The best Sorceress build for the early game in Path of Exile 2 is one that makes use of frost, fire, and lightning abilities, combining all of those effects to deal as much damage as possible. Lacking inherent defensive strength, the Sorceress needs to deal plenty of damage, have good evasion and energy shield stats, and keep away from enemies where possible to improve survivability.
The Sorceress’ passive skill tree is set up to improve her spellcasting and elemental damage. Here I'll run through my best starter build for the Sorceress class, explaining important skills to grab right away. I'll also explain key support gems for those skills and passive nodes to unlock within the game's huge passive skill tree. Beyond the initial few acts, it's up to you how you level the Sorceress and round out your build.
Best Sorceress skills and support gems for the early game
These are the Sorceress skills that are key to this build. Ideally, you'll want to find the elemental damage that you enjoy playing with the most, but in the early game you can spec into all of them with your skill choices, which is what I suggest doing to combine different effects.
You should grab these early and use these support gems with them:
Spark
- Arcane Surge: Supported skills gain arcane surge for eight seconds after spending a total of 100% of your maximum mana on supported skills
- Conduction: Supported skills have 100% more chance to shock
Spark is the first main skill you get as a Sorceress in Path of Exile 2. It launches a spray of sparking projectiles that travel randomly on the ground until they hit an enemy or expire. This is the main lightning damage attack in the game, and Conduction makes it more effective at shocking enemies, causing them to take even more damage. Arcane Surge is also good early in the game purely because you'll have low mana. Over time you will want to increase this significantly, but during act one and early parts of act two, this can help you recover mana quickly.
Flame Wall
- Ignition: Supported skills have 100% more chance to Ignite
- Fire Infusion: Supported skills gain fire damage, but deal less cold and lightning damage
Flame Wall is hugely important to any build with the Sorceress and is one of the most powerful skills in her arsenal. When used, it casts a wall of fire that ignites anything passing through it. But it also has a strong additional effect that enhances the damage of abilities fired by you and your party through the wall.
The damage increase is significant early on, and the wall can act as an extra defence between you and a group of enemies or a boss. Since you want to fight from a distance, I used this ability in almost every encounter, as the burning helps finish off enemies with low health.
Frost Bomb
- Magnified Effect: Supported skills have 40% more area of effect
Frost Bomb is a skill that can really help during act one, but you may want to drop it as your slots become full. This throws out a bomb that passes along the ground, dealing frost pulses that make enemies more susceptible to frost damage. You can then combine this with your weapon and Ice Nova (listed below) to freeze enemies quickly. This skill requires precise aiming, but it can be useful early on to freeze groups of enemies in their place or kill them quickly. Magnified Effect simply makes this more useful, covering a wider area.
Ice Nova
- Glaciation: Supported skills cause 50% more freeze buildup
- Cold Infusion: Supported skills gain cold damage, but deal less fire and lightning damage
Ice Nova is likely a skill that you'll use consistently throughout your playthrough. This causes an explosion of ice around you, knocking enemies back and freezing them with the frost damage it does. With additional frost damage buildup from your weapon, Frost Bomb, or other skills, you can quickly freeze or wipe out a whole group around you.
With the Glaciation support gem, your freeze buildup is enhanced even further, and this can be vital against many of the act one and early act two bosses. The playstyle that works best is to freeze an enemy or boss quickly, place a fire wall, and then use Ember Fusillade (listed below). You can then stack both freeze and fire damage to knock off huge chunks of health or slay big groups.
Ember Fusillade
- Fast Forward: Supported skills have 30% less skill effect duration
As you play through act one, you'll eventually get to choose your first Spirit skill. Make it Ember Fusillade. This conjures a blazing ember that hovers above you, which, after a short duration, launches at an enemy, dealing fire damage in an AoE on impact. You can cast this spell up to seven times, giving you seven free small attacks that deal dire damage. This is incredibly strong against enemies who are frozen. Stacking these embers to their max also increases the damage of each one.
The only downside is that the hover time for these embers is fairly long. This can be decreased with Fast Forward, a support gem that reduces the time the ember hovers for. This doesn’t show up on the curated support gems list, so you will need to uncheck that option in the menu to see it on the full list of support gems.
Sorceress stat priorities
These are the stats I recommend you prioritise via your gear and passive skill tree:
Intelligence is by far the most important stat to level up for the Sorceress. This boosts your mana, allowing you to increase your pool and fire more spells, therefore dealing more damage. This will also allow you to equip some of the gear I talk about later that focuses on evasion and energy shield stat increases. Additionally, dexterity is worth upgrading fairly high to improve your accuracy with projectiles when firing those spells. Strength is the third option here, but you do want to invest some points, purely because it will increase your health.
Energy shield is far more useful with the Sorceress than the traditional armor stat. Gear with this requires high dexterity and/or intelligence, and the energy shield naturally regenerates, giving you a layer of defence before you need to worry about taking damage.
A good Sorceress, keeping at a distance, will rarely lose this energy shield against low-level enemies and bosses, as you'll avoid attacks consistently or absorb them. Evasion also helps with this, giving you a chance to avoid taking damage and being hit by projectiles. You'll also want to invest a few stats into cold/fire resistance, as you'll face a few bosses and enemies that deal these damage types. Movement speed is also vital in allowing you to escape from attacks and dodge quicker, letting you fight from a distance if you get ambushed.
Adding some stats that improve your maximum mana plays into the class’ natural strengths too. Finally, regenerating life per second and overall maximum life are worth keeping amongst your defensive stats if you have gear with it on. It shouldn’t be core to your build, but the bonuses definitely help if you get caught in a tight spot.
As you'd expect, spell damage and critical hit chance are two key stats for the offensive area of your build. You want to be able to do the most damage possible as you send out a flurry of spells, supported by your defensive skills, extra mana, and spell cast speed (which I talk about in the passive tree section below).
You can also find weapons with stats that increase levels for base elemental attack. This effectively gives you free support gems and can really power you up early on in Path of Exile 2’s campaign. I killed most of the act one bosses with enhanced Freezing Shards on an ice staff quicker than I did with my Warrior build that did not have these increases for its physical damage.
Best Sorceress passive skills to grab early
These are Sorceress skill nodes that I'd suggest getting due to their power to improve your spellcasting:
Most of these skills lead directly down the main path from where the Sorceress starts. However, Flow Like Water can be found in the Monk tree to the right of where you start.
Best Sorceress gear
For the Sorceress, you want gear that has a lot of energy shield buffs, as well as some evasion. When it comes to weapons, the staff is your main option, and you can choose from either a fire staff, lightning staff, or ice staff. Go with what you have or which element you prefer, but I'd suggest an ice or lightning one. Gear to keep hold of includes:
- Gelid Staff
- Voltaic Staff
- Jacket of the Seal
- Face Mask
- Sapphire Charm
- Azure Amulet
Armour is highly dependent on the stats you roll, but the Face Mask will provide you with some extra evasion as well as solid boosts to your energy shield. The same goes for the Jacket of the Seal, which can help improve your evasion without needing to actually spend points in the passive tree on it. The Sapphire Charm will boost your cold resistance (extremely helpful during act one’s final boss), and the Azure Amulet provides a flat mana regeneration rate increase.
