A Stamina or Tank Sorcerer Improvement Suggestion

dodgehopper_ESO

This is a copy from another post titled: Stamina Sorc Suggestion but I want to see if people who play Stamina and Tank Sorcerers have any thoughts to share on this topic... forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/2689964/#Comment_2689964

I'd like to know something from people who play Stamina Sorcerer all day every day. Why do I feel like there is such a strong kneejerk reaction (or even ignoring) to my suggestion that they make crit surge effective versus shields (by making shields crittable) and then basing all shields (including Sorcerer, healing ward, etc) on health. They could in general stand to make health a better stat, either through upping its multiplier or by starting to scale mitigating efficacy off of it. The reason I make this suggestion is that actually the Stamina Sorc gets screwed on skills like hardened ward. I don't think any Storcs I know use it, purely because of its scaling on magicka (in my view a poor design choice if I've ever seen any). It would be nice for the Sorcerer Tanks, and Stamina Sorcerers if they could use Hardened Ward in an effective manner, and I think this is the solution. Why then is there so much backlash and outcry (historically) when I make this suggestion? I think if they did this, we could also see them get rid of the awful changes to Battle Spirit, and it would help the class as a whole. Please I won't feedback, particularly from you Stamina/Tank Sorcerers of Tamriel. (By the way, I do play a Sorcerer tank whose playstyle has gotten gutted by the changes in the last few major updates, as well as a Stamina Sorc that I've used specifically for blackwater pvp with a friend).

@Fengrush you're pretty vocal about your feelings on Stamina Sorcerers and balance, do you have any insight on this? Does anyone else who plays this build?

mistermutiny89

Making shields crittable isn't the answer.

Removing shield stacking is. Casting a shield on an existing shield should override the old one.

If a mag sorc is fighting another mag user; cast harness magicka... If it's group, cast conjured... If low health? Healing ward. Situational shield use instead of abc.

Stam sorcs don't need more utility, they need spammable dps abilities.

ZoS needs to realise that mag sorcs will only ever use Velocious (?) Curse and insta frag morphs..So there's two free dps morph slots available.

Stam users don't even use the Stam morph of Lightning presence (?), they want more Stam dps options.

RoyJade

mistermutiny89 wrote: »

Casting a shield on an existing shield should override the old one.

No, it's a really bad idea. Other player's shield would wreck away our own shield.
Shield should be all applied at the same time, but without stacking. If you have a 10k shield and you use a 5k shield, you should have 10k shielded damage, not 5k or 15k. Exactly like two major bonuses don't stack themselves but don't override themselves either.

Can't say really what a stamsorc need, except a real damage morph (and a better duration for thundering presence). My stamsorc is only level 30, and even if I kill nearly everyone in pvp I am not really experienced with it.

dodgehopper_ESO

mistermutiny89 wrote: »

Making shields crittable isn't the answer.

Removing shield stacking is. Casting a shield on an existing shield should override the old one.

If a mag sorc is fighting another mag user; cast harness magicka... If it's group, cast conjured... If low health? Healing ward. Situational shield use instead of abc.

Stam sorcs don't need more utility, they need spammable dps abilities.

ZoS needs to realise that mag sorcs will only ever use Velocious (?) Curse and insta frag morphs..So there's two free dps morph slots available.

Stam users don't even use the Stam morph of Lightning presence (?), they want more Stam dps options.

That's right Stamina users don't use the Stamina Morph because it is probably their best magicka dump, and is a fantastic mobility tool whereas thundering is not. The amount of damage the skill does is mediocre at best anyway, apart from when you get some nice disintegrates. I've got no problem with them giving a Bound weapon skill or something as a stamina alternative, but like I've said elsewhere I really think if they do this then DK and Templar need to get a real execute as well in their skill lines.

Staying on focus though I also agree that they need to nip shields in the bud. I could see them doing something with major/minor shields. For example the shield from Shield Charge or the shield from the two hander cone attack (I think the morph is Brawler) should be a minor shield, and class shields should be majors. I'm fine with them having a couple of shields if they did something like this, but I do agree that shield stacking needs a little bit of control in place.

dodgehopper_ESO

On the issue of Thundering Presence, I believe their design team felt that Stamina Sorcerers will be able to more easily sprint because of a great pool and stamina regeneration, so this is why the duration was kept so low. I think most of us just said: 'What's the point, the damage isn't that great anyway, and I'd rather the mobility and same armor/sr buffs with a chance at Disintegrate proc'. I personally think all they need to do is pump the duration up on Thundering Presence.

mistermutiny89

dodgehopper_ESO wrote: »

On the issue of Thundering Presence, I believe their design team felt that Stamina Sorcerers will be able to more easily sprint because of a great pool and stamina regeneration, so this is why the duration was kept so low. I think most of us just said: 'What's the point, the damage isn't that great anyway, and I'd rather the mobility and same armor/sr buffs with a chance at Disintegrate proc'. I personally think all they need to do is pump the duration up on Thundering Presence.

Agreed, plus perhaps minor endurance (?) for 10% extra Stam recovery whilst active perhaps? At the moment the ability is too expensive for such minimal returns so of course the magicka morph is the better option.

The whole minor and major shields thing makes perfect sense and would be a great comprise! I don't think ZoS could wrap their heads around it though haha.

MikeB

Stam Sorc, whether tank or dps, lack class skills to utilize for their roll. You rely on skills from the non-class trees, that everyone has access to, to do your job. All this does is make you less effective than any other class (excluding Templar) at your role. As other classes have abilities in-class and can cherry pick the best skills from the non-class trees to maximize their potential.

IMO the only reason DPS stam Sorc is a thing right now is because of how strong (objectively OP) Wrecking Blow and Steel Tornado are atm. You have little to no class skills to help you, which is a shame because of the Sorc wpn dmg/spellpwr passive.

aLi3nZ

I think make sheilds critable. I am a sourc. I don't like using sheilds, but don't have a choice, general just use hardened Ward, no sheild stacking. That should make a big difference for stam sources but they do also need some more dos abilities.

dodgehopper_ESO

MikeB wrote: »

Stam Sorc, whether tank or dps, lack class skills to utilize for their roll. You rely on skills from the non-class trees, that everyone has access to, to do your job. All this does is make you less effective than any other class (excluding Templar) at your role. As other classes have abilities in-class and can cherry pick the best skills from the non-class trees to maximize their potential.

IMO the only reason DPS stam Sorc is a thing right now is because of how strong (objectively OP) Wrecking Blow and Steel Tornado are atm. You have little to no class skills to help you, which is a shame because of the Sorc wpn dmg/spellpwr passive.

To be fair I really like the mobility that Sorcerer provides to a Stamina build, and you can get pretty decent +Wpn damage through passives by slotting class skills. I think the design team's fear with giving Sorcerers stamina-based attacks is that it would be really easy and blatantly superior to the Balanced Warrior passive from Templar in every possible way (and lets face it Sorcerer already has better passives). It is definitely a tough balance but I agree that some type of Bound Weapon attack or a Lightning Punch or such would be pretty cool.

Armann

Wroble touched upon giving stam morphs for DK a different damage type like poison. If that comes to pass, Thundering Presence would fall outside that design. I mean what would you replace it with since shock damage would be off the table?

dodgehopper_ESO

Armann wrote: »

Wroble touched upon giving stam morphs for DK a different damage type like poison. If that comes to pass, Thundering Presence would fall outside that design. I mean what would you replace it with since shock damage would be off the table?

Stinking Presence? :P

In all seriousness I'm not sure I like the idea of them doing the poison morphs for DK unless all of those passives that applied to fire migrate over to poison for the class. Even then that is likely a little overpowered and messes with the game design in much the same way the Argonian-Alchemist-Nightblade Synergy has been damaged.

Jar_Ek

Stamina Sorcerer Issues
There are a number of issues with stamina sorcerers which I have touched on numerous times. However rather than try to suggest ability changes, I will try to explain the issues as I see them and why stamina sorcerers are so annoyed at the lack of progress.

Roles
DPS
Stamina sorcerers are pretty much locked into a single role – DPS. Indeed it could be argued that this is too broad a definition as the stamina sorcerer is essentially limited to a critical focussed DPS build in most situations.

This is because the stamina sorcerer has a very limited number of options for survivability in real terms – these being critical surge, vigour, and rally. Although boundless storm / thundering presence can help (esp. the mobility) – and even streak to some extent (for mobility as escape is not an option) - without an effective means of either healing or warding all characters have very limited survivability – and critical surge, vigour, and rally are the effective ones open to the stamina sorcerer. You could argue that Clannfear and Dark Deal are also available, but the fact that the Clannfear does not scale with stamina and essentially takes two slots makes it an undesirable option, and the amount of healing provided by Dark Deal is too low for the 1s cast time (as animation cancelling also cancels the heal). I have pretty much discounted Bound Armaments for survivability as the Minor Resolve buff makes so little difference.

The way most stamina sorcerers deal with this situation is to slot critical surge, load up on weapon power and weapon critical and rely on critical surge healing supplemented with a HoT from vigour or rally. This means that most stamina sorcerers wear medium armour and often use a two handed weapon in order to maximise their critical chance and to be able to slot critical rush which guarantees a critical hit and hence a heal.

There are some serious issues with this playstyle especially in PvP –wards, impenetrable, and snares/roots. The wards and impenetrable reduce or negate the heals that the stamina sorcerer can generate through critical surge and healing – and the snares/roots prevent their mobility which is generally required to engage an opponent and hence gain any critical surge heals. However even in PvE this playstyle is extremely prone to roots/snares and suffers from being a very fragile build style (i.e. when it goes wrong you die without any real means of saving yourself).

Tank
Having said that it is possible to Tank as a stamina sorcerer, although it is in spite of rather than because of the class abilities – of which the only Tank friendly abilities are Boundless Lightning (Major Resolve / Ward and a mobility boost); Clannfear for the heal and the passives only (although this takes two slots) or Bound Armaments (also two slots) for a stamina boost and the passives. In theory Encase should be usable, but in practice it is too expensive, too unreliable (often simply doesn’t hit / work) and has too small an area of effect for tanking due to the frontal conical nature of the effect (potentially okay on an initial pull, but after that it is pretty useless). And Dark Deal is similarly useless as the heal and stamina return require that you drop your defences – meaning that you have just reduced your mitigation significantly… so when would you use Dark Deal? On mobs that you don’t need to block? – then you don’t need the stamina or generally the heals (with a competent healer) – or on bosses that are causing serious damage even through block? – in which case dropping block would be suicidal. The other obvious tanking ability would be Conjured Ward, but as this is scaled exclusively off magicka it is essentially a non-starter for a stamina tank as it provides a shield that is far too small for effective tanking (approx 1 light attack from a boss). The final ability that is of some potential use is bolt escape as it can absorb projectiles and provides mobility – which is useful on a stamina sorcerer tank – but it is expensive and cannot be maintained due to the cost scaling.

So why are stamina sorcerers so limited?

Synergy with passives:
Stamina sorcerers have very limited synergy with their class passives – energised, disintegrate (to some extent), exploitation, blood magic, persistence, rebate and expert summoner are all of limited benefit as they affect magicka based skills that are expensive and ineffective (scale off magicka) for a stamina build to use (Thundering Presence being the only exception and that skill is generally a poor choice for stamina builds due to the cost to maintain its benefit to stamina users is extremely high). That is over ½ of the class passives – and even daedric protection which is useful to stamina sorcerers forces them to slot either Bound Armaments or Clannfear – both of which are either toggles - or the Storm Atronach ultimate.

Lack of damaging stamina morphs:
There are no class stamina direct damage morphs – the only class stamina scaled damage ability is Thunderous Presence which is a utility skill (Armour/Mobility) with a front-loaded DoT component – and it is so expensive to maintain the front loaded damage that few stamina sorcerers actually use it – preferring to use Boundless Lightning for the longer mobility boost and to avoid draining their stamina.

It might be feasible to not have a direct damage morph as a stamina sorcerer if their survivability was better, or they had better access to effective utility abilities – but unfortunately they do not. They do not have access to any offensive or defensive buffs beyond Resolve/Ward and Brutality/Sorcery from within their class skills and to get access to any other buff them they are forced to run specific weapons / skills (such as Sword and Shield).

Survivability:
There are no survivability skills that support stamina builds other than Lightning Form (and arguably Critical Surge) as Conjured Ward (both morphs) scales with magicka and Bolt Escape is ironically too expensive to use as an escape (and hence for survivability) for stamina builds. The class has no other effective defensive or healing abilities (Dark Deal is not effective due to the size and time for the heal to take effect – it is primarily used to regain stamina resources after a fight – and critical surge is reliant on both achieving criticals and the target having no wards)… this includes no truly effective defensive ultimates (Negate provides a stun which does not work against bosses and is a silence that is easily broken in PvP).

Lack of build diversity:
Due to the limited range of useful class skills, there is a lack of build diversity. The vast majority of stamina sorcerers end up using a 2H weapon for Critical Charge (and hence a Surge heal), Wrecking Blow for a damage ability, and Rally/Forward Momentum for healing (at least until they get Vigour).

Pets
Pet builds are not used by stamina sorcerers in general (and especially at end game) as they do not scale with stamina (and hence cause low damage). The exception being the Clannfear which is occasionally used for the heal or as an off-tank.
Pets are also toggles and so use additional slots
In PvP, the pet damage and the level of threat implied to players is very low (they do not do enough damage or have any secondary abilities that force players to need to think about or react to them); they can also aggro random mobs [especially in IC] or run off to attack random mobs and are therefore more of a liability than an aid.

Ultimates
Sorcerer ultimates are currently heavily biased towards magicka builds and lack generalised utility. Overload scales off elemental cp and spell penetration and hence hits harder for magicka builds; Storm Atronach can still be killed/stunned/rooted and does not scale with any cp as far as I am aware – and does not taunt enemies (a priority taunt mechanic for a few seconds would at least make it useful in PvE to provide time to regoup / rez / heal); Negate has been destroyed as an effective ultimate outside of some co-ordinated pvp uses – because it’s stun has no effect on bosses and hence the only potentially use of it in PvE is when being attacked by hordes of mobs… which as a tank you would tank anyway and as a dps you would critical heal from with steel tornado – or root with bombard – or use to gain a damage shield with brawler.

The best thing that could happen for sorcerer tanks would be a change to negate to provide them with a decent damage mitigation.

The Trick
The trick for zos is to effectively improve stamina sorcerers without making magicka sorcerers too powerful as (due to the existing shield stacking mechanics) many perceive them to be extremely powerful already. The crux of this is conjured ward and specifically hardened ward. This single skill is likely to prevent zos from wanting to provide additional survivability options for the sorcerer class as a powerful shield with either powerful heals (such a gained through providing major mending), or powerful mitigation (such as major protection) would be likely to be considered too powerful – even if this was provided from an ultimate.

However there are things that can easily be done that do not affect magicka builds, such as:
• changing Empowered Ward to scale off health and provide 33% greater shield to pets
• making pets –or just the Clannfear - scale off stamina or magicka
• providing Bound Armaments with a minor Protection buff rather than Resolve
• making one morph of Negate (or Storm Atronach) provide a major fracture and breach debuff to opponents
• making a morph of Negate provide a major protection buff (at least vs magic damage)
• providing a major fracture active ability (Bound Weapon) to Bound Armaments

WalkingLegacy

It's not a proper stamina sorc thread without @Alucardo

phillyproduct

I know ZOS knows all that how don't the see that immediately take steps to fix it and then tweak smaller things afterwards?

Everyone who plays this game knows the worst classes ie. Magic dk, stam sorc, stam templar, magic templar pve and pvp those 4 are the ones that need help.

More importantly these classes have been broken for 6 months since ic at least.

We can look on the past patch notes from ic and scroll threw it wrobel said we do balance patches every 3 months what has change for stam sorc and stamplar since ic?

dodgehopper_ESO

WalkingLegacy wrote: »

It's not a proper stamina sorc thread without @Alucardo

I'd love to have @Alucardo weigh in here, and just want to say thank you for your well thought out post @Jar_Ek. The things you are saying exactly describe the concerns I have with my Nord Sorcerer Tank.

I do realize that Sorcerer does have one problem that Templar doesn't have when it comes to adding more great Stamina skills to the Sorcerer lineup. If Sorcerers have a reason to slot more than 3 of their own class abilities per bar, they will be much better than Templars. All it takes is for 3 skills to get the same Weapon Damage bonuses as a Templar, and they are on even footing there (actually more than even if you include Bound Armaments). I have to say I actually like Bound Armaments, but I understand why people don't like it. I'm not personally a big fan of the way toggles work in the game, and I would much rather have Bound Armaments be a click power like Boundless Storm, Hardened Ward, or Expert Hunter. I think the problem ZoS has with giving Sorcerer 1 or 2 stamina skills is you might actually start seeing Sorcs with +10% weapon damage from skills, another boost from flawless, high crits, and the stam/hvy atk boost from bound armaments. My gut feeling is why they're holding back on a real attack skill. I think they could still stand to offer one such morph, and its a balance problem they could either buff up another class in other ways or tone it down if its OP. The point is though that if its OP its already benefiting magic builds quite a lot.

Emma_Overload

mistermutiny89 wrote: »

Making shields crittable isn't the answer.

Removing shield stacking is. Casting a shield on an existing shield should override the old one.

If a mag sorc is fighting another mag user; cast harness magicka... If it's group, cast conjured... If low health? Healing ward. Situational shield use instead of abc.

Stam sorcs don't need more utility, they need spammable dps abilities.

ZoS needs to realise that mag sorcs will only ever use Velocious (?) Curse and insta frag morphs..So there's two free dps morph slots available.

Stam users don't even use the Stam morph of Lightning presence (?), they want more Stam dps options.

Nothing you've said addresses the issue OP raised about Surge heals failing to proc because you can't crit on shields. Sorcs DO need to fight other Sorcs from time to time!

Mojomonkeyman

Giving stam sorcs a spammable dps ability is not optimal, in my opinion. Add skilled timed burst combos through dots or follow up damage abilities. This game doesnt need another surprise attack, it leads people to play dumb. Just give me a stam curse to play around with timings and some form of non spammable active defense, very high cost attached since stam heals are pretty good, but stam sorc is missing a panic button to give 1-3 secs breathing room.

Those changes would make stam sorc exceptionally good while keeping some of its challenge to play.

Jar_Ek

@Mojomonkeyman lol that's a pretty good summary of my much longer post. We lack any panic buttons (including ultimate) and we lack any good means to add extra damage beyond weapon skills - particularly burst damage. Things like fracture or defile would go a long way to help. However from an atheistic viewpoint I think many stamina sorcerers would actually like some form of stamina / melee attack... but it probably doesn't need to be another suprise attack.

Mojomonkeyman

Jar_Ek wrote: »

@Mojomonkeyman lol that's a pretty good summary of my much longer post. We lack any panic buttons (including ultimate) and we lack any good means to add extra damage beyond weapon skills - particularly burst damage. Things like fracture or defile would go a long way to help. However from an atheistic viewpoint I think many stamina sorcerers would actually like some form of stamina / melee attack... but it probably doesn't need to be another suprise attack.

Your post was inspriring me to write mine, since I was surprised to read such a well worded and thought out analysis. Thanks.

Jar_Ek

@Mojomonkeyman Thank you for the kind words. Have an awesome for being a generous soul.