Help me with my sorc!

WhoThenNow7

I know everyone says they are easy mode, but after playing for about 2 years I finally got a sorc to level 50 (690cp) and I am pretty bad with it. I am losing to a lot of lower levels in duels.

A quick review of gear and skills... I'm just about 690cp, high elf, all attributes into magicka, running 5 spinners 5 seducer 1 kena all purple (2H 5L or 1H 6L). Mundus is atronach, drink witch mothers potent brew, sitting around 2200 spell power with major sorcery and around 2300 magicka regen.

Main skills I use, force pulse, rune prison, haunting curse, c frags, hardened ward harness magicka, streak, dark conversion, etc.

I usually try to weave with force pulse and then use rune prison, curse and then frags. I try to line them all up to where everything goes off at once. I don't have meteor yet, I know this is a big part of this burst. Can anyone just give me feedback and tell me a rotation that works well? Thanks guys.

Lord-Otto

Hardened->Harness->Curse->Pulse->(Meteor)->Cage->Frag->Repeat.
When target is low enough, Fury instead of Pulse.

It's probably not so much that you're playing wrong, sorcs are just typically very polarized.
Godly against potatoes, very predictable against experienced players.
They lack gimmicks in duels, unless you go full pet, which is broken.
They are highly mobile in open world, until that first gap closer connected, then you're permasnared and gapclosed.
Shields make you a walking tank until two decent damage builds focus you and you evaporate.

The bottom line is that sorcs are actually not as OP as forum potatoes want to sell them for.
(^_-)
Just keep practicing, you'll get more routined!

TheMystid

Drop seducer and use a utility back bar set like riposte or lich (not sp good anymore tho), so that you can use undaunted (blood spawn, engine guardian, slime etc.).

But most importanrly gold out your weapons or your burst won't be strong enough to put enemy on execute range... You can also transmute spinner staff into nirnhoned for more overall damage. (Also Infused resto staff with weapon damage glyph helps a lot: remember to LA and switch to destro bar before curse/frag)..
As for Shield, the first one you cast is the first that goes down when you take damage: so, for instance, if you are low always cast healing ward last to get the full heal...

Also, stamina for magsorc is extremely valuable (well, it is for any other magicka class): running ~ 1k recovery or a high stamina pool will save your life a lot...

Sidenote: sorc is very mobile so it will take little time to farm lorebooks if you can use the lorebook addon


Gl! Hf!

Thogard

Mag sorc is an “all or nothing” class.

Either you just stomp your opponent, or they stomp you. Rarely do you have duels that look “close”

This leads a lot of people to whine about them, because when a sorc wins it wins by a lot.
But those players aren’t good players. They don’t know how to counter a sorc and they don’t know that when a sorc loses, it loses by a lot.

ToRelax

Your setups looks like you haven't fully committed to a build yet (which is expected). I would suggest you add some more stamina and see what difference it makes. You could swap out Seducer for Shacklebreaker or go Serpent mundus with Triglyphs or 1 Bloodspawn with Trifood, something along those lines.

WhoThenNow7

Thanks for the help guys. I love seducer but I'm going to give shacklebreaker a try and see how I like it! I'll also farm lore books to get shooting star. Sadly I don't have the add on since I'm on Xbox

Drummerx04

Lord-Otto wrote: »

Hardened->Harness->Curse->Pulse->(Meteor)->Cage->Frag->Repeat.
When target is low enough, Fury instead of Pulse.

It's probably not so much that you're playing wrong, sorcs are just typically very polarized.
Godly against potatoes, very predictable against experienced players.
They lack gimmicks in duels, unless you go full pet, which is broken.
They are highly mobile in open world, until that first gap closer connected, then you're permasnared and gapclosed.
Shields make you a walking tank until two decent damage builds focus you and you evaporate.

The bottom line is that sorcs are actually not as OP as forum potatoes want to sell them for.
(^_-)
Just keep practicing, you'll get more routined!

Pretty much this. You'll find very quickly that sustained pressure builds are very dangerous, while strong burst builds ironically kind of aren't. So the average stamblade for instance can usually be predicted and you can shield all of their burst, but an average stamplar will have you permasnared and beat the crap out of your shields until you run out of mag.

As pointed out before, magsorc eats bad players for breakfast. Their shields make casual damage sort of irrelevant, and a couple of the attacks trigger automatically or can't be dodged which gives sorc a really bad rep. The downside is that seeing a magsorc pretty much means you know exactly what to expect, and the loss of the frag stun removed a pretty significant portion of the passive threat a sorc generates in open world, and Rune Prison is not actually that commonly encountered because often you are sacrificing something just to fit it on the bar.

As such I have a couple general advice points:

• If you are ever just spamming shields to stay alive without finding time to attack, you've lost already
• Be a little patient. Get in a heavy resto or two to keep your mag in good shape.
• Resist the urge to cast frag immediately upon proc. There's a good chance your opponent will dodge and waste it if you were just applying good pressure.
• If you don't stack shields, then they won't be strong enough to actually protect you against a good opponent. Usually hardened+healing is enough. Harness is more of an open world shield.
• Get a feel for when curse explodes. Heals on other classes is so high, staggering your damage often means you'll never win.

Derra

Drummerx04 wrote: »

As such I have a couple general advice points:

• If you are ever just spamming shields to stay alive without finding time to attack, you've lost already
• Be a little patient. Get in a heavy resto or two to keep your mag in good shape

These two points seem to contradict each other - as heavyattacking is basically the same as spamming shields to stay alive.

Also spamming shields to stay alive is exactly the point why sorcs are disliked in the community. It´s verymuch the point that you haven´t lost the fight until you die and you can´t kill someone that properly uses 3 shields on a sorc (with a magica build).