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. Something about a flaming boulder (it's not just a boulder...) plummeting to Earth and delivering an explosion of Fire, Ice, and Death in its wake is just too hard to pass up. If you agree, then enable the screen shake option in your game settings because Meteor is for you. And if you're lucky, maybe in time, Meteor is you.
This build guide assumes you have a Level 50 Character and finished the Campaign. Level up with our Firewall Sorcerer Leveling Guide. If you are looking for a different Sorcerer playstyle, check out all of our Sorcerer Guides.
Season 3 - Season of the Construct
In Season 3, you obtain the Seneschal Construct through the Season Questline, then collect Governing Stones or Tuning Stones to add attacks and augment them to support your build. Only certain Tuning Stones work with a particular Governing Stone. Look at the bottom of any Tuning Stone tooltip to see if it is compatible with your Construct's currently equipped Stones. Lastly, they can be leveled up by getting duplicates to max out their power. Check out our full Season 3 guide for more information.
Recommended Stones
- Flash of Adrenaline
- Duration
- Tactical
- Initiative
This stone gives us 20% multiplicative damage with 100% uptime. Plain and simple.
- Tempest
- Safeguard
- Arcing
- Efficiency
This stone gives us some damage reduction and bonus Crit Chance.
Alternative Stones
- In the early game when we still use Mana to cast Meteor, Resource should replace Arcing.
If you are lucky enough to get either Evernight or Genesis from Uber Malphas, you want to swap them in instead of Arcing and Initiative respectively.
Skill Tree & Gameplay
- Meteor is our primary source of damage. We take Wizard's Meteor to apply Immobilize and boost its damage significantly via the Devouring Blaze passive. Generally, casting it once is enough to kill most non-Boss enemies you just need to wait for all Meteors to land.
- Ice Armor provides a Barrier, which grants us some extra defense. More importantly, it gives us uptime on certain offensive Aspects such as Conceited.
- Flame Shield for tougher fights and to break crowd control, as well as heal up. This is also our panic button when things get too spicy.
- Ice Blades give us some extra Cooldown Reduction and can be very useful to activate Protection with its short cooldown. Use it whenever it's ready and you have nothing better to do.
- Teleport for mobility and a nice defense boost after use. Breaks crowd control and can also be used offensively to pull enemies together with Raiment of the Infinite.
- Deep Freeze is here mostly for cooldown reset. When all your skills are on cooldown quickly double tap it and continue spamming.
- Fire Bolt is not used but we must put points into something to progress in the skill tree.
In its final form this build runs six cooldown skills. Three of them: Ice Blades, Ice Armor, and Flame Shield you can just mindlessly spam all the time. And the other 3 you use according to the situation: Meteor to kill, Teleport to move, and Deep Freeze to reset cooldowns.
Enchantment Slots
Meteor Sorcerer has some flexibility when it comes to its Enchantment slots. For the purpose of this guide, the recommended ones are:
- Teleport. Mobility is extremely important in Diablo 4 if we want to be efficient. This Enchantment alone will save us tons of time throughout our journey and shouldn't be underestimated. It does so by replacing our evade with a slightly weaker version of Teleport. It doesn't make us Unstoppable but it can be very spammable with Boots that give Evade charges or reset Evade cooldown. This drastically increases our clear speed and general mobility during the majority of content in the game and will save us hours of time over the course of our playthrough. Secondly, it has incredible synergy with one of our endgame Unique items, Raiment of the Infinite. Since evade is now aTeleport, we can make use of its power very often - entirely changing the way we play and also making it a lot more fun in the process.
- Ice Blades. With our 6 cooldown skills we can get out quite a few blades from this enchantment, letting us spam our skills even harder. This becomes especially important while fighting Bosses because we need to cast Meteor as often as possible. On top of that we get some Vulnerable application and extra damage via Conjuration Mastery.
In some situations our Enchantments can change. Fireball is very useful for speedfarming by adding some extra AoE to our attacks and also by proccing "Attacks Reduce Evade Cooldown" affix on Boots. Meteor itself can also be used in an Enchantment slot. With enough Lucky Hit Chance stacked from gear and the skill tree, this can provide a pretty decent damage boost and is especially useful in harder endgame content.
Learn more details and how to unlock this class specification in our full Sorcerer Enchantment Slots Guide.
Resource & Cooldown Management
Before we find a good Starfall Coronet we must spend Mana to cast Meteor. Fortunately, most enemies die after 2-3 casts so we don't have to spam it all that much. With some Mana Cost Reduction and Resource Generation rolls, Prodigy’s Aspect (and Tibault's Will) can generate all the Mana you need. Very early on, we also use Fiery Surge to further help with Mana. Finally, we have Supreme Inferno which can let us spam Meteors against Bosses without any cost.
Cooldowns are a much more important problem to solve as early as possible and should be our main priority. Meteor can be cast on demand as long as we have the resources to do so, but a big part of being able to do that is having access to our cooldowns such as Ice Armor and Teleport as often as possible. Without them, the build will feel clunky and substantially weaker. We help alleviate this problem with:
- Cooldown Reduction on gear. In every slot we can get it, and with the highest value possible. It is available on our Helmet, Amulet, and Off-Hand (Focus). The Off-Hand slot will always implicitly have a Cooldown Reduction roll, as well as an option to roll it as a main stat (if it doesn't already inherently have it). For this reason, it's recommended to always make use of this slot alongside a one-handed weapon (preferably a Dagger). We also run two Unique Rings with Cooldown - Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop and X'Fal's Corroded Signet.
- Elemental Attunement passive can randomly reset one of our Defensive cooldowns.
- Summoned Ice Blades with Ice Blades Enchantment adds a bit of CDR to all skills. It generally doesn't do much because blades need to first make an enemy Vulnerable and then hit it a bunch and by that time it's most likely dead. However it's very useful against Bosses and that's precisely when we need to cast Meteor as much as possible.
Paragon Board
Carefully check your Paragon Boards to ensure correct board rotation. Glyphs go from a radius of 3 to 4 when they reach level 15!
Level the Paragon Board by scrolling. Each step optimizes progression.
Glyphs
We need to level up our Glyphs to activate their Additional Bonus with surrounding nodes. For some Glyphs, we max our bonuses by allocating every relevant node in range, while on others we take the minimum required for the Additional Bonus only. Because Glyphs at level 15 increase their radius, we need to prioritize leveling them by completing Nightmare Dungeons. After that, we prioritize leveling our strongest glyphs to level 21.
Note that there are some Glyph position swaps and a few adjustments to surrounding Paragon nodes once they reach level 15. See the last six steps in the Paragon progression above for details. The setup displayed by default is the final version of the build.
Glyph Leveling Priorities
Level 15
- Adept
- Control
- Flamefeeder
- Destruction
- Elementalist
- Reinforced
- Torch (PLACEHODLDER DO NOT LEVEL)
Level 21
- Destruction
- Control
- Adept
- Flamefeeder
- Reinforced
- Elementalist
Also check out our dedicated in-depth guides to learn more about Paragon Boards and Glyphs.
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 our Skill choices depend on what Legendary Aspects and Unique items are available to us. 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:
- Prodigy’s in Witchwater (Hawezar)
- Control in Sunken Library (Kehjistan)
- Elementalist's in Pallid Delve (Dry Steppes)
- Three Curses in Serpent's Lair (Hawezar)
- Disobedience in Halls of the Damned (Kehjistan)
- Storm Swell in Onyx Hold (Dry Steppes)
- Bounding Conduit in Komdor Temple (Dry Steppes)
- Snowveiled in Sarat's Lair (Scosglen)
- Unwavering in Putrid Aquifer (Kehjistan)
- Find the following Legendary Aspects either as a random drop or by gambling with Obols:
- Conceited: Gamble Focuses
- Put this on an item you are least likely to replace and move one of your Codex aspects to your Weapon.
- Shattered Stars: Gamble Focuses
- This aspect replaces Control after you make a switch to Starfall Coronet.
- Conceited: Gamble Focuses
- Acquire the following Unique items either as a random drop or by farming specific Boss drops.
Note: You cannot gamble Unique items with Obols!- Raiment of the Infinite (Varshan, Zir)
- Replaces Snowveiled or Unwavering
- Starfall Coronet (???)
- Replaces Unwavering or Snowveiled
- Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop (Varshan)
- Replaces Storm Swell
- X'Fal's Corroded Signet (Duriel)
- Replaces Prodigy’s
- Esu's Heirloom (Varshan, Beast in the Ice)
- Replaces Bounding Conduit in Push variant
- Raiment of the Infinite (Varshan, Zir)
Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.
Progression Steps
Follow the build's gearing progression from level 50 to 100, including the changes that need to be made as you obtain Legendary Aspects and Uniques.
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
Helm, Pants, Armor
- Disobedience
- Snowveiled
- Unwavering
Gloves, Off-Hand, Ring 1
- Elementalist's
- Storm Swell
- Control
Boots
- Bounding Conduit
Amulet
- Three Curses
Ring 2
- Prodigy’s
With this, we have a functional build that can be used to farm better versions of our existing gear as well as fill in some missing pieces. Don't worry if it feels a little clunky at first - we are using the bare minimum here and this will fix itself in time. When it comes to upgrading gear, our material resources may be scarce at first so we prioritize upgrading any pieces with Cooldown, Mana Cost Reduction, Critical Strike Chance, and Movement Speed in that order.
Skills
Our build is quite different from the endgame version since we need Mana instead of Cooldown Reduction to spam Meteors. We get Inferno and replace Ice Blades with Frost Nova. We also pick up some Mana-related passives such as Fiery Surge and Mana Shield.
Enchantment Slots
Since we don't use Ice Blades yet, we get Fireball for extra AoE damage.
In this setup, you have access to all Legendary Aspects, allowing you to pilot a much stronger version of this build. Additional Legendary Aspects are used to fill slots that may be replaced with Unique items later on.
Gear
There's only one non-Codex aspect we want to use: Conceited.
Another Aspect that we use in the final build is Aspect of Shattered Stars but it only becomes good when we switch to Starfall Coronet so just sit on it if you find it early.
Skills
With better gear we can make some minor adjustment to skill tree:
- Remove Fiery Surge to get more ranks in Teleport and Elemental Attunement if you have enough Mana.
In this setup, you have access to all Legendary Aspects and Unique items, unleashing the strongest version of this build. Be prepared to grind to access some of these highly sought after items!
Gear
The final version of our build includes 4 Uniques:
- Raiment of the Infinite
- Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop
- X'Fal's Corroded Signet
- Starfall Coronet
The first two are just straight up upgrades and you can use them as soon as you find them, but it doesn't work the same way for Starfall Coronet. This item completely turns our build upside down and you need to be ready before making the switch. That means you need to have Cooldown Reduction in all slots that can have it (at least 40% in total) and your Starfall Coronet roll should be 8 seconds or less. This way you can have Meteor with low enough cooldown to use it all the time. X'Fal's Corroded Signet only becomes useful after the switch thanks to the Cooldown Reduction roll. At the same time you switch Storm Swell to Shattered Stars because with so many Meteors you can actually hit some enemies with your Meteorites.
Enchantment Slots
We replace Fireball with Ice Blades to lower the cooldowns of our skills.
Skills
We lose Frost Nova, Inferno and Mana Shield and instead we get Deep Freeze, Summoned Ice Blades and Conjuration Mastery plus Precision Magic.
Uber Uniques
Some Unique items are very rare and only drop from Duriel, King of Maggots with approximately 2% chance. If you are one of the lucky few to have these items, here's how you can use them in this build:
- Harlequin Crest and Andariel's Visage can't be used in this build because it relies on Starfall Coronet to function.
- Ahavarion, Spear of Lycander is not recommended. While some shrine buffs are stronger than 2 Offensive Aspects, you also lose 20% CDR which really hurts our build.
- Melted Heart of Selig is a good defensive Amulet. We don't spend Mana and don't generate any but that can be easily fixed with a singe Lucky Hit: Chance to Regain Resource roll on our Gloves. With this, the Amulet essentially becomes free 75% damage reduction but it comes at a loss of big chunk of damage and Cooldown Reduction.
- Ring of Starless Skies is useless for the build because we don't spend mana. Although, it's very good if you somehow find it before you make a switch to Starfall Coronet.
It is possible to push Nightmare Dungeons with the Meteor Sorcerer, but you might have some trouble with high HP Bosses. With that said, there are a few optimizations we can make to help boost our offense (which in this case, is also our best defense). But first of all:
Avoid these Nightmare Dungeon Affixes
- Monster Fire/Critical/Crowd Control Resist - Drastically reduces our damage or shortens the window in which we can deal damage.
- Unstoppable Monsters - Significantly reduces our damage against enemies below 30%, as well as making them more threatening due to their immunity to crowd control effects.
- Drifting Shade/Lightning Storm/Death Pulse/Stormbane's Wrath - Requires us to pay even more attention to our positioning and are usually fatal if not avoided.
Gear
We use Esu's Heirloom to get more Crit Chance by spamming Evade. This allows as to drop Elementalist's in favor of Shredding Blades to get more damage and to apply Vulnerable faster. We also need to get a Total Armor roll on our Amulet and/or Iron Skin Elixir to reach the Armor cap (13,200).
Enchantment Slots
Replace Teleport with Meteor. If dying becomes too much of a problem, Flame Shield is also an option.
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.
Gear
Our optimized endgame build is already pretty well-suited for speedfarming most content, the only important thing is to make sure that your Boots have "Attacks Reduce Evade Cooldown" implicit. If you have enough damage, you can drop an offensive aspect to move Aspect of the Bounding Conduit to the Amulet and get Ghostwalker Aspect.
Skills
You can replace Ice Blades on your Skill bar with Lightning Spear or Frost Nova to apply Vulnerable to multiple enemies. If the content is easy enough that you kill it in one Meteor, switch the upgrade to Mage's Meteor to make it fall slightly faster.
Enchantment Slots
Replace Ice Blades with Fireball. Together with implicit roll on your Boots, this Enchantment lets you spam Teleport with virtually no cooldown, as long as there's enemies to kill.
Hardcore Adjustments
Hardcore requires you to build into more defenses. Here are some tips to successfully navigate this build through potentially dangerous situations:
- Flame Shield Enchantment offers a way to cheat death and has a 2 minute cooldown whenever it activates. Flame Shield as a skill also becomes much more important since it offers us Immunity when cast. Aspect of Binding Embers can be used to improve its utility even further.
- Damage Reduction and Life rolls on gear become more of a priority. Additional rolls can also be acquired by replacing some offensive stats on Jewelry and Off-Hand slots.
- Protecting Aspect or Everliving Aspect have some use as additional forms of damage mitigation, replacing Raiment of the Infinite.
Check out our dedicated in-depth guide to learn more survival tricks in Hardcore.
Build Scaling & Stat Priorities
Learn about the important build scaling mechanics and stat weights.
Cooldown:
- Summoned Ice Blades
- Elemental Attunement.
- Cooldown Reduction rolls on Helmet, Amulet, Unique Rings, and Off-Hand.
All our skills have cooldowns, including our main attack, so naturally this is our #1 stat.
Critical Strike Multipliers:
- Esu's Ferocity
- Aspect of Three Curses
- Devouring Blaze
Together these 3 effects result in a much higher Critical Strike Multiplier than the normal 1.5x. This forces us to stack as much Critical Strike Chance as possible. Thanks to Elementalist's Aspect, we can get almost 100% quite easily and Supreme Inferno makes sure that our Mana stays full.
Lucky Hit Chance:
Lucky Hit Chance gives a very small damage increase via X'Fal's Corroded Signet and Meteor Enchantment (In push version). We get this stat when it doesn't compete with anything important e.g. on Gloves.
Barrier:
Barrier offers us some extra defensive protection that scales with our health pool. Ice Armor is our main contributor, with Protection offering us even more when we cast any skill with a Cooldown. Barrier is not only important for us defensively, but also as a means to utilize Storm Swell and Conceited Aspect.
Damage Reduction:
- 30% from Shimmering Teleport.
- 15% from Reinforced.
- Various rolls on Chest Armor, Pants, Amulet, and Off-Hand, including:
- % Damage Reduction
- % Damage Reduction from Distant Enemies
- % Damage Reduction from Close Enemies
- % Damage Reduction from Enemies That Are Burning
Through various forms of damage reduction, we keep ourselves... well, alive. We can only play the game when we're alive. Some forms are better than others, but stacking many of them together is crucial to our survival. Damage Reduction from Distant Enemies is always recommended as a priority because in melee range our Crowd Control usually prevents enemies from attacking. Damage Reduction from Enemies That Are Burning is a lesser priority because even though Meteor does cause Burning, it only does so after it actually lands.
Armor:
- Aspect of Disobedience.
- Royal Skull socketed in Amulet and Rings.
- % Total Armor rolls on Helmet, Chest Armor, Pants, and Amulet.
Another form of damage mitigation, Armor is perhaps the most important as it is not conditional and always in effect. We want to scale this as high as possible and make it a priority everywhere we can get it.
Resistance:
Resistances reduce incoming Elemental damage by up to 70%. Luckily, as a Sorcerer we don't need to invest much into it since we can reach the cap from just base stats on Jewelry, Paragon, and Potent Warding.
Our Damage Explained article explains how to scale your Offense.
Learn all you need to know to scale Defense with our Defense Explained Article.
Stat Priorities
Choosing the right stats for your gear can make or break your build. You won't always find perfect stats (also known as affixes or modifiers) though, and you may need to make a tough choice between two good pieces of equipment. Use the following list of priorities to compare your gear and pick the best.
- Helm: Starfall Coronet REQD
- Low Cooldown Roll
- Cooldown Reduction
- Meteor Ranks
- Maximum Life
- Lucky Hit Chance
- Otherwise Look For: Unwavering with CDR and Armor.
- Chest Armor: Raiment of the Infinite, look for high Stun Duration and Close Damage/Int rolls
- Otherwise Look For: Snowveiled
- Total Armor
- Damage Reduction from Distant
- Damage Reduction from Close
- Damage Reduction
- Maximum Life
- Damage Reduction from Burning
- Gloves: Shattered Stars
- Critical Strike Chance
- Intelligence
- Lucky Hit Chance
- Attack Speed
- All Stats
- Pants: Disobedience
- Ranks to Meteor
- Total Armor
- Damage Reduction from Distant
- Damage Reduction from Close
- Damage Reduction
- Maximum Life
- Boots: the Bounding Conduit
- Implicit: + Attacks Reduce Evade Cooldown
- Movement Speed
- Ranks to Teleport
- Intelligence
- All Stats
- Amulet:Three Curses
- Cooldown Reduction
- Ranks to Mastery Skills
- Ranks to Devouring Blaze
- Movement Speed
- Total Armor
- Rings: Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop & X'Fal's Corroded Signet, look for high CDR and Unique effect
- Otherwise Look For: Prodigy’s & Control
- Critical Strike Chance
- Resource Generation
- Maximum Life
- Fire Damage
- Close Damage
- Off-Hand: Elementalist's
- Cooldown Reduction
- Critical Strike Chance
- Intelligence
- Lucky Hit Chance
- Lucky Hit Chance while Barrier
- Damage Reduction from Burning
- Main Hand: Conceited (Dagger)
- Intelligence
- All Stats
- Critical Strike Damage
- Close Damage
- Mastery Skill Damage
This build benefits a lot from the following Consumables:
- Elixirs: Elixir of Savagery, Precision Elixir, Iron Skin Elixir, Elixir of Fortitude, Elixir of Resourcefulness.
- Incense: Song of the Mountain or Reddamine Buzz.
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.
Why are you neglecting Meteor Enchantment?
Mechanics
Learn all you need to know about how to scale this build in the endgame.
Wizard's Meteor
Hungry for more Guides?
Sorcerer Guides
General Guides
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 Ball Lightning or Arc Lash aren't your cup of tea, give Meteor a shot - it may very well re-ignite your enjoyment of the class.
Credits
Written by snail
Reviewed by Northwar, DarkHumility
Updated by Northwar