The Sorcerer

In Summary the sorcerer is a high damage output, very squishy magical damage dealer. They are able to put out massive amounts of damage in a short period of time. Their special mechanic is "Dark Magic". Certain spells will generate Dark Magic and when you have Dark Magic your Critical Strike chance is increased and the amount your crits do is increased. The downside to Dark Magic is it can, and most likely will explode and damage you.

 

**If you are reading this in 2017 and playing the WAR Emulator take what you read here with a grain of salt. The guides were written for WAR when it first came out and most of the class guides were submitted to me - they will still contain useful information but not all of the information will be accurate**

 

Acronym's you will need to know for this guide;

AoE/AE: Area of Effect, i.g. spells that... effect... an area. Yeah.

DD: Direct Damage, i.g. spells that only effect a single target.

DoT: Damage over Time, i.g. spells that deal... well you get the picture.

DPS: Damage per Second, i.g. how much damage you deal over a length of time divided by seconds.

Knockback: i.g. this refers to getting attacked while casting spells, resulting in the spell cast time being delayed, making it take longer to cast.

PoS: Pit of Shades, this is a channeled AoE spell that doesn't suffer from knockback. (See! Using our new vocabulary already!)

HoR: Hand of Ruin. This is a learnable, channeled, single target DoT found in the Calamity mastery.

AV: Absorb Vitality. Spell higher in Calamity mastery.

GoN: Gloom of Night. Spell in Calamity mastery.

WoP: Word of Pain. Regular spell.

 

Attributes And How They Effect You

Strength: increases melee damage, useless for a caster of our type.

Toughness: shaves a static amount of damage from individual damage sources. i.e. Say your toughness stat saves you from 75 damage. If you get hit for 100, toughness absorbs 75 and you take 25 damage. Similarly, if you take 1000 damage, you absorb 75 but still take the remaining 925. Mildly useful since you have low armor and will be usually be getting hit too hard for it to matter that much. However, when stacked, it can increase your survivability.

Wounds: increases your hit points. More wounds means you live longer. Very important.

Initiative: increases your chance to avoid attacks and reduces your chance to be crit. Quite handy.

Weapon Skill: is another melee oriented stat. It increases your chance to parry melee, but not enough to be worth investing in.

Ballistic Skill: increases ranged physical damage dealt. Since you deal ranged MAGIC damage, this stat is useless.

Intelligence: increases magical damage dealt and reduces chance it will be disrupted (fizzle). This is the most important stat for a sorcerer/sorceress.

Willpower: increases healing done and your chance to disrupt (resist) spells cast against you. Mildly helpful, but not enough to worth investing in. There are better ways to defend yourself against magic attacks.

In summary, the most important stats for you are Intelligence and Wounds. Once you've got these two stats pretty high the next two you should worry about are Toughness and Initiative.

 

Resists

As far as Resists go you have elemental, corporeal, and spiritual. When stacking resists, stack in the order I have them listed here in importance.

Elemental: will primarily help you against those stupid flaming red burny ball flinging bastards known as Bright Wizards. These are your Order mirror class and arch nemesis on the battlefield. Melt these guys when you see them because they hurt... wait our magic is all icey and stuff. Well cast your spells until they chill out... HAHA! Ice spells, chill out... ah ha....ha.. ahhh... I slay me.

Corporeal: will help you against Engineers, Bright Wizards and Shadow Warriors.

Spiritual: will primarily help you against Archmages and Swordmasters.

 

Playing a Sorcerer/Sorceress

While there is no definitive way to play this class, I truly believe that there certainly is a divine calling from the gods for our class to excel in the area of ranged, AoE, utter destruction.
With that in mind, let us address some basics, Backlash. Backlash is the price we pay for wielding such massively destructive nasty power. As you cast, you build up Dark Magic. The higher it gets, the nastier and more potent our spells become. However, so does the punishment we suffer from casting.

Most spells carry the chance of backlashing and dealing a certain amount of damage to YOU. The damage is static according to your rank and Dark Magic amount, unmitigated by resists, and just sucks. There will be many times where you will fight, not be hit by your target, but still be lower on health than when you started because you basically kicked your own butt. There will also be times where you forget to watch your health and end up killing yourself by accident. It will happen, so just accept it now.

Now for regular playing, we want to be at range, slinging spells and doing a gleeful happy dance as the bodies pile up. While there are different styles of play, my emphasis will be on what I believe to be the true calling of our class. AoE. You won't get your first AoE until rank 8, I think, and that AoE requires you to be in melee. It's called Surging Pain and fails as anything other than a last resort, or maybe a spite spell to insta-cast while you're fleeing.

Whatever, eventually you'll get a spell called Shattered Shadows. This is a fun AoE spell. With this spell, you get to pick an enemy and make him a spell grenade. The way this spell works is you select your enemy, cast it, and the spell goes off with your selected target acting as the origin to the spells AoE radius. I like to pick the Bright Wizard hiding in the back with the other Bright Wizards and healers and just cast SS over and over until they're all dead.

The only problem to this spell is that you don't really decide WHERE the AoE will go off. If your target decides to run away from the group, so does your spell with him. The next spell I would highly recommend acquiring ASAP is Gloom of Night(GoN). This is an interesting spell that you can get at rank 21 in the Calamity mastery.

The interesting part is that this spell is both a DoT and AoE. Like Shattered Shadows (or SS), this spell requires a target to be your point of origin when casting. Also like SS, if your target moves, so does your AoE. While this seems to negate the usefulness of both spells, just wait. Most of the time, people won't realize what's happening to them. In the thick of battle, they're more focused on making us die.

I'd pick a nice stationary caster type in the middle of a group. I like to cast on Bright Wizards. (Notice a theme here?) Hit him/her with GoN, then start spamming SS. With the combined damage of the GoN ticking on the group and then my constant SS spam, LOTS of LARGE numbers started appearing on my screen. What was even better was when the numbers stopped appearing because... they were all DEAD!

What could top that, you ask? Please, let me continue! At rank 25, you get a beautiful spell called Pit of Shadows (PoS). I like to lead with GoN, then PoS, maybe mix in a SS while those are on cooldown, renew GoN, more SS, PoS again. Usually it doesn't even take that many spells to level a whole group of enemies/players. Combined with regular DoTs, Sorcerer/Sorceresses just, plain, own.

By rank 27, your mastery points should look something like this.

Anyway, you'll want to pick up GoN first, then Hand of Ruin (HoR), then Vision of Domination (VoD). HoR and VoD give you the flexibility you need for single targets. VoD is a tactic that beefs up a spell called Word of Pain (WoP). WoP is a ticking time bomb spell that goes off after 10 seconds, meanwhile, the enemy suffers a hit to their Willpower. Remember, willpower increases their chance to disrupt(resist) our spells. Lower Willpower is good for us. On top of that, it's great for taking out healers. Also, recall that Willpower increases healing done.

For single targets, I like to lead with a Gloomburst, Chillwind, WoP, then HoR. In most cases, after chillwind is done ticking and HoR is done channeling, the WoP will go off and finish them. I use Gloomburst because it's a 1.5 second cast spell vs Doombolt which is a 3 second cast. In the heat of battle, seconds and half-seconds matter. But, given a favorable situation, sometimes I do cast Doombolt for that added oomph in the beginning. But, normally I stick to Gloomburst because it also gives more Dark Magic. Remember, more Dark Magic means spells hurt more! See, I knew you were paying attention!

So, you've ranked up to 40 and you've been kicking names and taking butts. Good for you! If you're not sure how you want to spend your masteries, here's what I'm planning.

Disastrous Cascade will be a nasty surprise for any that try to get too close to my group, You may be wondering, but hey, that spell requires you to be melee but you said we're supposed to be at range. I say to you, don't mock me! It's about flexibility. Regardless of how hard you try, you will still find yourself in close quarters combat once in a while and having the tools to handle that inevitable situation is crucial to not being a complete noob.

The Neverending Agony tactic is great for halving the cooldown time of a couple spells, Infernal Wave but namely PoS!!! WOO MORE AoE!!!

Tips

How to maximize your potential by using hotkeys!

I know some of you people are just addicted to clicking, so, take this part with a grain of salt. I have a sister that plays MMO's and she's a clicker. She still plays like crap, though... so... I guess this wasn't a good point in favor of clicking. Whatever. Anyway, the less time you have to spend moving the mouse to click, the faster you're going to get spells/abilities out, the faster you deal damage and more likely stay alive. Now, I'm a FPS (first person shooter) player so I'm already accustomed to the WASD key set up. I rebound my A and D keys from default turn, to strafing.
I bound my Q key to my #7 hotbar, which is where I put my GoN spell. I bound E to my #8 key, which is my PoS. The greatest benefit for hotkeys really shines for PoS, since first you have to activate the spell, then move your mouse to where you want the spell, THEN click to cast it. With PoS hotkeyed, I can press the button with my mouse already where I want the spell to go, and instantly click and start the actual casting part. Very useful.

This is also helpful for people who aren't so much clickers, but are inefficient button mashers. I'll admit, I USED to just take my hand off my mouse, look down at my keyboard, and press all my hotkey buttons from #6 all the way through =. I was noob. I apologize and beg forgiveness. I no longer waste precious milliseconds taking my eyes off the action and mouse for such silly things.
I bound a couple frontal cone AoE spells to my 9 and 0 keys, and still button mash them, but that's because I hardly use them, so it doesn't effect me so much. On my - key, the one to the right of 0, I have WoP. I double bound this hotkey to Z. I guess it's poetic for me since this is a 10 second ticking timebomb spell, and Z is the end of the alphabet, and once the 10 seconds is up for the spell, the damage they take usually spells the end of their life. /moment of silence

Moving on, I also have my = key bound to X. In this hotkey I have the detaunt ability. This is also symbolic of basically saying, NO! Go away baddie, stop hitting my face with your giant weapon. it hurts. I had more to add in here but I forgot... I'll just add it later I suppose.

The Mouse is your friend!
Since I unbound my turn keys, I still need a way to rotate my character around. The absolute best way to do this is to right click and turn with your mouse. You turn faster, and it opens up some unique opportunities for spellcasting. Learn to mouse turn immediatly, if you don't, then aliens will abduct you. Seriously.

Now, since you now are a master mouse turner, you can do what we call Kiting. Kiting is the act of running away like a weiner and continuing to attack enemies as they chase you down. Kiting is best used with instant cast abilities because instant cast spells don't require you to stop moving. To Kite like a pro, it takes these simple steps.

1. Be afraid, be very afraid. Which is justified because a falling apple from a tree could very likely kill us.

2. Run away, run away, run away and say goodbye. Run away, RUN awaaaay, run away if you want to survive. (Cool points for anyone that knows this song.)

3. DoT DoT DoT. Basically, as you're running, JUMP, do a 180 with your mouse turn abilities, cast stuff like Chillwind or WoP, 180 back forward before you hit the ground, and keep running. If the baddie can't reach you, he can't harm you. If you get knocked down or something else, when you recover, root them with Grip of Fear, and continue the girlie screaming kiting flight of death.
There, you can now slowly and painfully kill melee's.

SUPER UBER KITING!!

Well, it's not so much super uber as it is cheesy. It's actually quite simple and I'll go as far as to say, a lame tactic. Wanna know the secret? OK, here it is. You hit your flee ability to run extra fast, then pop a potion to restore your AP. Popping flee drains all of your current AP, but doesn't continuously drain it. So, unless they changed something without me knowing, you can run at 150% speed, pop a potion, toss some spells, run some more, use your AP regen ability, run/cast even more... ohh, I'd hate to be a melee against that grilled cheese sandwich of a tactic.

This cheddery goodness is really actually useful against classes that get a sprint as one of their class abilitis. I know Choppas and Slayers have a flee and then a "charge" type deal for running fast. So, just keep this idea in mind.

 

Pluses and Minuses to a Sorcerer/Sorceress

+ High Damage out put

+ If you have a healer you can singly change the out come of a keep battle or SC.

- Backlash, well... Sucks. You'll be blowing yourself up... A lot!

- You're very squishy, thus high priority targets for melee and ranged.

Credits

This guide was created by Sygil on the Sorcerer Forums, all credit goes to him and whom ever helped him create this wonderful guide. To see the original guide, click here.