Several points:
First, lightning pool and morphs are very useful on stationary fights. However, when a boss moves, they lose a lot of impact (often only hitting ~25% of their duration.) This can make your day go south very fast. You really need to know that a fight won't waste your cast for this skill!
Second, consider Entropy if you are using the surge setup for spell damage boosting. The duration is a little less, but you get the bonus to max magicka, as well as a boost to HP with the right morph, and you are using an ability that does damage to a boss rather than completely missing that cast (75% duration, but nearly the damage of a primary nuke plus all your attacks hit harder, plus 1% magicka regen, plus a 20% to your next nuke additional.) I see everyone using surge, which loses so many passive benefits, and the only things it does better are duration and weapon attacks (which, honestly, in a magicka build, are a tiny fragment of your dps.) On top of that, it costs a measly 158 base compared to surge's 525... and get's a larger cost reduction from passives in terms of % (ending values are ~120 vs ~470 *I'm not calculating or looking that up right now!*)
Third, consider using a weapon swap spot for any toggle skills, and one for Dark Conversion. I know that 4 seconds without doing dps seems like a big waste at first, but here's why: You end up with a magicka bar that is basically full again. Consider that staffs do about 1.5k per second, maybe 1.8k top end when your mix heavy and light perfectly. With decent gear, that is less than 1 full nuke. Meanwhile, the magicka you regained with the staff is, from what I can see, ~1/4 of what you gain from the conversion skill. Meaning in terms of sustained output, you get more big hits overall, and more than make up for the lost time (using the staff is still good practice when ~10 seconds or less will see the boss dead anyway, as you won't miss the extra magicka at that point.)
Fourth, when you have sufficient hp, magicka regen and the twilight with magicka restore stack. This means that the food giving you, say, 300 magicka regen will actually give 330. By combining these and skipping on one of the spells you would otherwise use, you can prolong your nuking times and have less recovery/down time in the fight. It may or may not be worth it, depending upon the fights... but when it is you will also have a healer who loves you for that regen. *Note that only 1 sorc with a regen pet is of benefit, at least outside of the dps the pet does... ~1.4k/second on my main with rather low spell damage on his sets, without counting crits (pets crit with your bonuses, so if you have 40% crit chance so do they... and they also crit harder if you have something that boosts crit damage from spells.)*
Finally, Ultimates can be very situational... but as a DPS the top two are probably Meteor and the Storm Atronach (greater, preferably, for the higher single target damage overall... as single target is a weak spot with Meteor.) The alternatives for a Sorc are either utility or outperformed (although Star Wars Emperor style lightning is cool, the best use single target is for magicka regen *not terrible, but you are losing that burst of instant dps, and instead just have a light attack that hits like a nuke while you regen like a heavy attack, which can work... but I don't think it works as well as the other two,* and the AOE is honestly no better than using skills and/or Meteor... and the other damaging options are similarly just not enough damage to match them.)
» Edited on: 2015-04-13 23:09:15
» Edited on: 2015-04-13 23:09:34
» Edited on: 2015-04-13 23:14:04
