Nos's No Spammable Sorc Build (DB Ready)

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EDIT:

07/13/2016 – Updated gear and rotation to fully maximize potential.

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.

Race:

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 Stone:

Thief and Shadow

Champion Point Distribution:

100 in elemental expert

37 in Thaumaturge

29 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 Setup:

5/1/1

5 Infallible Aether

5 Twice Born Star

2  Torug’s pact Swords  –  No  Enchant

1  Sharpened Maelstrom Lightning  staff

1 Precise Maelstrom Lightning Staff

Bar Setup (Pure Single Target):

Main Bar (Staff): Inner Light, Bound Aegis, Stalwart Guard, Liquid Lightning, Elemental Blockade. Ultimate: Shooting Star

Dual Wield bar: Inner Light, Boundless Storm, Boundless Aegis, Stalwart Guard, Mages Wrath. Ultimate: Shooting Star

Rotation:

Potion>Meteor

Step 1: Boundless Storm>Bar Swap

Step 2: (Liquid Lightning>Elemental Blockade> Fully charged heavy attack till blockade runs out) x 2

Restart at Step 1

Use Soul Assault on proc (single target fights).

At 20%, start spamming Mage’s Wrath, while keeping your DoT’s up. You should use the following rotation:

Step 1: Boundless Storm>Bar Swap

Step 2: Liquid Lightning>Elemental Blockade>First tick of a fully charged heavy attack>Bar Swap

Step 3: Mage’s Wrath x 6

If it is a high AoE fight do not bother with Mage’s Wrath, just keep doing your pre-execute rotation. Note, in trash AoE fights swap the sharpened lightning staff for a precise one. Also in AoE swap Boundless storm for mines.

Reasoning:

1. 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 attacked. #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!

2. 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)

3. Why Stalwart Guard?

Because it now buffs you and another player with minor force assuming long as you remain within 15 meters of that player. This is a huge buff and is applied passively. Additionally the alliance passive provides us with 10% magicka regen for long single target execute phases.

4. Why not elegance?

This build has went through several iterations. It is now back to using TBS over Elegance due to the introduction of the Soul Assault Ultimate on main bar. The diminished contribution from heavy attacks to overall damage warrants the use of TBS over elegance.

5. Why Soul Assault?

To be used in Single Target fights only. It does more damage per ulti used than shooting star.

6. How is the single target damage?

I believe it can approach 33-35k with full raid buffs. Here is an unbuffed Bloodspawn parse. keep in mind that I did not have the morph of Soul Strike (Soul Assault), so the damage can probably reach 30k unbuffed with the right morph.

http://imgur.com/3raPFnr

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.

• This topic was modified 1 week, 2 days ago by  Nosferatuzod.