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Hello! And welcome to my first build guide, The “Step-Daughter of Coldharbour” Sorcerer Solo Build!
This guide will cover absolutely everything you need to know about this build, including gearing guides (which is very very cheap and easy to obtain) and leveling guide. Very friendly for new players too! This build might be stupid, wacky and bad, and people might hate this, but it is fun guaranteed!
Build Overview
This sorcerer build is for players who want to try out new things that may not be considered the most optimal for DPS (or any role really), and want to try new things in this game with fairly low investment. This build is designed for soloing, not just any soloing either, you could solo group dungeons fair easily if you are familar with the mechanics and have relatively okay-ish gear. This build is also “wacky” in some sort of sense, as we build up our defenses in a very weird way, using light armor, a large magicka pool and permanently making our health stay below 30%! Please note that this isn’t really your normal cookie-cutter build, nor does it demand high skill-levels or insanely accurate rotations, so this might not be some players are after. But if you want a really fun and themed build, read right on!
Build Strength and Weakness
Pros:
- Very Solo-friendly
- Insanely Tanky if you know what you are doing
- Easy to pull off
- Wacky build! Using the patented LowLife status to achieve huge damage mitigations!
- Cheap to Gear
- Fun for everyone!
- Themed Build! Which is pretty nice
- Great build name (depends on your perspective)
Cons:
- Very very very low DPS most of the time when you are defending against attacks. This isn’t really the build’s fault because if you are soloing dungeons, you are going to have low DPS since there are nobody to tank for you.
- You need to be a vampire, so this might be a turn off for some.
- Grouping with this build can actually mess you and your party up, I don’t recommend grouping with this exact build(you could just easily swap a few skills though if you want to group) if you aren’t very clear on the mechanics or if your group if unware.
- There are a few cases in the game where you will just simply die due to the mechanics, this can be avoided easily though.
- Horrible build name (depends on your perspective)
- Not really that effective I would say, it is a fun build, but if you want to do group dungeons without hiccups, you might want to re-slot a few skills
Mechanics
So, how does this build work?
Well, to understand, you rely on two key mechanics: damage shield and LowLife. The main theme of this build is LowLife that’ right, you don’t want your health to go very high, and I don’t mean just not putting any points into life. When you are in combat, your health should never be above 30%, in fact, the lower your health is, the better!
So how do we defend against attacks? Well, we use damage shields. And because we are sorcerers, we use the “Conjured Ward” skill from Daedric Summoning skill line. This skill will scale off our max magicka, which means, more magicka, more survivability, more damage and a better sustain too! In addition to this damage shield, we would also use “Annulment” skill from Light Armor skill line and the “Healing Ward” morph of “Steadfast Ward” from Restoration Staff skill line for a huge huge amount of damage shield.
So how do damage shield work? Well, damage shield act like your health, which is an additional barrier that must be penetrated before damage to your health can be done, damage done to the shield can not be mitigated by Armor or Spell Resist, nor can it be mitigated by blocking, so don’t bother wasting stamina for them.
Why keep your health on LowLife then? Well, there is a lot of neat things that can be done, because you don’t need to worry about health, you could easily put a lot of resources into magicka and magicka regeneration. And the main reason, actually is the vampire passive: Undeath. Undeath reduces damage dealt to you when you are below 50% health, the lower you are, the more damage is reduced. This actually applies to your damage shield, unlike armor and spell resist or blocking, this is what makes LowLife works! And because you are at LowLife and you are a vampire with reduced health regen, you can stay at LowLife longer. The ward ally skill from the restoration skill line also increases it’s strength by a whooping 300% if used on a severely wounded target, which you would be, this in total, give you a huge amount of effective health point. Also because of how cheap Hardened Ward is, and how this build is very very good at sustaining magicka, you can simply constantly recast Ward every few seconds. (Honestly, I recast it about every 2 seconds when soloing a group dungeon)
And so how do we keep our magicka up if we are casting Ward every two seconds? The answer? Fully charged Heavy Attack! Using fully charged heavy attack between ward casts will allow you to easily sustain your magicka, alongside with our cost-reducing gear sets, I can easily sustain my magicka at above 90% at all times! Seriously, I have way too much magicka sustain.
Skill Guide
First, you are going to need to be a vampire. There is no getting around that. Fortunately, that is very easy, you can simply ask in zone chat, it’s normally around 2k for a bite, don’t go any higher than that, or if you are in a good guild, people gave those away for free (We should be really, it’s food for us).
You need to have two bars, a destruction staff bar and a restoration staff bar.
This setup is for solo-ing very hard contents or group dungeons or craglorn delves, normally, this is a bit over-kill as you don’t even need the LowLife or ward when you are just fighting solo-mobs.
On the destruction staff bar, you would want to have a lightning staff, because fully charged lightning heavy attack will deal a lot of AoE damage, which will help you to clear adds in group dungeons.
On the destro bar, you would want to slot:
Unstable Clannfear, Hardened Ward, Spell Symmetry, [Open Slot] [Open Slot]
For this bar, you want to have the clannfear, which will act as a great distraction and tanking unit, and hardened ward, which you must refresh every moment you get, if this goes out, you are dead. You will actually need to dual bar both of these skills actually. You will want spell symmetry to keep your health down, and give you a bit of magicka too, the rest is open, you could slot of DPS skill too if you want, Impulse of Force Shock from the destro line
On the restro bar you want to slot:
Unstable Clannfear, Hardened Ward, Healing Ward [Open Slot] [Open Slot]
This is pretty self-explanatory.
On all of these open slots, you could consider the following:
Restoring Twilight: Another meat shield and high damage dealer, give you magicka restore too.
Bound Armor: Nice max magicka, the minor ward and resolve buff aren’t useful, but those max magicka are nothing to scoff at.
Annulement/Harness Magicka: Huge shield against casters.
Evasion: this is actually pretty interesting, it gives you major evasion, which gives a 20% chance to dodge. This cost stamina, but since you don’t really need to block a lot, you could consider using this.
Volcanic Rune/Encase: Nice bit of CC goes a long way
Inner Fire: Undaunted taunt, this could work if you want to tank in a dungeon, yes, this is actually a tank build.
Dark Ritual: This is actually pretty interesting, I am actually considering to use the stamina morph, since I have way too much magicka, I use the stamina morph to give me some stamina to break free or dodge roll.
Gear Guide
Gearing is very very easy for this build, most of which are crafted.
You will want:
5 piece Seducer: best magicka sustain set there is, easily craftable, and a nice 8% reduced spell cost.
3 piece Magnus: Another magicka sustain set, easily craftable. You will want your weapon to be either Seducer of Magnus, there isn’t a difference there.
3 piece Jewelery Warlock set: Another sustain! Yeah! There are a few other jewelry set that works too, warlock is fairly easy to obtain. If you can’t get a high level version of these, the Vet 5 Syrabane set works as well. No amulets though.
How to play this build
When you are doing quests, or any easily soloble missions, just put on force pulse, crystal fragment and put ward on and kill everything. When you are playing with a group in dungeons, you can be either the DPS (you are not gonna to top-tier damage with this gear though, if you want a backup gear, the Kagrenac’s Hope is a good set and Two piece Torug’s Pact too) or you could be an unconventional tank with Inner Fire from Undaunted (might take sometime to level it there if you don’t do a lot of dungeons). You could not go LowLife if the healer doesn’t know what you are doing and keep healing you, trading magicka with the healer is not really the best idea since you might actually have better sustain then him, but if the healer is aware of what you are doing and isn’t just actively trying to heal you, then you could go LowLife and turn the occasional Breath of Life into magicka reserve for you. Be wary that some bosses can actually hit through damage shield, so you might want to go full life on those bosses.
If you are soloing group dungeons, then go LowLife I myself managed to solo normal City of Ash at level 46 with subpar gear (only a 5 piece seducer because I was lazy) and unoptimized skills (Ward isn’t even morphed)
When you are playing this build solo, it’s fairly easy, use spell symmetry to get yourself down to LowLife put on your Clannfear, and every damage shield you get, constantly refresh them while you do fully-charged heavy attack (very important). Use DPS skills when you can, but defense comes first in solo-ing 4 man contents.
Leveling Guide
Fairly easy leveling, slot most of your class skills, level them all up, especially Resto Staff and Daedric Summoning and Mages Guild, become a vampire at level 40 or so and craft yourself some seducer and magnus if you can.
At vet 1, pick up the warlock jewelry for less than 500g per piece, at vet 5 pick up the Syrabane Two rings set and after that, you will want either the Soulshine set at vet 9 to vet 10 for very cheap, or if you can afford it, the vet 12 Warlock Rings.
Final Words
Well, this is my unique LowLife build, it’s wacky, stupid and bad, but hey, it’s fun, if you need any help with this build or anything else, don’t be afraid to message me in-game @zbzszzzt123. I can help you with your gear or perhaps if you are lucky, becoming a vampire
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This topic was modified 1 day, 11 hours ago by
zbzszzzt123.
