The Sorcerer is one of Diablo 4's most versatile classes to make builds for. They have great defensive skills, solid core skills, and powerful ultimate abilities with great uptime when you reach the endgame. While leveling the Sorcerer can be tricky, their build diversity in higher World Tiers is surprisingly varied.
No build showcases this better than a Ball Lightning build. Taking inspiration from the Paladin's iconic hammer build in Diablo 2, this setup fills the screen with dozens of Ball Lightning orbs that orbit your character, destroying enemies with a barrage of electricity and lucky hit effects. This guide will showcase how to turn your Sorcerer into a walking storm of elemental destruction, covering everything from skills to optimal gear choices.
Updated July 26, 2023, by Charles Burgar: Season of the Malignant has made some major balance changes to the Sorcerer class, generally nerfing the class' DPS in endgame content. The good news is that this season's Malignant Hearts are fantastic and nearly offset these changes. We've updated this guide with up-to-date skill and affix recommendations, Malignant Heart suggestions for this season, and a refreshed D4Builds link.
Build Overview
Pros | Cons |
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Turn your Sorcerer into a walking thunderstorm with this Ball Lightning build. We use the Gravitational Aspect to cause Ball Lightning to orbit our character, allowing you to deal damage by walking up to enemies. If you've played a Hammerdin build in Diablo 2, you'll feel right at home here. We aggressively scale attack speed, Crackling Energy, and lucky hit effects to stunlock our enemies to death with dozens of Ball Lightning orbs.
With the right gear, this build can spam Ball Lightnings as fast as your attack speed allows, and you'll have fairly high uptime on the Unstable Currents ultimate to give yourself a massive DPS boost against tankier Elites and bosses. While our build does rely on crowd control (CC for short) to deal damage, we inflict so many CC effects that we can instantly stun bosses to inflict massive damage. While this build does require good endgame gear to work, you can easily transition to this build from any Arc Lash configuration, making this a great build to try if you're already playing a lightning Sorcerer.
Skills And Passives
Skill | Augments |
|---|---|
Arc Lash | Enhanced: If Arc Lash's initial swipe critically hits, it swipes an additional time. |
Glinting: Hitting a stunned enemy with Arc Lash reduces your cooldowns by 0.15 seconds. | |
Fire Bolt | None |
Chain Lightning | Enhanced: Chain Lightning gains +3% critical chance per bounce. |
Destructive: When Chain Lightning critically strikes, it has a 25% chance to form Crackling Energy. | |
Teleport | Enhanced: Reduces cooldown by 0.5s per enemy hit, up to 3s. |
Shimmering: Gain 30% damage reduction for 5s after teleporting. | |
Frost Nova | Enhanced: Killing enemies frozen by this skill reduces its cooldown by 1s, up to 4s per cast. |
Mystical: Enemies frozen by this skill are vulnerable for 4s, increased to 6s against bosses. | |
Flame Shield | None |
Lightning Spear | Enhanced: After critically striking, Lightning Spear gains +5% stacking critical chance for its duration. |
Invoked: Lightning Spear stuns targets for 2 seconds when it critically hits. | |
Ball Lightning | Enhanced: Ball Lightning's damage rate is increased by 200% of your attack speed bonus. |
Mages: After hitting close enemies 50 times with Ball Lightning, your next cast of it stuns enemies hit for 1 second. | |
Unstable Currents | Enhanced: While Unstable Currents is active, gain +25% attack speed. |
Passives
Paragon Board
This Paragon Board showcased above is on a level 93 character with max renown and every Altar of Lilith discovered.
The D4Builds link showcases a Paragon Board intended for a level 85 character.
Enchantments
Enchantments | |
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Fire Bolt | Direct damage from skills applies up to an additional 26% burn that lasts for 8 seconds. |
Chain Lightning (Dungeons) | Chain Lightning forms automatically after spending 100 mana. |
Ball Lightning (Single Target) | Lucky Hit: Critical Strikes have a 25% chance of spawning a static Ball Lightning. |
This build uses the Fire Bolt and Chain Lightning enchantments for most content. Fire Bolt causes your attacks to burn, allowing this build to benefit from the Devouring Blaze passive and burning-related passives in the Paragon Board. We take Chain Lightning since we spend over 100 mana per second, allowing us to spam this skill for free. Since it critically hits so frequently, this is a great source of Crackling Energy.
If you're fighting a tough boss and need more single-target DPS, swap Chain Lightning with Ball Lightning. This will spawn a static Ball Lightning when you get a lucky critical hit. While this effect seems rare on paper, it frequently triggers once you spawn a few Ball Lightning projectiles. The best part is this enchantment can trigger itself, leading to a major ramp-up in damage the longer you're fighting the target.
Recommended Gear
Legendary Aspects And Uniques | |
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Slot | Affix |
Helmet | Aspect of Might Basic skills grant 20% damage reduction for 6 seconds. |
Chest | Raiment of the Infinite (Unique) Teleporting pulls in close targets and stuns them. Teleport's cooldown is 20% longer. |
Gloves | Fists of Fury (Unique) Your attacks randomly deal 1-300% of their normal damage. |
Legs | Aspect of Disobedience Gain Armor for each instance of damage. Stacks up to 30%. |
Boots | Aspect of the Ghostwalker While Unstoppable and for 4 seconds after, gain 25% movement speed and the ability to walk through enemies. |
Amulet | Elementalist's Aspect Core or Mastery skills cast at or above 100 Mana gain +60% critical strike chance. |
Ring 1 | Accelerating Aspect Critical strikes with core skills increase your attack speed by 25% for 5 seconds. |
Ring 2 | Prodigy's Aspect Using a cooldown restores 25 mana. |
Weapon 1 | Gravitational Aspect Ball Lightning orbits around you, but its damage is decreased by 10%. |
Weapon 2 | Aspect of Control Deal 35% more damage to stunned, immobilized, or frozen targets. |
Item Affixes | |
Important Affixes |
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Before you can play this build, you will need the Gravitational Aspect. This causes your Ball Lightning orbs to orbit around your character for their duration, making it much easier to hit targets. We also highly recommend that you use the Raiment of the Infinite and Fists of Fate Uniques on this build. Raiment gives you a way to group targets together, synergizing nicely with Ball Lightning. Fists of Fate is amazing since it gives us another damage scalar and a source of immobilization, triggering Devouring Blaze's secondary effect. These gloves also allow us to stun bosses in a couple of seconds since we're inflicting three different CC effects per hit—daze, immobilize, and stun.
Fists of Fate Alternative
If you do not own the Fists of Fate Unique gloves, you can use a Legendary pair of gloves with attack speed, critical chance, and primary resource restore chance. Equip the Aspect of Retribution on your gloves, then replace your boot Aspect with Burning Embers to give Flame Shield the ability to immobilize targets.
Beyond those items, you'll want to focus on damage and survivability. Might and Disobedience grant damage resistance and armor, respectively. Ghostwalker gives you a massive movement speed bonus after teleporting, and Prodigy's Aspect gives you a way to restore your mana in the unlikely event that no Crackling Energy spawns.
For damage, we use Elementalist's Aspect on our amulet to reach capped critical strike chance with Ball Lightning when it's cast above 100 mana. With how good our mana sustain is, this condition is met more often than not. For attack speed, we use Accelerating to gain a permanent 25% attack speed buff from our Chain Lightning enchantment. While both of these Aspects are great, our main source of damage is through Control, giving us a 35% damage buff against stunned, immobilized, and frozen targets. Fists of Fate ensures targets are always immobilized. If you want to further increase your damage, you can drop Prodigy's Aspect for any other damage Aspect; this build's mana sustain is still great without Prodigy equipped.
Malignant Hearts
Season of the Malignant characters can socket Malignant Hearts into jewelry, acting as a secondary Legendary Aspect. These effects are quite powerful and make this Ball Lightning build even stronger. Here's what we recommend:
- The Calculated (Devious): After spending 150 mana, your next attack stuns enemies hit for 2 seconds.
- Tempting Fate (Vicious): You gain 60% critical strike damage, but your non-critical strikes deal 15% less damage.
- The Picana (Vicious): Critical strikes electrically charge the enemy for 2.5 seconds, causing lightning to arc between them and any other charged enemy. Lightning damage scales with item power.
The Calculated is a great fit for this build since we spend so much mana. This allows your Ball Lightning projectiles to stun with every tick of damage, allowing us to drop the Mage's Ball Lightning upgrade for Wizard's instead. Your Ball Lightning projectiles can now stun targets and spawn Crackling Energy, making this build much stronger against bosses.
Tempting Fate is a ton of critical damage wrapped in a small package. This hearty offsets most of the critical affix nerfs this season, so we highly recommend you use it. Since you're using the Elementalist Aspect, non-crits are fairly rare.
The Picana is a nice source of added damage to this build. Critically hitting a target will electrocute them. If you electrocute multiple enemies, each target will zap each other with lightning, dealing heavy damage. This helps speed up the build's clearspeed, making it competitive with more popular builds like Ice Shards and Flame Wall.
Leveling The Build
We do not recommend that you level with Ball Lightning, as its damage is highly reliant on the Gravitational Aspect and spamming as many Ball Lightning casts as possible. For leveling, we recommend using a standard Arc Lash or Ice Shards setup to get through the first few World Tiers. An Arc Lash setup is ideal since both skill trees and Paragon Boards are fairly similar.
You'll want to transition to this build when you've achieved the following:
- You own the Gravitational Aspect. This is a drop-only Legendary effect.
- In Season of the Malignant, you can unlock the Gravitational Aspect in your Codex through the Season Journey.
- You have good rolls for the Prodigy and Control Aspects.
- You can grab the Static Surge Legendary node on the Paragon Board.
- You own multiple items that scale critical chance, life, and mana cost reduction.
- Cooldown reduction is also highly recommended.
Once you hit all of those thresholds, you can safely swap to this build and deal good damage. To scale your damage further, you'll want to level your Glyphs, unlock all five Glyph sockets for this build, acquire the Fists of Fate Unique gloves, Raiment of the Infinite Unique chest armor, and obtain gear with good affixes. Exact affix recommendations can be found in our "Recommended Gear" section and the D4Builds link.