When I made my Sorc tank I found almost no use for bound aegis personally. And the ward I replaced with bone shield to help protect my group. With scribing there's even more options I'm sure.

Not saying you're wrong, just saying even as someone who only tanks as a sorc, I don't see an issue on my end with the changes.

I spent about two hours so far trying to work out a way to replace Daedric Summoning that actually works for a PvE trial damage dealer sorc and... I can't. I have wanted to find a sorc build, especially a non-pet sorc build, that could hold its own in end game trials since forever, but losing the best ult a sorc can use to do damage in a trial, which is usually the main thing a sorc would be wanted for as well, is leaving me nowhere. Especially when we consider that the other skill lines don't have many skills worth slotting for a damage dealer in a trial either.

Then on my tank sorc I rely on Harden Ward without pets. So now that won't work anymore either. And while tank sorc has seen a bit more use lately, I don't think it's ever been overpowered or as common as, for example, DK, so I really don't think PvE tank sorc is something that should be nerfed.

"Those who do not wish to interact with the pet gameplay can now replace this skill line as a whole."

This comment from the notes just a little aggressive isn't it? Play pets or slot something else. You belong, but not here unless you love clanfears.
Take everything that isn't pet related out of the skill line if this is the tack we're taking.

buff Beacon Of Oblivion when?

method__01 wrote: »

so,if i want to keep using hardened ward i must use a pet and sacrifice 2 more slots for using it -cause pet wont stay up if only slotted in backbar.............how exactly does this add to my gameplay?

leave the skill as it is-go ruin other classes plz

From my understanding you can still use hardened ward without the pets. They just removed the split ability of "with pets does X, without pets does X and Y"

Malyore wrote: »

From my understanding you can still use hardened ward without the pets. They just removed the split ability of "with pets does X, without pets does X and Y"

I mean sure, but minus the heal (which my tank depended on) and minus the resources we'd get from a passive that now only does anything when you have pets.

Why not use the same "With each Daedric Summoning skills slotted" logic for passives that other classes have? Since pets take up a lot of barspace, this would help a lot. And they should just let Daedric Prey buff the Blastbones/Warden bear ult. Those skills do decent damage, but Prey is a single target dot and not as broken as the arc/necro/nb beam build right now.

Yudo wrote: »

The do or don't on this is hard to take. Non-pet sorcs losing pretty much all passives and 10% magicka, and have to just look elsewhere if we do not want to play pets. Bound aegis and Ward are still key skills with or without pets both in pve and pvp but now it feels like punishment to use it on non-pet builds.

I suppose I can see that. I mean we had the abilities before, and now they've been reverted back to a similar state before they were updated, with the exception of bound armaments being a larger change, from my understanding.

If they were re-reverted into their non-pet form, I honestly can't see a problem with it.
I just know I've never ever liked the pets in this game (both combat and non-combat 🤢). So I was eager to rip that line out by its arteries, and I was glad to see that ZOS seemed to understand players like me. For someone who's removing that class line anyways (rather than building into it), the way the abilities perform without pets didn't seem to matter for my builds. Even for my tanking, I can just replace it with a different, perhaps better, tanking line. But if players really do rely on the healing shield and such on it even for non-pet, and even if players want to subclass into the line as non-pet, then that does seem to offer more diversity and build application.

Malyore wrote: »

I just know I've never ever liked the pets in this game (both combat and non-combat 🤢). So I was eager to rip that line out by its arteries, and I was glad to see that ZOS seemed to understand players like me. For someone who's removing that class line anyways (rather than building into it), the way the abilities perform without pets didn't seem to matter for my builds. Even for my tanking, I can just replace it with a different, perhaps better, tanking line. But if players really do rely on the healing shield and such on it even for non-pet, and even if players want to subclass into the line as non-pet, then that does seem to offer more diversity and build application.

Same - my main character is a sorcerer who I played as a non-pet sorc back when that playstyle was viable (and preferred), and I really hoped I could return to that kind of playstyle even as DD.

But unfortunately, it's really not the case.

The one main thing why you would want a sorc in your group - the Atronach - is a Summoning ability. It's also the strongest damage skill that you have, by quite a margin.

There are really no good damage abilities in any of the other skill lines, with the possible exception of Frags and Hurricane. And for the latter, you can find decent replacements very easily. Which means that essentially, the whole Storm Calling line is basically dead weight. And most of Dark Magic as well - Frags is the only skill in this line that a DD would slot in an organised group.

On the other hand, Summoning has most of the damage skills that a sorcerer has - even without the pets. Haunting Curse, Atro, and maybe even Bound Armaments - that's the same amount or even more skills you would maybe use than in the other two lines combined.

One of the major reasons for this state is, of course, that the other two Storm Calling skills - Mage's Wrath and Liquid - are so comically underpowered that you nerf yourself by slotting them. If those were buffed to be viable skills, things might be different, but as things are, they're not.

Which means that for a DD, if you rip out Summoning, there's not really any reason to play a sorcerer. Yes, you can substitute two lines with better damage skills from elsewhere, but then you're left with two good lines and one that you have to drag along because you wanted a sorc. At that point, you're better off playing literally anything else.

How the sorcerer skills are distributed, and how ridiculously bad some of them are, means that they're really getting stuffed with the multiclass system. And the recommendation - "well, just replace Summoning with something else!" - is a dismal admission of total failure by ZOS. No, they did not "consider" non-pet sorcs - they briefly remembered they exist and then really hoped they would just go away.

That's also one of the reasons, I think, of the backlash against the Hardened Ward and passives change. Yes, you could probably find a way to work around that - but those were some of the few sorcerer abilities that were actually decent or even good. With the changes, non-pet sorcerer (and pet sorc suffers as well) descends from mediocrity into the abyss.

Soarora wrote: »

Yudo wrote: »

The do or don't on this is hard to take. Non-pet sorcs losing pretty much all passives and 10% magicka, and have to just look elsewhere if we do not want to play pets. Bound aegis and Ward are still key skills with or without pets both in pve and pvp but now it feels like punishment to use it on non-pet builds.

We lost one passive and the heal from hardened ward (an already strong shield on a class that has many heals available already). I don’t see the world-ending problem here?

It's more than "one passive and the heal from hardened ward".

Assuming Sorc swaps out Daedric Summoning due to wanting to not use pets, the class loses:
There was also no need for ZOS to get snippy with us when they could have simply moved a few abilities around (like they did for NB a couple patches ago) and reworked a couple of morphs from skills in other lines:
- Swap Curse and Daedric Mines with each other (why is Curse (literally using dark magic to curse a target) a "Daedric Summoning" ability, but Daedric Mines (that summons explosive runes) a "Dark Magic" ability.....). The names alone scream for those abilities to be swapped (have the mines grant the pet bonus and rework prey morph to do something else).
- Change the DPS morph of negate to match Atro's DPS and provide a group buff on cast (doesn't have to be berserk, but something useful). Remove the silence from this morph and keep the other morph as the "silence" morph for PvP (like how DK standard has clear distinctions between the PvE and PvP morphs).
- Buff Liquid Lightning to be an actually good DoT and have the synergy be a debuff instead of locking all the damage in the synergy that can't even be self activated.
- Increase base radius of lightning form and morphs to match the 7m melee attack range
- Make Rune-cage into a single target DoT (similar to mages guild degen)

At least with my above changes, non-pet Sorcerer would only have to try and find replacements for expert summoner passive, aegis, ward and 2 DoTs, something that can be feasibly done by swapping in 1 line and adding a couple of scribing skills.

From what I'm seeing on the forums, non-pet sorc is the new necromancer now lol

Malyore wrote: »

From what I'm seeing on the forums, non-pet sorc is the new necromancer now lol

It's just been reverted back to where it sat from ~2018 until U41.

Turtle_Bot wrote: »

Soarora wrote: »

Yudo wrote: »

The do or don't on this is hard to take. Non-pet sorcs losing pretty much all passives and 10% magicka, and have to just look elsewhere if we do not want to play pets. Bound aegis and Ward are still key skills with or without pets both in pve and pvp but now it feels like punishment to use it on non-pet builds.

We lost one passive and the heal from hardened ward (an already strong shield on a class that has many heals available already). I don’t see the world-ending problem here?

It's more than "one passive and the heal from hardened ward".

Assuming Sorc swaps out Daedric Summoning due to wanting to not use pets, the class loses:

- Aegis which is 8% max mag + minor resolve + minor protection
- Armaments which is STAMsorcs delayed burst
- Bird AND clanfear heals (there goes 2 more heal options)
- Ward (this was all that needed adjusting imo)
- Haunting Curse (non-pet magsorcs delayed burst and the PvP morph)
- Rebate passive (sustain on things like ward, curse and armaments)
- Power stone passive (8% cost reduction of ultimates)
- Atro (best DPS ultimate in sorcs entire kit and the only reason to bring the class into organized PvE raids at all)
- Expert Summoner (10% max mag + stam)
- 2 best DoTs in the entire class kit and the only single target DoTs in the entire class kit

This is a huge nerf to non-pet sorcs by "swapping out this line" as the devs told us to do in the patch notes..

- 18% max mag (this is a significant DPS and sustain drop)
- 10% max stamina (significant survivability drop due to less blocking/roll dodging)
- No delayed burst ability (for mag or stam)
- 60% of the classes heals are just gone, the remaining 2 are a cast time self heal (rip sorc healers) or prohibitively expensive/clunky
- No minor resolve/protection, or roughly a 10% drop in mitigation)
- No worthwhile DPS ultimate (overload is a buggy mess that is only useful for cheesing dummy parses and not even that is as good as what other classes can now get from subclassing without cheese and negate has so little damage and it's silence is completely useless in PvE).
- Only 1 remaining viable class DoT (hurricane morph specifically since lightning form never got it's base radius increased to match the new melee attack range)
- 8% increased ulti cost as well as 300 mag/stam restore every few seconds is a sustain loss and a significant DPS loss due to less frequent ultimates

I fail to see how that is not a world-ending problem for non-pet sorcs that were already behind pet-sorcs for PvE, especially in less casual PvE settings where the (strong in PvP) things like Streak are simply more niche tools rather than actual mainstay abilities.

There was also no need for ZOS to get snippy with us when they could have simply moved a few abilities around (like they did for NB a couple patches ago) and reworked a couple of morphs from skills in other lines:
- Swap Curse and Daedric Mines with each other (why is Curse (literally using dark magic to curse a target) a "Daedric Summoning" ability, but Daedric Mines (that summons explosive runes) a "Dark Magic" ability.....). The names alone scream for those abilities to be swapped (have the mines grant the pet bonus and rework prey morph to do something else).
- Change the DPS morph of negate to match Atro's DPS and provide a group buff on cast (doesn't have to be berserk, but something useful). Remove the silence from this morph and keep the other morph as the "silence" morph for PvP (like how DK standard has clear distinctions between the PvE and PvP morphs).
- Buff Liquid Lightning to be an actually good DoT and have the synergy be a debuff instead of locking all the damage in the synergy that can't even be self activated.
- Increase base radius of lightning form and morphs to match the 7m melee attack range
- Make Rune-cage into a single target DoT (similar to mages guild degen)

At least with my above changes, non-pet Sorcerer would only have to try and find replacements for expert summoner passive, aegis, ward and 2 DoTs, something that can be feasibly done by swapping in 1 line and adding a couple of scribing skills.

I feel like all the complaints are misleading if it's about subclassing then because it sounds like pure sorc is getting deleted when it's not. Not to say the complaints are invalid but they're misleading to someone who doesn't have the complaint.

I've played sorc main since I first installed eso, about 4 years ago or so. Always played no-pet, mostly pvp. Lately I've been playing eso less and less, instead opting for a different mmo where it feels like the developers are at least somewhat competent.

The announcement of multiclassing, combined with the latest patch notes and their stance on no-pet sorc, has made me pull the trigger and just uninstall eso. If this is the game they want us to play (until they change their mind again), I'd rather go back to Skyrim to get my elder scrolls fix, knowing that I'll be able to pick up a save file from 5 years ago and continue where I left off, without fear that some patch will turn it into an entirely different game.

Thank you for confirming you don't want me as a customer zos. Those 100+ free gb mean I can wait to invest in more storage space a bit longer.

As for the people who are excited about the changes: I'm happy you're happy, truly am. But it would have been nice if you'd found a way to be happy that wasn't at the expense of others, like maybe try a different game that does what you want instead of taking away what others were enjoying...