In this Diablo 4 Sorcerer in Vessel of Hatred & Patch 2.0 article, I’ll be helping you understand how the Sorcerer Class is changing with Patch 2.0 which is releasing along side the Vessel of Hatred expansion on October 8th, and give you an easy overview of what to expect for your builds and Gameplay.

The short and sweet of it is that Patch 2.0 is adding a new Conjuration Skill and five passives, while diversifying how you play a Sorcerer in Diablo 4 by helping you pick between single element focus or elementalist approaches. Familiar and Enlightenment aim to incentivize multiple element players, while the other skills focus on surviveability, cooldown reduction, and single element damage.

The New Sorcerer in Diablo 4 Vessel of Hatred – Patch 2.0

Before we get into the specifics of Sorcerer though, let me tell you about some huge changes coming to the game itself. I’ll try to keep this as brief as possible, and we’ll have full detailed coverage of all these changes in a future video, but for now let me tell you about the most important ones.

First of all, max level has been reduced to 60 (from 100), and players will begin receiving Paragon Points once they reach this level. These Points can be used by any level 60 character on your account. This not only means that you can gain Paragon Points for your Sorcerer while playing on your Necromancer, it also means that you will have an additional 10 Skill Points to allocate into your build (from levels 51-60), for a total of 69 Skill Points in Patch 2.0, up from 59 before.

Additionally, stats like Armor, Health, and Damage have been drastically reduced in order to simplify the game and make mathing easier for players. This doesn’t result in a nerfing of your character, it’s more of a backend change that is reflected in new numbers in your UI. Don’t freak out if you see your weapon no longer deals the same damage, it will still be as effective as it was before.

And lastly, the difficulty system of Diablo IV is changing, and there are now new Torment levels along with new difficulty levels, much like there were in Diablo III. Regular difficulty levels will be unlocked by advancing your character, but Torment levels will need to be unlocked through an End Game activity called The Pit of Artificers, which is much like Rifts in Diablo 3, which are randomized dungeons essentially with a Boss at the end. This shouldn’t change the way you play the game fundamentally, and hopefully allows players to customize their preferred difficulty a bit better.

New Skills

Familiar

In a game where skill synergy is everything, the addition of a new skill can be really very impactful. For the Sorcerer, our new active skill is called “Familiar” and it’s a Conjuration skill with 3 charges and a default 12 second cooldown. Your familiar is an entity made of the element of the last skill you cast, and it will float around to enemies and explode for 40% of that element’s damage for 8 seconds.

Since you can have up to 6 familiars active at a time, this is a very intriguing proposition for a multi-element build, as you could benefit from the elemental damage spread and get the benefits for each element: Fire will give 94% burning damage over 4 seconds, Cold will apply 15% chill, and Lightning will stun for 1 second.

This skill can be Enhanced into ignoring your previously cast skill and simply rotating through the elements, and giving you 3% damage reduction when 2 familiars are active, or it can be used so that the active familiar gives you 10% damage of that type (so for example, a lightning familiar would increase your lightning damage by 10%).

While this new skill is aimed at making Elementalist type builds more interesting, there can be some very unique applications if you are wanting to specialize in an element as well, so it can add new options to all playstyles.

The Familiar Enchantment gives you a 25% chance to spawn a familiar of a matching element every time you summon any other conjuration, so for example when you cast Hydra you could get a fire familiar. There are some really exciting synergies for this familiar and conjuration builds that I think will create a new way to play the Sorcerer, and the first thing to pair it with is the new Key Passive.

Enlightenment

The new passive skills are also very interesting and intend to make your gameplay faster and more versatile. The key passive is called Enlightenment and is, in my opinion, heavily geared toward multi-element sorcerers and will be a fantastic mix for Familiar Conjurers.

Enlightenment

• Key Passive: Casting any Skill grants 1 stack of Enlightenment, or grants 15 if your previous cast Skill was a different Element. After gaining 100 stacks you become Enlightened, can no longer gain stacks, and lose 10 stacks per second. While Enlightened your Bonus Damage with Fire, Lightning, and Cold are equal to them combined and you gain:
  • 25% increased damage
  • 45% Mana Regeneration
  • 20% Attack Speed

This sounds convoluted, so you need to math this out to what it means for your gameplay. If you spam skills and try to work on a rotation, you can probably get the required stacks in about ten seconds, and then you will enjoy 10 seconds of Enlightened status, giving you 50% uptime of the buff. That status is most effective to mix up a spread of fire, lightning, and cold damage buffs into one bigger “Bonus Damage” pool, in addition to the big attack speed, mana regen, and damage increase.

However, given how the community generally approaches sorc builds, it’s more likely we’re going to be seeing some autocast or external source used to build up a synergy with an item to maximize performance and obtain 100% uptime, rather than focusing on the rotation mechanics of getting this buff and maintaining it. All in all, it’s an intriguing skill that I’ll have to see how it actually plays with the itemization. I will go more in-depth into how these new skills and gear all come together almost to give you a build right away on the final section of this video so you can use the chapters to navigate there or keep reading to understand everything else first.

There other general passives are probably a lot easier to apply. Evocation, for example, is a new skill that reduces all cooldowns by 4, 8, and 12% – this is always welcome with sorc builds that want to spam specific OP ultimate.

Energy Focus

Next up is Energy Focus, that generates a 6 second barrier for a very small percentage of your Max life every second up to 30%, for so long as you don’t lose health. I’m quite confident this one will fit right in with the kind of crazy numbers we’ve been seeing for chain lightning mythical.

Dampen Layer

Another new defensive skill is Dampen Layer, that gives you 2, 4, and 6% damage reduction while you have an active barrier, most likely to be mixed with the previous passive to maximize sorc survivability.

Elemental Synergies

And lastly there’s Elemental Synergies, which makes Frost, Shock, and Pyromancy Skills deal 1/2/3% increased damage for each Skill you have equipped of their type. This is mostly beneficial to specialized single-element builds, that can be quite a rarity in the meta world (although I personally really like them!).

Changes to Skills & Trees

The sorcerer class has changed a lot since release, so if you’re a returning sorcerer it’s very likely that the build you were using is no longer viable and you need to reconsider your skill allocation and gear. There has been a huge amount of changes, ranging from minimal to massive, to each elemental specialization.

As a quick example, Flickering Arc Lash used to give you 6% movement speed for 5 seconds per enemy hit, up to 18%. It was a skill focused on building the “move fast” lightning sorcerer that would run, stun, and increase its attack speed and damage from those buffs. This playstyle has been mostly reworked, and this skill now has a completely different effect, granting 5 mana if your swipe hits at least one enemy, or you hit 3 or more enemies or a boss; the next swipe also deals 50% more damage.

It would be pointless and long to run you through the entire laundry list of skill changes from launch to today, so the highlights for the returning sorcerer are mainly that Ice is out as meta, being probably the most nerfed elemental line given its extensive overuse during the first months of the game. Hydra sorcs also went out of fashion for a while, and right now the sorc meta is all about chain lightning, lightning orbs, or fireball. The reason for this is not always the changes to skills, but that the itemization makes synergies of these elements and castings skewed, and you end up benefiting a lot more from these specific items reacting to each other than you do from trying to work with the skill trees themselves.

Fast forward to the changes being made to the current game by Patch 2 (the expansion), and you can see there are some attempts to rebalance lightning and fire, encourage multi-elemental builds, and improve some of the lesser-used skills on the fire and lightning lines. There are zero changes to ice and frost skills, so that tells you a lot about where the devs are in terms of ice shards spam.

Since there have been many subtle changes to skills over the year the game has been out, my recommendation for any returning player with a big gap in updates is to have a look at our build selection and pick something built around skills, easily obtainable items, and paragon boards first, as the many builds that you see doing a trillion DPS require an investment of time to develop that would probably get in the way of you enjoying the normal expansion content and will probably be different by the time you get to its endgame.

Changes to Paragon Boards & Glyphs

In 2.0, players will also now only be able to equip 5 Paragon Boards at a time, including your base board, so you cannot just ninja through a board for one node and out really quickly, and instead, players will need to utilize their boards wisely. However, each Class has gained a new Board, for a total of 9 Boards (up from 8), and some Rare and Legendary Nodes have changed. And on top of that, players can now earn a total of 300 Paragon Points (up from 200), which should allow for a serious power increase across all Builds.

Glyphs have also seen a significant change. They now no longer improve via experience, but instead level up by completing levels of The Pit of Artificers and trying to improve them at the end, again much like Diablo III. The higher level of Pit you complete, the higher chance you have of improving your Glyph. Glyphs also now go up to level 100, further expanding their power, and the higher level they are, the more difficult it becomes to improve them without going to higher and higher levels in The Pit of Artificers.

New Paragon Board

The new Sorcerer Paragon Board is the “Fundamental Release” board. Now this is VERY interesting to me because when it was first shown with the 2.0 Patch notes, the legendary node was very different than it is during the PTR. This means that the sorcerer optimization is still in flux, and developers want to encourage multi-elemental play, but are running into problems as they also need to add things that everyone can be tempted to use.

The original proposition for this board was:

• Fundamental Release: Each Fire, Lightning, and Cold attack you make against an enemy increases the damage it takes from your attacks by 10%[x] per element, up to 30%[x].

The current Legendary node is instead:

• Fundamental Release: Each time you apply Vulnerable, Burning or Critically strike an enemy, they take 10%[x] increased damage from you up to 30%[x]

This is a very significant difference as the first one was outright elemental attacks, and the new one is off applicable effects. The rest of the rare nodes align with the current description better, giving you extra bonuses for triggering these effects.

Rare Nodes

• +10% Vulnerable Damage / +10 Intelligence
• +10% Non-Physical Damage / +10 Intelligence
• 5% Damage Reduction from Burning Enemies / +20 Armor
• 5% Damage Reduction from Vulnerable Enemies / +4% Maximum Life
• +10% Damage to Burning Enemies / 16% Damage to Elites
• 6.5% Damage Taken Over Time Reduction / 3% Resistance to All Elements

In general, this board is standard with quite a few magic nodes and a versatile glyph slots that has both dex and magic around to give you options for the most popular glyphs. However looking at it simply before considering gear, this board is not really game changing for the sorc and it will simply be another optional tool in diversification arsenal, as the sorc continues to be a very gear-based class. That said, I can see this specific board working well with the new skills, as its encouraging multi-element builds.

Changes to Uniques & Aspects

Remember that the Codex of Power was changed in Season 4, and now stores Legendary Aspects of the highest roll you’ve obtained for that particular Aspect. You can also use the Codex of Power as many times as you want on items provided you have the gold and materials. If you have not played in a while, you should probably head over to your storage to pull items you’ve been saving for a rainy day, and Salvage many of them as soon as possible at the Blacksmith in order to unlock higher rolls at the Codex of Power and free up space.

There have been some changes to three specific Sorcerer Aspects, and they are rather straightforward. The first is aiming to balance barriers and narrow the use of this aspect to Ice Armor and encourage freezing. The second is changing how burning damage is dealt over time, and the third one is simply making Armageddon better, which is good news for me because I do love me an infinite meteor build.

Storm Swell Aspect

• Previous: You deal 15-30% more damage to Vulnerable enemies while you have a barrier.
• Now: You deal 15-35% increased damage while Ice Armor is active. This amount is increased by another 15% against Frozen enemies.

Aspect of Engulfing Flames

• Previous: You deal 30-45%[x] increased Burning damage to enemies below 50% Life. Additionally, you deal 70-100%[x] increased Burning damage to enemies while they are affected by more Damage Over Time than their total Life.
• Now: You deal 6%[x] increased Burning damage to enemies for each second they remain Burning, up to 30%[x] after 5 seconds. Additionally, you deal 10-30%[x] increased Burning damage to enemies below 50% Life.

Aspect of Armageddon

• Now drops more Meteorites.
• Meteorites from Aspect of Armageddon and Aspect of Shattered Stars now more consistently land around or on the enemies near the cast target.

Unique Items

Existing uniques Items have also been changed to match the new and improved “cast a skill of x damage” rather than “deal x damage type”. Tal Rasha for example will now synergize with the new key passive a lot better. Axial Conduit seems to be completely reworked, and Gloves of the Illuminator got a grammar fix.

Tal Rasha’s Iridescent Loop

• Previous: For each type of Elemental damage you deal, gain 10-15% increased damage for 4 seconds, up to 40-60%. Dealing Elemental damage refreshes all bonuses.
• Now: Casting a Pyromancy, Shock, or Frost Skill increases your damage by 10-25% for 5 seconds, stacking once per element. Casting again refreshes all bonuses if the previous skill was a different Element.

Axial Conduit

• +X% Chance for Chain Lightning Projectiles to Cast Twice affix changed to +X% Chance for Chain Lightning to Hit Twice.

Gloves of the Illuminator

• Effect reworded, but functionality unchanged.
• Previous: Fireball now bounces as it travels, exploding each time it hits the ground, but its explosion deals 30-0% less damage.
• Now: Fireball now bounces as it travels, exploding each time it hits the ground, but its explosion deals 70-100% of normal damage.

New Equipment, Uniques & Aspects

The new Legendary Aspects, Mythics and Uniques for the sorcerer have me quite excited to experience the new sorcerer. There are three known aspects for Sorcerer as follows:

Legendary Aspects

Aspect of Charged Flash – Offensive Aspect

• After Charged Bolts hits enemies 50 times, your next 3 casts of Charged Bolts becomes waves that pierce and deal (200-240% Weapon Damage) Critical Shock Damage.

Aspect of Elemental Constellation – Offensive Aspect

• Casting Pyromancy, Shock, and Frost Skills conjures a matching Elemental Dagger around you that pierces through enemies dealing (50-70% Weapon Damage) damage after 3 seconds. The damage increases by 100% per matching elemental skill you cast.

Aspect of Overheating – Offensive Aspect

• After channeling Incinerate for 2 seconds it deals (30-70% Weapon Damage) Critical Fire damage per second for 5 seconds. Casting Incinerate refreshes and maintains this bonus.

Since the sorcerer’s 2.0 flavor seems to be all about elemental mixups, I think Elemental Constellation is the most intriguing of the additions, particularly when we think about how this may interact with a min-maxed multielement conjuration build that is constantly spamming summons of all three elements. The unique item added with 2.0 is also focused on the Familiar, and will make those builds even more powerful.

Unique Item

Sidhe’s Bindings – Unique Gloves

• Affixes:
  • +X% Non-Physical Damage
  • +X% Familiar Explosion Size
  • +X% Chance for Familiar to Hit Twice
  • +X to Familiar
• Casting Familiar now summons all three elemental variants at once. Familiar’s duration is increased by 25-50%[x] and its Cooldown is reduced by 2 seconds, but its maximum Charges are reduced by 1.

If you are reading so far and a super-conjuration build is already brewing up in your head, you’re not alone!

Mythic Items & Runewords

In addition to everything you’ve seen so far, there are of course new mythic items and the all-new Runewords that will create new and intriguing combinations with whatever extra gear there’s yet to uncover in the game. Runewords themselves are deserving of their own video so we’ll have something explaining this in-depth closer to launch. For now let’s just put it out there that this is also an important part of your sorc-building and will probably change how you approach gameplay in general.

What this all means for the Sorcerer

The Sorcerer has always been one of my favorite Diablo classes to play, and I even tried remaking the classic fire and frozen orb thematic builds from D2 during our D4 launch coverage. If you are like me and you like experimenting with specialized builds and want to get the most out of a theme, these changes bring a very fresh approach to sorcerer building if we are willing to commit to the Conjuration school & go all out with elemental variety.

It would seem the easiest way to optimize around the new Key Passive would be to pair it with the Familiar Enchantment and create a conjuration-focused sorcerer, doing a multi-element chain of summons that keep spawning familiars and giving you all those bonuses, while using aspects to boost Hydra and conjurations in general. Think of something like Spark + Hydra spam that triggers cold orbs for a 3-element rotation leading to 100% uptime (and this synergizes very well with the paragon board legendary if we optimize for it).

Now to that we can add the new legendary aspect to summon elemental daggers and add the unique gloves to further boost familiar damage, and you have a theoretical powerhouse of elemental mayhem that should allow you to play a much more versatile sorcerer than any we’ve done before.

This is a very good thing for the class, as we seem to be stuck going from one element to the next and focusing on one single skill to pop crazy damage, but it would be fantastic to see fire, frost, and lightning live up to their max potential in one-to-rule-them-all type of build.

So that rounds up our introduction to the Sorcerer 2.0. I’m very excited to jump into the new expansion and see just how different my sorcerer can be, and I will be starting with Conjuration but surely exploring other maybe less obvious but equally exciting builds that the new content can bring. As always, you can find our builds on the blog at fextralife.com and make full use of our interactive map and wiki to keep track of where to get all items! We’ve already been working, and the expansion content is shaping up nicely.

Will you be playing a sorcerer? Or are you going to be going full on into Spiritborn? Let us know in the comments below.