Hello everyone.
I have been playing this game for over 6 years now and the majority of my time has been spent playing magicka sorcerer in pvp. As someone who has spent pretty much their entire ESO life as a magsorc, I can confidently say that magsorc is struggling more than ever. I find myself actively avoiding my sorcerer due to the way it has been performing. The defense is significantly worse than other classes, the skills and their morphs are inferior to most other class skills, and now even streak has been made almost useless with the mistform change. Magsorc has almost nothing going for it at the moment, and it has become an extremely frustrating gameplay experience.
Currently, my magsorc is running a good old-fashioned max mag setup. I am built around the idea of keeping damage shields up while using positioning to avoid incoming damage. In my opinion, this is the type of build that should really make magsorc shine; but it doesn't. Most of the time I find myself struggling to keep any of my shields up due to damage being so high, continuing to struggle with an extreme lack of healing power, my attempts to reposition with streak are often failed attempts now that mistform is streak 2.0, and I am struggling to keep any significant amount of damage pressure on most enemies. Now, I could certainly build a meta proc setup that would work just fine on my sorcerer, and I would probably have more success that way. However, after some testing, I don't think that is the biggest issue. A sorcerer with a meta setup is still going to be worse than a dk with a meta setup or a warden with a meta setup. So, I decided to log into the pts and do some simple testing that really shows some of the problems that sorcerer has.
I threw together a few characters in the pts: a sorc, a dk, and a warden. The dk and warden have the same exact build, 5 mara's, 5 rallying cry, 1 sea-serpent's coil, and 1 balorgh. They both had 3 heavy, 1 medium, and 3 light, 3 infused spell damage glyphs on the jewelry, tri-stat glyphs on all of the armor, 2 reinforced, 1 infused, and 4 impen. (Obviously not a setup for the live server, but this was just for some testing.) The sorcerer had 5 mara's, 5 crafty alfiq, 1 death dealers fete, and 1 domihaus. Same traits and enchants, except the jewels were arcane. In summary, same build on all 3 characters, except the sorcerer had max mag where the other two had spell damage. Here are some screenshots of the results.
Coagulating blood has a reasonable tooltip of 13k (this gets cut in half in pvp, so the tooltip is actually 6.5k, or 7.5k with the burning heart passive). Hardened ward has a tooltip of 9k. So, in regards to numbers, hardened ward is stronger. No. Coagulating blood increases based on missing health (up to 50%), this allows it to get a tooltip of up to 19.5k on this setup. Cut that in half and it has a tooltip as high as 9.7k. This can also crit making it significantly higher. It also adds major fortitude and increases healing received with the burning heart passive. Meanwhile, the sorcerer has a hardened ward that doesn't go above 9k, and it has no secondary effects from the skill itself or it's passives (it does proc rebate and daedric protection, but these are negligible. It should proc expert summoner, but it doesn't). Not to mention that if a sorc drops their shield for a second, they have little way to recover. Every other class can at least get a heal off and bring their health back up. Now let's look at the damage side of things.
Both of these abilities do damage twice, but deep fissure has a higher tooltip than curse (I switched the sorc to 2h here for the major berserk. A sorc will most likely not have access to in actual gameplay, making the tooltip more like 12k each tick). It also applies major and minor breach, is aoe, and costs less. Even with the major berserk on the sorc, the tooltip is still smaller than fissure, it is single target, and costs more than fissure. You could argue that deep fissure is easier to avoid because you can roll out of it easily, but I would argue that curse is just as easy to avoid with a simple purge (and as a matter of fact, it gets purged quite often).
So, what is the problem? For one, you can build stronger abilities with spell damage than max mag. In order for curse to reach the level of deep fissure, or for ward to reach the level of coagulating blood, you would have to build entirely into maximum magicka as I do on the live server. This means, you can't run a tank set or a damage proc, since you would have to run all max mag sets. Those building into spell damage can afford to run other, non-spell damage sets (such as mara's or procs like plaguebreak) without compromising their healing or damage too much, and what they do lose is made up for. If a sorcerer were to do that, they would lose all of their damage and defense. If a magsorc wears a tank set instead of a second max mag set, the defense they get won't make up for the smaller shield and heals. The second (and most glaring) issue is sorcerer's inferior skill effects. Ward is just ward. It doesn't offer anything else other than a damage shield. Every other class has something special attached to their burst heals. Coag gets bigger and offers health recovery, resistant flesh on the necro offers increased armor (and gets bigger via passives), healthy offering on the nightblade has minor mending. But hardened ward is just a ward (and doesn't even proc all of its passives). Then there are abilities like curse. Haunting curse deals damage twice, that's it. Nightblades get extra weapon and spell damage and heal on their spectral bow, dk gets major breach on noxious breath and a flat debuff on engulfing flames, deep fissure also deals damage twice with major and minor breach, but curse is just curse.
Now, I am not saying that sorcerer is bad in every way, and I'm not saying that it needs to be good at everything. However, there is a clear deficit with the sorcerer's toolkit. Many of their core abilities are outmatched by other classes. You could argue that crystal fragments is the best burst spammable in the game, but often dk has more burst with molten whip. You could argue that sorc has streak to get away from every melee class in the game, but I would say that mistform has almost completely ruined that. Sorc shouldn't be good at everything, but it should be good at what it does. If sorcerer is a single target burst damage class, then it should have single target burst damage that other classes don't (especially if those classes are dot focused classes). If sorcerer primary class defense is their damage shields, then it should have damage shields that rival the heals on other classes. If sorcerer is the master of movement and staying at range, then it should be able to do that. Between the scaling of abilities with max mag/stam and the poor morphs options on skills, sorcerer (especially magsorc) have become one of the worst and most frustrating classes to play in pvp.
So, what are my suggestions?
1. I would like to see some adjustments made to the way abilities scale off of max mag and max stam. There is no reason why someone building into max mag/stam should have to build into those stats entirely. Those building into spell damage can get away with one weapon/spell damage set, and some glyphs on jewels. Those building into max stats should be able to do the same.
2. I would certainly like to see a buff to hardened ward. The last buff (7% increase and higher health cap) was not enough. You still need to build entirely into maximum magicka to get a decently sized shield and the health cap is still limiting. Balancing health and magicka will still result in a shield smaller than the heals on other classes. Many people have suggested that it scale with spell damage, but I like the max mag style of sorcerer, and that's how it has been in every other elder scrolls game. Perhaps increase the scaling with max mag to put it on the same level as heals with spell damage, maybe it should create 2 shields instead of 1, maybe remove the health cap (damage has increased significantly since the health cap was added, so I'm not convinced it is still necessary). I'm not a game developer, so I don't know the answer. I do know that it needs some love.
3. I would like to see curse buffed. Many people think it needs some sort of enemy debuff or self-buff, but I agree with the combat development team that adding these cookie cutter effects to sorc's skills would be a bad move for sorc's class identity (I like that sorc is different from the other classes, that is why I play it). Sorc is one of the original damage classes, and I am more than happy with the idea of it remaining a damage focused class. However, if curse is going to remain a simple damage skill (without debuffs like breach) then it should have a higher damaging tooltip than other class variants, to make up for the lack of a debuff.
4. I would really like to see some more work done to mistform. Changing mistform into streak 2.0 has definitely hurt sorcerer, and I am concerned that it will also have a negative effect on the upcoming Arcanist class and their portal skill. Not to mention that the new mistform is awkward to use compared to the old mistform. The old mistform was a defense tool unique to vampires, and I appreciated that. The new changes have hurt vampires defense and uniqueness and has done the same to sorcerer.
There are other changes that I would like to see, but these are currently some of the biggest issues hurting the sorcerer right now. If sorcerer doesn't start to get some love, it will just continue to fall behind every other class in the game.
That's it. Sorry for the long post (first time posting here), but thank you to all who read this. I would really like to hear other people's thoughts on the matter. And hopefully this will help sorcerer's problems come to light.
Best,
ilawana