Path of Exile 2: Stormweaver Sorceress Ascendancy Explained

This guide focuses on the Stormweaver Ascendancy for the Sorceress, covering their Unique Skills and Skill Interactions.

Stormweaver Overview

The Stormweaver is an Elemental Caster that heavily specializes in Cold and Lightning Damage.

The Stormweaver is the only Ascendancy capable of stacking two instances of Chill or Shock, which gives them access to powerful and reliable Crowd Control and high burst potential.

Stormweavers can also permanently gain Arcane Surge’s effects, multiplying their Casting Speed and Mana Regeneration Rate. Arcane Surge can also be further Boosted by Mana, making them incredibly powerful for a Mana Stacker build.

Storm’s Recollection

Storm’s Recollection makes any Remnants we create reappear 3 second after collecting them. Additionally, Remnants can be collected from 50% further away.

The only This allows us to leverage Mana Remnants for Mana sustain, but also boost the speed at which we can create Elemental Infusions, which are considered Remnants.

Mana Remnants and our Elemental Infusion are both to be able to spawn more of. The only real downside to this effect is that it takes 3 seconds for them to reappear. This does line up with effects like Harmonic Remnants, which may make it feel a bit more seamless once we get into a flow of casting.

This may not see use often, outside of builds that want to lean heavily into Infusions. Even for Mana Remnants alone, it may be worth considering to generate large chunks of mana at a time. Overall, the Stormweaver has much stronger options available, and this will end up only being taken for lack of a better option on some builds.

Update 0.4 added some additional Remnant Pickup range to this passive, which does help alleviate the delay, but the delay still needs to be significantly shorter to even have a chance to still be in range.

Tempest Caller

Tempest Caller grants the Skill Elemental Storm. Elemental Storm is triggered by Elemental Critical Hits. This has a base cooldown of 3 seconds.

Elemental Storm creates a Damage over Time (DoT) area that also Hinders enemies, slowing them by 20%. While the base damage isn’t particularly strong, it can be boosted by both Elemental and DoT damage-boosting affixes, letting it scale decently well.

Elemental Storm’s damage is determined by the highest elemental damage of the skill that triggers it. This allows it to be used to quickly build up any Elemental Ailment of choice.

Multiplying Squall

Multiplying Squall increases the limits of Elemental Skills by 2.

This effect applies to the following skills: Frost Bomb, Living Bomb, Solar Orb, Firestorm, Orb of Storms, Explosive Spear, Volcanic Fissure, Volcano, and Thunderstorm.

In particular, this will make it easier to generate Elemental Infusions by increasing the number of Frost Bombs, Solar Orbs, and Orb of Storms we can have active. These can then be consumed by the Snap spell for more Infusion to use with other skills.

This has a very strong synergy with Firestorm and Thunderstorm as well, allowing for multiple overlapping storms from various forms of Spell Echo. This also heavily reduces the need for using Overabundance on these skills, helping them not to reduce their duration.

Heavy Snows

Heavy Snows allows Stormweavers to apply two Chills at once, but they cannot be higher than 35%. Chill Magnitude is reduced.

Chill reduces Action Speed, which means it affects the Attack, Cast, and Movement Speed of an enemy. It cannot be understated just how powerful reducing those values by up to 70% can be.

Unlike Strike Twice, this doesn’t reduce Chill Duration either, making it easier to maintain. It will however, require additional investment into Chill Magnitude to reach the maximum 35%.

Shaper of Winter

Shaper of Winter allows All Damage from Hits to Chill, regardless of type.

This means those powerful Chills aren’t restricted to just Cold Skills, but can be applied to any Skill. This can also make it easier to apply stronger Chills, or apply them over a wider area.

Strike Twice

Strike Twice allows two Shocks to be applied to any enemy, but for 25% less magnitude.

Shocks are a powerful way to increase Damage for ourselves or any allies we have, being able to stack two of them makes them even more effective. This even includes playing a Shock Support for Party Play.

The change to a reduced Magnitude is more impactful for a solo player rather than the support mentioned previously. As such, without investing in Shock Magnitude at all, we’ll have a baseline of 15% Shock. It’s not that much weaker overall, just something to keep in mind.

However, the real pain comes from trying to scale Shock Magnitude now. Previously, even with Jewels to boost Ailment Magnitude, it was hard to make Shock even double its base strength. To do that now, we’d need ~135% Shock Magnitude, which even with with perfect Ailment Jewels means needing four instead of three to reach a similar effect.

Shaper of Storms

Shaper of Storms allows All Damage from Hits to Shock, regardless of type.

Much like with Shaper of Winter, opening Shock up to skills beyond just Lightning Skills can be incredibly powerful. This can allow stronger skills that deal more consistent damage to easily apply Shocks, rather than relying on the unstable damage of Lightning Hits.

Constant Gale

Constant Gale applies Arcane Surge Permanently while allocated.

Arcane Surge is a very potent buff that grants Cast Speed and Mana Regeneration. It’s worth noting that this is a more multiplier on top of any Cast Speed or Mana Regeneration we already have.

Unlike other classes, this is 100% uptime on Arcane Surge with no effort. Normally this would require spending your Total Mana on a skill supported by the Arcane Surge Support, which only gets harder to do as more Mana is gotten.

Force of Will

Force of Will causes 20% of damage to be taken as Mana before Life. Additionally, we gain 20% Arcane Surge Magnitude per 10% missing mana.

While this passive prevents us from taking Mind over Matter, we cna still reach 100% of damage taken as Mana by using the Cloak of Defiance alongside some passive investment, where we can instead focus on scaling our Mana.

This takes full advantage of this passive, granting us Increased Cast Speed and Mana Regeneration. The lower our mana get, the more sustain and cast speed we get out of this passive.

It may not be quite as insane as premanently scaling Arcane Surge Magnitude as it did previously, but it’ll still find use for a Stormweaver.

Refracted Infusion

Refracted Infusion grants an additional Infusion of a different element when collecting an Elemental Infusion.

With this passive being buffed in Update 0.4, it’s a solid option for generating more Infusions. With the common existing options of Orb or Storm and Living Bomb not being able to generate Cold Infusion, this helps solve that without the need for Elemental Equilibrium, though that also changed in the same patch.

This is best utilized with a setup like Cast on Crit Living Bomb to just generate a ton of Infusion very quickly. It’s a 50/50 as to what the other infusion will be, but they can be generated so quickly that sustaining all of them would be easy.

The only downside of using Living Bomb, of course, is that you have to be in melee range of a boss to grab them at all. Not a big downside, but some added risk.