Unacceptable change to Critical Surge and Surge.

Digiman · January 2015

As most know before 1.6 Critical surge had a self heal that would heal for a sufficient percent from critical strikes inflicted. This meant sorcerers could literally AoE bomb a pack of normal mobs surrounding them in cloth and come out alive if they knew when to block, move from heavy AoE attacks, etc.

That is now completely gone. The 1 second CD barely registers a proper heal and it is usually from the weak AoE crits that proc it.

ZoS Live! said they planned to make the crit healing base line for Surge and its morphs but this change effectively shuts down AoE small healing, leaving only Single target healing the only viable way to get a bit of health.

I have no idea why they changed it this way, did they think Champion points system would cover that? Because it doesn't, and as cloth wearing mage you will be shredded before a sufficient heal helps.

It wasn't even powerful in PvP either as a pack of players would make huge work if you stood there hoping the heal from AoE damage would keep you alive. The usual strategy for the sorcerer to hang back and drop AoE attacks and Critical Surge to heal you if you sustained any damage. But be completely useless when players focused on you.

Honestly the best morph now is Power Surge as it seems to give more spell damage instead, which ZoS Live! said would give us proper spell damage at baseline.

Honestly I am dumbfounded by this and hope this doesn't go live. There is already very little reason wear cloth PvP, I don't want my class to be pigeonholed into pet damage because the lead class skill designer couldn't think ahead and ask if all Sorcerers wanted was to use them.

I know where that route leads to. Pet damage nerfs and a broken skill line till this game gets an expansion which is very unlikely.

angelyn · January 2015

This ^ coupled with health nerf for all players and nerf on light armour sets means my sorc has less health,less armour and minimal to no effective way of healing myself.

pppontus · January 2015

All classes have had AOE survivability nerfed. You are not supposed to be able to gather 24 enemies and solomurder them while healing yourself for 50K a second

That part seems about right, actually.

Valnas · January 2015

they should just ditch daedric summoning for necromancy and be done with the lore disaster of a tree. We could have actual life leach magic and/or pets that aren't pokemon's n statues.

cschwingeb14_ESO · January 2015

It's not just AE. Critical Surge is being outhealed by Rapid Regen in almost all fights, even when I test 10-pulls to validate AE cap changes (I check FTC recap, it gives a nice breakdown of damage and healing).

Single target fights where I heavy attack weave something other than crushing shock is when Surge can pull ahead. However, light attack+CS is still the staple filler for PvP between curses. I can't afford the snare of heavy attack.

Surge/Rapid regen are pretty even if I use Pulsar-spam and *don't* use Lightning Flood. But that's very sub-optimal AE DPS

To be clear, there are still plenty of ways to make herding work for all classes, but I'm using EVEN LESS sorc skills on PTS than I am on live, for both single target and AE. I'm also more reliant on Resto staff than on live.

I used to use Streak, Ward and Surge in almost all builds, and Fragments for small group pvp. Now I just don't use Surge

Digiman · January 2015

pppontus wrote: »

All classes have had AOE survivability nerfed. You are not supposed to be able to gather 24 enemies and solomurder them while healing yourself for 50K a second

That part seems about right, actually.

Pulling 24 enemies is a death sentence unless you out level and gear them at which point you might last a little bit longer before they kill you. I have also never seen a 50k second heal. The whole idea of critical surge was to give sorcerers a steady heal they could use while dishing out damage and being mobile.

All this change did was effectively say only Stamina Sorcerers will benefit from the crit healing with Bow and melee attacks. While flipping off Magicka based ones.

Domander · January 2015

Yeah, this needs a redesign.

ToRelax · January 2015

pppontus wrote: »

All classes have had AOE survivability nerfed. You are not supposed to be able to gather 24 enemies and solomurder them while healing yourself for 50K a second

That part seems about right, actually.

You shouldn't be forced to leave out all small damage ticks so they dont eat up your heal and you were never able to tank a whole raid in PvP with surge since the 0 ult Batswarm.
On live I can make a crit AoE build, gather as many mobs as possible and bring them down with crit surge, Firering, Clouding Swarm and eventually Evil Hunter.
gives me about 2k hps then.
Absorbtion field in PvP pre 1.6 gives you over 4k hps for the group if some noob spamms effects inside.

Surge is not even comparable to your 50k if you multiply it with 10 for 1.6 .
Also, Surge doesnt give you a higher buff on Impulse than anything else in the game anymore, especially not Critical Surge.

Other classes still have mechanics to deal with many enemies to close around them:
Draw Essence, Sap Essence, Blazing Shield, to name their imo most important skills for this. Sorc had Critical Surge... now it's completely useless besides for a stamina build that relies on burst damage aka 2 hand. Bow and dual wield apply dots that eat up the heal.

gendarkb16_ESO · January 2015

Stop saying that stamina sorcs benefit from surge... the first problem with surge even in 1,5 in AvA is that if the enemy blocks your crit, you don't heal, so in pvp everyone is permablocking so crit surge in pvp never (or very rare) heals. At least in 1.5 pve critical surge is still good.

But right now in 1.6 patch and the new buff unification mechanic, surge got nerfed to oblivion for both magica and stamina sorcerers.

Why use surge now when:

Magica sorc: Entropy gives the same buff and better heals + a dot dmg
or even worse a spellpower pot with health/spellpower/extrastat pot is better than surge for more duration and you get a free slot on your bar.

Stamina sorc: Rally gives the same buff for an extra 14s (34s total) and way more heals and a reliable heal on demand.
or even worse a weaponpower pot or health/weaponpower/extrastat pot is better than surge again and you get a free slot on your bar, you can even drop rally ... so why use rally or surge when a pot does the same effect.

The only way that surge ls usefull again is with the removal of the internal cooldown and make that if a crit attack is blocked you still heal by the 65% of the damage you did.
Also you promised(in interviews and esolive)that the extra duration that power surge morph gives right now in 1,5p (around 34-40s) in 1,6 that would be the new duration of surge in the base spell. Right now the brutality buffs fron pots last longer than surge...

NotSo · January 2015

I literally just made a post about constructive new ways to address Surge in 1.6 so I'm just going to copy/paste the address here. If you have input specifically on my list, I would prefer you comment in my post so I'll see it.
http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/148958/zos-1-6-critical-surge-alternate-suggestions

Surge
This ability now applies the Major Brutality buff.
Power Surge: This ability now applies the Major Brutality and Major Sorcery buffs.
Critical Surge: This ability now has a one second cooldown on the heal.

One second cooldown makes this heal totally unreliable; if you have any sort of aoe damage or dot that crits, consider this heal wasted. Since there's also a blatant reason behind the nerf (super fantabulous never ending mega heals), I would like to propose some alternate/additional ways to apply Critical Surges heals.

If Critical Surge must have a one second cooldown:
1. put a minimum damage gate behind the heal proc to prioritize larger hits.
2. check damage output over that 1 second and award a heal based on that (with or without a cap on heal strength).
3. change the heal to grant any resource at a higher reward % (aiming at lowest resource pool)
4. instead of proccing for heals, proc for more damage (it is lightning after all)
5. Change the cooldown behavior to wait 0.1 seconds before applying a cooldown to the remaining 0.9 seconds to allow all simultaneous crits to proc (to be aoe/cleave friendly)

If the one second cooldown it temporary for testing reasons (suggestions based on 1.5 Surge):
6. simply reduce the cooldown itself, previously heal procs were going off almost nonestop so even a 0.2 second delay would give it some dampening.
7. reduce the damage % checked for heal
8. only allow heal procs when below x% of max health
9. change Critical Surge to choose random attacks that will receive the bonus damage buff (hopefully higher than 20%) and have those attacks apply the heal
10. give this heal, as it is now, to Power Surge (on top of both damage buffs)

If it turns out to still be too much, change the proc to look at a different % chance instead of crit % chance (I have 56% on live wearing crafted gear, I get all the heals)

Each of these is supposed to work by itself on top of either the 1.5 or 1.6 Surge

angelyn · January 2015

I've posted this elsewhere but there be so many threads and I don't know which one the devs may see:
LIGHT ARMOUR MAGICKA SORCS HIT 3 TIMES OVER IN THIS UPDATE:

Nerfed health of all players- didn't scale health up same amount as other stats
Nerfed light armour -to provide only 25% protection that heavy can
Nerfed only remotely reliable healing for class- crit surge.

CRIT SURGE WAS THE ONLY REMOTELY RELIABLE SELF HEAL IN OUR OWN SKILL TREE(PVE)
So the main reason they nerfed Crit surge healing was due to the combination of impenetrable & AOE changes that will affect PVP? I can understand how the new AOE system means that healing off of a high crit AOE ability might make you OP.However, I wondered why all AOE healing abilities for all classes didn't have a 1 second cooldown implemented.

Even if there was no cooldown I have to choose between weapon power+healing or boost to spell power:

Stamina sorcs get healing(albiet at 1 second cooldown nerf rate)plus increased damage
Magicka sorcs get increased damage

Why should I PVE magicka sorc now have no viable self healing skills from my own class because they redesigned the AOE and impenetrable system?I'm not saying that the AOE changes or the Impenetrable changes are bad. I'm only saying that as a class, sorcerer's have no real self healing skill now because ZOS rendered our only remotely reliable heal (in PVE!) useless. In addition, they did this to stop their new system from affecting PVP negatively.

And even for stamina sorcs, a 1 second cooldown on the only remotely reliable heal from our own class tree will probably now not make it onto their bar. However, they may actually get some heals in PVP with the changes to impenetrable?

ANY OTHER RELIABLE SELF HEALS IN OUR OWN SKILL TREE?
There is hardened ward as an alternative to heal but because from now on all sorcs have to use pets, we will be picking the empowered ward morph instead so that we can have measly DPS.

Dark Exchange is another class ability that has promise for both magicka and stamina sorcs, but its rendered useless by the fact that it's a channeled ability.

IDEAL SOLUTION
@NordJitsu suggestion in this thread:http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/148366/surge-in-1-6/p1

NordJitsu wrote: »

The answer is clear.

Critical Surge (base skill): Costs magicka. Critical hits heal you for 65% of damage dealt.

Power Surge (morph): Costs Stamina, Buffs Weapon Power (Major Brutality or whatever the hell), and Critical Hits Heal you for 65% of damage dealt.

Spell Surge (morph): Cost Magicka, Buffs Spell Damage (Major Sorcery), and Critical hits heal you for 65% of damage dealt.

This is the only acceptable solution.

NordJitsu wrote: »

I don't think there'd be any need to reduce the % if they capped it at 6 targets like they said they're doing with all secondary effects.

ALTERNATIVE SOLUTION IF NOT WILLING TO CHANGE SURGE
Make Dark Exchange it an instant cast like @Kilandros suggested in this post:
http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/147868/suggestion-dark-exchange

Either way sorcs will actually have something in the SORCERER tree that can reliably heal them. That is the reason why so many sorcs are complaining. Give me a reliable heal in my own class tree.