“‘Such brutality!’” – Fa Nuit Hen

Class: Sorcerer
Role: Crit DPS (ADC in MOBA slang)

Everyone who played MOBAs know weaknesses of ADCs, but also knows what they are capable of.

ADCs are squishy and can’t kill opponent very fast (what Assasins do), but if they are ignored by opponent and are allowed to stand and do damage, they can slaughter the whole enemy team via high DPS multiplied by big amount of time 😉

Practically nobody plays ADC in ESO. Partially because pretty high DPS is possible in fighters and bruisers, partially because it’s hard to play lower toughness characters, partially because DPS doesn’t kill players because of how strong HoTs are in this game, so players go for burst when they build damage characters.

Why build DPS?

If you build high-enough DPS, you can do damage numbers comparable to burst. It will be enough to quickly kill most of the squishier characters, while enough to burn through resources of tougher characters that play defensively.

Secondly, it is teamplayer character. It is not meant for 1v1 or 1vX, but it is meant for teamfights.

You dealing high DPS to other players can completely negate their HoTs or even do considerable DPS on top, allowing allies to burst enemies down like if they had no healing.

Since teamfights feature many opponents, DPS sources should be AoE to be effective.

What’s the best way to build DPS?

Ask PvE players. Because PvE is all about maxing out DPS, what you want is to pick PvE setup that doesn’t suck in PvP. This means no ground-based dots, and no sets that improve some stat when you attack each second.

All meta PvE setups feature crits.

In last patch crits were capped to 225% (+75%), effectively nerfing crit-heavy builds in PvE very hard, but this change has much less impact on PvP. Why? Because every player has 20% crit resistance, which subtracts before the cap. So the cap is essentially at +95%, which is absurdly high no matter how you look at it. You also don’t have the same buffs/debuffs you would have in PvE trial, so you can only count on your own setup.

Crits are effective when you stack into them heavily, both chance and damage. That’s why it is not popular in PvP - you can’t half-way stack into crits, that’s not effective. And stacking all crit means you don’t have sustain and toughness, only DPS.

Several things changed in a recent time:

  • Proc set bruisers are no longer a thing with proc set scaling, limiting high DPS to lower-defence characters.
  • Gaze of Sithis as a single defensive item allows offensive builds to get minimal required amount of toughness to be able to survive long enough to be a problem.

Math

This build features 10 (minor force) +18 (shadow mundus) +12 (medium armor) +12 (sul-xans) = +52%, or 130%+52% = 182% crit damage,
52% (base) +10% (sul-xans) = 62% critical chance
Crit damage multiplier is 62% * 182% + (100% - 62%) * 100% = 150% crit multiplier

Now if you had no crit damage setup, you would have 20% crit chance and 152% crit damage (with same passives and skill layout), resulting in +10% crit multiplier.

150%/110% = 136%, or +36% compared to non-crit build.

Lets just check how much weapon damage do you need to stack to achieve same DPS:

I have 29236 stam, which converts to 29236/10.5 = 2784 weapon damage. I have 4446 weapon damage with fighters guild / sorc passives, 5097 buffed by major brutality, 5682 with berserker infused rune. 2784+5682 = 8466.

36% of that is 3048. Lets take damage bonus percentage into account, so 3048/132% = 2309 weapon damage base. And that doesn’t take 3x bloodthirsty trait into consideration ;)

Don’t know about you, but I don’t know any combination of sets that is capable of providing this amount of damage bonus, not even temporary or damage-type restricted ones.

Gear

Sets

  • Gaze of Sithis – allows to go deeper the DPS route without getting oneshotted by the simplest combos.
  • Twice-Born Star 5x body – allows to take both Thief and Shadow mundus, while stacking into divines. Unlike PvE, 2-4 bonuses are actually useful.
  • Perfected Sul-Xan’s Torment 2pc frontbar, dagger & dagger – there is no bigger crit bonus when effect is active. Unlike other PvE effects, this one is much easier to obtain - you AoE players and someone dies, even if that’s not you killing, or enemy blastbones = free buff. 30s is a lot.
  • Merciless Charge backbar – AoE dot that reapplies if opponent walks through the ground AoE area. Guaranteed crit on hit, direct damage part is AoE too. Movement skill that you don’t mind to have.
  • Slimecraw 1pc – classic crit boost one-piece.

Skills

silver-shards deadly-cloak hurricane bound-armaments camouflaged-hunter        power-overload

stampede critical-surge channeled-acceleration dark-deal resolving-vigor        summon-charged-atronach

People seriously sleep on Silver Shards. It provides ranged AoE with the cost of spammable, and the damage of spammable for a single target. AoE damage is on par with any other AoE direct damage source. Only downside is 0.5s animation delay, but we are not gonna use it to burst anyway, so it is not an issue.

Critical surge + AoE dots like Hurricane with this high crit is essentially another vigor that is always up.
When you are getting focused, surge + vigor + dark deal can provide insane amount of burst healing.

One of Daedric Summonnig skills are slotted at each tab for stam recovery bonus.

Dark Deal is a king of sustain skills, nothing except buffs uses magica in this build, so you can easily spam skills with just one stam recovery glyph, and no recovery mundus.

Front bar features insane passive damage boosts: 2% WD for each sorc skill, 3% for each fighters guild skill, and stam and light attack damage bonuses of bound armaments.

Bound armaments also provides HP% bonus from passives, even if not active.

Camouflaged Hunter gives Major Savagery, and also procs Minor Berserk almost all the time.

Power overload is here to open BGs with 500 ulti for 12 power overloads before the atronach. Requires guild hall with recovery fountain.

Why sorc?

  • Critical Surge healing moves you to another tier of OPness compared to any other class.
  • Sorc damage passives are one of the best passives in the game, so you are not missing on DPS while chasing for self-heals.
  • Also cost reduction passives.
  • Also Dark Deal, that allows to cut sustain for damage.
  • Also best ultimates in the game.

Armor types

6pc mid, 1pc heavy – medium gives highest damage bonuses, 1pc heavy is Gaze of Sithis.

Enchantments & Traits

  • Tristat enchants everywhere.
  • All Divines on body
  • 1x stam recovery glyph on jewels, 2x weapon damage glyphs
  • 3x Bloodthirsty trait on jewelry.
  • Infused backbar weapon trait with Berserk rune.
  • Nirnhoned main hand weapon, Precise backhand weapon.
  • Disease glyph on on of front bar weapons - to reduce healing against our DPS.

Food & Drinks

  • Lava Foot Soup-And-Saltrice – we need this chunk of regens to allow to spam crossbow, and stam affects DPS.
  • (pricey) Immovable+Stam+HP crafted pots
  • (default) Tristat pots
  • (cheap) Stamina pots

Race

High Elf. Not the worst pick due to damage and sustain (and the fact that max magica is not wasted), but Khajit would be stronger pick for any crit-based builds.

Attributes

Magicka Health Stamina
0 14 50

Gameplay videos



Did my first vMA perfect run with literally 100% same build as described above:



Pew! Pew! Pew!