MagSorc Pain Points, the simple and in depth (see spoilers) forms

Turtle_Bot

From what many magsorc mains (including myself) have been saying about the state of magsorc over the past year now, the following 6 pain points are the most common themes that keep coming up on every thread about the class. The spoilers contain more details of each of the pain points for those who wish to see a more detailed explanation of each of the points.

1. Being forced into niche (pet/heavy attack) builds when those are barely 20% of the class's kit while the rest of the class's kit is constantly either ignored or nerfed.

Many sorc players are sick of being forced to run pets builds. Pets are the only build of the class to have received any love at all over the past year, but it is not the way that many want to play the class.
DK are allowed and encouraged to build for their flame element, wardens are now encouraged to build for frost (although it would be nice if they weren't forced into frost staves for this), meanwhile sorcerers who are supposed to be the wielders of lightning magic are instead left to babysit a bunch of pets which cannot even remotely keep up with the other classes in pve without the 45% damage buff provided by daedric prey and are entirely useless or detrimental in pvp, or they're forced into running a heavy attack build that makes even less use of the class's kit than the pet builds do.

2. Unreliability of skills.

- The common counters to the class's offensive kit, dodge roll, block, cleanse, invis, LoS, speed, etc have become far too cheap and wide spread for how effectively they counter everything magsorc tries to do.
- Every skill has either a cast time, a long/slow travel time or can be entirely mitigated through a multitude of cheap or free methods.
- Class staple abilities (frags/overload) have slow travel times, very bright and obvious visual and sound cues for their projectiles which means that the abilities are super easy to see coming and counter or reflect with skills like crystaline slab, frags also suffers from relying on rng to deal meaningful damage.
- Other class staples (curse, fury) can be cleansed, blocked (and for some reason fury can be dodged too).
- Lack of a reliable targeted stun to help facilitate the class's offensive kit, ever since rune cage/defensive rune got hard nerfed to a 3 second delay with obvious visual/sound cues it has become a struggle to reliably land the sorc offensive burst combo on players, especially those who know what they are doing.

3. Severe lack of viable defensive options compared to other classes.

- Every other class has an instant cast burst heal that only takes up 1 bar slot, has another additional benefit/buff, is not tied to a pet that can be easily dispatched within 1 GCD, and is reliable to use with no punishing downsides.
- Every other class also has access to plenty of passive healing over time that doesn't require them to be continuously dealing specific (critical) damage that isn't facilitated by the class kit/buff access.
- The classes defensive utility options have either been straight up power crept, or other classes simply have better effects or less punishing downsides for their defense/utility options.

4. Punished harder than any other class when performance is not good.

This ties into the previous 2 points, but it is worth mentioning in its own point as well.
The class has so many unreliable and punishing mechanics tied to its kit that the class literally lives and dies by if its skills fire off or not, unlike every other class that at least has the ability to tank some damage and still recover even if 1 or 2 skills don't fire off immediately due to poor performance.

5. Outdated skills and build options

briefly mentioned above, but the classes toolkit is heavily outdated.
- It lacks many of the common buffs and debuffs that other classes get for free.
- its defensive options in shields are tied to a very old/outdated formula and pets that have stats (health/mitigation/damage) that are more suited to 2018 ESO rather than 2022 ESO.
- It is also the only remaining class with severe detrimental/unavoidable downsides on its abilities (especially the defensive options).
- the only class that relies on rng to have an instant cast "spammable" ability.
- It's also the only class to still have its execute tied to a very low 20% threshold to trigger its bonus damage (which doesn't scale at all) on a skill that otherwise deals less damage than a single tick of damage that most DoTs deal.
- bound armaments lost its niche of buffing light attacks and as such became a strictly worse version of spec bow, that takes 2 GCDs (to bows 1 GCD) to use, deals less damage overall (3200 base to spec bows nearly 4800 at base) on top of only providing roughly 30% of the boost to damage/healing that spec bow provides.

6. Lacking, unreliable or conflicting buff/debuff/passives that allow for a functional and synergistic kit.

Many of the classes buffs are tied to abilities that are not worth running or require outside triggers that other classes get for free on commonly slotted skills or from combining their own skills together or the class simply lacks relevant buffs/debuffs entirely, for example
- Major vitality (for 2 seconds) tied to a ground based soft CC that every class already runs the hard counter for in pvp and does not grant the buff if you don't hit anyone with it. It also messes with the tanks trying to CC and pull enemies in pve so its useless there as well.
- Major berserk must have an ally activate a synergy from atro that's not guaranteed to go to the sorc that summoned the atro as its the 8 closest allies and sorcs want to be at range.
- No in class access to breach (major or minor).
- Lack of a reliable stun for going on the offense, streak does not work well as a stun to go on the offense with. it puts you out of position which gets heavily punished during poor performance or on console where it is much slower to turn your character/screen around to face the enemy you just streaked over the top of to stun.
- Persistent passive and bound aegis applying to blocking damage (i.e. face tanking damage) while the rest of the class kit wants you to avoid damage at all costs.
- Blood magic passive requires direct damage from a dark magic ability (only 1 usable direct damage ability in this line, rest are unusable, delayed damage or DoT) and scales off max health, while shields scale off max magicka and healing and damage scales off weapon and spell damage.
- Crit surge requires dealing critical damage to proc its heal, but the class has no built in source of major prophecy/savagery to help facilitate this.

It would be nice if @ZOS_Kevin, @ZOS_GinaBruno or @ZOS_MattFiror could take a read of this and pass this info on to the relevant teams.

Sincerely, a magsorc main who has not been able to play their class, the way they want to, for a very long time now.

Zodiarkslayer

That is a good summary of pain points, thank you for compiling them. As a former MagSorc main, I really appreciate your effort. And I share your pain. Concerning the points:

1. Absolutely. Being forced to use pets is such a pain in the <rearward orifice>. I liked it from time to time, when questing for example. But together with Daedric Prey it already locks 3 out of 5 frontbar abilities. It is like the game design decides what you have to run. And the player doesn't even have a say in it.
2. I never PvPed with MagSorc after CP2.0 and alll the scaling changes thereafter, so I cannot comment on that. But those 2-3 years ago it wasn't as bad as you describe. But I build for MaxMagicka back then and that was a huge difference. The shields worked, Curse hurt with over 20k tooltip and Crushing Shock was a good PvP ability to combine with the class kit. But that was before the super high health and armor and healing META. I am honestly asking myself: What changed really, so that Sorc is off much worse now?
3. I disagree here. Hardened Ward is still strong and you can SOLO a lot of DLC WBs and Dungeons with it. But you are right with the healing. I would like to see dark exchange and morphs be reworked into HoTs, because crit surge is not a HoT. I would even sacrifice a couple o' cooldowns for a reliable HoT.
4. I think all classes are punished hard when performance isn't good. I mean Warden and Necro suffer pretty hard as well.
5. I agree on Mages Fury, Bound Armaments and Crystal Frags. Pet scaling is outdated, no question, but apperantly it is difficult to update. I wouldn't complain about that one, really, if it is impossible to change.
6. The point about Prophecy is only half true, since there is minor prophecy and that is 6% crit chance. But my MAJOR, MAJOR pain point is and always has been the absolute lack of Critical Damage in the class. At this point in time it is simply astonishing how Wardens can get 24% critdamage from Advanced Species, another 10% from Glacial Presence and of course another 10% from minor brittle. That is up to 44% crit damage and the Sorcerors have zero, zilch, nothing.

Beilin_Balreis_Colcan

To add to the list: one of the nicer Sorcerer ultimates, Energy Overload, is completely bugged. Every time I use it, I have trouble toggling it off, and for some weird reason I end up stuck in slow motion mode, where jogging is at walking speed, and running is at jogging speed. It occurs more often in dungeons, and it's bizarre. Perhaps it's something to do with the fact that this particular ultimate actually replaces light/heavy staff attacks until toggled off, but whatever the reason it's completely messed up.

AdamLAD

And people still say it is strong. It doesn't matter if individuals do well on it. The entire point is that it's still clear that it's lacking big in areas. Especially in defence and sustain. Have you seen how outdated our passives are. Everything about it is outdated. Its core functionality doesn't need to change, but the things that make up its core functionality need to be buffed significantly. Shields need just a straight-up buff and reduce to cost. Passives need updating. Our combo needs to deal more reliable damage. We have to line up our entire combination to do damage. Not going to happen when, like you stated, so many cheap ways to get rid of our damage so to speak. Cleanse, dodge, block, stealth. Plus lag. Lag makes it so hard to kill anything on a sorc. If shields do not cast you are dead. If streak does not cast, you're in HUGE trouble since our defense kit currently is terrible. So many different pain points. Other classes use so many healing overtime, which in lag works better, other classes don't need to necessarily need to line up a perfectly timed combination to do damage which makes them better in lag. Blocking is broken, mathematically equates to 36k resistance and over like 10-12k critical resistance when pressing one button. Oh but guess what, sorcs can't even use that as our stamina pool and sustain is garbage AND our block mitigation goes to 0 with a ward up. The list could go on and on. Hopefully zos just straight-up up buffs the class.

Turtle_Bot

Zodiarkslayer wrote: »

That is a good summary of pain points, thank you for compiling them. As a former MagSorc main, I really appreciate your effort. And I share your pain. Concerning the points:

1. Absolutely. Being forced to use pets is such a pain in the <rearward orifice>. I liked it from time to time, when questing for example. But together with Daedric Prey it already locks 3 out of 5 frontbar abilities. It is like the game design decides what you have to run. And the player doesn't even have a say in it.
2. I never PvPed with MagSorc after CP2.0 and alll the scaling changes thereafter, so I cannot comment on that. But those 2-3 years ago it wasn't as bad as you describe. But I build for MaxMagicka back then and that was a huge difference. The shields worked, Curse hurt with over 20k tooltip and Crushing Shock was a good PvP ability to combine with the class kit. But that was before the super high health and armor and healing META. I am honestly asking myself: What changed really, so that Sorc is off much worse now?
3. I disagree here. Hardened Ward is still strong and you can SOLO a lot of DLC WBs and Dungeons with it. But you are right with the healing. I would like to see dark exchange and morphs be reworked into HoTs, because crit surge is not a HoT. I would even sacrifice a couple o' cooldowns for a reliable HoT.
4. I think all classes are punished hard when performance isn't good. I mean Warden and Necro suffer pretty hard as well.
5. I agree on Mages Fury, Bound Armaments and Crystal Frags. Pet scaling is outdated, no question, but apperantly it is difficult to update. I wouldn't complain about that one, really, if it is impossible to change.
6. The point about Prophecy is only half true, since there is minor prophecy and that is 6% crit chance. But my MAJOR, MAJOR pain point is and always has been the absolute lack of Critical Damage in the class. At this point in time it is simply astonishing how Wardens can get 24% critdamage from Advanced Species, another 10% from Glacial Presence and of course another 10% from minor brittle. That is up to 44% crit damage and the Sorcerors have zero, zilch, nothing.

For point 2, there was a complete rework of the damage formula a while ago that made weapon/spell damage a lot more impactful on increasing damage and healing while max stats (mag/stam) was significantly reduced. The effect on pve is less noticeable since you don't need to build into health for that so can easily dump all attribute points into max mag.
This was the biggest change, since everything got changed but shields remained on the old formula.

For point 3, shields are still decent for pve, but for pvp, they get reduced by 55% due to battle spirit, so those 10k+ shields you can get in pve, get reduced to 3-4k unless you build purely for max mag (roughly 50k mag) which as explained for point 2, heavily reduces your damage dealt and healing done due to the formula rework.

For point 4, it is true that all classes are punished in poor performance, sorcerer literally lives and dies from skills working properly and reliably, this is because the class has minimal passive mitigation and healing relying instead on casting streak or shields to avoid or escape from threats, where as the other classes, yes they may miss kills or be forced to play defensive for longer, they aren't instantly dead if for example their armor buff drops for a GCD or 2.

For the last point, they do have minor prophecy, but they rely so heavily on crit surge for "passive healing" that not having in class access to major prophecy/savagery (stam can't effectively use minor prophecy either due to potion limitations which cannot make prophecy + stamina pots) is very noticeable. Agreed on the zero crit damage point though, it's crazy the class has literally 0 inherent crit damage in its kit.

Turtle_Bot

vsrs_au wrote: »

To add to the list: one of the nicer Sorcerer ultimates, Energy Overload, is completely bugged. Every time I use it, I have trouble toggling it off, and for some weird reason I end up stuck in slow motion mode, where jogging is at walking speed, and running is at jogging speed. It occurs more often in dungeons, and it's bizarre. Perhaps it's something to do with the fact that this particular ultimate actually replaces light/heavy staff attacks until toggled off, but whatever the reason it's completely messed up.

I haven't encountered this yet personally as I haven't used overload for a while now (its too slow and unreliable for me in its current form). If it's happening though, it definitely needs a bug report to be sent in and get fixed.

Aces-High-82

Turtle_Bot wrote: »

vsrs_au wrote: »

To add to the list: one of the nicer Sorcerer ultimates, Energy Overload, is completely bugged. Every time I use it, I have trouble toggling it off, and for some weird reason I end up stuck in slow motion mode, where jogging is at walking speed, and running is at jogging speed. It occurs more often in dungeons, and it's bizarre. Perhaps it's something to do with the fact that this particular ultimate actually replaces light/heavy staff attacks until toggled off, but whatever the reason it's completely messed up.

I haven't encountered this yet personally as I haven't used overload for a while now (its too slow and unreliable for me in its current form). If it's happening though, it definitely needs a bug report to be sent in and get fixed.

It was fixed in U36 just to being reintroduced when they tried to fix the block issues. Besides the off toogle jankiness the stuck in heavy animation can be reproduced by hitting LA while performing a roll dodge which again had been fixed and reintroduced.

Turtle_Bot

Aces-High-82 wrote: »

Turtle_Bot wrote: »

vsrs_au wrote: »

To add to the list: one of the nicer Sorcerer ultimates, Energy Overload, is completely bugged. Every time I use it, I have trouble toggling it off, and for some weird reason I end up stuck in slow motion mode, where jogging is at walking speed, and running is at jogging speed. It occurs more often in dungeons, and it's bizarre. Perhaps it's something to do with the fact that this particular ultimate actually replaces light/heavy staff attacks until toggled off, but whatever the reason it's completely messed up.

I haven't encountered this yet personally as I haven't used overload for a while now (its too slow and unreliable for me in its current form). If it's happening though, it definitely needs a bug report to be sent in and get fixed.

It was fixed in U36 just to being reintroduced when they tried to fix the block issues. Besides the off toogle jankiness the stuck in heavy animation can be reproduced by hitting LA while performing a roll dodge which again had been fixed and reintroduced.

Oh, ok, I knew about the heavy attack animation from dodge roll, I didn't know it also affected this too...
Another bug that needs fixing....

n333rs

"- The common counters to the class's offensive kit, dodge roll, block, cleanse, invis, LoS, speed, etc have become far too cheap and wide spread for how effectively they counter everything magsorc tries to do. "

Literally just streak through people it goes through block and dodge. Curse does the same kicking nightblades out of stealth on top of that. [snip]

"- Class staple abilities (frags/overload) have slow travel times, very bright and obvious visual and sound cues for their projectiles which means that the abilities are super easy to see coming and counter or reflect with skills like crystaline slab, frags also suffers from relying on rng to deal meaningful damage"

Overload and frags deal a substantial amount of damage, you need to get better at building your character.

"- Lack of a reliable targeted stun to help facilitate the class's offensive kit, ever since rune cage/defensive rune got hard nerfed to a 3 second delay with obvious visual/sound cues it has become a struggle to reliably land the sorc offensive burst combo on players, especially those who know what they are doing."

Again streak is the best skill in the game being both mobility and a CC that goes through block and dodge. Sorc has by far the best CC option in the game.

"- Every other class also has access to plenty of passive healing over time that doesn't require them to be continuously dealing specific (critical) damage that isn't facilitated by the class kit/buff access."

Slot a dot or elemental susceptibility and it will continue to proc at all times as long as you're not god awful at weaving.

"- The classes defensive utility options have either been straight up power crept, or other classes simply have better effects or less punishing downsides for their defense/utility options."

While defensive abilities are worse than other classes in the sense that you cannot face tank you have streak which is absolutely overpowered to get away from players, especially when the only players which can realistically do damage to you are all wearing coil you can simply walk away from them.

"- its defensive options in shields are tied to a very old/outdated formula and pets that have stats (health/mitigation/damage) that are more suited to 2018 ESO rather than 2022 ESO."

It is by far the last class that has any sort of unique sort of gameplay in the sense that you try to make distance while fighting people.

"- bound armaments lost its niche of buffing light attacks and as such became a strictly worse version of spec bow, that takes 2 GCDs (to bows 1 GCD) to use, deals less damage overall (3200 base to spec bows nearly 4800 at base) on top of only providing roughly 30% of the boost to damage/healing that spec bow provides."

It consistently procs sunder which is minor breach. You get 3k free pen with like 50% uptime it is arguably a great skill it gives procs the hp passive etc

"- Lack of a reliable stun for going on the offense, streak does not work well as a stun to go on the offense with. it puts you out of position which gets heavily punished during poor performance or on console where it is much slower to turn your character/screen around to face the enemy you just streaked over the top of to stun."

Nothing works in lag anyways and stop using a controller.


While "Magsorc" is *** awful just because of shields "stamsorc" is entirely overpowered. The only thing you need to make the class good is to make shields scale with weapon damage or spell damage. [snip] There is no more mag or stam it is the way to play something and there is the way not to play something, accept that your "mage" roleplay is at an end and slot skills that arent entirely based on mag and what you had 2 yrs ago.

[edited for baiting]

n333rs

Also to add to the list while overload still somewhat frequently bugs it is one of the best PvP ultimates simply because of the insane sustain it provides.

The issues with the class you're experiencing are entirely based on your own choices of skills and inability to adapt.

Justosay

As a sorcerer, I see this topic as more of a wrong use of skills and gear than a "weakness" of the class (and this conclusion is obvious after I read about the inability to play without a pet).
Firstly, TS didn't write what part of the game he is discussing: pvp (battleground, cyrodiil), pve (arena (solo), group, trial)?
Secondly, most skills are available for every class. Many class skills have counterparts in sets, CP and other skill branches. Of course, you can't have them all (and this is true for every class), and this leads to a very simple conclusion - "know your friends and enemies".
Maybe this class is just not your play style? Try to play, for example, dragonknight or nightblade...

Turtle_Bot

n333rs wrote: »

Literally just streak through people it goes through block and dodge. Curse does the same kicking nightblades out of stealth on top of that. [snip]

[snip]

Overload and frags deal a substantial amount of damage, you need to get better at building your character.

[snip] my builds do just fine thanks. No build helps against stuff like miats pvp alerts and lag though.

Again streak is the best skill in the game being both mobility and a CC that goes through block and dodge. Sorc has by far the best CC option in the game.

re-read my statements about streak. Shade is infinitely better than streak for gap creation as it works vertically, horizontally and completely ignores LoS and pathing restrictions, as is invis that works just like ball of lightning but for every range attack instead of only 1 projectile, that also creates its own LoS as well.

Slot a dot or elemental susceptibility and it will continue to proc at all times as long as you're not god awful at weaving.

You must not play on PC EU, weaving is unreliable there at the best of times and forget about it during lag and primetime. That is not a l2p issue, its a zos servers issue.

While defensive abilities are worse than other classes in the sense that you cannot face tank you have streak which is absolutely overpowered to get away from players, especially when the only players which can realistically do damage to you are all wearing coil you can simply walk away from them.

Streak is hardly as op as it used to be, especially outside of no CP pvp where 7 heavy armor clad tankdks/tankdens/tankplars run around at max movespeed even with coil proc'd

It is by far the last class that has any sort of unique sort of gameplay in the sense that you try to make distance while fighting people.

I never said it wasn't?

It consistently procs sunder which is minor breach. You get 3k free pen with like 50% uptime it is arguably a great skill it gives procs the hp passive etc

sure, it procs it, if it hits. Also how does a chance to proc minor breach make it any better than spec bow which deals 50% more base damage, can nearly 1 shot people on its own, provides unique raw damage bonuses and if it kills provides a full heal that ignores battlespirit healing reduction.

Nothing works in lag anyways and stop using a controller.

I don't use a controller, however this is a point that was pointed out to me by those who do use controllers because they play on console so I included it for those players.

While "Magsorc" is *** awful just because of shields "stamsorc" is entirely overpowered. The only thing you need to make the class good is to make shields scale with weapon damage or spell damage. [snip] There is no more mag or stam it is the way to play something and there is the way not to play something, accept that your "mage" roleplay is at an end and slot skills that arent entirely based on mag and what you had 2 yrs ago.

it's not just shields, I also never said stamsorc was underperforming, it's still holding its own.

It is not a l2p issue, if it was then why would the top magsorcs all be saying the same points about the class that I raised in this post? Like I said originally, it's not just my opinions on this issue, its the points that have been expressed by countless others across multiple threads for months now about the state of the class.

Also note: I stated in another thread that I am currently running a stam/hybrid build, I have adapted. Just because I want to see my preferred way of playing be made viable again, doesn't mean I haven't adapted with the changes. It means I miss how I enjoyed playing my main class and want to see that playstyle made viable again.

[edited for baiting & to remove quote]

Turtle_Bot

Justosay wrote: »

As a sorcerer, I see this topic as more of a wrong use of skills and gear than a "weakness" of the class (and this conclusion is obvious after I read about the inability to play without a pet).
Firstly, TS didn't write what part of the game he is discussing: pvp (battleground, cyrodiil), pve (arena (solo), group, trial)?
Secondly, most skills are available for every class. Many class skills have counterparts in sets, CP and other skill branches. Of course, you can't have them all (and this is true for every class), and this leads to a very simple conclusion - "know your friends and enemies".
Maybe this class is just not your play style? Try to play, for example, dragonknight or nightblade...

Not sure where I stated that I needed a pet or I couldn't play the class, I just said that for pve the pet builds perform far better than no pet builds.

For more context, I do mostly pvp, open world (CP) and bgs.
most skills are available, but key survival skills like a reliable on demand burst heal is not something that is widely available ever since the nerf to resto staff in U34, hence why the class is over-reliant on streak to give it the required time to use dark deal/conversion to heal up, as for healing over time, I already run mara's + vigor, but again, every other class has this set + skill combo as well as their in class healing over time that also provides other bonus effects.

The class was perfectly fine for my playstyle all the way up through U34, didn't even need proc sets to carry me in offense or defense so it clearly worked fine before (and no I wasn't using crystal weapon either). I have also played all the other classes plenty and currently run my stamden when the lag gets too bad to run sorc. DK and NB just don't interest me at the current point in the game, even though I've played them both before.

Beardimus

Turtle_Bot wrote: »

From what many magsorc mains (including myself) have been saying about the state of magsorc over the past year now, the following 6 pain points are the most common themes that keep coming up on every thread about the class. The spoilers contain more details of each of the pain points for those who wish to see a more detailed explanation of each of the points.

1. Being forced into niche (pet/heavy attack) builds when those are barely 20% of the class's kit while the rest of the class's kit is constantly either ignored or nerfed.

Many sorc players are sick of being forced to run pets builds. Pets are the only build of the class to have received any love at all over the past year, but it is not the way that many want to play the class.
DK are allowed and encouraged to build for their flame element, wardens are now encouraged to build for frost (although it would be nice if they weren't forced into frost staves for this), meanwhile sorcerers who are supposed to be the wielders of lightning magic are instead left to babysit a bunch of pets which cannot even remotely keep up with the other classes in pve without the 45% damage buff provided by daedric prey and are entirely useless or detrimental in pvp, or they're forced into running a heavy attack build that makes even less use of the class's kit than the pet builds do.

2. Unreliability of skills.

- The common counters to the class's offensive kit, dodge roll, block, cleanse, invis, LoS, speed, etc have become far too cheap and wide spread for how effectively they counter everything magsorc tries to do.
- Every skill has either a cast time, a long/slow travel time or can be entirely mitigated through a multitude of cheap or free methods.
- Class staple abilities (frags/overload) have slow travel times, very bright and obvious visual and sound cues for their projectiles which means that the abilities are super easy to see coming and counter or reflect with skills like crystaline slab, frags also suffers from relying on rng to deal meaningful damage.
- Other class staples (curse, fury) can be cleansed, blocked (and for some reason fury can be dodged too).
- Lack of a reliable targeted stun to help facilitate the class's offensive kit, ever since rune cage/defensive rune got hard nerfed to a 3 second delay with obvious visual/sound cues it has become a struggle to reliably land the sorc offensive burst combo on players, especially those who know what they are doing.

3. Severe lack of viable defensive options compared to other classes.

- Every other class has an instant cast burst heal that only takes up 1 bar slot, has another additional benefit/buff, is not tied to a pet that can be easily dispatched within 1 GCD, and is reliable to use with no punishing downsides.
- Every other class also has access to plenty of passive healing over time that doesn't require them to be continuously dealing specific (critical) damage that isn't facilitated by the class kit/buff access.
- The classes defensive utility options have either been straight up power crept, or other classes simply have better effects or less punishing downsides for their defense/utility options.

4. Punished harder than any other class when performance is not good.

This ties into the previous 2 points, but it is worth mentioning in its own point as well.
The class has so many unreliable and punishing mechanics tied to its kit that the class literally lives and dies by if its skills fire off or not, unlike every other class that at least has the ability to tank some damage and still recover even if 1 or 2 skills don't fire off immediately due to poor performance.

5. Outdated skills and build options

briefly mentioned above, but the classes toolkit is heavily outdated.
- It lacks many of the common buffs and debuffs that other classes get for free.
- its defensive options in shields are tied to a very old/outdated formula and pets that have stats (health/mitigation/damage) that are more suited to 2018 ESO rather than 2022 ESO.
- It is also the only remaining class with severe detrimental/unavoidable downsides on its abilities (especially the defensive options).
- the only class that relies on rng to have an instant cast "spammable" ability.
- It's also the only class to still have its execute tied to a very low 20% threshold to trigger its bonus damage (which doesn't scale at all) on a skill that otherwise deals less damage than a single tick of damage that most DoTs deal.
- bound armaments lost its niche of buffing light attacks and as such became a strictly worse version of spec bow, that takes 2 GCDs (to bows 1 GCD) to use, deals less damage overall (3200 base to spec bows nearly 4800 at base) on top of only providing roughly 30% of the boost to damage/healing that spec bow provides.

6. Lacking, unreliable or conflicting buff/debuff/passives that allow for a functional and synergistic kit.

Many of the classes buffs are tied to abilities that are not worth running or require outside triggers that other classes get for free on commonly slotted skills or from combining their own skills together or the class simply lacks relevant buffs/debuffs entirely, for example
- Major vitality (for 2 seconds) tied to a ground based soft CC that every class already runs the hard counter for in pvp and does not grant the buff if you don't hit anyone with it. It also messes with the tanks trying to CC and pull enemies in pve so its useless there as well.
- Major berserk must have an ally activate a synergy from atro that's not guaranteed to go to the sorc that summoned the atro as its the 8 closest allies and sorcs want to be at range.
- No in class access to breach (major or minor).
- Lack of a reliable stun for going on the offense, streak does not work well as a stun to go on the offense with. it puts you out of position which gets heavily punished during poor performance or on console where it is much slower to turn your character/screen around to face the enemy you just streaked over the top of to stun.
- Persistent passive and bound aegis applying to blocking damage (i.e. face tanking damage) while the rest of the class kit wants you to avoid damage at all costs.
- Blood magic passive requires direct damage from a dark magic ability (only 1 usable direct damage ability in this line, rest are unusable, delayed damage or DoT) and scales off max health, while shields scale off max magicka and healing and damage scales off weapon and spell damage.
- Crit surge requires dealing critical damage to proc its heal, but the class has no built in source of major prophecy/savagery to help facilitate this.

It would be nice if @ZOS_Kevin, @ZOS_GinaBruno or @ZOS_MattFiror could take a read of this and pass this info on to the relevant teams.

Sincerely, a magsorc main who has not been able to play their class, the way they want to, for a very long time now.

Thanks @Turtle_Bot I've been away from the game but am MagSorc from launch, handy thread to give the current state.

Justosay

Turtle_Bot wrote: »

Not sure where I stated that I needed a pet or I couldn't play the class, I just said that for pve the pet builds perform far better than no pet builds.

Pets don't do enough damage to be a "far better" choice. Change it to Bound Armaments and you will see the difference.

Turtle_Bot wrote: »

most skills are available, but key survival skills like a reliable on demand burst heal is not something that is widely available ever since the nerf to resto staff in U34, hence why the class is over-reliant on streak to give it the required time to use dark deal/conversion to heal up, as for healing over time, I already run mara's + vigor, but again, every other class has this set + skill combo as well as their in class healing over time that also provides other bonus effects.

1. Sorc has a direct heal ("Summon Twilight Matriarch").
2. A lot of sets with heal and damage shields.
3. Hots are available from a lot of sets and non-class skills.
4. CP abilities.
5. Sorc is a master of keeping distance ("Bolt Escape").
6. Alchemy.

Turtle_Bot wrote: »

DK and NB just don't interest me at the current point in the game, even though I've played them both before.

Let me guess... They haven't "good" heal abilities?

jaws343

Justosay wrote: »

Turtle_Bot wrote: »

Not sure where I stated that I needed a pet or I couldn't play the class, I just said that for pve the pet builds perform far better than no pet builds.

Pets don't do enough damage to be a "far better" choice. Change it to Bound Armaments and you will see the difference.

Turtle_Bot wrote: »

most skills are available, but key survival skills like a reliable on demand burst heal is not something that is widely available ever since the nerf to resto staff in U34, hence why the class is over-reliant on streak to give it the required time to use dark deal/conversion to heal up, as for healing over time, I already run mara's + vigor, but again, every other class has this set + skill combo as well as their in class healing over time that also provides other bonus effects.

1. Sorc has a direct heal ("Summon Twilight Matriarch").
2. A lot of sets with heal and damage shields.
3. Hots are available from a lot of sets and non-class skills.
4. CP abilities.
5. Sorc is a master of keeping distance ("Bolt Escape").
6. Alchemy.

Turtle_Bot wrote: »

DK and NB just don't interest me at the current point in the game, even though I've played them both before.

Let me guess... They haven't "good" heal abilities?

Matriarch is an awful heal. Takes two bar spots, can die, and you can be interrupted when you try to re-summon. It is the most unreliable heal in the game and far more of a liability than a aide in combat.

Justosay

jaws343 wrote: »

Matriarch is an awful heal. Takes two bar spots, can die, and you can be interrupted when you try to re-summon. It is the most unreliable heal in the game and far more of a liability than a aide in combat.

Matriarch heals well, this is a good group direct heal. And like I said, sorc is a master at keeping distance. If you want melee, you need to change spec/class.

jaws343

Justosay wrote: »

jaws343 wrote: »

Matriarch is an awful heal. Takes two bar spots, can die, and you can be interrupted when you try to re-summon. It is the most unreliable heal in the game and far more of a liability than a aide in combat.

Matriarch heals well, this is a good group direct heal. And like I said, sorc is a master at keeping distance. If you want melee, you need to change spec/class.

Sorc's only reliable stun literally puts them into melee range. There is no avoiding melee on sorc unless you mean sorcs should just run away from fights constantly.

Justosay

jaws343 wrote: »

Sorc's only reliable stun literally puts them into melee range. There is no avoiding melee on sorc unless you mean sorcs should just run away from fights constantly.

Did you say that "Rune Cage" has the melee range or it is not reliable?
Or do you think sorc can't use "Daedric Tomb" or "Clench"?
Or do you think "Streak" doesn't "stuns enemies between your beginning and final location" and stun from volatile familiar doesn't work?
You can't use poisons with staff?

jaws343

Justosay wrote: »

jaws343 wrote: »

Sorc's only reliable stun literally puts them into melee range. There is no avoiding melee on sorc unless you mean sorcs should just run away from fights constantly.

Did you say that "Rune Cage" has the melee range or it is not reliable?
Or do you think sorc can't use "Daedric Tomb" or "Clench"?
Or do you think "Streak" doesn't "stuns enemies between your beginning and final location" and stun from volatile familiar doesn't work?
You can't use poisons with staff?

Everything about this leads me to believe you know nothing about sorc.

Rune Cage is incredibly awful. Telegraphed, delayed, dodgeable. Everything that makes a stun terrible.

Daedric Tomb. What. That skill immobilizes, cost 5K mag, and can just be avoided by any competent player. Not even remotely a viable stun option.

Clench: 15M range is practically the opposite of staying at range of a target and hasn't been a decent stun option for several patches.

Streak still leaves you close to the enemy when using it as a stun. 15M range, means you are still in gap closer distance after streaking through someone. And it also means that you are facing away from the person that you are trying to use streak on offensively. Kind of impossible to follow up on a stun with attacks while facing away from the enemy. And now the time you took to turn around and face them, they have broken free, and again, you are not at a suitable range from the enemy.

Poisons are a laughable suggestion for a reliable stun.

Justosay

jaws343 wrote: »

Everything about this leads me to believe you know nothing about sorc.

Rune Cage is incredibly awful. Telegraphed, delayed, dodgeable. Everything that makes a stun terrible.

Daedric Tomb. What. That skill immobilizes, cost 5K mag, and can just be avoided by any competent player. Not even remotely a viable stun option.

Clench: 15M range is practically the opposite of staying at range of a target and hasn't been a decent stun option for several patches.

Streak still leaves you close to the enemy when using it as a stun. 15M range, means you are still in gap closer distance after streaking through someone. And it also means that you are facing away from the person that you are trying to use streak on offensively. Kind of impossible to follow up on a stun with attacks while facing away from the enemy. And now the time you took to turn around and face them, they have broken free, and again, you are not at a suitable range from the enemy.

Poisons are a laughable suggestion for a reliable stun.

Oh no. I don't even know how people use all these spells. They are so impractical. Lol.

P.S. It's so weird that even though sorc is one of the strongest group pvp classes, you still whine about how bad he is...

Dr_Con

Finally a good magsorc post. Many points you brought up were pretty good. If you build one iota of survivability to be more of a "brawler," all your damage goes away and you can't even kill something that is squishy. Some of the buff proc conditions are so wonky you have to wonder what they were thinking when the kit was developed.

Are magsorcs impossible to play well in PVP? No.
If 90% of players put in the same effort to playing magsorc as they would playing almost any other build, would those players perform better? Yes.

I won't concede that Magsorcs are unplayable like some would lead people to believe, but the pain points brought up in this post are important to take a look at. These points should be tackled one at a time, and each skill should get looked at and changed gradually, not all at once. This would give people time to react and respond to changes. With incremental patches we should receive a few tweaks and adjustments to classes, it doesn't need to be massively adjusted quarterly. I would argue that the massive adjustments are in fact harmful for the game, it's like a pendulum always swinging between being OP and UP.

Turtle_Bot

Dr_Con wrote: »

Finally a good magsorc post. Many points you brought up were pretty good. If you build one iota of survivability to be more of a "brawler," all your damage goes away and you can't even kill something that is squishy. Some of the buff proc conditions are so wonky you have to wonder what they were thinking when the kit was developed.

Are magsorcs impossible to play well in PVP? No.
If 90% of players put in the same effort to playing magsorc as they would playing almost any other build, would those players perform better? Yes.

I won't concede that Magsorcs are unplayable like some would lead people to believe, but the pain points brought up in this post are important to take a look at. These points should be tackled one at a time, and each skill should get looked at and changed gradually, not all at once. This would give people time to react and respond to changes. With incremental patches we should receive a few tweaks and adjustments to classes, it doesn't need to be massively adjusted quarterly. I would argue that the massive adjustments are in fact harmful for the game, it's like a pendulum always swinging between being OP and UP.

This would be good, make incremental changes every week or 2 for each of the incremental patches over the course of a DLC patch so that by the time the next dlc comes out, the actual end goal balance changes are already there and just need to be polished up.

The class doesn't need much in the way of numbers buffs, my second point about reliability of damage/healing was the main take away I have noticed over the past few months alongside a lack of buff/debuff access. The only reason it was number 2 and not number 1 on my list, was because every time zos buffs sorc with something that actually lasts more than 1 or 2 patch cycles, its only for the pet builds.

Justosay

Dr_Con wrote: »

Are magsorcs impossible to play well in PVP? No.
If 90% of players put in the same effort to playing magsorc as they would playing almost any other build, would those players perform better? Yes.

1. Years ago when I played Everquest and WoW, each class only had one build. Can you imagine how to complete quests in a tank or healer build? Can you imagine how to play pve and pvp in one build?...
But at some point, games gave players the ability to change their builds for different parts of the game or role in the game. In ESO, you can also easily change your build/spec many times and for free.
And all this makes me wonder when someone starts to say “My build is not OP in pvp, I can play pvp in another build much better than in this build, so buff it”… The next one will be “My build with healing staff doesn't do enough damage, buff it. And don't say me to change my build"?
2. If you want to become immortal in ESO 1v1 pvp, equip heavy armor and grab a healing staff. No one will kill you in 1v1, regardless of the class (yours and theirs). The more they try to kill you, the more likely they lose. 1v1 pvp is pointless...