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Focal Lightning Blast Ice Barrage Sorcerer, Giving Jurla The Cold Shoulder Last Epoch Build Guide - YouTube
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Sorcerer, Level 99 (LE Beta 0.8.5e) - Last Epoch Build Planner
Written Guide :
Hello, this is Dr3ad from Epoch Builds, and in today’s forum topic we are going to go over Focal Blast Cold Lightning Blast Ice Barrage Twisted Heart Sorcerer, finally making a version of Lightning Blast that is different enough from the usual meta setup that is an actual viable option. I just want to be clear in this video, some of my gear in this video is very lackluster, as I am nowhere near the amount of critical strike chance I want to be.
So the concept of this build is to utilize Focal Blast, which pretty much makes our Lightning Blast into a column attack, and then converts every chain into just 30% more damage. In my current setup, I am getting 120% more damage from this node, which is great! With some + to level of skills, you could easily get way more than this.
This allows us to clear and do our single target with one skill, but we do end up requiring some help from Ice Barrage. Ice Barrage has a node in it, Frost Armor which gives us a global 60% more cold damage buff while Ice Shield is active, which is a part of Ice Barrage that gives us a small shield that blocks projectiles. We can keep a decent uptime on this, and to be honest this node is the only reasons to ever go Cold Lightning Blast, as Shock and Convergence are so strong as of Patch 8.5e.
Ice Barrage does assist in our clear as well, because we end up shooting a bunch of random projectiles everywhere, which helps killing trash and helps apply armor shred onto bosses. It also helps us proc Prismatic Gaze for us.
So we are running a 2h staff, so we can get as much flat adaptive spell damage as possible. Normally this is not worth it, as a base crit catalyst is superior, but Lightning Blast has Storm Razor, allowing us to gain an extra 3% base crit. This combined with Prismatic Gaze, which gives us 4% base crit, its enough to make up for the lost of spell crit catalyst. And Prismatic Gaze also gives us all of our resistance shred. If you are unfamilar with how it functions, simply as you cast sub 40 mana cost skills, in this case Lightning Blast, you will gain a stack of prism shard, up to 5 stacks. When you use a skill that is over 40 mana, in this case Ice Barrage, it shoots out shards equal to the amount of stacks you have, homing on targets and shredding elemenal resistance, which is short hand for shredding fire, cold and lightning res at the same time. This allows us to not have to run Cold Shred on Heorot if we don’t want to, so its just free damage.
We then eventually will want to run a setup with Lightning Aegis, and cast speed while you have lightning aegis idols. Problem is my gear isn’t good enough to make the change, so I opted for just crit idols instead for now. Eventually I want to swap over, but I haven’t made the change yet as my Sorcerer gear is less than optimal at the moment because I barely ever play Sorcerer.
One important thing about our offensive setup that I had to find out the hard way, since we are running a Staff, it cannot roll Armor Shred on a suffix, meaning we only have 2 places to get it, amulet or gloves. Right now I have it on gloves and it works fine, even at an 84% chance. This just gives a lot of more damage versus bosses, which is great for our endgame DPS.
For our defenses we run a simple Twisted Heart and Prism Wrap setup. The idea is, every time we cast Lightning Blast, we sacrifice 15% of our HP to convert it into ward, which then we leech it back with the powerful leech of Prism Wraps and the Spell Leech Blessing from The Black Sun. This allows us to scale ward really hard, for not much investment, and lets us tank things we normally wouldn’t be able to as a sorcerer. Now you could probably make a different version where you utilize Fractured Crown, but I didn’t want to be paying for the mana cost of Ice Barrage while also losing mana from taking damage, so I opted it out for Twisted in the end.
This build feels great to play, and its fun being able to make a non convergence lightning blast work, as the Sorcerer meta has been very stale. Now this doesn’t outpreform Static Orb Lightning Blast in any way, but its more of a fun offshoot you can try if your bored of the normal bread and butter of Sorcerer.