This build is aiming to provide great DPS (and insane AoE damage) while running around with nearly constant full ressources.

you can do 25k + single target DPS just by heavy attacking and maintaining you DoTs, which is basically what this build is about.

With this toon, I completed nearly everything in the game: flawless vMA, vDSA, every vet trial except vMoL, hardmodes and no deaths in vcos and vrom.

Race: Altmer is best due to additional elemental damage and max magicka, dunmer (since SotH) and breton would be your second and third choice.

Gear:

2x Infallible Aether
And
5x Elegance
Or
2x Infallible Aether
3x Elegance
2x Illambris


Jewelry:

3x Infallible Aether (Weapon damage enchant)


Weapons:

Main Bar: 1x Sharpened Maelstrom Lightning Staff (yes lightning, not inferno)
Off Bar: 1x Sharpened Maelstrom Inferno Staff (with Illambris, otherwise two sharpened torugs pact swords)

Alternatives: In full raids with coordinated buffing, TBS is still best in DPS - purposes. Plus, you can use another piece of medium or heavy armor to get 2% additional stats.

Few things:
1. The difference between the staffs is that heavy attacks with lightning and resto staffs are channeled. For this build, this means that EACH tick of the attacks gets the infallible aether buff, which is 1k per tick and thus 2k per second.
2. Elegance boosts your light and heavy attacks by additional 20%, so this is a freaking lot of damage that you deal just by channeling your heavy attacks. In addition to this, elegance boosts overload spams by 20%, so expect your overload to hit crazy hard.


3.
If you are recruited as an offheal, use a master/ vMA restostaff on your offbar and switch elegance for spell power cure! Resto staffs proc in the same way as lightning staffs, so you can provide your group with a ton of additional dps by marking targets between doing your heal rotation! The problem i'm trying to work on at the moment is ressource management for healers, but elemental drain and harness magicka usually help in that situation.

4. The infallible marks are inflicted with the first tick of heavy attacks. What i do in AoE fights is to just move the cursor from enemy to enemy to giv them all marks. This is especially welcome in trials and 4 man dungeons, as your buddies get a huge dps buff!

5. This is the most crucial part: Lightning staff attacks hit nearby enemies for 100% (and more due to passives!) of the damage done to your original target. The raidus is about the same as pulsar, so you can do up to 100k DPS in trash mobs just by putting down blockade, liquid lightning and channeling to one target in the mob.

6. Forget the usual sorc ressource management issue: With this build, you can run arund with nearly no mag recovery as you get a ton of ressources back from your heavy attacks.

7. Sorcs get an original buff of 5 % to shock damage.

8. The reason for putting Blockade on the inferno bar is the 20% increased dmg on burning targets. And with illambris, this ensures the double proc chance as it is your only flame aoe damage skill on a sorc. I tried scalding rune, but another aimed aoe just annoyed me too much.


Issues:
1. Defensive play: as soon as you cant channel your attacks anymore, you get into trouble! The low recovery does not qualify you for a defensive playstyle, but as a dps, you would be doing something wrong it that would be necessary anyway :P

2. Mobility: As long as you channel attacks, you have reduced movement speed. I didnt have any issues with this, but you need to adapt your gameplay to it!


Adjustments:

For vma, you need to switch out two skills: Put blockade on main bar, curse on back bar, add crystal frags for mages wrath and force pulse/crushing shock for velocious curse. Keep you shield up all the time, let enemies stand in blockade and liquid lightning and leftclick your way through. Overload hits crazy hard with elegance, so use it on bosses. On overload bar, I use ward, liquid lightning, surge, bound aegis, inner light.

When playing dual wield, put blockade on main bar and curse on back bar.