Critical Sorcerer build + PvP balancing suggestions

[Xezbeth]

Hello community,-

I have joined Arcane Legends recently. I have 1 year experience in Dark Legends PvP, and it helped me adapt to AL PvP fairly quickly.
I also have 3 years experience in LoL (League of Legends). How is this relevant to anything you ask? Well it isn't really, BUT, since LoL is so balance focused, and stat-math is the key, experience with calculating stats helps in other stat based games, for example AL.

I am currently enjoying PVP, while running a lvl 26 maxed out Critical focused Sorcerer.
Most of you probably already thought "Critical Sorcerer? OMFG noob" and are about to close the thread.
Before you do that please bare with me and I will explain everything in detail.

My stats

2229 - health
340 - int
201 - damage
21% - critical

My skill build

Active

5/5 - Fireball
4/5 - Lightning (Excluding discharge on kills)
4/5 - Shield (Excluding knock-back when charged)
2/5 - Heal (point in skill + mana)

Passive

5/5 - INT
5/5 - damage %

Now already you might say. Ok, so you are critical based? So why damage % instead of critical 5%?
The reasoning for this is simple, while 5% extra critical will add to your luck, but benefit will not be as tremendous as compared to 5% extra damage, which will make you PEW PEW more consistent.

PET

Ribbit - for that sweet critical passive bonus, and 40% critical on activation.

How it works

Being a critical based mage, makes you very opportunistic, and to be good at it, a lot more factors are in have to be considered compared to being pure INT.

Since you now rely on critical bursts more than consistent damage, using Ribbit efficiently will be key to your success.

Note:

this is best executed if you play on a PC with a keyboard, and even then it will take time to getting use to and not messing up the combo order.

What you wanna do:

Charge your fireball, find your victim, before launching it activate Ribbits ability, and launch the fireball, right after that charge your lightning and fire away.
If executed well, this gives you just enough time to critical with both fireball (800dmg crit) / lightning (1600dmg) resulting in a massive 2400dmg nuke.

If you didn't crit with either one of the skills, do not despair, your a sorcerer! Pew Pew while running a way like the coward that you are and wait for your cooldowns to comeback if you haven't finished murdering your enemy yet.

This is the basics of how it works, now let me go into more detail of how to handle specific classes in PvP.

Strategy

As a mage, your biggest strength is your massive range and ability to hit and run. Never forget that, be smart about it. Good mage knows how to place himself in team fights.
Stand behind those beefy warriors, unleash h*ll.

Fighting against:

Rogues - fairly simple, you should never run around the field with charged fireball in the first place. Always charge your shield first. When you meet a rogue who is after your soul, remember, timed Shield will save you from 1 hit kill of that pesky arrow that they have. Once you blocked it with your shield, unleash your stun CRIT combo mentioned above, you will have enough damage to instagib them, if not, pew pew finish with your rifle.

Sorcerers - So you are walking around with your shield and encounter another shielded mage, what do you do? Assuming there is nothing left to do here, you simply walk away in the opposite direction completely ignoring each other. Face it, if you start lasering each other you will achieve nothing more than blow away your cooldowns and get cleaned up by passing rogues / warriors. If you find thinking of yourself as superior being and decide the arena is simply not big enough for the both of you, I would suggest kitting around for 3 seconds until invulnerability of the shield wears off, fire away and hope for cookies. Remember you are a crit-mage, you will out-damage him any day.

Warriors - you have 3 options when you encounter a warrior:

1. Run away for dear life
2. Assume cosmos has conspired against you and the only remaining option is to lay down on the floor while covering your sensitive areas
3. Hope that you are reincarnation of Bruce Lee, take a stand and fight

If for some unearthly reason you chose option 3 - consult your doctor or pharmacist.
If he/she is unable to help your mental condition, than this is what you should know:

Warriors have low mana pool.

Activate your shield early, use your stun crit combo, and run away while pushing him away with procs from your push gun (you have a pushgun right? if no, rage quit at that moment)
Like a true warrior most of them will chase you, and this is where the beauty of being a sorcerer comes into play.
Keep comboing him if he catches up you will soak up most of his damage with your bubble shield. If you activated it early, keep yourself alive with heal, remember not to use it to soon unless you have to, or he will wear you down. Hope your bubble comes back.

This is really 75% / 25% success scenarios, you can kill warriors 1v1 fairly easy if you know what you are doing and the universe is on your side.


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Suggestions on PvP and class balancing.

Rogues - they are DPS monsters. Fairly balanced, apart from one thing. The arrow kills other rogues and sorcerers in 1 hit.
To achieve true balance in PvP related games, there should never be a skill that K.O's opponents in 1 hit, unless they are heavily underleveled, or running around naked.
My suggestion:

1) Lower the critical % for the arrow to reduce damage (against players and not monsters, to not destroy their leveling and farming phase).
2) Apply slowing effect on the target you just shot.

Since rogues have a gap closer, what this will do, is make their enemies take critical crippling damage, and give the satisfaction into rushing in and dealing a killing blow.
Apart from that, the slowing arrow will now give them more options in team fights, to slow a beefy warrior charging at them, or help secure kills when you have a fleeing enemy.
Also will give rogue on rogue action more dynamics, instead of just hit-first-to-win.

Sorcerers - Really cool skill pool, big advantage of having massive range and hit & run tactics.
The only issue I have with sorcerers, just as no class should have a 1 hit kill ability, no class should have a skill that makes them immortal for 3 seconds.
My suggestion: Instead of total damage immunity on activation, the skill should now reduce 75% damage instead. To not make this look as a nerf, the prolonged cooldown should be reduced by a few seconds. What this will do is make mages more tactical based and more consistent if played smart, as you will have to worry about positioning more, and will give players who use rogues more chance against their early stun burst. Also mage on mage action will have more depth and dynamics, because more factors will have to be taken into consideration.

Warriors - Highly beefy, highly resistant, highly mobile, high damage burst machines. Which doesn't sound quite right if you think about it, does it?

Don't they remind you of anyone? ----> youtube /watch?v=7Pz3MPBs9BY

To understand what changes need to be applied to warriors, we have to break them down to basics.

What is a warrior and what is his role?

The role of warrior should be to initiate team fights, soak up most of the damage and burst from mages / rogues, let their team safely pew pew from behind, peal away them pesky rogues off your precious fireball spewing moogles.

Right?

My suggestion would be:

1. Lower the base damage dealt to opponents (not PVE just PVP).
2. Increase the cooldowns significantly
3. I believe, healing should be removed from this class in general.

Another way to tackling this issue would be reworking their weapons a bit:

1. Shields + Swords should have quite little damage, but provide good defense and Health boosts to fit a tank role.
2. Two-Handers like axes and large swords should have the berserker status, which means - they should have good damage, but reduce other stats like hp, armor etc, when wearing them.


This should make warriors fall back into their original rolls, and still be super effective. But now they would have to be more strategic and smart about which skill and when to use it,
position better, stick with the team for those precious heals and mana replenishments, and not roam around face-rolling everyone and everything in their paths.
Also they could choose what to be: beef tanks for their team who last long in team fights and protect their teammates while soaking damage, OR berserker damage dealers who do tons of damage, but go down quickly if focused.


Please note: This is just my 2cents of my experience in this game, and my suggestions on how it could be improved. By no means am I trying to enforce this on the community, just putting it out there just in case someone will find this read informative and interesting.
If you think the above wall-o-text is complete rubbish, please do not hesitate to point out my stupidity.

Also I do understand that the game is fairly new, and everything will be improved in the long run.

Apart from that, constructive feedback is welcome.

Cheers everyone!
-Xezbeth