It is the gravy train. The great thing is, pet health scales with your level, so they remain useful throughout leveling. I’ve actually soloed 4 mans with the Clannfear, in crap gear, and before I had really any CP. Fun stuff.
The other funny thing, that no one seems to talk about, is Dark Bargain, if you keep it morphed to give you mana back instead of stamina. You can use the pet heal, then use dark bargain (which also heals you), and you’ll be full mana again…you can do this literally indefinitely. I’m not sure if no one got onto it, because people just auto take the stamina morph, but it’s a pretty neat trick. It makes you immortal unless you get stunned.
So, the reason to go Sorceror is not to use the sorceror damage skills, right? Since they mostly base of off magicka, I assume as you mention that you use bows, two-handers, that are stamina based, correct?
Do you also wear leather armor then? Or do you use magicka for anything at all?
Yes, you’ll be relying on the weapon skills (bow, 2h, dual wield) to do damage. In early levels you can use sorc damage skills if you want, since the level system gives you similar amounts of magicka and stamina (skills that cost stamina cause damage based on your max stamina and weapon damage, skills that cost magicka cause damage based on your max magicka and spell damage.) That becomes increasingly sub-optimal as time goes on, and ultimately only about half of a sorc’s class skills/passives are applicable for stamina, but they’re potent ones.
You actually do use a fair number of Magicka skills but I think your main damage dealing and/or spam skills are Stamina.
As far as leveling all this goes, don’t forget that your skill trees level only when there is a skill from the appropriate tree on your quickbar. And as a video I watched told me, levels are everything (actually it was a video linked above, one of the ‘newbie tips’). So if you don’t put a spell from, say, Dark Magic on your quickslot, Dark Magic will not level (or I guess it levels ultra slowly).
I started with Bow and just shooting with left click; when it got to level 2 I unlocked the skill, put it on my quickbar, switched to two grungy sword I had picked up, and did the same until I could unlock Twin Slashes. Then I switched back to bow for some distance killing.
Since you can only wield one weapon type below level 15, I don’t use the Dual Wield skill, but the skill line is leveling because the skill is on my quickbar.
At this level I cast Crystal Shard, sic my Clannfear (‘Y’ key), then Fury, then alternate Poison Arrow and light attacks, throwing in a Fury when I feel like it. The Clannfear keeps the mob’s attention. It’s easy to kill packs of 2 this way, and I’ve pulled as many as 5 through reckless retreating but if you keep moving it’s pretty easy to win out.
As for armor, you probably guessed it but you only gain skills in a particular armor line if you wear armor of the specific type. So for this build most people recommend one piece of light armor, one piece of heavy armor, and the rest medium. But tell the truth, I usually just put on whatever I find (as long as I have at least one of each type equipped) since I rarely get hit.
Edit to say I have seen someone talk about leveling with 2H and Mage skills (root them with the Mage skill, then use the first 2H skill with the damage shield). That seemed pretty solid too.
Keeping skills on your bar that you are not using is a good idea, you don’t really need that much early on. Once you get to 12 and unlock an ult, you can use that for one of your leveling skills, and use 2 bow skills (poison and volley).
Level 1-15 use bow with poison arrow, and clannfear morphed for the heal. That will pretty easily and quickly get you to 15.
Your primary damage dealing is going to come from the bow and duel wield skills, but there are quite a few good sorcerer skills that have stamina morphs, or are still good as magic morphs. The big ones are:
Dark Exchange – 1s cast to spend stamina and gain health and magicka (you can move at normal speed while casting).
Unstable Clannfear (4) – Pet does 15% more damage, can charge and tail swipe. Upon death or unsummoning he heals you for 35% of max health.
Lightning Form – Applies Major Resolve and Major Ward buffs (increased armor and resist) for 15s. Deals damage to nearby mobs every second. Morphed into: Hurricane (S) (4) – 15s duration, and now uses Stamina, radius grows in size (up to 9m) and damage (up to 225%).
Surge – Applies major Brutality buff (increase weapon damage by 20%). Also heals on critical hits. Morphed into: Critical Surge (4) – Critical strikes heal you for more (50% instead of 40%). While this skill is still no longer king of AoE healing, thanks to the reduced cool down on its effect and the removal of silly DoTs causing it, the ability is an effective heal alongside the excellent buff.
Those are the main sorc skills to focus on, and fill in the passives that seem to make sense. Bow/Duel wield skills to shoot for are:
Poison arrow
Volley
Flurry – 5 rapid attacks doing higher damage on final hit. Channeled Ability. This can be morphed to heal you on the last hit. Can be useful early on before you have crit surge. One of the reasons to take duel wield for leveling.
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Hidden Blade – Throws a dagger dealing damage and snares and applies Major Brutality for 20s (20% increase to weapon damage) You don’t really need this, as you have crit surge providing you major brutality. I only use it on my melee bar, because sometimes I’m lazy and don’t bar swap, and just do hurricane, hidden blade, and steel tornado. This works just fine for trash packs. Not essential though.
Whirlwind – 360 degree AoE attack, increased damage against low health targets. Morphed to: Steel Tornado (4) – Increases radius. Great morph, your radius is now 11m, if there are mobs on your screen they are getting hit, those pesky bowmen and casters that spread out when you engage are not safe from you.
You can fiddle around with other stuff, as that’s most of the fun of the game, this is just what has worked out well for me. 2h is certainly viable as well, but duel wield IMO is better for leveling. You get heals and great AOE with duel wield. 2h is more of a PvP thing.
The combination of hurricane, volley, and steel tornado, while you have crit surge going, is what makes this so ridiculous for PVE. Start your hurricane, plop down a volley, and then spin to win while you’re getting healed. You can just plow through stuff like delves etc.
I was thinking… is there value in leveling multiple toons of the same class to 50? I mean, I do (or I used to) enjoy the PVE experience, but if I have a level 50 sorc is there any reason to level another sorc? Why not swap my existing guy over to this build? I was playing my own build back then so I probably will have to replace all his gear but other than that (and possibly leveling some of the skill lines up, no idea what shape I’m in there) it seems workable.
Only if you want to min/max the racial passives for your character, which you might want to do if you’re into PvP or hardcore PvE (trials, etc.) And even then it’s not really necessary.
Racial passives actually can be a thing depending on how far you want to go/push things.
For me, I like learning new specs as I go, and experimenting along the way. I like to see what works and what doesn’t for myself, and my play style. The biggest thing in respeccing, would just be leveling all the skill lines. If all your stamina skill lines are at zero, that will take some time and you’ll be in some trouble against the content, especially now that everything scales to your level. Trying to fight level 50 stuff with level 1 unmorphed skills can be a bit tough.
If you don’t care how your old sorc is specced, you could certainly try it out. I’ve never respecced out of an inherent build (i.e. stamina or magic), because I always have specific races for specific builds.
Another thing I’ve found helpful is using an add-on like this that allows you to load skillbars via hotkey. I keep one training hotkey full of skills I don’t normally use but want to level in, and I swap to that just before turning in a quest.
I’ve said this before, but for new players, make sure you go to Cyrodiil when you hit level 10 and complete the very short PvP training (no actual PvP involved.) You’ll get 2 free skill points and access to the most important skill in the game - Rapid Maneuvers. It’s a long lasting buff speed buff that makes traveling MUCH faster, and you can cast it from your mount. I usually keep it on another hotkey skillbar whenever I need to go more than 10 steps.
My level 50 sorc is a … Nord! I created a built sort of like an Enhancement Shaman - 2H hammer with shocks and buffs thrown in. At the time it seemed like a mix of Magicka and Stamina abilities would be a good thing! I’m not sure how optimized the build was but I enjoyed coming up with the idea and seeing it to fruition. Although I vaguely recall I respecced him to pure Magicka so I guess maybe the Shaman idea didn’t work as well as I hoped.
Continuing with a new guy is probably the path of least resistance, and avoids the skill line issues you mentioned.
I really do think there is a lot of merit to learning how to play it along the way, one skill at a time, instead of having everything dumped on you at once. There is quite a bit of management in ESO, and a lot of it is sort of subtle. It’s really nice to level right now anyway, given that you can just go anywhere.
Well as a nord you’re more suited to be stam based than magicka, and with the current holiday XP bonus you can level your weapon skills in no time. The weapon trees are very front loaded anyway, so I wouldn’t hesitate in changing back to stam. You can always level an Altmer instead if you end up missing magicka sorc.
I’m still getting used to this. The guy I rolled a few days ago bought the horse for 1 gold (I originally purchased the Imperial edition). I made a new toon yesterday and spent about 30 minutes running around stables trying to figure out why I didn’t have the option to purchase the cheap horse any more!
Yeah it took me a while to find the correct mount part of the UI. Could be more clear.
My problem is that after I got the Imperial edition I clicked on all of the DLC. Now I have a shitload of arrows on my compass bar. I know I can delete quests. But that makes me feel like I failed, somehow. :)
Another thing. I had the pumpkin and the guts, but I just couldn’t figure out where delves were. Then I ended up in Albion. One of the tips on the loading screen explained that a delve is marked with a torch icon. The delve I ended up in had a few people in it already. I just followed along helping out, until we ended up at the boss. Killed him easily. There was no talk, no PUG crap. Just a bunch of people with the same goal who supported each other.
Then the trip to the witch was pretty much riding north, finding wayshrines and trying not to get distracted by all of the new quests that popped up. Honestly I was so happy to meet the witch by her cauldron. So peaceful. So calm. Drink that bubbling green crap with the skulls floating in it? No problem. :)
