Sorcerers in Diablo 4 are casters of powerful elemental magics by using their wands, staves and focuses. They excel in both ranged and close-quarters combat thanks to a plethora of skills at their disposal. But there is always a downside to each class in Diablo 4 including Sorcerers. Thankfully, with the proper skill allocation and good gear, builds like the Chain Lightning Sorcerer in Diablo 4 can turn this class into the deadliest one.
The Sorcerer class in Diablo 4 has low defense and health, making them vulnerable to powerful enemies. Sorcerers’ builds without proper planning are ill-suited for the endgame content. We are here to help you build a Sorcerer character that is way too overpowered for its own good. This Diablo 4 Chain Lightning build for Sorcerer can be used to annihilate the endgame bosses and elites, and even players don’t stand a chance against it.
Jump To:
- Skills and unlock order
- Sorcerer Enchantment
- Playstyle and skill rotation
- Gear, Gems and Stats priority
- Paragon Board
- Unique Items
- Legendary Aspects
- Elixir choices
Chain Lightning Sorcerer skills progression and unlock order
Active skills from the Sorcerer skill tree play a very important role to create most of the builds in Diablo 4. Here is a general breakdown of all the active skills we will be needing for our Chained Lightning Sorcerer build.
- Fire Bolt (basic/enchantment)
- Arc Lash (basic)
- Chain Lightning (core/enchantment)
- Ice Armor (defensive)
- Frost Nova (defensive)
- Teleport (defensive)
- Unstable Currents (ultimate)
- Vyr’s Mastery (key passive)
Diablo 4 allows the players to earn a maximum of 58 skill points before replacing the whole system with Paragon points. The primary purpose of this section is to allocate these skill points efficiently among both active and passive skills we will be needing for our specialized Sorcerer build.
Here is a list in priority order to unlock the skills for creating a Chain Lightning Sorcerer build.
| Unlock Order | Skill Name |
| 1 | Arc Lash (Rank 5) |
| 2 | Enhanced Arc Lash |
| 3 | Flickering Arc Lash |
| 4 | Fire Bolt |
| 5 | Chain Lightning (Rank 5) |
| 6 | Enhanced Chain Lightning |
| 7 | Greater Chain Lightning |
| 8 | Devastation |
| 9 | Elemental Dominance (Rank 3) |
| 10 | Frost Nova (Rank 5) |
| 11 | Ice Armor (Rank 5) |
| 12 | Teleport (Rank 3) |
| 13 | Enhanced Ice Armor |
| 14 | Enhanced Frost Nova |
| 15 | Mystical frost Nova |
| 16 | Precision Magic (Rank 3) |
| 17 | Align the Elements |
| 18 | Mana Shield (Rank 3) |
| 19 | Protection (Rank 2) |
| 20 | Icy Veil (Rank 3) |
| 21 | Inner Flames |
| 22 | Unstable Currents |
| 23 | Prime Unstable Currents |
| 24 | Fiery Surge (Rank 3) |
| 25 | Coursing Currents (Rank 3) |
| 26 | Electrocution (Rank 3) |
| 27 | Convulsions (Rank 3) |
| 28 | Vyr’s Mastery |
| 29 | Warmth (Rank 3) |
The first thing that you will notice here is the allocation of more than 58 skill points in the skill trees. Before proceeding any further, we like to remind you that 10 out of 58 skill points can only be obtained by completing 5 Renown tasks.
This is not a hard and fast list when it comes to upgrade point allocation. We removed upgrades from Arc Lash as we progressed further in the game. We encourage players to experiment by themselves to see which upgraded skills suit them better.
Choosing the skills is however a different story. This skill list for the Diablo 4 build is created very carefully with only Chain Lightning Sorcerer in mind. So, we don’t want you to deviate or remove the skills from your build. But you can use the upgrade points to acquire a few other skills that you want.
The reason for Vyr’s Mastery as our key passive is to increase the damage of shock skills; Arc Lash and Chain Lightning, while reducing the damage by 20%. If a shock skill delivers a critical strike, Vyr’s Mastery increases these bonuses by 25%.
The rest of the passive skills from each tree either enhance your defense or provide further attack power to shock attacks.
Sorcerer Enchantment for Chain Lightning build
Enchantments is a Sorcerer class special ability that allows the players to select any two elemental skills and apply them enchantments in special slots. There are a few restrictions on using enchantments.
Only the skills that have been unlocked by spending a skill point can be used as enchantments. No more than two skills can be enchanted. Enchantment skills must belong to either Fire, Ice or Shock categories.
Below are our two favorite skills we recommend to enchant for the Diablo IV Chain Lightning Sorcerer build.
- Fire Bolt: This enchantment applies a fixed amount of fire damage to the enemies when they are attacked directly (both physical and elemental).
- Chain Lightning: Chain Lightning skill is used automatically for free after spending 100 mana.
Chain Lightning Sorcerer playstyle and skill rotation
With the Chain Lightning Sorcerer build, we are aiming for high DPS and minimal damage received from the enemies. Here is a list of skills divided among categories to achieve both of our goals in addition to a few other ones.
Increased Elemental Damage
Chain Lightning Sorcerer build depends heavily on inflicting as much elemental damage as possible. We are talking Ice, Fire and Shock damages all combined in one package. Here is a list of skills that enhance these damages even further.
- Enhanced Arc Lash: This skill inflicts 42% damage to close enemies and stuns all enemies on every 10th cast. Swipes the enemies a second time if the first one was critical.
- Greater Chain Lightning: This skill inflicts chain lightning damage to up to 5 enemies at a time. However, if the lightning chains the players, it inflicts an additional 10% damage.
- Elemental Dominance: This passive skill inflicts 9% more damage from passive skills if players have mana more than 50.
- Teleport: This skill makes the players invincible and allows them to move to another location, dealing a minor amount of shock damage to the enemies at the place of their arrival.
- Unstable Currents: This ultimate skill allows players to cast a free random skill from any tree by using a core skill.
- Vyr’s Mastery: This skill inflicts 10% additional damage to close enemies by shock skills. In case of a critical strike, this bonus increases to 25%.
Mana Regeneration
Sorcerers’ skills are true mana hog, and you will run out of it before you can even realize it. Conserving and regenerating mana is extremely important when starting a run with the Chain Lightning sorcerer build. Here is a list of skills to aid you with this goal.
- Devastation: This passive skill increases the total mana by up to 9 permanently.
- Enhanced Ice Armor: This skill increases the mana generation by up to 25% when active.
- Fiery Surge: This passive skill increases the mana generation by up to 30% by killing a burning enemy.
Increased Defense
Sorcerers are prone to taking a lot of damage from enemies. To counter this, we have selected a few skills and passives that will help protect your character throughout the journey.
- Ice Armor: This skill reduces 30% of players’ total life in damage for a few seconds. It also strengthens by 5% of players’ attack power with each strike.
- Align the Elements: This passive skill allows the players to take less damage by up to 3% every second, up to 40% against the Elites. The condition for this skill is to not take any damage during this time.
- Protection: This passive skill generates a barrier equal to 20% of maximum life upon activating a cooldown.
- Icy Veil: This passive skill increases barrier duration by up to 15%.
- Electrocution: This passive skill makes the players take up to 15% less damage from the enemies who are critically struck by their shock skills.
Health Regeneration
Because of using the Firebolt enchantment that puts all enemies on fire, we have selected a passive skill that will constantly heal the character during combat. This is an extremely important skill to regen health and stay alive while using our Chain Lightning Sorcerer build.
- Warmth: This passive skill allows the players to heal for 0.9% of their maximum health per burning enemy close by. This bonus increases to 1.8% per second against bosses.
Damage Rotation for Chain Lightning Sorcerer
This section covers the active skills we will be using with our Chain Lightning Sorcerer build in Diablo 4 and the order in which they should be used.
- Arc Lash
- Ice Armor
- Teleport
- Chain Lightning
- Frost Nova
- Unstable Currents
Always start your rotation with Arc Lash. This shock skill, when fully upgraded, can deal serious electric damage to nearby enemies. Activate Ice Armor before Teleporting near the enemies in the area. Our primary focus for this build is to get as close to the enemies as possible to start a chain lightning reaction.
However, due to a lack of defense and health, jumping into a group of enemies with a Sorcerer is foolish. This is where the combination of Frost Nova and Ice Armor comes in. Ice Armor protects you from all kinds of attacks due to the passives supporting it, while Frost Nova freezes the surrounding enemies for up to 3 seconds.
This is your best chance to unleash hell upon enemies by using the Chain Lightning skill. Because of the Fire Bolt enchantment, Chain Lightning delivers both shock damage and put enemies on fire for a few seconds. Combined with fire attack-enhancing passives, the area surrounding the player turns into an inferno for the stunned enemies.
Lastly, the ultimate attack in the form of Unstable Currents enforces the players to cast a free skill from all skill trees by using any shock skill. This lasts for 10 seconds, allowing players to cast multiple skills on already destroyed enemies.
This is the most OP and borderline broken endgame build in Diablo 4. Just rotate these skills and even elites don’t stand a chance against your Chain Lightning Sorcerer.
Gear, Gems and Stats priority
In this section, we will discuss the primary stats that work wonder with Chain Lightning Sorcerer build. Each class uses the same four Diablo 4 stats that provide permanent buffs when upgraded.
Below is the order in which you should upgrade the stats to have the maximum benefits from both primary and secondary effects.
- Intelligence
- Willpower
- Dexterity
- Strength
Every point in the Intelligence stat increases skill damage and resistance to all elements by a particular percentage.
Willpower increment increases overpower damage, resource generation and healing received by a particular percentage.
Dexterity plays an important role to enhance dodging and critical strikes chance by a fixed percentage.
Sadly, Strength has no primary effect for the Sorcerer class but its secondary effect increases 1 armor per upgrade point.
Gems are totally a personal choice for any build in Diablo 4. This stands true for Sorcerer too. However, here is a list of gems you should equip for a good Chain Lightning Sorcerer build.
| Type | Gemstone | Effect |
| Weapon | Topaz | This yellow gemstone increases the damage of basic skills. |
| Armor | Amethyst | This purple gemstone reduces the damage received over time. |
| Jewelry | Diamond | This rare gemstone increases resistance against all elemental attacks. |
For endgame equipment, we recommend finding the item affixes that enhance your gear in line with the Chain Lightning Sorcerer stats. Here is a list of our favorite affixes.
- Increase damage by using basic skills.
- Increase shock damage to close enemies.
- Increase fire damage to close enemies.
- Increase the duration of the armor.
- Apply thorns to return the damage to the attacker.
- More attack speed.
- Less damage received from close enemies.
- Enhanced Mana regeneration with the use of skills.
- More health recovery from enemies and items.
- More damage from crackling energy to the enemies.
Paragon Boards
Diablo 4 likes to mix up things by replacing skill points with Paragon Board and Glyphs towards the endgame. Players earn 4 Paragon points during each level which can be used to purchase nodes and glyphs. These nodes and glyphs provide advanced effects to the players.
Here is a list of some of our favorite nodes and glyphs for Chain Lightning Sorcerer.
- Elementalist: This rare node increases maximum life by 4%.
- Elemental Balance: This rare node enhances the elemental damage by up to 20%.
- Burning Instinct: This legendary node increases the burning damage by 40% of critical attacks and further increases it by 5% for every upgrade in the intelligence stat.
- Kindling: This rare node delivers up to 20% more damage to burning enemies and 16% more damage to elites.
- Reservoir: This rare node increases the total mana by 16.
- Enchantment Master: This legendary node strengthens the enchantments by 20%.
- Erudite: This rare node increases the resistance against all elemental attacks by up to 8%.
- Destruction: This glyph increases damage by critical strikes by up to 12%.
- Territorial: This glyph reduces damage taken by 10% from close enemies.
- Torch: This glyph delivers up to 12.5% more damage to enemies depending on the number of burning enemies around.
- Winter: This glyph allows the players to deal up to 15% additional damage to the chilled enemies.
- Icefall: This legendary node grants barrier for 15% of your maximum life for killing a frozen enemy.
- Static Surge: This legendary node restores 10 mana for each stunned enemy nearby.
Unique Items
Of all the gear items in Diablo 4, unique items are the most powerful ones. Their unique skills can totally turn the tide of battle in your favor. However, they only appear later in the game and are very rare to find.
The whole process of collecting the desired unique items is troublesome, to say the least. Still, we managed to find a few ones that we recommend to readers who are interested in the Chain Lightning Sorcerer build.
- Staff of Lam Esen: This legendary staff increases lightning damage to both close and injured enemies by a good margin.
- Esu’s Heirloom: These unique boots increase movement speed, especially after killing an elite. It also increases the chance of a critical strike by 25% of your total movement speed.
- Raiment of the Infinite: This unique chest armor stuns the enemies which are affected by Teleport skill. It also increases intelligence by up to 25 while dealing more damage to stunned and closed enemies.
- Iceheart Brais: These unique pants releases Frost Nova from the enemies killed while frozen. It also increases Freeze duration while doing more damage to injured and frozen enemies.
Legendary Aspects for Chain Lightning Sorcerer
Legendary aspects in Diablo 4 are the most viable affixes to use as compared to the unique items. These aspects can be applied to any gear piece of choice (rare or legendary only) to grant them the power of legendary affix. This opens a new door to endless possibilities. However, all good things come at a cost.
Legendary aspects appear as a drop from enemies or can be looted from dungeons only in the form of Codex of Power.
Here is a list of Sorcerer legendary aspects in Diablo IV that we recommend for the Chain Lightning Sorcerer build.
- Aspect of Abundant Energy: The crackling energy has an additional percentage chance to chain more enemies.
- Aspect of Biting Cold: This aspect has a percentage chance of making a frozen enemy vulnerable for a few seconds.
- Aspect of Control: This legendary aspect allows you to deal a particular percentage of more damage to stunned and frozen enemies.
- Aspect of Efficiency: If a core skill is cast immediately after any basic skill, its mana cost is reduced significantly.
- Aspect of Overwhelming Currents: This aspect allows the Unstable Currents to cast an additional shock skill randomly.
- Aspect of the Bounding Conduits: This legendary aspect increases the movement speed by a particular percentage after using the Teleport skill.
- Aspect of the Unbroken Tether: This legendary aspect increases the number of chains created by the Chain Lightning skill.
- Charged Aspect: This legendary aspect increases the movement speed as a reward for collecting Crackling Energy.
- Mage-Lord’s Aspect: This legendary aspect allows Vyr’s Mastery passive skill to reduce the amount of damage taken depending on the number of closed enemies.
- Prodigy’s Aspect: A chance to restore a certain amount of mana after using cooldown.
- Snowveiled Aspect: This legendary aspect makes the players unstoppable for a few seconds after donning the Ice Armor.
Elixirs and Potion choices
Sorcerers are masters of elemental manipulation and extraction of health from their enemies. We still recommend upgrading your healing potions to get an upper hand in fights against the elites and bosses. There are a few elixirs in diablo 4 we also recommend that you brew with the help of Alchemists before venturing into high-level dungeons.
- Iron Skin Elixir: This elixir increases armor by up to 300 for the next 30 minutes.
- Elixir of Fortitude: This elixir increases the maximum health by 30% for the next 30 minutes.
- Vampirism Elixir: This elixir heals the players for 0.8% of their maximum life with direct strikes to the enemies for the next 30 minutes.
Only one elixir can be used at a time. Make sure to use the one that counts.
