Stormweaver Ascendancy Overview

The Stormweaver Ascendancy for the sorceress class is focused on elemental ailments, mana, and critical strikes. Your damage nodes increase the damage taken by your enemies, and strip away their resistances while letting you conjure powerful Elemental Storms directly on their heads. As a Stormweaver you can specialize into the arcane arts, enhancing your spellcasting and obtaining generous mana recovery. While this ascendancy doesn't offer much in the way of direct defenses, it does offer indirect options through Recoup and Chill.

Stormweaver Mechanics

Here are some of the key mechanics available to the Stormweaver Ascendancy.

Damage and Defense

• Constant Gale and Force of Will combine to provide cast speed and mana recovery, scaling with your maximum mana.
  • You can combine mana stacking with Archmage to scale your spells further based on mana.
• The mana recovery synergizes with Mind Over Matter making it easy to add this potent defensive layer to your build.

Strip Their Defenses!

• By default, effects like Frost Bomb and Lightning Exposure lower enemy resistance by 20%.
• If an enemy has 75% Cold Resistance, and you lower it to 55%, you deal around 80% more damage.
• Scouring Winds strips even more enemy Cold Resistance resulting in significantly higher damage.
• Add in a bit of exposure effect from things like Strip Away and Overexposure and a curse and you can set an enemy's resistance to 0 or even far into the negatives (making it better than Penetration).

Inflict Crippling Ailments

• Heavy Snows and Shaper of Winter makes it easy to Chill an enemy, slowing them down so you can avoid attacks.
• This is a nice defensive layer, but not as potent as some of the other tools available to the Stormweaver Ascendancy.
• Strike Twice allows you to apply 2 shocks instead of the normal 1.
• When combined with Shock Magnitude from nodes like Alternating Current you can massively increase the damage an enemy takes.
• Combine this with a spell like Lightning Conduit for more damage scaling, or take Shaper of Storms and shock enemies with your cold-damage Fireball build!

Recovery

• Heart of the Storm offers an additional avenue for Energy Shield recovery, but unfortunately, this is unreliable due to not working on Physical Damage. This makes it weaker than other nodes for most builds.

Storm in a Bottle

• Lastly you can use Tempest Caller to summon Elemental Storms onto the battlefield. The Storm's elemental damage type matches the highest damage type that spawned it, so Fire Damage spawns Fire Storms, Cold Damage spawns Cold Storms.
• These persist for a short time dealing damage meaning that both cooldown recovery and skill effect duration increase your DPS.
• It takes some investment into Critical Strike Chance on your spells, but once you do, use Rain Dancer to generate even more storms.
• Cold Spells in particular excel here because they have a high base Critical Strike Chance. Alternatively, you can substitute high crit for high hit rate, because the faster you hit the more chances you have to proc the storm. Or, use a skill that provides the best of both, Eye of Winter for example, hits frequently and inflicts Critical Weakness, making it easier to land a Critical Strike.
• This is a great budget to mid-range option.

The Stormweaver Ascendancy is a great choice for Sorceresses looking to maximize their elemental potential. Unleash elemental devastation on your foes, strip away their defenses, or bind the arcane with your will by harnessing raw mana. If you want to learn more about what to play on your Stormweaver, check out the Build Meta, peruse our Build Guides, or Browse Maxroll and Community planners!

Credits

Written by: Crouching_Tuna, Tenkiei
Content Reviewed by: CaptainLance9, Crouching_Tuna