Light Armour or Medium Armour? Shields or No Shields?

Tsunahmie · June 2022

I'm trying to theorycraft a build for my magsorc and have seen a lot of different information/opinions online about what is better for a magsorc nowadays. Cyrodiil is my main haunt.
Is stacking max mag still the way to go for damage?
Do I stack max mag + shields or no shields?
Do I go for a mix of max mag/spell damage + shields or no shields?
Medium armour dodge rolling stacking spell damage?

I used to have a really good build that no longer works due to CP changes and am trying to understand what kind of builds work best.

Cheers for any insight!

chris25602 · June 2022

hey I am in a similar setting. I am still messing around but, a few things I have discovered.

Minor Force from the psijic skill line, the skill gives you minor force and some movement speed, morphs will either give you a purge or x3 uptime on minor force.

I am also now trying out the mythic gaze of sithis to see if that can make me tankier.(breaking 20K resists)I usually dont block much except for canceling things; still trying to determine if GoS is worth it or not.

I have also seen some people run a medium armor set of ironblood and then they drop all shields.

I would be interested in anything you might have picked up I have been playing about a month now since the servers got fixed but I hadn't seriously played since 2018.

jaws343 · June 2022

If you are trying to run effective shields, stacking max mag is still the way to go imo.

If you want to drop shields, and rely on healing and dodge roll, stacking spell damage will work better.

Both are options. Stacking max mag for shields and damage will result in a more defensible build with a bit less damage output, and not really any potent proc combinations. You are pretty much shoe-horned into a small amount of viable setup options.

Stacking spell damage will mean your shields are tiny. But you will hit hard and make better use of proc sets.

I think it really comes down to how you want to play the sorc. I personally play a max mag stack, using alfiq, death dealer, trainee, domi, and grace of the ancients. Sit comfortable around 31K health, 24K stam, and 47K mag after death dealer stacks. A respectable 10K tooltip on my spammable, and an 10K or so shield after battlespirit.

jaws343 · June 2022

I will say though, a pretty solid setup that ditches sheilds and stacks spell damage, is Rallying back bar, Clever front bar, balorgh monster, and death dealers (or markyn, or even snow treader really).

With the new patch, you could even swap out Clever for something like Draugrkin. Paired with crushing shock, Draugrkin will add around 10% more damage to your spammable, as well as additional damage to all of your burst. With frag, crushing shock, light attack, enchant proc, curse, and fury, it's like 2600 more damage.

ResidentContrarian · June 2022

I stopped running shields when they made changes on crit. I don't run resistances anyway, so they are pointless to cast.

I prefer to dodge, block, etc. on all my mag builds, but once you get used to that, being a mag build is pointless and hybrid is better (esp. with more support these days compared to the previous patches.)

Now that damage scaling is heavily dependent on WD/SD stacking...I find it hard to slot any shield besides healing ward, and that's more because the skill is great to use as a heal and shield when rolling ...

Tsunahmie · June 2022

ResidentContrarian wrote: »

I stopped running shields when they made changes on crit. I don't run resistances anyway, so they are pointless to cast.

I prefer to dodge, block, etc. on all my mag builds, but once you get used to that, being a mag build is pointless and hybrid is better (esp. with more support these days compared to the previous patches.)

Now that damage scaling is heavily dependent on WD/SD stacking...I find it hard to slot any shield besides healing ward, and that's more because the skill is great to use as a heal and shield when rolling ...

I am definitely leaning towards a more hybridized sorc build at this point hehe
I'm thinking of Ironblood + something else but not sure what yet. Clever Alchemist might be really good?

Would you be able to share your thoughts on hybrid gearsets for sorc specifically? Thanks for the reply!

Tsunahmie · June 2022

jaws343 wrote: »

If you are trying to run effective shields, stacking max mag is still the way to go imo.

If you want to drop shields, and rely on healing and dodge roll, stacking spell damage will work better.

Thanks for the reply! I think I am definitely leaning towards a more spell damage build leaning maybe into hybridized stats. Any more insight you could provide would be awesome!