Fire Bolt Sorcerer Endgame Build Guide

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

Alternate Witchcraft Powers

• Any other Unique power. We don't need any specific tag from these and they are all fairly low impact.
• Aura of Misfortune - A viable alternative to Aura of Siphoning, this Power mitigates some incoming damage while boosting your Movement Speed. Unfortunately, it's ineffective against Bosses.

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

• Vulture Talon - doesn't increase our DPS in long fights but helps kill enemies faster in speedfarming scenarios.
• Friend of the Bog - Extra Core Stats and Maximum Life and we get 3 Growth & Decay powers without even trying.
• Moonlight Ward - provides up to 15% unconditional Damage Reduction.

Alternate Occult Gems

• Dust Stone - A small damage increase than can replace Moonlight Ward.
• Toadling's Wish - provides a bit more Main Stat by boosting Soul Harvest.

Skill Rotation

• Use your Evade Teleport to move through the map and find enemies.
• Group them together with Inferno.
• Place Firewall on top of the group and position yourself slightly outside.
• Spam Fire Bolts into it trying to hit as many mobs as possible with all 3 Fire Bolts.
• Recast Ice Armor whenever it expires or breaks.
• Recast Inferno whenever it's up to maintain the damage bonus.
• Cast Ice Blades off cooldown but not more than once every 2 seconds.
• Use Flame Shield if you get CCd or if your Barriers break for some reason.
• Be careful to not spam too many Firewalls because when everything is on fire, your Fire Bolts will split immediately after you shoot them, and then you have to worry about being exactly right distance away from your target.
• Use your Firewall as little as possible. Its animation is almost twice as long as Fire Bolt, so you're losing a bunch of DPS each time you recast it.

Enchantment Slots

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

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.

Glyph Leveling Priorities

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 Fire Bolt Sorcerer focuses on the following combos:

Best in Slot

• Cir + Thul - gives 15% damage bonus and periodicaly freezes all the enemies.
• Igni + Ohm - 15% damage with nearly 100% uptime.

Alternative choices

If you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top runes, you can also benefit from these options:

• Lith, Nagu, Yul, and Cem - decently good Ritual Runes that can serve as a substitute.
• For invocations there's not a lot of good stuff:
• Xal - For extra defense.
• Lum - if you struggle with Mana.

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 Scorched Earth.

Reinforcement: Raheir

We choose Bastion with Injured trigger for its massive damage reduction which can save our life in sticky situations.

To enable the Fire Bolt 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

Item Progression Goals

Before you dive into the Endgame with the Fire Bolt 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.

This section is designed to guide your Fire Bolt 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.

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.

What can I do to improve survivability?

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.
• If all else fails you always have the nuclear option of replacing Raiment of the Infinite with a defensive chest, ideally Tyrael's Might.

Why aren't you using Adaptability?

Adaptability does not buff Fire Bolts that come out of Firewall after splitting. This means it only works when you position yourself wrong and deal 1/6th of normal damage.

Why Permafrost?

Permafrost's tooltip is currently bugged. It increases the damage of all your skills, not just Frost ones.

Mechanics

Stagger

Bosses are immune to Crowd Control (CC) and instead take Stagger Damage when hit by one. The amount of stagger damage dealt depends on the type of CC and is proportional to its duration. After being hit by a CC effect, the Boss will temporarily take less Stagger Damage from CC of the same type.

Effectively, this means that when you're just spamming one type of CC you don't need to spam any more of it than what you need to keep a normal enemy permanently CC-d. To stagger the Boss quickly you need to use as many different types of CC as possible. In this build we have:

• Slow, Stun, and Freeze from tempered affixes on our gear.
• Immobilize from Crippling Flames.
• Daze from Concussive Strikes.

Apart from using different types of CC you can use the same CC from different sources to apply full stagger. These sources are:

• Skills and Passives
• Legendary Aspects
• Uniques
• Lucky Hit procs

After the Boss is staggered it gains a certain amount of stacking Stagger Damage Reduction for the rest of the fight:

• After 1st Stagger: 20%
• After 2nd Stagger: 40%
• After 3rd+ Stagger: 90%

Bosses naturally regain 1% of their Stagger HP every second and when that regen is combined with 90% Stagger Damage Reduction it becomes borderline impossible to Stagger the Boss again.

Fire Bolt Attack Speed

Like all other skills, Fire Bolt has Attack Speed Breakpioints, meaning you need to stack certain amount of Attack Speed to actually make it cast faster. In this build we have Category 1 Attack Speed from Gear, Moonrise, and Elixir of Advantage II. For Category 2 we have up to two Pyromancy Attack Speed tempers and Basic Skill Attack speed on Shard of Verathiel. Your final Attack Speed is the sum of all these bonuses with respect to 100% cap in each Category. To not waste any Attack Speed you need to aim for one of the follwing breakpoints:

Frames	IAS (Sword + Focus)
17	106.7%
16	121.8%
15	137.7%
14	156.5%
13	179.5%

Note: the above values are measured with 1.3% precision. If you have exactly as much Attack Speed, you have the breakpoint. If are at least 1.3% below the stated value, you will not have the Breakpoint. If you are less than 1.3% below, then you need to check manually.

With fully upgraded Ancestral Items it's quite easy to reach 13 frames breakpoint so you should ultimately aim for it.

Fire Bolt Sorcerer is a strong build that is, unfortunately, very Unique-dependent and very single-target oriented.

• Group up mobs with Raiment of the Infinite.
• Place down Firewall and shoot a million splitting Fire Bolts into them.
• Watch it burn.

Written by Northwar