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Have you been having a lackluster time on your sorc? Are you struggling with sustain even without using Kena? Do you feel useless in group content? Well all of this is about to change. This build focuses on a specific and unique gear setup, which will permit high DPS, while maintaining full resources and the Kena Proc.
Class:
Altmer – best racial choice for this specific build because of the lightning damage bonus.
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:
Thanks to @Asayre for helping me figure out the CP distribution, since due to the unique nature of this build, the calculator doesn’t work with it. You will run the following CP distribution:
95 in elemental expert
53 in Thaumaturge
18 in Elfborn
1 Staff Expert
In the green tree you will max out reduce cost first and then regen later, 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 Defender and Thick Skinned. (Or Bastion for certain cases)
The Setups:
A). If no infallible jewelry:
5 light/1 Medium/ 1 Heavy
3 Moondancer Jewelry – Arcane with Spell Damage Enchants
2 Moondancer Swords – No Enchant
5 Infallible Aether Armor Divines with Magicka Enchants
2 Skoria Divines with Magicka Enchants
1 Sharpened Maelstrom Lightning staff
B). If there is Infallible Jewelry:
5 light/1 Medium/ 1 Heavy
Infallible Jewelry – Arcane with Spell Damage Enchants
2 Torug’s pact Swords – No Enchant
5 Twice Born Star Armor Divines with Magicka Enchants
2 Infallible Armor Divines with Magicka Enchants
1 Sharpened Maelstrom Lightning staff
Bar Setup (Pure Single Target):
Main Bar (Staff): Inner Light, Shock Clench, Bound Aegis, Liquid Lightning, Elemental Blockade. Ultimate: Overload
Dual Wield bar: Inner Light, Boundless Storm, Boundless Aegis, Rearming Trap, Degeneration. Ultimate: Shooting Star
Rotation:
Step 1 (Overload Bar): Boundless Storm>Liquid Lightning>Velocious Curse> 3 Overload Light attacks>Velocious Curse> 3 Light Attacks
Step 2 (Overload bar): Liquid Lightning>Velocious Curse> 3 Overload Light attacks>Velocious Curse> 3 Light Attacks
Step 3 (Overload Bar): Repeat steps 1 and 2 until overload is depleted. If a fight is very short (30 sec or less) do not bother cursing. Curse’s damage is there to prolong overload uptime.
Step 4 (DW bar): Shooting Star>Boundless Storm>Rearming Trap (block cancel)>Degeneration (bar swap cancel).
Step 5 (Staff bar): Shock Clench>Liquid Lightning>Elemental Blockade>Full charged heavy Attack
Step 6: Repeat Step 2, but re apply Elemental Blockade at the end of the rotation.
Step 7: Restart at Step 4
At 20-30% switch to spamming Overload. When it gets down to 100 ultimate, switch to Mage’s Wrath, but keep reapplying Liquid Lightning and Boundless Storm.
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Bar Setup (Mixed Single Target/AoE):
Main Bar (Staff): Inner Light, Velocious Curse, Bound Aegis, Liquid Lightning, Elemental Blockade. Ultimate: Overload
Dual Wield bar: Inner Light, Boundless Storm, Boundless Aegis, Rearming Trap, Soul Splitting Trap. Ultimate: Shooting Star
Rotation:
Step 1 (DW bar): Shooting Star>Boundless Storm>Rearming Trap (block cancel)>Soul Splitting Trap (bar swap cancel). Note: Only use Soul Splitting Trap if more than 1 target is present.
Step 2 (Staff bar): Velocious Curse>Liquid Lightning>Elemental Blockade>Full charged heavy Attack
Step 3: Repeat Step 2, but re apply Elemental Blockade at the end of the rotation.
Step 4: Restart at Step 1
At 20-30%
If pure single target, then switch to spamming Overload. When it gets down to 100 ultimate, switch to Mage’s Wrath, but keep reapplying Liquid Lightning and Boundless Storm.
If there is even 1 single add present, continue your rotation step by step. Each additional target adds an inhumane level of dps, so with 2+ targets FHA> Overload or Mage’s wrath.
Reasoning:
1. Why 5 piece moondancer?
- Allows us to run 2 5 piece sets and a monster helm, since the swords can be on the off bar.
2. Why Skoria and not Kena?
- With this build you have unlimited sustain so Kena is ideal for this set up, however I found that its uptime is at best between 70-75% which adds around 6-7% increase to damage. Since this build uses all DoT’s with the minor exception of the initial hit of Shock clench, skoria’s damage contribution should also be between 6-7%. The final issue that I noticed afterr multiple Bloodspawn attempts, is that light attack weaving between skills lost me 4-5% dps. Perhaps there is a way I can animation cancel to achieve better results with light attacks, but at the moment of testing I wasn’t able to increase my dps by doing this.
3. Why Infallible Aether?
- Infallible is getting buffed in the Dark Brotherhood update. It is an amazing set for 2 reasons. #1 It provides the Vulnerability debuff to the target that is being heavy attack. #2 It adds damage to each fully charged heavy attack. At first glance, it seems like a lackluster buff, but at closer examination I found that it buffs every tick of a channeled heavy attack thus adding quite a bit of damage to each tick. Oh and don’t forget the 5% Minor Slayer and Increased Crit Chance on top of all these goodies!
4. Whats with the lightning staff?
- A few reasons:
A) As I mentioned above, Infallible Aether buffs each tick of a fully charged heavy attack.
B) Each channeled tick is buffed by the vMA lightning staff.
C) Sorcs have a 5% lightning damage passive buff
D) Each channeled lightning staff heavy attack spreads to nearby targets and hits them for a ton of damage, which scales with Thaumaturge and Elemental expert. The radius is around the same as from elemental ring, except unlike elemental ring, you can do it from range AND it costs 0 magicka. Have you ever run out of magicka while spamming elemental ring in trash pulls or second boss of vMoL? Leave those negative moments in the past. The AoE damage is insane.
E) Fully Charged Heavy Attacks Inflict Vulnerability debuff and since the attack is channeled by moving the cursor from add to add we can actually give the debuff to all the adds surrounding the boss (if there are adds) without stopping our rotation. Keep in mind that because the lightning staff attacks are channeled, you only need the first tick of the heavy attack to proc vulnerability debuff.
F) The Lightning staff concussion debuff synergizes well with the exploiter CP passive that grants stam builds increased DPS.
G) Lightning Staff is lightning damage, staff damage and DoT damage. This means that it takes advantage of 3 CP stars and thus draws on more sources of DPS buffs. This makes its full DPS potential to be off the charts. The automatic AoE is nice because each additional add automatically doubles your DPS.
H) Chance to proc disintegrate (implosion)
5. Why Degeneration and Shock Clench?
Although Degeneration scales with Elemental Expert and Thaumaturge, it still puts it slightly below Velocious Curse for pure single target damage, but because it is a Mage guild ability and we have Shock Clench on the front bar, the empower increase to Shock Clench’s damage makes it surpass Velocious in terms of pure single target damage. Also both of these have DoT components and are thus buffed by 2 CP stars and also increase the chances of proccing Skoria.
6. Why Soul Splitting Trap?
Have you ever seen how well the Templar skill reflective light works on fights with AoE? Well think of soul splitting trap as a weaker version of the same skill. The DoT damage it does is slightly below the damage of reflective light, and of course there is no initial hit on soul splitting trap, but on 2+ targets it becomes a great dps contributor. Make sure to use it only if there are at least 2 adds present though.
7. Why Curse?
Although it is no longer buffed by Thaumaturge, the single target damage as well as the high AoE damage that it does, makes it a no brainer in an AoE rotation.
8. Why not elegance?
If there is no infallible jewelry, then switching elegance for infallible, would be a huge dps loss. If the jewelry exists, then TBS>Elegance.
9. How is the single target damage?
The following screen shot is from the PTS and was done on a 300 CP character with 5 infallible 3 willpower 2 skoria 1 maelstrom lightning staff, 2 torug’s swords set up. The rotation began with Shooting Star, instead of overload spam. The execute with overload was initiated at 28%. The debuff used was puncture. The only buff was a spell power potion. No other buffs were used in this parse.
Note that skoria with this build contributed 1800+ dps to this single target fight.
Acknowledgements:
Special thanks to @rokrdt05 for spending hours and hours tanking for me in Spindleclutch and suggesting Soul Splitting Trap as an aoe DoT. Special thanks to @liv3mind for suggesting the use of Degeneration and Shock clench to optimize pure single target dps. And of course a special thanks to @Asayre for optimizing my CP setup.
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This topic was modified 23 hours, 25 minutes ago by
Nosferatuzod.