ESO Skill Review: Crystal Shard and its Morphs

Today we are examining another skill in the Elder Scrolls Online. This time we are focusing on the Sorcerer skill, Crystal Shard, and its morphs which are Crystal Fragments and Crystal Weapon.

Let's find out what these skills do, and if they are worth using!

Crystal Shard is the basic version of this skill. It is the first skill in the Dark Magic skill line, which means you can start using it pretty much immediately after you create your Sorcerer.

The skill does quite a lot of damage, which makes it decent to use when you are leveling up your character, as it allows you to dispose of weaker enemies quite quickly. The problem with the basic version of the skill is that it has a lengthy cast time, which prevents you from doing anything else while you are charging up the skill.

However this skill changes drastically when it is morphed, and both options deal with the cast time issue in their own way.

Crystal Fragments is the magicka morph of this skill. If you just cast the skill by itself, it will function exactly the same as the unmorphed version, Crystal Shard.

But as the tooltip makes clear, that is not how the skill is supposed to be used. Rather, correct timing is the key to getting the best out of this morph.

Whenever you cast any other ability that costs Magicka, you have a 35% chance to “charge up” your crystal fragments, meaning that your next cast will not have a cast time, and will do a lot more damage too.

So generally on a magicka sorcerer you will be casting Damage over Time skills, buffs, or a spammable ability like Force Pulse, and whenever you hear the “ping” noise notifying you that your Crystal Fragments have charged up, you activate that skill next.

It takes a little bit of practice to adjust your rotation at short notice and get the most out of the skill, but doing so can give your Magicka Sorcerer a nice damage boost.

Crystal Fragments generally won't work too well for Stamina Sorcerers in spite of the hybridization changes, because you probably won't be using enough Magicka skills to charge up the fragments often enough to make it worth using.

On Magicka Sorcerers however, this is a good skill to use to augment your DPS in PvE, and to trouble your opponents with dangerous amounts of burst damage in PvP.

Crystal Weapon is the Stamina version of this skill, and it behaves very differently to the other morphs. This morph used to be pretty much useless, but it was reworked and is now a very powerful skill indeed.

It does away with the crystal projectile seen in the other two versions of the skill, and instead imbues your weapons when you cast it, which will cause your next two light or heavy attacks to do massive amounts of extra damage.

Again, this has applications in both PvE and PvP. In PvE you can basically use it as your spammable ability on a Stamina Sorcerer, as long as you are confident weaving a light attack between each cast of your skills. Utilizing this properly can grant you juicy amounts of damage.

This skill can also work to some degree on Magicka Sorcerers since the hybridization made all skills scale from whichever of your damage stats is higher (weapon or spell damage), but the problem with this currently is that it costs quite a lot of stamina to keep using the skill as often as you need to in order to get the most out of it.

Next patch however, if things remain unchanged from the High Isle PTS, there will be a very strong new Mythic item in called the Oakensoul Ring which will allow you to easily sustain this skill as your spammable on a Magicka sorcerer and get very high damage out of it, at the cost of being unable to switch bars. You can check out our article about that here.

Back to the current version of the game though - Crystal Weapon is also viable in PvP, again offering you massive amounts of burst damage. Both Magicka and Stamina sorcerers have reliable ways of dealing huge burst damage to their enemies before they can react, thanks to the different versions of this skill.

We hope you enjoyed this article about Crystal Shard and its morphs in ESO (Elder Scrolls Online). ESO is a massively multiplayer online game developed by Zenimax Online Studios.