Sorcerer PVP Healer - Update 45 (Cyrodiil, Battlegrounds, Imperial City) - ESO

For raw healing output in CP-active Cyrodiil, Sorcerer, along with Nightblade, is the top dog of PVP healers. Power Surge provides a solid amount of healing on top of your regular heal-over-time skills (Radiating Regeneration + Echoing Vigor), and Sorcerers have unmatched mobility through Streak, making positioning a piece of cake. As of Update 41, they also have a valuable class burst heal with Vibrant Shroud. Finally, either morph of Negate is a powerful tool against enemy groups.

This build is made for Cyrodiil PVP, ideally in groups of 5 to 8, but I've also successfully played it with a group as small as 3. As with every healing build, the sets you run, as well as other build aspects, are largely determined by what the rest of your group is running. The specifics of this build are tuned to fit the group that I am currently playing with on Daggerfall Covenant PC/EU, but feel free to change any aspect of the build that you think you need in order to perform optimally.

UPDATE: I've also added a new build variant that can be used in Battlegrounds or to play more casually in Cyrodiil or Imperial City. It's more tanky than the other builds and has a crapload of sustain while still churning out decent heals. I'm making a separate build video to fully explain this build.

Sets

As said, I run these sets because they best fit my group. You can change them around, but doing so might have some consequences for your buff food.

Phoenix Moth Theurge - Phoenix Moth is one of the few useful medium armor support sets that you can one-bar. Another common one is Powerful Assault, but since that is already present in most groups, Phoenix Moth is usually the better option. Phoenix Moth just needs a heal to proc, and it will give Minor Force and Minor Courage to the target, increasing their critical damage by 10% and their spell and weapon damage respectively. While these buffs are undeniably useful, they might lose a bit of relevance in certain group compositions. For example, Arcanists can provide Minor Courage, while a skill like Race Against Time/Channelled Acceleration can grant Minor Force. But since we mostly play without any Arcanists, this is a good set to run. Another good reason to run Phoenix Moth is more selfish: the first 2 bonuses give you a big amount of stam recovery, helping us to run without any recoveries and without Jewels of Misrule/Orzorga's Smoked Bear Haunch. Instead, we can run Orzorga's Red Frothgar, which gives us better overall stats in the HP and magicka recovery departments.

I've added an alternative set-up with Powerful Assault that uses the same weights and traits. Note that this changes a few things: since we need to compensate for the loss of 2 lines of stamina recovery, we're running Orzorga's Smoked Bear Haunch (or Jewels of Misrule) for this set-up. That, in turn, gives us less magicka recovery, so we'll need to add a magicka recovery glyph to our Powerful Assault ring. These adjustments give us roughly the same stats as on our Phoenix Moth set-up.

Robes of Transmutation - Transmutation is a set that gives friendly targets more crit resistance. This set is often ran in combination with a set that does something similar: Rallying Cry. But since Rallying Cry is often worn by DDs, Transmutation is the ‘safer’ option when you want to avoid double-dipping. As with Phoenix Moth, Robes of Transmutation has 2 very useful bonuses available to you at all time: 2 lines of increase magicka recovery. The combination of these sets makes it really easy to sustain without sacrificing jewelry glyphs, our Mundus blessing or your buff food choice to achieve this.

Ozezan the Inferno - The monster set choice is, again, down to the group composition. Usually the ones you have to have covered are Ozezan the Inferno and Symphony of Blades, and I am currently running the former. It grants a unique armor buff to targeted allies, while also granting them Minor Vitality, increasing their healing received and shield strength by 6%. It also has a line of magicka recovery, which is always useful. Keep in mind that the armor buff procs only on overheals, and the Minor Vitality buff only procs on actual heals. (Overheals are heals applied to a target already at 100% health. They typically make up around 80% of your heals.)

Snow-Treaders - The Snow-Treaders mythic is essential for healers in CP-active Cyrodiil. In exchange for not being able to sprint while in combat, Snow-Treaders will make you immune to all snares (i.e. soft CC), such as Bombard. Remember that you will still be able to get stunned (i.e. hard CC). The snare immunity gives several advantages, the obvious one of course being that you will not be stuck in one place nearly as much, so positioning is easier. Another advantage is that you will not have to dedicate one of your slots to having a snare removal, and you will not have to waste any stamina on roll-dodging when you don't have your snare removal at hand. This makes it so that we can sustain ourselves perfectly with just over 800 base stam recovery. You can run another mythic, the prime candidate being Death-Dealer's Fete, but expect to run into trouble with your stamina sustain if you do not switch your buff food and/or jewelry glyphs. The inability to sprint in combat is slightly annoying, but it won't affect us since we will have plenty of speed built into our build to still be faster than most players in Cyrodiil even without sprinting.

Alternative sets - I run with a group where popular sets like Powerful Assault, Spell-Power Cure and Rallying Cry are nearly always covered. If you do not have such luxury, you may want to consider running these sets yourself. Realize, though, that you might have to change your buff food to compensate for the lack of stamina recovery, and add recovery glyphs/more light armor pieces to get back some of the lost magicka sustain (see the paragraph above about Powerful Assault for an example). To this end, you may also want to consider Arena weapons such as the Maelstrom Arena or Dragonstar Arena Restoration Staves instead of a monster set. If you do run a monster set, Symphony of Blades and Earthgore are acceptable alternatives to Ozezan. For an optimal set-up, always discuss beforehand with your raid leader and fellow healer(s).

I have also added a Spell Power Cure set-up. Most healers/groups will 1-bar SPC, but it can also work if you one-bar it since it procs on any overheal. It will require high APM gameplay and I highly recommend using a Breton for this spec.

Enchants, weights & traits

Enchants are pretty straightforward. All tri-stat glyphs on armor, all increase spell harm glyphs on jewelry, absorb glyphs on frontbar Swords (these don't matter much, to be honest), and an increase weapon/spell damage glyph on your Restoration Staff.

Armor traits are pretty flexible; the only thing that's set in stone is to run Reinforced on any heavy pieces. The rest is a mix of Impenetrable, Divines and Well-Fitted. You can prioritize the ones you think you'll need most and adjust if necessary. Sturdy is not terrible either.

Jewelry traits are all Swift. If you play a race that has a speed bonus, like Orc or Bosmer, you can replace a Swift jewelry piece with Infused. Why Swift? Because fast movement is everything in more organized groups. Most high-end groups use it, so if you don't, you're already at a disadvantage. The combination of full Swift jewelry and Streak also means that we'll never have trouble catching up with the group despite Snow-Treaders.

Weapon traits are Nirnhoned (main hand) + Powered (off-hand) on frontbar, and Powered on backbar. This combination gives us the strongest healing.

I run with a Dual Wielded Swords frontbar because the significant increase in weapon damage means that every healing skill we cast on this bar will be stronger, even when you take Restoration Staff passives into account. We also get access to the Quick Cloak skill, which I'll explain in a bit.

My current weight set-up is 2 Heavy, 4 Medium and 1 Light. I find that this combination gives me the best balance of survivability, sustain, and spell/weapon damage (it is important to remember that, unintuitive as it sounds, Medium Armor traits are more useful to healers than Light Armor ones). You can add an additional Heavy piece if you want more survivability, but I personally don't find this necessary.

Skills

Sorcerers have a highly versatile skill kit for healers. I will tell you what I run and why.

Streak is first and foremost our mobility tool we use to position ourselves. You may also use it to stun, but be sure to discuss this with your raid leader/DDs to make sure you don't mess up their ulti-dump by granting enemies CC immunity at the wrong time. If your group has issues with this, run the Ball of Lightning morph instead. I personally prefer Streak as it gives me the ability to help with crowd control should it be necessary.

Power Surge grants us Major Sorcery/Brutality, which is nice in case there is no Dragonknight, or the DK present has bad uptimes. More importantly, it passively does a significant amount of healing and it only has to be activated twice per minute.

Bound Aegis and Inner Light are slotted for their passive benefits and are not normally activated during battle.

Quick Cloak grants us Major Evasion and briefly gives us Major Expedition, making us even faster.

Energy Orb gives some extra healing to nearby allies, who can activate the synergy to recover resources. Very important for group sustain, but don't cast during damage pushes as it might override damage synergies. You may consiuder this our flex spot, in case there is another skill you really want or need to run.

Echoing Vigor and Radiating Regeneration are our heal-over-time skills that should be up at all times. Echoing Vigor reaches up to 6 people and Regeneration up to 3 people, so you may need to cast multiple times per rotation to cover everyone.

Healing Springs is a ground AOE heal that you can put under your group members when they are standing still or in their path when they are on the move. Gives a decent amount of healing and gives you extra magicka recovery.

For our burst heal, we have 2 choices. Vibrant Shroud is the brand-new skill for Sorcs, and can serve as a group burst heal. We can put it on our frontbar so it can benefit from the superior Dual Wield passives. Shroud has a smaller range than our other option, Blessing of Restoration, so while the heal itself is stronger, it is more difficult to land, especially if your group is not stacking tightly. Another benefit of Shroud is that it applies Minor Vitality to allies and Major Maim to enemies hit. We will also grant our allies Minor Prophecy through the skill tree passive. In practice, Vibrant Shroud gives more useful passives but results in lower HPS than Blessing of Restoration. This effect becomes stronger the bigger and more casual your group is. Whichever skill you choose, make sure to also move Inner Light and Replenishing Barrier to the bar that your burst heal is on. To illustrate how either skill bar set-up should look, you can check the Phoenix Moth Theurge and Spell Power Cure build set-ups I have for the Blessing of Restoration variant, and the Powerful Assault set-up for the Vibrant Shroud variant.

Our ultimates are Absorption Field and Replenishing Barrier. Absorption Field's primary function is that it will cancel any magicka-based spells from your enemies within its radius, and it will make them unable to cast such spells as long as they are standing in the ulti. Good to put on chokepoints. You may also use the other morph, Suppression Field, which damages the enemies instead of healing your allies. The damage nor the healing are all that amazing, so either morph is fine. Meanwhile Replenishing Barrier is there to allow your group to survive heavy pressure. Kind of an emergency button. It also gives us a small amount of extra magicka recovery on the bar it's slotted, because of the Support skill tree passives.

Scribing has recently been added to the game. I've added a separate build (build #4) with an example of how to include it in your healing. The best choices for a base skill would be either Mender's Bond or Ulfsild's Contingency. The best ‘traits’ on each skill highly depend on what's available in your group and what's still needed. Anything involving a useful buff or a boost to sustain will come in handy. Try it out for yourself! The healing on the skills themselves is not that great (anymore), so use them only if you want to access the buffs they provide. They are by no means necessary for this build, either.

Consumables

Buff food: Orzorga's Red Frothgar gives us amazing magicka recovery and boosts our health a lot. We don't need the extra stamina recovery of Jewels/Bear Haunch because we are based. Except if we use Powerful Assault, then we do run Bear Haunch…

Consumables: We will primarily use Tri-Stat potions just to make the sustain as comfy as possible. You may alternatively use Immovability potions.

Mundus

The Ritual is the only mundus you should consider as a group healer.

Attributes

As of Update 41, I put 34 points into health as an Imperial, and 36 into health as a Breton. This gives me around 33-35k health depending on the set-up. The rest goes into magicka. You can put more points into health if you want a bigger buffer. I would consider 32k health the minimum for running in Gray Host. Note that these numbers include buff food, but not Minor Toughness (Warden health buff).

Curses

We play as a mortal because the primary cause of death of healers is running out of resources, and we should have plenty of health to avoid getting overwhelmed by some ganker. If you play in a small group and you are the only healer, you may consider Vampirism 3 for the Undeath passive, but in my current group it is not worth the sustain penalty. I know this is an unpopular opinion but you can really ween your healers off Vampirism and reap the rewards if they don't play like headless chickens.

Race

I currently play Sorcerer on a few different races. On DC I play as an Imperial, because that is just what my DC Sorc happens to be. I originally did not even make her as a healer, but regardless, Imperial is a pretty solid choice for this play style. With bonuses to health and stamina, it is easy to get your attributes to a comfortable level, and the 6% reduction in all skill costs makes Imperial a top tier race for any healing spec. On AD, I am a Breton. With Breton's 7% cost reduction of magicka skills and bonus to magicka recovery and max magicka, it is a strong contender for being the best healing race. On EP, where I only play on Ravenwatch, I am an Argonian. While in my experience it falls a little behind Imperial and Breton due to not having a sustain bonus apart from the potion buff, it is still a solid healing race that can crank out good numbers. Races like Dark Elf, Nord or even Wood Elf would also work fine. In fact, any race would work with this build, but you may need some compromises when it comes to jewelry glyphs or  maximum attributes.

Other stuff

As said, this build is merely what works best for my group. Feel free to use it as a template and tweak it to your liking. If you have any questions about this build, feel free to message me through Youtube or in-game. My name is degonyte in both places.

Gossamer is still a bad set.

Changelog

2024/02/28 - Added a second set-up with Powerful Assault.

2024/03/01 - Added a third set-up with SPC that is still a work in progress and needs to be tested on live.

2024/03/11 - Improved the build for Update 41 by adding Vibrant Shroud. Moved Inner Light and Replenishing Barrier to the frontbar as it is now our main burst heal bar. Adjusted the attributes to account for the changes in Sorc passives. Added new screenshots showing the exact builds on both Imperial and Breton. Also added a new video link showcasing gameplay of the previous (but very similar) version of the build.

2024/03/17 - Added more explanation about Vibrant Shroud vs. Blessing of Restoration. Added back Blessing to 2 of the build variants. Adjusted attributes of SPC build and added Superstar screenshot from live server.

2024/03/26 - Added a build video link.

2024/04/08 - Edited the information about racial passives and attributes, and took away the ‘WIP’ disclaimer from the SPC set-up as I was able to try it out and it worked fine.
2024/07/30 - Added a 4th build that includes an example of how to use scribing in your build. Edited the build name to indicate it's been updated for Update 42.

2024/08/05 - Added a 5th build for Battlegrounds and more casual Cyrodiil play.
2024/08/24 - Added my new video for Update 43. This mainly concerns the 5th build variant I've added. To get info on my default build, look up my video for Update 41; the build is pretty much unchanged.
2025/03/10 - Build checked for any changes for Update 45, but no alterations had to be made and the build is still fully up to date for the current patch.