Diablo IV’s Season of The Malignant has been going on for about a week now. Over the last week, the community has seen the game’s meta shift and morph into where it is today. With this comes changes to how classes are played and what builds are considered the best. Sorcerer currently isn’t in the best state and due to that a lot of the class builds aren’t as vibrant as some of the other classes in the game.
This guide will go over a leveling build for Sorcerer. You can play this build in the new Season of The Malignant or you can just play it in the core experience of the game, it’s up to you!
Leveling Ice Shard Sorcerer Build
The Sorcerer is, on paper, a fairly simple class to play. It’s the only class in Diablo IV to play anything like what you’d normally expect a class to play. You cast spells of various elements and deplete your mana.
Having to manage mana that increases over time and also from stats or rolls on equipment makes the class harder to play due to the entire RNG nature of the game. Now, this doesn’t mean Sorcerer is bad at all. It just means the class takes some more love to get going.
When you hit level 50 you should have a total of 48 skill points from leveling and 10 skill points from completing the Renown challenges in each Act zone.
If you are playing a Seasonal Sorcerer you will want to keep an eye out for these Malignant Hearts: Tal’Rasha, Revenge, and The Barber.
- Tal’Rasha: For each unique element you deal damage with, you deal 7-12% increased damage for 3-10 seconds.
- Revenge: 10-20% of incoming damage is instead suppressed. When you use a Defensive, Subterfuge, or a Macabre skill, all suppressed damage is amplified by 250% and explodes, dealing up to 1360-2040 Fire damage to nearby enemies.
- The Barber: Critical Strikes and all subsequent damage within 2.0-4.0 seconds is absorbed by your target. Then, the absorbed damage erupts onto surrounding enemies. Stored damage is increased by 10% per second.
The Core Skills
Your hotbar should consist of Frost Bolt, Ice Shard, Frost Nova, Ice Armor, Teleport, and eventually, Blizzard.
Your main damage-dealing skills are Ice Shards and Frost Nova. Ice Shards is a single target skill that will eventually gain a ricochet effect, bouncing between frozen enemies at quick speeds! Frost Nova is going to be your AoE skill which will act as your way to control enemies by freezing them and allowing your Ice Shards to bounce off of them, causing a ton of damage.
Picking up Blizzard is very important because it helps make your ice skills more powerful while reducing the mana cost of your Core skills. AKA, you can cast Ice Shards two times more than before.
Teleport is self-explanatory. You need to get out of the way a lot as a Sorcerer and this helps.
Ice Armor is also a great skill that gives you protection in case you’re stuck in the middle of a rock and a hard place. This skill will generate Mana for you in a pinch as well, so look keep that in mind just in case.
The leveling path looks like this:
- Frost Bolt to Enhanced Frost Bolt
- Ice Shards to Greater Ice Shards
- Enhanced Frost Bolt to Glinting Frost Bolt
- Frost Nova
- Ice Armor
- Teleport
- Enhanced Frost Nova to Mystical Frost Nova
- Enhanced Ice Armor to Mystical Ice Armor
- Enhanced Teleport to Shimmering Teleport
- Ice Shards to Level 2
- Blizzard to Wizard’s Blizzard
- Ice Shards to Level 5
- Frost Nova to Level 5
- Glass Canon to Level 3
- Devastation
- Elemental Dominance to Level 3
- Avalanche
- Align the Elements
- Mana Shield
- Protection
- Icy Veil
- Snap Freeze
- Cold Front
- Permafrost
- Hoarfrost
- Frigid Breeze
- Icy Touch
- Permafrost to Level 3
- Hoarfroast to Level 3
- Frigid Breeze to Level 3
The above leveling path is just a soft suggestion, but this is what you should be sitting on at Level 50. Ideally, as long as you stick to the Ice skills that are available you should be good to go.
If you’re playing Diablo IV Season of the Malignant, let us know! What class are you playing?
