Nos's No Spammable Sorc Build (Update 12 ready)

Replies: 241

EDIT:

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

09/27/2016 – Updated for Update 12.

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

Champion Point Distribution:

100 in elemental expert

52 in Thaumaturge

33 in Elfborn

2 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 the rest 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 Divines Infallible Aether armor

3 Moondancer Jewelry

2  Sharpened Moondancer Swords  –  No  Enchant

1  Sharpened Maelstrom Lightning  staff

2 Divines Ilambris Armor

Bar Setup:

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

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

Rotation:

Step 1: Potion>Velocious Curse>Bar Swap>Shooting Star

Step 2: Scalding Rune>Boundless Storm>Bar Swap

Step 3: Liquid Lightning>Velocious Curse>Elemental Blockade>Fully Charged heavy attack till Velocious Curse runs out>Velocious Curse> Fully charged HEAVY attack till Elemental Blockade runs out.

Restart at Step 2, but reapply Boundless Storm every other bar swap.

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

Step 4: Liquid Lightning>Velocious Curse>Elemental Blockade>First tick of fully charged heavy>Bar Swap

Step 5: Mage’s Wrath x 7

Restart at step 4

If it is a high AoE fight do not bother with Mage’s Wrath, just keep doing your pre-execute rotation. Also in AoE you can use 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 Scalding Rune?

It’s an AoE DoT that will help us proc Ilambris fire proc in high AoE situations.

4. Why Moondancer?

Willpower is a good 2nd choice but for min maxing Moondancer is Best in Slot. Here is my rationale:

A). Willpower adds around 2k magicka and 232 spell damage with full raid buffs. Backbar torugs swords add another 161 spell damage, but only on that back bar. 2k magicka for all non staff attack skills is equivalent to 191 spell damage, but for staff attacks (scales at 40 to 1 VS 10.5 to 1) it is equivalent to 50 spell damage.

B). Moondancer 5 piece bonus remains in effect regardless of which bar you remain on. This means that on the front bar you gain 560 spell damage with full raid buffs, which is more than willpower and is better overall for the build because of how spell damage scales with staff attacks.

C). Moondancer has a 30 second proc duration and no cooldown, meaning if you get the regen proc you can quickly reproc it as many times as needed.

5. How is the DPS?

Screenshot of @liv3mind using this sorc build in our guild runs:

http://imgur.com/a/aMIdj

http://imgur.com/a/5yUqT

Acknowledgements:

Special thanks to @rokrdt05 (fire0) for spending hours and hours tanking for me in Spindleclutch and of course a special thanks to @Asayre for optimizing my CP setup.

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