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I’ve written most of this in other posts, but it’s not all terribly well organized, so here we go again.
This is a guide to solo leveling a magicka-based sorcerer in landscape PvE. Some of your goals for leveling may be to do dungeons, endgame PvE or PvP. Great. This guide mentions how to prepare for those, but it doesn’t actually cover what to do in those venues.
Basic principles underlying this guide include:
- Spell-casting is fun.
- Therefore, we want to have lots of magicka available so we can have fun casting spells.
- That entails squishiness, so a lot of the spell-casting involves staying alive.
- Pets are useful in staying alive. So we use them.
- As per my general tips thread, which may well also be of interest to you if you’re looking at this one, it is not necessary to be optimal.
- In particular, how fast we kill isn’t terribly important. Lots of other things take up more time in the game than actual damage-dealing, which is only a few seconds per fight.
- Not being in a hurry, we can save ultimate skills for tough fights, rather than using them as part of a regular rotation.
- Everything in this guide has large margins for error. Success does not depend upon precise play.
I further believe that there are three major categories of skill use when soloing:
- Doing damage.
- Avoiding death according to your regular fight plan.
- “Re-setting” the fight when stuff goes seriously wrong.
Altmer or Breton are the most optimal choices for this playstyle, with Altmer probably being slightly the better of the two. If you enjoy another race more — well, it’s not necessary to be optimal.
As for weapons:
- This guide uses staffs all the way, except when you want to level up skills for future use. (E.g., one-hand-plus-shield is a popular weapon choice in PvP, specifically for the skill Defensive Stance.)
- Destruction staff is your main weapon all the way, except that if you briefly use something else at very low levels instead, that’s fine. (The first weapon you get coming out of character creation may be a bow. The first staff you get may be restoration.)
- Your second weapon when you can use one (Level 15) should be either a restoration or second destruction staff.
- When I first wrote this guide, fire/inferno was clearly the right element choice for your destruction staff. The elements are more balanced now, but fire is still what I and most other players that I know of prefer.
Once you’ve made sufficient investment in the Light Armor skill line, you’ll want to wear lots of light armor, specifically at least 5 pieces.
Your most important skill lines to level up are Daedric Summoning, Destruction Staff, Storm Calling, Dark Magic and Light Armor. The first 2 are slightly more urgent than the others.
Mage’s Guild can be good to level too, but other than downloading the Lorebooks add-on to make sure you don’t miss any lorebooks, there’s little you can do to rush that one.
Please note: Posts 1-57 were written before the announcement of Patch 2.1. Please see Post 58 for initial comment on the changes it will introduce. In general, while I’ve done a little editing over the months as details of the game change, various specifics in the earlier posts may have become a little obsolete.
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This topic was modified 7 months, 4 weeks ago by
FrancisCrawford.
