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Ball Lightning just received two unique Focus's for Season 7!!!

At the start of this season, both focus's were extremely underwhelming. But fear not, as of March 4th, Stormhorn's received a 5x buff and is now the clear front runner. At full min max, it should be able to do around a 120 by my estimates.

Okun's
• Always be casting Ball Lightning
• Use cooldowns liberally
• The goal is to have
• Save flame shield for when you need a get of jail free card
• Teleport as needed for movement and to break crowd control

Stormhorn's
• The same as above, except you hard cast Ball Lightnings into enemies from range like Ice Shards
• The Ball Lightnings have a max range they can go, and when they hit an enemy at that max range they will stun them
• If they are hit from inside max range, it will still explode for max damage, but no stun

Starter Builds
• Starter builds use Tibault's Will to restore resource when you teleport or Ice armor
• We use Frost Nova on the skill-bar at first over teleport because I'd rather have runes for crit chance and resource generation over frost nova at that stage of gearing

Note: Ball Lightning is labeled as both a Mastery and a Core skill - It benefits from both Mastery damage and Core skill ranks

Okun's Catalyst Unique Focus
The gravitational aspect was reworked to be a utility aspect that grants the ability to pull enemies together, and in it's stead they created Okun's Catalyst. Okun's is a great item. Ball Lightning's now gravitate around you, and instead of each Ball ticking independently, it creates a static field of damage that increases with each active Ball Lightning. It also has an affix where after you use a defensive skill you get a large boost to attack speed, but I am unsure which attack speed cap it is yet.

This focus grants you permanent unhindered. Unhindered means you can move freely through enemies so the build feels smooth. However this is not the same as unstoppable, where you can not be crowd controlled. You simply cast a bunch of ball lightnings and walk around and kill stuff.

Strike of Stormhorn Unique Focus
Stormhorn was really fun to play in the PTR. You just go around casting high damage Ball Lightnings like Randy Johnson fastballs into that bird. Instead of Ball Lightning casting twice, you just make a super Ball Lightning (patent pending) that deals 125% more damage. This focus made ball lightning feel like a real smasher and I look forward to playing it again.

Key Passive Enlightenment
Enlightenment is still the best passive in sorc's aresenal for direct damage. You should get around 80% extra damage out of it when it is active. The goal is to get 100 stacks and then the passive is active for 10 seconds. Everytime you cast a skill you get 1 stack. When you cast a skill of a different element you get 8 stacks. The way we get high uptime with enlightenment is by spamming ice blades and ice armors inbetween Ball Lightning casts. Every cast of these skills is 16 stacks as you alternate back to Ball Lightning.

Frost Nova is Back!!!
Frost Nova now provides 15% damage to anything you hit with it. At first we run it on the skill-bar, but late game we use the THUL rune to proc it often!

Leveling

• Get into a group of 4 and literally just blast the season event and helltides
• Once you get access to Nightmare Dungeons and Infernal Hordes those are really good for XP
• Pits are the best source of XP once you are able to do them and you can start leveling your glyphs

Firewall Leveling
Ice Shards Leveling
Blizzard DOT Leveling
Incinerate Leveling
Chain Lightning Leveling

Enlightenment Vs Vyr's Mastery Key Passive

Enlightenment is more damage at around 75%, and has attack speed and mana regen. However the uptime can be a touch spotty on Shock builds after the nerf down to 8 stacks for an alternating skill cast. This is because you only gain a bunch of stacks when you alternate skill casts.

For general content, Vyr's Mastery is a solid option. It provides upwards of 50% damage on bosses, and has a damage reduction component. If you are annoyed about enlightenment, as you can't even tell when it is active because it falls off the skill buff bar, just run Vyr's Mastery all the time

Paragon

Boards
• Starter
• Frigid Fate - 1.6x damage
• Fundamental Release - 1.5x damage
• Static Surge - 1.5x damage
• Ceaseless Conduit - 1.6x damage

Glyphs
• Tactician - Bonus damage after using a defensive skill
• Elementalist - Bonus damage after hitting enemies with different elements
• Unleash - Bonus damage and mana regen after spending 50 mana
• Adept - 30% larger Ball Lightnings with Stormhorn and + mastery skill damage
• Destruction - Large amount of critical strike damage

Witch Powers

Powers
Builds use Aura of Siphoning and Aura Spec to get a crit damage boost within that aura, the value is actually multiplicative damage despite the tooltip stating [+]

Soul Harvest is used to increase our main stat by a large amount. Abyssal resonance just adds a bunch of extra damage and basically acts like we have a shadow surge temper on a weapon. Hex of whispers is just really nice as it removes the debuff stacks that tormented and pit bosses apply to you. Hex of whispers also applies a hex so we can get 25% damage out of Elder Sigil

The cycle is taken purely to satisfy reqs requiring us to have 3 growth powers for the friend of the bog gem.

Gems
• Friend of the Bog - Just a great gem, increased life and main stat, and permanently unhindered. Synergizes with Intelligence % on the amulet and the Soul harvest witch power
• Elder sigil - 25% more damage to hexed enemies

Third Gem Options
• The default gem is Moonlight ward for 15% damage reduction and to help shore up resistances
• The max damage gem is Hungering void, which will pull enemies in every 8 seconds. The reason this grants damage is through clumping enemies for you. Gravitational is great, but it doesn't have a massive pull. Hungering void is massive. Soul harvest grants intelligence based on the number of enemies near you, and with hungering void you can get a really large pull at the start of an activity or pit. As long as your soul harvest does not fall off, you should get a really large intelligence boost that hangs around for a while.

Runes

Starter builds use Lum and Gar to restore resource and gain crit chance

Endgame builds don't have the above issues, so we want 15% damage from warcry and 15% damage from enemies we hit with frost nova for the most part

Speedfarm setups don't care about damage as much, so it focuses on grouping enemies and damage reduction. Dying means less time kill, means less loot.

In the pit, we do not really need teleport enchant. So we can run frost nova and ice blade enchantment. This frees up a rune to run Vex for ranks and out standard warcry rune for 15% damage. TamWat and XolOhm are also very reliable, which is the Necro decrepify for executes and barb warcry classic setup.

Mercenaries

Hired
• After playing with Subo I cannot play without him. He provides you with a maphack of all enemy locations and resources on the map
• Subo provides us with 20% movement speed and small windows of 25% more critical strike damage when you see his cover fires arrows land on enemies

Reinforcement
• I opt for Raheir and his bastion ability, synced to go off when I am injured. Bastion provides 90% damage reduction for 5 seconds and unstoppable for 1 second. This dude can help you get out of a pickle, and because it's set to only go off when we are injured, it shouldn't go on cooldown when we don't need it.

Incense Elixirs

Elixirs
Standard elixir is attack speed, however max life or resource pot can be used to alleviate other pain points

Incenses
• Intelligence incense - can use All stats one if you are lacking on paragon reqs
• All resist incense
• Max Life incense - If you don't have 1000 armor you will need to use armor incense

Incense and Elixirs are basically free to craft, you should have an elixir and 3 incenses on at all times, you can have 1 of each type of incense on

1/24/25 - skill trees, skill bars, and witch gems updated after damage testing. All looks good

1/25/25 - Speedfarm and Pit variants added

1/26/25 - Witching Hour + Purging touch taken off the builds, it does not appear to work for Okun's catalyst. I am really sorry, but I just didn't know until I farmed one and tested it :( Sorry If i wasted anyones time. Welcome to diablo

2/28/25 - Build updated to have a STORMHORN version for March 4th update - Bowling Ball

3/4/25 - Bowling ball deleted
• all builds converted to Stormhorn builds, it will vastly outperform Okun's as it got buffed by 5x
• Adjustments to MW hits to prioritize core ranks to scale Stormhorn
• rune tweaks across the board
• Changes to Witch powers,/gems - writeup updated
• Amulets changed to reflect buffs to glass cannon

If you want to run these build's as Okun's you can, nothing about them changes, just prioritize cast twice on Okun's, ranks to Ball Lightning is also fine