourite.

Also one slightly negative final point. I know it is a large corporation and there are multiple teams. However, the lead combat guy(who is designing our pets and pet related skills)had to speak to the team creating bosses, since he did't realise that it is still a problem with bosses targeting pets and certain heals being taken up by pets.

It just seems a little sad, that the guy designing all of our combat skills has not taken all of the factors in combat into consideration, and shockingly even the most basic factor such as how the boss/healings would interact with sorc pets. His advice was to use certain heals to help players and other heals for pets. How many raid leaders will take along a pet sorc if their healer has now 1 more thing to concentrate on and that is the heals-workaround for the pet sorc? They will just drop the sorc since it will make the healer's life a nightmare.

This only leads me to think that the Combat team who design all of our skills, may work in isolation to the other teams (Boss team/End game PVE Team?), testing on single target dummies for PVE and testing within PVP which I mentioned in another thread:

angelyn wrote: »

I have a sneaking suspicion that devs test any balance changes only in PVP or on a single PVE target. Hence why they said in ESO live that pet build was giving massive DPS but "not king of DPS", and why no one considered how sorc dps is supposed to AOE trash mobs with no armour,no AOE skill as no space on bar due to toggles, and no block casting as our stamina drains to 0 in like a few seconds when blocking.

This would also explain why Paul Sage/Chris Strasz said in the recent Q&A that basically some people will always complain, when the subject of sorcerers was raised.Perhaps he's only thinking of how amazing sorcs are in PVP. Also I've yet to hear a dev say that sorc is their favourite class,when I've heard numerous times how much dk is fav class. (I'm not shouting for nerf of other classes). Maybe they just need to roll a sorcerer and see if they can dps an ENTIRE dungeon/trial successfully, with our only viable build-the toggle mancer,that relies on a set that only goes up to VR12,has sturdy on each piece and has just taken a nerf (Necropotence).

Again perhaps a more cohesive approach is needed between the combat team and the other teams since that would certainly help the situation.Or hell- why not go really crazy and get the Boss Team and the Combat Team to run dungeons together to test out any changes :P

However overall, I am interested to have a look at the sorcerer changes.

XEVENEX

The expert mage change seems more of a nerf to the cost of streak and its morphs. I guess we will have to wait and see.

Tamanous

Lussura wrote: »

Sadly this fixed nothing.

Magicka sorc complaint: Not enough dps.

These changes add spell power, more layered damage to increase dps and the destro staff ability (which evidently EVERY sorc in the game thinks is a core sorc ability) may be bugged and not as bad many think once fixed.

Each one of those changes increased dps. Changes always come each and every patch too.

What is your complaint again?

RinaldoGandolphi

Its not all bad, those changes should help.

However the damage shield Nerf is going to hurt bad.

I ran into guys like pact mender on the pts who was able to chew through my shields as fast as I could cast them, and this was before the Nerf.

The damage shield Nerf was brought on by certain night made builds whining they could dps a hardened ward user down in 2 seconds.

You can still be cc, stunned, etc behind a damage shield, they didn't make us unkillable by a long shot.

All this does is make sorcs even squisier and will force us to rely more on bolt escape even more.

I can bolt escape either 17 or 18 times on pts with the standard champ points, if I can do it, so can others.

How long now before they cry to re-Nerf bolt escape? 2 days after it goes live? A week? Because folks are crazy if they think I won't be spamming blinky blink because I sure as hell am not going to stick around behind needed shields and let folks kill me.

I'm sure other sorcs will come to the same conclusion, hope folks like chasing......

Vis

Not holding my breath. They have not specified how much spell power per skill. If it's 1-2% it would actually be a nerf and not a buff.

Dracane

I doubt, a 4 meter radius ability is going to be the big solution, we were looking for.

Vis

Tamanous wrote: »

Lussura wrote: »

Sadly this fixed nothing.

Magicka sorc complaint: Not enough dps.

These changes add spell power, more layered damage to increase dps and the destro staff ability (which evidently EVERY sorc in the game thinks is a core sorc ability) may be bugged and not as bad many think once fixed.

Each one of those changes increased dps. Changes always come each and every patch too.

What is your complaint again?

Again, we don't know yet. To implement the passive they will be removing the cost reduction. The change may actually hurt sorcs more if the % per skill is too low.

Snit

Vis wrote: »

Not holding my breath. They have not specified how much spell power per skill. If it's 1-2% it would actually be a nerf and not a buff.

I hope they remember it has to be superior to Might of the Guild and Magicka Controller. If we want Critical Surge, Lightning Splash, Dark Conversion and the like to be better than Entropy, Fire Rune and Symmetry, then Expert Mage has to beat those excellent Mage Guild passives.

Vis

Snit wrote: »

Vis wrote: »

Not holding my breath. They have not specified how much spell power per skill. If it's 1-2% it would actually be a nerf and not a buff.

I hope they remember it has to be superior to Might of the Guild and Magicka Controller. If we want Critical Surge, Lightning Splash, Dark Conversion and the like to be better than Entropy, Fire Rune and Symmetry, then Expert Mage has to beat those excellent Mage Guild passives.

Agreed ... a part of me is pessimistic though.

Emma_Overload

Nothing about Critical Surge and the cooldown?

Snit

Emma_Eunjung wrote: »

Nothing about Critical Surge and the cooldown?

Nope.

Get used to spamming Conjured Ward

Vis

One of my big issues is how much spell damage really increases our dps.

Testing with a full magicka build (3178):

4.9% increase in spell damage only correlates to a 1.5% increase in fragment damage

The passive would have to be HUGE to justify the loss of passives/damage from other skill lines.

Elemental drain alone would make a much larger impact than an almost 40% increase in spell damage.

Dracane

I expect the passive to give us 5% more spell damage per slotted Sorcerer ability (or however this is supposed to scale) Everything below that, is probably not worth it.

Pancake-Tragedy

I felt like my question was a good one, and went unanswered and instead they made fun of my name

Edit: to clarify, I asked for a ranged instant-cast single target class ability. Eric replied with: "Well you have the instant proc cast for crystal fragments"

Dracane

Another thing: Why don't they implement a small shock damage buff to Surge ? Entropy also applies a DoT. Surge should make our attacks deal shock damage on each attack. Only as much to be on par with Entropy.

For those who forgot about it:

Surge:

-Increases Spell damage by 20%
-40% of critical strikes is added as health (crits against blocking targets and Damage shields is not impossible, impenetrable lowers the healing)
- has 9 seconds longer duration than Entropy
- Costs a huge amount of Magicka.

Entropy:

Increases Spell damage by 20%
-Deals damage over time
-Recovers health every few seconds
-Increases max health by 8(?)% or 15% on hit to get 115% of weapon attack damage as health
-Increases max Magicka by 2%
-Increases max Magicka regen by 2%
-After activation, next spell deals more damage
-Costs almost nothing

So yeah.... no comment needed.

Snit

Pancake-Tragedy wrote: »

I felt like my question was a good one, and went unanswered and instead they made fun of my name

Edit: to clarify, I asked for a ranged instant-class single target class ability. Eric replied with: "Well you have the instant proc cast for crystal fragments"

Well, he did answer it, it was just "No."

And your name is awesome.

Dracane

Pancake-Tragedy wrote: »

I felt like my question was a good one, and went unanswered and instead they made fun of my name

Edit: to clarify, I asked for a ranged instant-class single target class ability. Eric replied with: "Well you have the instant proc cast for crystal fragments"

'Hugs you warmly' poor one

Emma_Overload

Although not strictly Sorc-related, I noticed that Eric did NOT answer that guy's question about the Spellscar grinding nerf. He just started talking about "enlightenment" blah blah blah. What about people who actually play every day? Where is the XP going to come from?

Ezareth

Snit wrote: »

Wrobel addressed Sorc changes in the upcoming PTS patch. Three major points:

Lightning Splash duration will be increased. The two morphs will be six and ten seconds, respectively. That is their solution to increasing sorc sustained DPS without increasing burst. PvE gets buffed without impacting PvP in a significant way.

Next, he said the Expert Mage passive will change. It will now increase spellpower for each class ability slotted on the hotbar. This will scale our nukes, but not our pets (pets do not scale with spellpower, only max magicka)

I think these are both clever buffs. We'll see if they're sufficient, but I like the careful thought process. If the spellpower buff is sufficient, that alone will make our class skills outshine Mage Guild abilities with duplicative effects. Maybe

Last, Damage Shields will be nerfed 15% in Cyrodiil.

Nothing for stamina sorcs, though.

He also mentioned the Crushing Shock nerf. He believes the Force Shock morph gives you the 10% damage back, making this good for PvE. It does not, however. That's now a bug (and it does not appear they know of it).

Other Points:

- Light Armor is about to get more spell penetration. PvE monsters have changed, too, so they now have significant armor and spell resist to penetrate
- Sorcs are not getting a new, instant nuke. Crystal Shard and its morphs are meant to be it. He thinks it will be more useable in Cyrodiil as people move away from Crushing Shock
- They will keep looking at the AoE damage pets take in boss fights. It's conceivable that pets could become immune to it, if they are eating too much of the area heals.

So Bolt Escape is receiving a 16% base cost increase nerf and the penalized version(+50%) is receiving a 9% cost increase nerf.

Mages wrath is receiving a 16% base cost increase nerf.

Lightning Splash is going to last longer but cost 16% more.

All of our Damage shields are receiving a 15% nerf that are even more necessary in 1.6.

In return we're going to receive a spell power buff of unknown strength for using the same class abilities that they just nerfed and Light Armor is getting more Spell Penetration when spell penetration is already next to useless.

Brilliant!

And this was meant to address "Issues" with Sorcs? I'm so looking forward to going backwards even further in 1.6....