My thoughts for sun mage playstyle

Baconlad

Hey guys, gals and zenimax mods!

So I'm gonna jump right to the point, I've been doing some basic math on my unbuffed ultimates and trying to gather the damage per 1 ultimate cost and I've noticed some things.

First I've been having a stupid amount of fun with oakensoul. Not because I think it's powerful compared to two bar setups, but because of being able to play all content without the stress of barswapping.
I HATE fire staff infused offbar with ten skills in a rotation. It's not engaging to me, feels like my magplar doesn't get to use the skills that I REALLY enjoy using, and while I'm not a typically a number chaser I've been trying to get the absolute most damage with my favorite skill setups.

I have always loved Sun mage/ cleric/ palidan playstyles. My favorite skills are dark flare, blazing spear, piercing javelin radiant destruction, soul assault and most importantly the most badass looking skill in the game...NOVA! The main play HAS to use dark flare spammable...no question. Oh and dual wield...I love sun mage dual wield it was my main skyrim build...super fun

Been looking at ultimate numbers and compared to meteor, nothing really stands out as a possibility to use. Soul assault give me MUCH higher damage per 1 ultimate cost, but it's still falls behind meteor in actual parsing. even though it's a single target spell.
Then you look at nova and it just doesnt give much to the table. The 15% damage reduction is kinda useless in all but ball group stacks in cyrodiil. Big ball of awesome that kinda...doesn't do anything and if solo I'm not even getting the burst of damage...just the lackluster AOE

Can we look at these two skills in the future to get reworked or atleast looked at with an explanation as to why they are so bad compared to meteor for damage?

I've been playing main as a sun mage since early access on PC. Then swapped to the meta sweeps for a few years and rebuilt it during summerset back to angel bombing to GREAT success. Sun mage was nerfed REALLY hard after summerset and its been a terrible playstyle since then for both PvE and PvP.

I'm able to achieve 60k DPS on a trials dummy with this oakensoul build and meteor but only about 45k with nova. I'm having a blast playing it...but being kicked from vet groups for my choice in spammable kinda sucks.

Just asking for a dev or mod to throw some of their wisdom on the scene. Hopefully get this some attention?

Thanks for reading!

Baconlad

Oh...I have to give credit where due guys...zeni THANK YOU for the new piercing javelin...it's such an awesome skill to use in PvP.

danno8

If you can medium weave next patch Dark Flare medium weave will be a big buff for you assuming (a) ZoS keeps empower on DF and (b) they don't realize that empowering medium weave raises the ceiling which is against their stated goals.

I'm still not sure why DF has a cast time tbh. It's not very powerful anymore.

Baconlad

Ugh...no thanks lol. I'm sure that was just an oversight and will be changed

tsaescishoeshiner

Making Nova a DPS skill might make it overpowered in those other contexts.

Soul Assault has needed a rework for a long time. It does such low damage in practice because you can't do anything else while casting it.

I'm pretty sure that Crescent Sweep is your best DPS ult. The +60% damage to enemies in front of you makes it an AoE smite, and the cheap cost means that it saves you magicka because you can use it once per 14 seconds with Oakensoul.

I also love Dark Flare, and although they nerfed the damage a lot a few years ago, it got a cost reduction recently, so I think it's as good a spammable as snipe now.

Templar is really good in PvE and PvP this patch, so I can't agree with whether "sun mage" is good or bad without more details as to which builds count as sun mage and which don't. 60k is pretty good for a theme build! I wonder if Purifying Light, Crescent Sweep, and maybe 1 more DPS skill could get it up to 70k. Depends what you're running for parses atm.

Baconlad

Awesome response! Thank you I thought I was alone in here haha. I like that you called it a theme build...I'm not an RPer but the theme and basic story of my character and why he uses what he uses is important to me to get into the game.

So...the more I think about crescent the better it sounds. It would give me that constant aoe damage that I lack for packs, and being that I use melee weapons, it's a go!

So my skill bar setup is this:
-Dark flare spammable
-Blazing spear for burning light procs, crit damage buff and my sole ground AOE.
-twin slashes for mag sustain and being able to ensure stamina status effects like bleeds, poison etc are utilized.
-radiant oppression for very obvious reasons
-flex I might use purifying light if my mag sustain is Gucci, I might use honor the dead for solo, group content with a bad healer or rune for some decent healing and great mag sustain skill.

Just a disclaimer, purifying light is expensive as hell, when I'm running a fire staff for them emergency heavy attack mag return replacing twin slashes, but casting it off cool down is very expensive burns my mag terribly and isn't sustainable while dual wielding. So I normally run it in my flex spot when dual wielding if I have constant spear synergy mag return.

My gear as of now is 5p pillar of nirn in head chest legs and two jewels. And orders wrath 5p in remaining gear slots. Slime craw 1p shoulder. I was running tsogvins replacing pillar but with new changes I'll have constant minor crit damage buff so I changed it early.
Plus I get a juicy bleed status effect proc.

I think the new changes to oakensoul mean I'll get more DPS than the old one. SPC gives major courage, and I'm only losing 5% damage done from slayer change. So I think it's better for group content. Although my PVP setup will suffer haha.

I'm still playing with it, if anyone can give me advice as to better skill selection within my themes reason I hope you do!

Always looking to improve this, would love if a better player than me built a DW flare spammer single bar build to help me out lol.