Guide: Starting as lightning sorc (newbie friendly)

[Lucid]

Hey guys,

wanted to share my experience while leveling up as a lightning sorc.
Ive recently started over again with a fresh sorc, just muled some energys. But youll be fine without them.

Some general rules for leveling up your character:

- you cannot be leveled by a character that is more than +10 levels from you. This will result in almost no experience. You can be rushed tho (no observing yet, so participate like in D2LoD)
- playing trough the game normally and maybe just ask for act3 waypoints will make a smooth leveling process and has the best experience
- dont forget to look for a group to make the lvl30, lvl60 and lvl80 challenges which you can find in the wiki - search for souls. You cannot complete this challenges after you hit lvl 31/61/81. But you should be able to complete them solo with this build.
- generally pick up every soul on your way. Watch out for icy looking cloudes after killing an uniq monster or boss and the blue letters in the bottom left that tell you, that a mysterious presence is near -> In that area theres a uniqmob or boss dropping a soul.
- use your energys that you find! Dont bother of their worth, most of the real worthy ones only start to drop in hell anyways. Just use them to make your gear better. Youll need every upgrade to make and keep the leveling process smooth. (magic rings and amulets can get +1 skills at the very start, gloves with +skills follow shortly after. Thats both a good damage boost at the start)
- Potions are permanent and there are 4 different ones for 4 different belt slots. Use a different Potion in each slot and try to craft good and useful stats with your energys on them. There can be stats like "immune to curses", "you cannot be frozen", %max life or %max mana, which helps alot as sorc. Etc.
- Pick up every resist rune you find (ral, ort, tal, thul, ith). Allresist and high defense are really good defensive stats, which are definitly needed when fighting bosses. You can easlily change socketed runes by rightclicking for example a ral out of your gear and swap it for a ort if you die to souls or at mephisto. Thats not cheating, thats how the game works :P


Now the light sorc guide for leveling:

Status points:
Put all skillpoints into energy. Energy provides you with mana, synergizes with your energy shield later on and provides you with +% elemental damage.
Thanks to crafting, you can watch out that you dont craft gears that need too much strength. If you find an uniq or good rare that needs strength, go for it. Ive made it up to Hell with only 10 stated points into strength. Rest came from gear, jewels and ive generally tried to avoid high strength req gear.

Skills:
Due to high skillceiling and the lack of synergies, its best to only skill few skill but those at high levels/maximum.

Go for charged bolt, and ignore everything else until this skill is 20. When thats reached, you have very good singletarget damage and also pretty decent area damage. Next up you need something for defense:

Go for energy shield. Thanks to your energy, that energy shield soon gives you really great toughness. Try to keep your life-mana and energy% absorb balanced. If you have 500life +500 mana, aim for a rough 50% absorb. You dont need to fully skill it at first. Just try to keep balance and max your resists and defense in the background and you should be relatively tough for the start.


After that, ive skilled thunder. At lvl 20 it hits every 0,5 seconds with a pretty hard hit. Especially if youre only low level but progress trough your journey quick, it helps you at bosses in late nightmare and hell. Those hit really hard and facetanking them wile melting them with charged bolt isnt really possible. So thunder helps you by kiting and killing those.

You can ofcourse just aswell switch your primary damage skill too. At akara in act1 town you can just as in D2LoD, reskill your character.
The classic frozen orb sorc or a pyroblast sorc both work pretty good here. Just get a few levels first, because a lvl5 frozen orb by far wouldnt do the same damage as a lvl 20 charged bolt...
As far as the battlemage tree goes: You need some really good gear and tankiness, before you should try this. Nonetheless if it sounds fun just try it. Reskilling your character is 3x free at Akara and even after that you can just aswell farm essences from the bosses in hell or buy a token of resolution at Hadriel for either 200gold or a potent energy (which are btw not really that worty. Youll find them from nightmare ~act3 on.)


Hoped that help especially the new players. The general rules of leveling pretty much counts for every class.
If more experienced players want to add something to it, just post and ill add it on
Once thats all ok itll maybe find its way in the wiki.

gl & hf at your journey!

[rileyboo]

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