Making a Build

[ShakyCrusader]

So I have come down to really liking the beam skill and meteor trying to build around those. I am new to last epoch but not the genre. Because I have played alot of Diablo and some what poe but I never really spent time trying to make a build in those games. I think it be fun to make a build but at the same time it gets on my nerves xD. To I think I rush to make a build and it involves testing and really pushing the build to see if it works or not.

[Vatinas]

Hi!

In general, I find it much easier to make a viable build in LE than in other ARPGs. So, other than the core mechanics / finding what stats to scale, you can always just try it out, and unless your build is really flawed, it’ll be viable, at the very least for non-empowered monoliths. And hey, if it doesn’t work out, you can always respec all passives and skills (but not the mastery!).

That being said, let’s talk about your idea! There are two tricky things here:

First, Meteor is a fire skill (that can be converted to lightning with a staff), while Disintegrate is Lightning/Fire by default, but can be converted to full fire or full lightning via nodes in its tree. If you want to play with both Meteor and Disintegrate, I recommend choosing an element, and making both skills that one element (the simplest would be to go full fire on both skills, so that means regular Meteor tree and Disintegrate tree that grabs the “Infernal Ray” node).

Second, the beam skill (Disintegrate) is damage over time, which doesn’t scale with crit, while Meteor is a hit, which is a hit, thus potentially scaling with crit (and Meteor in particular has some pretty decent crit nodes). That gives you two options:

• Not scaling crit at all. In this case, you’ll want to focus on raw damage (added spell damage, % increased fire or lightning damage depending on the chosen element, % increased elemental / spell damage). This also enables the use of Singularity, a unique idol.
  You can also play with the two spells in different elements, and scale added spell damage / % increased spell damage / % increased elemental damage, but you’ll lose a bit of damage compared to builds with one single element (because the “% increased fire damage” mod, for instance, has higher numerical values than the “% increased elemental damage” mod).
  The bi-element playstyle does enable the Dragon Mage node of Sorcerer, which might be able to compensate for the loss of damage if you invest into it (up to 100% increased damage of an element if you’ve cast a spell of another element recently).

• Using Ignivar’s Head to make Disintegrate scale with crit. In this case, you can’t use the staff that converts Meteor to lightning (since it’s a catalyst, an off-hand), but you can go crit and use both skills.

Now, another thing to note: using both those skills is going to be pretty mana intensive. Disintegrate costs 10 base mana per second, and Meteor costs 56. As such, you’ll want to invest in mana regen as much as possible - which is often the case for Sorcerers anyway. You can also use Focus or Mana Strike to regain mana quickly, at the expense of mobility.

A thing that could be worth trying is to use the Laser Focus node in Disintegrate, which makes it deal much less damage, but makes it free, and “leech” mana while damaging enemies to enable more intensive use of Meteor. The downside is, it’s behind the node that converts it to lightning, so that forces you into the lightning playstyle for Disintegrate. If you still want to go fire Meteor, you can go bi-element like I mentioned.

I’m sorry if that’s a lot of information at once, haha. I wish you good luck with your build!