Tera Guide PvE Sorcerer Very Strong DPS Class

Tera Guide PvE Sorcerer Very Strong DPS Class.

The sorcerer is a cloth armored class which specializes in a disc with long ranged offensive damage-dealing capabilities.

Although what seems the weakest of all in terms of defense, the Sorcerer is full of great knowledge in magical spells varying from strong area attacks and devastating fireballs for a quick destruction.

Guide PvE Sorcerer – Recommended Gear Rolls

Weapon

Top line:

Increases damage by 9.3% when attacking enraged monsters

Bottom Lines:

Increases damage by 9.3% when attacking enraged monsters
Increases damage by 6.9% when attacking from behind
Increases damage by 6%
Decreases skill cooldowns by 7.2%

Gloves

Increases Attack Speed by 2.25%
Increases Power by 5
Increases Crit Factor by 9

Boots

Increases Movement Speed by 6%
Increases Endurance by 4
Replenishes 2% of total MP every 5 seconds

Guide PvE Sorcerer – Etchings

There are uncertainties about what etchings are best suited for sorcerers. I will be explaining this based on my personal experience with each etching mix.

TL;DR: Run double energetics this patch. If your ping is good you can also try 1 pumped etching. Keen is no longer the best option.

Important: You can get FREE tier III etchings from 90 tier 3 iod tokens.

Keens

Keen used to be really good but with the addition of more and more crit accessories, it’s no longer the optimal etching and is worse than energetic or pumped.

Energetics

This is my personal favourite build for sorc. Double Energetic is a very different experience while playing this class. With 2 Energetic IV etchings, you gain 10% more attack speed, and 6% cooldown reduction at the expense whatever etchings you had on before.
You will immediately notice the increase in attack speed, and will have to alter your rotation to make sure you are using the priority skills as much as possible, while using fewer filler skills. This is currently the best endgame build for sorc.

Pumped

These are an alternative to energetics if you don’t like having that much speed. However I would absolutely not recommend double pumped.

You want to always run full crit. Run 2 crit rings, earrings and crit neck, with an 8 crit roll on your circlet. If you have them, you can run 2x resized rings from last patch for extra crit from the set bonus. However, sorcerer doesn’t need to run a resized necklace like other classes because you have so much built in attack speed that the 4% extra isn’t worth the loss of power.

The rolls should be 4 crit 4 power on each ring, 4 power on the necklace, and 4 endurance 4% HP on the earrings.

Innerwear

+24/+20 /+16 / crit is optimal for sorcerers.

Ideally, you will want a Marrow Brooch. However this is very difficult to get as it only drops one per phase 4 of Harrowhold. The next best thing is a Quatrefoil brooch. It only lasts 5 seconds shorter (15s total) than a marrow brooch, and has the same stats and active effect.

They are both vastly superior to either of the other brooches, Quickcave and empowered. If a Quatrefoil Brooch is too expensive for you to obtain, then go with a Quickcarve Brooch on your sorcerer.

It is better than empowered because the 12% attack speed and 50 crit are more useful than 40 power during your Mana Boost burns.

Guide PvE Sorcerer – Crystals

Weapon

Spiteful, Savage and Focused are mandatory with the exception of Harrowhold phase 2 and 3, where you would replace Focused with either Forceful or Pounding (you should have Carving on already in Harrowhold).

The fourth weapon crystal has 3 options, and they are all situational. I will be brief and then explain it. Carving with solo priest or in Harrowhold, Forceful with brawler or warrior tank + mystic, and Pounding with lancer tank + mystic.

Carving helps greatly with solo priest because you are losing 55 crit factor from not having a mystic present. You should always run carving without a mystic.

Forceful is what you will likely use most of the time. Sorcerers use full crit jewelry which means that power is more effective. The more power you stack, the less effective it becomes, and since we have not as much as a gunner for example, Forceful is better than pounding in this situation. I will note here that using Forceful all the time is okay.

Pounding is for that extra little bit of min max. When running with a lancer tank, their Guardian Shout buff adds power to the party members. Power becomes less effective the more that gets built, so a Pounding crystal is marginally better for burns (Mana Boost + enrage + lancer buffs) with a lancer tank. However, if you don’t want to bother then that’s fine.

Armor:

4x Hardy (preferably at least 1x Glisteningly Hardy Niveot)

4x Hardy Niveots are mandatory for everything except for RMHM Lachelith. It is best that you have 160k HP on this boss, and you should be able to reach this with 3 / 4 relentless dyad niveots, 1 relentless IV etching, 4% HP on each earring, 8% HP on your chest, and the maxed out guild HP bonus.

The reason I say 3 Relentless instead of 4, is if you have a Glisteningly Hardy Niveot (which is basically required to play this class) then you don’t have to remove it to use relentless. You could also get a Glisteningly Relentless for this too.

Accessories:

Keen Vyrsks

Use Keen Vyrsks all the time.

Dyad Lines:

Weapon dyads: Here, the two most useful in this order are Poisedly and Relentlessly. If you have 4 Poisedly Dyads in your weapon then it totals up to a bonus of 8.8% damage reduction vs enraged monsters, which is actually 0.3% stronger than having a 5th hardy dyad in your chest. This is very useful.

Relentlessly is not as good as 4x Poisedly, but adds 1359 HP per dyad that you have, totaling to 5436 extra HP, which is about the same as a Relentless Niveot. This is the only other beneficial secondary line, with the exception of resolutely for slaying.

Armor dyads: As I said before, you need a Dyad that has a Glisteningly bonus line. Preferably a Glisteningly Hardy. What this does, is give you 60 MP every second every time you get a back crit. The buff stacks up to 4 times, giving you 240 MP every second. Each back crit will refresh the stacks.

Note, you do not have to have more than 1 Glisteningly crystal to easily get 4 stacks of this buff.

Guide PvE Sorcerer – Skills / Glyphs

Sorcerers are capable of casting powerful magic and utilizing elemental attacks that range from fire, ice, lightning and mind elements. This aspect is made more apparent with Sorcerer’s Awakening and skills are now divided to three categories: fire, ice and arcane magic.

Don’t use this.

You should not glyph this skill.

This is a decent filler skill and is used while higher priority skills are on cooldown.

You should not glyph this skill

Used only to stun bosses during certain phases, like Aquadrax and Terradrax in Harrowhold.

You should not glyph this skill.

This is your primary rotation starter, is very high up on your DPS contribution list, and is the best skill during Mana Boost.

Glyph Empowered (damage), Slick (can move while charging) and Keen (Crit Factor buff) Arcane Pulse. The 2.5x crit factor buff is worked out by your base crit factor.

Every time you fire this skill, you gain 75 crit factor for 5 seconds, which is huge. You can (optional) glyph the Frost Sphere damage powerlink, but I don’t recommend it, as you rarely actually use Frost Sphere within 5 seconds of Arcane Pulse.

Don’t use this skill. You should always use mana pots (Prime Replenishment Portable, Sarberry Deliciousness, or Divine Infusion) if you are running out of mana.

You should not glyph this skill

This is your highest damage contribution skill. It has a whopping 11647.93 base damage (including the chest roll 10%), and a “bloodlust,” or “execution” HP scaling effect. In layman’s terms, the lower HP the boss is, the more damage Meteor Strike does. (The other skills that have this effect are Arcane Pulse, Void Pulse, and Nova).

This skill is normally around 25-33% of your damage and should be prioritized over everything else except Lightning Strike, Void Pulse and Hail Storm (we’ll get into this later).

Glyph Carving (Crit chance), Hastened (cast speed) and Energetic (cooldown) Meteor Strike.

One of sorcerer’s 4 iframes. (The others being Warp Barrier, Teleport Jaunt and Stone Skin).

You should not glyph this skill.

Sometimes during Mana Boost, with a bunch of speed buffs on like arush, rootbeer etc, you will get badly cd locked if lightning strike doesn’t reset. That is the only time you should cast this skill; when everything else is on cooldown.

You should not glyph this skill.

It gives you a 17346 HP shield that only works on the caster. Basically a personal mini Kaia’s Shield for Sorcs. Some might consider this skill useless and not bind it but I disagree.

It’s useful in 3 particular situations and possibly more. If you don’t have enough HP to take a sphere on Lachelith, and it would get you enough, you can use this instead of potting. Secondly, for the LKHM second boss, you need 150k HP to tank the full bar wax AOE thing.

This skill has saved my life more times than I can count on this boss, when either the priest doesn’t use Kaia’s Shield, there is no priest, or your HP didn’t get topped off and you would die otherwise. Finally, it may be useful on Phase 4 of Harrowhold for the mechanic known as “spread” or “meteors.”

If you aren’t full HP and the healers are having trouble, you can pop mana barrier to give yourself some extra HP to take the initial damage of the meteor landing and then use a pot afterwards.

However useful this skill may be in niche situations, you should not glyph it.

This skill is pretty much the bread and butter of Sorc. Spamming lightning strike resets after each other is actually higher damage per second than casting meteor strike. This becomes less apparent as the boss goes below about 30% HP and meteor strike starts doing more damage.

I will cover the actual rotation system later in the guide but just know that this is your main skill. One thing to note is that “highest damage contribution skill” does NOT equal “highest damage per second.”

Meteor strike may do more overall damage than this skill, but if you factor in damage versus casting time, then lightning strike is a better skill. On a typical breakdown, this skill would be around 15-20% of your DPS depending on the amount of resets you had.

Note that this is one of the two ping based skills on Sorc, the other being Flaming Barrage. It’s no where near as ping reliant as barrage, but if you are on 200ms+ you will notice that your lightning strike resets are slower than a low ping player. You can macro it which helps a little.

Glyph Carving (Crit chance) and Persistent (reset chance) Lightning Strike.

This is a simple skill: it fires a ball that does damage to a single target. This is actually one of the few skills that sorc has which isn’t an AOE (area of effect) attack. A situation where this can be annoying would be the 2nd boss of RMHM when the spider can sometimes block your void pulse from hitting the boss if you are not careful.

Void Pulse is the one of the highest damage vs casting time skills on Sorcerer and should therefore be prioritised.

Take both Energetic (cooldown) and Carving (Crit chance) on void pulse.

One of Sorc’s three movement skills. Similar to priest’s fiery escape, meaning that it is purely a movement skill, and not an iframe. Glacial retreat is extremely useful for getting around. With the burst of celerity passive that Sorc now has, this skill is very fast too. A practical application of glacial retreat is dodging un iframable attacks.

If you ping is high, you can’t use Backstep to easily dodge something like Lachelith’s donuts at the last second, because it might lag or rubberband and the server will think you never moved, even though the iframe will go off. The same applies on Atrocitas with the colored circles debuff mechanic.

If you try and Backstep out late with high ping, you’ll die. If you use glacial or jaunt to get out, you won’t. However, you can Backstep out or back in early and you’ll be fine. If your ping is low then ignore this.

You can (optional) glyph Blazing (increased cast speed of Arcane Pulse) Glacial Retreat.

This is a great skill. It has the highest damage vs casting time of any skill, and once thrown down on the boss, does automatic damage. You have to stay looking at the back of the boss for it to continue back critting. It does NOT work like archer rain of arrows.

You can throw it down on the front of the boss, go behind and face the back of the boss and it will start to back crit. You don’t have to worry about placing this skill behind the boss; you can reposition and the skill will adapt to your new position.

If you are behind the boss and look away with your camera, if your character’s body isn’t facing the back of the boss, or aren’t behind the boss for whatever reason, then hailstorm will stop back critting until you look back or return to being behind the boss.

Note that Noctenium makes this skill’s already fast casting time even faster, but does not change the damage of the skill.

You should glyph Energetic (cooldown) Hail Storm.

This is an interesting skill, and one that a lot of sorcs forget about. I will start by saying that it has exactly the same iframe coding as Warp Barrier. What I mean by this, is that whatever you can or can’t iframe using Warp Barrier, will be the same with stone skin. It’s basically a 5 second Warp Barrier with a 3 minute cooldown. Your emergency “oh shit” iframe button.

Practical application of this would be on RMHM last boss, if she does two tail spins in a row, Warp Barrier will be on cooldown. If you are not confident using backstep to iframe it, then you can use this. IMPORTANT NOTE: you can cancel out of stoneskin by pressing the skill a second time while turned into a statue, meaning you don’t have to wait all 5 seconds to get out of this skill.

The skill is also an aggro drop, and gets you out of combat. Just cast it and then cancel it and you will no longer be in combat. It is possible to do this to switch brooches mid fight and double brooch again, but I really don’t recommend doing this. You lose more DPS doing the stoneskin cancel than you do just continuing to hit the boss.

I don’t recommend glyphing this skill because even with the glyph, the cooldown is still quite long, and you barely use this anyway.

This is a very good “supporting” skill for your other skills and does very high damage by itself. However the innate crit chance of the Nova skill is actually quite low, being around 50-60%. It has the same crit glyph as Arcane Pulse, except it last for 4 seconds instead of 5.

A very useful application of Nova is that it works like mystic’s corruption ring. You take half damage while casting this skill. If it’s off cooldown and you can use it to tank something, then go for it, but I don’t recommend saving Nova to tank a hit.

You should always glyph Hastened (cast speed), Keen (Crit Factor buff), and Energetic (cooldown) on Nova, and you can (optionally) glyph Grounded (endurance) on Nova which helps a lot if your gear isn’t that great, especially in Harrowhold. This glyph gives you 12 endurance, and it’s up for most of, if not the whole fight once you cast it, because the duration of the glyph is longer than Nova’s cooldown.

This skill used to be really strong, but this patch it isn’t that useful. There are a lot of things you can’t iframe with it, like the ‘S’ attack on RK9. It can still iframe most of the red aoes however.

If you have it glyphed, it’s a 2 sec invulnerability spell, but as of the VSNM patch, they increased the cooldown a lot.

An example of how broken this skill used to be (or rather was, since this is an older dungeon) the Nightmare Dakuryon (2nd boss) fight in Shadow Sanguinary (Hard Mode). By abusing Warp Barrier you can do something similar to the following video. (Pre revamp gameplay. Ignore the rotation):

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi7z758srBE[/embedyt]

Guide PvE Sorcerer – Recommended Glyph Builds

My Standard dungeon glyph page:

Mana conservation glyph build: I recommend this build if you don’t have a glistening or just don’t want to spend as much gold on pots. You will probably still be potting a lot as this is a sorc after all.

You can also unglyph warp barrier completely and take the hail storm mana glyph if you feel you don’t need warp.

Guide PvE Sorcerer – Rotations

(These rotations were built assuming the boss does not move)

The first thing to remember is that you should always start a rotation with Hail Storm, and from then on, cast it off cooldown. The reason I say this is because the cast time is so short and it’s free damage.

Starting rotation (Mana Boost)

Ideally, Lightning Strike would keep resetting but unfortunately this will never happen you will need to know what to do if lightning strike doesn’t reset at all, so let’s take a look at that:

These two are the filler skills and should always be replaced with a Lightning Strike if it is off cooldown.

You would have to either forego, or use more skills depending on your attack speed buffs at the time (Lancer Adrenaline Rush + Root Beer etc), and your etchings. I do highly recommend using Lein’s Dark Root Beer for Mana Boost.

Outside of Mana Boost

The following assumes that Lightning doesn’t reset. You would still spam Lightning if it resets. Cast Arcane the instant it comes off cooldown and repeat the rotation.

Important note: If you are having trouble fitting in all of these skills, the most important thing is that you get the priority skills off.

If you play with high ping then you will have to replace flaming barrage with frost sphere or just not use it.

Ideally, if you were guaranteed lightning resets, you would use something similar to this:

Final note regarding rotations: These rotations are a guideline. They work on paper if you assume the boss is a sandbag (doesn’t move). Of course you will have to use re positioning skills sometimes and won’t be able to perfectly get the entire rotation off 100% of the time but you can certainly try.

If you got perfect reset RNG against a boss that moves a lot such as Perimos, you would still use Meteor Strike, as you want to get it off before the boss turns around. Then you can re position and continue using Lightning Strike.

Tips & Tricks

• Elin is the best race for sorcerers. The animations are significantly faster. Becoming an elin if you are not already is recommended.
• Increase your FoV (Field of View) if you haven’t already. I recommend 80+ FoV and at least 100+ FoV in Harrowhold. To do so, go to your TERA installation folder then find Client/S1Game/Config and open S1input.ini. Add these two lines: Bindings=(Name=”end”,Command=”fov 100″) and Bindings=(Name=”home”,Command=”fov 80″). You can enter another button for the keys. If you use Shinrameter then you’ll have to change home to something else. End still works with Shinra. Personally I play with 100 FoV all the time.
• You can iframe out of the casting animation of nova, the charging animation of arcane pulse, and the ending of the animation of meteor strike with both backstep and jaunt.
• Flaming barrage will not back crit unless your character is actually facing the boss’ back, not just your camera. Same with hailstorm, and the 2 projectile skills; void pulse and frost sphere.

Check below for other useful guides:

PvE Archer Best Rotation

Guide PvE Lancer

PvE Warrior DPS Build

PvE Mystic Guide

PvE Reaper High Damage

Ninja Class Melee and Ranged Attacks

PvE Slayer Build

PvE Berserker DPS Build

PvE Brawler Best Tank Class

Gunner PvE Build

Priest Guide after Godsfall Patch