I have an 82 sorc and for small scale like running with a 6 man (or less) and fighting against similarly sized groups, I prefer single target (aka ST). You can burn people down if your dots fire. My typical rotation of abilities for ST:
Chillwind, Word of Pain, Vision of Torment, Gloomburst, Impending Doom, and then Hand of Ruin. Throw in Ice Spikes if you can / need to.
I find the timing of that has a lot of damage landing around the same time so it can surprise your enemy.
Spec for ST including tactic choices:
https://builder.returnofreckoning.com/c ... ,9524,9523
If I have a tank to guard me and healers to keep me alive, I go all out AOE. My chief abilities are Infernal Wave, Disastrous Cascade (this combined with a choppa using Chop Fasta is great), Surging Pain, Ice Spikes, occasionally will drop a pit of shades, Impending Doom to hit a single called target. I will also toss dots on people if I have nothing else to do or they're too far for AOE. Note that I run the Piercing Shadows tactic which is an unmitigatable 375 damage with full dark magic (always run full dark magic) which adds up over time. I'd say Disastrous Cascade hits hardest because it is fast and will hit for 600+ on crits.
Spec for AOE:
https://builder.returnofreckoning.com/c ... ,9529,9526
I run 5 Sovereign and 4 Triumphant (includes the ring but I ran 3 Triumphant until I could save for the ring).
It can be a painful road to get your sorc up but once you run the gauntlet, you can be pretty powerful with the right team behind you... Good luck finding that. Some people on destro don't have any respect for sorcs because they don't know anyone who plays them AOE which is close range and played effectively the same as melee DPS but better (yeah, I said it

). So basically you'll find any choppa will get priority over you when it comes to guard. Try to get into a good warband like Hand of Blood sometime and see what their AOE sorcs do... it's a thing of beauty.
Update 2/28/2023: I had the link wrong for the ST spec. Fixed.