Why is Sorcery Counted as The worst healer power and what changes would you make to it

Yea same here, alot of powers and weapons were fine especially for PvP, now everything is more generic than anything, whats strange to me is how does mental have all elemental Pi's while Sorcery doesn't.

Buff circle's heals and allow you to still get the healing if you step outside the circle

Watcher no longer uses power to heal itself

Revert watcher so it uses soul siphon

Make offering more viable, right now it's not worth the two slots for watcher and offering
-I suggest watcher casts a group hot when it has full power

Bring back bad karma

Bring back the aura buffing healing crits but offset the buff in some way like reducing healing overall or increasing power costs

Sorc has 3 abilities that do basically the same thing; Shard, transmutation, and soul bolt. This is unnecessary and quite frankly annoying change trans and soul bolt to have a different function

Make transcendence more viable
- This is a problem with a lot of powers, there is one really good sc and the other falls behind, as long as arbiter is as good as it is transcendence will be looked over just like elecs invigorate and natures regeneration


If we take away artifacts sorc is the worst healer and it needs some degree of buffs to make it more inline with other powersets the only saving grace of sorc is arbiter and i have a feeling it will be nerfed at some point down the line

I’m leveling a sorcery character now. So watcher doesn’t need power to heal? You don’t need the “feed ability” to power it? Isn’t bad karma the pi?

And yeah they took away the powers that had some form of passive abilities during revamp, like ice with its raised crit chance while have the ice armor active

Yea watcher needs power to heal you can give it power using offering or the 4 man heal but offering isnt worth a loadout slot

During the revamp sorc got gutted it was once a complex power but they turned it into something more simple. Originally when in healer role any enemy with bad karma would heal the person they were attacking a little bit, the amount healed was small but those little ticks added up. In my opinion this was a change for the worse, sorc used to be a powerset with abilities that are only useful in very specific scenarios for example soul well used to give very small heals but when an enemy died within its range everyone nearby would get a big burst heal so it was an amazing heal for hallways or boss fights with trash adds

From reading over this thread... I'm getting the feeling this is more of a 'play style'/'ability choice' issue than an actual problem. I'm reading comments from a player who runs Elite content and has no problem with Sorcery... then reading from other players who complain that it's bad, needs to be fixed, etc. Just seems like, "I don't want to use those abilities in my loadout therefore the power is bad" type of situation... or the old... "it used to be like this and I don't want to adjust because it doesn't play like it used to"; welcome to MMOs, where if you cannot adjust you will remain miserable playing.

I think the problem is, DCUO has been severely dumbed down since I last played five years ago... and the devs are not only trying to make everything easier, but also trying to make all powers equal but also unique... which doesn't always work. They need to adopt the "it's OK to have powers have somewhat same abilities" mentality. I played DCUO religiously from 2013-16, I've played every power except Munitions and Water, and Sorcery was one of my favorites... as was Celestial, Earth, and Electric. Being a solo-centric player, I was mostly DPS... but even then, it was all about 'choices' in how the power played. Not liking certain abilities, that's a choice not to use the best ability for the situation, and that's on you. Clearly, if some players have no problems with the power, then it's not a power problem, but a player choice problem *IMO*.

The issue is both: there was little care in the powerset adjustment and player's inability to adapt to those changes.

I can barely remember sorc healing back in the day so I'm not going to comment on it much. I do remember that bat form and shard were OP and that meant everyone ran them. I see players still using them now and I'm just like "your power bar is already full and no one in here is hurting" and just ignore it. The rise of buff trolls, maybe it makes a comeback or maybe use it for an EoG build instead of super useless bloom. But projectile healing just ain't gonna cut the mustard on how raids are setup these days. Everyone spread out or everyone but tank is clumped together. You really aren't having to worry about healing melee dps anymore. Kinda sad and deserves it's own topic but it isn't part of this one.

But yeah, different strokes for different folks. I'm of the mindset that asking for changes results in all bad things so I would much prefer sorc be left alone. Yes, circle and soul well could use those minor changes. Please let that be it. I don't care what they do to any of its supers since they're all meh

I appreciate the information you've contributed, because I am going to return to Sorcery and am building builds based upon your information- with minor tweaks since I'm mostly a solo player and love pet builds. But overall, your information was VERY helpful to me.

I'm sure it could use some tweaks. And again, other setups can work. This is just my "easy" (aka lazy) loadout. Hasn't kept us from finishing any content yet but I also play with some great players that know what they need to be doing to keep my life easy.

If you're solo'n everything, my suggestion is either dps loadout/ build and run watcher, shield with like 1 to 5 dom sp, the white mod that heals while using offering and maybe 1 resto aug. Or can go healer role, dps gear, and use some healing projectiles. It's actually a very versatile solo survival powerset so you'll have a lot of ways to play that

I think that’s an oversimplification of what some of us are saying. The power set has significant drawbacks in comparison with other powers. All powers are playable BECAUSE of artifacts, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be brought up to be comparative to other healing powers. Take away artifacts and I can assure you that the upset over sorcery would be exponentially larger than it has been. Not all of us play elite, where you often have to have everyone doing their roles decently to succeed- often time in pug groups the support roles have to pick up the slack for a lack of following mechanics and a lack of decent burn. That’s when you really see powers like sorcery start to dip in comparison to other healer powers. My opinion is the opposite- just because some players can make a power work doesn’t mean that certain things shouldn’t be tweaked from time to time.

Soul Wells duration was decreased. Shard of Life’s cooldown was increased. Circle of Protection had its changes. People aren’t making these things up, it has nothing to do with with play style or ability choice and everything to do with how the power was changed. The only reason why sorcery is viable in the slightest is because of artifacts. Watcher and Ritualistic Word were not enough to have healing sustainability until Page of Destiny and Purple Healing Ray came along. Before that people had to spam soul scrap and arbiter of Destiny.

With PoD you get a group heal with a HoT that can heal 2 additional players once the artifact is 180 or 200. PHR resets the cooldown of your group heal so essentially, you get to spam it.

Sorcery was nerfed, there’s no denying that. All of the moves heal the same way as before, they’re not stronger or worse. But with increases to cooldowns it definitely has made it more difficult to play. Being a sorcery healer has become a burden because all you Do is spam your group heal and your priority heal. All of the other powers in sorcery that heal have a cooldown higher than 6 seconds or they have a tiny area of effect. I’m talking about Soul Well, Soul Siphon, Transmutation, invocation of renewal, Shard of life, soul bolt, and circle of protection is the only exemption because it is very good, but it’s area restricted. Do you know how many times people put circle up on a boss and then the boss teleports to the other side of the map? We need CoP to be the way it used to be. When people could step in it, gain its effects, and then move back or move freely. There was absolutely no reason to change that and so many other things.

There’s no room for using different moves aside from the ones that are the strongest. I’m not talking about replacing one move for another, because that’s all you can do, I’m talking about how some powers were changed for the better, like soul bolt and transmutation, yet they are still useless to most healers. You need as many group heals as you can get

Strictly my opinion, but Sorc healing doesn’t have enough *umph* to it. CoP is awesome, but I wish the heals were faster. Also placement is always awkward. Siphon could be sooo good, but it never is consistent with the heals. Do I need to hit my allies with the siphon or can I aim anywhere? The heals I do think that are fine as is are Rejuvenate and Invocation. Those have good heals and should be used wisely. Ritualistic Word is pretty solid, too. I don’t like Watcher at all, too power hungry it’s like I’m it’s personal controller. What. I’d rather focus on healing. Lastly, I really think that Sorc is a good power, but there are some small things that it lacks in which other powers do not. I didn’t stick with Sorcery and tried other powers (Celestial being my favorite in healing), but I have played it a fair amount. If Sorcery had a diverse range of powers that could do healing, I think that would be really cool. Soul Bolt healing. Vengeance healing. Soul Barrage doing projectile healing. Projectile healing, honestly, could bring Sorcery up on my “healing power list”. Just saying.

Totally agree, it doesn’t have enough zing or zest, it’s bland. If some of the smaller heals like Soul Siphon, Soul Bolt, and Transmutation could have a buff in heals it could really open up some power diversity. One of the things I like most about Water is all the different loadout possibilities. Some healers use riptide and use two Solace’s of the Sea, some use High Tide but no Tsunami strikes to reduce the cooldown and they do fine. Just having more possibilities

On a related note: someone above mentioned the Arbiter of Destiny. I've never really used it, so can someone give me an idea what kind of loadout and artifacts to try in batty-form?

i use eye Orb sometimes Page and phr and the form is good but water 5000 supercharge is way better since you get all of your power back almost instantly but it's shorter but you are immune to damage til its over

I just logged in to DCUO yesterday after a 5 year hiatus. I feel like a stranger in a strange world. I'm even tempted to start over with a character, but I'm not giving in to temptation just yet. Sorcery was my favorite in 2017. I should be able to figure it out because it seems a lot less technical now. Dumbed down is exactly the description I would use.

ehhh, no? The mechanics and functionality have shifted a little since 5 years ago, because that would have been right at the end of the AM era - it's still definitely in its own niche, but I wouldn't say it's been oversimplified. Then again, I play Electric for my Healer; so my definition of complexity may be somewhat skewed because Electricity is the core definition of a Spam Healer and everything is more complicated than that.

Mental doesn't have elemental PIs. Mental's PIs are Dazed and Terrorized. It still has the APPEARANCE of other PIs, but doesn't actually inflict Burning, Electrified, Frostbite, et cetera.

I did not stay sorcery for too long but this is an opinion. The new circle of protection is a step in the right direction, however, i feel that the HoT should tick faster or the amount healed should be significantly greater to make it feel like more of a protected area. A lot of sorcery’s healing abilities have healing near the target you are attacking which might be good for a scenario like TSDE for instance if you are running 2 tanks and the sorcery healer can drop a circle on the add tank and use those abilities to keep the tank up. Changes to the way watcher heals and soul well would put sorcery in a great spot. Still a very capable power but compare it to something like my favorite healing power celestial something just feels a little lacking. Maybe it needs a kinda bread and butter ability like some of the other healing powers to make it feel up to par.

In the current healing meta all healing powers are kind of the same (not even talking about EoG-Spam)
Prio + Group + Shield + SC + 8man + Wildcard

Elec: Surge, Recover, Flux, GT, Cap, Wildcard
Celestial: Renew, Admonish, Blessing, Sacrifice (or CI or CG), DL, Wildcard
Water: Soothing Mist, Mending Wave, Bubble, Flood of Power, Blessing of the Depths, Wildcard
Sorcery: Rejuvenate, RW, Boon of Souls, Transendence (or Arbiter), Soul Bolt, Wildcard
Nature: Blossom, Metabolism, Swarm Shield, Regeneration, Flourish, Wildcard

Except the wildcards its all the same (basically). Water having some options with Riptide. Nature is still a bit weird but still the same as all other powers. 8man shields are nice, but not needed (still give it to nature pls).


I am all in to give sorcery (and the other powers) more viable healing options, but lacking is just wrong. Its basically the difference of 1 healing power in a loadout (and no combos obviously)