The best Sorceress builds in Lost Ark

The best Lost Ark sorceress builds play to her strength. A ranged damage-dealer with excellent area-of-effect attacks, she can make shockingly high numbers pop out of lots of enemies at once. The best things about Lost Ark is its over-the-top action-RPG sensibilities, and the sorceress has some of the most impressive-looking moves this side of the Artillerist. 

As a mage advanced class, she's all about spells that cover wide areas in fire, frost, and lightning—as well as occasionally just turning off gravity or creating a big crystal bomb. If flashy attack animations are what brought you to Lost Ark, the Sorceress is an excellent choice.

Her main weakness: some of those flashy animations are super slow. A Sorceress locked in place bringing down a storm or a burning meteor is easy prey, and isn't armored enough to take the hits. In fact, her outfits seem to get smaller as you work through the endgame tiers—it feels a little odd to ask a blacksmith to hone your gear, then place a pair of tiny underpants on the anvil.

Mitigating that potential slowness are her identity skills. The first is Arcane Rupture, which sends out a wave of damage and puts the Sorceress into an enhanced magick state: 15 seconds during which her spells have their channel time halved and cause 10% more damage. Arcane Rupture normally takes 30% of her specialty meter (AKA identity gauge or "Mysterious Magick Meter", according to one tooltip), but if used when the meter is 100% full it becomes Arcane Torrent, which boosts spell damage by 20%, reduces all active cooldowns by 25%, increases the destruction/weak point bonus of fire spells, and increases the stagger bonus of lightning spells. It improves everything she's good at, and still halves channel time.

Her other identity skill, Blink, is a teleport that also costs 30% of the meter. That may seem underwhelming by comparison, but since her dash has an eight-second cooldown, having another way to nope out of danger is crucial. It's so useful that in PvP, Blink is tweaked to use up 45% of the meter instead, just to prevent sorceresses from bamfing off to safety whenever a deathblade comes anywhere near them.

Builds

The best Lost Ark sorceress build: Igniter or Reflux? 

There are two main builds for the Sorceress based on her two mutually exclusive class engravings. The Igniter engraving improves her identity skill so that Arcane Rupture, in addition to its regular effects, halves cooldown times and increases both crit rate and crit damage for its duration. Alternatively, the Reflux engraving provides a blanket bonus to the damage and cooldown rate of her spells at all times, while preventing her from using arcane rupture at all.

Igniter

Igniter is the more immediately appealing of the two, and is much more popular. It encourages a burst-damage playstyle, where you save your identity skill until just the right moment and then let loose. On average, an Igniter Sorceress can cause more damage overall than the steady Reflux sorceress, but only in a white room simulation. In reality it's easy for a boss to duck away during the Igniter's brief window of pyrotechnics, or for spells to simply miss. 

Reflux

Meanwhile a Reflux Sorceress is always causing consistent damage, and thanks to abbreviated cooldowns doesn't have to worry about memorizing a skill rotation. A Reflux sorceress can play reactively, casting whatever a situation calls for since a bunch of her spells will be available at any time.

While the top-tier players who have internalized every boss pattern do better with an Igniter, for the majority of us Reflux is the wiser choice. You get to be more mobile, using Blink whenever you want rather than being miserly with your meter because you need to save it for those 15 seconds where you actually get to have fun and be useful. What's more, a Reflux Sorceress isn't as reliant on having amazing ping, and will be more forgiving of the occasional spell missing its target thanks to lag. 

The rest of this guide assumes you're playing Reflux, but will note a few Igniter choices as well.

Abilities

Blaze

The bread-and-butter Sorceress spell is Blaze, which draws a line of flames that widens into a rectangle of hot-coal pain. As well as taking fire damage over time, anyone caught in it is paralyzed, leaving survivors open to a slower follow-up. Once you start partying up, put 4 skill points into Blaze to unlock the first tripod, then select Damage Amplification. That gives everyone in your party a +6% damage boost on hit. While the Sorceress is no support, keeping Blaze on a boss as much as possible provides a welcome buff. After the first tripod, save your skill points for other abilities. 

Seraphic Hail

One of the spells you start with, Seraphic Hail, summons a wave that launches enemies into the air, then bounces back like a tsunami rolling in and slams them a second time. It's great for taking out massed mobs, and stays valuable through the endgame with enough points put into it. Choose Quick Prep and Additional Explosion as the first two tripods so you can use it more often and do more damage. At the final tripod, Weak Point Detection is a good choice for boss fights, but I'd understand if you chose Red Hail, which swaps the element to fire. It's a fine option for a second loadout you switch to in Chaos Dungeons and other horde-heavy situations, with Weak Point Detection on the loadout you use for Guardian Raids and the like.

Punishing Strike

Seraphic Hail is your first tool for cleaning up mobs. Punishing Strike is your first tool for laying the hurt on bosses. It calls down bolts of lightning that do high stagger damage—after a delay. That can be shortened by choosing Unavoidable Fate as the second tripod, which turns it into a diagonal lightning strike with a much shorter casting time. For the first tripod, either go with Mind Enhancement to halve the mana cost if you find yourself regularly running low on MP, Wide-Angle Attack otherwise. For the third tripod, choose Final Strike for better crit damage. (Igniters will want Magick Amplification instead, which increases the spell's damage during your identity skill.)

Reverse Gravity

When surrounded, the sorceress responds by disengaging gravity to send anyone in her personal space floating upward, then re-engaging it with a burst of spite to slam them back to the ground with bone-breaking force. Reverse Gravity is fun to use, so it's gratifying that it's useful, too. For tripods, go with Rift Acceleration to speed it up, Lava Area to increase its damage and add fire, then Weak Point Detection so that, while it won't lift push-immune bad guys, it'll still make them hurt.

Rime Arrow

Ok, they're actually just icicles, but there sure are a lot of them. The first two tripods are much of a muchness (consider Quick Prep and Piercing Strike), but with the third you get to choose between Frost Barrage, which speeds up the casting time and increases damage, and Ice Pick, which doesn't speed up the casting time, but has double the damage boost. Go with Ice Pick.

Frost's Call

While I'm on the subject of ice, Frost's Call summons a circle of it that causes damage over time while you levitate into the air looking haughty, and has decent range. The downside is that it's a holding skill, one where you need to keep the key pressed to keep it going. Unless, you take the second tripod Unstable Rule, which makes it immediate. Do that. For the other two tripods, go with the two reliable sorceress fallbacks: Mind Enhancement to reduce MP cost and Final Strike to boost crit damage.

Esoteric Reaction

Esoteric Reaction summons a crystal that grows by stages, pulsing with gravity, then explodes. It's great for casting when a gang of bad guys is hot on your tail so you can run around it in a circle, clumping them together in time to go boom. Thank goodness there's no friendly fire in Lost Ark. The first tripod is up to you (I go with Quick Prep), while for the second Final Strike gives another crit boost, and for the third Stabilized Crystal provides a decent damage boost at the cost of some radius. That shouldn't matter if you're leading bad guys into its range in the proper fashion. 

Squall

This gust of wind is the only counter the Sorceress has, a frontal attack you can use to deny a boss who has turned blue and is about to launch into a particularly annoying pattern. It's tricky to pull off, though, both because it takes a moment to cast, and because you have to be up close to someone's face to hit them with it. In case it needs to be said, a Sorceress should not be up close to any boss' face. If you're a seasoned Guardian Raider, especially the kind who likes to solo them, you'll want to bring Squall with the Agile Cast tripod to speed it up. Otherwise, it's optional.

Elegian's Touch

A rare defensive spell in the otherwise offense-heavy Sorceress spellbook, Elegian's Touch surrounds you with a shield that drains MP instead of HP when you're hit. It also slows down your MP recovery and has a 35-second cooldown. For those reasons it's not a popular choice, but with the right runes and enough Mind Enhancement tripods on other skills, running low on MP isn't a worry. Choosing Quick Prep as its first tripod trims a few seconds off its cooldown, useful in Chaos Dungeons where it will need to be recast at every transition, and the second tripod Swift Footwork gives a 10% increase to movement speed while it's up. That makes Elegian's Touch worth taking in place of Squall, at least for the alternate loadout you use for Chaos Dungeons, Cube runs, and jogging around islands doing fetch quests. 

Other abilities

Explosion and Doomsday are both slow-as-molasses, high-damage fire spells. If you consider the cost worth the hassle, swap them in while taking out Reverse Gravity and/or Seraphic Hail. Definitely pick both if you're an Igniter. The remaining spells, Lightning Bolt, Inferno, Energy Discharge, Lightning Vortex, and Ice Shower, are all leftovers from when Lost Ark didn't rush players through the early levels quite so hastily. While fun to experiment with as you're leveling or messing about in Chaos Dungeons and Cubes—especially Lightning Vortex, as seen above—none are worth keeping on the skill bar in raids or most other endgame activities. 

Like every advanced class, the Sorceress gets two awakenings to choose from. The first you unlock, Enviska's Might, forms a dome that draws in enemies and explodes, while the second, Apocalypse Call, makes meteors rain from the sky. Apocalypse Call has a higher potential damage ceiling, but the randomness of its meteors means you likely won't reach it. That makes Enviska's Might the better choice.

Gear

Stats

When comparing accessories, there are only two stats that really matter for a Reflux Sorceress: crit and swiftness. Crit is essential for pumping up your chance to see a payoff from all those crit damage-increasing Final Strike tripods on your skills. Swiftness increases the speed of your stately attack animations. Specialization, which increases the rate your specialty meter fills up, is more useful than either for an Igniter, however.

Engravings

In addition to the Reflux or Igniter class engraving, keep an eye out for accessories and ability stones with battle engravings that suit your playstyle. For a Reflux Sorceress, get anything that boosts your chance to crit. The Precise Dagger engraving does exactly that, and its penalty to crit damage amounts to nothing compared to the amount your Final Strike tripods increase it by.

Other decent choices are Adrenaline, which increases crit chance and crit damage, but only after you've built up stacks of it by using skills, and Hit Master, which increases the damage of any ability not labeled a frontal or back attack. The Sorceress, specializing in area-of-effect spells as she does, has hardly any frontal or back attacks, so it's a solid pick. Finally, Spirit Absorption increases both movement and attack speed and has no downsides. 

While their improvements to damage and attack power respectively might make Grudge and Cursed Doll seem like attractive options, they come with harsh penalties. Only when maxed out do they become worthwhile—don't bother with them at anything less than the third level of their effect.

Runes

Either Focus, which reduces MP consumption, or Galewind, which reduces casting time, are the runes worth choosing between for almost every sorceress skill. Blaze is a rare exception, being both cheap and fast, so it can have a Bleed rune to make it a little extra hurty. 

Focus runes can be found in the loot from field bosses on Spida Island or Unknown Island, as well as from building rapport with Azena on Rohendel, collecting 13 giant's hearts, or just straight-up buying them from the stronghold merchant Borza. Galewind runes are rewards for defeating guardians, and bleed runes come from defeating continental field bosses, though you can also get one for building rapport with Lutia on Feiton.