News Tag: Diablo 4 Ball Lightning Sorcerer

Diablo 4 Season 10 is an absolutely insane season. Chaos Perks and Chaos Armor are changing the build strategy this season, bringing some incredibly high-damage builds.

Currently, Raven Druid is incredibly popular on the PTR, as it can easily reach 150 The Pit. However, its near-infinite damage is because of a bug, a fairly serious one that will probably be fixed soon. Here's a recommended normal but strong build: Ball Lightning Sorcerer.

Diablo 4 Season 10 primarily buffs Lightning-related abilities. This build was already considered a Tier A build in Seasons 8 and 7, and the new unique item for Season 10 Sorcerer, Galvanic Azurite, further enhances this build, making this build potentially Tier S in Season 10.

Pros And Cons

In Diablo 4 Season 9, this build's strengths lie in its high damage and fast farming speed. It's particularly effective in situations with many enemies, such as Infernal Hordes and Chaos Rifts. It also offers decent survivability. Besides being able to teleport away from monsters, you can also use Chaos Perk, Mana Shield, to boost your survivability.

This build is even highly effective against bosses, as the immunity phase for all lair bosses (including Lilith) has been removed. Now, you can instantly kill them with high damage without having to wait for them to transition. Just unleash all your Ball Lightning upon the boss, and they'll be swiftly annihilated.

On the downside, besides requiring some resource management and a relatively high number of skills to unleash, you'll also need Mythic items to maximize your damage.

Skills

• Lightning Spear (Rank 1): Enchanted Lightning Spear and Invoked Lightning Spear
• Ball Lightning (Rank 5): Enchanted Ball Lightning and Mage's Ball Lightning
• Ice Blades (Rank 1): Enchanted Ice Blades and Invoked Ice Blades
• Unstable Currents (Rank 5): Prime Unstable Currents and Supreme Unstable Currents
• Familiar (Rank 1): Enchanted Familiar and Invoked Familiar
• Chain Lightning (Rank 1): Enchanted Chain Lightning and Destructive Chain Lightning
• Teleport (Rank 1): Enchanted Teleport and Shimmering Teleport
• Enchantment Slots: Teleport and Familiar

In fact, most lightning-related skills are worth using in Season 10, so the above skill options are not the only choices, and you can even make all your skills with lightning skills. If you think there is a better skills match, you can also use Diablo 4 gold to reset them.

The main use of this skill set is to spam Ball Lightning at enemies. Once you're surrounded by Ball Lightning, you can repeatedly teleport among monsters to deal damage. Unstable Currents provides useful buffs like attack speed, while Ice Blades makes your enemies vulnerable.

Chaos Perks

• Mana Shield (Sorcerer Unique): Your maximum health is reduced, and damage you take is first applied to mana, then to health. If you haven't taken damage in the past 4 seconds, your mana regeneration is increased by 5,000%. Your maximum mana is increased by 200-400%, and your Intelligence can be used instead of mana.
• Advanced Techniques (Sorcerer Rare): Your base core skill level increases mana cost or cooldown by 10% and further increases damage by 10-20%.
• Power Siphon (Rare): Your core abilities deal increased damage, but your maximum resource is reduced.
• Mana-Infused Conjurations (Sorcerer Legendary): Your spells are empowered, increasing damage by 30% (multiplicatively), but each cast costs 5 mana per second. Ice Blade attacks create bursts of energy around the target. Lightning Spear attacks have a 10% chance of spawning static ball lightning.

Chaos Perks address Sorcerer's survivability issues. With the massive shield provided by Mana Shield, even with half your maximum physical resistance, virtually no monster can penetrate it, making you practically a tank.

Mana-Infused Conjurations, on the other hand, leaves static ball lightning on the field after you cast Lightning Spear, damaging nearby enemies. This improves your Diablo 4 item farming efficiency.

Equipment

• Helm: Heir of Perdition (Nagu and Ohm)
• Chest Armor: Shroud of False Death (Cir and Vex)
• Gloves: Aspect of Inner Calm
• Pants: Banished Lord's Talisman (Topaz and Topaz)
• Boots: Crown of Lucion
• Amulet: Aspect of Tenuous Destruction
• Ring 1: Galvanic Azurite (Skull)
• Ring 2: Ring of Starless Skies (Skull)
• Weapon: Aspect of Shredding Blades (Ruby)
• Offhand: Strike of Stormhorn (Ruby)

Since Season 10 Sorcerer is more survivable than in previous seasons, the armor requirements for gear are less stringent, allowing you to focus more on attack speed and critical strike, which can boost your DPS.

This gear set requires three Mythic unique items, which is a bit of a burden for most players. Heir of Perdition provides a significant DPS and critical strike chance boost, while Ring of Starless Skies reduces resource consumption. These two Diablo 4 items are practically essential.

Before you get Shroud of False Death, you can use Raiment of the Infinite as a replacement. The unique item that enhances Teleport and improves your farming efficiency somewhat.

That's the basics of this build. When using this build, be mindful of mana consumption. Besides the mana regeneration provided by Legendary Diablo IV runes and glyphs, you can also use Elixir of Resourcefulness II to supplement your mana. However, as long as you have Ring of Starless Skies, you're pretty much covered. Currently, reaching 100 The Pit with this build is no problem.

You may have heard that all Ball Lightning builds in Season 2 are overpowered, but that’s broken. So here I’ve optimized a version where I can melt Uber Lilith in 10 seconds while only level 86, skipping all of her mechanics. We can even fly in T100 Nightmare Dungeons and kill the boss in one hit.

The other good news is that this build is something you can safely use as the developers have no plans to nerf anything in Diablo 4 Season 2.

Why Is Ball Lightning So Broken?

Why is Ball Lightning so broken now? Overall, Ball Lightning’s DPS is 10x higher than before, and here’s why.

First, if we look at the skill itself, it does 60% damage per hit. But before patch 1.2.0 it was only 18%. So the skill DPS itself gets a 3.33X buff.

Next, prior to 1.2.0, Enhanced Ball Lightning would not increase Ball Lightning’s DPS at all. Because the faster our attack speed is, the less damage we cause every moment. No matter how much attack speed bonus we have, it will result in the same damage output.

But patch 1.2.0 fixed this bug and Enhanced Ball Lightning passive now works as expected. However, Ball Lightning has a hidden damage tick rate cap of 10 times per second. As you can see, it ticks every 300 milliseconds, so 3.33 ticks per second. By stacking a 100% attack speed bonus, we can triple Ball Lightning’s DPS.

But does this mean our extra attack speed boost of over 100% is wasted? No, the extra attack speed bonus of over 100% also allows us to cast Ball Lightning faster, causing more Ball Lightning to appear around us, melting everything.

Also, the high attack speed makes the build super smooth, so we never felt a lag when casting anything in the game.

In short, Ball Lightning’s DPS is 10x higher in patch 1.2.0. On top of that, we can run Gravitational Aspect to keep Ball Lightning around us to avoid wasting any Ball Lightning DPS and further multiply increase its damage by 25%. Now we know why ball lightning is so fragmented.

Infinite Mana

We need to have unlimited mana to cast Ball Lightning continuously so that we can enjoy it. Therefore, this build requires Chain Lightning in an enchantment slot so that after spending 100 mana, it can automatically cast a Chain Lightning in the direction we are aiming.

It has several benefits. First, we use Recharging Aspect, which restores mana every time Chain Lightning bounces.

Second, we use Invigorating Conduit passive to restore 12 mana every time Crackling Energy Status Effect is picked up. We use Destructive Chain Lightning passive so that we can gain a lot of Crackling Energy from Chain Lightning hits. Because the whole point of this build is high critical hit chance.

Third, we use a Static Surge Legendary Node so that every time we cast Chain Lightning we recover 10% of max mana from the enchantment and make the monster vulnerable.

Because we need to spend 100 mana points to cast Chain Lightning once, and we only need to spend less than 100 mana points to get Static Surge for the next Chain Lightning.

Also, we have another Crackling Energy generator from Ball Lightning hit. So don’t forget to walk around and pick up Crackling Energy to get a lot of manas regeneration. And don’t forget to target monsters when casting Ball Lightning in order to restore mana and apply 100% vulnerable uptime.

But since a Ball Lightning cast costs 50 mana, this is already very high. We also need Conceited Choker Amulet to reduce the mana cost stat by 20% for unlimited Ball Lightning.

If we get a 20% mana cost reduction stat. Casting more Ball Lightning already feels smoother. If you have enough Diablo 4 Gold budget, you can also get another 10% mana cost reduction from boots. As long as we walk around and pick up Crackling Energy, we can easily cast infinite Ball Lightning.

Survivability

Now we can cast infinite Ball Lightning to melt everything around us. But when I ran it for the first time, I found that I was dying a lot more than when I ran the previous Chain Lightning build. The main reason is that it fixed our combat style to melee combat. Therefore, I tested several variations and found the following setup to be the most reliable.

First, I recommend using Reinforced Glyph when there is a barrier to reduce damage by 15%. We have Protection passive, which grants a barrier equal to 30% of our max health on all cooldown skill casts, including ultimates and random Lightning Spears during ultimates.

Second, getting Flame Shield is very helpful in avoiding fatal injuries in extreme situations. Some people may feel that Lightning Spear on the skill bar can be naturally replaced by Flame Shield. But I recommend replacing Frost Nova.

Because Lightning Spear can stun distant monsters for us, we can avoid a lot of damage. But we have other tools to stun monsters at close range instead of Frost Nova.

We can use Convulsions so that monsters at close range are easily stunned by our Ball Lightning Circle. We also use Call Familiar Vampiric Power to shoot bats and stun nearby monsters. It does decent damage and can also help knock out bosses quickly.

Also Read: How To Farm Uber Duriel & Uber Uniques Quickly In Diablo 4 Season 2?

Skill Tree

In terms of skills, we use Ball Lightning as our DPS skill. As mentioned before, we use Chain Lightning as a secondary skill in the enchantment to apply Vulnerable and help restore mana, and we only need level 1.

I’m not running Frost Nova in this build, but Flame Shield because we have enough tools to stun monsters at close range.

We run Firebolt as another of our enchantments to create a burning synergy. We’ve also bumped up Devouring Blaze by 3 levels to further increase our critical damage.

Paragon Board

The most important node in Paragon Board is Static Surge Legendary Node, which allows our Chain Lightning to apply vulnerable status to all monsters and some mana regeneration. The first thing we do once we get to the second board is unlock it.

We also chose Frigid Fate Legendary Node because we maintain 100% Vulnerable uptime on monsters. We get a ton of non-physical damage nodes from Paragon Board, from which we can easily get a 16% multiplier damage boost.

Vampiric Power

• Ravenous: It gives us an attack speed bonus of 40% or more, creating great synergy with Call Familiar. It’s also a significant source of stunning enemies and stunning bosses at close range, further increasing the damage we do with each Ball Lightning cast.
• Anticipation: It helps us get ultimate skills with close to 0 cooldown, more damage, stun sources and better survivability through infinite barrier.
• Prey on the Weak: When we apply 100% Prey on the Weak uptime to all monsters, we get another 16% multiplier damage boost.

When To Use This build?

While this build is great, it requires Gravitational Aspect to perform well. Gravitational Aspect can only be dropped randomly and cannot be targeted for farming. Of course, you can also choose to spend Diablo 4 Gold to trade with other players to get it.

But before buying, I recommend you check out S-Tier Chain Lightning build which is a lot of fun to play. It’s efficient enough. And it has a section on Gravitational Aspect alternatives. It’s also very easy to switch between Chain Lightning build and this build since aspect and gear stats are shared.

After acquiring a Gravitational Aspect, you may find that you don’t have enough mana to cast infinite Ball Lightning. This is normal as we also need 20+% Mana Cost Reduction, Recharging Aspect and Static Surge Legendary Node.

Before getting these, I recommend getting rid of Flame Shield and getting one point back from Firebolt, and getting Arc Lash with its movement speed passive. This way, we can use Arc Lash when we run out of mana.

Ending

Lightning Sorcerer has never been so efficient of melting everything in seconds. With this in-depth guide, Ball Lightning Sorcerer you build in Diablo 4 is destined to become powerful. Harness the power of Ball Lightning to master every aspect of your game and conquer the game with unparalleled strength.