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The Sorceress Guide part 5
X) Still to come: Mastery Ideas25 Points
15(4)/5(1)/0 – High Agony Triple Nuke BuildXI) Suggestions & BugsSuggestion to Mythic: Healing DebuffWe need one. I really need to stress that this is very, very important! I'm not sure exactly whom has Healing Debuffs and whom doesn't, but it sure feels like the Order gets one on every Ranged DPS and some Support cousins, while Destruction get a meager few on their Melee DPS and maybe somewhere else I'm unaware of. The Sorceress could really use one, in fact it really should be standardized across the factions as to whom gets it as CORE abilities, not something you spec for. I think it should be limited and at least be accessed by the Glass Cannons of both sides - the Bright Wizard and the Sorceress. Either make it Core with a nice cooldown or on two or so Morale abilities on different levels to allow some choice on when to have it.
This solves two things. They really make us the tank destroyers we are meant to be. Healers usually focus their heals on the tanks keeping them up, which is basically their survival mechanic in group RvR and what makes them nearly unstoppable. If we can coordinate some focus fire and cut their healing in half then we can effectively counter them with our Magic DPS. It makes the chain of Magic DPS > Tank more of a reality. It also makes the stalemates of the near indestructible healers less frequent. Healers should eventually die even if they are focusing all their heals on themselves, this is certainly not the case now in practice. It's a careful timing issue with a Healing Debuff to kill off the healer. Not only do you have to worry about their morale heal being unaffected, but you have to be able to burst them down before it wears off. A 50% strength heal is still pretty powerful when most healers are pretty Magic Resistant. It gives us a chance to beat them, not enough of a chance be the favored in a duel, but it gives us a chance to take them off guard or get lucky with burst damage. Suggestion to Mythic: Willpower Resistance Reduction and Staff DPS
Something to be concerned about is gear scaling in accordance to casters. As you get better and better gear later on, you are going to get more Int, Weapon Skill, Strength, Toughness, Armor, Resistances, etc. Int, Str, and Ball all balance out with Toughness pretty much equally. Armor is combated by more Weapon Skill. Essentially that help cut back the extra armor everyone will be experiencing. The problem is resistances and weapon dps bonuses are pretty much stand alone. Nothing counters them and as people get more and more gear it'll simply reduce magic damage with nothing to compensate it. The weapon dps will increase weapon-users damage as gear expands, but that can be expected to match Wounds. Thus we need something comparable.
Put simply, the higher in progression you get as long as you fight equal geared enemies you will be doing less magic damage because people will have more base resistances on their resistance pieces simply because they are stronger pieces of armor. This will result in people having more and more resistance % against your type of magic damages. Getting more and more Intelligence is simply countered by someone getting Toughness to compensate not to mention there will be a soft cap in which getting all the more Int would be less effective. There needs to be a mechanic that counteracts this.
The easiest way, is to put a Resist Piercing mechanic on Willpower to somewhat relate it to Weapon Skill. This will make healing classes more effective at piercing resistances as well, which isn't really that much of a problem considering it will reduce the insane length of battles between a Healer v. Healer fight. A small re-balance of the resistance system would have to be done, but this is vital to keeping the game scaling at a proper pace. If this doesn't occur, the longer the game continues the less damage any caster will do. In the same way, Staff DPS needs to be worked into spell damage as a equal damage mechanic to mirror a weapon-users upgrades. A rework of all the spell damages would have to be done, but this is important to ensure that our damage scales just as a weapon-users damage scales throughout the game. If you would add say 200 points to every stat in two opponents then you would find that the Magic DPS does less damage due to not having anything to work against resistances and the Weapon DPS careers would simply do more damage because their weapon dps would be increasing and allowing them to do more damage. Considering more wounds equally the Magic DPS will take a much lower percentage of health from their opponent and the Weapon DPS should be balanced into doing around the same percentage damage.It's imperative that something such as Willpower gives us resistance penetration and staff dps added to the spell damage. I awknowledge that it would be a fair amount of work having to increase the base resistance given by resistance points and reducing the base damage of spells to compensate for the added staff dps on average. Overall it would be for a much improved system in terms of a balancing act.
XII) The Last StuffThere isn't much here yet. I imagine I will give credit to those that help me if I update it.I'm currently still proofreading it so if you see any mistakes... I might have missed it or I'm in the process of working on it. There is a particularly nasty bug that doesn't allow you to edit pages with the spells with pictures on them nor touch the regular hyperlinks in an easy format. I'm trying to catch most of them! Can't wait to see you all at launch!
Credits...Part 4
The Sorceress Guide part 4
VII) MasteriesAgonyThese skills focus on doing the most damage while you still have Action Points in your system. Directly effecting a single target with massive damage to dispose of them quickly and effectively. Builds Dark Magic extremely quickly with Impending Doom and Gloomburst and is often quite damaging to oneself especially with Swell of Gloom slotted. These Sorceresses will be feared for the burst damage they can output while empowered with Dark Magic.Recover EnergyAmazing tactic if you are an Agony Sorceress as you will be using a lot of Agony abilities. Used in tandem with the previously mentioned Devour Energy and Grasping Darkness you should boost your sustained damage considerably. It remains to be seen if you can exceed the sustained damage of a Calamity Sorceress but I can't imagine it being too far off.Echo of PowerIn it's current incarnation it's quite weak. It does far less then Impending Doom and has a requirement to be cast as well. Did I mention it costs the nearly same AP? I imagine if a target would disrupt often then it could be of use since it has no cooldown... but that doesn't happen enough because you are stacking a lot of INT right? I've never taken this ability other then to see if I could find a use for it. Suggestion to Mythic: Make it proc on a chance to block as well, increase it's strength to make up for it's rarity, and/or give it a debuff to the enemies disrupt/block chance upon activation. Right the damage isn't much to be felt in comparison to Impending Doom and this carries a requirement. It has no cooldown but the requirement makes it so rare it's hardly ever used. Making it a better mechanic in taking down tanks wouldn't be such a bad idea, as we could use a better method of dealing with block in some form.Tapping the DarkPretty neat ability. You become a pseudo support. I was never sure if it worked though even while trying to use it (I never noticed a new buff on my allies). Remember in it's current form it boosts only your allies an not yourself. With Umbral Fury I imagine your group keeping a shield up quite often to the point I hope it has a hidden “can only occur once every 3 seconds” tag in there somewhere. I don't often take it however since I want other things and it takes up a tactic slot. Besides... I kinda want some benefit to myself for a mastery ability.EDIT: THIS DOES WORK ON ONESELF! Note to self, update this guide.Suggestion to Mythic: Let it proc on ourselves. It'd be most powerful on any dual-wield dps anyway and not us. As long as the skill is capped to be only occurs once at most every 3 seconds then it should be fairly balanced to be on ourselves as well. Give us some form damage mitigation in our direct combat tree since that's likely where I should be.Impending DoomVery strong burst damage. Builds a ton of Dark magic and it's cooldown isn't too significant. Perfect when coupled with a healer or if you plan to use Empowered Dhar a lot. It will allow maybe favorite quick chain of spells which is Doombolt ? Gloomburst ? Impending Doom. (The Triple Nuke! Rawr!) It'll bring you up high in the Dark Magic levels though (it builds 75 Dark Magic!) although it's relatively safe at low levels of Dark Magic for what it outputs since the highest generation is backloaded. Especially useful while on the run although it's difficult to discharge the Dark Magic while doing so. No Agony Sorceress should ever be without it.Swell of GloomA very powerful tactic as long as you are willing to suffer the consequences. Doombolt ? Gloomburst ? Impending Doom is a wicked combo with this tactic and you can bring people to their knees with a crit streak. It does come at that price though as you absolutely must have someone healing you. I'd take this tactic just so when the chance arises you can slot it. It makes Gloomburst just that much more to be feared. Swell of Gloom hits separate to Gloomburst so it triggers a separate hit and can crit just like any spell but will not be cast if the initial Gloomburst has killed the target.BUG: Currently this only backlashes for around half of what you usually get hit with. Perhaps this is intended I'm not sure. I'm fairly certain I submit this bug however I'm a little tipsy right now so I can't be certain.Shades of DeathIt's not too impressive at first glance. Maybe it's not too impressive at all being a Master Ability Level 13. But I find it quite useful for a few things. The damage is triggered when anyone strikes the target and each trigger can crit. In other words, that's a good chunk of instant cast damage when a target is being focused upon as the five charges will be used up instantly. Often it will kill targets that are nearly dead and being attacked by anyone else. Also, it builds no Dark Magic. That means it can't backlash as well but still gains the bonus from Dark Magic. When you are fully charged on Dark Magic you can throw this out relentlessly (before you begin to drop levels of Dark Magic anyway) and not worry about causing harm to yourself while it is still extremely effective with it's frequent crits. The other use is prepping the target before you Triple Nuke it by getting 4 charges to trigger from it (Doombolt, Gloomburst, Swell of Gloom, and Impending Doom for those who question my math!) I've heard tale of this ability being too weak on damage and maybe it's true for a 13 point mastery ability but I find use enough for it anyway.CalamityDamage over time is a wondrous tool for those whom enjoy it. Coupled with the only way to recover health through an ability it enhances your DoTs to be the most that they can be. Technically, this is supposed to increase your sustained damage by a considerable amount. I'm not completely sure about it, although I could imagine Word of Pain, Chillwind, Vision of Torment, Gloom of Night, Shadow Spike, Absorb Vitality, and Hand of Ruin doing all the damage for you in some sense. Not all the DoTs are terribly efficient however. Having said that, they still do considerable damage allowing you to mostly be on the move and pepper a wider array of targets at the same time as compared to Agony. At low Dark Magic this is the safest line to progress in, but at high Dark Magic rapidly casting instant casts is very dangerous as you can trigger a lot of backlashes in quick succession. If you can cast at low Dark Magic and build up to high Dark Magic safely while your dots are still active... well... that's awesome because you played Calamity perfectly.Vision of DominationCurrently this gives you 50 Action Points in return for the 40 you spent on it and the meager damage and minor AP drain. I suppose if you find a certain instance you use it relentlessly it could be of use. Currently however I honestly cannot find a time I'd not find another tactic of more value. Not to mention you will have access to the tactic FAR before you can get Vision of Torment.Suggestion to Mythic: Scrap this and instead make a tactic that increases the duration of Chillwind, Absorb Vitality, Ice Spikes and/or Gloom of Night. It would really boost the sustained dps of the sustained dps tree to have a method of increasing the duration of the dots by a larger amount increasing the efficiency and therefore sustained dps.Gloom of NightDirt cheap to cast, does a little more damage per second then Chillwind, and did I forget to mention it's an AoE effect around the target? Does have a 2s cast time however, so it has that minor flaw coupled with a 10s cooldown and 80 ft range. Use it when you can. It's very useful in adding to your array of DoTs and a centered AoE DoT is nothing to sneer at especially one stronger then the primary DoT you carry. Stack as many DoTs on your primary target that you can and make sure to use this before you throw out Pit of Shades.Shadow of DisasterThis ability is largely valued by it's power in comparison to Daemonic Chill. It helps degrade the ranged defenses and is especially useful at damaging any AoE sources of damage. However, since Daemonic Chill does not have much of an effect this skill doesn't much either. I've heard of some sources claiming it does respectable damage against enemy AoE attacks but in my experience against a Bright Wizard whom carries the mirror tactic I didn't think the damage taken was much of a bother at all.BUG: This ability has not yet reflected the text change and still says Demonic Chill.Absorb VitalityOh sweet, sweet healing. It's not terribly much but it's enough to offset a backlash or two over the course of it's duration. Besides it is extra damage at the same price as Chillwind and it does nearly the same amount of damage as well per tick. This ability alone probably makes this tree one of the safest trees to utilize Dark Magic with, especially if you can use Dark Magic as described in the Calamity section above.Chilling GustsIncreases the Chillwind tick by about 50%.. 33% of the time. What is that, 16-17% increase in damage? On a skill that does maybe 60 DPS (Int vs. Tough not included) this doesn't really seem to amount to much as you are really only boosting yourself by 10 DPS. My advice? Don't take it in it's current incarnation. You are welcome to try and convince me the other way and I really wish that I could see the value in it. But currently I just don't think it's worth it.Suggestion to Mythic: Give this some added effect for when it procs such as Toughness debuff and/or AP recovery and/or have it affect some other DoTs. Make this the crown jewel of sustained DPS in the tree since currently the tactics don't seem to provide that terribly much in that department.Hand of RuinRaw damage that ticks 4 times. Great for adding in a pseudo direct damage for Calamity that is extremely safe to use when at maximum Dark Magic since it only chances a backlash once in the beginning of the channel. It's damage is high and it's cost isn't so bad either. It's also a fantastic source of Spirit damage for when the are Corporeal protected. Only in comparison to Withering Heat which does equal damage and snares in return for only costing 3 AP per second more. Not to mention it's much easier to get access to. I wouldn't really compare these two but they are nearly identical except for the snare, position in tree, and slight cost increase.Suggestion to Mythic: Maybe consider increasing the damage by 10-25% when the target is Hexed and/or Cursed. I don't want it to be a direct mirror of the Bright Wizards and I think it should be the source of efficient and high damage for a Calamity Sorceress. Besides we already have a snare – I just want this ability to compare to a nearly direct mirror of an ability that our mirror class possesses. I know it's frowned upon to compare but Hand of Ruin could use something to differentiate itself damage wise for being such a difficult ability to get.DestructionThis makes your area of effect abilities not only feared as they were before but respected as you can crit your Pit of Shades for damages that no one wishes to be within. This will make you an AoE powerhouse if you simply put the points into the tree for strength and ignore the skills. Remember increasing the baseline damage of a skill by 50% when you max it out is nothing to sneer at. The abilities are interesting to say the least but out of all three trees are generally not the most exciting. I often find my ability as an AoE caster just fine without Destruction but with it I become a tool for deflecting groups of enemies and killing any of those whom let themselves dwindle too low.Piercing ShadowsOkay so this is a situation you don't want to be in pretty much ever where you Backlashes are close enough to injure the enemy. It also presumes you are killing yourself quickly. If you do intend on using it however it does do excellent damage. Over 300-400 damage AoE attacks are nothing to sneer at. Of course, you absolutely require healing support unless you want to die quickly.
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