Learning to play: Part 2 - More questions

Violynne

Current character is a level 42 magBlade. No special traits on armor save for increase armor and 2 with Mundus. 5 light/2 medium. Primary is a lightning staff with 2300+ shock enchant (using precise as I can't research sharpened until I find a drop or buy).
Skills used: Impale, Lotus Fan, Concealed Weapon, Shadowy Disguise, and Swallow Soul (healing).

Base with staff is 1100ish with crits around 1400.
Impale hits for 1.2-1.4k with crits around 1.6k
Lotus hits about 5k, with 7k crit.
Concealed is about 1.2k, with around 1.5k crit, though take with salt as I don't use it often.

Magicka at 26k, with combo of passives, Mundus, and enchants.

I have 45 CP in Spell Penetration.

Now for my questions.
1) I've been critting 10k+ since level 20 with Lotus Fan, but I don't know how. If a crit delivers 1.5x base, how am I generating this number? I don't see any information LF scales off magicka, but this would make sense. Currently critting for 15k.

2) Why does the 15k crit always happen as the last strike? I can't seem to get this to hit during a fight any other time.
Note: Shadowy Disguise guarantees a crit on next hit, but LF never goes above 7.5k

3) Based on the above info, why aren't my other skills hitting for higher crits? (assuming they're also based off magicka)

4) Reading various builds while I learn, I keep seeing something about a "soft cap". Some articles state the soft cap was removed in 1.9. What is a soft cap and how does/did it affect the game?

5) I'd like to respec my CP to put all points into spell penetration, but I've read this is "overkill" since PvE has an armor cap of 35k. How do I translate my penetration number (currently around 7000) to work with PvE without wasting CP? Or do I just plan on PvP and dump all points?

So far, playing the game has been a breeze, only because mobs are 2 or less. When I get into area with 3+ mobs, now I feel extremely underpowered and have found myself spamming Swallowing Soul just to stay alive. I believe this may be the level cap issue I've heard others talk about, but not sure. I just can't seem to do enough damage against 3 mobs and it's irritating.

Before I unlock additional skills, I'd like to understand these first. Other skills seem to be similar, so I figure if I can "master" these, the others will just be added for play style.

I really don't want to get back into the habit of using Destructive Clench for CC. Any ideas of CC would be appreciated here.

Thanks to all who have helped and will continue to help. Seeing 10k crits is a first, and I have to admit, I want more.

Thanks for reading!

Autolycus

Just as a quick note, everything you have listed on your bar in the OP scales with magicka and spell damage. Shadowy Disguise doesn't scale because there's nothing for it to scale up (no damage, healing, etc).

I might need some more information to answer (1) and (2), I think there's some bit of information I'm missing to connect all the dots. What I can say now though is that Lotus Fan definitely does scale with magicka and spell damage. I'm guessing that the reason you see relatively low values for it on the tooltip and higher values in floating combat text is because of the battle leveling / scaling.

For (3) the answer should vary. Concealed Weapon and Swallow Soul are both strictly direct-damage abilities (no damage over time), so they should deal more up-front damage than something like Lotus Fan, which offsets the reduced up-front damage with additional damage over time. They should be critting for more than Lotus Fan unless there's something else at play (like if it's Empowered).

(4) There are no soft caps in ESO. They were removed a long time ago and haven't been back since. People sometimes still say soft cap, when they mean hard cap. Maybe that's what they meant? Hard to say.

(5) The hard cap on both physical and spell resistance is 33,100. Penetration works on the same scale as resistance. If someone has 1,000 spell resistance and you have 1,000 spell penetration, then they effectively have 0 resistance. These numbers crunched behind the scenes - that player isn't going to see their resistance reduced on their character sheet if you have penetration. They will see it, however, if you do something that reduces their resistances. In the former, you carry that stat; In the latter, your opponent carries it.

Going "all in" to penetration is generally overkill, but for a number of reasons. In pve, there are multiple people providing a variety of buffs and debuffs. As a tank, I would use Pierce Armor, for example, which reduces the target's spell resistance. I'm not carrying that stat (it's not penetration) - the enemy is being reduced. This means that you benefit from my debuff. As mentioned, there are a variety of these buffs, not every group provides any or all of them. Generally speaking, if you go all-in to penetration in pve, you're going to run into situations where you have too much penetration. If the enemy's resistance is reduced to 0, any further reduction or penetration has zero effect.

Note that pve mobs have lower resistances, most bosses and mobs have 18,200 spell and physical resistance. Major Breach (from Pierce Armor) reduces it by 5,280 all on its own. The Concentration passive in the Light Armor tree gives you 4,884 penetration. These are in effect the same thing, but one is carried by you (penetration) and the other is carried by the enemy (reduction). In this case, this particular enemy still has 18,200 - 5,280 - 4,884 = 8,036 spell resistance remaining. For solo content (where nobody is providing these debuffs), if stripping the whole 18,200 is the goal, it's up to you to do it all. Just remember that "free" penetration from Light Armor.

In pvp, you can over-penetrate players if they are intentionally stacking resistance above the hard cap. In this case, they aren't getting any increased mitigation for going over the cap, but every point over the cap is a hedge against penetration. It's not super common, but there are players that do this so that your sharpened weapons, for example, don't bring them below the hard cap.

(6?) Once you start getting more mobs per pull, it's a good idea to have some sort of AoE damage. Your choice in AoE will undoubtedly differ between pve and pvp. For pve, Sap Essence (morph of Drain Power) is one of your best options, as it does respectable damage, heals you, and gives you Major Sorcery and Brutality for 20s. It also increases your healing potency and your max magicka for being slotted via the Siphoning passives, but note that the max magicka is for having at least one Siphoning ability. Since you already have Swallow Soul, this is not granted a second time, just once. You'll still get the additional healing, though.

Cripple (morph to Crippling Grasp) and Agony (morph to Prolonged Suffering) are two really good options for you for CC. The former will deal respectable damage over time and root the target in place, but it does not prevent them from using attacks or abilities (best to use this on melee, who can't reach you if they are rooted. Ranged can and will still attack you). It can be spammed to keep the target there while you take out his/her friends.

Agony is a disorient effect. It takes that enemy out of play for the duration of the effect (~30s) as long as the enemy isn't damaged. If you have 3 enemies, you can use Agony on one of them, and let the other two come to you. Then just take out that third one after you've handled the first two.

Violynne

Autolycus wrote: »

Just as a quick note, everything you have listed on your bar in the OP scales with magicka and spell damage. Shadowy Disguise doesn't scale because there's nothing for it to scale up (no damage, healing, etc).

Yep. It's one of the things I felt I had to do in order to understand fully. Having a confirmation helps.

I'm guessing that the reason you see relatively low values for it on the tooltip and higher values in floating combat text is because of the battle leveling / scaling.

Time to get embarrassed, but I don't know what a tooltip is. The only way I can see my damage output from spells is during combat, as white gives base and yellow gives crits (plus an exclamation mark). I'm on XB1, so I may have inadvertently turned off the text as I'm one who doesn't like a ton of text on my screen, such as the quest tracker and bar.

Concealed Weapon and Swallow Soul are both strictly direct-damage abilities (no damage over time), so they should deal more up-front damage than something like Lotus Fan, which offsets the reduced up-front damage with additional damage over time. They should be critting for more than Lotus Fan unless there's something else at play (like if it's Empowered).

Hmm. This answer surprises me, because I'm seeing the opposite. LF does the most base damage attack at over 5k. All skills are morphed/level IV.

I'll do some testing tonight to get accurate numbers. I usually hit with LF after SD for the guaranteed crit, which is around 7.5k. The 15k only happens at the end of battle, but I have no clue why.

(4) There are no soft caps in ESO. They were removed a long time ago and haven't been back since. People sometimes still say soft cap, when they mean hard cap. Maybe that's what they meant? Hard to say.

Definitely soft cap, but if it's been removed, the article is most likely old. Not many have dates of original publish on them, sadly.

Going "all in" to penetration is generally overkill, but for a number of reasons. In pve, there are multiple people providing a variety of buffs and debuffs. As a tank, I would use Pierce Armor, for example, which reduces the target's spell resistance. I'm not carrying that stat (it's not penetration) - the enemy is being reduced. This means that you benefit from my debuff. As mentioned, there are a variety of these buffs, not every group provides any or all of them. Generally speaking, if you go all-in to penetration in pve, you're going to run into situations where you have too much penetration. If the enemy's resistance is reduced to 0, any further reduction or penetration has zero effect.

I'm still trying to learn to use debuffs. On XB1, we have to press the Y+B button, which isn't easy to do. It's actually a poor design, imo, but I'll get there.
Thanks for the info. I'll respec my CP tonight and boost penetration to at least 10-15k.

(6?) Once you start getting more mobs per pull, it's a good idea to have some sort of AoE damage. Your choice in AoE will undoubtedly differ between pve and pvp. For pve, Sap Essence (morph of Drain Power) is one of your best options, as it does respectable damage, heals you, and gives you Major Sorcery and Brutality for 20s. It also increases your healing potency and your max magicka for being slotted via the Siphoning passives.

I'll unlock it tonight and start leveling it.

Cripple (morph to Crippling Grasp) and Agony (morph to Prolonged Suffering) are two really good options for you for CC. The former will deal respectable damage over time and root the target in place, but it does not prevent them from using attacks or abilities (best to use this on melee, who can't reach you if they are rooted. Ranged can and will still attack you). It can be spammed to keep the target there while you take out his/her friends.

I can't believe I missed the byline of rooting targets. Getting old blows. Will definitely work to getting these leveled ASAP.

Agony is a disorient effect. It takes that enemy out of play for the duration of the effect (~30s) as long as the enemy isn't damaged. If you have 3 enemies, you can use Agony on one of them, and let the other two come to you. Then just take out that third one after you've handled the first two without having to worry about them.

The "not taking damage" has always been a problem for me because passives spread damage to all surrounding enemies. Never could understand why put this passive and skill together. The effect is usually negated. Even if I try to kite two mobs away, it seems it's never far enough, especially in narrow corridors. Looks like I'll need to practice.

Thank you so much for your help! I'm looking forward to applying this knowledge to my character.

Autolycus

Happy to help! Looks like most of it made sense, and you have something to work with now at least. A few follow-up points:

The "tooltip" is the ability's description. When you go into your skills menu and read the description - this is where it details most information about the skill. Here it tells you damage type, how long it lasts, additional benefits, etc. This collective description is the tooltip. The values in the tooltip are usually adjusted as you add in buffs, like Major Sorcery, for example. However, not everything is captured there.

If you weren't using the tooltips to compare your skills before, then what I suggested is incorrect. I presumed you were looking at those values beforehand, and comparing them to the numbers popping up over the enemy in combat. There are some factors that come into play between what is written in the tooltip, and when it actually hits the enemy. One of those factors is penetration, as the tooltip has no way of knowing what the enemy's resistances are.

Take a look at these tooltips for each of your skills when you have a moment. Note how much damage is stated in each one. You should see that Concealed Weapon and Swallow Soul deal a higher amount of magic damage compared to Lotus Fan, but Lotus Fan also deals more damage after the initial hit over several seconds. Assuming each of these skills have the same buffs and stats (it's not good to compare a crit to a non-crit, for example, or if you have Major Sorcery for one, but not the other), the ones with higher tooltip values should still be higher at the bottom line.

When you compare damage over time to direct-damage skills, to make a true comparison, you have to get them into the same terms. It might look from the tooltip alone that Lotus Fan deals a lot less than the other two, but when you factor in the damage over time component, and compare the total damage of Lotus Fan to the others, it looks a lot better.

To figure out why they aren't hitting for more than Lotus Fan, I'd almost need to watch you do it. Maybe spend some time on a dummy or a weak mob and look at how much each skill does without casting anything first (like SD). If you use SD for one, then to truly compare them, you would need to use SD before each one when you check the values.

I have no idea what the 15k hit at the end could be. I'm more than happy to help explain it, but you'll have to figure out what it is first. I know how hard it is to track some of this stuff without addons, but you're asking all the right questions to understand your character. Keep at it!

Nestor

All the answers you seek can be found in the equations that drive everything:

http://tamrielfoundry.com/topic/pts-2-1-2-sorcerer-arithmagic/

http://tamrielfoundry.com/topic/introduction-to-pve-damage-calculation-homestead/

Violynne

I'm a complete and utter idiot. I'm confusing Lotus Fan with Impale. Impale has a 300% damage attack on enemies with less than 25% health, which not only explains the 15k crit, but why it's at the end of a battle.

*slams head on desk.

My apologies. Maybe I should turn the bar back on and start memorizing icons.

*takes Aleve for new found headache.

Even still, thanks for the tooltip info. I'll definitely start keeping track of the numbers. I never noticed if they changed during any of my 3 characters. Usually, once I unlock/upgrade, I rarely revisit them. Never saw the need until now.

I do remember Lotus Fan (formerly Impale in my twisted head) throws out orange numbers on screen, indicating DoT. I recently swapped skills on my bar and am stupidly remembering LF as slot 4, rather than Impale.

Two hours before I can get home and pay the reaper to respec. I'm actually freaking excited about these changes and can't wait to see what they unlock.

*bows

Damn, I love this community. Again, absolutely appreciate and very thankful for your help!

Autolycus

Yay! Glad you figured it out. Impale crossed my mind, but no way for me to know for sure. Just glad we know now.

Hope all goes well! Good luck, feel free to ask me anything at all going forward.

Violynne

Autolycus wrote: »

Hope all goes well! Good luck, feel free to ask me anything at all going forward.

It did not go well at all last night.

But, not all is lost because it was a combination of my own stupidity and overconfidence.

The first thing I did (well, second, had to do my writs) was respec my CP. Bumped spell penetration from 2k to 5.5k (max for my CP at the moment), and boosted health received by 5%. Not much else changed.

Excited as a child on Dec. 25th, I ran to (literally, as much as stamina would allow me) to Bahraha's Gloom. Lots of mobs with physical damage. Starting attacking, and saw improvements in the numbers. Not grand, didn't expect that, but around 400pts of additional damage. The Impale crit is now mid 15k. Nice! I'll take every point I can get as a solo player.

Came across my first mob of 3, and was wiped. What the... these guys never gave me a problem like this! Resurrected, and went through again. The mobs of 3+ were getting harder! Surely a slight change couldn't have done this, right? Of course not.

I enter the center room anxiously waiting for The First. It finally shows up and.... resurrected again. "What the f***!!", I said out loud! I have never lost to this boss before. Oh dear. What have I done.

I decided to bail the temple and do the Flawless Plan quest. This temple wasn't difficult. A few gargoyles and another "First" enemy. No problem!

Problem. Gargoyles wiped me. Gargoyles! S**t! What's going on? I struggled to complete the quest. About this time, it was close to stopping for the night, so I head to Vylen Harbor to take care of business.

Ticked off, I spend another 3k restructuring my CP choices. Then I thought, "Well, dying over 12 times probably destroyed my armor, probably have to repair it."

I enter inventory and my jaw hits the floor. Level 25 gear. All of it. I'm level 44. I was so angry at myself. I could have swore I crafted new armor when I hit 40. As I think back, I only recall doing writs, not actually crafting a new set.

Wasted 3k gold, just like that.

Despite wiping more times in one night with this character than my last 3 combined, I can walk away with some positive, knowing that a slight boost in spell penetration was definitely noticeable.

I didn't get a chance to look at the tooltips, because I didn't have any Skyshards to upgrade.

Even though I respecced CP, I think these choices may be better. I'll know tonight as I'm going back to Bahraha's Gloom for some serious revenge using level 44 gear with some buffs in a few attributes.

Good grief, I can be an idiot sometimes.

I did have one question, though: When a description says "Increase spell critical", what does this actual mean? I tried reading info on it last night, but all the articles did was just copy/paste from the game with no example of what it actually does or how it works.

Hope this was entertaining to read. Sorry it was long, but I couldn't help but share my idiocy.

kylewwefan

I see your level 42. I've noticed when leveling new toons, this is about where things start getting much harder as you're not scaled so much to make up differences.

You get a lot of spell penetration from a sharp staff and light armor passives. The skills you choose and passives start really making your build come together.

Start working on mages guild quest. Like every magic build uses inner light for the passives it gives you. Sap essence gives you major sorcery to make your spells hit harder.

Using siphoning skills gives more magic and more skills slotted gives stronger heals. There's lots of things to play around with.

Violynne

kylewwefan wrote: »

I see your level 42. I've noticed when leveling new toons, this is about where things start getting much harder as you're not scaled so much to make up differences.

I've heard about the level cap as well, but I don't think this was the problem as much as it was not paying attention to my own gear. I have a hybrid character I recently completed the same quest with and she had zero problems with it. She doesn't use CP or has anything special. Just atypical leveled gear.

Start working on mages guild quest. Like every magic build uses inner light for the passives it gives you. Sap essence gives you major sorcery to make your spells hit harder.

My guild level is currently 4. I just hit Greenshade a few days ago, but once I'm done with the Thieves Guild quests, I'll be back collecting lore books. The only passive I've unlocked so far is Persuasion. More to come with ranks and skyshards.

Using siphoning skills gives more magic and more skills slotted gives stronger heals. There's lots of things to play around with.

Indeed. Right not my biggest wall is lack of skyshards. All my skills are in the 40 level, and two won't be unlocked until 46 and 48. That'll be done this weekend, for sure.

Autolycus

Thanks for the update, it was a good read :P

Don't be bummed about it though, things like that happen more often than one might think. You shouldn't have lost survivability solely from adding points into penetration, unless you took them from one of the mitigation stars (e.g. hardy, elemental defender). One thing to note is that higher penetration means more damage, right? So if you have a skill that heals you based on damage dealt, then more damage = more healing. This is the case with skills like Swallow Soul and Sap Essence, and knowing this can help you time your skills appropriately, so as to afford you that extra healing when you know you need it.

Spell critical is, in essence, your chance to critically hit with spells. Defining spells can be tricky sometimes, but generally speaking, if it scales with magicka and spell damage, it also scales with spell crit (as opposed to weapon crit). There are a few things that can't crit, and few things that don't follow normal logic, but don't worry too much about that for now.

ZOS made critical ratings and crit chance more complicated and confusing than it needs to be. Instead of something giving you, say 3% more spell crit chance, they'll give you something that increases your crit rating, which in turn is just a different way of increasing your crit chance. That rating has to be converted into a percentage, and it does this automatically on your character sheet. The conversion is slightly different for you being under level 50, but at level 50, 219 critical rating is equivalent to 1% crit chance.

Edit: A critical hit on a skill causes it to deal 1.5x (150%) of its normal damage or healing. As a NB, you get a free extra 10% (bringing it to 1.6x, or 160%). For example, let's say your Swallow Soul normal damage is 1,000, and let's say your spell critical is 50%. This means you have a 50% chance to deal 1,600 damage instead of 1,000. I simplified this a fair bit to illustrate the concept; know that there are other ways to boost your crit damage, not just your crit chance, and that it can be more complicated than this.

@kylewwefan touched on this above and it's a good point: The closer you get to level 50, the less of a handicap you get from character scaling.

Aside from having the right gear equipped, there are many things you can do in combat to help you survive. For example, remember earlier when I mentioned using Crippling Grasp? Not only does it root your enemy in place for a couple seconds, it also grants you Major Expedition (increased movement speed) for the full duration of the ability, which is 8s. This extra movement speed makes outrunning Gargoyles a helluva lot easier. There are a lot of skills you can use that have neat little quirks like that. Finding the combination that suits you best is part of the challenge (and part of the fun too).

Violynne

Autolycus wrote: »

...unless you took them from one of the mitigation stars (e.g. hardy, elemental defender).

Actually, I did do this. I reduced Elemental Defender because I haven't really seen much in the spell damage category. The death board made it pretty clear all my damage was physical based.

I wasn't really too upset with the amount of dying. I was more upset of not knowing why. I had just played the same delve the night before and had zero problems. Now it's a problem? The only thing that did change was I bumped up two levels and made slight changes in CP. Nothing drastic, I don't think. Tonight, I'll make note of my CP distribution so you can see them and I'll explain why I chose them. Some of them may be incorrect based on my interpretation of what I think they do.

Spell critical is, in essence, your chance to critically hit with spells.

Thanks for explaining. I figured this was the case. When I returned to the game, I noticed several traits were renamed/replaced/given new descriptions, so confirmation is greatly appreciated.

Oh, look at the time. Gotta go, pick up dinner, and try again!

Thank you so much for your help! I hope others are finding this experience helpful as well.

Until next time...

Violynne

Continuing with my saga of L2P, great news! Last night was phenomenally better than my last post. Upgrading armor/weapons and resetting CP a bit differently changed for the better. Bahraha's Gloom's bosses definitely felt my revenge! Now that's better!

I still feel I can tweak better as I paid particular attention to changes between using food and without. Seems like every 5k of additional magicka provided an extra 1k-1.4k of crit damage (now in the 16k range). Getting better. Too bad that's only on Impale's last hit.

All other crits are about the same, 1.5x damage. I'm okay with that. Using Cripple has helped as well, as its DoT throws down damage while I'm darting away from attacks.

My stats today:
(with food)
M: 34k H: 18k S: 11k
Sp dmg: 1271 Sp crit: 26.9%
Wp dmg: 1276 Wp crit: 15%
Sp Res: 14.5k Phys Res: 15k

CP distribution:
Lover:
48 Archamist (M recovery 15%)
48 Health (H recovery 15%)
1 left over

Mage:
70 Spell Erosion > 3.8k sp pen
27 Elemental Expert > 10% sp dmg

Steed:
43 Spell Shield (Sp res 2.4k)

Lover:
54 Light Armor Focus (phys res 3k)

Even as I wrote these out, I can see I have room for improvement. Sadly, I need to steal more stuff before throwing out another 3k gold.

I don't want to remove points from Lover because of the mat gathering bonuses (love the speed gain), but I'll move 49 points to Archamist, which should bring this close to 25% recovery for magicka. When I'm done with mats, I'll shift to reduction of magicka cost.

Going to move the 27 points in Mage to Spell Erosion. With a generous gift I received last night with lightning Sharpened, this will boost penetration once I learn the trait and apply it to new weapons.

The last two have been there since I created the character. I'm thinking moving 43 into Light Armor because physical damage hurts wearing light armor. Makes more sense to me, since most enemies I face which do the most damage are physical (especially those archers).

Once I respec, I should see some improvements on overall damage.

Looking forward to having fun in group dungeons and salivating at the chance to go up against a world boss solo.

No questions today. Now it's more of trial and error to see what changes affect output/protection.

Autolycus

I know you said no questions today, but I have one thing I think will help:

Light Armor Focus is in The Lady tree (red points). You can actually improve your survivability by a lot more if you put all of those points into Hardy and Elemental Defender instead, which are in the same tree. The basic rationale for this is that you will reduce incoming damage by more with either of these than via traditional resistances. If you spend all of your time fighting physical enemies, then having all of those into Hardy instead of Light Armor Focus will be a noticeable increase in survivability.

Violynne

Thanks for the pointer. Tonight, I'll be turning on the damage taken numbers so I can see what I'm dealing with. I left them off because I wanted to focus on outgoing. I'll do some comparisons before I respec so I can see it. Not doubting you at all, of course, but I want to see it so I can understand more of what's going on.

I watched a video last night on damage scaling and DPS. The guy goes on to give a couple of demonstrations, and by the time the video was over, I said to myself, "DPS has got to be one of the worst measurements in the game."

By making a slight change to crit % increase, I'm seeing more crits fly out. Not much, just one or two here and there, but that's what I expected. There's nothing in the game (aside from guarantees from skills) which allows me to create the crit, so this has to be a measurement of RNG.

Given this, I put two-and-two together to realize DPS is a mechanic of the game, not me. I want to focus more on maximizing output of each of my skills/weapons in conjunction with combos.

For example, I fell in love with Cripple. It's not spectacular in damage, but its DoT over those 8 seconds has served me well. Along with the destructive staff's AoE (hitting multiple targets, though I'm not exactly sure what passive unlocked this) means 2k+ per second, which equates to about 10k. That's 10% of an enemy's health right there.

My numbers slightly improved again last night as I unlocked the first of two Concentration passives, adding an additional 2k in phys/spell penetration. I'll take it! Next one will increase this to 4k.

I'm about the point where I'm ready to start slotting my bars based on combos, not just skills. Sadly, I'm out of skyshards again, and I need to farm this weekend to unlock/level more skills.

In an ironic twist of fate, I found myself "locking" myself out of the game. My inventory is completely filled with stolen goods that I can't complete quests now. HAHAHA. My fault, because I didn't pay attention to the Fence reset clock. All this respecing isn't cheap, so the fine citizens of Tamriel are assisting me (though not with their permission) with my training.


This entire new outlook of the game has me enjoying it. I can't tell you how often I think to myself, "Okay, this boss has 1.2M health. Can I take it?"

Nope. Not yet. But it sure was fun trying.