suggestion about sorc:
1. Swap Bound Armaments with Daedric Mines, and change the passive ability of Bound Armaments to While slotted, your Max Stamina&Magic is increased by 5%.
2. Change Lightning Splash to the same level as Spear Shards, increase damage, and allow own synergy.
3. Exchange Power Stone with Persistence to turn all Daedric Summoning abilities except pets into tank abilities.
4.Expert Summoner changed back to U45 effect.
5. Suppression Field has been reworked, leaving the silencing effect to Absorption Field, and greatly increasing the damage of Suppression Field, and giving Major Brittle to the damaged target, making it competitive with Atronach.
6. Reworked Endless Fury, removed the execution effect, and provided more damage, making it a spam skill for sorc.
7. Reworked Power Surge and changed it to a sticky dot similar to Degeneration.
8. Buff Shattering Spines, so that it gives a 10-second sticky dot and a 4-second delayed burst of direct damage, making it a qualified damage skill.
9. Defensive Rune has been reworked to have an effect similar to Solar Barrage, dealing direct damage every 5 seconds centered on itself, and increasing the damage the target receives from the black magic skill line.

Does the rest of the skill line have enough if we give it Bound armaments?

MurkyWetWolf198 wrote: »

Does the rest of the skill line have enough if we give it Bound armaments?

It is far from enough.
Dark Magic's passive is very bad, except for Exploitation, the others do not affect dps. Especially Persistence, it's just terrible.
Unholy Knowledge should be moved to Persistence and merged with it, and a new passive ability should be added to Unholy Knowledge: When you deal damage with a Sorc class skill, increase the damage your target takes by 3/6% for 10 seconds. This effect will be triggered every 10 seconds.
And need buff Shattering Spines, so that it gives a 10-second sticky dot and a 4-second delayed burst of direct damage, making it a qualified damage skill.

I would say no. Bound daggers are clearly a conjuration ability which fits right with the other summons.

The problem with sorcerers is that they still don’t have a clear cut tank/healing skill line. Tank and healing stuff is scattered throughout all three skill trees. This is going to make it very hard to balance this class for subclassing.

It makes the most logistical sense at this point.

• Curse can't be moved because it's attached to Daedric Prey, no matter how much I love Haunting Curse, it belongs there so it can't be moved.
• Ward can't be moved because it's attached to Regenerative Ward, it's been an underused skill for a long time, I quite like the idea they've been pushing where it's more utility/pet based. It works and has spruced it up a bit. Additionally, they went to the effort of removing the heal from Hardened Ward, putting it in Dark Magic would add Blood Magic which esentially did the same thing to a much lesser degree (at least from mag stacking perspective, not sure what the exact % was for health stackers). They could always add a condition that somehow excludes Ward, but I go back to the original point of 1 morph actually having a pet effect. Maybe adding a new Dark Magic skill here could do a similar thing, but we're getting into fantasy land at this point.
• Bound Aegis is a tank skill that doesn't really get anything out of the Daedric Summoning line.. except for this new 5% mitigation bonus, but I mean it's 3 days old, I'm not married to that idea. I'd argue if you did have the line, it would still be covered via Hardened Ward or Clanfear. Suppression Field is also more utilty based than Storm Atro for a tank to provide, and Blood Magic would proc any time you cast Bound Aegis which makes WAY more sense seeing as it is a max hp % heal tanks barely take advantage from in the line. We also need to consider that Persistance is in the Dark Magic line which reduces the cost of abilities after blocking by -18%. The bonus plus Blood Magic tells me this line is way closer to tanking line than Daedric Summoning ever could be.
• Bound Armaments, again all of the points raised in this thread. Dark Magic is just not appealing enough right now for damage dealers seeing as it only has Crystal Frag/Crystal Weapon. If the skill moved here, then it could proc Blood Magic and Exploitation which make much more sense for the skill as a semi spammable. It also allows us more ways to keep up minor prophecy and justify's the lack of power this ability has in comparison to Grim Focus... which for some reason... provides up to 450 Weapon Damage now, a huge burst heal, and +37% more damage... +52% more damage on PTS just on the tooltip, before you consider you also have more damage and crit for using it... I'm not saying BA having a heal would fix it's weak AF damage, but it would certainly highlight it as a more utility based pressure tool, rather than an outright burst damage tool that holds no candle to Grim Focus on.

We're told by ZOS that if we're not into pets, we should subclass Daedric Summoning out, but there is 3 abilities in there that are staples of the no pet sorc playstyle we've been acustomed to for 10+ years (Ward/Armor/Curse). While moving only 1 skill wouldn't entirely solve the problem, it would certainly help their argument about Daedric Summoning being meant for pet builds. I'd prefer the line have its own non pet bonus like before, but due to the way the lines are designed, I really only take 1-2 skills from both Dark Magic and Daedric Summoning at a time, which now have comparitively weaker passives when I start to consider subclassing for similar skills.

For example, if I really wanted Bound Armaments and Dark Deal, why would I take Daedric Summoning and Dark Magic when it would be better to take Assassination (Grim Focus) and Siphoning (Siphoning Attacks). Obviously as a Sorc main I can't do this, so the reality is, I now have to reroll into Nightblade, then swap out Shadow to pick up Storm Calling to play as a better version of the Sorc playstyle I was already doing before. The funniest part about this is despite not having the negligible bonus of +8% stamina from Bound Armaments I was used to, I now get Magicka Flood from Siphoning for +6% Stam/Mag lol.

I mean something about that last point just sounds like a deliberate joke to me. Like they intentionally changed MAGICKA Flood into a speudo version of the bonus Sorc mains got from Bound Armor and/or Expert Summoner as if to say "Remake your character, you don't belong over there".

To be clear, I've been advocating to hybridize Magicka Flood for years, I'm just pointing out the weird situation this is. Also rename that..?

Stx wrote: »

I would say no. Bound daggers are clearly a conjuration ability which fits right with the other summons.

The problem with sorcerers is that they still don’t have a clear cut tank/healing skill line. Tank and healing stuff is scattered throughout all three skill trees. This is going to make it very hard to balance this class for subclassing.

Change it from Daggers to Purple Crystals, problem solved? Also Daggers are not "pets" which is where a "summon" actually matters here, they were never buffed by Daedric Prey so it doesn't really have a place in this line. I get what you mean from a VFX standpoint that they're conjured daggers, but at some point you need to weigh what is more important between visuals and game design. We can both agree Sorc's lines are a mess when considering subclassing, the lines don't stand very well on their own because they cross polinate too much. Shouldn't we seek to resolve that instead of getting hung up on the way a skill looks or sounds?

Plus, if we start nitpicking things like that, we can find numerous examples where abilities don't follow the theme of the line they're in. Most classes share themes from 1 line into the others to make the entire thing feel like a complete package. That's why the pets deal shock damage despite not being from Storm Calling, although that has always bother me that Dark Magic doesn't deal physical/shock, but it's not something I'm going to die fighting about because clearly ZOS doesn't care.

Let's look at Ward and Curse for example, how does that have anything to do with "Daedric Summoning" any more than "Dark Magic"? Seems more Dark Magic to me, but someone 18 years ago decided to put them in Daedric Summoning so here we are. Bound Armaments was only created in like 2018 so it's not like it can't change again. The original Bound Armor used to replace your outfit for a Daedric one, but players hated that, so they just made it a purple glow which funny enough fits Dark Magic way more than Daedric Summoning does, but the name "Bound Armor" despite not giving you Daedric Armor remains. Even in this sense they chose game design over VFX.

Look at all the skills for DK that were changed from magic to flame damage 3-4 years ago without any alteration to their VFX whatsoever. Spikes and dragon wings dealt magic damage, now they deal fire, no 1 batted an eye because fire damage made way more sense on a class that is suppose to be proficient with fire.

Nightblade just recently swapped Veiled Strike to Assassination and Blur to Shadow, neither ability had their VFX changed, it just made more sense to move them. I saw requests to do this dating back to like 2015 which is crazy to think that it took them 10 years to finally cave in.

Templar's Backlash is a yellow glowing spear that comes from the sky, seems more like an Aedric Spear skill to me, yet we have Sun Shield in there that has nothing to do with spears. From a pure gameplay standpoint, I'd move Sun Shield, Focused Charge, and Piercing Javelin into Dawn's Wrath, then move Dark Flare (spammable), Backlash (semi-spammable), and Radiant Destuction (execute) into Aedric Spear, making it a clear DPS line, where as Dawn's Wrath becomes the clear utility/tanking line. As it stands, Templar has a similar Sorc problem, the lines are mixed, but their issue is 2 lines instead of 3. Aedric Spear has 2/5 damage skills, and Dawn's Wrath 4/5, ults aside, yet Aedric Spear has the classes majority of damage related passives. Dawn's Wrath is basically only useful for Minor Sorcery, but that is a 20s buff. Enduring Rays +2 duration applies to skills where you don't need it in the 1st place making timers awkard at 22s instead of 20s..... Anyway, off topic, it's just bad design, I wouldn't want them to be held back by VFX either. I don't main templar though, I have no idea if they noticed this issue or if it's just me.