In Season 4, the Season Theme revolves around helping out the Iron Wolves. Compared to past themes, this one does not offer any borrowed power as the entire game has been redesigned with new itemization and crafting options, increasing player power substantially across the board. Instead, you can gather reputation similar to the Vampire Bounty Board from Season 2 to unlock rewards that supercharge your leveling journey to 100 with extra items, crafting materials and eventually even a Resplendent Spark to craft an uber unique.

We recommend to follow the seasonal questline until you unlock the reputation system, check which rewards suit you most and then follow your regular leveling path. To learn more, check out our full Season 4 guide for more information.

Sorcerers can choose two skills to put into Enchantment Slots, where they provide powerful passive bonuses. Ball Lightning Sorcerer uses the following Enchantments:

In different variants of the build our Enchantment Slots may change:

If there's was a competition between Sorcerer skills for who can consume the most Mana, Ball Lightning would take the first place and it wouldn't be even close. Not only does it have the highest Mana cost at 50, but it also attacks faster than any other spell and its Enhanced Ball Lightning upgrade incentivizes us to stack even more Attack Speed. Luckily there are several tools at our disposal to help us tackle this monstrous Mana problem.

This Aspect give us a lot of Mana and it works at full effectiveness, regardless of how many enemies (if any) we are currently fighting. Four out of six our active skills have a Cooldown, so there are plenty of opportunities to activate it.

This passive is our backup source of Mana. Theoretically, it provides enough Mana to infinitely spam Ball Lightning all on its own, but in practice there's one problem. Crackling Energy needs to be picked up, meaning you need to waste time running after it. For that reason we never want this passive to be our main Mana source and instead use it just to help us quickly replenish Mana after a fight or as an emergency.

And finally we come to the real way of solving all our Mana problems: just find good gear. It's often easier said than done, but nonetheless, this is what we have to do. There are 3 key stats we are looking for:

Cooldown Reduction helps us in two ways: it lets us proc Prodigy’s Aspect more often and it increases our Unstable Currents uptime. The latter is important because Unstable Currents can cast Lightning Spears, which give us Conjuration Mastery stacks.

Mana Per Second is also extremely important to have because all our Mana Regeneration bonuses are useless if we don't have high enough base Mana Regen. The other Mana-related stats such as Resource Generation, Resource Cost Reduction, or Chance to Regain Mana on Hit can also be useful but we don't have any slots where we can get them without sacrificing a lot of damage so in the optimal endgame setup we only have these stats on some Uniques (Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop, Harlequin Crest, Ring of Starless Skies).

Carefully check your Paragon Boards to ensure correct board rotation. Glyphs go from a radius of 3 to 4 when they reach level 15!

We need to level up our Glyphs to activate their Additional Bonus with surrounding nodes. For some Glyphs, we max our bonuses by allocating every relevant node in range, while on others we take the minimum required for the Additional Bonus only. Because Glyphs at level 15 increase their radius, we need to prioritize leveling them by completing Nightmare Dungeons. After that, we prioritize leveling our strongest glyphs to level 21.

Note that there are some Glyph position swaps and a few adjustments to surrounding Paragon nodes once they reach level 15. See the first three steps in the Paragon progression above for details. The setup displayed by default is the final version of the build.

For maximum efficiency, follow the order outlined below. First, level your Glyphs to level 15 and then do a second pass to get them all to 21.

When you start diving into the Endgame, you don't have all the tools available to achieve the final build version. Let us guide you through different progression points to give you a smooth transition from our Leveling Guides to the final build version.

Many of your Skill choices depend on what Legendary Aspects and Unique items are available to you. While we can guarantee, that everyone has access to the same Codex of Power Aspects, the progression might be different for everyone!

Hardcore requires you to build into more defenses. While this build is tanky enough to be played in hardcore as-is, here's some adjustments you could make it even tankier:

Learn about the important build scaling mechanics and stat weights.

To enable your build to perform optimally, you need to reach certain Stat "Breakpoints". Some examples are reaching 100% to Critically Strike, or 20 Resource per second. Since there are many values of these stats on different pieces of gear, read the checklist below and refer to the recommended Tempered Affixes and Masterwork Crits ↑. Desirable Greater Affixes will always be the top three recommended Affixes.

This build benefits a lot from the following Consumables:

Once a guide is released, many players have questions on why and how we are approaching certain choices. In this section you can find the answers to the questions that have been asked the most.

Learn all you need to know about how to scale this build in the endgame.

Written by Northwar
Reviewed by Chewingnom