This Diablo 4 Sorcerer Build – Eternal Battlemage build puts players in control of the battlefield with incredible survivability. Become a melee Battlemage and don’t be afraid to be in the thick of battle!
This build is a beginner-friendly midgame build that makes your first steps into Tier 3 farming of Whispers, Helltides and Nightmare Dungeons a lot less stressful. If you need help with finding aspects make sure to use our Diablo 4 interactive map, or access the complete skill and item database on the D4 wiki.
If you are looking for a powerful sorc build but don’t want to keep dying, give the Eternal Battlemage a try!
Diablo 4 Sorcerer Build – Eternal Battlemage
This Diablo 4 Sorcerer Build – Eternal Battlemage assumes you are approaching level 50. If you are progressing into this from another build, the Elementalist is the simplest starting point, but any build can successfully merge in. You may have to realocate some points, and in general you’ll want to be flexible with your point choices to adapt to your exact style, but the mantra of this build is: Resistances, Barriers and Cooldowns.
The jump from Tier 1 / 2 to Tier 3 can be very painful for players, as monsters will gain affixes and elemental damage that you are probably not ready to take on. There is also a special “Helltide” event that takes over a region, during which you gather currency that must be spent within the hour of the event. If you die, you lose 50% of your carried currency, making death a really sucky thing to happen as you get locked out of valuable rewards.
Diablo 4 Sorcerer Build – Eternal Battlemage Stats & Skills
If you are coming into this from our elementalist build, you’ll find the skills have remained pretty much the same. However we are using them a bit different and have put more of a focus on passives and extra boosts.
Your main gameplay rotation will be to round up enemies and go to the middle of them, summon your Hydra for passive damage, cast frost nova, then spam fireball until you don’t have mana, and use arc lash to build it back up and stun enemies. You will use Fire Shield and Frost Armor as your bubbles, and both can give survivability and damage.
Crowd control is an essential part of staying alive and dealing damage, but since we are creating a multi-element build we’ll be able to freeze and burn enemies as well.
The Skill Selection Process & Gameplay Rotation
Our approach to combat will be to get into the middle of a group of enemies, crowd control them, and blast them away with powerful Fireball, then rebuild our mana with Arc Lash. For this purpose, We’ll use Fire Bolt as an enchantment, so all our direct damage applies burning. This means your AOE Arc Lash will be doing both lightning and burning damage whenever you hit close enemies.
Because you’re standing in the middle of a group, you need to be able to survive pools dropped under you. The synergies for this multi-element setup come from:
- Potent Warding: gives you an extra 2% elemental resistances plus 1% of your fire / ice elements),
- Elemental Attunement: 10% chance to reset your defensive skills aka Frost Nova, Ice Armor and Flame Shield
- Align the Elements: Up to 40% less damage from Elites
- Mana Shield: 10% damage reduction every 100 Mana spent
- Protection: Using a cooldown grants you 20% of your life as a barrier (so your flame shield, nova and ice armor all give you an extra shield)
- Warmth: Heal per second based on burning enemies around you
- Vyr’s Mastery: -20% damage from close enemies.
The interconnection of these passives and the gear we selected gives you incredible survivability, allowing you to stand still and tank elite groups and bosses if you’d like.
You will be using Blizzard as an Enchantment as well, so it casts itself periodically over you every 15 seconds. This is very useful as it follows you around, so you won’t have cast it somewhere enemies moved away from. Your blizzard, Ice Armor and nova will chill and freeze enemies, your arc lash, flame shield and nova will burn them as well. This means they’ll be well-controlled and you can stop their attacks entirely while you blast away with fireball and thin their numbers. Just make sure to ALWAYS target the purple glowing enemies that give others elemental resistances.
Diablo 4 Sorcerer Build – Eternal Battlemage Equipment, Gems, & Aspects
Equipment is a critical part of any lvl 50+ build as this is where the actual itemization begins to take shape in the game. For this Sorcerer LvL 50 build, we are looking to get gear with specific bonuses to our main damage dealer skills, but also want to focus on boosting Pyromancy and Frost Skill lines, elemental damage for Fire & Shock, damage to crowd control or close enemies, and attack speed. You should also look to increase your stats with +stat bonuses on gear.
I have kept Damage Type resistances (Poison, shadow, etc) buffs on gear as it can be troublesome to deal with elemental packs. With this setup, our out-of-combat buffs rest over 50% against all damage types, and we can increase those when using our in-combat skills and obtaining additional buffs.
In general, you’ll be in the situation where the items you are picking up are only 50% or 70% of what you want. You will be lacking materials to transform rares into legendaries since you’re just starting this phase. To counter this you should focus on doing wishes and helltides to obtain more legendaries that you can deconstruct. The “Mystery” chest on the helltide is the single best source for legendaries (can give up to 4 in one pop), but staying alive with your 170 Hellfire Crystals can be a challenge.
The legendary Aspects I am using are:
- Aspect of the Crowded Sage: You heal for x Life per second for each close enemy, up to 121 life per second
- Protecting Aspect: When hit while not Healthy, a magical bubble is summoned around you for [3.0-5.0] seconds. While standing in the bubble players are Immune. Can only occur once every [90] seconds.
- Storm Swell Aspect: You deal [x]% increased damage to Vulnerable enemies while you have a Barrier.
- Frostblitz Aspect: Frost Nova gains an additional Charge but the Cooldown per Charge is increased by [??]%.
- Aspect of Fortune: Your Lucky Hit Chance is increased by [15]%[+] while you have a Barrier active. [10-20]%[+]
- Aspect of the Frozen Wake: While Ice Armor is active, you leave behind exploding Ice Spikes that deal [88-132] damage. Your Ice Spikes Chill enemies for [10]%.
- Aspect of the Protector: Damaging an Elite enemy grants you a Barrier absorbing up to [135-270] damage for [10] seconds. This effect can only happen once every [30] seconds.
- Gain X of your Primary resource for every 25% of your Life that you heal
- Mother’s Embrace (Unique Ring): If a Core Skill hits 5 or more enemies, x% of the resource cost is refunded
- Aspect of the Inner Calm (Optional): Deal [3.0-10.0]%[x] increased damage for each second you stand still, up to [30]% [x]. If you feel confident you won’t “fidget”, you can boost your DPS by using this aspect. I personally move and dash too much, but this build is a good synergy for it.
A VERY important and easily neglected aspect of this Diablo 4 Sorceress Build – Eternal Battlemage is the “enchant” and “upgrade” options. By this point in the game you should have sufficient materials to upgrade your equipment 3 times or so. This actually does make a difference so make sure to do so. For enchanting, you may find the cost can be high – you’ll have to do helltides to obtain the materials. But being able to remove an unwanted bonus can be very impactful in your overall build.
Gems are also an important part of the game, as you can create slots in equipment and you can swap them in and out at no cost. Since this is a tanky sorceress build, I have focused on Rubies for Armor (+% max life), Diamond for Jewelry (+% Elemental Resistance) and Topaz on Weapon (+% Basic Skill damage)
D4 Sorcerer Tank Battlemage Build: Paragon Levels
From level 50 onwards you don’t obtain any more skillpoints, and instead gain 4 Paragon points per level. Paragon points are used to unlock nodes in a separate tree, and each node can give a minimum of +5 to any stat, +% damage reduction, or significant boosts to your damage output.
As you level paragon, you will put points into willpower and intelligence, but you’ll want to take the Tactician Glyph on your slot. So you’ll have to assign 25 points of dexterity around it. Once you do this, you will get a very nice boost to the rare nodes higher on your tree, that boost your non-physical damage (so all your damage!). Additionally, this glyph gives you 10% increase damage for 4 seconds after casting a defensive skills. Nova, Ice Armor and Flame Shield are all defensive skills so they’ll all trigger this effect. If you’re feeling nostalgic for our starter multielement build, the Elementalist Glyph gives you extra damage to all elements, which works great with this build as well.
D4 Sorc Tank: Final Tips
I created this build because I wanted a no-stress easy and chill run through dungeons and content when playing on my own. Its damage output is not top tier but it gets the job done, and the survivability makes you highly resilient to nasty surprises such as server lagspikes or teleporting elites.
Since Helltide farming is such a big part of this portion of the game, not dying is crucial and you’ll be happy you took 20 seconds longer to complete an objective when it doesn’t cost you 20 minutes of farming in currency loss to an unpredictable death.
Use this build to grind the harder aspects of the endgame transition, and get ready for our powerful endgame builds that can truly set the tone for consistent endgame performance.
Be sure to check out our Diablo 4 Wiki for any other questions you have about the game and the Builds page if you are looking for more Diablo IV Builds, as well as our Getting Started Guide and Best Class to Play if you are looking for more Diablo 4 content!
8 responses to “Diablo 4 Sorcerer Build – Eternal Battlemage”
i haven’t taken this one to 70+ yet (got stuck trying to get pure lightning to work well) so unsure ;(
I know the paragon setup was briefly talked about but I was wondering after the initial starter board and tactician glyph, what boards and glyphs would you recommend be good for this build? I did look over the different boards/glyphs and tried to make a lvl 100 build but thought I get some advice.
It’s meant to adapt based on the gear you have. Just distribute points based on what you’ve gotten on gear
I am a bit lost. I tried to put everything explained in the guide in a build planner and noticed that the skill points spent exceeds the 58 available points for a character that is lvl 50 with 10 renown points. I am wondering if the skills that have “+gear” next to it means the gear gives points so it equals 5 or the skill already has 5 points and the gear gives extra points?
You can look at the endgame builds and see the ones you like and start building toward them from 25-50, re-specing points is not that expensive so you can try things and change them based on what you like. If you are doing Fire & Ice, we have a Pyromancer and a Permafrost build that go in-depth into each side.
Will there be a build between level 25 to 50? I am using currently using the fire and ice build and might transition into this build but what about between the two builds? I’m new to using a build, I usually just go willy nilly on skills
You should use points from gear to boost your stats, you’ll have flexibility to adapt that way. You use Blizzard and Firebolt for enchantments
i am a bit confused because the chosen abilities exceeds the allowed number of abilities in the action bar, would you please let me know what am i missing ?
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