Diablo 4 Shock Sorcerer Arc Lash Build Guide: Crackling Spears

This build for the Sorcerer in Diablo 4 focuses on a post-campaign Endgame Arc Lash Shock build that functions without too many Aspects, but becomes much more potent with the completed build!

The Sorcerer is a class with many options available to them as far as main skills and builds go. This guide focuses on just one of those playstyles, an Arc Lash Build that utilizes Crackling Energy to very rapidly Stun and Crowd Control for huge damage potential.

This Shock Sorcerer build guide assumes you’re at least level 50 and have completed enough of your Renown to have gained the 10 additional Skill Points available.

If you want a great leveling build to reach this point with, try our Sorcerer Leveling Build. This build here is the completed endgame version of that build and requires very little effort to transition into.

Build Overview

This build uses Arc Lash as its main damage source, with various spender skills serving as a way to generate additional Crackling Energy. We’ll also be making use of Unstable Currents and the Stable Aspect for additional damage and damage potential.

As a result of this, we’ll often have Lightning Spears, Ball Lightning, Chain Lightning, and Charged Bolts flying out randomly. Each of these ends up being upgraded to benefit the build in some way, keeping the skill tree almost wholly focused on Shock Skills.

On the Defensive side of things, we’ll be making use of both Teleport and Ice Armor to cover our defenses and survival. Teleport also has the added bonus of being able to boost the effectiveness of our Crackling Energy, allowing it to hit more targets.

We’ll have a lot of skills being cast at random as well thanks to the Stable Aspect, which will provide a lot of Stuns to help lock enemies down. It’ll be a common occurrence for whole groups to get locked down, especially during Unstable Currents.

Skill and Passive Breakdown

In this section, we’ll be talking about each skill we use. This is the whys and hows of how the build works, and then we’ll cover the skill point distribution.

Skills

These are the main skills for the build. We’ll explain what purpose each serves and how they fit the build

Arc Lash

Arc Lash is our Main damage, as it has solid AoE, a consistent stun, and a fairly high Lucky Hit Chance to help trigger some helpful effects. We’ll be upgrading it to Glinting Arc Lash to help speed up cooldowns.

Chain Lightning

Chain Lighting we’ll want to use fairly often still, as it will have multiple chances per cast to create Crackling Energy. For it to do this, it must be upgraded to Destructive Chain Lightning.

Teleport

Teleport is our mobility option and on-demand Unstoppable. When upgraded to Shimmering Teleport it’ll also grant Damage Reduction.

Ice Armor

Ice Armor is the on-demand Barrier that will allow us to face tank a lot of damage when needed. We’ll upgrade this to Shimmering Ice Armor to increase our mana regen and have a defensive freeze occasionally.

Lightning Spear

Lightning Spear will put in a lot of work dishing out stuns to provide additional damage for us as well as mana sustain. We’ll upgrade these to Invoked Lightning Spear to allow them to frequently Stun.

Unstable Currents

Unstable Currents is quite a powerful Ultimate, despite not dealing direct damage on its own. When upgrading it to Supreme Unstable Currents, the sheer number of spells it casts, the bonus Attack Speed as well as the added benefits to Crackling Energy make it absolutely vital to the build.

Passives

Here we’re only going to talk about the main passives we absolutely want as well as our Key passive. There are unfortunately a couple we will need to take to get access to these though.

Key Passive – Overflowing Energy

Crackling Energy isn’t super great without this. However, with this Key Passive, we’ll be able to very quickly lower the cooldown of Teleport, Lightning Spear, and Unstable Currents. This gives us plenty of cooldowns at the ready, and only get better as we reduce the maximum cooldown of our skills.

Elemental Dominance

This increases the damage of Chain Lightning, while also increasing the damage of all skills cast by Unstable Currents (with the exception of Lightning Spear). It does require additional Mana Management, but our main skill is a Basic Skill, so we can just reduce the frequency with which we cast Chain Lightning.

Glass Cannon

With how often we’ll be protected by various barriers, our mobility with Teleport, and our Stuns this becomes free damage for us. The downside of taking extra damage is barely a downside at all.

Precision Magic

This build relies on a few Lucky Hit triggers to boost its potential, so getting a solid increase in how often they happen is welcomed.

Protection

We’ll need to take Align the Elements to Reach this, but this is hands down the best defensive passive we can get. We cycle cooldowns so frequently that we’re able to have high uptime on this free barrier. This will also trigger with the spells cast by Unstable Currents

Static Discharge

If our skills weren’t already enough, this allow every Critical Strike to potentially provide more Crackling Energy. More Crackling Energy means a shorter cooldown and more mana.

Shocking Impact

This passive really amps up our damage, especially since we’ll have several skills upgraded to stun more often. We’ll also be looking to get bonus levels for this on our Amulet, which gives this a high damage ratio compared to any skill we cast, that will trigger every time we stun.

Coursing Currents

This gives us fairly regular Critical Strikes, which just overall improves our damage and allows us to make use of various passives.

Invigorating Conduit

This will grant us a ton of extra Mana sustain, just from generating Crackling Energy. The more mana we have, the easier it’ll be to sustain our Crackling Energy.

Skill Point Distribution: Where to Assign Your Skill Points

This is an easy-to-reference table for where we’ll be placing all of our Skill points. These are listed in the order they appear on the skill tree.

Icon	Skill Name	Skill Tree	Points
	Arc Lash	Basic	5
	Enhanced Arc Lash	Basic	1
	Glinting Arc Lash	Basic	1
	Chain Lightning	Core	1
	Enhanced Chain Lightning	Core	1
	Destructive Chain Lightning	Core	1
	Devastation	Core	1
	Elemental Dominance	Core	3
	Teleport	Defensive	1
	Enhanced Teleport	Defensive	1
	Shimmering Teleport	Defensive	1
	Ice Armor	Defensive	1
	Enhanced Ice Armor	Defensive	1
	Shimmering Ice Armor	Defensive	1
	Frost Nova	Defensive	1
	Enhanced Frost Nova	Defensive	1
	Mystical Frost Nova	Defensive	1
	Glass Cannon	Defensive	3
	Elemental Attunement	Defensive	3
	Lightning Spear	Conjuration	1
	Enhanced Lightning Spear	Conjuration	1
	Invoked Lightning Spear	Conjuration	1
	Precision Magic	Conjuration	3
	Align the Elements	Conjuration	1
	Protection	Conjuration	3
	Ball Lightning	Mastery	1
	Enhanced Ball Lightning	Mastery	1
	Mage’s Ball Lightning	Mastery	1
	Static Discharge	Mastery	3
	Shocking Impact	Mastery	3
	Invigorating Conduit	Mastery	1
	Unstable Currents	Ultimate	1
	Prime Unstable Currents	Ultimate	1
	Supreme Unstable Currents	Ultimate	1
	Coursing Currents	Ultimate	3
	Electrocution	Ultimate	2
	Overflowing Energy	Key Passive	1

Gearing and Stats

In this section, we’ll cover all the things you’d want to keep an eye out for to enhance the final build. This includes our Recommended Weapons, Enchantments, Aspects, and of course, Uniques.

Recommended Weapons

For this build, we’ll always want to run a One-Handed Weapon and Focus. Since this build demands a fair bit of Attack Speed to work well, having a higher base speed to work with does wonders. The Focus also helps us with additional Cooldown Reduction, which is something we’ll also want a fair bit of.

There are some options for using a 2H with this build, but means you’ll have to drop an Offensive Aspect for it, and two if you wanted to fit any Uniques like the Staff of Lam Esen to support skills used in the build. Though, ideally you stick to the 1H and Focus.

Ideal Stats

The table below details the ideal stats for our gear, be on the lookout for gear that matches at least three of the four rolls below.

Due to the width of the table, we highly recommend mobile users rotate their devices to view it properly.

Slot	Stat 1	Stat 2	Stat 3	Stat 4
Main-Hand	Critical Strike Damage	Vulnerable Damage	Critical Strike Damage with Lightning	Intelligence
Off-Hand	Cooldown Reduction	Resource Cost Reduction	Critical Strike Chance	Lucky Hit Chance
Helm	Cooldown Reduction	Maximum Life	Barrier Generation	Lucky Hit Chance with Barrier
Chest	Maximum Life	Damage Reduction	Total Armor	Resistance
Gloves	Critical Strike Chance	Ranks to Chain Lightning	Lucky Hit Chance	Attack Speed
Pants	Maximum Life	Damage Reduction	Total Armor	Resistance
Boots	Movement Speed	Resistance	Resistance	Ranks to Ice Armor
Amulet	Cooldown Reduction	Ranks to Elemental Dominance (or Devouring Blaze)	Ranks to All Defensive Skills	Lucky Hit Chance with Barrier
Rings	Critical Strike Chance	Critical Strike Damage	Maximum Life	Barrier Generation

Recommended Gems

This build uses Emeralds in our Weapons, Rubies in our Armor, and Diamonds in our Jewelry.

We use Emeralds in our Weapons as we’ll be applying Vulnerable fairly often. This allows Vulnerable to also boost our Critical Strike Damage.

We use Rubies in our Armor as it scales both our Maximum Life and Barrier. Crowd Control is nearly as frequent or unbearable, and we’ll have such a short cooldown on Teleport we won’t have to worry much.

As with most builds, we use Diamonds in our Jewelry as Resistances are worth stacking up now. You can swap these out for more specific resistance gems as your armor fills one or more of them out.

Vampiric Powers

During the Season of Blood, we’ll have access to Vampiric Powers, which allow us to slot up to five unique powers into our Sanguine Circle to increase the power of the build. We’ll include more than the maximum in the selection below to offer alternatives, but they will be listed in order of their relative strength.

Name	Effect	Reason
Moonrise	Grants stacking Attack Speed when landing Basic Attacks. At max Stacks, enter Vampiric Bloodrage gaining a large amount of Basic Skill Damage and Movement speed for 10 seconds.	Arc Lash is out main skill. The Attack Speed and Damage significantly boost it in addition to pairing well with other powers.
Hectic	Every 5 Basic Attacks, slightly reduce one of your active cooldowns.	This shortens our cooldown significantly as we already attack quite fast.
Ravenous	Chance to increase Attack Speed by a percentage of Total Movement Speed.	A great, free Attack Speed boost that scales with Moonrise.
Anticipation	Reduces Ultimate Skill Cooldown. Additional Ultimate Skill Damage is increased for each enemy affected by DoT.	Great Sustain, assuming anything gets through Barrier health.
Undying	Every skill cast heals you for a small percentage of Maximum Life. This effect is doubled under 50% Life.	Great Sustain, assuming anything gets through our Barrier.
Accursed Touch	Skills have a chance to apply Vampiric Curse and it an spread to nearby enemies. Accursed Souls deal increased damage.	This pairs well with Prey on the Weak to provide an alternative source of Vulnerable.
Prey on the Weak	Increases Vulnerable Damage. Enemies afflicted with Vampiric Curse are also Vulnerable.	Enables Accursed Touch apply Vulnerable.

Enchantments

For our Enchantments, we have the main two Enchantments, Frost Nova and Teleport. There are other options that could be considered too, but they overall seem less reliable.

Frost Nova works really well here for additional Crowd Control and Vulnerable application thanks to its upgrades. Regardless if we’re manually casting Lightning Spear or it is cast from Unstable Currents or the Stable Aspect, each hit from each Spear can trigger this, leading to fairly high Freeze and Vulnerable uptimes.

At first glance, you’d probably overlook the Teleport Enchantment, but it does a lot for the build. Despite being a shorter distance, this Teleport also inherits your cooldown reduction, Affixes, Aspects, and even your Evade Charges from your Boots. This allows it to provide near-constant bonuses to movement speed and damage reduction with Shimmering Teleport.

Fire Bolt is a great option for the build in place of Teleport, with the main benefit being access to Burning to enable the use of useful Passives and Affixes on gear as well as some other Paragon Board and Glyphs. It’s more restrictive on your Skill Points, as you’d want to take Devouring Blaze along with this enchantment, meaning you’ll need to move 5 points around.

Additionally, there’s Chain Lightning which could also be used instead of Teleport. This would supplement our Crackling Energy in boss encounters that lack minions, as it’ll give us the occasional free cast of Chain Lightning on top of any we already would get.

Aspects

We’ll cover the Aspects that are recommended for maximizing the potential of the build. We’ll also suggest which gear slot you should look to place them in.

Stable Aspect

The Stable Aspect gives us a lesser version of Unstable Currents when the skill isn’t active. This gives us more frequent access to Stuns from Lightning Spear and Ball Lightning, which helps with both damage and survivability

We’ll place the Stable Apsect in our Main-hand Weapon. Any Offensive Aspect slot would work, aside from the Amulet so fit where you can.

Aspect of Overwhelming Currents

The Aspect of Overwhelming Currents boosts the number of casts you get for free out of Unstable Currents. It’s a huge DPS boost with how often it can trigger.

The Aspect of Overwhelming Currents will be placed in our Off-Hand Weapon. Like most of our Offensive Aspects, where we place it doesn’t matter as long as it’s not the Amulet.

Rapid Aspect

Since the Build uses Arc Lash as our Main Damage source, there’s never a reason to not take this. It’s a huge boost of attack speed, which also means more casts during Unstable Currents.

We’ll place the Rapid Aspect in one of our Rings slots as the base effect is more than enough.

Elementalist’s Aspect

While this Aspect requires some resource management, with Chain Lightning not being our main damage source, this should be fairly easy to maintain.

We’ll place the Elementalist’s Aspect in our Amulet. We want it to be boosted up, which gives us very near to 100% Critical Strike Chance after our Affixes, at least for all Non-Basic Skills.

Gravitational Aspect

The Gravitational Aspect is great for our build, as any Ball Lightning casts from Unstable Currents or the Stable Aspect will follow us. This allows us to more readily direct its damage as well as make good use of Mage’s Ball Lightning.

We’ll place the Gravitational Aspect in our Gloves. Like most of our Offensive Aspects, where we place it doesn’t matter as long as it’s not the Amulet.

Conceited Aspect

This is one of our best damage-boosting Aspects, since we have an on-demand shield in Ice Armor as well as shorter duration shields thanks to protection, we’ll be able to use the reliably, even during bossing.

We’ll place the Conceited Aspect in our other Ring. Like most of our Offensive Aspects, where we place it doesn’t matter as long as it’s not the Amulet.

Aspect of Fortune

Lucky Hits do a lot for the build, from triggering Frost Nova Enchantment to resetting our Defensive Cooldown with Elemental Attunement. Between Protection and Ice Armor, we’ll have high uptime on having a Barrier and this Lucky Hit Chance bonus.

The Aspect of Fortune can be placed in our Helm or Chest, depending on which slot isn’t holding one of our Defensive Aspects.

Ghostwalker Aspect

Since Teleport will be up fairly often on its own, we’ll be able to maintain this bonus fairly easily, granting us greatly improved mobility. We can take this further by also using the Teleport Enchantment, which can increase how often we use Teleport.

As a Mobility Aspect, the Ghostwalker Aspect will be placed in our Boots.

Aspect of Disobedience

With the number of hits we can deal in a short span of time, we can often stack this pretty fast. Armor is easily one of the best defensive stats currently and getting more for just dealing damage is nice.

The Aspect of Disobedience will be placed in our Pants, depending on what’s open after other Aspects.

Aspect of Might

The Aspect of Might is a great defensive option for us, with Arc Lash being our main skill which means it’ll be up 100% of the time during combat. It’s more consistent and useful compared to Aspect of the Protector.

We’ll place the Aspect of the Might on our Chest or Helm. Depends on what’s open after other aspects.

Unique Items

We’re only going to talk about the few that offer the strongest effects on the build. While there are others that help, these are the ones you really want to slot into your build if you get the chance. These will drop starting in Tier 3 content, but decent upgrades for the build once you get them.

Raiment of the Infinite

Raiment of the Infinite is a Unique Chest that will pull and Stun enemies near us after a Teleport but increases its cooldown. This can help set up for better Crackling Energy use as well as work nicely with Glinting Arc Lash. This will also work for the Teleport Enchantment, which makes Evading incredibly powerful as a grouping tool and on-demand Stun.

Esadora’s Overflowing Cameo

Esadora’s Overflowing Cameo is a Unique Amulet that gives a chance to trigger a lightning nova when we pick up Crackling Energy. Additionally, it grants levels to our Shocking Impact passive, as well as additional Damage and Movement Speed. This makes it a solid item to use if you get it before you find a good Amulet, but we can ultimately get more damage out of a good Legendary Amulet.

Soulbrand

Souldbrand is a Unique Chest that has a lot of great stat on it, but also turns the instant healing of our potion into an on-demand barrier. More importantly it also grants us additional Damage Reduction while we have a Barrier active, which improves all of our existing Barriers.

Paragon Boards and Glyphs

These two endgame options are part of the Paragon System which is available starting at level 50.

Paragon Boards

Paragon Boards are a feature that becomes available at level 50. These boards allow us to spend the Paragon points we earn for leveling and Renown to strengthen our character. Each of these has a single Glyph Slot to place a glyph of our Choice.

Starter Board

All starter boards are identical, offering generic damage and defenses for us.

We’ll path up the right side through Elementalist, grab our Glyph and move Elemental Balance to our Gate node for now. The Defensive clusters here, Erudite and Resilience, offer a lot of Elemental Resistance, Armor, and Life making them great to pick up later.

Static Surge

Static Surge can help a lot for applying Vulnerable, as roughly every 4th cast of Chain Lightning will apply Vulnerable in addition to recovering some Mana.

Rotate this board so the Legendary Node is closest to the bottom. We’ll path up through Overwhelming, and stop off to grab Static Surge, before going back up the initial path to Incapacitate, then we’ll head right, to our Glyph, then take Electro and exit out the right gate.

Ceaseless Conduit

We’re not super focused on Crackling Energy, as while it does help us it doesn’t do much damage, even if we put everything we can into it. This board does offer a lot of Lightning Damage and Elite Damage still, which is worth grabbing.

Rotate the board so our Glyph Node is in the upper left. We’ll path down and grab Hunter Killer first. Then we’ll head up to our Glyph Node, grabbing the full Galvanic Catalyst cluster as well as the Lightning Resistance of the Electro cluster. Then we’ll grab the Conduit cluster for its Lightning Damage and connect to the top gate.

Enchantment Master

While Enchantment Master can help make our Enchantments stronger it doesn’t do too much for the build overall. Its board however offers plenty of Elite Damage and Non-Physical Damage bonuses.

Rotate the board so the Glyph Node is in the lower left. We’ll path up to Erudite, taking the resistances of this cluster on the way to our Glyph Node. Then we’ll grab Elemental Balance‘s Non-Physical Damage nodes and path through Intellgence nodes as we branch out to Elementalist and Ruinous from our Glyph Node. Finally, we’ll exit the left gate, from our path to Elementalist.

Frigid Fate

Frigid Fate is a board we can pick up a lot of extra Vulnerable Damage on. While not as powerful as it was before, we still apply it often enough to make it a consistent damage boost. We pick up a decent amount of Non-Physical Damage to also enable Frigid Fate to be a great boost.

We’ll rotate this board so that Oppressive is in the lower right. We’ll head straight to Chilling first, before grabbing out Glyph Node here. Then we’ll grab the Vulnerable damage of the Weakness cluster and all of the nearby Intelligence for our glyph. Then we can head up and grab Frigid Fate as well as the Lucky Hit chance from the Advantage cluster.

Glyphs

Each of our Paragon Boards has a Glyph Slot, where we can socket one of our Glyphs. These Glyphs provide powerful bonuses that can be leveled up by completing Nightmare Dungeons to increase their power. Below are the Glyphs we recommend and what board to place them on.

Adept

Adept boosts the damage of our Mastery Skills for every 5 Intelligence allocated in range. With 40 Intelligence allocated in range, Mastery Skills have increased AoE.

We’ll place Adept in our Starter Board, as it has a good amount of intelligence within close proximity. This allows us to boost Ball Lightning a fair bit, for extra damage during Unstable Currents.

Destruction

Destruction grants Critical Strike damage to all skills for every 5 Dexterity we allocate in range. If we allocate at least 25 Dexterity, our Critical Strikes will increase all damage we deal to enemies.

We’ll slot Destruction in the Static Surge board, as this has the easiest Dexterity to pick up to meet the secondary requirement.

Electrocute

Electocute increases the Lighting-based damage and damage reduction bonuses in range. With 25 Dexterity allocated in range, we’ll gain increased Critical Strike Chance with Lightning Skills against Stunned, Immobilized, or Frozen enemies.

We’ll place Electrocute in the Ceaseless Conduit board, as it has the best Lightning bonuses allowing the base effect of the glyph to give us a pretty big damage and defensive boost. We can grab Dexterity as we path through to easily activate the glyph as well.

Elementalist

Elementalist increases the Non-Physical Damage and Damage Reduction nodes in range. With 40 Intelligence allocated in range, dealing Fire, Cold, or Lightning damage increases our damage for a short time with each type of damage.

We’ll place Elementalist in the Enchantment Master board, as it has the most Non-Physical nodes to boost making it an effective way to increase both our damage and defenses.

Enchanter

Enchanter increases our Non-Physical damage for every 5 Intelligence allocated in range. With 40 Intelligence allocated in range, we gain additional Maximum Resistances for the elements of our equipped Enchantments.

We’ll place Enchanter in the Frigid Fate board, as we can grab a ton of Intelligence here without going too crazy in terms of the overall point cost.

This concludes our Shock Sorcerer Build focusing on the Arc Lash skill. You can find more leveling and endgame Diablo 4 builds here on VULKK.com to try new things with your characters and spice up your gameplay.