Nos's Highly Improbable but Possibly Workable Sorc Build

Class:

There are two good options for race choice, as of the making of this build these are the rankings:

1. Altmer – most well rounded setup. You lose a bit of fire damage, but gain sustain.

3. Breton – Best for sustain, but you are losing DPS compared to the other races.

Attribute Distribution:

All in Magicka. As of this expansion there is no need to points into health.

Food:

Health and Magicka

Mundus Stones:

Thief and Shadow

Champion Point Distribution:

As per @Asayre ‘s Calculator you will be running 100 in Elemental Expert, 22 in Elfborn, 41 in Spell Erosion and 4 in Thaumaturge in the blue constellations.

In the green tree you will max out reduce cost first and then regen later. the reasoning behind this is that in PvE the primary strain on resources occurs in high intensity fights from which you can’t run away to regen resources, thus I have 100 points in reduce cost and 67 in regen. Additionally you do not have any regen on gear, which further devaluates the CP tree.

In the red tree I distribute points evenly across Hardy, Elemental Expert and Thick Skinned. (Or Bastion for certain cases)

The Setup:

5 light/1 Medium/ 1 Heavy

3 Moondancer Jewelry – Arcane with Spell Damage Enchants

1 Moondancer Armor Piece – Divines with Magicka Enchant

1 Piece Molag Kena Armor Divines with Magicka Enchants

2 Piece Torugs Pact Armor Divines with Magicka Enchants

3 Piece Twice Born Star Armor Divines with Magicka Enchants

4 Piece Twice Born Star Swords (2 on back bar) Nirnhoned with the two front bar swords enchanted with Fire and Lightning (no enchants on back bar swords)

Bar Setup:

Primary bar: Inner Light, Crystal Blast, Boundless Aegis, Velocious Curse, Liquid Lightning. Ultimate: Shooting Star

Secondary bar: Inner Light, Boundless Storm, Bound Aegis, Proximity Detonation, Mage’s Wrath. Ultimate: Overload

Overload Bar: Inner Light, Boundless Storm, Bound Aegis, Liquid Lightning, Velocious Curse.

Rotation:

Single target Overload Phase:

Step 1: Proximity Detonation>Overload Bar>Boundless Storm

Step 2: (Liquid Lightning>Velocious Curse>Overload Light Attack x 3> Velocious Curse> Overload Light Attack x 3) x2

Step 3: Boundless Armor> Repeat Step 2

Once overload runs out:

Step 1: Boundless Armor

Step 2: (Liquid Lightning>Velocious Curse>Crystal Blast>Medium Weave>Crystal Blast x 2>Velocious Curse>Crystal Blast>Medium Weave> Crystal Blast x 2) x 2

Once you go out of magicka switch back to Overload Phase. The Medium weaves should be charged during the cast time of Crystal Blast.

Reasoning:

Why did I even bother reading this far? A sorc without a staff??? Well this is what I thought as well, but then I started thinking. We only use a staff because our main spammable is a staff ability (Force Pulse/Crushing Shock). This spammable doesn’t hit that hard, which is why pre-overload our dps is not as high as other classes. Well what if there was a way to not use this skill and still pull competitive DPS? So now hear me out, with a staff you will be using Force Pulse/Elemental Blockade and with a dual wield setup it will be Velocious Curse and Crystal Blast. So what we have to establish is whether Force Pulse+Weave+Elemental Blockade is better than Velocious Curse and Crystal Blast.

The current BiS Setup for Sorcs in single target boss fights is:

2 Molag Kena

5 Twice Born Star (With the recent changes to how major force is applied TBS is better than Julianos with a back to back Warhorn rotation)

3 MoonDancer

1 Sharpened Maelstrom Inferno staff

The setup I am proposing above gives you 8617 ability power, while this BiS setup gives you 8336.

Ability Power is (Total Magicka (with Warhorn) / 10.46 + Total Spell Power) x additional buffs. Since both setups benefit equally from CP and the Mundus effects applied by TBS, we can negate these in our calculations. This leaves us with only the Moondancer buff, the Dual Wield Buff, the Altmer buff and the Sorc lightning damage buff. When calculating these coefficients I already had the Altmer buff and the Sorc lightning damage buff included.

The ability coefficient for Force Pulse is .820 combined damage / Ability power

The ability coefficient for Crystal Blast is 1.189 damage/Ability Power

The ability coefficient for Elemental Blockade is 1.797 combined damage/ Ability Power (over 8 seconds)

The ability coefficient for Velocious Curse is 1.042 damage/Ability Power (over 3.5 seconds)

Assuming the Elemental Blockade>7 Force pulse rotation we get that the combined damage from these two sources will equal to 62,828 over 8 seconds or 7854 damage per second. Keep in mind that this is raw unmodified damage.

Assuming Velocious>Crystal Blast x 3 rotation we get the combined damage from these two sources to equal 39,715 over 3.5 seconds, or 11,347 per second.

Now what is missing from these calculations is the the medium Light/Medium weave contribution to damage. To compensate for this, I will say that it will never exceed 40% of the combined force Pulse damage. Assuming this is true, the total damage from the Force Pulse/Weave/Blockade becomes around 10,588 per second.

Final piece is of course the randomly occurring Crystal frags proc. From browsing of many parses I can see that the Crystal frag Proc is used on average roughly every 10 seconds during long fights. This makes its damage contribution fairly small in the overall scheme of things. And this should be further diminished by the increased damage to DoT’s coming from this setup.

From the above you can clearly see that at least theoretically my gear/bar setup proves superior to the staff weaving setup. Additionally your execute/overload is buffed tremendously since not only is Kena not wasting your resources, you don’t have to weave to get the damage bonus.

Finally, since each skill in your single target rotation is also an AoE skill, you literally do not have to change up your rotation at all. Just keep rotating your skills through and they will damage not only your primary target, but also the other targets adjacent to it.

Possible issues:

1. Sustain:

So sustain is a big issue and while you gain damage to all of your attacks, you lose the elemental drain bonus from Force Pulse, Elemental Blockade AND your Staff weaves (which are also free and thus generate magicka). The counter point is that Kena’s activation drains resources more so than the rotation/gear proposed above. By switching away from Kena, you may actually improve sustain. keep in mind that you should still gain magicka back from Siphon Spiritas well as the Elemental Drain ticks from your two elemental DoT’s on the target.

2. Lowered Mobility:

Because Crystal Blast is channelled, it casting it will lower your ability to move around quickly.

Well, this is it, please tell me if I am just insane for even considering dropping a staff and please let me know any errors that i have made in terms of my predictions. Also keep in mind that this is all purely theoretical.

Special thanks to @Asayre in advance for analyzing my build and letting me know whether I am crazy or not.

Also special thanks to @Yolo-Wizard and multiple others for providing parses for me to analyze.