Leveling your character in Diablo 4 is an open-ended affair, with plenty of options available. But we have a build for Sorcerers that is currently considered the best.
Part of our complete Diablo 4 class guide.
The Sorcerer is a very versatile class in Diablo 4, with plenty of builds that can work great. While you can experiment with a wide variety of builds, certain builds are already part of the metagame. When you get past level 50 and start entering the endgame part of Diablo 4, you can check out our best Diablo 4 Sorcerer endgame build. Let’s take a look at a lightning-focused Sorcerer build for leveling.
Main Skills
Here is a quick rundown of all the main skills you will use with this build. These will be your damage-dealing skills that synergize together to melt any enemies that you encounter.
Arc Lash
Even though it has a pretty limited range, Arc Lash is one of the strongest basic skills available at the start of the game. It has great AOE and will be a core part of your damage-dealing capabilities throughout the leveling process. After putting a few points in it, you should upgrade it to Flickering Arc Lash for increased mobility.
Chain Lightning
This is a great Core Skill to deal with packs of mobs, especially given that you don’t have to aim it accurately. As long as you hit one mob in a pack, the spell will do the rest and bounce between targets. You should upgrade it to Greater Chain Lightning, which will increase it’s damage whenever it bounces off your character. This will turn it into a great Boss or Elite killer.
Teleport
Teleport is one of the best mobility spells in the game, which is evident once you realize every single Sorcerer build has it in its roster. You should upgrade it to Shimmering Teleport, which will reduce damage when cast. This will allow you to also use it offensively to get into the thick of things.
Ice Armor
One of the best Barriers available, Ice Armor is great since it scales with your Life total as well as our damage output. We will upgrade it to Enhanced Ice Armor for the added Mana Regeneration, giving us more freedom to spam our damage-dealing spells.
Lightning Spear
Even though it’s pretty difficult to correctly aim, Lightning Spear works great with the over-arching theme of this build. You should upgrade it to Summoned Lightning Spear for the extra damage since it will become stronger and stronger once you start picking up Crackling Energy.
Unstable Currents
This will be your main weapon to deal with Elites and Bosses since it deals a ton of damage. Upgrading it to Supreme Unstable Currents will allow it to feed off your Crackling Energy stacks, giving it even more AOE potential.
Passive Skills
These are the passives that you should be aiming for to make this build work properly.
Key Passive – Overflowing Energy
Clearly the ideal Key Passive for your build since three of your offensive skills are all Lightning based. All you have to do is focus on any skills or skill upgrades that give you more Crackling Energy to refresh your cooldowns even faster.
Precision Magic
A few skills do rely on Lucky Hits, meaning Precision Magic will enhance all of them. Later, you can forego the points added to this skill if you stack some Lucky Hit chance from your items.
Glass Cannon
Even though you’ll also be taking increased damage, the bonus to your damage output is well worth the risk. Especially since you have Ice Armor at your disposal when things start getting dicey.
Conjuration Mastery
Since we’ll be spamming Lightning Spear once the build truly starts working, picking up Conjuration Mastery is a no-brainer. Every cast will increase our damage and during Unstable Currents there will be a lot of Lightning Spears flying around making this passive even better.
Static Discharge
This is one of the main passives that will help us create more Crackling Energy. This will obviously boost our damage by reducing cooldowns for all our skills due to the effect of Overflowing Energy.
Invigorating Conduit
This passive pairs up great with Static Discharge. As long as we keep picking up Crackling Energy, we’ll have more mana to spam our other skills. And since we don’t have a lot of mana regeneration in this build, Invigorating Conduit is a core passive that you should never skip.
Coursing Currents
This passive will increase our critical strike chance whenever a lightning skill hits an enemy. After we land a critical strike, this process will be reset. But since most of our skills are AOE, this will consistently give us plenty of critical strikes.
Electrocution
Every time we land a critical strike, Electrocution will diminish the damage output of that particular foe. And given that the Sorcerer can struggle with survival in plenty of encounters, this is a great source of defensive capabilities that makes good use of our critical strikes.
Playstyle
Your main damage dealer will be to simply spam Arc Lash as much as possible. Teleport can be used to put yourself in a better position for Arc Lash, but make sure to activate your Ice Armor when too close to enemies to keep yourself alive. To spend your mana you can use Chain Lightning, especially when left alone with an Elite.
After you’ve picked up a few Crackling Energy buffs you can also start dishing out tons of damage with the help of Lightning Spear. When dealing with a large or dangerous pack of enemies you should definitely activate Unstable Currents for the bonus damage and the extra Lightning skills that it can automatically cast.
Efficient use of your cooldowns is tantamount to success for this build, so always pay attention to your spells that have a long cooldown and try to use them only when needed. Items that give you cooldown reduction can help out immensely, but getting your hands on them in the early game is easier said than done.
