Nova's Magic Mastery Guide to Sorcery

I fight the urge every time I look at my banked loyalty points. I would have to stay within the healers though because I have 2 tanks and hate trolling. That leaves elec and nature that work well in both roles. Never liked nature, wouldn't mind trying electric but it's too bandwagoney ATM for my liking. So looks like I'm stuck. At least I can squeak ahead of the average pug that's not FoTM chasing. So with good players I just try and stay ahead of the tank on the board.

I'm already flight, so that's why I can do as well as I do.

That's an astute point and DPS would need to be adjusted in some way, depending on the frequency of death, as deaths undoubtedly result in a dps loss. Though, the new summon would also return with full power.

Similarly, Guardian would benefit from certain AOE heals already cast on the tank and melee DDs. Also, would the RSK also suffer an increased rate of death at melee range? Its DPS, too, should then suffer a similar penalty.

I love that at the start of the revamp everyone was trying their hardest to figure out how to do well with sorcery and a few of us called it terrible and just a bad power... now this thread has changed from figuring out good loadouts and all of that to everyone just admitting it's the worst power on the game and is basically pointless to play. The Damage is the lowest possible in the game and has a risk of doing no damage. The healing aspect of sorcery took a huge hit with increases to cooldowns and changing of PIs so pvp is completely off limits and healing PvE is almost as hard as it was during Nexus and Wave days

The red lantern Corp is calling to you.

You actually can pvp with Sorcery. From what I have seen, Electric healing seems best in pvp.

For all other powersets, they have to ditch the 450 base power cost Hot. For Sorcery, its COP. In place of the 450 base power cost, one has to use the 450 base power burst heal.

For Sorcery, its Invocation of Renewal. Kiting is more important than ever before.

Eww, I'm either staying sorc or going water when it comes out. I've never changed my power before and been playing since lightning strikes

The healing side actually isn't that bad imo.

Sorcery has always been a challenged power for several reasons.

The Devs refuse to do anything interesting with the Pets and their AI. All that happens is that the Devs will buff the Pets occasionally, then they become too strong, people complain about how OP the pets are and then they are nerfed again. Still, that's better than it used to be. Up until about late 2013, the Sorcery pets weren't even functional after a player reached end game. They just got killed by anything moderately strong or produced little damage, so they were not worth the loadout slot. The AI was even worse back then, and sometimes they failed to summon altogether.

Sorcery had some interesting power interactions back at launch and for about the first six months. For example, Soul Well was an object back then. It couldn't be picked up, but it could be placed and used to create line of sight and movement issues with NPCs. It was a pretty unique power. Players could blow it up with transmutation for good damage, especially with multiple soul wells out. If I am not mistaken, they would persist so that they could be blown up multiple times and hit things around them. They also still had the dot, and up to three could be out at once. Shard used to be an object summon that got buffed by any weaponization enhancements like Superstrength. It would be interesting to see that version of Shard now with the recent buffs to weaponization in the stats. Shard could also be blown up by Transmutation. Transmutation also exploded certain projectiles like the Martial Arts Shuriken Combo. The Development Team slowly disable that whole line of power interactions over time and none function as initially designed.

One of the bigger changes came when all Power Sets received 35% finishers. Nature and Sorcery were the only powers at launch that had the type of 35% finisher we have now. Ice and Fire had these longer cast time finishers that were not as good. Mental and Gadgets didn't have any finisher. However, as we know, that changed.

So those are three marked, and distinct features Sorcery had at the launch of the game in 2011 that it either does not have any more for one reason or another or just were ignored and not developed. In reality, Sorcery lacks any marquee mechanic and doesn't have common PIs to leverage with other powers.

Sorcery struggled for a long time as a healing power set because it's more proactive than reactive with its heals. As a result, once the Dev team moved to more one and two shot mechanics, the average raid group preferred Electric, Nature, and eventually Celestial, because those powers could react and recover more quickly to massive burst damage.

With all that said, I still think there could be a couple of solid loadouts for the DD side of things. I hope to post some stuff for others to verify this weekend.

You can pvp with any power but for the two roles sorcery has it's the lowest in PvP and pvp is so broken rn

Ok by what I meant is that yes it's doable but when they changed shard to how it is they did it so we weren't challenged by placement cause our heals were dependent upon our circle and that had a huge cooldown, so they gave us shard shard gave good heals and had a 3 sec cooldown and placed BK on enemies and they gave BK a reason in healer role. Then they changed it and took the power designed to help sorcery Match other healer powers in versatility and movement and majorly nerfed it. All healing is doable or not terrible but sorcery keeps getting pushed back to how it was at its worst

I honestly feel less restricted healing now than I did before. IoR being useable now, RW got a cool down reduction. Both having max render distance helps greatly. Hots across the board are low and nearly pointless atm, but sw got a bit stronger with a much larger radius than circle. Having 2 of those out surpasses what circle can do.

Bad karma heals were inconsequential at best to begin with. The changes to syphon are really only noticeable in large mobs but the power is still very useable and effective. Trans got a considerable buff in healing strength wirh a decent radius around you. Shards radius seems to be unchanged, mainly a tank heal. And soul bolt gives surprisingly good healing for its power cost and cool down with a pretty decent radius around target.

Now id be a fool if I didn't acknowledge that we are still range limited more than any other and it will become a glaring problem in open style maps, but reverting circle or restoring bad karma heals won't make that any better.

Yeah, there are a few broken powersets in pvp atm. It is what it is for pvp.

Hence, my sig.

IoR heals were useable before if you knew how to use it right, now it's super OP but has a huge cooldown. RW is cool and it's great that they fixed it cause it was broken with range and people. I still prefer CoP with the head mod as the technical reduction in power use makes it good. Shard is yes a tank Heal primarily but still good all around it just sucks that it's cooldown is 6s instead of 3. Transmute got a major nerf to its cooldown and it was good before using BK to get those great heals. And that's what everyone said about BK heals but they were always fantastic for me cause BK heals plus 1 old soul well could match CoP whenever I healed. If they changed to add back in BK head and changed CoP back we'd be great in PvP again and it would help a lot more then you realize in PvE

Ior before was half luck half skill. BK was ticks of 75, and trans no longer requires a pi to heal. BK heals and retaining the healing from circle won't do as much as you think to help pve healing. Maybe PvP. HoTs across all power sets need a buff, burst or bust is the meta right now.

IoR wasn't cause if you clipped it with either Rw or shard it depends on situation it could keep the whole group alive. And BK had its moments of being higher and was nice in both pvp and pve as it helped the tanks and rage DPSes it was slow but it did help with meleeing. Transmutation was great because you could spam it before so you could spread BK and then spam that for heals. And yea CoP won't change it too majorly but anything helps

Loadout : soul storm - vengance - soul bolt - condemn - circle of destruction - shard of life


Try this - rotation
CoD > shard - soul storm >vengance > soul bolt > condemn into soul storm (or any projectile- you can usully do 1 or 2 soul bolts or vengance) until shard is ready.
As soon as shard / condemn / cod is ready should be used

A bit easier to show in a video or in game rather than on here but you should be ok - doing quite good damage in single content, raids and alerts

Using 30 second parsers on the single dummy i tend to average at 175k. ( without any consumables or trinket)

Im not saying this is the best loadout for sorcery dps, but it is what's working for me atm. Open to any suggestions on what could make it better.


Ive also put together a loadout woth the neo venom supercharge which is equally as good during some situations

Soul storm- soul barrage - soul bolt - neo venom - cod - Heat vision

rotation - cod > heat vision jump clip after first tick which is usually 9k > soul storm > soul barrage jump clip to speed interaction into bolt and finally heat vision full interaction

Lol something like that

After seeing a post mentioning movement tree powers being useful, I checked out the flight skill tree and I found the Downdraft ability to be a good AoE burst replacement for Soulstorm/Barrage, it doesn't get stuck on group members (obviously) and I found it to do more damage than the soul abilities, I recommend you try it out if you use the flight movement and see if you can replace the soul powers with other movement powers

Yeah, Cyclone Push in Super Speed functions the same way. I imagine it's the same for Throwing Knives in Acrobatics, but I have not tested that one. You're right, though, it is a good substitute. It has a faster animation, shorter cool down, and hits in a conal AoE. These movement based powers tend to produce more damage on a larger number of targets. As far as I can gather, the rounding math for the five ticks of damage on Soul Barrage or three ticks Soul Storm appears to round down more often (probably due to the division of damage among the ticks) than Cyclone Push or Downdraft with a single tick of damage.

The draw back with Cyclone Push (and maybe downdraft) is that it's a midrange power and the initial conal AoE appears to be pretty narrow. It appears that positioning matters a lot with these powers just as it does with Barrage or Storm, but instead different things intercepting the projectiles of the Sorcery powers, the cone will just miss due to width or distance limitations. Still, as long as the power hits three targets, it will produce the same amount of damage as if it were to hit eight. From that perspective, it doesn't matter if it hits everything.

So, your suggestion appears to be sound advice, especially if it fits the playstyle of the player (midrange or melee range vs longer range).