Meteor Sorcerer Endgame Build Guide
Welcome to the Meteor Sorcerer Endgame Guide! So, you woke up today and were like, "I want to be a Meteor." Completely relatable - we've all had those days. Regrettably, our current technology does not support this sort of wild and drastic (but admirable) lifestyle transformation, so perhaps vicariously existing as one through the incantations of the Meteor Sorcerer can help fill that void.
The goal of the Meteor Sorcerer is to rain fiery impending doom and destruction on anything in its path, and to look good doing it. While it is currently not the strongest skill the Sorcerer has at its disposal, Meteor is more than capable of doing all endgame content with its above average base skill damage and more importantly, its stylish visuals.
Meteor is very dependent on Starfall Coronet and Cooldown Reduction to perform somewhat well. It's not impossible to play without the helmet but the base skill is so bad that basically any other build you can think of would be better.
Requirements for this build
- Starfall Coronet with 4s or less Cooldown
- Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop
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
Urivar's Lobbed Bombs - We use this primarily for the bonus Cooldown Reduction which is an extremely important stat for this build. But thanks to extremely low cooldown of Inferno we can also spam this power to activate Modifiers and deal some damage.
Modifiers
- Harbinger of Hatred's Volley gives a 1.3[x] multiplier when we spam Inferno.
- Sinerat's Flames provides an unconditional 25%[x] damage boost, which grows even further when Enlightenment is active.
- Hatred's Embrace's Haste gives us tons of Critical Strike Chance letting us easily reach 100%.
Alternate Boss Powers
- Flesh Reaper's Disruption - can replace Hatred's Embrace's Haste in speedfarming setups where our Crit Chance is capped by Esu's Ferocity. This modifiers requires us to use at least one Crowd Control Duration temper.
- Kirma's Sparks - same as the above but instead of damage this gives Evade CDR, making it easier to reach one attack Evade breakpoint.
Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.
Skills & Gameplay
- Meteor is our main damage spell. With Starfall Coronet it doesn't cost any Mana and deals very good damage, albeit with a delay.
- Inferno is another key skill that groups us enemies, makes them Vulnerable, boosts our damage by 50% and activates Armageddon buffing our meteorites even further.
- Teleport is our mobility spell that can also break us out of Crowd Control.
- 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 and to quickly reactivate our Enlightenment.
- We put points into Familiar to get the bonus damage when it's summoned by the Enchantment.
Skill Rotation
- Spam all 6 buttons and Evade at all times. The only ones you need to aim are Meteor and Inferno (somewhere next to enemies) and Teleport (wherever you want to go).
- Using more skills results in more Ice Blades summoned by the Enchantment which means more CDR -> more damage. The cooldowns on everything are so short that there's no point trying and using these skills strategically.
Enchantment Slots
- Teleport Enchantment provides extra mobility. It's always nice to have, regardless of the build.
- Familiar Enchantment counts as all 3 elements for Enchantment Master giving us tons of damage while Enlightenment is active.
- The third commonly used option is Ice Blades Enchantment. It reduces the cooldowns of all our skills and greatly reduces the cooldown of Ice Blades themselves, turning it into a spammable skill we can use to proc Enlightenment. This enchant replaces Teleport when we don't need speed (e.g. Bossing or high tier Pit) or Familiar Enchantment in the early game variants that don't use Enlightenment.
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.
Meteor 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
- Elementalist
- Pyromaniac
- Destruction
- Flamefeeder
To Level 46
- Destruction
- Tactician
- Elementalist
- Pyromaniac
- 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 Meteor Sorcerer focuses on the following combos:
Best in Slot
- Yul + Qax - gives us occasional damage boost. While uptime on this is not great, the bonus is so large that on average it easily exceeds 15% we can get from something like Ohm. On top of that, this Runeword gives us the ability to spend Mana and thus make use of the Mana Shield passive.
- Igni + Thul - gives 15% damage and activates Hoarfrost.
Alternative choices
If you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top runes, you can also benefit from these options:
- Cir, Cem, Tam, and Lith are fairly good Invocations that you can use as a substitute.
- Zec can be extremely useful when your CDR is not high enough. Without Inferno this build can't deal damage.
- Ohm - another source of extra damage.
- Vex - relatively small damage boost but has other benefits, mainly Teleport and Inferno CDR.
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 Meteor 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
- 45%+ Cooldown Reduction
- 4s or less on Starfall Coronet
- 80% Critical Strike Chance
- 20+ Total Ranks in Meteor
- Armor Capped 1,000
- Resistance Capped 70%+
- 5,000+ Life
Item Progression Goals
Before you dive into the Endgame with the Meteor 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 Meteor 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.
- Without fully optimized gear, Inferno uptime becomes our number one priority. Zec is extremely helpful for that.
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.
- If you don't have good Boots with a lot of Meteor ranks, use Rakanoth's Wake instead. It will also help a lot with Resistances.
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
- At some point you should switch from Esu's Ferocity to Enlightenment. The latter is a bit inconsistent but a lot more powerful. Usually a good time to switch is when your Crit Chance is close to 100% without the passive.
- The only Mythic Unique we use is Shroud of False Death, which simply gives us a lot of damage and some defense.
- In final setup we switch from Zec to Qax for extra damage. This also lets us use Mana Shield.
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 very good 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 board) we can reach a point where we can Teleport after every attack! To get to that point of infinite teleports we need to:
- Get an Amulet with Evade CDR temper
- Switch from Staff to 1h + Focus with CDR
We also use Zec and Vex for our runes to get more consistent damage and even more Teleport CDR.
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 from Teleport Echant to Ice Blades in order to spam Meteor at full 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.
Meteor Enchantment is a good source of extra damage but it has couple problems. First, the damage is delayed so in speedfarming it doesn't do much because mobs die before the extra meteors have a chance to fall. Secondly, it's a Lucky Hit so it doesn't do much against Bosses, and the Bosses are the only part of the game where we really need extra damage.
This build deals most of its damage with Meteorites coming from the Shattered Stars. They do not have the Mastery Skill tag so these bonuses do not affect them.
Mechanics
Immobilize is applied after the damage, meaning that damage modifiers that rely on crowd control do not apply to the initial cast, only subsequent ones, and only if enemies are still under the effects.
Summary
The Meteor Sorcerer offers a familiar and fun playstyle that was popularized in previous Diablo games. Fans of this playstyle should be happy to know that it is still more than viable, and only has room to get better from here on. If other builds like Lightning Spear or Fireball aren't your cup of tea, give Meteor a shot - it may very well re-ignite your enjoyment of the class.
Credits
Written by Northwar