Sorcerer Stam build suggestions

Amoilesmobs

Sorc vr12 here.
I'm back since Tamriel Unlimited and really disapointed by the sorc spot atm.
( Lag in Cyrodiil also, but it's another story. A sad one.)

Waiting for ZoS to make change for stamina sorc.
Waiting for ZoS to make change for stamina sorc since launch.
One all year.

It has never been worst for us who want to play as ZoS announce it : Play as you want !
Well, i want to play a solid stam sorc with a few spells.

Hybrid build was possible if i remember. Not anymore without the softcaps it seems.
Something to balance that ? Oh yeah, 1 pet explosion and a bound armor morph. Champagne !

Now i made my khajiit a full magicka and ... i spam shields. It's annoying. It won't last.

RavenSworn

I havent had the opportunity to experience sorc at high levels but judging from what I currently see for the skill lines, daedric summoning seems to be the best bet for changes to make stamina sorcs worthwhile.

Clannfear should scale off from stamina, the healing matriach should heal a percentage of your max health while scaling off from stamina, hardened ward by itself seems best if it scales of health too.

It ties in into the warlock sorcerer type, using health and stamina to conjure or summon demons from beyond.

Dark magic is another skill line that can benefit from stamina morphs though it really is more of a debuff skill line.

I have always envisioned battlemages or spellswords to actually use light armor, buffing their health and armor using magicka and taking the profiency of the weapon itself as their main damage source.

Just my two cents here...

THEWILLEM55b16_ESO

As a returning VR sorcerer:
Before Tamriel Unlimited, I was loving my capped magica & health and I could get great mileage out of the armor and magic resists buffs sorcs get, by virtue of tankyness. It just had variety and utility all over the place being able to hybrid several roles based on equip and what skills were on my hotbars.

Since 1.6 dumping all my stat points into magica seems like the only viable build option.

From before 1.6 I remember Absorb Shields absorbing flat damage, armor and magic resists do not reduce the damage dealt to shields. I assume it still works this way now.

This assumption means that: because our shields scale based on magica, armor and resist buffs are effectively useless to magica builds and are waste of a skillslot and magica when you could just recast your absorb shield.

Stuff like Lightning Form, Surge and the morph of Dark Exchange that costs magica and grants stamina therefore seem to be relegated to high health builds,. Their defensive bonuses do not actually scale with magica and you cast them from a pool you would otherwise not use.

I chose sorcerer as my main because I like hybrid builds and sorc had a lot of utility that helped hybrid builds succeed. Since 1.6 Hybrid builds are inferior at pretty much everything. So all those cool hybrid skills that offer damage + defense go to waste where their additional effects cannot really be used.

So on the topic:
Should sorcs get more skills/morphs that cost stamina? No, I don't think they should. I think we should have our non-damage skills cost less magica, not scale with magica and offer better utility to any build, by scaling off percentages. What I want back, is that no matter where I put my attribute points magica, health, or stamina, my utility skills remain useful.

How could this be done?

• Lightning Form damage changed to deal damage to all nearby enemies based off a percentage of incoming damage taken during the previous second. Instead of the damage scaling with magica.
  (To differentiate it from Casting Lightning Spash at your own feet)
• Volatile Familiar exploding for damage based on the damage it took before it died. Instead of scaling with magica.
• Familiar & Clanfear health scaling with player max health. Instead of not scaling at all.
• Weakening Prison making targets take more damage as a percentage, rather than as a spellpower buff.
  (like NB Ambush does)
• Conjured Ward, should scale... differently, but without being overnerfed for non-pet builds...
  Maybe the base skill scales with magica, and the Hardened Morph also scales based on magica, but the extra 20% strenght on self, is changed to be 10% of max health.

I am uncertain if/how pets should scale with stamina, on the one hand I feel a medium armor ranger with a bow and a clannfear pet should be a viable build, on the other hand I think a double pet dps build should be relegated to the realm of magica and cloth armor.

Jar_Ek

@THEWILLEM55b16_ESO In essence what you are asking for is for utility skills to scale off max magicka & max stamina, rather than a single resource. This could be a simple addition and divide by two, or a more complex formula biased towards one of the resource stats. This would work for pretty much all utility skills, but the trick would be in getting the correct formula. Alternatively it would be an alternative so that the scaling would be either max magicka, or max stamina, or max magicka + max stamina /1.75 (for example) - whichever was better for a given character.

Something similar was suggested on the PTS prior to 1.6, but no notice was paid to it. This is a pity as making hybrids competitive can only add to diversity. However I would have to add that not all skills, even utility ones, should scale like this... esp. not ward which could become really op for stamina builds if the scaling included stamina.

Oh and pets don't need any more downsides, an archer using one is still using 2 slots per pet.

Dekkameron

I only have a single sorc and its a bow/2handed.

THEWILLEM55b16_ESO

Jar_Ek wrote: »

utility skills to scale off max magicka & max stamina, rather than a single resource.

I guess that might work to aid magicka+stamina hybrids.

Jar_Ek wrote: »

This could be a simple addition and divide by two, or a more complex formula biased towards one of the resource stats. This would work for pretty much all utility skills, but the trick would be in getting the correct formula.

But because it requires consideration of calculations like that, what I was trying to suggest was making utility skills scale as little as possible, so that they would be equally utilitarian to any build regardless of its stats.

Scaling is for damage and healing skills. A 2 second stun is a 2 second stun regardless of the stats of the user. I say we extend that design principle to all skills for which the main purpose is not making red bars go up or down, such skills should work based on something that is reliably similar regardless of build.

100 armor is either a big difference or a small difference depending on your level, 10% physical damage reduction is reliably 10%, which means it is easier for a game designer to wrap their head around, making it easier to balance.

In my above post I suggested 2 things that scale with max health, so I was contradicting myself, which doesn't help the clarity of my message, sorry. What design wise needs to be accomplished is that they should not have a falloff in effectiveness for a VR14 character in white quality gear and a VR14 character in all gold quality gear, because the incoming damage of the content you face when you first reach VR14 is much lower than the content you face in the hardest part of the game. Yet pet health stays the same, it needs to scale with something, but I'm not sure with what.

Jar_Ek

Well I guess scaling could be off something like Max magicka+ Max stamina + Max health /3.
And I tend to agree with pure utility abilities... however pure utility abilities are very rare.