Buff Sorcery

My sorcery toon is bottom compaired to alot of my characters over 600sp 160 to 200 arts and its sad cause if I went to munitions or electric they would destroy everything and everyone but I have 4 electric and 5 munition characters . I do ok but my sorcery is 100% reliant on my arts mercy, source shard, quizlet and pippers flute I have water golems and 6th dimension drone. Now I will add that to me single target doesn't matter when I compare powers damage as a dps cause all are pretty much the same. Spame single target move then hit finisher or use heat vision then finisher clip easy power here.

Feels clear that I'll need to grab and some level some specialized dps arts to do the most. Right now, I still have trans and strat as part of a 2 role budget art set up. Solid info. Thanks; I hope others sorting through sorcery appreciate it, too.

Sounds about right for munitions, yeah. My muni overperforms his still developing 200-something sp and 140/100100 arts every chance I get around to him. Hoping my sorc can at least burn 30% harder consistently than he does.

Just adding to this few months old thread.


Karmic Backlash is Sorc's only melee power and it's damage is pathetic. It does half the damage of transmutation, which is already nerfed in strength and is one of it's very few hitscan powers. The rest of its heavy hitting powers are slow, conal and can miss quite easily. Cast time animations in a rotation are fairly long - long enough that in newer content you have zero time to get out of AOE one-hitter-quitters. (Though you can jump during some of these animations, your lateral travel speed is near zero and you can't roll out of it).

While its numbers may look good enough when hitting static sparring targets, in practice it pales in comparison to many other powers. It's mid tier at best and you see better results when dipping into the movement/iconics trees. It definitely needs a refresh. Some of its animations are recycled a bit too often, at that. There are a few other 'hocus pocus' type animations out there that could fill in, and with the ps3 memory limitations now expanded at least up to what the Nintendo Switch can cope with, it shouldn't be an issue.

The worse thing about sorcery is that all the AOE attacks that gets boosted by the power interaction (bad karma) has a tendency to miss... a lot. Shard of Life is understandable as it deals good damage (especially when crit) and applies a DoT, but I do not see the reason why Soul Barrage and Soul Storm also has the chance to miss. The only good attack that interacts with Bad Karma is Condemn, but even then Condemn the main thing holding it back is that it has a 12 second cooldown.

One small change that would benefit Sorcery would be to change Soul Siphon (an unused skill) or Circle of Destruction to have their damage get boosted by the power interaction instead of inflicting it.

IMO the best way to play Sorcery atm is by using a pet build with Source Shard/Quislet. it is a lot less spammy and flashy than using trans/strat/quislet though.

Use more might

Derp'd on this. Turns out Karmic Backlash actually is stronk as it should be in melee -- but it is currently bugged. Karmic will drop severely in it's damage performance if there are any destructible object nearby (or in my case, testing it in my base with all my stuff around).

Karmic is one of many power that is not allowed to damage destructible objects, but for whatever reason it splits damage like it was supposed to (transmutation used to, but was changed when the AM was implemented). This goof may have happened around that time as well, so Karmic needs to be corrected but otherwise does solid damage for a melee setup.

As for Sorcery, it's issues stem from three major issues:

#1 - All of it's big AOE hitters are slow travel time projectiles that can miss

#2 - Way, waaaaaay too many of its projectile attacks are split up into multi-hit attacks instead of single, solid burst attacks. The problem this causes is due to how these multi-hit attacks work with crit rate and magnitude. In the classic game this problem was less noticeable as you could not raise your crit chance beyond 25%-35% using SP and certain trinket/power buffs (like Joker's bomb trinket, etc). Now that we can push into the 45% range and beyond, the potential of burst vs DoT leans significantly more into the burst category of powers.

For example, a 3 second, 200 cost AOE might power might hit a single target for 40k. It may have the crit mag potential of 150k. A 3 second, 200 cost AOE might power that splits it damage in 5-7 hits, however, may sum up to 40-45k, but it's crit magnitude is much lower. While it has a higher chance of scoring crits across it's multiple hits, the total damage added from the crits simply will not add up to or surpass the potential of the single hit power ranging higher in mag potential.

Now, because sorcery has soul well, soul bolt, soul storm, soul barrage, shard of skull crackin', circle of bee stings, condemn and probably another 1 or 2 i'm forgetting, these being a majority of its 'viable' powers, it hurts the power heavily compared to burst powers. I'd recommend several of these being changed to single tick damage bursty powers, such as at least Soul Storm and Shard.

Also consider what happens when burst damage powers score back to back hits, which can occur several times with a 45% ^ crit rate. It can more than quadruple damage in a short window. Compared to split dots? It can't even compete.

Not all dots, mind you, suffer from that. Nature's poison combination is intentionally coded to have a more robust damage dot and similarly has an increased magnitude, which is why melee nature is extremely powerful (3 poison dot powers make up one half of the tray, then 3 melee range powers, borrowing from iconics and/or movement tree, which include thorn burst to spread/refresh dots and do solid AOE damage on its own, to complete the tail end of the tray). Note: Ranged nature performs poorly due to having insufficient ranged attacks of the burst variety w/o borrowing from movement/iconics, and it's ranged poison refresh/spreader hits like wet tissue paper on its own.


By going hard into the movement/iconics trees you can improve sorcery's numbers a good deal, and this is best done with flight/skimming. Low pressure and high pressure have a PI bonus, adding to their damage, while they also do solid damage on their own. Sonic Cry from iconics does good damage (but is slightly weaker). Karmic Backlash definitely works its way into that mix. Whirlwind does decent damage, and although it's a channel, due to it's melee nature it doesn't get empowered channeling protection so is somewhat risky. High pressure's knockback CC is a bit of a problem in solo content, though. To counter the unwanted CC effect (scattering targets is not wanted for dps and should have been changed to popup, but movement powers were ignored during the AM review periods), you can utilize a loadout for solo content that consists of high pressure then use low pressure to bring knocked back targets in again, followed by karmic backlash (it's shorter range AOE means using it right after the pull is the best chance to multi-hit with it), and then chain into whirlwind. That makes up the 4 power rotation, and can then use circle as a DoT field, and Fury, as Fury (even without feeding him power) is a better AOE secondary than soul well, which underperforms in damage quite a bit. (It takes 2 soul wells to account for its low damage, and those cast times are too far apart to be viable in quick moving content - and even then Fury may still outperform it in damage vs a solo target like a boss).

Alternatively you can rely on giving mobs CC immunity by going in first with the low pressure > karmic backlash > whirlwind > high pressure.

The first 3 powers spam so much CC that mobs will breakout of it during whirlwind, which will allow high pressure to hit without scattering mobs -- however in this first rotation the time delay between using low pressure and then high pressure is too great to gain the PI bonus, but it will reverse chain every time on the 2nd rotation and onward as high pressure immediately chains into low pressure. Also as Fury is out and about, you don't need to stop the rotation to hit that power slot, and will only do so for circle of destruction - and only then when you're facing a very tanky enemy or a boss, as otherwise your 4 rotation is faster damage.

All ranged sorcery HAS to use Final Ruin (finisher) in order to pick up damage. It's single target, but at least if its part of a 4 or 5 power rotation, at the tail end, it has the potential of chain finishing several mobs in a group. In general, you have to also use shard, which has a longer, funky cooldown that will push you into a five power rotation over the usual 4. Basically that would go as: Shard of Skullcrackin' > Soul Storm > Soul Barrage > Downdraft, Throwing Knives, or Speedster's garbage range push attack > Final Ruin. Circle is still used with Fury like in the melee loadout.

You can also do a mix of both melee and ranged, which consists of:

Soul Storm > Soul Barrage > Downdraft/Knives/Cyclone Push

and Low Pressure/Forward Flip Attack > Karmic Backlash > Sonic Cry. (High pressure would just scatter mobs due to lower CC spam, but can be slapped on in group content to do more damage, as your dominance won't be high enough in group as a DPS to push targets).

Speedsters instead would use a 3 power melee rotation of Karmic Backlash followed by their two spin attacks.

Made a video for these, but i'll just drop the YT code rather than embed the video so I don't come off as some punk *** advertiser. (just regular punk *** is fine enough)

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You could also opt to utilize freezy breath and sonic shout from iconics as additional channels/conal ranged attacks. It will change up the rotation timings due to their longer cast times and 4 second cooldowns, but with shard already being a 6 second CD, and it's strongest hitting AOE attack, you could work that into a 4 power rotation with Shard > Freezy > Sonic > Final Ruin. The delays in the cast time should push it out far enough that shard will be ready to go for the next rotation as ruin ends. You'll want the empowered channeling mod for this, though. Keep yourself from getting interrupted, which would royally eff' up your loadout refresh.