Ladder Starter Sorceress Guide

Introduction

Sorceress builds are the best ladder starters in the game. Their movement speed is unmatched due to having access to the teleport skill, and having the lowest frame rates of casting it.

Their damage is huge from any of their 3 skill trees, since they don't need to rely on expensive high damage weapons and runewords. They also excel at delivering area damage, as their strongest attacking skills (Blizzard, Chain Lightning, Meteor) affect a huge area. In addition there are easy to access budget items that are almost as good as the most expensive choices. Check out our Ladder Starter RW guide to see which ones are a great match for your sorc!

Magic finding with a sorceress

I will start off with an important note: the Blizzard skill received a boost in the most recent 2.4 patch, reducing its cooldown from 4 seconds to 1.8. Blizz sorcs were widely considered to be the most effective magic finding builds, which is especially true now. You can check out our Blizzard Sorceress Guide to learn everything there is about Blizz sorcs.

There are two main magic finding approaches, Bossing and farming. Bossing imply teleporting to a specific location where a Boss appears, killing it, and moving on to the next Boss in a similar fashion. Once you killed all the Bosses you wanted to, you can go on and create the next game to repeat the process.

Meanwhile farming is a number's game, it relies on killing as many monsters over a period of time as possible. Because of this, it's the most efficient in monster packed, dense areas.

An important factor in both Bossing and Farming is the potential drop of your targeted enemy monster. Bosses have special drop tables, meaning each of them have their unique list of what they can drop, and what they can't. For example, Hell Andariel can not drop a Tyrael's Might armor, but she has the highest chance to drop a Stone of Jordan, or a magic charm. Before deciding on which Bosses you farm, you should check out their drop tables. The same goes for area farming, different areas have different monster levels. The highest level an area can have is 85, and at such places a monster can drop basically anything.

The Level85 areas in the game are: Act 1 - Underground Passage Level 2, Act 1 - The Mausoleum, Act 1 - The Pit Level 1 and 2, Act 2 - Stony Tomb Level 1 and level 2, Act 2 - Maggot Lair Level 3, Act 2 - Ancient Tunnels, Act 3 - Arachnid Lair, Act 3 - Swampy Pit Level 1, level 2 and level 3, Act 3 - Disused Fane, Act 3 - Ruined Temple, Act 3 - Forgotten Reliquary, Act 3 - Sewer Levels 1 and Level 2,- Act 3 - Disused Reliquary, Act 3 - Ruined Fane, Act 4 - River of Flame, Act 4 - Chaos Sanctuary, Act 5 - Abaddon, Act 5 - Pit of Acheron, Act 5 - Infernal Pit, Act 5 - Drifter Cavern, Act 5 - Icy Cellar, Act 5 - Worldstone Keep Level 1, level 2 and level 3, Act 5 - Throne of Destruction.

Gearing for magic finding

Magic find on gear has diminishing returns on Unique and Set items. While 100% Magic find provides 71% extra chance of finding uniques, 300% provides 136%, 500% provides 166%, 800 provides 190% and 1000 provides 200%. There is a bigger difference in drops between 0 and 100% magic find then 300 and 1000%. Because of this, you should wear items that let you do your farming or bossing runs time-efficiently to bring the best out of your effective magic find.

When farming Bosses, the main priority is a fast teleport speed and a high magic find % with a relatively okay Boss killing speed. The kill itself will only take ~10% of your Run's time, so increasing your damage output does not significantly improve your performance. On the other hand if you farm level85 areas, 80% of the time you will be attacking monsters, so delivering the most amount of damage should be the absolute priority, even at the expense of several hundred % magic find.

Bosses and areas that are best for farming

#1 -Mephisto - Meph is the favorite farming target for players who enjoy Bossing, as he can drop almost all of the valuable items in the game. In most cases he has the highest, or second highest drop chance from any monster to drop a specific item.

#2 -Andariel - Similarly to Mephisto, Andariel has the highest chances to drop many unique and set items in the game. However, there are some elite unique items that can not be found by farming her.

#3 -Chaos Sanctuary+Diablo - This is a best-of-both-worlds combination, as Diablo is a very profitable Boss to farm, and the Chaos Sanctuary is a monster dense level85 area. I'd suggest focusing on your damage, as you will spend most of your time clearing the Chaos Sanctuary. You will be able to find almost any elite item here.

#4 -Throne of Destruction+Baal - A baal run takes significantly longer time than a Diablo run, so you should focus even more on damage output. In the Throne of Destruction, the monster density is far behind Chaos Sanctuary's, but there are quite a few superunique monsters to kill before getting to Baal. As Baal is the final boss of the game, his drop rates are the best for the most elite items. If you want to kill more level85 monsters, you can farm your way to Throne of Destruction by killing monsters in Worldstone Keep level 2 and 3.

#5 - Pindleskin - Pindle is a superunique monster that you should approach with a high MF %. He has very good chances of dropping the most elite unique items, and a run only takes you 30 seconds.

#6 - Nihlathak - Nihlathak is another superunique with very high drop chances for the most elite items. A run takes about twice as long as a Pindle run, however here you can find item level 99 grand charms, which can then be cubed to 40+life skillers.

If you decide not to farm for hundreds of hours, you can quickly buy runes from our D2R Store.