Welcome to the Arc Lash Sorcerer Endgame Build Guide. This build dishes out incredibly high damage and it does that by spamming a skill that you unlock at level 2 - Arc Lash. Being a melee build it might not be the easiest build for conquering high tier Nightmare Dungeons but with smart usage of Frost Nova and Flame Shield your survivability is effectively infinite, so the sky is the limit.
The build deals damage by attacking very fast with Arc Lash, producing lots of Unstable Currents and Ball Lightning Enchantment procs. Since large portion of our damage comes from Lucky Hit procs, it naturally grows higher the more enemies we fight. But even against Bosses the damage is more than fine, provided they don't constantly run out of Ball Lightnings.
With all 4 Defensive Skills on our bar and extra Cooldown Reduction from Glinting Arc Lash, this build is about as tanky as a Sorcerer can get. Still, surviving in melee range in high tier Nightmare Dungeons is not easy and you will need to use your abilities very carefully.
The build doesn't need any specific Legendary Aspects to come online. Each one of them provides a small bonus and missing out on one or two is not gonna break the build. Rather than Aspects, this build is very hungry for stats. You need quite a lot of Cooldown Reduction, Attack Speed and Critical Strike Chance to make everything fall into place. Because of that you have to modify your build and play a weaker version until you get all these stats.
In this guide we teach you all you need to know to grow from Level 50 Crook with a tiny lightning whip into a Level 100 Avatar of Elemental Destruction whose mere presence instantly disintegrates all enemies. Let's dive into it!
This build guide assumes you have a Level 50 Character and finished the Campaign. Level up with our Ball Lightning Sorcerer Leveling Guide. If you are looking for a different Sorcerer playstyle, check out all of our Sorcerer Guides.
Very Mobile ✔
Low Cooldowns ✔
Good AoE Damage ✔
Does Not Use Mana ✔
❌ Melee
❌ Small AoE
❌ Needs A Lot of Stats
❌ Damage Needs Time to Ramp Up
Season 2 - Season of Blood
Diablo 4 Season 2 introduces a new questline to hunt down the Shadow Vampire forces of Lord Zir across Sanctuary. With Lilith's blood still residing within our bodies, the infliction put upon us is harnessed throughout our leveling, granting access to new Vampiric Powers. Completing the seasonal questline, partaking in the seasonal Blood Harvest event and collecting Potent Blood are the main ways of obtaining and empowering these abilities. Check out the full Season 2 Guide from Chewingnom to learn more!
How it works
- There are 22 Vampiric Powers, separated into 2 different types:
- 15 Minor Vampiric Powers - Require 1 to 3 Pacts to be activated.
- 7 Major Vampiric Powers - Require 6 Pacts to be activated.
- There are 3 different types of Pacts:
- Ferocity Pact
have a Crown icon. - Divinity Pacts
have a Chalice icon. - Eternity Pacts
have a Skull icon.
- Ferocity Pact
- Pacts can roll only on Armor pieces (Helm, Chest Armor, Gloves, Pants, Boots).
- Helms & Boots can have up to 3 Pacts, Pants can have up to 4, Chest & Gloves can have up to 5. This gives you 20 Pacts max!
- You can use Cleansing Acid - All to remove all Pacts from a piece of Armor and place new Standalone Pacts to meet your Powers requirements to activate. Cleansing Acid can be altered at the Alchemists to target 1 of the 3 Pacts only.
- Once you have equipped the right Pact Armor pieces, you can activate Vampiric Powers in the Sanguine Circle through the character screen. Powers require varying amounts of different types of Pacts, pay attention.
- You can use Potent Blood acquired from Blood Seekers to upgrade your Vampiric Powers from Level 1 to Level 3.
With this in mind, let's look at the top 5 best Vampiric Powers and how they impact this build:
Best-in-Slot Vampiric Powers
- Ravenous (Minor) - Simply provides unholy amounts Attack Speed for free. Great for any non-channeling build.
- Anticipation (Minor) - Reduces the cooldown of Unstable Currents by 20%, what else needs to be said?
- Hectic (Minor) - a shoe-in power for Basic Skill build. Greatly reduces all our cooldowns.
- Infection (Minor) - Adds a bit of damage and an extra stack for Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop.
- Moonrise (Major) - Gives even more Attack Speed and some Basic Skill Damage.
Alternative Vampiric Powers
- Accursed Touch (Major) - a different way to apply Vampiric Curse.
- Metamorphosis (Major) - applies Vampiric Curse and gives Unstoppable, which gives us damage bonus via Tibault's Will.
- Prey on the Weak (Minor) - Free ~1.4x multiplier when combined with one of Vampiric Curse powers.
- Domination (Minor) - Another Aspect Control.
Skill Tree
Active Skills
- Arc Lash is our main skill, it deals decent damage on its own but that's not the main reason we use it. Arc Lash has a very fast animation and hits twice on Crits, which is ideal for proccing various Lucky Hit effects, mainly Ball Lightning Enchantment and Static Discharge. On top of that the Cooldown Reduction from Glinting Arc Lash is absolutely invaluable for a build where every other skill has a cooldown.
- Unstable Currents is a huge damage buff for our build. It casts a random Shock Skill every time we cast Arc Lash, more than doubling its damage and Lucky Hit Chance. On top of that we get +25% Attack Speed, which is an extremely valuable stat for this build. Overall our DPS almost quadruples when Unstable Currents is up, so we stack all possible sources of Cooldown Reduction to have it more often.
- Fireball and Ball Lightning are only here to be put into Enchantment Slots.
- We get Destructive Charged Bolts to benefit from the damage reduction when our Ultimate casts the spell.
- Teleport is our main mobility skill, which also serves as a CC break.
- Frost Nova is both a defensive and offensive skill. It keeps us safe by Freezing all enemies in place and also dramatically increases our damage output by making them Vulnerable.
- Ice Armor gives us a huge Barrier. Since we don't get any upgrade to this skill, we can remove all points from it when we find an Amulet with Defensive Skill ranks.
- Flame Shield provides even more defense, as well as some healing.
Passive Skills
- Conjuration Mastery provides a lot of damage when our Ultimate summons multiple Lightning Spears.
Enchantment Slots
Sorcerers can choose two skills to put into Enchantment Slots, where they provide powerful passive bonuses. Arc Lash Sorcerer uses the following Enchantments:
- Ball Lightning Enchantment deals a lot of damage and produces Crackling Energy for Overflowing Energy.
- Fireball gives us larger AoE coverage, which helps us deal with large crowds of enemies
The second Enchantment Slot can sometimes change. Teleport can be used for mobility while speedfarming. Fire Bolt lets us access extra damage and defense from Burning-related effects when taking on high tier Nightmare Dungeons.
Learn more details and how to unlock this class specification in our full Sorcerer Enchantment Slots Guide.
Paragon Board
Level the Paragon Board by scrolling. Each step optimizes progression.
Glyphs
Glyphs drop from everything once you hit level 50. You can only find each Glyph once so it doesn't take long until you have them all. After finding them, you need to level up your Glyphs by completing Nightmare Dungeons. At level 15 Glyphs increase their radius, which makes it much easier to activate their Additional Bonus.
Placeholder Glyphs
- Elementalist
Glyph Leveling Priorities
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.
Level 15
- Control
- Reinforced
- Territorial
- Destruction
- Exploit
- Adept
Level 21
- Destruction
- Control
- Territorial
- Exploit
- Reinforced
- Adept
There are a total of 225 Paragon Points. Starting with level 50 you gain 4 Paragon Points per level, plus 20 from Renown, and 4 from Altars of Lilith.
Gameplay
The Arc Lash Sorcerer is a pretty straightforward build. There is only one big decision to make: whether or not to pop Unstable Currents. Hint: the answer is usually "Why not?".
- Start off a fight by Teleporting in and using Frost Nova to Freeze the enemies and make them Vulnerable. If you have it ready, and enemies are formidable enough, also activate Unstable Currents.
- Start swinging away with Arc Lash and spawning Ball Lightnings under the enemies.
- After enemies unfreeze and start fighting back, use Ice Armor to protect yourself.
- If fight is continues for more than a few seconds, use Teleport whenever it's up to refresh Shimmering Teleport buff, proc Protection, and just for fun.
- Keep Flame Shield on standby for when shit hits the fan.
- After the fight is over make sure to pick up some Crackling Energy before teleporting forward. This will let you proc Overflowing Energy, resetting your Unstable Currents and Teleport.
Resource & Cooldown Management
This build does not use Mana and is filled to the brim with Cooldown Reduction effects. In most cases no management is necessary, so feel free to spam all the buttons. The only thing you need to pay attention to is conditional CDR from Enhanced Frost Nova and Enhanced Teleport. Try to hit at least 2-3 enemies when you cast these spells.
Endgame Gear & Skill Progression
When you start diving into the Endgame, you don't have all the tools available to achieve the final build versions. Let us guide you through different progression points to give you a smooth transition from our Leveling Guides to the final build version.
Progression Goals
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!
- Unlock the following Aspects in your Codex of Power:
- Rapid in Buried Halls (Dry Steppes)
- Might in Dark Ravine (Dry Steppes)
- Control in Sunken Library (Kehjistan)
- Storm Swell in Onyx Hold (Dry Steppes)
- Disobedience in Halls of the Damned (Kehjistan)
- Snowveiled in Sarat's Lair (Scosglen)
- Bounding Conduit in Komdor Temple (Dry Steppes)
- Find the following Legendary Aspects by farming in Dungeons, Nightmare Dungeons, Helltides, through the Tree of Whispers, or gambling with Obols:
- Conceited: Gamble Focuses
- Gravitational: Gamble Focuses
- Overwhelming Currents: Gamble Focuses
- Fortune: Gamble Helmets or Chests
- Find the following Unique items by farming in Dungeons, Nightmare Dungeons, Helltides.
Note: You cannot gamble Unique items with Obols!- Raiment of the Infinite
- Flickerstep
- Tibault's Will
- Godslayer Crown
- Esu's Heirloom
- Esadora's Overflowing Cameo
- Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop
Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.
Progression Setups
Once you have completed the leveling guide, only the Codex of Power Aspects are guaranteed. With this setup you can farm the Legendary Aspects and Unique items you need for the next progression point.
Gear
- Rapid goes on the amulet for extra Attack Speed.
- It's best to put Control and Storm Swell on Rings or Gloves because Weapons are often replaced.
- Bounding Conduit can only be imprinted on Boots.
- It's best to put Disobedience on the Pants because you can only put Defensive Aspects there, and Disobedience is the one Aspect that stays in every variant of the build.
- Might and Snowveiled can go on either Helmet or Chest.
At this point resources are scarce, so only upgrade items that have Movement Speed or Cooldown Reduction rolls on them.
Skills
At low levels we don't have enough Critical Strike Chance and Cooldown Reduction to make the combination of Ball Lightning Enchantment and Overflowing Energy viable. So we adjust our skill tree to work without them.
- Vyr's Mastery gives damage and defense.
- Shocking Impact is used to add more AoE damage.
- Remaining points go into Teleport ranks.
Enchantment Slots
Since we can't reliably proc Ball Lightning, we use Arc Lash to help with Glinting Arc Lash cooldown reduction and to proc Shocking Impact.
Build Scaling & Stat Priorities
The answer to many questions can be found in the following section.
Build Scaling
Learn all you need to know about how to scale this build in the endgame.
- Cooldown Reduction (CDR). This is the most important stat for any Sorcerer build. What good are our skills if we can't use them because they are on cooldown? In purely offensive terms, CDR gives us the following:
- More uptime on Unstable Currents (about a 4x damage buff)
- More uptime on Vulnerable and Freeze from Frost Nova (about a 2x damage buff)
- More uptime on Barrier from Ice Armor or Protection, activating Conceited and Storm Swell (1.62x damage buff)
- Attack Speed (AS). Attack Speed is extremely important for this build and there's a long list of reasons why.
- AS makes you attack faster (duh). More attacks = more damage and more Lucky Hits.
- AS makes your Ball Lightning tick faster thanks to Enhanced Ball Lightning upgrade.
- More attacks means more Glinting Arc Lash procs, so AS also grants all the same benefits as CDR.
- Critical Strike Chance (CSC). Apart from letting us benefit from 1.5x Crit multiplier more often, CSC also activates Enhanced Arc Lash, effectively becoming another way to get more Attack Speed. Unlike real Attack Speed it doesn't make our Ball Lightning stronger but everything else still applies. One caveat here is that since Crit is rolled separately for each enemy hit, there's no difference between 30% CSC and 100% CSC when fighting multiple enemies, Arc Lash will swipe twice either way. In single target fights though, every point of CSC matters.
- Next, we have all the normal damage stats: Weapon Damage, Intelligence and all kinds of Additive Damage bonuses, in that order of priority.
- Last, we have Lucky Hit Chance (LHC). This build deals around 55% of its damage via Lucky Hit procs and one might think that this would make LHC one of the most important stats, but that's not actually the case. Simply put, it's not worth investing into a stat that boosts a portion of our DPS, when we could invest into stats that buff all of our DPS (sometimes in more than one way). Also putting all eggs into the Lucky Hit basket makes our build stronger in AoE (where it's already very strong) and weaker against single targets (where it can struggle). That's not a wise thing to do, unless you play in a group where it's someone else's job to kill Bosses.
- In terms of skills, about 35% of our damage comes from Arc Lash, 30% from Ball Lightning, and the remaining 35% are split between the other Shock skills.
Stat Priorities & Gear Options
There are many stats and status effects that generate on gear, but many are not important for your build. Some stats may block others from rolling or only appear on certain gear slots. See below for a per slot priority list in the table.
Put the following Gems into your gear:
- Armor: Royal Rubies
- Jewelry: Royal Skulls
- Weapons: Royal Emeralds
This build benefits a lot from the following Consumables:
- Elixirs: Heady Assault Elixir, Heady Precision Elixir, Iron Skin Elixir
- Incense: Song of the Mountain, Sage's Whisper
Refer to the table below to see the best rolls for every slot ranked in order of importance:
| SLOT | ASPECT | STAT PRIORITY |
| Weapon | one of: Control Gravitational Conceited Storm Swell Rapid | Weapon Type: Wand 1. High Damage per Second 2. Intelligence 3. All Stats 4. Damage to Close Enemies 5. Critical Strike Damage 6. Lightning Critical Strike Damage |
| Off-Hand | one of: Control Gravitational Conceited Storm Swell Rapid | 1. Cooldown Reduction 2. High Damage per Second 3. Critical Strike Chance 4. Basic Skill Attack Speed 5. Intelligence 6. Lucky Hit Chance |
| Help (Best in Slot) | Godslayer Crown | |
| Helm (Optional) | Snowveiled | 1. Cooldown Reduction 2. Basic Skill Attack Speed 3. % Total Armor 4. Maximum Life 5. Lucky Hit Chance while Barrier 6. Intelligence |
| Chest (Best in Slot) | Raiment of the Infinite | 1. Damage to Close Enemies 2. Damage to Stunned Enemies 3. Intelligence 4. Ranks to Glass Cannon |
| Chest (Optional) | Might | 1. % Total Armor 2. Damage Reduction against Close Enemies 3. Damage Reduction 4. Damage Reduction against Distant Enemies 5. Maximum Life 6. Intelligence |
| Gloves | one of: Control Gravitational Conceited Storm Swell Rapid | 1. Attack Speed 2. Critical Strike Chance 3. Lightning Critical Strike Damage 4. Lucky Hit Chance 5. Lucky Hit: Chance to Heal 6. Intelligence |
| Pants (Best in Slot) | Tibault's Will | |
| Pants (Optional) | Disobedience | 1. Ranks to Ball Lightning 2. % Total Armor 3. Damage Reduction against Close Enemies 4. Damage Reduction 5. Damage Reduction against Distant Enemies 6. Maximum Life 7. Intelligence |
| Boots (Best in Slot) | Flickerstep | |
| Boots (Optional) | Bounding Conduit | Implicit: + Max Evade Charges 1. Movement Speed 2. Ranks to Frost Nova 3. Ranks to Teleport 4. Intelligence 5. Ranks to Flame Shield |
| Amulet | Rapid or Disobedience or Esadora's Overflowing Cameo | 1. Cooldown Reduction 2. Movement Speed 3. Ranks to Defensive Skills 4. Ranks to Conjuration Mastery 5. Ranks to Hoarfrost 6. Damage Reduction against Close Enemies |
| Rings | one of: Control Gravitational Conceited Storm Swell Rapid | 1. Critical Strike Chance 2. Damage to Close Enemies 3. Maximum Life 4. Critical Strike Damage 5. Lightning Critical Strike Damage 6. Lucky Hit Chance |
Hardcore Adjustments
Hardcore requires you to build into more defenses. Here are some tips to successfully navigate this build through potentially dangerous situations:
- Put Flame Shield into your second Enchantment Slot.
- Focus more on Defensive rolls on your gear, such as Damage Reduction on the Amulet, or Maximum Life on Rings.
- Use Royal Topazes in armor instead or Royal Rubies to prevent worst case scenarios.
Check out our dedicated in-depth guide to learn more survival tricks in Hardcore.
Level 100 Endgame Variants
You can optimize your build further for certain endgame activities, such as Speedfarming, Nightmare Dungeon Pushing, etc. Let's take a look at the changes you need to make to achieve the best results in them.
The Speedfarming setup makes you more efficient in farming the Open World, Helltide zones, Tree of Whispers, regular Dungeons, and Nightmare Dungeons below Tier 45.
Skill Tree
We drop some of the more conditional damage and defense passives to get more mobility
- Remove Fireball
- Remove Charged Bolts
- Max out Conduction
- Drop remaining 1 point into Elemental Attunement
Enchantment Slots
We replace Fireball with Teleport to get more mobility and more pulls from Raiment of the Infinite.
No Changes
There are no changes to Gear, Gameplay, Paragon Boards, or Glyphs.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
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.
Why don't you use Imbiber?
Why no Edgemaster’s on a build that always has full Mana?
Why no Stable Aspect?
Why no Aspect of Overwhelming Currents?
Why use Conjuration Mastery with no Conjuration Skills?
Why do you have points in Charged Bolts if you don't use them?
Mechanics
Learn all you need to know about how to scale this build in the endgame.
Ball Lightning
Arc Lash
Esu's Heirloom
Video Guide
Coming Soon
Hungry for more Guides?
Sorcerer Guides
General Guides
Summary
The Arc Lash Sorcerer is a very powerful build that can output absolutely insane damage in the right conditions. Its melee range and squishiness are the only things keeping it somewhat in check. Still, between abundant Crowd Control and never-failing Flame Shield, this build can find a way to survive even when it has no right to.
- Start off by using Fireball Enchantment to farm in the open world.
- Stack Cooldown Reduction, Critical Strike Chance and Attack Speed before switching to Ball Lightnings and Overflowing Energy.
- We use Teleport to get on top of enemies, not to run away from them!
- Use Ice Armor, Flame Shield, and Frost Nova to stay alive against even the toughest foes.
- Use Unstable Currents strategi... ahh, nevermind, just pop it now, it feels amazing, the Cooldown is short anyway :)
Credits
Written by Northwar
Reviewed by Chewingnom
