Assuming that 'off meta' means 'don't challenge my set choices', you can...

• Swap your backbar staff to lightning, as most of your damage output is AoE skills.
• Swap the glyph placements, weapon damage can't proc while you're on your front bar this update, but flame can.
• Go get a medium head or shoulder for your Ilambris setup, to get another 2% stat from Undaunted Mettle
• Retrait your staves to Infused if you want to do better in 12 man, otherwise leave them alone
• Cast Ele Drain instead of Susceptibility because everyone else is getting that penetration stat sustain for ability spam while solo parsing, and you're not
• Add casting the Volatile Familiar's Pulse to your pre-fight so it comes in on second 1 instead of second 4-5

Beyond that you need to tell us what "avoid going down that road" means, because avoiding the meta means purposefully weakening your sustained damage output.

For example, light attacks are very potent in recent updates due to the stat scaling changes and CP cap finally being high enough for some builds to get Butcher activated in the Atronach tree, if they want it. You're running a heavy attack rotation, a spec which has been consistently nerfed for the last two years in terms of both damage scaling and applicable sets.

If you tell us what your rules are for what you do and don't want to wear, do, or use, we might be able to provide better feedback.

• Blockade of Fire does do a bit more damage than Blockade of Storms, but at the same time your Scamp's pulse, your Liquid Lightning, and your Blockade's damage are doing 8% less than they could be while you're on that Fire bar due to the passives. The single target you're doing on that bar is light attack weaves and the Storm Atro ticks if he's up at the time, I don't think that outweighs the dot damage loss.
  
• Running a Weapon Damage glyph on the front bar is fine. It might give a little bit less single target than a direct damage glyph like Shock or Prismatic, but it's a stat bonus so it'll help with AoE as well. Other glyphs do not. Optimal single-target leans towards running two different damage glyphs, commonly Shock or Prismatic on the back bar and Flame on the front bar with a light attack rotation to ensure high uptime.
  
• Yes, the added damage from Infused glyphs would help a parse more than a Nirn backbar would, though again people tend to optimize for group-buffed single target increases. Solo, both of these things tend to lose to Sharpened.
  
• You're right about Suscept, I forgot to check which of EleD's bonuses it dropped in favor of the infinite duration. Though it's worth noting that the added sustain from Ele Drain is one of the things that lets people run a spammable damage ability on their front bar, resulting in higher damage output for higher effort.

Okay, that makes sense about getting burned re-farming after the gear season swaps over. With that in mind, a purchasable gearing you could go for would be 2 Ilambris, 5 Necropotence on the body, and 5 Mother's Sorrow with jewelry and staff on the front bar, and your Maelstrom staves on the back. Both sets are Zone dropped and therefore tradable, though MS Inferno staves are a bit expensive as it's a popular option right now. Getting a complete Epic jewelry set and a Lightning staff would run you about 80-100k on PC-NA, I'm not sure what it'd be on the console market. Neither Necro nor Ilambris nor MS have been altered in more than a year. I very much doubt that Zenimax will do anything to any of those sets in the next cycle, but if you're leery of it wait 10 days for PTS to re-open and check the changelog.

If gold isn't an issue and you'd like to play up the Max Magic idea, get Destruction Mastery jewelry and frontbar staff instead. The Lightning Staves aren't cheap on that one.

If you do want to farm a 5 piece for your body slots, nothing beats Siroria's Mantle from Cloudrest in Summerset. You can get the standard set in normal mode, which isn't too punishing to run. The place effectively has a difficulty slider; killing each boss one at a time on Normal mode is very laid back. There's a slightly upgraded version of Siroria from clearing the Veteran modes, but all that it grants is another line of + Magicka. It's nothing to lose sleep over.

As for your CP, I didn't read them closely on the last pass. You've made a mistake... Putting 75 points into Thaumaturge turns on the Exploiter passive, which grants a damage buff from the Off Balanced status. That status is most frequently placed by Concussing (Lightning glyph/ Shock Elemental effect) a target standing in a Blockade of Storms, which... you are not casting. You are also not wearing a Lightning glyph to make Concussed more common, and to top it off, Concussed also grants Minor Vulnerability (8% increased damage) , which you are giving yourself 100% from your Infallible 5 piece. Even when it *does* go off from Liquid Lightning or Scamp Pulses, you've overlapped the benefit that the status grants by wearing that set. Also, in this update it would normally be a Healer who would slot Infal, as it's a group-wide bonus, and so if you went to a Trial wearing it you'd risk wasting your frontbar 5 piece for something already provided.

While it's not a mistake to put that much in Thaum with a pet sorc, with your stated gearing you should have stopped at 81 or 72 rather than 75. You're currently wasting 3 points to activate a passive you're barely even utilizing. If you want to start using Exploiter, swapping to a Lightning backbar and out of Infall for a 5 piece with less buff overlap ought to provide some improvement.

The rotation you're using is very basic, but there's nothing wrong with continuing to use it. The optimal strat is to track each DoT and recast it only when it expires, but that requires a lot of concentration to do without addons. The room to improve in that respect is to start trying to use Ele Drain with a skill like Elemental Weapon or Force Pulse on the front bar, to add higher single target damage while your magicka lasts.

If you use that Matriarch to help keep yourself or your groupmates alive, then continue to do so. The DPS it adds is an illusion, though. It's purely single target, and it takes up the room needed to slot other abilities for single target damage, survival, stat utility, or an execute. If you're just after damage, it's not really worth the bar space, even for a dedicated summoner.

That's what comes to mind for now.

Summoner Sorc is a Lightning spec. The Scamp does lightning damage, as does the Greater atro, as do the LL ticks, your heavy attacks, and your Blockade if you choose. Altmer is the best race for that, but only by a little. Dunmer does just fine if you don't want to shell out for a Race change token. Dunmer wins for the non-pet single target focused builds, but again, only by a little.

Infused on Large vs Divines on Large is a sidegrade while you're using the Scamp. Your standard-scaling abilities will all lose a little damage, and your Familiar Pulse will increase by roughly the same amount, shifting overall damage slightly towards AoE on the build as a result. It will also make your damage wards cast for a little higher, and increase the heal strength of the Matriarch. When I'm running a Magic stacking Necropotence build, I do personally run 3 Inf 4 Div, but it's down to personal preference.

I can't really give you a clear "yes, wear this 2nd 5 piece, it's the best" answer, I merely named a few easily-obtained options. The Summerset gearing changes combined with Zeni's history of nerfing every 5 piece that hits Meta status for the last 12 patches has resulted in multiple well-balanced 5 piece sets that were all intended to be worn by themselves, complementing other, lesser sets. Now you can slap on two of the things. If Siroria weren't simply better in a way that's clearly intended to sell copies of the Chapter to gear fiends, there might not even be a standard gearing for mages at all. Mother's Sorrow, Moondancer, Mechanical Acuity, Infallible Aether, Burning Spellweave, Undaunted Infiltrator, Necropotence, Torug's Pact (really!), Master Architect, Destruction Mastery, the list of nigh-identically viable 5 pieces goes on and on.... Some classes wear one option slightly better than another, of course. In the end it just comes down to what you, personally, feel like buying, having crafted, or farming for. The swing between one on-spec set and another is usually within 5-10% effectiveness at most.

The overall rule now, is that you want to leave the set which grants you the most stats on your body (Siroria, Necropotence, Julianos, etc), and slot a second set which grants a strength proc or lesser stats to your front bar. That way you either keep the bonus active while you barswap (Infal, Moondancer, Mech Acuity, BSW, etc) or you don't miss enough stats for it to matter for the few seconds you swap over (Torug's Pact, Mother's Sorrow, Dest. Mastery, etc). That lets you get the most use out of both gearsets, keep your Undaunted set slots free, and lets you slot an Arena weapon on the back to buff yourself up further.

You said you don't want to gear grind, but if you've got a BSW *staff* laying around that you can use, that set is much better as the frontbar proc set than as the body slot you currently have it as. It's still not ideal for a Magsorc because there aren't any in-class Flame damage options, but it'd help out your DK to gear it that way.

Passives only, Inner Light vs Matriarch is a wash for parsing. If I were wearing your build from the video, I'd swap it on the back bar for Ele Drain (Hardened Ward in raids), give Ele Drain's frontbar slot to either Inner Light, Elemental Weapon, or Force Pulse, depending on whether you want to break up your heavy attack rotation, and give the Matriarch's frontbar slot to Mage's Wrath.

As for improving your rotation, right now you have your heavy attacks separated by a skill and that's not required. If you want to keep using the 8-9 second basic Summoner rotation, you should cast Ele Blockade -> Liquid Lightning -> (Barswap) Familiar Pulse -> Daedric Prey -> 4-5 seconds for frontbar activities. Blockade goes first to buff the rest of the light attacks, Prey doesn't really matter where you put it if you're casting it in a strict rotation like this. It's going to buff 3 scamp ticks regardless. You want to cast two of the abilities from your frontbar so that you have the shot for those light attacks to proc your frontbar glyph, while Ele Blockade procs the backbar one.

The Heavy attacks ought to be right next to each-other just for simplicity, and also because it's easier to think of them being the 'fill' damage window that way. You really have 4 free seconds to cast things before your Blockade wears off and you have to start over. That can either be four light weaves with a skill, One heavy and two skills, or two heavy attacks. Lightning heavies take 2.5 seconds, so if you do two together your Blockade will drop a tick, but with this simple rotation that's not the end of the world. There are more complicated rotations that ensure higher uptime for your Prey and less overcasted ticks for your Scamp/Liquid Lightning. But, they really only benefit you once you're already used to sustaining a light attack rotation. Judging by this topic and your DK topic, that really isn't your playstyle at the moment. I would suggest wiggling in some room for an execute at least, though. There's not much point of being at max stats all the time if you have nothing juicy to *spend* them on when you're willing to do so, and executes fill that slot nicely.

If you'd like some practice to go with this preach, here's a parse of Zaan / Necropotence / Mother's Sorrow on a 6mil. This was done with the simple 8 second rotation mentioned above, using Crushing Shock or Endless Fury as magicka and the skeleton's health allowed. A dynamic rotation would get a few thousand more out of this setup, but not more than 2-3k at most. I can do about 44k with a more single-target focused setup and a better rotation, by comparison.

Erraln wrote: »

• Blockade of Fire does do a bit more damage than Blockade of Storms, but at the same time your Scamp's pulse, your Liquid Lightning, and your Blockade's damage are doing 8% less than they could be while you're on that Fire bar due to the passives. The single target you're doing on that bar is light attack weaves and the Storm Atro ticks if he's up at the time, I don't think that outweighs the dot damage loss.
  
• Running a Weapon Damage glyph on the front bar is fine. It might give a little bit less single target than a direct damage glyph like Shock or Prismatic, but it's a stat bonus so it'll help with AoE as well. Other glyphs do not. Optimal single-target leans towards running two different damage glyphs, commonly Shock or Prismatic on the back bar and Flame on the front bar with a light attack rotation to ensure high uptime.

Hello, could you please explain why Shock is better on backbar and flame on front bar and not vice versa? Wouldn't shock on front-bar help proc concussed as most often as possible?

That's good to know regarding Race. I have a preference for Dunmer for the passives (and also cos they seem to do fairly well as Stam Builds as well).

That's good to know regarding Infused vs Divine on big. I did change from all Divine to Infused on big on my DK to see if it make a difference and i seemed to lose damage slightly, not a massive amount but still a loss so wasn't sure if i were shooting myself in the foot doing it this way.

Tbf i think i need to branch out with sets. I've kinda pigeon holed myself with them (i deconstructed a lot when i used to follow the meta a while back, kinda wishing i'd not seen as some have come full circle again ha). Good to know about the difference in damage wise as well. Gonna have to do a lot of testing i think.

Sadly, i still need a BSW Lightning staff. CoA hasn't been kind to me in that respect. Took me ages to get all the body pieces as well as drop rate was just so poor for. Tbf me and RNGesus don't get on very well at all haha

Recommendations noted for my rota thankyou. And oi appreciate the details and timings to the most out of each bar. Hopefully i'll be able to push the numbers more to where i want them to be now. And thanks for the link as well. Always good to see a rota in action so i can compare to what i'm doping.

Really appreciate the pointer thankyou.

Sparr0w wrote: »

I'd first thing that sticks out is that you're running a weapon damage glyph on the back bar & it's nirn, meaning half of the time it won't proc. You want to change this to infused with a damage glyph, flame would probably give you the most damage.

Front bar nirn is fine, I'd go with weapon damage glyph since your main damage will be AoE rather than ST.

Last change I'd make is dropping spellweave & swapping the vMA staff to a Lightning one, swap it for Necro, Destruction Mastery, Julianos, Siroria, Mother's Sorrow.

IMO IA has lost a lot of viability this patch since
1. Healers now opt for running this
2. Ele weapon (the new main spammable for 90% of classes) will also apply this, along with Sorcs running Asylum staves.
3. Enchant changes mean quite a lot of mag classes are also running shock glyphs.

Another thing to add is pets only scale with Max Magicka (hence why Necro is BiS) so if you're running 2 pets I'd definitely opt for running max mag sets.

EDIT: Elemental Succession (from MA) might be a fun set to play around with if you want to keep the inferno back bar... hmm

Hey Sparr0w, appreciate your input dude thankyou. Few things to consider / get on with changing there. Got a lot of saving up to do so i can change some traits i reckon. I used all i had changing weapons to Nirn and a few body pieces to infused lol i actually tried BSW / IA for giggles and found that the damage was comparable to Necro / Willpower, which i thought was strange so decided just to stick with it (you know me and being different). Bought myself a full MS set so gonna have a play around at some point and take on board all the above on this thread and see where i get to :-)

Erraln wrote: »

Assuming that 'off meta' means 'don't challenge my set choices', you can...

• Swap your backbar staff to lightning, as most of your damage output is AoE skills.

The problem is that you dont benefit from the AOE dmg buff once you switch bars because the all the AOE dmg values are recalculated with the fire staff passives.

In group the target(s) will usually be debuffed with Engulfing Flames so Blockade of Fire will deal 9% more dmg. It also deals more dmg against targets with the burning status effect so a fire staff is the best choice.

Lightspeedflashb14_ESO wrote: »

Cybercore_Death wrote: »

Lightspeedflashb14_ESO wrote: »

Not necessarily going to improve your DPS but I have a lot of fun going full pet mode with my sorc, ie using maw of the infernal and believe it or not, mad tinkerer, the damage from the summon is electric and is amped by daedric prey, I have had the verminous fabricant hit for like 20k. Yes it doesn't always hit the target but it is a lot of fun in trash packs to see all the mobs fly into the air. I also use a 6 second rotation with unstable wall and lightning flood. One heavy lightning per rotation. Loads of fun, neat to have 5 pets out at once, with the maw, scamp, twilight, fabricant and atro.

Gutted, actually got rid of a full set of tinkerer a while back. Sounds like a pretty fun build tbf. Might acquire some and see how it runs. Sounds like like it could be a good laugh. Also, does Monster / Set summons count as pets when active?

yes, i have necropotance as body set and mad tinkerer as jewelry/ front bar lighting staff, back bar vma lighting staff, of course. they counts as pets as far as daedric prey is concerned, not sure for the necropotance buff.

That's good to know man thank you.

SquareSausage wrote: »

My build here.
42k. No pots at all.
Using thief. No cheese.

https://youtu.be/_dsJKDjilX4

Awesome man thank you. Good to know I'm on the right track. I tried Necro + IS before but found it lacklustre. Might just have been me not working the rota right at the time though. I'll give it another go.

Cybercore_Death wrote: »

Septimus_Magna wrote: »

Erraln wrote: »

Assuming that 'off meta' means 'don't challenge my set choices', you can...

• Swap your backbar staff to lightning, as most of your damage output is AoE skills.

The problem is that you dont benefit from the AOE dmg buff once you switch bars because the all the AOE dmg values are recalculated with the fire staff passives.

In group the target(s) will usually be debuffed with Engulfing Flames so Blockade of Fire will deal 9% more dmg. It also deals more dmg against targets with the burning status effect so a fire staff is the best choice.

This is why I was going with Flame in the first place (as I run it on my DK for the same reasond).

I suppose it's a case of give and take between Flame buffs and Lightning buffs, or ratehr situational maybe?

In the past it was situational because the ground AOE remembered the weapon it was cast from. Thats why some players ran nirnhoned lightning staves on the back bar to buff AOE dmg and increase off-balance up-time. Currently the dmg is calculated for each tick with the passives from your active bar.

So you lay down Liquid Lightning+Blockade of Storms, switch to your front bar and get a buff for doing fire dmg. This means there's only a disadvantage to run different type destro staves.

Its kinda messed up, the staff your carry decides which passive the ground AOE gets, regardless of the dmg type.

Erraln wrote: »

Vahrokh wrote: »

Hello, could you please explain why Shock is better on backbar and flame on front bar and not vice versa? Wouldn't shock on front-bar help proc concussed as most often as possible?

The Volatile pulse procs Concussed as strongly as a direct damage attack, last I checked. So between that, two other lightning AoE's, your light attacks, and whatever your Scamp's melee and Atro's beam are adding in, Concussed uptime is high already. On the basic parse I posted, it went off every 2.5 seconds. Burning on the other hand only comes from the glyph and a frontbar spammable, on this build, so it needs what help it can get.

Septimus_Magna wrote: »

The problem is that you dont benefit from the AOE dmg buff once you switch bars because the all the AOE dmg values are recalculated with the fire staff passives.

In group the target(s) will usually be debuffed with Engulfing Flames so Blockade of Fire will deal 9% more dmg. It also deals more dmg against targets with the burning status effect so a fire staff is the best choice.

I meant that double Lightning should be used, but y'know what? I was outdated on that one. This patch's Scamp is weak enough that it's worthwhile to get more single target damage out, even though you're not buffing the Pulse with it. Somehow I still had it in my head that AoE made up the majority of a pet build's damage output. That's not the case at this point, between Scamp nerfs, light attack buffs, and increased glyph contribution among other things. My suggestions above are mostly lined up to buff that Familiar Pulse AoE, since it's the build definer. I guess in Wolfhunter even AoE-defined builds need to be running Fire.

You do lose your Off-Balance uptime in solo parses running a Maelstrom Inferno, but enough is gained back that it's still worthwhile on an Altmer, and a Dunmer would get a little more.

I really wouldn't swap to double-fire, though, as the Maelstrom-buffed Lighting heavy attack really is central to the build's AoE and sustain. If it comes to that, just drop the Scamp and be done with it.

I tried double fire on my DK and it was less than impressive. Lightning staff HAs are just the best for the damage they do. However, i did notice that Fire staff LAs seem to do more damage more often than not

md3788 wrote: »

Erraln wrote: »

Okay, that makes sense about getting burned re-farming after the gear season swaps over. With that in mind, a purchasable gearing you could go for would be 2 Ilambris, 5 Necropotence on the body, and 5 Mother's Sorrow with jewelry and staff on the front bar, and your Maelstrom staves on the back. Both sets are Zone dropped and therefore tradable, though MS Inferno staves are a bit expensive as it's a popular option right now. Getting a complete Epic jewelry set and a Lightning staff would run you about 80-100k on PC-NA, I'm not sure what it'd be on the console market. Neither Necro nor Ilambris nor MS have been altered in more than a year. I very much doubt that Zenimax will do anything to any of those sets in the next cycle, but if you're leery of it wait 10 days for PTS to re-open and check the changelog.

If you decide MS lightning staves, you can get an infused MS lightning staff from a quest that takes about 10 minutes

Wish i'd have known about this before i made a purchase haha tbf though i dropped on a purple infused for 30k.... someone lost a lot of money on that sale

hedna123b14_ESO wrote: »

Is it mandatory to use twilight? Or are you willing to just run familiar?

The only reason I ran twilight is for the extra stat boost and self healing for when running solo (still getting used to how Sorcs work) but I'm happy to take any and all advice so I can better understand the build and what does and doesn't work :-)

So, from just changing the back bar staff to Infused (previously Nirn) i managed to get the parse up to just shy of 40k.

Now i've got a little time to work on things going to try out suggestions and see how i get on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUOsdz8JH0w&t=34s