Welcome to the Arc Lash Sorcerer Endgame Build Guide!
This build dishes out incredibly high damage and it does that by spamming a Basic Skill that you unlock immediately - Arc Lash. Being a melee build it might not be the easiest build for conquering the depths of The Pit but with smart usage of your defensive cooldowns and the ability to absorb deadly stacks with Flame Shield you will come out on top.
The build deals damage by attacking very fast with Arc Lash, producing lots of Unstable Currents procs.
With 3 Defensive Skills on our bar and extra Cooldown Reduction from Hectic, with extra cooldown and Summoned Ice Blades, this build can get very tanky. Still, surviving in melee range in high tier Pit is not easy and you will need to use your abilities very carefully.
The build receives a large amount of damage from it's aspects and unique items but can be played with few resources if needed, making it a great build to start your Endgame journey. Keep an eye out for Moonrise and Adaptability for some of our largest damage aspects.
In this guide we teach you all you need to know to grow from Level 50 Crook with a tiny lightning whip into a Level 100 Avatar of Elemental Destruction whose mere presence instantly disintegrates all enemies. Let's dive into it!
This build guide assumes you have a Level 50 Character and finished the Campaign. Level up with our Ball Lightning Sorcerer Leveling Guide. If you are looking for a different Sorcerer playstyle, check out all of our Sorcerer Guides.
Season 5 - Infernal
In Season 5, the Season Theme brings your hero back into the bowels of Hell, in the Infernal Hordes endgame activity. You're first introduced to Hellbreach Dungeons, miniature Horde-like micro-dungeons that teach you the new mechanics and rewards systems. As you slay more powerful Demons and Bosses, you're rewarded with the new Reputation progression that comes with amazing rewards. These include Crafting Materials, unlocking Season's Journey tiers and even the coveted Resplendent Spark, needed to craft a Mythic Unique.
Follow the seasonal questline until you unlock the Reputation system, check which rewards suit you most and then follow your regular leveling path. To learn more, check out our full Season 5 guide for more information.
Skill Tree & Gameplay
- Arc Lash is our main skill, it deals decent damage on its own, it hits twice when you crit, and it's a Shock spell which means it can proc Unstable Currents.
- Unstable Currents is a huge damage buff for our build. It casts a random Shock Skill every time we cast Arc Lash and gives +25% Attack Speed, which is an extremely valuable stat for this build. The random spells it casts don't do a lot of damage but they can proc various effects such as Destructive Chain Lightning or Conjuration Mastery.
- Teleport is our main mobility skill, which also serves as a CC break and pulls enemies together with Raiment of the Infinite
- Ice Blades are used for the Cold Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop and Elementalist stacks and their Coolodwn Reduction ugrade. Also this spell gives us a little bit of damage via Conjuration Mastery.
- Ice Armor gives us a huge Barrier and extra damage against Frozen enemies (which includes staggered Bosses) or refreshes it's cooldown once we start spending mana.
- Flame Shield provides insane defensive options but isn't needed early on. Lightning Spear provides more damage and an extra Protection barrier early on.
- We put some points into Chain Lightning to benefit from their ranks and upgrades when they are cast by Unstable Currents
Enchantment Slots
Sorcerers can choose two skills to put into Enchantment Slots, where they provide powerful passive bonuses. Arc Lash Sorcerer uses the following Enchantments:
- Fire Bolt gives us access to various Burning bonuses such as Devouring Blaze and Flamefeeder.
- Teleport gives us mobility and cooldown reduction for our ultimate with Flickerstep.
The Enchantment Slots can sometimes change. Fireball can be used to give us more AoE while speedfarming.
Learn more details and how to unlock this class specification in our full Sorcerer Enchantment Slots Guide.
Resource & Cooldown Management
This build uses mana with Shard of Verathiel but counteracts it with it's own generation combined with some Resource Generation on gear. Eventually you may be lucky enough for a Ring of Starless Skies. Meanwhile our ultimate cooldown is managed by Flickerstep which also lets us spam teleport for maximum fun.
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!
This board is used for an optimal leveling experience. Drag the slider under the paragon to the right to progress.
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 first three steps in the Paragon progression above for details. The setup displayed by default is the final version of the build.
Glyph Leveling Priorities
For maximum efficiency, follow the order outlined below. First, level your Glyphs to level 15 and then do a second pass to get them all to 21.
Level 15
- Destruction
- Tactician
- Elementalist
- Enchanter
- Flamefeeder
- Exploit
- Reinforced
- Charged
Level 21
- Destruction
- Enchanter
- Flamefeeder
- Exploit
- Elementalist
- Reinforced
- Tactician
- Charged
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 your Skill choices depend on what Legendary Aspects and Unique items are available to you. 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:
- Rapid in Buried Halls (Dry Steppes)
- Might in Dark Ravine (Dry Steppes)
- Edgemaster's in Oldstones (Scosglen)
- Storm Swell in Onyx Hold (Dry Steppes)
- Inner Calm in Raethwind Wilds (Scosglen)
- Disobedience in Halls of the Damned (Kehjistan)
- Snowveiled in Sarat's Lair (Scosglen)
- Bounding Conduit in Komdor Temple (Dry Steppes)
- Find the following Legendary Aspects either as a random drop or by gambling with Obols:
- Conceited: Gamble Focuses
- Shredding Blades: Gamble Focuses
- Adaptability: Gamble Rings
- Replaces Storm Swell on Amulet, move Stormwell to replace Edgemaster's.
- Moonrise: Gamble Focuses
- Replaces Rapid on Amulet, move Rapid to replace Inner Calm.
- Juggernaut's: Gamble Pants
- Replaces Disobedience
- Hectic: Gamble Boots
- Replaces Bounding Conduit
- Orange Herald
- Replaces Juggernaut's if you have armor rolls or Offensive aspect on gloves.
- Acquire the following Unique items either as a random drop or by farming specific Boss drops.
- Raiment of the Infinite (Varshan, Lord Zir)
- Replaces Might
- Shard of Verathiel
- Replaces staff so no aspect lost with focus added.
- Flickerstep (Duriel, Andariel)
- Replaces Bounding Conduit.
- Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop (Varshan)
- Replaces Rapid
- Raiment of the Infinite (Varshan, Lord Zir)
- If you're lucky enough to obtain the following Mythic Uniques, they're useful for the build.
- Andariel's Visage is your BiS helmet. It provides a lot of damage and utility.
- Ring of Starless Skies is a nice addition once you have Shard of Verathiel.
Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.
Progression Setups
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
- Rapid goes on the weapon for extra Attack Speed.
- Storm Swell goes on our Amulet.
- It's best to put Edgemaster's, Control, and Inner Calm on Rings and Gloves.
- Bounding Conduit will be imprinted on Boots.
- Might, Disobedience, and Snowveiled go on our defensive slots.
Enchantment Slots
In the early game we don't have amazing Critical Strike Chance so while Fire Bolt Enchant is useful, you may want to consider Teleport for Mobility instead. Unfortunately, Teleport enchant will be useless once we find a Juggernaut to solve armor. Fireball for needed extra AoE damage. Consider looking at the Teleport Enchant variant in the planner.
Skills
- We keep very similar skills as our Leveling to 50 Build Game but replace Hydra with Ice Blades.
- We pass on Flame Shield and rely on Ice Armor for unstoppable thanks to Snowveiled.
- Very standard skills that give options for Protection while boosting our damage and mobility thanks to Conjuration Mastery.
The gear that becomes available will significantly improve your damage once we are no longer limited to only Dungeon Aspects. The replacements here will have us flying to 100.
Gear
We add Shredding Blades, Adaptability, and Moonrise replacing our weakest Offensive Aspects. We also add Hectic, Juggernaut and Orange Herald.
In this setup, you have access to all Unique items, and Legendary Aspects. This allows you to pilot this build at its peak efficiency. Let's take a look at the changes you need to make to implement them.
Gear
In the optimal build, we get Raiment of the Infinite, Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop and Shard of Verathiel. We replace and lose Rapid. Hectic moves to our helmet and we drop all defensive aspects and add Mage-Lord's. Consider running Might if you want more defense over Hectic.
Mythic Unique Items
Andariel's Visage provides ridiculous attack speed and an extra source of damage, plus more Tal Rasha stacks. Ring of Starless Skies makes resource easy to manage and provides great damage. Fists of Fate goes into this section because a good pair will be required and is practically a Mythic with the roll range.
Skills
We switch to our final skill tree:
- Remove Fireball to add Chain Lightning.
- We keep points in Lightning Spear for Unstable Currents but add a point to Flame Shield and replace Lightning Spear on the skill bar.
Gameplay
Raiment of the Infinite changes the way you use Teleport. The main difference is that now you need to be more careful because the enemies can trap you. If you hold force move away from your teleport location as you cast it then you can usually step away from the group as it gets pulled in.
Hardcore Adjustments
Hardcore requires you to build into more defenses. Here are some tips to successfully navigate this build through potentially dangerous situations:
- Prioritize Maximum Life over Intelligence on your Gear. Always cap your Resistance as a priority when entering a new World Tier.
- Replace Raiment of the Infinite with Mage-Lord's Chest.
- Replace Flamefeeder or Exploit with Territorial.
- Consider forgoing Glass Cannon for extra defense in Warmth or mobility in Conduction.
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 Reduction (CDR). This is very important for any Sorcerer build. What good are our skills if we can't use them because they are on cooldown? In purely offensive terms, CDR gives us the following:
- More uptime on Vulnerable from Lightning Spears
- More uptime on Barrier from Ice Armor or Protection, activating Conceited and Storm Swell. Once we drop these aspects, our CDR value may drop for Ranks on Amulet.
- Attack Speed (AS). Attack Speed is great for our build but we will get a lot with our Mythical variant, normally we will prioritize Critical Strike Chance.
- Critical Strike Chance (CSC). More Critical Strike Chance means extra attacks from Enhanced Arc Lash and higher damage on our attacks than average due to Devouring Blaze.
- Next, we have all the normal damage stats: Arc Lash Ranks, Weapon Damage, Intelligence and all kinds of Additive Damage bonuses, in that order of priority.
- Cooldown Reduction (CDR). As with our damaging skills, our powerful Defensive Skills are not doing much if we cannot cast them. Teleport makes you Unstoppable invincible for a short moment, lets you get out of any dangerous situation and gives 30% Damage Reduction for 3 seconds after. Flame Shield makes you immortal and Ice Armor is Flame Shield with 3x the duration at best or a protective layer that almost doubles your HP at worst.
- Barrier. Mostly coming from Ice Armor, it is our main defense. With our high and consistent damage output, the Barrier will instantly refresh as long as it's not broken in one hit.
- Armor is the major source of Damage Reduction against Physical damage. We naturally get Armor just from having high Item Power gear, and we further boost it with Skulls in Jewelry. It's extremely important to reach the Armor cap of 9,230 as the last few points of Armor get exponentially more effective.
- Resistances give us damage reduction against Elemental damage. Similar to armor it should be stacked as close to the 70% cap as possible for full effectiveness. As a Sorcerer, we get lots of Resistances from our high Intelligence and our Paragon Boards, letting us almost reach the cap without sacrificing any stats on gear.
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
To enable your build to perform optimally, you need to reach certain Stat "Breakpoints". Some examples are reaching 100% to Critically Strike, or 20 Resource per second. Since there are many values of these stats on different pieces of gear, read the checklist below and refer to the recommended Tempered Affixes and Masterwork Crits ↑. Desirable Greater Affixes will always be the top three recommended Affixes.
Damage Scaling
- 75%+ Critical Strike Chance
- 60%+ Attack Speed
Defense and Utility
- Armor Capped 9,230
- Resistance Capped 70%
- 20,000+ Life
- 30%+ Cooldown Reduction
- Helm: Hectic
- Cooldown Reduction ↑
- Intelligence
- Maximum Life
- Armor
- ⚒️Warmth
- ⚒️Chance to Slow/Freeze/Immobilize
- Chest: Raiment of the Infinite
- Glass Cannon ↑
- Intelligence
- Shocking Impact
- Elemental Attunement
- Otherwise Look For: Might
- Ranks to Teleport ↑
- Intelligence
- Maximum Life
- Armor
- ⚒️Warmth
- ⚒️CC Duration/Barrier Generation
- Gloves: Fists of Fate
- Lucky Hit Chance ↑ (Andariel Priority)
- Critical Strike Chance ↑
- Attack Speed ↑
- Lucky Hit Chance to CC
- Otherwise Look For: Storm Swell
- Attack Speed ↑
- Critical Strike Chance ↑
- Intelligence
- Maximum Life
- ⚒️Vulnerable Damage
- ⚒️CC Duration/Barrier Generation
- Pants: Might
- Ranks to Arc Lash ↑
- Intelligence
- Maximum Life
- Armor
- ⚒️Warmth
- ⚒️Chance to Freeze/Slow/Immobilize
- Boots: Flickerstep
- Damage Reduction Close ↑
- Movement Speed ↑
- Ultimate Damage
- Lightning Resistance
- Otherwise Look For: Orange Herald
- "Attacks Reduce Evade Cooldown"
- Intelligence
- Movement Speed
- Maximum Life
- Mana per Second
- Armor
- ⚒️Evade Cooldown Reduction ↑
- ⚒️Chance to Immobilize/Slow/Freeze
- Amulet: Moonrise
- Conjuration Mastery ↑
- Devouring Blaze ↑
- Cooldown Reduction
- Glass Cannon
- Critical Strike Chance
- Movement Speed (Priority Leveling)
- ⚒️Vulnerable Damage
- ⚒️Evade Cooldown
- ⚒️Movement Speed if using Juggernaut
- Ring 1: Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop
- Cooldown Reduction ↑
- Non-Physical Damage
- Lucky Hit
- Potent Warding (Good Defensive Option
- Otherwise Look For: Rapid
- Critical Strike Chance ↑
- Attack Speed ↑
- Intelligence
- Maximum Life
- ⚒️Vulnerable Damage
- ⚒️Resource Generation
- Ring 2:Adaptability
- Critical Strike Chance ↑
- Attack Speed ↑
- Intelligence
- Maximum Life
- ⚒️Vulnerable Damage
- ⚒️ Resource Generation
- Main Hand: Shard of Verathiel
- Basic Skill Attack Speed ↑
- Basic Skill Ranks
- All Stats
- Maximum Resource
- Otherwise Look For: Shredding Blades (Wand)
- Intelligence
- Maximum Life
- Crit Damage
- Vulnerable Damage
- ⚒️Chance to swipe twice with Arc Lash ↑
- ⚒️Vulnerable Damage
- Off Hand: Moonrise
- Critical Strike Chance
- Cooldown Reduction
- Intelligence
- Maximum Life
- ⚒️Chance to swipe twice with Arc Lash ↑
- ⚒️Vulnerable Damage
This build benefits a lot from the following Consumables:
- Elixirs: Elixir of Advantage II or Elixir of Fortitude II for defense.
- Incense: Sage's Whisper, Spiral Morning, and Chorus of War
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 don't you use Imbiber?
Why no Stable Aspect?
Why no Aspect of Overwhelming Currents?
Why do you have points in Charged Bolts if you don't use them?
Mechanics
Learn all you need to know about how to scale this build in the endgame.
Arc Lash
Summary
The Arc Lash Sorcerer is a very powerful build that can output absolutely insane damage in the right conditions. Its melee range and squishiness are the only things keeping it somewhat in check. Still, between abundant Crowd Control and never-failing Flame Shield, this build can find a way to survive even when it has no right to.
- Start off by using Fireball Enchantment to farm in the open world.
- Stack Cooldown Reduction, Critical Strike Chance and Attack Speed to unlock unlimited power.
- We use Teleport to get on top of enemies, not to run away from them!
- Use Ice Armor and Flame Shield to stay alive against even the toughest foes.
- If you're hesitating about using Unstable Currents, the answer is always "yes".
Credits
Written by pandaglassjaw
Reviewed by Northwar