Advice needed! New Sorc player

I recently made a Sorcerer and while it’s been relatively fun I feel really limited to one element to make anything particularly effective. Started lightning and ended up accidentally making an Arc Lash build and it worked fine but was really repetitive and now I’m on Ice and I’m essentially untouchable but still feel relatively limited to this.

Full disclosure I am a level 50 and only just beat the capstone dungeon. I am fully aware I likely haven’t even found half of the aspects so I am likely missing a lot.

What I want is a good way to fit in all elements OR AT LEAST TWO into my build. I am aware I can stat points into both fire and frost bolt and throw them into my enchant spots for the guaranteed double proc but I mainly still wanna be able to get most of the bonuses from freeze since it’s essentially my only way to apply vulnerable and I’ve found a lot more sustainability in that tree anyways.

Sorry if this is a bit long-winded I’m more of a lurker so I don’t really post on anything ever and likely rabble on too long whenever I do. Like this!

Any advice is welcome please I wanna make this work and I pretty much refuse to go a pure route with one element only

Diablo is usually a repetitive game, If you mean boring, probably a switch off from the basic skill. Not trying to sound mean, its just how it is, basic skills are in general boring.

In Diablo 4, no sorceress plays with 1 element. You basically use multiple but deal damage with one. I can’t give you an exact advice on how to turn this around for you. Maybe follow a starter guide. If I give you one and you are disappointed thats on me, and the leveling part until 70 is usually very fun for most. So yeah, browse around the net about D4 Starter builds. I’d recommend Ice Shards over everything but eh, lightning and fire are also really really good.

Your build, whatever it is, will be 10x more fun with this one (I know it’s trite) “simple trick.”

Get +15% run speed on your boots. Get +15% run speed on your amulet.

Once you have these, the game will be much more fun. I current vendor every pair of boots that doesnt have + runspeed. Same for amulet. It doesnt matter how good the rest of the affixes are - you must have runspeed or the game will suck.

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I’ve played an Ice build since I started so I dont know lightning that well.
A good Ice Shards build will use fire also - you can call yourself (A song of Ice and Fire - oh wait thats taken :grin:). Anyhow, with ice shards to max your build you’ll want to use some fire in your build generally for the devouring blaze passive (I know you said you’re aware but it does incorporate fire in the build while able to spend most of your skill points in the ice tree). In most builds, people use the fire bolt skill ONLY as an enchantment to apply burning. So every ice shard you fire will burn the enemy. Most people also incorporate flame shield into their build. I dont think this skill is really necessary until you start pushing higher tier NMD (say, 65+) so you have time to experiment. For example I was using ice blades for awhile because its a cooldown that triggers a barrier and its not a boring defensive skill.
Im sorry I cant help with the fire or bolt builds as I have not done as much research on those. Good luck!

Funnily enough I actually have a lotta movement speed already.

What I mean is I generally want to be able to use more than one specific element for damage. But allocating stats to Ice AND Fire makes one of the other far weaker. Especially when the key passives only seem to be designed to work with a single element and doesn’t encourage the use of others alongside it

I think this is D2 thinking, where multi-element damage was almost required for most sorcs.

We dont have damage immunity in this game (yet), and trying to be a multi-element sorc seems to have a lot of downside - you use more affixes on your gear boosting the different elements, and you have very limited skill slot hotkeys to bind, on top of almost-mandatory defensive cooldowns. I cant see making it work in this game.

I dont see mixed-elements as part of the concept in the Sorc class design.

If you would like to try non ice shard/blizzard builds, suggest you look up builds by Blackheart. The fellow is wonderful for off-meta builds based around lightning this season. Gives me lots of good ideas to run with and do my own thing based on his builds. Currently running something somewhat close to his lightning spear-crackling energy build and it’s lots of fun. It also allows me to use all the elements and get the most out of the Tal Rasha heart.

A conjurer can use mixed elemental builds well. See GreyGhost’s videos. Other than that incorporating all 3 is indeed difficult. You can synergize two and still focus on one for main damage though.

Yeah I guess I will have to use a guide after all. I typically don’t like to do that for ARPGs and I love creating a character and doing interesting builds.

I’m gonna probably work with lightning and ice. Ice ofc being the “Main element” ig since I have to still be able to proc Vulnerable and the CC from Ice is just too good to pass up.

I’ll still work on trying to make other builds work but it’s seems pretty clear that I’m just not going to be able to do anything too creative :confused:

I play with just frost skills and so far at level 84 it’s doable…I just prefer sorcs and always have and maybe thats why I have a decent build idk…experiment and play what makes you happy and who cares about the rest.

I respect that. Ice is fun I have a ton of success with it. I just got a loooove for hybrid builds in games. Always like doing complex stuff if I can.

Seems like it’s just a little more difficult for me rn. Gotta work for it which is fine I didn’t want it to be easy anyways

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I love a good hybrid build as well…I have several alternate test characters that I experiment with rinsed what’s optimal…one of which is a hybrid build with spells from all elements, I’m just using frost cuz itsnthe one I have most experience with atm. Good luck friend!

Play an other class. Sorcerer is very funny with the builds but very squishy in the High level from NM80 - 100. Non-Elite can One-hit you from distance even with a full deff Gear. Overall Sorcerer is clear the worse class and F-Tier compare to the other even after the “Buffs” in Patch 1.1.1. I don’t have much hope for S2.
Blizzard is not playing their own Game. The best thing is all the QoL problems players reported the Beta, Blizzard is implementing piece by piece in mid season patch and future Season patches and sell this as “big QoL season update”. Endgame doesn’t exist in S1 because Blizzard has no idea. D4 future looks not good if you see how many good games recent released and how many will be released.
Its very sad if you see that Diablo IV took more than 6 years to develop and whats the result. Same with Overwatch 2. Almost 5years after the announcement on the Blizzcon the canceled the PVE part. Blizzard is getting slow more and more down until they will disappear.

25% all damage from blizzard, 23% distant (10% all damage if u lucky) each pants and tunic, no point on glass canon, 900 + 200 armor from elixir, bows can not kill u by 1 hit. u can use flame shield for immortal.

It’s hard to drop glass cannon but actually you can still stack much more defense. Probably you want 2 rolls of damage reduction from distant enemies (armor&pants) , you can use the Reinforced glyph, a couple of hearts give damage reduction (flat) as well, Icefall quasi perma-barrier, and of course +% total armor everywhere you can (+ disobidience aspect)

Dont forget you can get general damage reduction on jewelry.

I cannot reiterate enough, defense is the best…it’s a game changer for Sorcerer.

u can increase damage in tunic ~ 10% and amulet ~15%. if u want more defense, use reinforced on frigid fate, always cast ice armor or cooldown skills. that enough for 1st shoot , but the next shoot will harder. if bows not in dungeon, u can use glass cannon for fun.

Thats the point. You need to have on all possible gear Deff stats, deff aspects, Paragon and Glyphs, even than you can be one Shot as Flame shield and Ice armor have CD. Than you are still one Shot. I know Blizzard Build have dmg reduction but than you are forced to play Blizzard build….
Don‘t understand me wrong. Sorc is a very funny class with a lot cool builds but in the Endgame from Lev 90 - 100 and in NM from 80-100 you will have a very hard time comparer to other classes. Players reported this in the pre season and in the beginning of S1 but Blizzard just did a „small minor buff“. Other games like LoL they do regularly balacing patches. But Blizzard only in the start of a season and mid season. This is one of reason why 70% of the players already left D4. D4 Future looks not good and the game could be soon dead like D3 or Overwatch 2. But thats how Blizzard is working. They just care about ho much money they make in the start of a Game and with the in game shop. Blizzard really need to change their self or in Future they won‘t sell much games anymore. There is more than enough other games on the Market.

This all happens due to the Armor/Resistances/Damage Reduction being tied not only together but with a diminishing return also. At season 2 these things will change.

This means a few things.

I can give you a description what you should do at this moment. And what will happen in the future Season.

As of right now, Blizzard sorc has damage reduction, but this is how every character is build basically.

Armor works well against enemies on your current level eg.100. After that its useless. Meaning endgame Damage reduction beats it significantly. So if you are not doing Lilith or lower content armor is nearly useless.

Resistances are gimped from the Tier 4 halving. Not only that, they also have diminishing return like Armor, so stacking them is near useless as well.

The only way to enhance your character survivability is Damage reduction aspects/rolls on gear.

If you are playing mostly Tier 100 Nightmare Dungeons the only thing that will protect you well is damage reductions + shield.

Due to this fact Max Health also gains more value than Armor and Resistances.

This is how things are now and hopefully in the future this will change, because its dumb at best.

PS. About the Sorceress in general, Cold Sorceress will always have the most survivability due to crowd control.
The problem comes her damage is tied to Crowd Control and Vulnerability. If you are lacking one of these your damage is pretty bad.
So for builds without decent Crowd Control, like all Fire builds, sorceress feels like a walking skeleton. Thus Cold and Lightning Sorc will feel much more smooth in the end.
Even then sorceress being tied to conditionals is a very bad concept in my eyes.

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