Critical Surge: Suggestions To Make The Ability More Useful

sabresandiego_ESO · February 2015

Critical surge is not worth its magicka cost, global cooldown animation, etc... This is primarily due to abilities like entropy and momentum which do the same thing and are better. Entropy is better because its cheaper, and the added effects are nice, and momentum is better because the heal is reliable and the morphs are now fantastic (great job on making forward momentum competitive with rally!). The heals from critical surge are unreliable and that's its biggest issue.

Suggested Fix: Make critical surge also be an instant heal that heals you for your crit % in health. So if you have 50% crit (the higher of spell or weapon), crit surge is also a 50% heal. (The actual heal number should be balance tested, it does not have to be an exact 1:1 ratio with your crit) This would make the ability competitive with momentum and entropy, and also synergize with both stamina and magicka builds giving sorcerrors more build options. Id also suggest making one morph of crit surge cost stamina.

Robbmrp · February 2015

They either need to remove the cool down or exclude DoTs from it. The issue is the DoT's are taking priority over the bigger crit heals so you get a 50 heal every 1 second which doesn't help at all when taking 500 dps or higher.

Father · February 2015

The cooldown is 0.25 sec, whats wrong with that??? I really have no problem with it. about momentum and entropy they are not bad, but crit surge is more reliable in farming, the only way I think its not reliable is when you have low crit rate.
I havn't really tested stamina sorc in pvp against 7 piece impenetrable players on pts but I think it might work with the change of this trait

Right now alot of people are using bursty skills and few dots, so I dunno about dots eating up HP, all the toons I make have 20-25k hp and its enough for ganking and dueling 1 on 1 with all the CS perks applied

Snit · February 2015

[quote="Robbmrp;1551038"]They either need to remove the cool down or exclude DoTs from it. [/quote]

I agree. Having DoT's and spells like Lightning Form active should not reduce your self-healing.

Snit · February 2015

Father wrote: »

The cooldown is 0.25 sec, whats wrong with that???

Much of our damage occurs simultaneously. If you're AoE'ing a pack of four, this change reduces your healing by 75%. If you have a DoT running, it's worse.

There should be a survivability option that isn't "spam shields." Surge + Lightning Form + 5/2 LA/HA should work, but Surge needs to be unscrewed first.

Gyudan · February 2015

Suggestion for Surge: add a Minor buff on top of the current active.

This skill now grants you the Minor Sorcery buff (+5% spell damage) while this ability is slotted on your active bar.

ToRelax · February 2015

Father wrote: »

The cooldown is 0.25 sec, whats wrong with that??? I really have no problem with it. about momentum and entropy they are not bad, but crit surge is more reliable in farming, the only way I think its not reliable is when you have low crit rate.
I havn't really tested stamina sorc in pvp against 7 piece impenetrable players on pts but I think it might work with the change of this trait

Right now alot of people are using bursty skills and few dots, so I dunno about dots eating up HP, all the toons I make have 20-25k hp and its enough for ganking and dueling 1 on 1 with all the CS perks applied

Look, a reason to create high bursts while loosing overall dps is also critical surge itself, as it's not a reliable heal if you don't play this way. If you are now building uo your defense with magicka and at the same time building up your offense with magicka, in order to do any real damage against other builds like that, you have a small health pool that you are protecting with shields.
Its a build bypassing the necessity of a reliable, cost efficient, heal. So its useless for such builds as well.

Only for 2 hand it could be useful I think, especially if you are using forward momentum now (against mines for example) and need another heal. But not sure here as i didnt even try out 2 hand on pts.

Robbmrp · February 2015

Father wrote: »

The cooldown is 0.25 sec, whats wrong with that???

If they removed DoT's from Critical Surge they could change the cool down back to 1 second. The DoT's hit sooner than any other spell and take up the healing so you get minimal heals.

Jar_Ek · February 2015

The problem with critical surge is that the crit that procs the heal is essentially random if you have any dots or equivalent going. So lightning form, caltrops, lightning splash, various bow and DW skills will proc a minor heal rather than a decent heal.

The best solution would be to remove the CD and cap the number of mobs that can generate a heal with aoe skills so that all skills that crit generate heals, but aoe skills don't unbalance the equation. Crit surge also needs to be calculated and proc off damage shields.

Other options would be to calculate the max damage within the CD window to determine the heal or to reduce the CD to 0.05 secs which would prevent aoe abilities multi proccing.

ToRelax · February 2015

Jar_Ek wrote: »

The problem with critical surge is that the crit that procs the heal is essentially random if you have any dots or equivalent going. So lightning form, caltrops, lightning splash, various bow and DW skills will proc a minor heal rather than a decent heal.

The best solution would be to remove the CD and cap the number of mobs that can generate a heal with aoe skills so that all skills that crit generate heals, but aoe skills don't unbalance the equation. Crit surge also needs to be calculated and proc off damage shields.

Other options would be to calculate the max damage within the CD window to determine the heal or to reduce the CD to 0.05 secs which would prevent aoe abilities multi proccing.

1.) What about skills that are not AoE abilities and yet hit for several hits at the same time? Like Crushing Skock itself, wich so many Sorcerers are using as their main sustained damage ability.

2.) Since you don't crit damage shields, wether that would heal or not is irrelevant as of now.

3.) I agree, they should just cap the number of targets granting the heal from Surge. At least in PvP even better would be no AoE caps at all, but that's not the topic here now.