Return of Reckoning

Hey all,


This topic was discussed in the '[Sorc] Suggestions' thread started by dwyur, and I figured since a lot of people seemed to agree on this issue it was deserving of its own topic.

The issue that was discussed was the underwhelming nature of Sorc M4's, in regards to their usefulness during keep/fort fights. What I will do in this thread is discuss the four M4's available to the Sorc and why they fall short in this area. Then I will briefly discuss how they match up to other classes and what the implications are.



As stated, the Sorc has access to four different M4's, like most classes.

Two of these are point-blank AoE morales with 30ft range. These are 'Unleash the Winds' and 'Paralyzing Nightmares'. These both do 1800 damage upfront. Unleash the Winds also punts the enemy, and Paralyzing Nightmares roots them for 10 seconds.

The other two morales have 100ft range. These are 'Crippling Terror' and 'Soul Stealer'.

Crippling Terror silences and disarms up to 9 enemies within 20ft of your target for 7 seconds.

Soul Stealer deals 1200 damage to all targets within 20ft of the target and drains 125 AP from them. It also heals the Sorc by 1200 and gives the Sorc 125 AP.


Starting with the point-blank AoE morales 'Unleash the Winds' and 'Paralyzing Nightmares', the issue is simple. The use of these M4s during a lord room push will often result in instant death. This means a Sorc has to make the choice between contributing with their M4, and hoping they will be ressed quickly so they can continue to contribute to the push, or not use their M4 and contribute with their ranged AoE instead. Given these choices, most Sorcs will opt for the latter option.

The ranged M4s are equally problematic. Crippling Terror can only hit 9 targets and it is affected by immunities, making it very difficult to get much value out of this M4 in a lord room fight. Soul Stealer is quite user friendly, but has two gaping flaws. The first, it deals only 1200 damage, which is half of what some other classes are capable of putting out. This deficiency in damage isn't really compensated by the AP drain and self-heal, which are of limited usefulness in a lord room push. The second is the fact that Soul Stealer is in the Path of Agony, which is the Single Target tree for Sorc.

The result of these issues is that a lot of Sorcs forego the use of their M4's altogether during fort/keep pushes. Some, like me, will opt to use the M2 'WInd-Woven Shell' instead, and others may use the M2 'Shatter' because it does not involve a punt, which a lot of people regard as being disadvantageous due to the immunities it produces.



When discussing this in dwyur's thread, most seemed to agree this was a strange situation and no one was able to provide any reasoning why the aforementioned is the case. Why should every other class have powerful, fight-changing M4s, the combined effort of which often decides the outcome of fort/keep pushes, but not Sorc? It should be noted that every other Ranged DPS class has a strong ranged AoE nuke, and even some healers have better ranged M4s than Sorc.

An equally interesting question is, what impact does it have on the fort/keep balance when an entire class worth of people has little to contribute in terms of M4s?

I hope this produced some food for thought.


Thank you for reading,

- Caduceus

That's only part of the problem. The main issue stems from the system itself, i.e. the rate at which you gain+lose morale and that they all have the same costs regardless of efficiency.

As it stands, M4s are only worth investing in for forts because that's the only place where range and tanks can stay in combat for the 4 minutes required to build morale.
Outside of that one isolated element, you're lucky if you go past m2.

Those three points are better spent elsewhere.