Sorcs who rely on shields...but that sucks now

NBrookus wrote: »

My orc DK is basically a permablock build, so she uses Sturdy.

Beat me to it. One agree for you.

You can mitigate the need for Impenetrable somewhat with heavy investment into Resistant, but you won't be as tanky as someone with both Resistant and Impenetrable. Surviving without much Impen on your armour basically boils down to being elusive and fast. If you flank your opponent, he needs to turn around before he can hit you. If you move fast, you can dance round the edges of your opponent's attack range while raining attacks on them.

Radiant Magelight becomes a serious consideration on your part, because your lack of Impen means that you can't really survive attacks that you don't see coming. Therefore, RML helps in this regard by buying you extra time to react to enemy attacks. That 1.3 second difference can be the difference between getting a defensive countermeasure off and being sent back to the nearest keep.

Immovable potions also help the low-Impen fighter, as while you are being CC-ed, you cannot actively avoid/juke incoming attacks. The potions allow you 15 seconds of unrestricted mobility, in which you can take advantage of by quickly incapacitating a few key targets or making a swift unhindered retreat.

Be light on your feet, stay mobile, abuse LoS and kill fast. Going without Impen means trading staying power for mobility and damage.

I run 7 piece well-fitted (actually 8 with one more on my back bar shield). With cloak and dodge, only one in every 20 hits actually touches me, so I hardly care about a single 10 k hit.

infused on the big pieces and divines on the smaller ones. stack magicka as high as you can and keep your shields up. rarely do you have to worry about crits.

I spread my mitigations across multiple sources:
- 5 pc heavy armor
- major pieces above 1300 get reinforced traits. Rest get a flex trait
- at least 1k crit residence
- 33k spell resistance
- 30 k physical
- 30k health
- class shield for initial burst protection
- s+shield defense back bar. My block mitigation is 75%,
- 90 points into hardy. I'm looking at 20% reduction in all physical dmg sources.
- other dmg reduction sources (pots, vampire, templar rune, etc.)

It's more balanced but overall I excel in 1v1-1v3 situations. Anymore and people spam spells; no defense can protect you from 3 snipes, 2 RD waiting for the 30% range, and other 1k attacks. Especially if your block no longer works.

My Woodelf Stamplar only uses 3 impen traits and he's the squishiest bar my magDK who uses 6. That's it, sorry but 7 or 8 impen just works. If you're a pure tank you can skip impen by perma block with sTURDy.

I agree with @Dracane, the time Sorcs could forgo Impenetrable is long gone. It's very common for Sorcs to get caught with their wards down these days.

Currently, I'm running 5-1-1 Heavy (Black Rose) with Impenetrable on the Heavy pieces and Infused on the other two (Light hat, Medium pants). My survivability has improved, and all I've really given up is the penetration from Light Armor.

Emma_Overload wrote: »

I agree with @Dracane, the time Sorcs could forgo Impenetrable is long gone. It's very common for Sorcs to get caught with their wards down these days.

Currently, I'm running 5-1-1 Heavy (Black Rose) with Impenetrable on the Heavy pieces and Infused on the other two (Light hat, Medium pants). My survivability has improved, and all I've really given up is the penetration from Light Armor.

Ive thought about this myself, doesn't the loss of regen and spell cost make a difference? (From LA passives) and I know black rose helps with heavy armor passives, but doesn't it give two stamina bonuses from the set?

susmitds wrote: »

I run 7 piece well-fitted (actually 8 with one more on my back bar shield). With cloak and dodge, only one in every 20 hits actually touches me, so I hardly care about a single 10 k hit.

Thanks for the tip.