Khazaad wrote: »

What are the results of hitting a mob 2000/5000 HP with Pulsar? Would it do damage or just result in 2000/4350 for the duration?

Osmiumium wrote: »

Master_Quack14b14_ESO wrote: »

Wow, there sure is a lot of misunderstanding about Surge/Critical Surge and how mechanics scale....

First off, Class skills that use mana scale off of your attribute points and stop scaling at level 50. Weapon skills (to include Destro/Resto stave SPELLS) scale off of the damage your weapon does. That is why when you hit Veteran rank 1 or higher the damage continues to scale for weapon skills but not class skills. Surge will not boost your class skills, if you are only using class skills you should not really bother with it. If you use the Destro/Resto spells then the benefit is HUGE (about 20% increase).

Secondly, the healing effect is insanely powerful. If you choose to morph it to Critical Surge you should also be running Mage Light morphed to Inner Light to increase your crit by an additional 20%. This compounded with Prodigy (10% crit with light armor), a rare crafted weapon with the precise aspect (5% Crit), and the Thief Mundus Stone (5+% crit based off of level/gear enchants) will net you a base 40% chance to crit. You can pick up another 5% crit chance with the 3 piece "Willows Path" crafted set bonus. If you are a Sorcerer and use Shattering Prison with the Exploitation passive that is another 15% chance to crit. At this point you easily have 60% chance to crit with any spell and a 70% chance to crit if you use a Fire Stave with the Destro passive Tri-Focus. 70% chance to heal yourself for 65% of the damage you do? Yes please...

Lastly, if you are going for a healing build then you would want to morph to Power Surge to extend the length of the spell to 40 seconds total. This will last PLENTY long enough for most encounters and buff all healing stave abilities. This is by far the BEST buff to use for healers as no other single spell/talent will buff your heals by as much as 20%. Combining this with "The Ritual" mundus stone and you can do some SERIOUSLY effective healing!

As a side note, I am running Critical Surge/Shattering Prison/Elemental Blockade/Elemental Ring/Inner Light with a Fire Destro stave as a Sorcerer with 55% crit and I can easily take on 5~6 mobs at a time that are several levels higher than me. With the MASSIVE amount of healing from just one single Elemental Ring I never have to worry about healing of any kind. I have all my attributes in Magicka. I keep my stamina Pool as small as possible and enchant Jewelry with +stam recovery because Dark Conversion is the most effective way to rapidly regen mana. I have been using this build since about mid 20s (obviously with much lower crit) all the way to Veteran rank 1 to such an awesome degree of effectiveness that I very often just go out to AoE grind because it was significantly more effective for gaining experience and TONS of loot!

I have respecc'd about 5 times already so I have a lot of experience with many different Sorcerer builds, so if you have any questions just feel free to ask.

It appears to me that you are incorrectly adding up crit percentages, in that some only apply to weapon critical, some only to spell critical and some just say "critical strikes". Perhaps your direct experience proves otherwise, but....

According to tooltips (for what *that's* worth in ESO -- looking at you Endless Fury):

Critical Surge: heals from Weapon crits only
Inner Light: +20% crit to Spells
Light Armor - Exploitation: +10% crit to Spells
Weapon - Precise: +5% crit to Weapons
Mundus - Thief: +5% crit to Weapons
Willow's Path: +5% crit to Spells
Dark Magic - Exploitation: +15% "critical strike" chance (both?)
Destro Fire Staff - TriFocus: +10% "for destruction spells against target" "while using a heavy attack"....well, destruction skills are weapon attacks, not spells right? Is this a buff that lingers to be utilized after you use the heavy attack, or only for others hitting the target "while using" the heavy attack...it is very unclear.

So for Critical Surge heals, you cannot add in the Inner Light, Light Armor or Willow's Path (unless of course the tooltips are wrong). That leaves you with Precise (5) + Thief (5) + Exploitation (15) and possibly TriFocus (10) = 35% chance of a crit.

That said, I really wouldn't be surprised to find out Inner Light works on Destruction Staff skills, which are supposed to be weapon attacks, but maybe they count as spells since they use magicka? It certainly isn't clear.