Ball Lightning Sorcerer Endgame Build Guide
Welcome to the Ball Lightning Sorcerer Endgame guide! This build uses Okun's Catalyst to make many shiny Balls of Lightning go round and round. The build has good single target damage and decent AoE coverage and it can evaporate every enemy in the game. The main downsides of this build are its melee range and lack of burst damage.
Ball Lightning Sorcerer doesn't produce very impressive damage numbers; you will never see a billion on your screen. However, the sheer amount of the damage numbers more than compensates for that and, at times, it gets so ridiculous that you have to go and disable them in settings. As a wise man once said: « Fear not the man who does 10 million damage per hit, fear the man who does 100,000 damage thousand times per second. »
The alternative to the Okun's Catalyst is Strike of Stormhorn and curiously enough you can just exchange one item for another and keep the rest of the build intact. This item offers you similar power but a much different playstyle almost identical to that of a Frozen Orb Sorcerer.
This guide will teach you all you need to know to fill your entire screen with yellow numbers. Your almighty cloud of damage numbers will blot out absolutely everything and make the game lag, instilling fear in friends and foes alike! Let's dive into it!
Requirements for this build
- Okun's Catalyst or Strike of Stormhorn.
- Elemental Acuity or Poc Lum.
This build guide assumes you have a Level 60 Character and unlocked Torment 1. To get there, level up with one of our Sorerer Leveling Guides. See how this Build compares against others with our various Build Tier Lists.
Witchcraft Powers
Season 7 is the Season of Witchcraft. It features two separate borrowed power mechanics in the forms of Witchcraft Powers and Occult Gems. Both Seasonal mechanics are unlocked and improved by new NPCs found at the Tree of Whispers after collecting resources from Headhunt Zones, Seasonal areas similar to Helltide that appear across Sanctuary.
There are 25 Witchcraft Powers, 6 of which can be equipped at a time. Each Power belongs to one of four Schools (Eldritch, Growth & Decay, Psyche, and Lost), tags that promote synergies within themselves and with Occult Gems. Each School has a single Unique Witchcraft Power, only one of which can be equipped at a time. These Unique Powers max out and gain an additional effect at rank 5, while the other Powers max at rank 21 and gain their bonus effects at various levels. To unlock and improve Witchcraft Powers, defeat Headrotten or complete Whispers within the Headhunt Zones to collect Restless Rot. Lost Powers are an exception, requiring you to randomly encounter a Forgotten Altar in Dungeons to unlock them.
Best-in-Slot Witchcraft Powers
- Soul Harvest - This Power dramatically increases Core Stats based on monster density and is a reliably strong choice for any build
- Aura of Siphoning - You must equip one of the three available Witchcraft Auras to enable Aura Specialization. Aura of Siphoning is preferred for its Healing effect.
- Aura Specialization - The AoE is nice but the Critical Damage Multiplier that comes with levels is even better.
- Hex of Flames is needed to activate Elder Sigil.
- Hex of Whispers provides a situationally useful self-cleanse effect and lets us activate Friend of the Bog without The Cycle.
- Vengeful Spirit - a nice defensive bonus.
Alternate Witchcraft Powers
- Any other Unique power. We don't need any specific tag from these and they are all fairly low impact.
- Hex of Shattering can replace Hex of Flames providing some Damage Redcution instead of damage.
Occult Gems
Rarely, Headrotten Bosses appear with a still-attached Fugitive Head stolen from the Tree of Whispers. Slay these enemies and return the Heads to Gelena to unlock and upgrade Occult Gems. These Gems are socketable in Jewelry and each provide +160 Armor and +8% Resistance to All Elements. More importantly, each Occult Gem grants a unique effect that synergizes with your equipped Witchcraft Powers to provide a variety of Offensive, Defensive, and Utility-based bonuses.
Best-in-Slot Occult Gems
- Elder Sigil - buffs Mastery skills, plain and simple.
- Friend of the Bog - Extra Core Stats and Maximum Life and we get 3 Growth & Decay powers without even trying.
- Dust Stone - A small damage increase
Alternate Occult Gems
- Moonlight Ward can replace Dust Stone if you prefer defense over damage.
- Toadling's Wish - provides a bit more Main Stat by boosting Soul Harvest.
Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.
Skills & Gameplay
- Ball Lightning is our main damage skill which also produces tons of Crackling Energy via Wizard's Ball Lightning. You want to spam this skill all the time. If you run out of Mana, simply walk around or use Evade to pick up some Crackling Energy.
- Unstable Currents is very important buff that should be active at all times. Not only does it give us extra Attack Speed, but 3 out of 4 spells it can cast are also very useful us: Lightning Spears and Familiars are Conjuration so we gain mana regen from Primoridal Binding. On top of that, Familiars give us 10% damage via Invoked Familiar. Finally, Destructive Charged Bolts reduce enemies' damage.
- Ice Armor and Flame Shield are our standard defenisve spells, with the former also providing some Mana regen and damage via Storm Swell Aspect.
- Finally, we use Ice Blades to get extra Cooldown Reduction, Primordial Binding stacks and to quickly reactivate our Enlightenment.
Skill Rotation
- Spam Ball Lightning to maintain the Ring of Happiness™ spinning around yourself.
- Walk or Teleport into enemies to kill them with aforementioned ring.
- Keep Ice Armor and Unstable Currents active at all times.
- Use Ice Blades every 2-3 seconds when your Enlightenment is up. Use them as often as possible when it's down.
- Use Flame Shield once at the start of the run to get full stacks of Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop. After that, keep it for emergencies.
If you run out of Mana, pick up Crackling Energy that is lying around.
Enchantment Slots
- Teleport Enchantment lets us spam the spell a lot more. The ability to spam Teleport is very important for Ball Lightning Sorcerer because with Raiment of the Infinite we can group all enemies in the middle of the ring where damage is the highest.
- Ice Blades Enchantment gives us a lot of Cooldown Reduction via Roaring Ice Blades. It also greatly reduces the cooldown of Ice Blades themselves, turning it into a spammable skill we can use to proc Enlightenment.
Learn more details and how to unlock this system in our full Sorcerer Enchantment Slots Guide.
Paragon & Glyphs
Carefully check your Paragon Boards to ensure correct board rotation. Glyphs go from a radius of 3 to 4 at level 15 and from 4 to 5 at level 46. Some of them cannot be activated before reaching these thresholds! Progress through The Pit to rank up your Glyphs.
Use the slider to see the progression steps. At around Paragon 200, leveling slows down significantly and all important Rare clusters, Legendary nodes and Glyph sockets should be unlocked. Afterwards, you can min/max your build with minor tweaks and by picking up additional smaller nodes.
Ball Lightning Sorcerer Endgame Paragon
Some Glyph position swaps, board changes and other pathing adjustments may occur as you unlock your full potential. The setup displayed by default is the final version of the build before spending additional points that do not significantly impact your character's power.
Glyph Leveling Priorities
To Level 15
- Tactician
- Destruction
- Elementalist
- Unleash
- Exploit
To Level 46
- Destruction
- Tactician
- Unleash
- Elementalist
- Exploit
There are a total of 328 Paragon Points. After reaching level 60, you gain up to 300 Paragon Levels, 24 from Renown and 4 from Altars of Lilith. Check out our dedicated in-depth guides to learn more about Paragon Boards and Glyphs.
Runes
You can have up to two Runewords in your setup, each consisting of one Ritual and one Invocation Rune. Socket them in Two-Handed Weapons if your build calls for them, otherwise place them into your Armor pieces to replace normal gems. The BallLightning Sorcerer focuses on the following combos:
Best in Slot
- Tam + Thul - gives us 15% damage and periodicaly Freezes enemies.
- Nagu + Ohm - free 15% damage with 100% uptime.
Alternative choices
If you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top runes, you can also benefit from these options:
- Yul, Igni, and Poc - very strong Ritual Runes.
- Lum - is great in early game when you're struggling with Mana, especially when combined with Poc.
- Gar - Crit Chance is extremely important. Use this instead of Ohm if it's below 70%.
Learn more about Runes and how they work in our dedicated Runewords Overview and Runewords Tier List.
Mercenaries
Mercenaries are unlocked during the Vessel of Hatred campaign and assist you in battle. There are 4 separate Mercenaries to choose from, each with their own skill trees and abilities. You can have one hired (permanent) mercenary during solo play and a reinforcement who assists you from time to time in certain situations.
Hired: Subo
Subo passively gives us a maphack which is so nice to play with it's hard to use any other merc after trying it once. On top of that he provides some extra damage through Opening Fire.
Reinforcement: Raheir
We choose Bastion with Injured trigger for its massive damage reduction which can save our life in sticky situations.
Learn more about Mercenaries and how they work in our dedicated Mercenaries Overview.
Stat Priorities & Item Progression
To enable the Ball Lightning Sorcerer to perform optimally, hunt for these stats on your gear with good rolls and aim to Temper ⚒️ & Masterwork Crit ↑ them accordingly. Keep in mind that certain stats, such as Armor, Resistances, Extra Size Tempers, Attack Speed and more, have caps that may affect your priorities according to the items and Paragon points available at that moment.
Recommended Endgame Stat Thresholds
- Sub 30 sec Unstable Currents Cooldown
- 95%+ Critical Strike Chance
- 60%+ Attack Speed
- 70%+ Chance to Cast Twice
- Armor Capped 1,000
- Resistance Capped 70%
- 3,000+ Life
- Lucky Hit Chance to Restore Resource roll
Item Progression Goals
Before you dive into the Endgame with the Ball Lightning Sorcerer, take a look at this overview of the items used in the build. See below for further details about the different progression steps and variants. Some of your Skill Tree choices depend on what Legendary Aspects and Unique items are available to you. Keep in mind that while we can guarantee that everyone has access to the same Codex of Power Aspects, the exact progression is different for everyone.
Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.
Build Variants
This section is designed to guide your Ball Lightning Sorcerer from a fresh level 60 into the very late endgame using the three variants Starter, Ancestral and Mythic. At the final step, you should be fully decked out with a great all-rounder build. From there, follow the other min/max variants if you want to optimize around certain activities such as Pit Pushing, Speedfarming and more.
If you are fresh in Torment 1 coming from a leveling guide, this is where you begin. Since only some Aspects can be guaranteed from Dungeon unlocks for the Codex of Power, focus on acquiring the additional aspects via gambling with Murmuring Obols.
Gear & Skills
- Early on in your progression, focus on Armor & Resistances to survive. Each Torment difficulty adds a penalty of -250 Armor and -25% all Res and it's recommended to keep both capped (1000 Armor, 70+ Res) at all times. As you unlock higher power gear, masterworking levels and more Paragon points, you naturally scale your character into the higher difficulties and can start replacing some of these rolls with offensive or utility stats.
- At this point your number one problem is Ball Lightning's insane Mana Cost. Prioritize Mana Per Second Mana per Second above everything else and pay attention to your Elemental Acuity and Enlightenment buffs. Poc Lum Runeword also helps with that, and you can use any good ritual rune if you don't have Poc.
The goal here is to progress through the Torment difficulties as you unlock Ancestrals, Paragon points, all Legendary Aspects, Temper mods and the most important Uniques to pilot this build. Some Legendary Aspects are used temporarily to fill slots that may be replaced with more Unique items later on.
Gear & Skills
- As you upgrade your gear to Ancestrals with more masterworking levels and reach higher paragon, you can focus more and more on replacing Armor & Resistance rolls with better stats, but ensure to stay capped at 1000 Armor and 70%+ Resistances for the difficulty you're currently in.
This is the final version of the build's progression, including all regular Unique items, Mythic Uniques, Legendary Aspects, Temper mods and Masterworking, leaving you with a great all-rounder build for all content in the game. Additional variants use this as a baseline to optimize around certain activities.
Gear & Skills
- Heir of Perdition gives us tons of damage and Crit Chance letting us replace Gar with Ohm.
- Ring of Starless Skies gives us a lot of damage and enough resource cost reduction to drop Lum in favor of Thul.
This Speedfarming variant optimizes the build for easy activities like Helltides, Whispers, Nightmare Dungeons and lower Pit Tiers after you have finished the Mythic variant and reached a plateau in your progression.
Gear & Skills
Flickerstep is a mandatory item for any serious Sorcerer speedfarming build. What makes this item so good is not the stats on it and not even the unique power but the implicit roll that makes your attacks reduce Evade cooldown by 2.5 seconds, which is 1 second more than what you can normally have on Boots. However, that 1 second makes all the difference. With enough CDR, Teleport Ranks (and sometimes Enchantment Master) we can reach a point where we can Teleport after every attack! To get to that point of infinite teleports we need:
- Harlequin Crest with GA CDR.
- Amulet with Evade CDR
- If you don't have items with good enough rolls to make it work, the only option is to take the L and remove Raiment of the Infinite. Replace it with Tyrael's Might, or if you need even more CDR - Gravitational Chest with extra Teleport Ranks.
This setup optimizes the build to push the highest possible Tiers in The Pit after you have finished the Mythic variant and reached a plateau in your progression.
Gear & Skills
- In Pit Push version we use Raiment of the Infinite instead of Gravitational Chest for more consistent pulling and extra damage.
- We switch to Mage's Ball Lightning and use Destructive Chain Lightning to generate Crackling Energy.
- We remove some points from Teleport and unspec Invigorating Conduit to get Hoarfrost.
Instead of Okun's Catalyst you can use Strike of Stormhorn if you want a different playstyle. Since both builds want to maximize the damage of Ball Lightning you don't need to change anything else. The only exception is Raiment of the Infinite in the Pit Push variant. Strike of Stormhorn doesn't want all enemies to be on top of you so it's best to stick with Gravitational or use Shroud of False Death.
Gear & Skills
The only change besides the Focus is switch from Roaring Ice Blades to Invoked because we no longer overcap on Attack Speed.
FAQ & Mechanics
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.
The build works really well when you decimate everything in seconds, but may get overwhelmed if fights are long against high level monsters. There are several adjustments you can make when you have trouble with more difficult content:
- Check if your Armor & Resists are capped.
- Use defensive consumables.
- Roll Maximum Life instead of offensive stats on as many pieces as possible.
- Kite enemies when they become Unstoppable.
This guide is already very focused on Mana Generation as it is always a major problem for any Ball Lightning. Poc Lum Runeword helps a lot and even just Lum with any strong Rune of Ritual will go a long way. Ultimately, you just have to get enough CDR, Mana per Second, and Lucky Hit: Restore. You can get some Resource Cost Reduction rolls on your Gloves, Rings, or Focus but that will cost you a lot of DPS or survivability. The best course of action is to chug Elixir of Resourcefulness II and keep keeping on, you'll be fightning an uphill battle until you get Ring of Starless Skies.
Permafrost's tooltip is currently bugged. It increases the damage of all your skills, not just Frost ones.
Mechanics
- Ticks 3.33 times per second.
- Each Ball Lightning has a separate 5 second timer.
- The damage is proportional to the number of currently active Ball Lightnings.
Summary
The Ball Lightning Sorcerer is a powerful and fun to play build. It's not the strongest build, it's hard to get gear for it, and it can be very frustrating to fight small enemies. However, all of that is more than compensated by shiny balls going in circles and producing literally thousands of damage numbers. The balls are good for your soul, and that's what really matters in the end!
Credits
Written by Northwar