Best Magicka, Spell Power Balance

THEDKEXPERIENCE

I logged into my Magplar yesterday for the first time in eons. Unbuffed he has just north of 50K magic and 2.4K SP. When solo buffed the SP generally sits around 3.5K. More than enough to melt nearly anything in 99% of the game, PVP included.

Anyway, I know this is not a normal set up and since I’ve been away so long I figured I’d crowd source everyone here to see what they believe is the correct Magicka vs Spell Power balance.

Open to all suggestions for any build. I got a lot of toons to mess with this afternoon. Thanks.

Dracane

THEDKEXPERIENCE wrote: »

I logged into my Magplar yesterday for the first time in eons. Unbuffed he has just north of 50K magic and 2.4K SP. When solo buffed the SP generally sits around 3.5K. More than enough to melt nearly anything in 99% of the game, PVP included.

Anyway, I know this is not a normal set up and since I’ve been away so long I figured I’d crowd source everyone here to see what they believe is the correct Magicka vs Spell Power balance.

Open to all suggestions for any build. I got a lot of toons to mess with this afternoon. Thanks.

Normally the answer would be very simple. Magicka is quite unnecessary as a damage stat and Spell Damage is always to be favored above it.

Templar has a few interesting twists with max Magicka, because the maximum damage of purifying light depends on your magicka and radiant oppression gets 20% extra damage from your current magicka. This makes templar the last remaining class that gets any offensive benefit from magicka over spell damage. Sorcerer used to, but pets now scale horribly with magicka.

I am no templar expert, though I imagine that neither of these reasons are enough to justify such a heavy investment into magicka over spell damage. Especially since you have access to the (in my opinion) best minor class buff in the game: Minor Sorcery. Since you seem to play solo, this is a straight 10% modifier on all your spell damage. Making it even more attractive over magicka.

If you want damage, always spell damage.

THEDKEXPERIENCE

Dracane wrote: »

THEDKEXPERIENCE wrote: »

I logged into my Magplar yesterday for the first time in eons. Unbuffed he has just north of 50K magic and 2.4K SP. When solo buffed the SP generally sits around 3.5K. More than enough to melt nearly anything in 99% of the game, PVP included.

Anyway, I know this is not a normal set up and since I’ve been away so long I figured I’d crowd source everyone here to see what they believe is the correct Magicka vs Spell Power balance.

Open to all suggestions for any build. I got a lot of toons to mess with this afternoon. Thanks.

Normally the answer would be very simple. Magicka is quite unnecessary as a damage stat and Spell Damage is always to be favored above it.

Templar has a few interesting twists with max Magicka, because the maximum damage of purifying light depends on your magicka and radiant oppression gets 20% extra damage from your current magicka. This makes templar the last remaining class that gets any offensive benefit from magicka over spell damage. Sorcerer used to, but pets now scale horribly with magicka.

I am no templar expert, though I imagine that neither of these reasons are enough to justify such a heavy investment into magicka over spell damage. Especially since you have access to the (in my opinion) best minor class buff in the game: Minor Sorcery. Since you seem to play solo, this is a straight 10% modifier on all your spell damage. Making it even more attractive over magicka.

If you want damage, always spell damage.

Actually radiant oppression in PVP is the exact reason why I always ran this. My unbuffed tooltip value is somewhere between 10k-11k. I made him this way so I could be the one guy on the server who could kill “unkillable” tanks. I’m on XBox so I don’t know what my DPS is but I do know that I can get someone from 31% to 0% EXTREMELY fast.

Unfortunately the drawback to essentially being the closer was my toon is horrific in 1 on 1 situations at full health unless I had a ultimate ready. I’ve always enjoyed non-meta builds but I’ve been away long enough to know I should see what normal people run.

worrallj

I'm amazingly bad at pvp, so won't offer advice, but just ask a question. I see a LOT of pvp builds (dotz, alcast etc) that appear to favor resources over spell damage - running things like crafty alfiq, necropotence, and bone pirate.

What's the rationale there? Most long fights last long enough that you have to rely on regen instead of large resource pools anyway, so I don't get it.

THEDKEXPERIENCE

worrallj wrote: »

I'm amazingly bad at pvp, so won't offer advice, but just ask a question. I see a LOT of pvp builds (dotz, alcast etc) that appear to favor resources over spell damage - running things like crafty alfiq, necropotence, and bone pirate.

What's the rationale there? Most long fights last long enough that you have to rely on regen instead of large resource pools anyway, so I don't get it.

My rational has always been that I want enough of a magic pool to heal/shield through a stamina stealth attack and still have 20 or 30K left over to go one offense.

Even running sub 900 regen (it’s like 847 or something) historically I’ve never had issues running out of resources. Usually one or two heavy staff attacks will get me back in the fight whenever I’ve depleted everything, but that’s usually when it’s 50 on 50.

The pool, for me anyway is simply about 2 things:

1 - Killing tanks with an over powered radiant oppression

2 - being able to spam my way out of nightblade surprise attacks with shields and heals, with enough left over to go on offense.

jaws343

worrallj wrote: »

I'm amazingly bad at pvp, so won't offer advice, but just ask a question. I see a LOT of pvp builds (dotz, alcast etc) that appear to favor resources over spell damage - running things like crafty alfiq, necropotence, and bone pirate.

What's the rationale there? Most long fights last long enough that you have to rely on regen instead of large resource pools anyway, so I don't get it.

In PVP, you need to have a decent health and mag pool alongside recovery. Mostly the recovery and health, but the mag pool helps with shield strength. On top of that, mag has less access to spell damage modifiers compared to stam, so stacking spell damage ends up having less impact than stacking mag.

But, recovery is a major factor here. You can stack mag using alfiq and necro and run pure recovery glyphs and lose no damage. And your sets are providing you magicka in every slot. Whereas, if you are stacking spell damage, if you have recovery issues you have to sacrifice spell damage enchants to run recovery, reducing your damage. Plus, the 2-4 piece bonuses of most spell damage sets don't offer as much help to damage as the max mag bonuses for mag stacking sets. For example, max mag, or recovery, or spell crit, rather than pure spell damage 2-4 bonuses.

All of that makes it easier to stack mag, and since stacking mag impacts shield strength, it becomes a much more reliable way to build for damage. Take a Mag Sorc running Alfiq and Bright Throat, with 1 piece Domi and Malacath band.

You can run tristat enchants and have 50K mag, 20K health (+5K in cyro), 13-15K stam (depending on the drink you run). On top of this you have like 1900 mag recovery, and Malacath band is adding 25% damage to all of your attacks. To get this type of return stacking spell damage, you would have to give up a lot, including health and recovery.

Dracane

THEDKEXPERIENCE wrote: »

Dracane wrote: »

THEDKEXPERIENCE wrote: »

I logged into my Magplar yesterday for the first time in eons. Unbuffed he has just north of 50K magic and 2.4K SP. When solo buffed the SP generally sits around 3.5K. More than enough to melt nearly anything in 99% of the game, PVP included.

Anyway, I know this is not a normal set up and since I’ve been away so long I figured I’d crowd source everyone here to see what they believe is the correct Magicka vs Spell Power balance.

Open to all suggestions for any build. I got a lot of toons to mess with this afternoon. Thanks.

Normally the answer would be very simple. Magicka is quite unnecessary as a damage stat and Spell Damage is always to be favored above it.

Templar has a few interesting twists with max Magicka, because the maximum damage of purifying light depends on your magicka and radiant oppression gets 20% extra damage from your current magicka. This makes templar the last remaining class that gets any offensive benefit from magicka over spell damage. Sorcerer used to, but pets now scale horribly with magicka.

I am no templar expert, though I imagine that neither of these reasons are enough to justify such a heavy investment into magicka over spell damage. Especially since you have access to the (in my opinion) best minor class buff in the game: Minor Sorcery. Since you seem to play solo, this is a straight 10% modifier on all your spell damage. Making it even more attractive over magicka.

If you want damage, always spell damage.

Actually radiant oppression in PVP is the exact reason why I always ran this. My unbuffed tooltip value is somewhere between 10k-11k. I made him this way so I could be the one guy on the server who could kill “unkillable” tanks. I’m on XBox so I don’t know what my DPS is but I do know that I can get someone from 31% to 0% EXTREMELY fast.

Unfortunately the drawback to essentially being the closer was my toon is horrific in 1 on 1 situations at full health unless I had a ultimate ready. I’ve always enjoyed non-meta builds but I’ve been away long enough to know I should see what normal people run.

You mentioned pvp only on a side note, so I assumed this was mainly about pve.
A friend of mine, @Shannoria (I am unsure if the linked person is even THE Shannoria) , who I consider to be the best magicka templar on PC EU, actually recommends going for max magicka in pvp. Though she does not use radiant oppression and says this is mainly to buff purifying light.

I think for pvp things are not nearly as strict, although I would argue spell damage is still always better when you want damage unless you just want to be an execute bot. For pve, I think there is no decision at the moment. It's crit or nothing (yawn)

tsaescishoeshiner

Spell Damage gets multiplied by 1.2x by Major Sorcery, whereas Magicka has many other multipliers: CP passives, Inner Light/Mages Guild passives, undaunted passive.

Two things complicate this further: 1 Spell Damage = 10.5 Magicka. And set bonuses give 129 Spell Damage, but 1096 Magicka. So the efficiency of stacking them can be a bit mathy to compare, but the person who suggested Spell Damage for damage reasons is probably right. You should be able to compare them directly, but certain abilities scale differently with them I think

I used to run 63k Max Magicka on my argonian sorc for PvP. It wasn't competitive because of the overinvestment into Magicka, but the Ice Comets totally obliterated people lol. Who needs recovery when you have 10 million magicka :pppp

THEDKEXPERIENCE

tsaescishoeshiner wrote: »

Spell Damage gets multiplied by 1.2x by Major Sorcery, whereas Magicka has many other multipliers: CP passives, Inner Light/Mages Guild passives, undaunted passive.

Two things complicate this further: 1 Spell Damage = 10.5 Magicka. And set bonuses give 129 Spell Damage, but 1096 Magicka. So the efficiency of stacking them can be a bit mathy to compare, but the person who suggested Spell Damage for damage reasons is probably right. You should be able to compare them directly, but certain abilities scale differently with them I think

I used to run 63k Max Magicka on my argonian sorc for PvP. It wasn't competitive because of the overinvestment into Magicka, but the Ice Comets totally obliterated people lol. Who needs recovery when you have 10 million magicka :pppp

I’ve run a few tests in the past and I’ve always found that maxing out my spell power gave me a very small increase in damage but I liked the extra reserves in the gas tank. Also, as you said, melting randoms with an ice comet is a blast.

This time I decided to give back about 8 K in magicka about 15k in resistances. My SP more or less held steady. I found I was still able to get plenty of PVP kills and was much more survivable. Way better solo PVP set up for me this way.

Thanks to everyone for all the notes.