Ignorance about Sorc OP'ness

in admittance the only healer ive played is my merc which is still like 18 19 i think.and while i didnt chose sorc over my assassin.so i cant really vouche for them.what i can say is with very extensive pvp time with a assassin and slightly less with my sniper both of which rarely have a pocket healz or a consistent non pug<<<so in my mind i should be in that range of AC's like...omg i hate sorc there so oped>>..but actually its never been a real issue.1 if you know your class 80% of the time you CAN shut them down.unless they severely over gear you,then you shouldnt win healz or not..which brings me too 2 and this is all im gna say cuz this whole thread is pointless they dont make decisions cuz babies cry...anyway 2 what i have seemed too notice after paying more attention since this thread started is alot of the sorc steamrolls ive seen have been on inexperianced or new players.in wow i remember expans would hit there would be certain classes that seemed like they sucked at 1st then all o sudden in full pvpg they rocked...lock...and the classes that rocked at 1st then didnt scale as good in higher gear.that seems to me and my friends the issue here might just be but maybe not who knows....and yeah bh missle spam is retarded op

Since when do tanks get 50% damage reduction against Elemental damage? 20% at the most with base, sage buff and the defensive tree skill picked up.

35% if you have saber ward up.

our main damage reduction only applies to blasters and lightsabers (ranged and melee) when it comes down to it, elemental is the least mitigatable damage type in the game.

Hopefully with the upcoming Guardian/Jugger love, this'll change and Sorcs/Sages wont be bombing the heck out of the first Guard/Jugger to leap on them.

Afterall you said it yourself, you should have to survive by kiting, not sitting there and blasting someone to smithereens before your stun has even worn off.

i really appreciate seeing alot of the usual sorc/sage complaints that came up, and then how those complaints are diffused with corrections and hard numbers.

for all of the cc talk we havent touched on a very important point: resolve. this game mechanic makes any class with more than 2 cc's stop and reconsider their uses.

example: previous poster outlined how a talented whirlwind, when broken, will stun the target for 2 seconds. thats 2 cc's. that will basically fill a resolve bar. that means in 2 seconds that target is about to become one unstoppable force. this also works for operatives and their now criticized opening damage. after their knockdown stun they also mostly fill a resolve bar and must wait for it to cooldown before applying their next major cc.

so since resolve affects these abilities, which also stated are not unique to sorc alone, we find that its not really that they can be used to dominate 1 opponent, but instead to manage the flow of the GROUP's targets.

GROUP...... in 1v1 sorcs are ok. if the conditions are right, if we dont get tore up before we can set up, etc. but in group play we shine because even though we cannot burst a player in short order, we are the very definition of dps if such a thing can actually be applied to pvp. pvp is typically measured in burst, while a 10minute boss fight in dps. we just keep on going.

sorcs arent bam! here it is!! wait, now what do i do between blowing people up. we are here, and there. everywhere? our lightning draws attention and our heals hide our threat. both types are equally focused, and ignored.



lastly. the burst argument. jacked up gear, stims, buffs, procs, stars aligning, all that junk aside (along with the 5k crit club post). here are actual numbers more than the ones i included in the original post for the main damage dealers in a standard 3-7-31 madness spec:

creeping terror: 31pts this better rock my sox..... or maybe just provides a nice root. causes a 2 second root and 1508 internal dmg over 18seconds. thats some sad damage. 9 second cooldown, and not adding resolve is its greatest strengths. i subscribe to the school of thought that this ability has no damage component. it is only an instant cast root that like all snares and roots does not add to resolve. to be used for cc purposes only. i have cast it too many times for damage purposes to have it not be available before its off cd and needed for that root on a full resolve target (either by my doing or that of the cc spammers on the team).

affliction: our "main" dot. no cooldown. 1532 internal dmg over 15 seconds (this is with talents that buff this turd). most classes have a 1.5 second cast (same as the global this instant takes up) that beats that damage. not very impressive is it? tiny heals on crits only.

force lightning: u know it u love it. 2534 channeled energy dmg over 3 seconds. this suffers hugely from mitigations as most people in decent gear have upwards of 20% energy mitigation, some tanks push 50% base. once again, though this is bread and butter for a madness spec, its not really very stellar dmg.

death field: this makes the dots leet?? 1170-1201 internal damage (helps its damage) targeted aoe with a laughable heal (85 health per target, max 3 targets). this with talents can crit for 2500, but more regularly hits from 900-1200. low side if player is affected by our inq/cons class buff. 15 second cooldown so its not really on-demand burst. talented this will increase 20 TICKS of any dot(s) on target by 20%. so bad dots get less bad for short time.

shock: stun is for pve only ppl. 1085-1149 energy dmg. instant, 6sec cooldown. still not very bursty for taking up a global. also highly mitigated due to energy dmg. talented it will deal 50% more damage 45% of the time. (could be an anchorman sex panther joke by the devs with those % like that, look it up)

crushing darkness: u best have a wrath proc. 848-912 kinetic dmg plus 1267 kinetic over 8 seconds (talented to tick longer). at 2 seconds of casttime this is borderline decent to highly questionable as it is clearly out dps and utilitied by lightning, but as an instant when the wrath talent procs off our force lightning, this becomes a real go-to ability as wrath makes it both instant and deal 20% more damage.

what does all that yield. for madness, mostly lightning spam. deathfield every 15 seconds. affliction only on main target as spreading it around will only buff the wz chart, blow your force pool, does almost no noticable damage to its target alone, and on crits only, will heal the caster with talents for 1% of total health. nice, but also not enough to save our tails.

so where is all this mysterious burst?
not from our ghetto dots.
not from our average instant.
from our 15 second cooldown targeted aoe?

no. even with dots up, deathfield every cooldown, crushing darkness, shock, lightning. it takes us an average amount of time to whittle down oponents. if left alone, sure we can be deadly, but not in the same way as a sniper. much less so in fact.

some say that it comes in the form of a 0-11-03 build to get chain lightning instead of creeping terror, then to use chain on the wrath proc. i havent used it, but the talent tree says it does 1265-1297 dmg. that sounds like it could hit hard on wrath proc as instant and 20% buffed. however, i personally feel like i need creeping deaths root to help my group more than to blow stuff up blow stuff up.

hope this is informative, especially to non-sorc/sage types. please compare this to your abilities. feel free to consider our bag of tricks, etc as part of the package and also everything the other classes bring to the table.

we are apparently a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none type of class and im ok with that. i do just fine thank you, but i do not appreciate all the misinformation that goes around. likewise, i have not thrown gas on the fire of other percieved balance issues.

ty.aud.

sorry to break it to you, but i have 17.34% energy/kinetic mitigation on my sorc in my pvp gear. a well geared, hard to kill vengeance jugg i pvp with/against (grr huttball) just told me hes at 45.41%.

the buff only affects internal/elemental. sorcs dont do elemental (is this tech dmg type?). we do energy, kinetic, internal.

so, maybe now you can see that perhaps you kinda possibly may have slightly sorta misunderstood just exactly where everything is at??????

tanks are stong in pvp. many know this already. many more will know. especially when they all have 4pc set bonus: 5% dmg increase across the board for them when they have a target guarded. nerf tanks?? no. apparently tankin in pvp is actually fun for tankylove players. i say let them be..... for now.

let it all be. its too soon. even for those pesky stealthers....

ty.aud.

That's quite interesting considering I have about (not in game right now so it's a rough figure) 40% energy/kinetic mitigation myself, which would put it at 90% with Saber ward up for 12 seconds.....however

Do sorcs start tickling me? Nope they still manage to bypass all that defence and pump out 2k+ crits even while I'm in Saber Ward.

Maybe it may have something to do with the mitigation figures improperly reflecting how much defence you really have, maybe it also is an issue with Bolster not Bolstering properly (bumping only raw stats and not increasing your armor properly) in fact...I'm fairly certain this could be right since I was asking a Scoundrel why he kept taking his armor off and putting it back on every time he came into a new PvP match, his answer....

"Bolster isn't calculating my armor properly so I have to take it off and put it back on"

Btw Imho the only thing Sorcs could do with "toning down" in reality is there sheer amount of CC availible for little to no investment (this also applies to sages) and the bug fixing where some of there CC is bypassing full bars of resilence (had this happen more times than I care for)

The true issue classes are actually the Trooper and the Bounty hunter with the damn nade launcher/tracker missle spam that seems to outdamage everything, if there was anyone that was truly a one button class, it's those guys.

Actually it's just high-level healers taking advantage of an easy way to get an extra medal. It's always on voidstar, if you look closely.

The trick is simple: the AoE heal does about 2500 to everybody in range. When that's 6 people scrapping on top of a bomb point then you can rack up some big total numbers fast, largely because overheals count towards your total.

This doesn't often have a massive impact on the progress of the fight, because it's unlikely that more than one or two people really needed it.

in your previous post you said elemental. and you said your main reduction applies only to blasters and lighsabers. thats incorrect. you were confused, and its ok. this quoted post is very subject to criticism as you now claim to have known all along that our damage is not elemental, and now claim somehow that YOU alone are experiencing our damage bypassing your mitigations?

please stop. the hard evidence is that we have decent damage most of the time, but horrendous damage against heavy. im trying to have a clear, informative thread here where i can help to dispel some of the falsehoods and misconceptions people have about sorc/sage damage and utilities.

ty.g'nite.aud

Now that's assuming, I admittedly was wrong on the whole elemental thing and no I don't claim I alone have this problem, several heavy armor users still get blasted to smithereens by Sorcs in the space of a single CC unless they managed to pop saber ward.

I'm not saying it's entirely bypassing mitigations, this is clearly not the case, however I was stating that the "bolster" effect may not be applying a proper value to armor and thus a level 46 would only have a level 46's worth of armor instead of being bolstered to 50.

Yes, the bug of Sage/Sorc CC bypassing a full bar of resilence is also very true and happens so often it isn't even funny (note how you skated away from answering that one), seeing yourself with a full white bar getting CC'ed by a Sorc clearly shows that the class does have some issues, that is no misconception.

So what I was trying to say is maybe the issue isn't with sorcs but actually with bolster?

That's got nothing to do with the class. Resolve is broken. Anybody can CC through it, sometimes.

As a scoundrel speced completely into Infiltration(lv41), I rely heavily on my burst, especially when faceplanting sorcs into the ground. My shoot first has roughly around a 75% chance to crit and normally does around 3.4k-4k, depending on if i pop an expertise stim. Back Blast has the same crit chance and does around 1.2-1.5k.

In the beginning of my normal rotation, its Flechette Round + Shoot First > Pugnacity + Back Blast. On any other target besides a Sorc, this is usually around half hp. But the bubble absorbs my Shoot First completely and reduces my Back Blast to like, 800-ish. I dont wanna say this is OP, but its definitely frustrating. Especially when Flechette Round gives 50% Armor Reduction... my point is, sages are supposed to be the squishiest class in the game and while i target them(and snipers) almost exclusively, they're harder to kill than tanks sometimes. (most times actually) And after all that has gone down they can just heal themselves back to full and continue slowing and pushing me back, etc. (Not to say this happens ALL the time, but its happened enough)

To the above posts about resolve and all that: Resolve is only affected by mezz and stuns. I think the reason people are so jaded about Sorcs/Sages is because slows, roots, and pushbacks are all applicable at any time. Meaning the super channeled slow with more range than a sniper and the pushback + root(same ability) on super low CDs affect you 100% of the time. You also cannot escape from a channeled slow. Meanwhile, Scoundrels and Operatives get 0 movement speed bonuses in combat, no dash attacks and no pushbacks and we have to be stealth or behind an enemy(or both at the same time) to use our attacks. Our survivability is solely based on you not surviving the initial attack and hoping your friends arent looking back. While sorcs/sages just sit there and look pretty while everything i throw at them gets soaked up.

Note: A snared sage/sorc force sprints faster than anyone can move, so much for that argument. And whoever said it was right, the sprint should be an Assassin/Shadow thing, not a Consular/Inquisitor power. Sages and Sorcs have no business with it, especially with all the utility they already posses.

So yes, I think they need to be nerfed.

Yep- Sorcs got no burst...