Sorc 1.6.3 Preview (From Livestream)

Ezareth

woodsro wrote: »

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......

They just did nerf it.

angelyn

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"

I know..:( but maybe force shock is being fixed? or perhaps I could mail you a bottle of syrup?:)

ezareth_ESO wrote: »

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....

They better not be replacing the current expert mage cost reduction! They should add the spell power bonus to it. Otherwise how is this a buff, when you take something away? If you have 1 and you add 1 but then minus 1...you still end up WITH 1! That is not an addition, that's "you asked for extra so we added some and took away some, so now you have exactly the same as before but you should feel better because we gave you some"

Nihil

ezareth_ESO wrote: »

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!

A post from beginning of January I think, I don't believe it got into Patch notes, or else they missed it.

Castle wrote: »

Armor and Spell Resistance on MOBs is set pretty low on the LIVE servers, being ~10% mitigation at a given level.

For patch 1.6 we're going to be changing this to help make abilities which debuff these stats more meaningful. The base mitigation a Mob will have due to Armor or Spell Resistance will be increased to 18%. Additionally, in general, Mage type mobs will have twice the base Spell Resistance while Tank type mobs have twice the base Armor value. Skirmisher type mobs had 1/3 higher value than base in both. Specific mobs, particularly "Boss" style mobs, may have their own individual modifiers and can have more or less mitigation.

Hope this info helps!

Aimelin

no one uses lightning splash in pvp, i don't wanna play the pet game, and now a nerf to dmg shields? guess they all want everyone switching from light armor to heavy armor, grab a sword & shield and not kill eachother sounds like fun

Gyudan

Dracane wrote: »

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.

This is the #1 issue for sorcerers at the moment in my opinion.
Surge is overpowered by Entropy and Momentum. We lost our class-defining ability...

Vis

Dracane wrote: »

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.

Even then, it's not much. 5 skills would be 25% spell damage buff which would be less than a 7% increase in dps (if you're pure magicka build).

Dracane

Does anyone else think, the armor values of Bound armor is way too low ?
I have just tested, how low 960 armor is. The enemy was dealing 1983 damage without me having bound armor activated and 1964 with me having bound armor activated. This is very poor in my opinion.

The funny thing is, even in 1.5, it gave us 1000 armor and now in 1.6 even less, even though it should be increased just like everything else.

OtarTheMad

Saw the nerf to damage shields coming, called it even in other threads telling Sorcs to be ready and have a backup build. Makes it really hard to roll a Sorc in PvP with the damage people can put on you so quickly.

I hope people made a backup build for their Sorc because without a good self-heal we're basically the easiest target in PvP for an easy kill. It just means that Bolt Escape will be more important and an almost must have on all Sorcs.

angelyn

Dracane wrote: »

Does anyone else think, the armor values of Bound armor is way too low ?
I have just tested, how low 960 armor is. The enemy was dealing 1983 damage without me having bound armor activated and 1964 with me having bound armor activated. This is very poor in my opinion.

The funny thing is, even in 1.5, it gave us 1000 armor and now in 1.6 even less, even though it should be increased just like everything else.

Absolutely! that means it scaled negatively?

Perhaps they didn't want scale bound armor positively since the LA scaling at 1:2 vs MA/HA scaling at 1:4 wasn't a big enough nerf.

Dracane

Vis wrote: »

Dracane wrote: »

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.

Even then, it's not much. 5 skills would be 25% spell damage buff which would be less than a 7% increase in dps (if you're pure magicka build).

I agree. I don't wanted to be greedy and I don't wanted to exagerrate.
We shouldn't expect too much. If Zenimax is going to give Sorcerers a SERIOUS buff, I'm going to accept Talos as a god. And nothing of this is going to happen

We should be lowering our expectations for the passive.

Snit

Aimelin wrote: »

no one uses lightning splash in pvp, i don't wanna play the pet game, and now a nerf to dmg shields? guess they all want everyone switching from light armor to heavy armor, grab a sword & shield and not kill eachother sounds like fun

All that is true, but that's exactly what they're trying for:

- We get a sustained DPS buff for stationary targets (mostly applies in PvE)
- We get a spellpower buff, to increase our nukes but not pets
- We get a moderate survivability nerf for PvP

It's really about making us better for endgame PvE content while nerfing us a bit for PvP. And it should make nuker builds able to compete with pet builds.

It really all depends on the numbers in the Expert Mage passive.

CP5

Just want to throw this idea out there, not sure how well it would work in game but. What if, like NB's have Refreshing Shadows for 30% stamina regen, sorcs got Capacitor buffed to be a 30% magicka regen passive?

Dracane

CP5 wrote: »

Just want to throw this idea out there, not sure how well it would work in game but. What if, like NB's have Refreshing Shadows for 30% stamina regen, sorcs got Capacitor buffed to be a 30% magicka regen passive?

*-* I want

Vis

Snit wrote: »

Aimelin wrote: »

no one uses lightning splash in pvp, i don't wanna play the pet game, and now a nerf to dmg shields? guess they all want everyone switching from light armor to heavy armor, grab a sword & shield and not kill eachother sounds like fun

All that is true, but that's exactly what they're trying for:

- We get a sustained DPS buff for stationary targets (mostly applies in PvE)
- We get a spellpower buff, to increase our nukes but not pets
- We get a moderate survivability nerf for PvP

It's really about making us better for endgame PvE content while nerfing us a bit for PvP. And it should make nuker builds able to compete with pet builds.

It really all depends on the numbers in the Expert Mage passive.

Though seriously, it won't be a buff to our nukes unless its over 10% spell damage per skill ... which is not likely. So ultimately it's a nerf because it hits our costs.

Dracane

I have just watched again the show. and it seems like, crits against damage shields are possible in 1.6.3 (so 15% less shield AND crits against shields. We are so dead)

Because Eric said, Surge will now provide heals against damage shields (same goes for the NB thing and such things)

Lussura

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

Nihil

Vis wrote: »

Dracane wrote: »

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.

Even then, it's not much. 5 skills would be 25% spell damage buff which would be less than a 7% increase in dps (if you're pure magicka build).

The DPS increase will be relative to the stat you focus on (magicka or spell power). As was shown early on in PTS dps is (ABILITY + POWER × 10.46) × COEF. Thus if you have say 28k magicka and 2k Power, then add in the 25 % buff from passives (2.5k spell power) and assuming that it is additive we will go up to 3k spell power, (skipping math) this will bring us to a 9.6 % increase in dps. If we lower the magicka to 20k (purly to show the difference) and keep spell power that player will get a 11.3 % increase in dps. So the more a player would focus on spell power over magicka atrribute the stronger it will be. Better then the mage guild passive typicaly of 4 % damage increase (for the 20k and 2k comparison)

RinaldoGandolphi

ezareth_ESO wrote: »

woodsro wrote: »

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......

They just did nerf it.

Damn your right I forgot were losing the expert mage cost reduction....oh my...that really really sucks....

Khivas_Carrick

Damn you guys got gypped. I am sorry people.

XEVENEX

They said that surge will now proc on shielded targets. This implies shields can now be critically hit. If this is true shields just took a massive nerf, and should at least benefit from mitigation to compensate.

After thinking about the changes and watching the stream, I retract my hopeful outlook. Eric couldnt even remember the name of the skill he just nerfed, crushing shock. He thinks hard casting shards is actually viable in pvp etc. It's pretty scary. He might be a great programmer, but as a programmer myself, we dont always make the best "combat designers".

This is very disappointing. This game has so much potential, but their design schedules and choices are going to kill it.

Snit

XEVENEX wrote: »

They said that surge will now proc on shielded targets. This implies shields can now be critically hit. If this is true shields just took a massive nerf, and should at least benefit from mitigation to compensate.

He kinda mumbled through that. If shields can be critically hit, then.. well, whatever. Life is full of choices.

XEVENEX

Yeah, like which game to play instead.

danno8

Dracane wrote: »

Does anyone else think, the armor values of Bound armor is way too low ?
I have just tested, how low 960 armor is. The enemy was dealing 1983 damage without me having bound armor activated and 1964 with me having bound armor activated. This is very poor in my opinion.

The funny thing is, even in 1.5, it gave us 1000 armor and now in 1.6 even less, even though it should be increased just like everything else.

I worked out the math a few days ago, 1% damage reduction is around 650 armour give or take.

So you are talking about taking up a whole slot for 1.5% DR. That is terrible. Thundering gives 5000 which is a respectable 7-8% at least.

Snit

XEVENEX wrote: »

After thinking about the changes and watching the stream, I retract my hopeful outlook. Eric couldnt even remember the name of the skill he just nerfed, crushing shock. He thinks hard casting shards is actually viable in pvp etc

Yeah, I'm there, too. The fact that, once again, a couple of PvP complainers got the sorc class nerfed is just... well, grrr.

Derra

OtarTheMad wrote: »

Saw the nerf to damage shields coming, called it even in other threads telling Sorcs to be ready and have a backup build. Makes it really hard to roll a Sorc in PvP with the damage people can put on you so quickly.

I hope people made a backup build for their Sorc because without a good self-heal we're basically the easiest target in PvP for an easy kill. It just means that Bolt Escape will be more important and an almost must have on all Sorcs.

15% is nothing really. It´s to satisfy the whiners. If shields can be critically hit then i see no reason why zos should not allow shields to be critically cast aswell to make up for it.

The cost increase to streak and mages fury is far more concerning in my opinion.

OtarTheMad

If they did what we all think we did to damage shields... I... I just don't know what to think anymore.

Derra

Well crit- and sneakattackable dmg shields will be something thats going to hurt.
Heavy Armor it is then.

Asgari

Goodbye magicka builds hello stam builds.

Dracane

The 15% nerf is around 2000 less power for conjured ward, this is a lot in my opinion.

If crits are possible against shields, I'm seeing no future for magicka, light armored Sorc in pvp. I am so scared of Nightblades and 2 handed enemies. Auri-El: Just let me come to Aetherius right now I don't want to live anymore.

Snit

Dracane wrote: »

If crits are possible against shields

Yep. Congrats to @dduke and pals. They won. Sorcs will return to their accustomed place in the pecking order.