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Javagawd
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re: PvE solo Sorc build?

Idea's? I've been doing the bow/templar thing and it fits my style a bit as it seems to be a good "jack of all trades" but I'm an Altaholic in every sense of the word and I've been itching for something different.



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ESOSecret
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re: PvE solo Sorc build?

Bretton Light armor Daedra/Resto build

or

High Elf Light Armor Lightning Staff Build (cant remember the class skill line off hand) 



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kazzine
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re: PvE solo Sorc build?

Ive pulled this from Tamriel Foundry. Its a long read but should point you the right way for PVE.

 

Baseline

This section will outline all of the skills I consider central to the build which should not be changed. I will try to explain why they are vital to the build, and how to best utilize them. After the baseline abilities I will provide a basic rotation before suggesting additional skills to fill in the open slots.

Basic Build

Crystal Fragments

This spell is included in every Sorcerer build for good reason. It deals heavy damage, costs a moderate amount of magicka, and can be cast repeatedly without over-writing itself. Expect to spend the majority of your time casting this spell.

Mage’s Wrath

Another spell included in every Sorcerer build I’ve ever seen. This is the most powerful ability in the game below 20%, and is what makes Sorcerers a potent force in a game dominated by Dragon Knights.

Inner Light

Inner Light comes from the Mage’s Guild, it provides 20% Spell Critical as a baseline benefit, but through Mage’s Guild passives also grants 2% Max Magicka and 2% Magicka Regeneration. This skill provides a straight damage increase higher than any other skill, rightfully earning a place on both weapon bars.

Critical Surge

Both of the end-Trial bosses have a burn phase which coincides with our execute phase. Using Critical Surge before beginning your Mage’s Wrath phase greatly relieves healer stress and can even keep you alive long after the group has perished. Have 4-5 Sorcerers doing this and you can easily turn a wipe into a kill. I consider this ability to be a core skill, but if you must remove one, remove this.

Spell Symmetry

This is your Magicka sustain, it allows you to cast high cost spells without concern for your Magicka pool. We are building around Crystal Fragments, a high cost spell, so Spell Symmetry is a must.

Greater Storm Atronach

The highest damage per ultimate / damage per cast ultimate currently available for Sorcerers. The increased duration and survivability makes this morph superior to the Charged Atronach. This ultimate beats out Soul Assault because it is fire-and-forget, you don’t need to channel it, allowing you to immediately go back to casting other spells. It also deals more damage over the full duration than Soul Assault; Greater Storm Atronach averages 4500-5000 damage over the full lifetime of the Atronach.

Power Overload

This build uses double restoration staves, which means its AoE potential is somewhat lackluster. Power Overload helps to narrow the AoE gap between this build and other Destruction Staff oriented builds. Careful management of your ultimate points ensures this ultimate is always available when AoE damage is needed.

Rotation

Light Attack Weaving

With only a few skills, the rotation is very basic. However, there is one core concept which is essential to this and every other build: light attack weaving. I will explain that first.

Light attack weaving is essentially taking advantage of the game’s animation priority system, designed to make the game as smooth but responsive as possible. Essentially there are 3 priority tiers, in descending order they are:

  1. Block/Bash
  2. Any Spell costing Magicka or Stamina
  3. Light/Heavy Attacks

Essentially any skill higher on this list will have a higher casting priority than any skill lower on the list. Block/bash will cancel spell cast animations, spell cast animations will cancel light/heavy attack animations, and block/bash will cancel light/heavy attack animations.

What this means for you is that any light attack initiated before casting a spell will have its animation cancelled, but its effect will still activate. In essence this means that a light attack before every spell will increase the damage of that spell cast by the damage of your light attack. Example:

My light attack deals 148 damage, and my Crystal Fragments deals 757 damage. If I just cast Crystal Fragments, it will simply deal 757 damage. However, if I light attack then immediately cast Crystal Fragments, it will deal 148 + 757 = 905 damage. This took the same amount of time to execute because the light attack did not perform its animation.

If you are having trouble understanding this or prefer a visual advantage, this youtube video explains the mechanic in more detail.

Rotation

Now that we understand light attack weaving, we can create a rotation. I feel it is better to think of our rotation as a “priority” system, rather than a set rotation. Here is the single-target priority, which I will explain below:

Note that every skill should have a light attack weaved in, never cast a spell without cancelling a light attack.

  1. Activate Inner Light – if not currently active
  2. Spell Symmetry – as needed, see below
  3. Mage’s Fury – if target health is at or lower than 20%
  4. Storm Atronach – cast when ready
  5. Crystal Fragments

This is a fairly basic priority type rotation. The goal is to start at the top and cast the first spell which matches the current scenario. For example, if I do not have Inner Light active, I would cast it. If I do have Inner Light active, I would move to the next spell. The next spell is Spell Symmetry, at this point I would glance at my current Magicka pool to determine whether Spell Symmetry currently needs to be cast. If I do not have enough Magicka for my next spell, I need to cast Spell Symmetry. For more details about Spell Symmetry, see Making the most of Spell Symmetry below. If I have plenty of Magicka, I can move to the next spell, Mage’s Fury. At this point I would look at the target’s health, is it at or below 20%? If so, I would cast Mage’s Fury. Otherwise, I would move to Storm Atronach. This is when I look at my ultimate points to see if Storm Atronach is available to cast, and if so cast it. Finally, Crystal Fragments is my filler. Anytime none of the above spells are ready or need to be cast, I cast Crystal Fragments to fill the gap and prevent wasting time.

This is a very basic priority system which we will expand upon when we start to look at filling our remaining 4 spell slots.

Making the most of Spell Symmetry

Spell Symmetry is a fairly simply skill, but can take some practice to master. I will provide a couple of tips here and explain briefly how it works, but it is up to you to truly master this spell.

Might of the Guild is a passive bonus provided by the Mage’s Guild tree. It grants 20% bonus spell damage to the next spell cast after a Mage’s Guild spell, namely Spell Symmetry. This means that you should try to use Spell Symmetry prior to a higher damage spell rather than a lower damage one. For example, you would be best to cast Spell Symmetry before Crystal Fragments which deals ~750 damage instead of Velocious Curse which deals only ~600 damage.

This spell does not only works the way you would hope, however. For example, ground-targetted damage over time effects such as Caltrops and Liquid Lightning only benefit the initial damage effect, not the entire spell. This means that casting Spell Symmetry before using Caltrops will net you a weak 20 extra damage compared to Crystal Fragments netting you an additional 150 damage. Similarly, Spell Symmetry only benefits the initial impact damage for your Storm Atronach, not the full duration of its lifetime.

Additionally, this spell usually adds less damage to your next spell than simply casting another spell would deal. For example, Spell Symmetry then Crystal Fragments deals 900 damage, but Velocious Curse then Crystal Fragments deals 500 + 750 = 1250 damage for the same amount of time. Therefore, Spell Symmetry should only be used when necessary to restore Magicka, and not used to boost the damage of specific spells. There is currently no single spell which deals enough damage to warrant casting Spell Symmetry instead of another spell.

Finally, you want to ensure that you always have enough Magicka for your entire execute phase. This means that before the boss reaches 20%, you should ensure that you have enough Magicka to spam Mage’s Wrath from 20% -> 0%. This will take practice, but if you end the fight with exactly 0 Magicka, you can say that you are a true Spell Symmetry master. Note that if you run out of Magicka prior to the death of the boss, you have not yet mastered Spell Symmetry and could benefit from more practice.

Optional Skills

This section will outline all of the skills which could fill the extra available slots in the Basic Build. I will explain each skill as well as why they should or should not be used. A few of the abbreviations I will be using in this section:

  • DPET – Damage per execution time
    • This refers to the damage a spell deals for every 1 second spent executing or casting it. We assume that instant spells have a 1 second execution time due to the light attack cooldown.
  • DPSDamage per second
    • This refers to the damage a given spell deals each second. This differs from DPET which simply calculates the total damage dealt for a given spell execution.
  • Proc – Procedure
    • This is a term used to refer to an event triggered under particular circumstances. In this context, it refers to abilities which have a chance of occurring under various circumstances. For example, Crystal Fragments has a 35% chance when casting other spells to “proc” an instant spell cast.

Spell evaluations will be formatted in the following way:

  • DPET Total (Increase over Crystal Fragments)
  • DPS Total (Increase over Crystal Fragments)
    • See below for how this is calculated. The most important figure is DPS increase over Crystal Fragments. DPS Total tells us very little since the skills will not be spammed.

We should also consider the DPET of Crystal Fragments at 903.04, and instant Crystal Fragments at 1173.953. Since the DPET of Crystal Fragments is 903.04, we can also take this to be our base DPS.

Calculating Spell Values

In this section I will demonstrate how I am calculating the DPS and DPET of each ability. I will use Velocious Curse as an example.

First we calculate the base DPET using the following formula:

[(Base Damage + LA) * (1 + Spell Critical * 0.5) + 94.82] / Execution Time

In my case I have a 559 Base Damage, 148 Light Attack, 60.3% Spell Critical, giving me 920.16 DPET. This gives us a 17.12 DPET improvement over Crystal Fragments. To convert this to DPS, we use the following formula:

Damage Per Execution Time / Average Time Between Casts

The average time between casts can vary but for Velocious Curse, 4 seconds is a generous estimate. This gives us a DPS improvement of 4.28 over simply casting Crystal Fragments.

Each cast of Velocious Curse also gives a 35% chance to cast Crystal Fragments instantly. We already know that an instant Crystal Fragments has an 1173.953 DPET, so we can calculate the DPS increase in the following way:

[(DPET Instant – DPET Hard Cast) / Average Time Between Casts] * Chance of Activation

Average time between casts is 4 seconds, the chance of activation is 35% or 0.35, and the DPET difference is 270.913. This gives us a DPS increase of 23.7 for instant Crystal Fragments activations. Adding this to Velocious Curse’s increase of 4.28 gives us a total DPS increase of approximately 28 (27.98). We can also calculate the total DPET increase as:

(DPET Instant – DPET Hard Cast) * Chance of Activation

Giving us 94.82 DPET for a total Velocious Curse DPET of 1014.98.

Velocious Curse

Unfortunately only one Sorcerer can have Velocious Curse active at any given time. This makes it impractical for Trials where an average of 3 Sorcerers will be present in each group.

  • 1014.98 (111.94) DPET
  • 232.755 (27.98) DPS
Summon Winged Twilight

Our DPET and DPS values are variable in this case because Winged Twilight is indefinite. As a result, we must consider two scenarios; the pet stays alive for the entire fight (full duration), and the pet must be summoned mid-fight (limited duration).

Full Duration

The pet surviving for the entire fight means that there is 0 time spent activating it. Additionally, since you could not have otherwise spent the execution time casting Crystal Fragments, the DPS gain is 100% efficient (the gained DPS is entirely on top of your normal DPS).

  • Infinite (Infinite) DPET
  • 64 (64) DPS

Limited Duration

This is where things get tricky, read on below to see how I came up with these numbers. Evaluations for 20, 30 and 40 second durations, note that we are including cast time in the total duration:

20 Seconds

  • 1471.44 (568.4) DPET
  • 73.57 (28.42) DPS

30 Seconds

  • 2111.44 (1208.4) DPET
  • 70.38 (40.28) DPS

40 Seconds

  • 2751.44 (1848.4) DPET
  • 68.79 (46.21) DPS

Let us first find the break-even point for casting Winged Twilight compared to Crystal Fragments. We use Crystal Fragment’s 903.04 DPET to solve for Winged Twilight, including instant Crystal Fragment procs:

903.04 = [(64 * t) + 192.62 + 94.82] / 1.5

We find that a duration of 16.67 seconds allows us to break even with a Crystal Fragments cast. However, the Winged Twilight is unable to attack while being summoned, so we must add the 1.5 second cast time for a total of 18.17 seconds.

From here, calculating our durations is easy:

DPET = ((Duration-1.5) * 64) + 94.82 + 192.62

DPS = DPET / Duration

DPS Gain over Fragments = (DPET – cfDPET) / Duration

Daedric Minefield

This skill requires melee range, and also requires the boss be large enough for all 5 mines to detonate. This works for The 1st, 2nd and 3rd bosses in Aetherian Archive, and the 1st boss in Hel Ra Citadel.

  • 2584.59 (1681.55) DPET
  • 861.53 (560.52) DPS
Liquid Lightning

This ability will require practice to avoid losing too much time placing the area effect circle. I am calculating both with and without the conduit synergy. For the synergy calculations, I am assuming they use Spell Critical and are being activated by another player with the same statistics that I have:

With Synergy

  • 1877.15 (974.11) DPET
  • 625.72 (324.7) DPS

Without Synergy

  • 1179.55 (276.51) DPET
  • 393.18 (92.17) DPS
Soul Trap

This skill from the Soul Magic tree is a simple DoT effect which procs instant Crystal Fragments. This skill is included because I have been asked about it several times, it is unsurprisingly not a DPS increase.

  • 847.09 (-55.96) DPET
  • 84.71 (-5.6) DPS
Rearming Trap

This inclusion is entirely theoretical, as I have not tested it in any form. I am assuming that it is based on Spell Critical, and that you are attacking an undead or Daedric enemy. Damage is calculated from the base skill, it does not include the damage gained from increased ranks.

  • 1848.13 (945.09) DPET
  • 231.02 (118.14) DPS
Entropy

Another ability I have not yet morphed. Calculations are based on the rank 3 base skill. I am ignoring Might of the Guild because Light Attack currently consumes it.

  • 860.1 (-42.94) DPET
  • 59.73 (-2.99) DPS
Scalding Rune

I do not have this morphed, calculations are based on the rank 3 base skill and the DoT is calculated. I am ignoring Might of the Guild because Light Attack currently consumes it.

  • 1028.14 (125.1) DPET
  • 102.81 (12.51) DPS
Razor Caltrops

This ability is one that I had previously recommended, but I’ve started to move toward other fillers such as Winged Twilight and Daedric Minefield. This is still a very high DPET skill which acts effectively when other skills are impractical. However, Caltrops still beats Winged Twilight on fights where the Winged Twilight does not survive indefinitely.

  • 2412.98 (1509.94) DPET
  • 80.43 (50.33) DPS
Javagawd
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re: PvE solo Sorc build?

Wow, that is a lot to absorb at once, I think i've got the basic idea of it though which should be enough to get my feet wet, thanks for pasting the article here as I'm sure I'll be referring back to it as I gain more understanding of the gameplay.

The Pet/Resto idea reminds me of the Cabalist from DAoC :) well, without the buffs and dot's... ok, I guess it doesnt.. 

bleh, more coffee.......



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kazzine
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re: PvE solo Sorc build?

For my VR 12 Sorc, I kinds use the Crystal Fragment build. Only difference is I use Crushing Shock from Destruct Staff as the filler and only use CF when it procs. 

 

http://tamrielfoundry.com/topic/mages-guild-sorcerer-high-single-target-dps-aoe-backup/

 

http://tamrielfoundry.com/topic/tripwyrs-sorcerer-a-high-dps-trial-oriented-sorcerer-build/

 

Both links will show types of builds that are good for PVE.

 

 

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