Sorcery in it’s current state is borderline unplayable. Yes, you gave it a cool Mule Kick which is part of the reason I gave it another try, but you also increased Stamina regen delay by 10x which makes an already stamina-gimped build even more miserable to play.
I keep coming back and trying different builds, looking for even a glimmer of viability but not even masochists would stick with a sorcery build when you are literally half a player. It is non-competitive in either PVP or PVE, and is simply not fun to play.
Honestly the biggest problem with it is the Stamina loss. Half health and half stamina is just too punishing. Not only do you cripple yourself with half the health pool you could potentially have, but also half the stamina: which is used for every single action in the game. There are a couple of builds that help with the tiny health pool, and with some practice you can work around that and still be competitive, but there is absolutely nothing you can do about the fact that you have half the stamina of everyone elseandyou gain half the benefit that anyone else does from armor and buffs.
The changes to Mule Kick brought me back again to try a corrupted sorcery build. I had dreams of punting people off the roof of Al’Merayah to their deaths below, or yelling “THIS IS SPARTA!!!” while I hoofed them into the Sinkhole. This time around I could only stand it for two days, and every single moment of those two days I was asking myself “why am I doing this to myself?”. “Why am I suffering when I could do [insert just about any activity in CE] better/faster/more effectively with a normal build while having more fun?”.
Mule kick is a gimmick. Desecrate is a gimmick. The Petrified perk is nice… except it’s not enough since you can’t survive more than 2 hits anyway. And it’s certainly not nice enough to give up half your health and half your stamina and Fast Healer and Robust (+100 health) for. There simply isn’t enough in a sorcery build to counter the massive drawbacks. Even in BIS endgame stamina gear you end up with less of a Stamina pool than a level 1 naked player. On top of the already brutal cost of a halved stamina and health bar this is simply too much of a handicap.
The entire concept of “being a sorcerer” is laughable too, since anyone can cast all of the spells without a single corrupted attribute point spent. So for this tremendous handicap of being - literally - half of a player, you don’t even get to cast any exclusive spells.
Also, respeccing is ridiculously expensive. 38-60 Soul Essence. That is insanely expensive considering that any other build costs absolutely nothing to respec but a couple yellow lotus and blood. People may be more open to trying - or even just goofing around with - sorcery builds if they didn’t require potentially 60 Soul Essence to respec every single time. That’s 60 Soul Essence that could be put to far better use making 60 Potions of Rebirth, which are actually useful.
Please do something to make Sorcery viable. Some potential suggestions you or the community could build on:
Either:
give us corrupted Agility, Grit and Expertise trees that are specifically tailored to compensate for the massive handicap of gimped stamina.
or
make health and stamina bonuses from armor and buffs not suffer from being halved.
or
give us a handful of spells that only sorcerers who have gone fully down the path and done a full corrupted build are able to cast.
or
rebalance the current corrupted perks and/or figure out some mechanic where corrupted perks stack/synergize in an additive way with normal perks, with specific attention to Stamina regen.
and
make it so that the cost to corrupt is paid once, and then subsequent respecs so that respeccing to/from a corrupted build doesn’t cost potentially 60 Soul Essence each time.
A lot of players want more options than the cookie cutter ASV build, and many have experimented with corrupted sorcery builds. The vast majority quickly respec back to normal builds once they realize how handicapped sorcerers are. A handful of die-hards stay despite everything that comes with sorcery and not because of it.
Please give full corrupted sorcerers something other than small gimmicks to counteract the massive drawbacks that are imposed on the player.
One of the issues Sorcery has is that it is far too easy to get into and far too easy to opt out at any time. Because of that the spells and abilities will have to be lackluster.
The way it should have worked is it should have taken significant effort to get into Sorcery, something not everyone could or would want to do. But going down such a path also shouldn’t be easy to get off by simply drinking a potion.
If they did some system like that, then significant buffs could be applied across the board.
The challenge, difficulty, and effort to be a sorcerer should be that a clan designates a sorcerer and puts their effort into getting them the abilities and resources they need. Its a team effort. Solo players would likely want to seek outside help and offer their services to clans who have no dedicated sorcerer. The whole seeking out the wiseman hermit for their wisdom and abilities trope.
It’s also how most players like their games. You might not like it, and I respect your right to dislike it, but in each MMO the game systems have moved from more-complicated to less-complicated over time.
I agree with your basic idea, that sorcery should be more viable and is too gimmicky, but changing it to something that takes “significant effort” and “something not everyone could or would want to do” is a non-starter for the game devs.
The history of MMO’s says otherwise.
And if Funcom did that, there would be a hue and cry from tons and tons of players that it’s OP or that only try-hards or cheaters.
If sorcery was harder, but was only equally balanced with other options, then no one would want to do sorcery because it would take too much time and too much trouble to do it. If sorcery was harder, but was more powerful than other options then there would be a constant stream of complaints that it’s OP and unfair.
There are many of examples of this in games all over the place, but probably the best example was an early Star Wars MMO. I think it was “Star Wars Galaxies”, but it’s been a long time so I’m not sure anymore if that’s the right name. The original concept was that it would be hard and time consuming to become a Jedi Knight. The creators and developers thought that Jedi Knights should be rare in the game, just like they’re rare in the Star Wars universe.
And. People. Hated. It.
They got a non-stop stream of vitriol and anger from people who wanted to play a game on their own schedule, people with jobs, people with kids, people who were casuals, but still wanted to be able to be a Jedi Knight.
Making sorcerers rare and/or elite would be as popular as a lead balloon. The large majority of people would hate it and they would hate the people who becamse sorcerers. There is no amount of ‘offering services to clans’ that would change this in the slightest. If sorcery was rare, difficult and had more power then non-sorcery then the great majority of players would hate them.
What sorcery needs is to be better balanced compared to non-sorcery, and to be useful without being OP.
Did they? Why does everyone I know who played that game said that when classes were made simpler in SWG it was the single worst patch in gaming history?
I assume some may have liked easy Jedi/Sith. But that patch literally killed that game and drove the IP to Electronic Arts.
Except for the teleport you unlock at the end of it I found sorcery to be a complete waste of time and totally useless. Not sure why they bothered adding it.
To say that it is not viable or unplayable is simply not true.
With 15 points worth of Grotesque Excrescence, I regenerate six times faster than Fierce Vitality. Twisted Flesh causes 7.5% of attacks against me to do no damage. Petrified is, in my opinion, one of the best perks in the new attribute system.
However… I absolutely cannot fight toe to toe with someone who is not corrupted unless they are significantly less skilled. Sorcerers are supposed to be weak, but I will agree that this weakness is a bit too much.
Additionally, while a sorcerer should not be capable of winning in a fair hand to hand melee, they should be capable of winning an unfair magic versus sword fight.
Our current magic selection is too limited. I will point out the original intentions for Sorcery laid out by Joel Bylos seven years ago:
Necromancy: Implemented, but not to its full potential.
Demon summoning: Implemented, but very underwhelming.
Transformations: Unimplemented.
Illusions: Implemented and one of the peaks of sorcery.
Transmutation: Unimplemented.
Ripping out a man’s heart: Unimplemented, and this is exactly the type of sorcery we are missing.
Multiple possible reasons, more on that in a minute.
For the moment, unless you say otherwise, I’m going to assume you mean the changes made to the game after it had been out for a couple of years. I’m talking about the beginning of the game, from beta and during the first two years of the game, while you’re talking about a later period, the middle-to-end of the game.
Ask youself, why did they change the game to make classes simpler in the first place? The answer, which was well known at the time, is that it was in response to tons of player feedback. They made these changes to the game because most people hated how hard it was to become (and maintain) a jedi character. Some people liked it, of course, some people revel in “elite” accomplishments in games, but most don’t.
So in answer to your snarky, “Did they?”, yes. Most people hated the Jedi system right from the beginning, during beta, and continued hating it after the game was released.
Now, this doesn’t mean that Sony/Lucas did a good job when they simplified the classes, people hated that too. But the two different hatreds are not mutually exclusive. People hated the early jedi system and people also hated how they went about simplifying the classes. The two things are both true.
As for the possible reasons:
Confirmation bias, maybe you only remember the stories that match your personality.
You don’t know that many people who played and so your simple size is skewed.
Maybe your gaming friends lean more towards hard-core gamers, and those are the specific people who would have disliked the simplifcation.
People love to tell stories that make the past larger than life. Describing a change as “the single worst patch in gaming history” is about as hyperbolic as it gets. There have been many games that released terrible (and sometimes game killing) patches, to call one of them “the single worse” is some pretty high drama.
I don’t know, but it doesn’t change the facts. The original facts are that a significant number of people hated the jedi system in the early history of the game and that there was an ongoing clamor for a less demanding system.
Yup, both it’s possible for two things to both be true. Just because people wanted a change doesn’t mean they did a good job of making the change. But the decline of the game doesn’t change the fact that people hated the original jedi system.
And who says they have to be “weak”? This is a multiplayer game, there should be balance. If sorcerers are weak in melee, they should have spells that compensate for that. No, a sorcerer should not be able to stand toe-to-toe with an archetypical “Barbarian” and trade greatsword hits equally, but then they should have something… anything that could tip the battle in their favour. Right now they have nothing.
Give them some kindof group use then - crowd control? AOE cripple? A fear/disorient spell… anything.
Perhaps I need another word than “viable”. Technically you could finish all content in the game without having spent a single attribute point. If that is how you played the game since day one, then likely you’d be better at it than most players with the same “build”. That doesn’t change the fact that it is still at a huge disadvantage compared to a proper build.
There are very few people in the game outside of RP servers that actually play full-time “sorcerer” builds with full corruption. Sooner or later everyone realizes that hey, I could be doing this a lot easier without all this constant corruption, and they go back. The few die-hards that stick with it do so despite the drawbacks, not because there is any advantage to sorcery.
There should be a balance. If you are “permanently” sacrificing half your health and half your stamina (the most important stat in the game) then there should be some useful trade-off or utility that you can only get through that sacrifice. Otherwise you are literally just gimping yourself for no reason.
And they really need to rework the cost of speccing/respeccing sorcery. Make it a one-time cost that lets you spec back to sorcery without having to spend up to 60 Soul Essence again, or drastically reduce the cost.
I believe the best solution to this is to double down on corruption, specifically by finishing adding corrupted perks to all attributes. Corrupted grit could work to reduce the stamina cost of attacks scaling on ranks in it, which would lean into the glass cannon approach of corrupted builds. Attack more, but still be limited on dodging/blocking/running. They could also do some kind of “leech” effect, wherein a successful hit replenishes a bit of stamina, encouraging you to commit to full combos vs the current strategy of hit twice and then back off for 3-5 business days and repeat.
Yes - anything that will address the fact that Stamina is brutally handicapped.
Also keep in mind that a lot of people aren’t using something like @Tephra 's build and do not have Quickfooted. The most popular build I’ve seen is 20 corrupted Strength, 19 corrupted Vitality with Glutton for Punishment, and 19 corrupted Authority with War Party. There is no Agility or Quickfooted and while you share your damage with your thralls you are literally a slug that people can run circles around. You run five steps and you’re out of stamina, it’s absolutely pathetic.
The problem is that in “theory” to gain corrupted perks which give some minor tankiness and slightly more powerful attacks you lose 50% of your max health pool and 50% of your max stamina so you can swing that sword less.
The reality is that Stamina is not just for attacking but for every single action you do, and losing 50% is just insanely punishing. You can run half as far, climb half as high, swing a sword half as many times. When you consider the fact that Stamina costs for swinging a weapon have been increased and the Stamina regen delay just got increased tenfold It’s absolutely brutal.
What makes it even worse is that gear and buffs are what round out a build… and any corrupted build is only going to benefit 1/2 as much from their armor and food/potion buffs. So that piece of armor that gives +28 health? You only get +14 of that. The one that gives +7 Stamina? You only get 3.
When it comes to light armor a lot of people wear it primarily for the buffs and not the paltry ~40 armor per piece, and anyone with a corruption build is literally getting half the benefit.
A bandaid fix from Funcom that would go a long way towards making corrupted builds a little bit more viable is to change it so that there is no reduction of any bonus attributes gained from armor. That would help squeeze out a little bit more Health and Stamina and make it so that corrupted builds don’t get half the benefit from armor.
They shall add instant cast for spells if you have Any perk Full corrupted It Will make a sorcerer have aleast a little diference Because right now anyone can cast ANY spell.
I Hope They add New spells , rework some perks like the autority demon useless perk and add New corrupted line perks like grit , expertise and agility.
I Hope They add something like invisible in agility perk turning Rolling trush when you roll you turn invisible for 10 sec .
The grit perk shall Win something to help shield build like return damage when holding a shield.
And expertise something to stop food and Water or use mounts when in Full weight.
First, I feel I should link to a topic, because it touches on plenty of things that would take too long to get into here. There is the caveat that I was talking about mainly Corruption Builds in general (but more geared towards fighters), but a lot of the info still applies. This is especially true when talking about the current Stamina situation.
Now, you mentioned that there is nothing you can do about half stamina… And if you’re on EL, you’re pretty much right on the money. It’s a very cut and dry loss. Siptah has its methods like Sigils that can definitely help mitigate but not fully alleviate the loss. This is worth noting, but not really a solution. It also doesn’t change the fact that you’ll still only have 50% Stam/HP
Trust me, this gimmick can indeed be one worth having… but it is indeed a gimmick and has relatively low use case outside of chance opportunities and making escapes if necessary. One use I have found is using a Spear and when the enemy gets too close to fight effectively, kick them off into oblivion to “reset” the situation into a more comfortable one.
…But when it comes down to it even this perk (among the others you list) has aspects that still hurt. I’m also not in love with the fact that everybody can now kick you down - even those who are not Corrupted. Mule Kick does have a boost but it definitely feels like less of am exclusive perk now than it did.
Let me provide a pause here. This a great perk in its best moments! By the way, I’m only equipped with the Bestial Regalia and the Leggings of Kurak in this clip, so this would have even more damage if fully STR buffed with STR Damage Armor. The rest of the armor is transmog from the mod “TOT ! Custom 1.5.16”
…And that’s what is so aggravating. It is such a good perk… When it procs. Its proc % is beyond far too low. I know that the chance is a 5% and should expect only one proc every 20 hits or so, but you should not be hitting somebody over 40 times. It took me 44 in the following instance, and I captured some of that unlikely chance here:
Okay, so at least if it procs it should always be awesome, right? Of course not, you could not be that lucky!
Sometimes when it procs, the opponent will only receive damage, but not be launched.
That’s a big deal, because the damage is the most subtle part of what the ability allows. It the proc chance could be raised (even just doubled!) and the ability fixed so that targets and surrounding enemies would always launch on a proc, I think I would find Desecrate to be one of the best perks in the game.
Let’s move on.
This is another gripe of mine, although perhaps not for quite the same reason. The Developers have put Corruption at a point where these Builds are inherently at a disadvantage. That is relatively painful to face sometimes when you realize that not only is the gameplay likely “harder” due to having to play better to compensate for your weaknesses, but there is also a barrier of entry. It’s not to say that this doesn’t fit thematically, because some sort of “trial” and/or ritual really does fit the bill, but to have to work longer just to play the way you want to play leaves a bad taste in the mouth. It’s important to mention here that Corruption/Sorcery Builds are not bad necessarily, and there are perks worth getting, but the need to actually play better afterwards is real. For example, @Tephra’s Build listed above has taken a subtle approach to the Corruption aspect and has received exclusively relatively good perks from the Corruption Perk list at a perhaps overall gain given that some health and stamina have been kept afterwards… And yet…
Even players that enjoy their time in their Corrupted Builds would never honestly say that they did not feel at some sort of disadvantage.
Also, thanks for reminding me of this:
I need this not as the full fix but as my temporary compensation for the state of these builds. Finisher for the staff perhaps?
For this
I hear what you’re saying here, but the spells lack a lot of practicality. most of these spells feel lackluster even given the current “low” cost. Let’s not forget that you need to already be at certain level of corruption to cast some these spells, so you’ve already put yourself at a disadvantage even if not in a Corruption Build. As I mentioned before, the lore implications of having no “entry fee” is not very kind to the concept. In that sense, I agree with you… But there’s still a barrier of entry in the form of the Souls that Non-Corrupted Builds simply don’t have. These other builds will not likely hit that mark of Corruption either. Hey, if they do go to that length just to cast a spell then they are at a disadvantage too, so I’d be happy with them using a spell -even a relatively strong one- at that point too. In this case I’m talking practicality over and and even a bit against the lore aspect at this point.
I feel that this makes for a good story and little else. This would likely happen in an RP server but next to never in a non-RP server let alone an Official server. The spells are not fascinating and currently add next to nothing in more cases unless executed flawlessly.
I would agree that a Sorcerer should perhaps not trade blows equally… But in the given the state of Corruption Perks, it certainly seems to look like they are intended to. If we look towards the perks, what do we see? Let’s look at the top-level Perks since they should best reflect the concepts being pushed:
And then you had to go and hit me with the truth nugget and pull me back into a harsh reality:
And that’s just it, isn’t it? The gameplay would be easier if you weren’t Corrupted. There are benefits to these Builds but the tradeoffs heavily outweigh them. I will say that playing this way does make me feel better after every victory. It feels like I’ve fought the odds and come out on top. Unfortunately, that’s not as good as it might sound. That means that even after a victory I feel like my build is worse and I just picked up its slack. This is also after extreme amounts of time have been spent fine-tuning as well, so consider that just another barrier of entry.
These two parts you mentioned are something I too would like to see happen. I feel like these two options have really the same meaning in terms of what a rebalance would look like. I think that Funcom would do well to hear these propositions and act on them.
Glass cannon, you say? You’re going after my heart.
Another home-run idea here and adding onto the rebalancing/addition of Corruption Perks idea. People are asking for these things, and so long as people are still trying Corruption the desire will live. It has been years and several nerfs to many aspects of combat that Corruption Builds use since they’ve been properly balanced:
I bring these two points up together to show a bit of contrast that can absolutely both be true.
The most succinct point @AngryPotato made here is the most fully correct one, at least as far as I’m concerned. This IS a video game. It’s something we do for fun, and the systems in it (while tedious at times) should overall be fun above all. This includes when it comes to lore. Devs should capitalize on lore infusion whenever possible, but if it violates the fun players can be having, a line is being crossed. Both of these things are possible… They could just both be done better here.
And that brings me back to the quote of @Tephra. The spells should absolutely be better. Curses, blasts of corruption onto those who likely would not want it, enchantments or debuffs like spells to buff followers (kind of already in-game in the form of Frenzy), AOE spells that cause debuffs like a slow effect which would act similar to cripple but only in the area surrounding the caster for a period of time, or even spells that the caster would buff their damage with by using their own health as a further cost (as in something like taking damage once and then have a damage buff for an amount of time).
This, while still effectively being melee combat, would at least be a small step towards the options I believe Tephra is looking for.
I want to like this idea, but I think that spells of this sort would have to be the ones like those we have at bottom level currently. They cannot be very powerful if so. The utility spells would be okay for this kind of situation and not much else outside of perhaps rather weak offensive spells of some sort.
And that’s it. I go on a lot but I think the topic of Corruption Builds is extremely fun and I would love to see more people get into it so the cries for a rebalance would have more of a voice. Thanks to anybody who read all of what I offered.
I want to talk about this a bit because you’re definitely not wrong here.
The problem sorcery has (or at least one of them) is you give up quite a bit to be able to BE a sorcerer. But you’re not quite giving enough to be stronger. If that makes sense. Its in this weird sort of limbo. So close to the line so to speak.
I’ve thought of asking for them to lessen the penalties (such as max corruption being like… 25-30% instead of 50%, but then I have to ask myself the question, “if that happens, what’s the point?”
So I believe it should go in the other direction, if the corruption was harder to obtain, and sorcery took a bit more commitment then it could be buffed. And the idea was that it would be buffed enough that a clan without a sorcerer is at a disadvantage to one that does. But a lone sorcerer isn’t going to be able to go toe to toe with a solo non-sorcerer (but likely could do something if they take them by surprise or what not).
I had a more detailed post about this a few weeks ago:
It goes a bit better into detail to what I’d like to see.
It’s funny that you mention that post, I remember it (in fact you quoted and responded to me in it haha). I’ll say this: Going either way you mentioned here seems ideal when in comparison to the system’s current position. I can’t say that I have the completely “correct” answer here, I just know that the current system feels truly rough to play. No question on another thing you said; being a lone sorcerer makes a lot less sense than being one within a clan of 2+ members.
Although I do have some respect for the lore in general, this is a topic mostly about the gameplay of being a Sorcerer. Please don’t shoehorn a fistful of lore into this conversation unless it’s meaningful to the actual topic at hand.
Even those who aren’t invested have a basic understanding.
Alright, and has staying true to this concept in the way they have made the game as fun as it could be? I’m inclined to say that if they’re going to harm the fun of the game then they should dive deeper like @Taemien said. I don’t really like that approach, but I believe that it could be more satisfying than this.
Agree. I actually thought they did a pretty good job with it in Age of Conan, would have loved to see something more akin to that class system in this game, but balancing classes for PvP takes a lot of work I suppose.
