With update 6, destro staff and resto staff abilities will scale based on spell damage instead of weapon damage. While this change makes sense, it will heavily impact the way sorcerer dps and healers work.

Right now, most sorcerers rely on critical surge to increase their weapon damage and the effectiveness of their destro/resto staff abilities. I've been waiting for a buff on sorcerers for a while now and this switch to spell damage is yet another nerf. Yay! Thanks ZoS!

Critical Surge
This is the one advantage that sorcerers currently have: their staff abilities can be easily boosted by overcharging weapon damage.


Apart from staff skills, the only 2 class abilities that would benefit from investing in spell damage are:
- Crystal Fragments: only useful to cast when the 35% procs. Stun is now useless for most of the PVE content.
- Endless Fury/Mage's Wrath: an execute move, only useful on targets under 20% health.



All other abilities are quite useless. Mines have been nerfed, velocious curse is too slow, all cc abilities are useless on most of the PVE content (list of immune monsters increased with update 5). Who even uses pets in advanced PVE content?

A few facts
- Sorcerers are currently less effective than other classes at dealing damage (bested by DK/NB) and healing (bested by Templar/DK). Of course good sorcerers can beat an average DK, but the best DKs pull way more dps than the best sorcs and the same goes for average ones.
- Sorcerers have no direct damage abilities and no damage over time (DoT) abilities.
- Sorcerers have no abilities that can heal other players.

DPS discussion here

For a good example of how sorcerers work, watch the "Let's play" segment of ESO Live#5, the camera is filming a VR14 sorcerer inside Blackheart Haven.

DKs right now:


Sorcerers right now:

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DKs after update 6:


Sorcerers after update 6:



Source: admin post

ZOS_JoeBlackburn wrote: »

Hey Guys,

Qhival's post is super informative, and hopefully we can help clear up a little more of the critical strike info for you. Currently critical strikes are based on the defense that an ability checks when it goes off.

So when you use an ability like Uppercut, it checks against the target's Armor when it does damage. This means it has a Critical Strike chance based off of your Weapon Critical stat.

If you are using an ability like Crystal Shards that checks against the target's Spell Resistance when it does damage, it will base its Critical Strike chance off of your Spell Critical stat.

For Update 6 we are making a huge effort to make sure that everything that costs Magicka scales in damage based off your Max Magicka and Spell Damage, and uses Spell Critical as its Critical Strike Chance. Similarly, all abilities that cost Stamina will scale in damage based off your Max Stamina and Weapon Damage, and use Weapon Critical as their Critical Strike Chance.

We know that currently it’s a little confusing to determine what stats modify your abilities when you put them on your bar, and we are working to make sure it will be very obvious in the future.

Questions for ZoS:
- What will you change for sorcerers to balance the switch to spell damage for staff scaling in update 6?
- Should I just grab two daggers or a 2-handed sword and switch to a weapon I never wanted my sorcerer to use? Is this the only way I can deal damage similar to the other classes?
- Will sorcerers ever get a skill healing party members?
- What is the point of getting a staff to legendary quality if weapon damage doesn't matter? Just the trait increase?

I love the game but this imbalance keeps getting worse.