Chain Lightning Sorcerer Leveling Guide (1-50)

Overview

• Chain Lightning Sorcerer is a great leveling build and actually can scale quite well into the late game. It has great AoE clear and pretty strong single-target damage.
• We will use the Chain Lightning enchantment early to ensure we get some free casts since mana economy is quite low early.
• The second enchantment slot will be Firebolt, this allows us to benefit from some passives in the skill tree related to ‘burning’ enemies. An alternative to this could be Fireball, which causes enemies to explode on death. If you feel like you’re strong enough and are blasting through the leveling process, this is a viable alternative.
• The play style is quite simple, you teleport from pack to pack, maintain your Ice Armor, pop Frost Nova, unload Chain Lightnings, and watch everything die. We have great mobility with Teleport and Arc Lash and will have no problem blasting through the leveling process.

Skill Progression

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Enchantment Slots:

• Our first enchantment slot will be Chain Lightning. This gives us a free cast of Chain Lightning for every 100 mana we spend.
  

• The second enchantment slot we will use is Fire Bolt. We do not use this for the damage the burning will do, but we do this to grab any skill points and bonuses related to burning enemies.
  

Leveling Aspects (Codex of Power)

These aspects can be grabbed throughout your leveling process and should be thrown on Jewelry slots when leveling.

Offensive:

• In the Dry Steppes, we can pick up the Elementalist’s Aspect at Pallid Delve. This aspect gives us a massive bonus to critical strike chance if we are casting a core skill above 100 mana. We are going to want to make sure we are casting Chain Lightning above 100 mana. This playstyle could synergize well with Edgemaster’s Aspect, which increases our damage when we are near full resource. Edgemaster’s is not necessary for the build, but can be a good addition if you find one or pick it up at the Oldstones in Scosglen if you had bad RNG and need an extra damage boost. This will likely find its way into our build in the later stages of the game. We should place Elementalist’s Aspect in our Amulet.
  

Resource:

• The first aspect we want to pick up is the Recharging Aspect from Zenith in the Fractured Peaks. We can get this very early in the game and it gives us quite a bit of extra mana. Every time Chain Lightning bounces off of you, you get 4-6 mana. This will let us unload Chain Lightnings in single target fights. We should place this in our ring.
  

• The Prodigy’s Aspect can be found in Witchwater in Hawezar. This aspect grants us 15-25 mana when we use a cooldown. This gives us an easy way to maintain our mana above 100 to synergize with the Elementalist’s Aspect. We should place this in our ring.
  

Other Useful Aspects for the Codex

Defensive:

• As a Sorcerer, we will be running some general defensive aspects. The first is the Aspect of Disobedience, which can be found in the Halls of the Damned in Kehjistan. This gives us a stacking armor buff that will make us quite tanky since this build involves us being close to our enemies.
  

• The next is the Aspect of Might which we will unlock when progressing the campaign in the Dry Steppes. This gives us 20% damage reduction when using our Basic Skill. Since we will be using it often, we should maintain close to 100% uptime on this buff.
  

• The next aspect is fantastic for any leveling build and can be picked up early in the Lost Archives in the Fractured Peaks. Aspect of the Protector gives us a large barrier for 10 seconds when we damage an Elite enemy. It can only occur once every 30 seconds, but since Elite packs are usually pretty spread out, we can expect to have this up for every Elite pack or every other Elite Pack.
  

Mobility:

• The mobility aspect we are going to want to grab can be found in Komdor Temple in the Dry Steppes. It is called the Aspect of the Bounding Conduit and it grants us a 3 second movement speed buff after casting teleport.
  

Other Helpful Aspects

These aspects could help us when leveling. You can equip these if they are on an item better than what you currently have equipped, but when you are ready to replace it, make sure to extract these powers since they will be useful later on in the game.

• One RNG drop that you are going to look for is the Conceited Aspect. This gives us a big damage buff while we have a barrier active which is going to be quite often with Ice Armor.
  

• Another RNG drop that is a must for this build is the Aspect of the Unbroken Tether. This gives us a chance to have our Chain Lightning bounce 2 additional times, which gives us quite a big DPS increase for both AoE and single target.
  

• Another option is the Aspect of the Expectant. Since we are going to try to be casting our Chain Lightning above 100 mana, we will constantly be using our Basic Skill Arc Lash in this downtime. This also gives us Movement Speed and a stun every 10 hits. We will be using this quite frequently when kiting packs together. This aspect makes it so when we cast our basic skill, we increase the damage of our next core skill. So making sure we use Arc Lash a few times before each Chain Lightning will greatly increase the damage.
  

Stat Priorities

Gems

Alternative Leveling Guides

• Ice Shards is an alternate leveling build if you don’t like Chain Lightning or you can feel it starting to slow down. It lacks a little bit in AoE early but catches up quite a bit as you progress. Ice Shards also is a much stronger build end game, so leveling with this makes it easy to transfer to the end game variation.