@SoLooney
It depends on how substantial pet damage is to your overall damage. If you are us running the Volatile Familiar, maybe he's providing 12% of your total damage output. So using Apprentice, you gain no additional power for the Volatile Familiar, but 88% of your other skills get a sizable buff. Now if you're using the Volatile Familiar, Twilight Matriarch, Storm Atronach, and Maw of the Infernal, more of your total damage will be coming from pets, so Mage will begin to have a larger impact on your overall damage.
Remember, the Mage also offers some additional utility in the form of bigger shields and more usable resources.
Pets use max magicka, spell crit, and spell pen. Spell Damage does nothing for them.
The Apprentice is better for DPS and noticeably so imo.
Keep in mind:
- The Apprentice grants Spell Damage. It will give all of your active skills a bit more raw damage than The Mage would. Light and Heavy Attacks only scale off of Spell Damage so it will increase those a lot while The Mage would give zero benefit to them.
- The Mage grants Max Magicka. It will give all of your active skills a bit less raw damage than The Apprentice would. Pet-dealt damage and Shield strength only scale off of Max Magicka so it will increase those a lot while The Appretince would give zero benefit to them.
The Apprentice is better for DPS and noticeably so imo.
Keep in mind:
- The Apprentice grants Spell Damage. It will give all of your active skills a bit more raw damage than The Mage would. Light and Heavy Attacks only scale off of Spell Damage so it will increase those a lot while The Mage would give zero benefit to them.
- The Mage grants Max Magicka. It will give all of your active skills a bit less raw damage than The Apprentice would. Pet-dealt damage and Shield strength only scale off of Max Magicka so it will increase those a lot while The Appretince would give zero benefit to them.
Thief is still good on a petsorc as well (look at the parses above) it will scale better with warhorn than apprentice and buffs everything you do except your monster set.
I found that there is close to no difference between the two, but I can imagine that Thief will outparse apprentice in a raid environment by a small margin.