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An alternative Tank Build that is fun to play and works!
This is a non-pet build centered around the self healing of crit surge and the sorcs nice cost reduction passives.
Highlights:
- Great sustain
- High mobility
- Great Survivability
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Stats with Self Buffs up on a Redguard, Ebon/Alkosh/Warden setup. Got nice stat pool and resistances (capped when lord warden procs). Attributes are highly subjective to your own preference, race, and content you're playing. Just make sure to have slightly more max stamina than magicka as usual (so that you can get stamina back from Orbs/shards while blocking). Also note the extra Spell and Weapon critical that we have easy access to thanks to both CP passives, these help proc the crit surge self healing more quickly.
SKILLS
Bar1 - Bound Aegis (Flex) | Pierce Armor | Boundless Storm | Heroic Slash | Crit Surge | [Barrier]
Bar2 - Ball of Lightning (Flex) | Inner Fire | Restraining Prison | Silver leash | Dark Deal | [Aggressive Horn]
Useful Skills
Bound Aegis: Nice change to this skill in Summserset, passively grants us minor Resolve/Ward. Activating the skill grants us a nice block mitigation boost for a short time, unfortunetely costs a lot of magicka though but it does reduce damage noticably. Also slotting enables the "deadric protection" passive for a nice health recovery boost. Slot this skill for very hard hitting bosses.
Pierce Armor: The bread-and-butter Taunt + armor debuff
Boundless Storm: Really nice combo buff, our source for major resolve/ward, short speed bonus, and a nice dot to increase crit Surge healing procs. Keep this up 100%
Heroic Slash: Minor maim for the enemy, minor heroism for us. Keep this up 100%
Critical Surge: The main source of healing. Expect about 1k - 1.5k constant hps on a single boss, and up to 3k-4k when adds are around, because they will proc more crits when boundless storm hits them.
Ball of Lightning (Flex): Really helpful mobility tool and gap closer, and so much fun to use.
Inner Fire: The ranged taunt
Restraining Prison: Incredible AOE root to glue add packs together after chaining them in. Also grants us Major Vitality (+30% healing) for 2s plus 1 more second for each enemy hit. The area of effect is in front of us with a relatively long range, instead of around us like the DK root.
Silver leash: Thanks to the fantastic change in Summerset, this now lets us chain in ranged adds.
Dark Deal: Restore stamina plus a big heal, but use carefully! - Block will drop while casting this, choose the time wisely!
[Ult] Agressive Warhorn: The main Ultimate to buff our group.
[Ult] Barrier: I like to have this on my front bar for the 10% extra magicka recovery from the support skill line passive, and it can sometimes be used to save the group if something goes wrong. But there are other good options, like Shield disciplin, temporal guard, or double bar Warhorn for easier access.
[Ult] Shield Disciplin: Nice Life saver
[Ult] Temporal Guard: A little bit of extra damage mitigation for the front bar
Flex spot alternatives:
Vigor: When we run with 3dd's and don't get enough healing
Empowered Ward: Grants group Minor Intellect and enables the "deadric protection" passive for a health recovery boost.
Defensive Posture: Reflect projectiles + tiny block cost and mitigation buff
Sanguine Altar: Nice little heal over time with a long duration, plus healing synergy for group members
Energy Orb: Great heal over time plus resource synergy for group members
Elemental Drain: (requires Ice staff on back bar!) For when you have no healer and 3 extremely spoilt DD's who refuse to slot it themselves.
Important Passives:
Deadric Summoning:
Power Stone: 15% Ult cost reduction
Deadric Protection: 20% Health (and stam) recovery if we slot an ability from this tree
Dark Magic:
Unholy Knowledge: 5% cost reduction
Blood Magic: 10% heal when we hit something with Restraining Prison
Persistence: 15% cost reduction for the next skill after blocking an attack. If done carefully and not spamming skills to much, you can basically get this cost reduction on every skill you cast. It is an incredibly powerful tanking passive on the sorc.
Storm Calling:
Capacitor: 10% Magicka Recovery
Implosion: This actually scales with max Health, of which we have plenty, so we will deal a nice little bit of extra damage in execute phase
GEAR
I personally prefer a 6 Heavy setup with the waist medium/light, It's a good combination of passives without sacrificing much resistances.
Food: Tri-stat (withered tree inn etc)
Mundus: Atronach
Of course there are other useful options such as the
Lord if more HP is needed or
Steed for HP recovery. The
Thief is another interesting option as it will slightly improve the average rate of crit surge heal procs and heal crits.
Gear explanation:
Ebon: Still the Bread-and-Butter tanking group support, been this for the last 5million years or so.
Alkosh: The stam DD set that ended up being the unrivaled BIS tanking deduff set for what feels like half an eternity. Works particularly well on the SorcTank as the crit bonus adds a tiny contribution to our surge self healing.
Jorvulds Guidance: Really cool sustain/support set. Makes our life easy by extending many of our buffs and providing nice magicka sustain, helps the group by extending the Warhorn (note that it also extends the duration of the stamina and magicka boost even tho those are not official major/minor buffs yet). Use this instead of alkosh if you run dungeons with 3dd's and not enough synergies to make alkosh worth it.
Livewire: Honorary mention: it's a cool debuff set that fits thematically PERFECTLY with this build. Grants about 50% uptime on minor vulnerability and nice self healing.
Race
Argonian - potion addicted sustain miracle
Imperial - highest max resources
Redguard - great stam sustain
That said, almost all races have something useful for tanking though, Races have a less important impact on the tank role than on others i think.
The usual stuff applies here, Argonian BIS blablabla.
I want to give a honorary mention to Redguards though, because there are many Redguards stamsorcs out there already, and if any of them are reading this build and find it interresting, let me tell you the redguard does work surprisingly well for this build. I'm getting a good 100 stamina per second on average from adrenaline rush even on this build, its a pretty good sustain help, and the 10% extra stam help as well.
Similar applies even to Altmer, the extra magic pool and regen are far from useless. In fact I first tried out this build by repurpusing my Altmer magsorc and it worked really well.
CHAMPION POINTS
The Steed
Ironclad - 72
The Lady
Thick Skinned - 72
Hardy - 37
Elemental Defender - 37
The Lord
Quick Recovery - 32
The Tower
Warlord - 31
Bashing Focus - 25
The Lover
Arcanist - 64
Tenacity - 27
The Shadow
Shadow Ward - 72
Tumbling - 31
The Apprentice
Blessed - 100
Elfborn - 81
The Atronach
Physical Weapon Expert - 31 (Riposte Passive - this can proc crit surge and adrenaline rush. Use this if beeing a redguard, otherwise put points into Elfborn instead)
The Ritual
Precise Strikes - 38 (Perfect Strike Passive for crit surge, also buffs vigor heals)
Thanks for Reading - If you actually happen to try this out or have your own SorcTank build already let me know what you think about it!
Enjoy the game and stay away from sorcs. keeps you alive bit longer longer in pvp