Diablo 4 – Sorcerer Gameplay FAQ (Season 4)

Season 4: Useful Tips & Tricks for Sorcerers

Best Leveling in Season 4

• World Tiers (WT1 / WT2)
  • Helltides hands down
• World Tier 3
  • Helltides
• World Tier 4
  • Early WT4 you can mix in Helltides and NM dungeons
  • Once you are able to do Pits you should clear pits as they are the best XP/Hour if you are able to kill Level 100 enemies for Pit Tier 1
  • Don’t worry about your glyphs too much unless you are struggling, the strategy is to slingshot yourself upwards via Pits to skip the early Tiers of Nightmare Dungeons
  • You can level your glyphs later once you are higher level as Higher level NM dungeons reward much more glyph XP than lower level ones

How can I manage my mana in early game?

A codexed Prodigy and Umbral aspect on rings can help manage mana early. Frostbolt enchant is a good way to proc Umbral while leveling as you get mana back when you crowd control an enemy.

Enchantment Guide

Used Frequently

• Firebolt
  • Taken to apply burning for the Flamefeeder Glyph, Damage Reduction to Burning Enemies, and the Devouring Blaze Passive for damage
• Fireball
  • Commonly used when leveling to help clear mobs faster, but useless on bosses
• Frozen Orb
  • A popular way to apply Chill/Freeze, apply Vulnerable, and cover your Cold Damage requirement for the Tal Rasha Unique Ring
• Teleport Enchant
  • The go-to for Speed Farming builds with ‘Attacks Reduce Evade’ boots, turns your Evade into a Teleport that can utilize the Raiment Unique Chest to stun and group enemies
• Ice Blade
  • Taken to abuse the Summoned Ice Blade node which reduces the cooldowns of all your skills
• Firewall
  • Taken on most burning builds just as an extra source of burning damage

Niche

• Frostbolt
  • Mainly used when leveling in combination with the Umbral Ring aspect to generate mana by Chilling/Freezing enemies
• Arc Lash
  • Can be used in leveling builds to stun enemies
• Ice Shard
  • Taken mainly on Ice Shard builds to help kill frozen enemies, but useless on bosses
• Chain Lightning
  • Taken only on Chain Lightning builds for more damage
• Frost Nova
  • Taken on some builds that utilize conjurations to freeze entire screens, provide vulnerable, and stagger bosses
• Lightning Spear
  • Used on some Lightning builds that generate a lot of Crackling Energy to scale damage through the Conjuration Mastery passive and provide vulnerability and stuns
• Meteor
  • Used mainly on Meteor builds and can chain react and proc itself with the aspect of Shattered Stars
• Ball Lightning
  • Taken on some Lightning builds to help bolster damage, most notably on Ball Lightning builds (surprise)
• Incinerate
  • Can be used on Incinerate builds, but it has spotty uptime
• Hydra
  • Every 200 mana you summon a Hydra for 10 seconds. High mana requirement, so not used a lot

Rarely Used

• Spark Enchant
  • Chance to form a Crackling Energy on kill is terrible
• Charged Bolt
  • Doesn’t work on bosses
• Flame Shield
  • Previously used on Hardcore builds, but the enchant is now functionally useless
• Ice Armor
  • Just not worth it
• Blizzard
  • Terrible uptime

Tips for Sorcerer Crowd Control

Sorcerer & Crowd Control

Sorcerer has three main crowd controls:

• Chill/Freeze
• Stun
• Immobilize

Chill / Freeze

• Skills like Frozen Orb and Blizzard apply, as does all direct damage if you are using the Frostbolt enchantment
• These skills apply a chill %, and upon reaching 100% chilled, an enemy is frozen for a certain duration
• For the sake of multipliers, Frozen is considered 100% chilled, so damage to chilled will work on frozen targets
• Although chilling an enemy does slow their movements, they are NOT considered “Slowed” which is a separate crowd control

Stun

• Stun is most often seen on lightning builds that utilize Lightning Spear and/or Unstable Currents
• The Raiment chest piece is also a good source of stun for any element build and the stun/grouping can be procced off a hard casted teleport or an evade enchant teleport
• When enemies are stunned they are unable to attack or move for a period of time

Immobilize

• Immobilized enemies can act, but they cannot move for a duration
• Immobilize is most often seen on burning builds
• Incinerate and Meteor have skill tree nodes that can immobilize enemies
• Firewall and Fireball must utilize the Crippling Flames passive to immobilize

Additional Sources of Crowd Control

Lucky Hit Chance Tempers

• With the Itemization rework in Season 4, we now have access to utility tempers to inflict crowd control effects
• There are tempers for Freeze, Stun, Immobilize, and Slow

Utility Aspect: Concussive Strikes

• This is an extremely strong aspect as our lucky hits gain a 20% chance to daze for 2 seconds and we deal 20% extra damage to Dazed Enemies

Unstoppables

• Mob type enemies will go Unstoppable after about 6 seconds of being crowd controlled
• Unstoppable lasts about 8 seconds and during this time enemies cannot be crowd controlled.
  • Any crowd control damage multipliers have no effect
• Because of this, a lot of Sorcerer builds spec into a “glass cannon” route where the aim is to crowd control a pack of enemies and be able to kill them before this mechanic occurs

Bosses

• Bosses cannot be crowd controlled and crowd control damage multipliers do not work on them until staggered
• Bosses have a Stagger Bar that is filled by applying sources of crowd control to them
• Repeated Crowd Control effects have diminishing returns toward this stagger bar
  • Example: Applying chill over and over will result in less progress added to the Stagger Bar over time
• As a result of these diminishing returns, the best way to stagger a boss quickly is to try to apply multiple forms of crowd control.
  • Example: Blizzard chills, while lucky hit stun tempers apply stun
• Once staggered a boss will sit there unable to act and is considered affected by ALL forms of crowd control. It is stunned, immobilized, frozen, etc all at once.
  • Aspects, Affixes, and Glyphs that increase damage to crowd controlled targets are now active on the boss
• Once the Stagger Bar ends, you can start to build up stagger again. However, after each stagger phase the boss becomes more resistant to crowd control and the stagger bar takes longer to fill up
• Affixes and Aspects that affect crowd control duration do not increase how long a boss is staggered for, but they do increase the amount of Stagger Bar progress your crowd control effects contribute

Boss Target Farming

Click to enlarge…