I'll agree that there have been a handful of improvements, particularly to Crystal Shards and Lightning Splash, but what difference do they make if your Sorc dies in 3 seconds because Crit Surge doesn't heal much any more?

I'm watching some of the streams here. They are going through all the classes and giving the skills a go fighting mobs/PVP..

You can tell how excited they are about DKs.."DKs are awesome", "DKs are so BadA*S"..

When they tried sorcs it was like "Soo...what do you guys want to see on sorcs? Oh yes..pets!!" Tried pets and died within a min

angelyn wrote: »

When they tried sorcs it was like "Soo...what do you guys want to see on sorcs? Oh yes..pets!!" Tried pets and died within a min

I think we're going to see another video from Angry Joe soon.....

I tested now different builds with sorc and skills but i cannot say enough to this.

The reason is, that the v14 templates got not lvled skills, so i cannot play with morphed skills.


The first meaning of sorc with basic skills is desastrous. The sorc is much weaker than before 1.6

angelyn wrote: »

TLDR my build changes in 1.6:
Pros
• I can hit more targets with my AOE
• A number of skills will boost max magicka instead of reducing it.
• Due to the above my spell damage will increase.

Cons
• Crit surge will no longer heal me effectively.
• I will not generate ultimate on my AOE bar unless I start to weave single attacks in
• It will be harder for me to generate ultimate overall as even my single target spells/abilities will no longer generate ultimate.
• Armor and armour spells provide less spell resistance and armour protection than before. I will be more vulnerable.

I envision I will put less stat points into Magicka, since some skills now buff it. Instead I will put those stat points into health to make up for Crit surge changes.

Who knows? I may even try out a pet build!

Its quite clear they are trying to stop AOE spam builds. Critical surge works a bit like momentum. Damage boost and some heal. I never heard anyone complain that the heal part of momentum doesn't scale depending on how many enemies you are fighting. I think its a good decision that will force sorcerers to use a bit more finesse to survive instead of spamming AOE. Pre 1.6 critical surge would make it easier to survive the more enemies you could hit making you less likely to die the more targets you hit.

The same goes for ultimate generation. I don't see any reason skill spammers should get more ultimate than others.

Yeah you're really awesome. You used to take on 10 enemies at once without any skill or finesse whatsoever. Just head in and spam your AOE. Im happy those kind of builds will just be a memory.

ZOE are clearly targeting overpowered, and thereby overrepresented builds that were never intended. These builds formed from using super efficient skill combinations. And will be a problem for update 7 also. People will theorycraft and tweak new builds until they find new slightly more overpowered setups.

tunepunk wrote: »

Critical surge works a bit like momentum. Damage boost and some heal.

Momentum is a weapon skill, while Critical Surge is, or was, our only real class heal. Without it, Sorcs are the only class without a viable class-based heal.

It's even worse now for magicka-based sorcs.

That was surprisingly poetic, @NordJitsu‌

Just gonna share what someone else posted in another thread, this is how sorc self heal looks at the moment in PTS.

Erock25 wrote: »

Leovolao wrote: »

Just gonna share what someone else posted in another thread, this is how sorc self heal looks at the moment in PTS.

Ohhh yeah look at that burst heal of 1% of total HP.

Pretty OP, I think they need to increase the cooldown to 2 seconds.

Emma_Eunjung wrote: »

Crit surge has a cooldown, now... a COOLDOWN? Are you kidding me?

Are sorcs only supposed to fight one mob at a time?

Please tell me this is joke.

and make sure you don't use dots

I've been playing my sorc on PTS for hours now (my 1500+ hour main VR14 all legendary gear of many different sets). Theory crafting started about 1 minute after spec'ing the reset skills and realizing I don't have anywhere near the DPS or survivability I have on live.

Swapping gear, crafting new pieces, calculating damage and heals (thank goodness most of the addons work), re-spec'ing multiple times for morphs, distribution of attribute points and champion points. I can't even touch the content I can solo on live.

I'm calling it a night. Killing slower and dying faster is getting tiring.

Very disappointed after tremendous anticipation...

-Aletheion

ZOS, i have to ASK! Are you joking to NERF to die the SORC class?

Why no healing with spell damage on SURGE? Selfheal only with STAMINA weapon? Spell buff only, when no self-heal? Why? Do you want to delete sorc from the game at all? This change is unacceptable) Sorc was the worse class already, why do you nerfing it more and more and more?
Until now we had at least self-healing, we were able to solo content, but after this change it will be not possible properly...

Sorc needs to use STAFF for making DPS, STAFF is based on SPELL damage! With this change, SORC HAS NO SELF-HEAL ABILITY!
And do not mention the cooldown of healing and also crit % nerf... With all of these nerfs, SORC will be weaker than BEFORE!

I can imagine the sorc surge like this, but no other way and I think, everybody can say the same:

Surge = "heal on crit" (without cooldown!) OR "weapon buff AND spell buff"
Power surge = heal on crit + weapon buff (without cooldown!) - costs stamina
Spell surge = heal on crit + spell buff (without cooldown!) - costs magicka




@ZOS_GinaBruno‌
@ZOS_JessicaFolsom‌

The 1 second cooldown kills crit surge, would be better off making it only heal on single target ability crits if aoe is the concern.

@ZOS_GinaBruno‌ @ZOS_JessicaFolsom‌

Let's do an experiment, get all the coders to pull an all-nighter and on Thursday patch the PTS and change Reflective Scales from a 4 limit reflect to a 1sec cooldown and see how the community reacts.....

We made threads when you told us destro/resto would scale off spell damage.
We made threads when you announced on ESO live what surge + morphs was going to be like.

We told you this was not what we wanted, and we didn't even know about the cooldown. If feedback matters, then this should have never made it to PTS in the first place.

ONE piece of good news: The "instant" proc on Crystal Shards is now actually instant. It is, I used it several times. How that didn't make the patch notes I'll never know.

It is pretty clear ZoS does not comprehend the current 1.5 Meta that recognizes sorcs are in a bad place. My personal theory is that when they had their big guild summit, the sorc was not quite seen as merely a "negate" monkey and thus was not informed just how lacking the sorc was until after many of 1.6 changes were already undertaken.

The class really needs an overhaul because so many problems plague it:

- Pets should *never* have been a toggle with the scarcity of skills we are allowed to slot. At the very least there should have been a cheap disposable summons ala Skyrim available as an option.

- Surge is now an absolute disaster. I get it that RPGs have always had a spell that made wizards good with swords, but there should have always been the option to make surge what the mythology of a sorcerer actually is: an overflow of MAGIC that the caster cannot really control (i.e. makes spells powerful but interesting side effects). Let's not even talk about the idiocy of a heal potentially procing off an impulse dot and thus invalidating everything else during the cooldown...

- Mines and encase suffer from high cost / underwhelming effect syndrome. From what I understand of the notes, bosses now gain immunity to mines after setting one off. As if the skill wasn't bad enough. I'm am guessing they did so because someone submitted a joke /feedback that the a group killed the Mantikora in SO by using well placed daedric mines and ZoS took this seriously...

- Sorcs skills tend to be so underwhelming that Sorcs seek alternatives from other skill lines. Spell symmetry instead of dark exchange. Impulse instead of Lightning Flood. Crushing shock instead of deadric curse. Crushing shock is still better (or at least more versatile) than curse and trial sorcs will still spell sym rather than dark exchange. The jury is still out on lightning flood.

None of this means one is incapable of playing a sorc, having fun, and completing end-game content. But doing so is kind of like playing the black pieces in chess...the player is accepting a disadvantage for doing so.