Fire Bolt Sorcerer Endgame Build Guide
Last Updated:October 8, 2024|Change Log|FAQ
Welcome to the Fire Bolt Sorcerer Build Guide! This build uses Flameweaver to turn Fire Bolt into a real damage skill. Unfortunately the way this item works makes the build quite clunky: first you have to place down Firewall, then shoot enemies with Fire Bolt and then you have to wait for them to die because you deal damage over time. On top of that, the damage only gets really high if you hit the same enemy with all 3 Fire Bolts right after they split. Effectively that means that this build is very single target oriented even if Fire Bolts can technically hit multiple enemies. This build is most suited for Bossing and slow push in high tier Pit. Speedfarming is doable, thanks to Raiment of the Infinite, but it takes a lot more effort and brainpower than builds with proper AoE.
Requirements for this build
- Flameweaver
- Moonrise
This build guide assumes you have a Level 60 Character and unlocked Torment 1. To get there, level up with one of our Sorerer Leveling Guides. See how this Build compares against others with our various Build Tier Lists.
Season Theme
Season 6 is the Season of Hatred Rising. It features the Zakarum Remnants faction which hunts Realmwalkers, massive behemoths that roam outdoor zones and beckon Mephisto's hellspawn. Participate in these zone events and take down the Realmwalkers to spawn a portal to a Seething Realm. There you can acquire Seething Opals, new consumables that stack with Elixirs for a XP buff and the chance to gather extra rewards when defeating enemies. The types of Opals are:
- Seething Opal of Equipment
- Seething Opal of Gold
- Seething Opal of Materials
- Seething Opal of Torment
- Seething Opal of Socketables
Use these Opals at all times to earn reputation with the Zakarum Remnants faction and unlock further rewards.
Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.
Skills & Gameplay
- Fire Bolt is our main damage skill. It deals some direct damage and then applies a DoT. Because of all the Burning multipliers we're using the direct damage amounts to less than 2% of total so we only care about the DoT.
- Firewall is neccessary to proc Flameweaver and sixtuple our damage. It also buffs Burning even further with Enhanced Firewall.
- Familiar provides lots of extra damage through Invoked Familiar, Combustion, and Conjuration Mastery.
- Ice Armor and Flame Shield are our standard defenisve spells, with the former also providing some Mana regen.
- Teleport is our mobility spell that can also break us out of Crowd Control. Since there's no slot for it on the skillbar, we only use it via the Enchantment.
- Finally, we use Ice Blades to get extra Cooldown Reduction and Conjuration Mastery stacks.
Skill Rotation
- Use your Evade Teleport to move through the map and find enemies.
- Group them together with Raiment of the Infinite.
- Place Firewall on top of the group and position yourself slightly outside.
- Spam Fire Bolts into it trying to hit as many mobs as possible with all 3 Fire Bolts.
- Recast Ice Armor whenever it expires or breaks.
- Use Familiar every 10-12 seconds to maintain the buff. When you have no enemies to fight, dump all charges to get some extra Conjuration Mastery stacks
- Cast Ice Blades off cooldown but not more than once every 2 seconds.
- Use Flame Shield if you get CCd or if your Barriers break for some reason.
- Be careful to not spam too many Firewalls because when everything is on fire, your Fire Bolts will split immediately after you shoot them, and then you have to worry about being exactly right distance away from your target.
- Use your Firewall as little as possible. Its animation is almost twice as long as Fire Bolt, so you're losing a bunch of DPS each time you recast it.
Enchantment Slots
- Teleport Enchantment is necessary to move around the map and group enemies with Raiment of the Infinite.
- Ice Blades Enchantment reduces the cooldowns of all our skills and adds a bit of damage via Conjuration Mastery.
Learn more details and how to unlock this system in our full Sorcerer Enchantment Slots Guide.
Paragon & Glyphs
Carefully check your Paragon Boards to ensure correct board rotation. Glyphs go from a radius of 3 to 4 at level 15 and from 4 to 5 at level 46. Some of them cannot be activated before reaching these thresholds! Progress through The Pit to rank up your Glyphs.
Use the slider to see the progression steps. At around Paragon 200, leveling slows down significantly and all important Rare clusters, Legendary nodes and Glyph sockets should be unlocked. Afterwards, you can min/max your build with minor tweaks and by picking up additional smaller nodes.
Some Glyph position swaps, board changes and other pathing adjustments may occur as you unlock your full potential. The setup displayed by default is the final version of the build before spending additional points that do not significantly impact your character's power.
Glyph Leveling Priorities
To Level 15
- Tactician
- Exploit
- Elementalist
- Unleash*
- Pyromaniac
To Level 46
- Unleash
- Tactician
- Elementalist
- Pyromaniac
- Exploit
*If you still don't have Shard of Verathiel version of the build by the time you reach 4th board, use Eliminator instead of Unleash (don't level it past 15).
There are a total of 328 Paragon Points. After reaching level 60, you gain up to 300 Paragon Levels, 24 from Renown and 4 from Altars of Lilith. Check out our dedicated in-depth guides to learn more about Paragon Boards and Glyphs.
Runes
You can have up to two Runewords in your setup, each consisting of one Ritual and one Invocation Rune. Socket them in Two-Handed Weapons if your build calls for them, otherwise place them into your Armor pieces to replace normal gems. The Fire Bolt Sorcerer focuses on the following combos:
Best in Slot
- Lith + Wat - used mostly to generate a lot of Offering via Xol. As a nice side effect, we get some damage reduction.
- Xol + Ohm - 15% damage with 100% uptime.
Alternative choices
If you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top runes, you can also benefit from these options:
- Poc, Cir, Yul, and Cem - decently good Ritual Runes that can serve as a substitute.
- For invocations there's not a lot of good stuff:
- Xal - For extra defense.
- Lum - if you struggle with Mana.
Learn more about Runes and how they work in our dedicated Runewords Overview and Runewords Tier List.
Mercenaries
Mercenaries are unlocked during the Vessel of Hatred campaign and assist you in battle. There are 4 separate Mercenaries to choose from, each with their own skill trees and abilities. You can have one hired (permanent) mercenary during solo play and a reinforcement who assists you from time to time in certain situations.
Hired: Subo
Subo passively gives us a maphack which is so nice to play with it's hard to use any other merc after trying it once. On top of that he provides some extra damage through Scorched Earth.
Reinforcement: Raheir
We choose Bastion with Injured trigger for its massive damage reduction which can save our life in sticky situations.
Learn more about Mercenaries and how they work in our dedicated Mercenaries Overview.
Stat Priorities & Item Progression
To enable the Fire Bolt Sorcerer to perform optimally, hunt for these stats on your gear with good rolls and aim to Temper ⚒️ & Masterwork Crit ↑ them accordingly. Keep in mind that certain stats, such as Armor, Resistances, Extra Size Tempers, Attack Speed and more, have caps that may affect your priorities according to the items and Paragon points available at that moment.
Recommended Endgame Stat Thresholds
- 180% Attack Speed (from all sources)
- 25+ Ranks in Fire Bolt
- Lucky Hit Chance to Apply Vulnerable roll
- 5+ Mana Per Second on Boots
- Armor Capped 1,000
- Resistance Capped 70%
- 3,000+ Life
- Lucky Hit Chance to Restore Resource roll
Item Progression Goals
Before you dive into the Endgame with the Fire Bolt Sorcerer, take a look at this overview of the items used in the build. See below for further details about the different progression steps and variants. Some of your Skill Tree choices depend on what Legendary Aspects and Unique items are available to you. Keep in mind that while we can guarantee that everyone has access to the same Codex of Power Aspects, the exact progression is different for everyone.
Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.
Build Variants
This section is designed to guide your Fire Bolt Sorcerer from a fresh level 60 into the very late endgame using the three variants Starter, Ancestral and Mythic. At the final step, you should be fully decked out with a great all-rounder build. From there, follow the other min/max variants if you want to optimize around certain activities such as Pit Pushing, Speedfarming and more.
If you are fresh in Torment 1 coming from a leveling guide, this is where you begin. Since only some Aspects can be guaranteed from Dungeon unlocks for the Codex of Power, focus on acquiring the additional aspects via gambling with Murmuring Obols.
Gear & Skills
- Early on in your progression, focus on Armor & Resistances to survive. Each Torment difficulty adds a penalty of -250 Armor and -25% all Res and it's recommended to keep both capped (1000 Armor, 70+ Res) at all times. As you unlock higher power gear, masterworking levels and more Paragon points, you naturally scale your character into the higher difficulties and can start replacing some of these rolls with offensive or utility stats.
- Without Shard of Verathiel we don't spend any Mana so we remove things that depend on it such as Mana Shield and Shimmering Ice Armor.
The goal here is to progress through the Torment difficulties as you unlock Ancestrals, Paragon points, all Legendary Aspects, Temper mods and the most important Uniques to pilot this build. Some Legendary Aspects are used temporarily to fill slots that may be replaced with more Unique items later on.
Gear & Skills
- As you upgrade your gear to Ancestrals with more masterworking levels and reach higher paragon, you can focus more and more on replacing Armor & Resistance rolls with better stats, but ensure to stay capped at 1000 Armor and 70%+ Resistances for the difficulty you're currently in.
- With Shard of Verathiel but without Ring of Starless Skies Mana becomes a major problem. Make sure to get Boots and Helmet with Mana Per Second rolls and get Lucky Hit Chance to Restore Resource. If you don't have these items, you can fix the Mana problems with Elemental Acuity.
This is the final version of the build's progression, including all regular Unique items, Mythic Uniques, Legendary Aspects, Temper mods and Masterworking, leaving you with a great all-rounder build for all content in the game. Additional variants use this as a baseline to optimize around certain activities.
Gear & Skills
- Harlequin Crest gives us obscene amounts of Cooldown Reduction letting us remove it from the Amulet and also switch to Mystical Ice Armor.
- Ring of Starless Skies fixes our Mana problems and gives lots of damage and Attack Speed.
This Speedfarming variant optimizes the build for easy activities like Helltides, Whispers, Nightmare Dungeons and lower Pit Tiers after you have finished the Mythic variant and reached a plateau in your progression.
Gear & Skills
The base Mystic variant is good enough for Speedfarming. It has all the damage and Teleport Enchant. You can try to make it move faster by doing the usual Flickerstep and Evade CDR shenanigans, but moving faster does you little good when to kill any enemies you need to:
- Place down Firewall.
- Suck them in with Raiment of the Infinite.
- Shoot Fire Bolt a few times to apply the DoT.
- Wait a second or two for enemies to die.
This build just cannot kill enemies fast.
This setup optimizes the build to push the highest possible Tiers in The Pit after you have finished the Mythic variant and reached a plateau in your progression.
Gear & Skills
- The Mythic variant is already fully optimized for Pit Pushing/Boss killing because that's the only thing this build is good at.
FAQ & Mechanics
Once a guide is released, many players have questions on why and how we are approaching certain choices. In this section you can find the answers to the questions that have been asked the most.
What can I do to improve survivability?
Why aren't you using Adaptability?
Mechanics
Stagger
Fire Bolt Attack Speed
Summary
Fire Bolt Sorcerer is a strong build that is, unfortunately, very Unique-dependent and very single-target oriented.
- Group up mobs with Raiment of the Infinite.
- Place down Firewall and shoot a million splitting Fire Bolts into them.
- Watch it burn.
Credits
Written by Northwar