Chain Lightning Sorcerer Endgame Build Guide
The Chain Lightning Sorcerer puts on a dazzling performance. One of of the most visually impressive builds in the game, this Sorcerer paralyzes and destroys monsters with a barrage of electricity. It has insane mobility and great Speedfarming potential, shredding open world Events and Helltides with ease. Its Pit pushing capability is also solid.
Chain Lightning and Unstable Currents together make up the bulk of this build's damage. In the late game most of the damage comes from Azurewrath's Lucky Hit proc. Axial Conduit greatly increases both damage and AoE capabilities of the skill.
While Chain Lightning Sorcerer needs a lot of Uniques with specific Greater Affixes and Masterwork Crits it has a fairly nice progression curve starting from vanilla Chain Lightning spam powered by Recharging, into Axial Conduit explosions with whatever Mana generation you can get your hands on, and finally evolving into its final Lucky Hit abuse form with Azurewrath and Fists of Fate.
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.
Boss Powers
Season 8 is the Season of Belial's Return. It allows you to tap into Boss Powers obtained from World, Event, and Lair Bosses throughout Sanctuary. The new seasonal mechanic, Apparition Incursions, is available at any difficulty level and gives you the opportunity to unlock a subset of these powers very early on. Various Apparition Monsters appear in these special timed events throughout Sanctuary. Defeating these monsters spawns 1 of 10 Apparition Bosses to hunt you down and defeating them grants you their Boss Power. After defeating the first Boss, continue the event for a chance to fight a second Apparition Boss, after which Belial himself joins the fray.
There are 24 Boss Powers available and the first time you defeat one of these Bosses, you claim their power for yourself. Boss Powers each have Main and Modifier effects to boost your build. 13 are available in all difficulties (from Apparition Incursions and World Bosses), while 11 can only be acquired in Torment 1 difficulty or higher from Lair Bosses and Lilith. You can equip 1 Main Power and 3 Modifiers, and all powers can be upgraded up to Rank 20, increasing the potency of both the Main and Modifier effect. You use Spectral Ash to upgrade these powers, dropped from Apparition Incursions and by defeating any Bosses. Boss Powers also scale with your Paragon Level, growing stronger as you progress.
Best-in-Slot Boss Powers
Main Power
Beast in the Ice's Sleet is a great source of additional damage. It also helps us activate Hoarfrost Passive.
Modifiers
- Harbinger of Hatred's Volley gives us permanent 30%[x] damage bonus.
- Sinerat's Flames provides an unconditional 25%[x] damage boost, which grows even further when Enlightenment is active.
- Flesh Reaper's Disruption - gives another small damage boost that we can scale with a Utility temper on our Boots.
Alternate Boss Powers
- Hatred's Embrace's Haste can replace one of our multipliers if we need Crit Chance, for example when using Harlequin Crest in speedfarming setup.
Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.
Skills & Gameplay
- Chain Lightning is our primary source of both AoE and single target damage.
- Unstable Currents is very important buff that should be active at all times. Not only does it give us extra Attack Speed, but 2 out of 4 spells it can cast are also very useful us: Lightning Spears and Familiars are Conjuration so we gain mana regen from Primordial Binding . On top of that, Familiars provide 10% damage bonus via Invoked Familiar.
- Teleport is our mobility spell that can also break us out of Crowd Control. On top of that it's an extremely fast Shock spell so it is very good for proccing Unstable Currents.
- 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 Fireball to quickly gain Enlightenment stacks. It can also occasionally be helpful by executing enemies with Greater Fireball.
Skill Rotation
- Spam Chain Lightning whenever you have enemies to kill. As long as you have stuff to hit, you will never run out of Mana thanks to Lucky Hit procs.
- Use Teleport to move forward and find more enemies.
- Keep Ice Armor and Unstable Currents active at all times.
- When your Enlightenment is down, alternate Fireball casts with Chain Lightning to qiuckly regain the buff.
- 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 find Axial Conduit very early and don't yet have the Mana Generation to spam Chain Lightning just slow down. Cast Chain Lightning once or twice and then just wait for it to kill everything. It will still deal a lot more damage than without the pants. Make sure to never let your Mana hit 0! If that happens all your Chain Lightnings disappear and you deal no damage so you feel compelled to cast more Chain Lightning and since your Mana is low it's just gonna disappear again and you will be stuck like that.
Enchantment Slots
- Chain Lightning is simply casting more of our main spell. More Chain Lightning = more damage, simple as.
- Familiar Enchantment counts as all 3 elements for Enchantment Master and gives us tons of damage when Enlightenment is active.
Learn more details and how to unlock this system in our full Sorcerer Class Overview.
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.
Chain 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
- Flamefeeder
- Tactician
- Destruction
- Elementalist
- Unleash
To Level 46
- Destruction
- Tactician
- Unleash
- Elementalist
- Flamefeeder
Learn more details about the Paragon System in our in-depth Paragon Boards and Glyphs guide.
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 Chain Lightning Sorcerer focuses on the following combos:
Best in Slot
- Poc + Thul - gives 15% damage and activates Hoarfrost.
- 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 and Tam - very strong Ritual Runes that can be substituted in with minimal loss of efficiency.
- Gar - Crit Chance is extremely important. Use this instead of Ohm if it's below 70%.
- Lum - can be very helpful if you're running our of Mana and losing your Chain Lightnings.
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 Chain Lightning Sorcerer to perform optimally, hunt for these stats on your gear with good rolls and aim to Temper ⚒️ & Masterwork Crit ↑ them accordingly. The green arrow ↑ indicates which affix is most impactful to Masterwork Crit, and it does not indicate how many Masterwork Crits you need on that particular affix. 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
- 180%+ Lucky Hit Chance
- 20,000+ total damage between Azurewrath and Elemental Surge proc
- 100% Chance to Hit Twice
- Armor Capped 1,000
- Resistance Capped 70%+
- 4,000+ Life
- Lucky Hit Chance to Restore Resource roll
Item Progression Goals
Before you dive into the Endgame with the Chain 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 Chain 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.
- Starter version of the build uses vanilla Chain Lightning. Decently rolled Recharging combined with Unbroken Tether should solve all your Mana problems. If you only have a min roll of it, add in some Mana per Second and/or Elemental Acuity.
- Your #1 goal at this point is to get Axial Conduit so go do some Helltides and fight Grigoire.
- Hatred's Embrace's Haste replaces Flesh Reaper's Disruption in all early versions of the build unitl you start overcapping Crit.
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.
- With Axial Conduit you really need Lucky Hit Chance to Restore Resource on at least one item. If you can't get it you can temper same stat on all your Jewelry but doing so will destroy your Unstable Currents uptime. The damage won't be good until you have both.
- Since Greater Chain Lightning doesn't work properly with Axial Conduit we switch to Destructive Chain Lightning for easy Crackling Energy.
- Azurewrath and Fists of Fate are powerful items for this build but they really need good rolls (preferably Greater Affixes) on Cold Damage proc and Lucky Hit Chance respectively. If you only have access to bad rolls, it's better to stick with regular weapon/glove and put Conceited/Vehement Brawler's on them.
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 Hatred's Embrace's Haste with Flesh Reaper's Disruption.
- Ring of Starless Skies gives us a lot of damage and resource cost reduction.
- Shroud of False Death provides a lot of offensive and defensive bonuses.
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
In order to go really fast we need to stack enough CDR to reach the point where our Evade Teleport is reset by our Boots' implicit after just a single attack. To do that we need:
- Harlequin Crest with GA CDR.
- Amulet with Evade CDR temper.
If rolls on your items are not good enough and you need to attack multiple times to reset Evade, you can attempt to fix it by using a Chest Piece with extra Teleport Ranks and/or Flickerstep.
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
- We switch Teleport on our skill bar to Roaring Ice Blades to get some cooldown reduction, as well as extra damage from Elementalist and Cold Invoked Familiar.
- We use different Runewords: Ahu Qax and Poc Xan. These runes let us generate a lot of Offering, maintaning good uptime on both buffs. However, it only works in push scenario where enemies take a long time to die. If you bring it into lower tier Pits where you complete a run in under 5 minutes, you will just be playing Running Out of Mana Simulator 2025.
- To push this build to its absolute limit you should also use Raiment of the Infinite to group up enemies. Unfortunately, will make you extremely squishy because only our Boots and Focus can have Life on them.
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.
- The best way to gain survivabilty on this build is to using Doombringer, although that will massively tank your damage.
In the early game Recharging, Mana per Second rolls and Elemental Acuity will easily solve all your problems. After you get Axial Conduit you really need Lucky Hit Chance to regain Mana. If you already have both and it's still not enough you can add Recharging on top.
Mechanics
- Each Chain Lightning counts Mana drained by all Chain Lightnings until it reaches 66.
- Explosion occures after Chain Lightning goes out and finishes bouncing.
- While orbiting, Chain Lightning hits nearby enemies once for its normal damage.
Summary
- The Chain Lightning Sorcerer is easy and effective build well suited for speedfarming various types of content.
- Make sure to maintain your Mana! Find gear with Mana Per Second and take advantage of Recharging Aspect and Paragon.
- Find Axial Conduit and watch your destructive power rise to the next level.
- If you run out of Mana simply cast less and wait, it deals more damage this way!
- This Chain Lightning Sorcerer is a highly mobile destroyer that puts on a beautiful light show! What more can you want?
Credits
Written by Northwar