Last Epoch Build Planner: Sorcerer, Level 93 (LE Beta 0.8.4e) - Last Epoch Build Planner
loot filter - ThyMeteor.xml (84.4 KB)
Hello lovely people, Thyworm here with a build guide for Last Epoch Patch 0.8.4H. I don’t make too many build guides, but that’s because I actually play the builds a lot before I make a guide about them.
Today, I bring you a decent Lightning Meteor Mage. He’s really fun to play, and does decent damage, but it’s not very tanky.
You can find a written guide, this script, on the forum. The build is available in the Last Epoch Build Planner. See the description for all of this. If you enjoy this content, consider liking or subscribing, it helps out a ton. I make the occasional Build Guide, quite some ARPG content, and I cover plenty of indie games too.
Let’s start with the build requirements
[BUILD REQUIREMENTS]
In order for this build to work, you need the Vilatria’s Set. This turns your meteor into lightning damage, which looks cool. If you don’t have this set yet, you can still play the build, but then just use lightning blast and probably another lightning skill, maybe Static Orb. You can farm the set that way and swap once you have it. Ideally though, you have the set, so you can enjoy the build.
Then, the build philosophy
[BUILD PHILOSOPOHY]
I have a general build philosophy, which you should know. With the current state of Last Epoch, meaning boring end-game, I’d rather play fun builds, than grind corruption. This means I put effort in creating builds that are enjoyable to play, rather than super effective. I also tend to not run completely overpowered gear, because I usually don’t have that, so my equipment is not overselling the build. I did clear multiple empowered timelines with this character, which went super smooth, but I think at around 200 corruption, you’re going to get oneshot a lot.
The build itself focuses on pure lightning damage and makes use of a well-designed set. It’s completely built around Vilatria’s set, turning your meteor into lightning. We’re using additional shock and shock effect to weaken our enemies, and we have lightning blast to clear trash mobs. This build is a decent allround build, with great meteor damage on bosses, and good lightning blast damage on trash mobs. You use teleport to keep your distance.
I tried building this more defensive, with a focus on ward, but ultimately that didn’t feel great, even with many points invested, so this remained a life-base build with few defences in place.
Something I didn’t use either is focus, which may be a surprise. You can use it if you want, but I just hate that ability. It locks you in place, it takes a long time to refill mana, and it doesn’t feel good to use. I played around with it for a long time, but ultimately just went for some mana regen and free spell casting instead.
So, what do you need in terms of stats? Here’s the wish list.
[WISH LIST]
In terms of defences, make sure to get res capped of course, and get 100% crit avoidance. The blessings in the monolith can help a lot here, as well as idols. You want health, and shock chance, which stuns enemies.
In terms of offence, this build scales really well with intelligence. Because of the set, intelligence adds base lightning damage, shock chance, shock duration and increased lightning damage. That is all exactly what we want. Furthermore, get additional shock chance and shock effect, it really helps dealing more damage, and stunning enemies. Anything else after that which boosts lightning damage is great, of course. We’re crit capped as well, with decent crit multipliers, adding a significant chunk to the damage. Mana is important too, to get your bonuses and to make sure you have enough mana to cast a few very expensive meteors. And cast speed is great, it just makes everything feel a lot better.
Let’s look at the skill specialization and skills we’re using
[skill specialization]
I will not discuss each point invested, but instead focus on the most important nodes. You can see everything in the build planner yourself. The build planner doesn’t calculate everything correctly, it misses some skill points as it doesn’t take the set bonus into account. The distribution is accurate however.
Starting with your opening skill, lightning blast. This is the skill I’m mostly using while mapping. It’s good enough to kill most enemies, even in empowered timelines. I’m taking 4 points in Arcing Power, turning it into chain lightning. Surging influence is mandatory I feel, increasing the range at which chain lightning works. I’m taking 2 points in lightning attunement, giving us 10% to get lightning Aegis when casting lightning blast. Doesn’t seem like much maybe, but you’re casting lightning blast all the time, I think it lasts 4 seconds, it increases lightning damage and reduces damage taken by 25%. On top of this, I run some idols giving me increased cast speed when lightning aegis is available. I did not get shock chance on lightning blast as I have a lot of other sources of shock, so the remaining points are simply to boost the damage.
Second Skill, Flame Ward. I’m putting this on autocast, to get max value. Flame Ward has 2 purposes. It provides good defence, and it gives a lot of additional lightning damage. I take the damage points first, on the left side. Infusion and lightning ward convert all the bonuses from fire to lightning, giving us 200% lightning damage increase. 4 points in through flames gives you an additional 8 base lightning damage on top of that. Then the defences. 5 points in barrier means 40% less damage taken from hits, and prismatic buffer reduces elemental damage taken by 30%.
Third Skill, Static. This is honestly interchangeable with Focus if you want, but I really like static, as it occasionally hurls out a lightning blast. That’s how it is built as well, just a bit of extra damage against monsters chasing you in the map, while you’re running to the objective. I take 3 points in overcharge for more charges, and 4 points in High Voltage to charge those charges faster. 1 point in Stormchaser helps a lot. You shouldn’t stand still in an ARPG anyway. The combination of Overload, Diode and Unlimited Power lets Static automatically cast Lightning Blast at random targets, using the skill tree as well. Works like a charm. I don’t cast Static myself, I just use the charges I get while running around the map to cast a bunch of free lightning blast spells.
Fourth Skill, Teleport. The most important node here is Mana Tunnel, giving you a free spell to cast after you use Teleport. That free spell should be Meteor, of course. We’ll get back into this in the playstyle. You have 4 seconds to cast meteor, by the way. Take longer than that, and it costs mana again. Mana tunnel puts a 6 second cooldown timer on teleport, which we reduce by taking 5 points in tunnel finder. While you’re here, 1 point in rock phase grants stun immunity, which is useful. I’m taking Flicker and Wormhole for additional mana cost and cooldown reduction, which is just a small bonus. And we round it off with extra elemental damage after using teleport, another 50%, from Elemental Affinity.
Then, the reason we have this build in the first place, Meteor. I tried a lot of different versions of Meteor, and ultimately landed on this one. There is one node which is amazing here, and that’s Stardust, 4 points. It provides 80% more damage if meteor is not doing fire damage. This synergizes of course really well with our set, turning meteor into lightning damage. Also pretty much non-negotiable in my opinion is Extinction, great name by the way, giving 8% base crit, and giving you a 40% chance for a large meteor. Now, these are actually really large. And if you have more than one meteor per cast, which we do, this 40% chance counts for every meteor. Because of Twin Meteors, and Meteor Shower, and Rain of Fire, we’re casting 6 meteors. Each of those has a 40% chance to be a large meteor. That’s great. My last points I spent in quality of life, rather than even more damage. At this point, Meteor pretty much kills everything, apart from timeline bosses. I chose to spend only 1 point in Distant Craters, which is 15% more damage, but also increases the meteor spread. Next to this, I spent 2 additional points for 30% more AOE. You could easily argue this isn’t worth it, but I would rather have my meteors hit more targets, and overlap better, than to do more damage. I found with this point distribution, my meteors are much more predictable, and when I target a boss or spire, all meteors land on that boss. If you take more points in Distant Craters, your DPS increases a ton, on paper, but your meteors start flying all over the place. Your effective DPS is much less. You need these meteors to overlap, not to spread across the map. That’s my argument for this setup, and for me this works really well.
Time to look at the passives.
[passives]
I will just highlight a few interesting decisions, as most of this is rather straightforward, given what I already told you before.
In the base tree, knowledge of destruction is excellent, providing both crit chance and crit multiplier. In the sorcerer tree, Calculated Destruction provides good crit chance, to get us capped. Together with 8 points in crackling precision for another 160% crit chance, plus arcane obliteration for 50% multiplier, you should have enough to get crit capped with meteor. You will have to calculate this yourself however, manually. You take the crit chance from Meteor, which is 5% by default, plus another 8% from the tree, so that’s 13% base crit chance. To reach 100% crit chance, you need around 8 times that, because 8 times 13 is 104. That means you need around 700% increased crit chance from all sources. The passives can already give you 390%. That means on your gear, blessings, potential buffs and idols, you need to find the remaining 300% crit. This is very achievable in end-game.
Another important stat is shock. I’m taking 8 points in Chronomancy, for the vitality and shock duration. This allows us to stack more shocks on a target, because they now last longer. I take 5 points in arcane current, for shock effect, which is great. Because shock, as a reminder, reduces lightning resistance by 5%, and increases stun chance by 10%. It stacks up to 20 times. Using Lightning Blast, we apply on average 2 shocks every hit. Within a few seconds, an enemy has 20 stacks of shock, which increases our damage a ton. Stunning is also a surprisingly effective defensive mechanic, because it interrupts spellcasting, even on large dragons.
Finally, I take recollection, 4 points, because I feel the cooldown reduction on teleport is amazing. It doesn’t do much for the rest of our build, but teleport plays an integral role.
Then, also very important, Gear
[Gear]
As per usual, my gear is okay. I’m level 93 and I played this character from scratch, all the way to this. You need the set items of course. Your body armor ideally has +2 meteor, at least, and spell crit, which is doubled at 300 or more mana. This is 150% spell crit, for me. The other slots are really nothing special. I keep focusing on intelligence where I can. I take health where I can. I make sure I’m crit avoidance capped, and res capped, apart from poison. And crit multipliers on amulets and relics help out.
[Idols]
For idols, you have a lot of options really. Idols for me are a big chunk of my shock chance. I have 2 idols that increase cast speed on lightning aegis, which makes me cast lightning blast faster, which makes me proc more lightning aegis, so this works out beautifully. You can get more crit on idols too, if you need it.
[Blessings]
For blessings, I’m pretty much taking all the resistance blessings, because I don’t want to deal with resistances. I found a shred lightning resistance from Lagon, but not sure how effective that is. It’s only 11% chance to shred, so I don’t think it does much. The frailty blessing is great though, 48% chance to apply frailty, reducing the damage output of enemies by 18%.
[Loot filter]
I created a loot filter, based on the loot filter the planner gives you. Use this at your own risk, however. I can’t stress this enough. I like to run extremely strict loot filters. At first, you should just enable all of the rules, and once you feel there’s too much loot dropping and you geared up, start disabling more and more rules. I used this loot filter from level 1 and it worked for me. You don’t see a ton of loot until level 25 or so, but lightning blast carries you either way.
[Levelling]
Levelling is super easy, barely an inconvenience. Lightning Blast, it’s still amazing. Take the chain lightning nodes as soon as you can, and then spec into damage. As you get more cast speed, the build starts to feel great. As soon as you can equip the set items, you boost your damage multiple times, and once meteor has some skill points in it, you will not have any issues until 200 corruption timelines.
Let’s talk some Monolith modifiers
[Monolith]
Generally, the only thing I would avoid is giving enemies crit avoidance. That really screws up your damage, but apart from that, you’re completely fine. Lightning blast and meteor can be dodged, by the way, as these are hits.
And that brings us to the playstyle of the build.
[play style]
Here’s the build in action.
There is a certain rotation you should be aware of. The whole idea of this build is that you teleport, you get a free spell, and you cast meteor. Then you use some lightning blasts across the screen, you teleport, and you meteor. You can cast meteor in between this rotation another time, actually spending mana this time, which will regenerate as you do your free rotation. On bosses, it’s the same thing. This rotation is important, because you run out of mana if you mess this up. If you don’t like doing this, just lose static, and get focus, and recharge your mana using focus. I hate focus however, so I prefer this rotation instead. It takes a bit getting used to, but once you get the hang of it, it plays super smooth.
Because we’re fairly squishy, you kind of need to know the boss tactics. You can’t facetank much with this build, you’re a mage, after all. We have decent mobility and damage reduction, and an occasional hit is fine, but don’t stand in AOE or facetank fire beams. It is not healthy.
Apart from this, keep your distance. Both lightning blast and meteor have a huge range. If you have ultrawide, or even super ultrawide like me, you can target this miles away. So use that to your advantage. Don’t teleport into groups, don’t facetank stuff, but stay out of range and blast them away from a safe spot. This playstyle doesn’t make the build all that fast, but I find it extremely satisfying to demolish enemies from a large distance.
I had a lot of fun creating this build, all the way from start to finish. I do hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, give it a like, toss a sub to the channel because I create more extensive guides like this, and finally, thanks for watching. See you soon, love you all, bye bye.
