I’m using Meteor for big enemies, with Elemental Nova for the smaller ones (and Black Hole for the really big ones, together with Meteor). The build gets somewhat fragile when I run out of mana; I would like to get those last 75 mana to reach 1.000, but I can’t find a good gear slot in which to add that.
I have 6 unused passive points; any suggestion of where to put them?
I think your biggest deal, would be to shift away from the Vilatria’s set, or get the staff converted to an Exalted one, with the affix crafted onto it, if you are truly set on the Lightning focus.
If not, shift to an Exalted MH/OH, specifically a Crystal Wand, as they have the +Mana implicit, as well as being able to get both the Mana/Mana Regen Prefix and Mana/Mana Spent as Ward Prefix. With the implicit and one T7 of those two, it is over 200 Mana, just from that slot alone, while still having your entire Offhand slot.
And overall, you can scale the whole build around just stacking Mana. There is a mana-stacking Meteor guide on LETools. It’s from 1.1, but none of the nodes have changed or been nerfed that I can tell. So even if you don’t entirely copy it, it should give you some strong insights to how to twist and optimize your own.
I tried my sorc mage on 100c w-echo with arena guys. That was pretty interesting survivability test. And it’s failed multiple times! You need mitigation layers for character, not only “a lot of ward/hp”. Dodge have best synergy with hit/miss based dodge. As result of test with arena bros I decided to stay with Exsanguinos body and same boots. Teleport with armor buff.
Btw, the main issue of sorc is when you run out of mana (and you will run definitely and kinda fast) you need some time to stand still and recover. Thats when you get killed. Anyway: some decent armor, dodge, defence flame ward on stun + cdr on gear should help. But sorcerer should use very active play style and spell timing to survive.
Thats all about meteor sorc! imho
Yes. Dragon staff base (+1 elem skills) and t7 mana+mana regen t5 lighting dmg % t5 L-penetration t5 blind And sealed t1 set affix to make it work 
seems much badass than original Vilatria staff
No need to craft t5 affix
And reforged Invoked set looks… not so good
Maybe Omnis t7 mana will solve both +skill and res % issues, saving ring slots for defensive options and more int
Or Strong Mind for extra mana.
And t7 mana in body armor. And more mana idols. More
Absolutely not, Meteor without Vilatra is basically a death-sentence for meteor. It’s the BiS item for Meteor and offers everything which is extremely powerful for it. Lightning conversion, massive %inc which has a ridiculous scaling with Meteor, Mana and shock duration which ensures follow-up meteors will do massive damage still even if you run out of mana shortly.
The most important bit is the lightning conversion though as the skill tree of meteor has a scaling option more powerful then anything else in the game solely for that one.
Absolutely agreed!
That’s why some items in this build are definitely a kinda must-have.
So to come to it as I’ve talked in-depth about Meteor builds 2-3 times now here’s the summary @Erasculio :
Skills:
Meteor has a synergy build based on Fireball, that’s heavily recommended as you can trigger multiple casts of meteor with a single fireball cast. That’s the highest recommended thing to do right away. This way you can avoid using Elemental Nova. Both in conjunction fare… rather poorly.
Meteor itself: Skill into ‘Stardust’, that’s 100% MORE damage since you do lightning damage, you don’t need Vilatra if you don’t use this node, why convert to Lightning otherwise? If you use the Fireball trigger as well then cast-speed reduced through ‘Infernal Descent’ also has no meaning, hence those 2 nodes provides 150% MORE damage which is utterly massive. 9 Points needed there, so here how to get em:
Removing Apocalyptic Impact (3)
3 removed from ‘Crushing Force’
Removing ‘Mana Falls’ and ‘Distant Craters’. (together 3)
That makes all 9 points and provides you with more then double your current damage output right away.
Obviously this means something has to go. I would recommend re-speccing into Fireball as mentioned, also Teleport. Teleport is basically a mandatory skill, solely using Evade is getting you killed. Having access to a movement skill and not using it is a extreme handicap.
That means Black Hole and Elemental Nova go, Instead putting Fireball and Teleport inside.
It looks initially like it wouldn’t be as survivable but it’s TON more so, especially with the follow up:
Passives:
Damage wise one important thing to use is ‘Rift Bolt’, since you’re not using a low-life build currently that’s a extremely powerful method of scaling extra damage, each layer of multiplication is massive in itself when used in conjunction. Base damage, more damage, inc damage, crit and pen should if possible be used as much as possible together. Multiplication is stronger then addition after all.
6 Points needed there.
‘Arcane Insight’ is plainly spoken a useless skill for the investment. Even at 100 Int it’s only 500 threshold… that’s ridiculously low. Other means work a lot better.
Frees up 8 points.
The 5 points in ‘Elemental Ascendance’ can be better used in ‘Elemental Affinity’ on the Spellblade tree, 5% more ele res. The stun isn’t all that powerful, if you use a trigger for Meteor you free up a ton of usable space for skills and can use a unspecced ‘Snap Freeze’ even, which is a more reliable and direct ‘Oh shit!’ button.
‘Sphere of Protection’ is basically one of the strongest defensive skills with any elemental skill used. Heavily recommended.
8 points needed.
‘Essence of Celerity’ can be really helpful since it provides mobility, since your trigger would be Fireball with high cast speed that means you’re also going to have full stacks of ‘Arcane Momentum’ nearly all the time. Provided the points in momentum are kept low.
So a total of 8 Points for the synergy there.
So, that’s obviously a lot of points needed, so something has to go. Plainly spoken ‘Afterglow’ (8 points) is a really minimal reward for the investment, even at doubled value it just kinda… sucks.
‘Warder’ (5 Points) is a really awful passive no matter what, even as a Elemental Nova main skill it’s only 22,5 Ward/Second at most, with perfect precision in usage.
All of that provide a surplus of 5 free passive points again. Which hence can be used rather freely. ‘Ceraunomancer’, ‘Elemental Ascendance’ (which you already have so potentially keeping them in) or ‘Chronomancy’ are the 3 prime candidates, whichever is most needed. Mind you with ‘Sphere of Protection’ shocking enemies means taking less damage.
So over to gear, there’s a lot here to say:
Chestpiece is definitely not powerful for you. You’re not a main Elemental Nova mage, hence it’s a waste. Better options include either low-life focus with ‘Exsanguinous’ (you need to remove the recommended lightning pen from the tree then and focus on stacking Health to the mana on top) or ‘Wall of Nothing’ because it has basically everything you need. No damage taken, ward generation, ward Threshold and a potential Synergy for Endurance towards ward to increase the baseline amount you have in a stable manner.
Amulet: Use the DoT reduction base of possible. Also the set-Affix is useless, that focuses on Elemental Nova. Yes it provides a point in Meteor but that’s really not worth ‘wasting’ 2 Affix slots in total (The lightning one is good). Instead Lightning pen, Lightning damage, Health, Mana, res… whichever is most needed.
Belt: Use another Sealed affix if you don’t go for life-stacking, really bad one. Cleansing is great, Mana Regen is extremely powerful for you offensively and defensively as well as potentially the experimental Mana regen on potion use one since you’re stacking potion slots with that belt anyway and it synergizes well.
Relic: Twisted Heart is massively stronger. Extra ward and the + skill on it. Also extra strong without the low-life version of your build.
Gloves: Either ‘Liath’s Machination’ for the synergy of Fireball into Meteor, or trying to get ‘Ravenous Void’ with at least 1 LP for Experimental armor to DoT or a if you go with low-life then Ward for Missing life.
Rings: Late-game either Red Ring, second best option high LP ‘Julra’s Stardial’ directly followed for a well rolled ‘Swaddling of the Erased’.
The non-unique option is simply Int, Lightning damage, Mana regen, Invoker set for flat spell, Health, res, Ward per Second, Crit avoidance potentially. Whichever routes you go.
Idols:
The 4 slot is not really good, looks great! But doesn’t do as much as 4 small idols instead.
For the 3 slots the optimal combo is actually Mana and Mana/Armour combo, using 4 of those is massive for your build. Enchantments are optimally: either melee/spell damag flat or armor/reduced crit. Ward-second/threshold is also good.
The 2 slot idols can go.
The 2x2 Idol as well.
Blessings:
The one for Mana can be exchanged with Lightning Shred if all other gear is up to par, until the Mana is the best choice.
If you can get into crit reduction rather then avoidance then moving the Blessing for that over to all res saves up a TON of Affix space overall.
Same with Phys res, should you get the space then %Armor is a great choice there later on.
If you go with ‘Wall of Nothing’ then changing Frailty on hit to Endurance is a fantastic choice for some extra EHP, Frailty works great though.
That should be everything coming to mind right away.
80% more damage from 4 points in Stardust? There are a number of nodes that can do more, both in Meteor & in other skills. 1 Point in Twin Meteors is more powerful (a second meteor which does the same damage is equivalent to 100% more, assuming it hits), Shattershock does 84% more damage (assuming the target is chilled & shocked), The Harder They Fall (Earthquake) does 100% more damage, and others.
4 * 20% = 80%.
True, somehow my brain went with ‘there’s 5 points there’. Dunno how that went.
It’s not, it basically doubles Mana-cost and hence keeps DPS the same since Meteor is Mana-starved. Your limit is generally Mana as you can create a ridiculous amount of meteors through triggering.
Shattershock comes form Lightning Blast, which has a base damage of 21 with a damage effectiveness of 100%
That means if we use Vilatra’s there (just for example measure) it would become (minim rolls) 81 damage with 200% inc. Leading to 243 damage.
That means 84% more does create 447,12 Damage.
Comparatively Meteor has a base damage of 190 with 950% damage effectiveness.
That means the 60 damage of Vilatra become 9,5 times as effective, leading to a base damage of 570 damage added for a total of 760 base damage for Meteor, which leads into the the 200% inc also being 9,5 times as effective, meaning they become 1900% damage.
That leads to the total damage being 14440 damage baseline.
Hence the 80% more damage there definitely do work a ton better then with alternative options on skill trees. It leads to 25992 Damage per hit.
You gotta take the base-stats of skills into consideration to assess the individual power each node has. A skill without scaling opportunities through gear needs excessive ones through the passive tree and skill tree. One which excessive scaling from the skill itself is supposed to have miniscule scaling from passive trees and skill trees.
A problem EHG has with their overall design for skills to date still, as mentioned in other threads by me.
So yes, I’ll say my argument for it being one of the most powerful available nodes skill-tree wise is in my opinion upholding.
Earthquake in comparison is already a ton better, though it is based on another scaling and highly reliant on gear. Melee physical damage is the strongest stat for it for a reason since it has a 600% damage effectiveness, making it gear-reliant unlike Meteor which scales by itself already to high degrees without any gear present, only needing a common set item to make it work. It can scale higher though as the upside.
Yes, but if you’re using triggered meteors then you wouldn’t be taking Twin Meteor or several of the nodes behind it since they wouldn’t affect non-directly cast meteors. Last I checked, 100% more was bigger than 80% more.
For the life of me I can’t get to 243 damage from 21 base + 60 (the staff’s minimum damage) → 21 + (60*2) = 121 * (1 + 200% increased) = 363.
That said, this is where two things can be true depending on what you mean.
84% more is clearly bigger than 80% more, so I’m right based on what you said, but Meteor’s much higher added damage effectiveness means that the absolute hit damage is higher. But as you mentioned about Meteor being mana starved, you can spam Lightning Blast a lot.
Yes & no. If you’re going to say “X node is the most powerful in the game” that’s open to interpretation, plus what if you’ve run out of mana? That massively powerful & expensive skill isn’t going to be doing much now is it?
Yes, but without a source of flat damage Meteor isn’t going to do much damage. Spells have higher base damage but they are still gear-dependent for the flat damage.
But that’s not what you said.
Still mana-starved which wouldn’t (through twin alone, only with the follow-up points) increase your Damage. And true, you wouldn’t use em for a trigger.
Yeah, messed up, I didn’t take the base damage in, so my 200% went into being a times 2 multiplier… not a time 3 multiplier.
Yeah, tens of times comparatively to a single meteor hit 
I mean… that’s kinda a balancing issue, has always been. Lightning Blast is not without reason either used as a 0 Mana solution for fallback or as a supporting mechanic either being triggered, supporting or triggering other things along the way. Not as a core damage skill.
Which mind you… it should have the potential for that but doesn’t.
Won’t happen for a long time since you build for ridiculous mana regen with meteor, the belt does a lot, Rings help heavily, defenses scale off of mana usage as well and your EHP rise with Mana as well.
You generally regen 150-200 mana per second easily, which makes a hit viable, going into the millions of damage with a mediocre build already. I’m happy to reach 50k hits with Lightning Blast as a direct cast. Fireball is even worse by itself.
190 flat by itself is I think the highest base damage available? You can scale purely with %inc and be fine damage wise. Actually using flat damage with such high initial values is rather detrimental until you got a surprisingly large investment.
Same thing as with high investment into crit as another layer versus base damage (flat, %more, %inc in this example), there’s a turnover point.
The higher base damage the further away the turnover point. Earthquake for example has a massive need for flat and low amounts of %inc, Meteor has the other way around.
trigger multiple casts of meteor with a single fireball cast
Can you explain please, I don’t understand and can’t find synergy of fireball and meteor. Is it from belt and crits?
Yes, belt and crits.
Unlike alternatives Fireball has the ability to get 9% base crit for a total of 14% base crit.
The only downside is that it needs to be scaled in some way. One decent option is to abstain from using Vilatra’s and instead pushing the set Affix onto a item and then using it on a 1 LP ‘Peak of the Mountain’ as the easiest method. 240% min roll already makes it into a 47,4% crit chance by itself. So basically every second fireball crits.
Also meteor crits count as critting as well, causing a cascade which re-casts it until enemies are dead or your mana is gone. A very powerful combination which can - but sadly rarely will - happen.
You basically try to spam fireballs this way.
The Fireball tree for that would be:
4 Adept
3 Mana Sphere
3 Winged Fire
2 Orb of Destruction
1 Fire Spray
3 Skira’s Gambit
3 Flammability
1 Seeker’s Ash
For a basic 20 Point setup.
Liath’s gloves are nice to get ‘Plasma Ball’ and bring ‘Winged Fire’ closer to max while also adding a little bit of extra shock chance overall. Though it becomes detrimental for the pure Crit-related casting, so with more points it’s to be removed again to go towards ‘Burning Wounds’
Further potential points come from Relics (Knowledge of an Erased, Twisted Heart or even Shattered Worlds)
1-2 more for Amulet (Omnis, Nihilis)
A absolutely disgustingly strong ‘Dragon Staff’ (which is really late game crafting) with Vilatra set Affix plus Mana/Mana spent as Ward as well as Lightning pen and chance to ignite on hit (for triggering more crits)
Keeping the Vilatra Crown will allow to take ‘Plasma Ball’ beforehand as it’ll provide the lightning tag, but it’s not really worth it with other good uniques around, the lightning pen is strong but scaling shock chance is huge as well as it does basically the same but with a limit of 10 stacks.
Thanks. Trying mana strike with some procs now, build get to melee zone but who cares 
mana sustain is nice, but need more crit and attack speed with staff kinda meh. Cooking next day, time to sleep.
That’s not what the belt says.
Oh? I completely ignored the fine print there! Sorry for that one, that’s a massive blunder from my side! Thanks for mentioning it!
Thank you for the very detailed reply, I’ll apply some of your suggestions.