Welcome to the Ice Shards Sorcerer Endgame Build Guide. This build transform your Sorcerer into an Ice-based machine gun shooting out Ice Shards at around 1000 Rounds Per Minute. With its great single target DPS and relatively long range, this build can go pretty far in Nightmare Dungeons.
This build can technically be played at range, but in practice it's very reliant on Frost Nova so you have to be melee to a degree. During the Boss fights, however, this is no longer the case, so you are free to run all the way to Narnia and shoot the Boss from there.
The Ice Shards Sorcerer is not very dependent on any specific Legendary Aspects. The Codex of Power versions of Prodigy’s and Piercing Cold are more than enough to make the build work. However, a lot of build's power is locked behind Frost Nova. The build can feel somewhat sluggish until you get enough Cooldown Reduction and ranks in Frost Nova to make it spammable.
In this guide we teach you all you need to know to turn your Sorcerer into a literal machine gun and have a blast doing it. Let's dive into it!
This build guide assumesyou have a Level 50 Character and finished the Campaign. Level up with our Ice Shards Sorcerer Leveling Guide. If you are looking for a different Sorcerer playstyle, check out all of our Sorcerer Guides.
DifficultyEasy
SpeedfarmingStrong
The PitPoor
BossingPoor
DefenseAverage
Season 4 - Loot Reborn
In Season 4, the Season Theme revolves around helping out the Iron Wolves. Compared to past themes, this one does not offer any borrowed power as the entire game has been redesigned with new itemization and crafting options, increasing player power substantially across the board. Instead, you can gather reputation similar to the Vampire Bounty Board from Season 2 to unlock rewards that supercharge your leveling journey to 100 with extra items, crafting materials and eventually even a Resplendent Spark to craft an uber unique.
We recommend to follow the seasonal questline until you unlock the reputation system, check which rewards suit you most and then follow your regular leveling path. To learn more, check out our full Season 4 guide for more information.
Skill Tree & Gameplay
Active Skills
- Ice Shards is our main skill. It deals very high single target damage, and with ricochets from Enhanced Ice Shards, Aspect of Piercing Cold, and its own Enchantment it's also pretty decent for AoE.
- Teleport is our main mobility skill, which also serves as a CC break.
- Frost Nova is both a defensive and offensive skill. It keeps us safe by Freezing all enemies in place and also dramatically increases our damage output by making them Vulnerable, not to mention that it activates our Ice Shards Enchantment, which is our main source of AoE damage.
- Ice Armor gives us a huge Barrier and a bit of Mana regen.
- Flame Shield provides even more defense by making us temporarily invincible.
- Unstable Currents is our last active skill; it's used purely for Attack Speed it provides to help with single target damage.
- Fire Bolt is only here to be put into an Enchantment Slot.
Enchantment Slots
Sorcerers can choose two skills to put into Enchantment Slots, where they provide powerful passive bonuses. Ice Shards Sorcerer uses the following Enchantments:
- Ice Shards Enchantment is our main source of AoE damage. When we cast Frost Nova, Ice Shards automatically fire at every Frozen enemy. Each of these shards can then ricochet and pierce through multiple enemies and the end result of it all is absolute icy devastation.
- Fire Bolt Enchantment is a lot less flashy but still very useful. It lets us use various stats such as Damage to Burning Enemies or Damage Reduction from Burning Enemies, as well as Devouring Blaze passive.
Learn more details and how to unlock this class specification in our full Sorcerer Enchantment Slots Guide.
Resource Management
This build can be quite Mana-hungry, as we constantly spam Ice Shards.
Early Game
Here we have some Mana problems so we invest a lot into it:
- Frigid Breeze
- Avalanche
- Prodigy's
- Voracious Rage
- Mana Per Second on Helmet, Chest, and Boots
- Resource Cost Reduction/Generation (or more Frigid Breeze) tempers on all Jewelry
- Elixir of Resourcefulness II
With this we should easily have enough Mana to spam Ice Shards because, unlike other Cold spells, Ice Shards proc Lucky Hits very well so we get a lot of mileage out of our passives.
Mid Game
Here we need to find one more key piece - Aspect of Frozen Memories. This can replace both our resource Aspects while also providing a little bit of damage.
Once we find Tibault's Will, we can safely replace Mana Per Second Helmet and Boots with Godslayer Crown and Esu's Heirloom (You still need some Mana Per Second on your Chest).
Late Game
And finally we get Ring of Starless Skies. With this item we straight up generate more Mana than we can spend and we don't even need the Mana from Tibault's Will procs (we still keep it for the damage).
Paragon Board
Carefully check your Paragon Boards to ensure correct board rotation. Glyphs go from a radius of 3 to 4 when they reach level 15!
Level the Paragon Board by scrolling. Each step optimizes progression.
Glyphs
We need to level up our Glyphs to activate their Additional Bonus with surrounding nodes. For some Glyphs, we max our bonuses by allocating every relevant node in range, while on others we take the minimum required for the Additional Bonus only. Because Glyphs at level 15 increase their radius, we need to prioritize leveling them by completing Nightmare Dungeons. After that, we prioritize leveling our strongest glyphs to level 21.
Note that there are some Glyph position swaps and a few adjustments to surrounding Paragon nodes once they reach level 15. See the first three steps in the Paragon progression above for details. The setup displayed by default is the final version of the build.
Glyph Leveling Priorities
For maximum efficiency, follow the order outlined below. First, level your Glyphs to level 15 and then do a second pass to get them all to 21.
Level 15
- Control
- Tactician
- Reinforced
- Destruction
- Flamefeeder
- Exploit
- Elementalist
Level 21
- Destruction
- Control
- Flamefeeder
- Exploit
- Reinforced
- Tactician
- Elementalist
Also check out our dedicated in-depth guides to learn more about Paragon Boards and Glyphs.
Endgame Gear & Skill Progression
When you start diving into the Endgame, you don't have all the tools available to achieve the final build versions. Let us guide you through different progression points to give you a smooth transition from our Leveling Guides to the final build version.
Progression Goals
Many of your Skill choices depend on what Legendary Aspects and Unique items are available to you. While we can guarantee, that everyone has access to the same Codex of Power Aspects, the progression might be different for everyone!
- Unlock the following Aspects in your Codex of Power:
- Piercing Cold in Dead Man's Dredge (Fractured Peaks)
- Prodigy’s in Witchwater (Hawezar)
- Control in Sunken Library (Kehjistan)
- Disobedience in Halls of the Damned (Kehjistan)
- Storm Swell in Onyx Hold (Dry Steppes)
- Bounding Conduit in Komdor Temple (Dry Steppes)
- Voracious Rage in Hallowed Ossuary (Fractured Peaks)
- Shared Misery in Oblivion (Hawezar)
- Find the following Legendary Aspects either as a random drop or by gambling with Obols:
- Conceited: Gamble Focuses
- Accelerating: Gamble Focuses
- Replaces Prodigy’s
- Frozen Memories: Gamble Focuses
- Replaces Voracious Rage
- Everliving: Gamble Pants
- Acquire the following Unique items either as a random drop or by farming specific Boss drops.
Note: You cannot gamble Unique items with Obols!- Tibault's Will (Duriel, Andariel)
- Replaces Disobedience
- Godslayer Crown (Duriel, Andariel)
- Replaces Shared Misery
- Esu's Heirloom (Varshan, Beast in the Ice)
- Replaces Bounding Conduit
- Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop (Varshan)
- Replaces Frozen Memories if your Mana is good or Control otherwise.
- Tibault's Will (Duriel, Andariel)
- If you're lucky enough to obtain the following Uber Uniques, they're useful for the build.
- Harlequin Crest is your BiS helmet. It provides about as much damage as Godslayer Crown but much more toughness and utility.
- Ring of Starless Skies is also BiS. It gives more damage than Control, works against Bosses and also provides insane Mana Cost Reduction.
Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.
Progression Setups
Starter
Leveling to 100
Endgame & The Pit
Speedfarming
Once you have completed the leveling guide, only the Codex of Power Aspects are guaranteed. With this setup you can farm the Legendary Aspects and Unique items you need for the next progression point.
Gear
- Storm Swell goes on the amulet for more damage.
- Prodigy’s and Voracious Rage are Resource Aspects and can only be placed on Rings.
- Control and Piercing Cold take up 2 out of 3 remaining offensive slots. It's generally best to leave your weapon without an Aspect because it's replaced often.
- Bounding Conduit can only be imprinted on Boots.
- Put Disobedience on the Pants or Chest.
- Shared Misery can go on Helmet or Chest.
Skills
At low levels we Struggle with Mana, so we remove points from Voracious Rage and Elemental Dominance to put them into Fiery Surge and Precision Magic.
With more level, better stats on items, and better rolled aspects our build can progress further. In this version we do a bunch of changes to our gear, skills and enchantment slots. See below to find out when and why each change is made.
Gear
- Put on Conceited and Everliving.
- Replace Voracious Rage with Frozen Memories.
- After you get enough Mana Per Second, drop Prodigy’s for Accelerating.
In this setup, you have access to all Unique items, and Legendary Aspects. This allows you to pilot this build at its peak efficiency. Let's take a look at the changes you need to make to implement them.
Gear
The final version of the build uses 4 Uniques:
- Esu's Heirloom
- Tibault's Will
- Godslayer Crown
- Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop
Be careful when replacing your Mana Per Second Helmet and Boots before you find Tibault's Will as you may not have enough Mana. Same goes for Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop replacing Frozen Memories. If you get it before Tibault's Will, drop Control instead.
Skills
When our Mana problems are resolved, we can drop Fiery Surge and get our Elemental Dominance back.
Gameplay
These Uniques just make us stronger without drastically changing the build. The only new thing you have to worry about is maintaining the buffs from Tibault's Will and Esu's Heirloom. To do that you simply need to spam Evade and Teleport as much as possible.
Gear with Uber Uniques
Ideally we want to use 2 Uber Uniques:
- Harlequin Crest
- Ring of Starless Skies
There's not much to be said about them, they are straight upgrades in their respective slots. With Harlequin Crest you can move a point from Flame Shield to Align the Elements.
The Speedfarming setup makes you more efficient in farming the Open World, Helltide zones, Tree of Whispers, regular Dungeons, and low tier Nightmare Dungeons.
Gear
- Replace Tibault's Will with Iceheart Brais
- Repalce Esu's Heirloom with Bounding Conduit Boots with "Attacks Reduce Evade Cooldown" implicit.
- Replace Godslayer Crown with Shared Misery Helmet.
- Get the following tempers on your Armor and Amulet:
- 100% Frost Nova Size
- Frost Nova CDR until it's under 5s
- 2x Evade CDR
- As much Chance to Freeze on Hit as possible
Enchantment Slots
We replace Fire Bolt with Teleport. Without Burning we lose quite a bit of damage, but it's not really necessary for speedfarming.
Skills
Simply remove Devouring Blaze and max out Teleport. If you don't have any Chance to Freeze tempers, also remove Elemental Dominance to get Snap Freeze.
Gameplay
Just spam Ice Shards and Frost Novas all over the place. With Iceheart Brais, Shared Misery, and Chance to Freeze on Hit you will have Frost Novas going off everywhere and your Ice Shards Enchantment will kill everything.
Paragon Board & Glyphs
If you don't want to respec, simply put Winter Glyph in place of Flamefeeder. Optionally, you can also reallocate a few points to get Enchantment Master to Teleport more often.
Hardcore Adjustments
Hardcore requires you to build into more defenses. Here are some tips to successfully navigate this build through potentially dangerous situations:
- Prioritize Maximum Life over Intelligence on your Gear.
- Replace Tibault's Will with Protecting Pants.
- Replace Flamefeeder or Exploit with Territorial.
- Take Skill Points out of Glass Cannon and put them into Flame Shield or Icy Veil.
- Only farm Nightmare Dungeons with monsters that are about your character level when you have near optimal gear.
Check out our dedicated in-depth guide to learn more survival tricks in Hardcore.
Build Scaling & Stat Priorities
Learn about the important build scaling mechanics and stat weights.
Damage
Defense
- Cooldown Reduction (CDR). This the most important stat for any Sorcerer build. What good are your skills if you can't use them because they are on cooldown? In purely offensive terms CDR gives us the following:
- More uptime on Vulnerable and Freeze from Frost Nova (about 3x damage buff against single targets and about 9001x in AoE)
- More uptime on Barrier from Ice Armor or Protection activating Conceited and Storm Swell (1.625x damage buff)
- Mana. We continue to chase our philosophy of being able to use skills = good. The next skill we want to use is Ice Shards, which has a Mana cost, instead of a Cooldown. We need to stack enough Mana Per Second in order to spam Ice Shards freely.
- Offensive Stats. We want all the normal offensive stats: Weapon Damage, Ice Shards Ranks, Critical Strike Chance, Attack Speed, Cold Damage, Intelligence, and all kinds of Additive Damage, in that order of priority. Attack Speed can be a double edged sword, as it also increases your Mana consumption, so it's better to focus on other stats until your Mana is completely figured out.
- Cooldown Reduction (CDR). As with our damaging skills, our powerful Defensive Skills are not doing much if we cannot cast them. Frost Nova is effectively 100% Close Damage Reduction against non-Bosses, Flame Shield makes you immortal and Ice Armor is Flame Shield with 3x the duration at best or a protective layer that almost doubles your HP at worst.
- Barrier. Mostly coming from Ice Armor, it is our main defense outside Nightmare Dungeons. With our high and consistent damage output, the Barrier will instantly refresh as long as it's not broken in one hit.
- Armor is the major source of Damage Reduction against Physical damage. We naturally get Armor just from having high Item Power gear, and we further boost it with Skulls in Jewelry. It's extremely important to reach the Armor cap of 9,230 as the last few points of Armor get exponentially more effective.
- Resistances give us damage reduction against Elemental damage. Similar to armor it should be stacked as close to the 70% cap as possible for full effectiveness. As a Sorcerer, we get lots of Resistances from our high Intelligence and our Paragon Boards, letting us almost reach the cap without sacrificing any stats on gear.
Our Damage Explained article explains how to scale your Offense.
Learn all you need to know to scale Defense with our Defense Explained Article.
Stat Priorities
To enable your build to perform optimally, you need to reach certain Stat "Breakpoints". Some examples are reaching 100% to Critically Strike, or 20 Resource per second. Since there are many values of these stats on different pieces of gear, read the checklist below and refer to the recommended Tempered Affixes and Masterwork Crits ↑. Desirable Greater Affixes will always be the top three recommended Affixes.
Damage Scaling
- 50%+ Critical Strike Chance
- 5+ Mana Per Second (from Items)
Defense and Utility
- Armor Capped 9,230
- Resistance Capped 70%
- 20,000+ Life
- 50%+ Cooldown Reduction
- Helm: Godslayer Crown (prioritize CDR)
- Otherwise Look For: Shared Misery
- Cooldown Reduction ↑
- Mana Per Second
- Intelligence
- Maximum Life
- ⚒️Frost Nova CDR
- ⚒️Frost Nova Size
- Chest: Everliving
- Armor ↑
- Mana Per Second
- Ranks to Defensive Skills ↑
- Intelligence
- Maximum Life
- ⚒️Frost Nova CDR
- ⚒️Frost Nova Size
- Gloves: Piercing Cold
- Ranks to Piercing Cold ↑
- Critical Strike Chance
- Attack Speed ↑
- Intelligence
- Maximum Life
- ⚒️Cold/Vulnerable Damage
- ⚒️Frost Nova Size
- Pants: Tibault's Will (prioritize Close DR)
- Otherwise Look For: Disobedience
- Intelligence ↑
- Maximum Life ↑
- Armor
- ⚒️Frost Nova CDR
- ⚒️Frost Nova Size
- Boots: Esu's Heirloom (prioritize Movement Speed)
- Otherwise Look For: Bounding Conduit
- "Attacks Reduce Evade Cooldown"
- Mana Per Second
- Movement Speed
- Intelligence
- Maximum Life
- ⚒️Evade Cooldown Reduction ↑
- ⚒️Chance to Freeze
- Amulet: Storm Swell
- Cooldown Reduction ↑
- Devouring Blaze/Permafrost/Hoarfrost/Glass Cannon ↑
- Critical Strike Chance
- Attack Speed
- ⚒️Cold/Vulnerable Damage
- ⚒️Frost Nova CDR
- Ring 1: Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop (prioritize CDR)
- Otherwise Look For: Frozen Memories
- Attack Speed ↑
- Critical Strike Chance
- Intelligence
- Maximum Life
- ⚒️Cold/Vulnerable Damage ↑
- ⚒️Resource Generation
- Ring 2: Control
- Attack Speed ↑
- Critical Strike Chance
- Intelligence
- Maximum Life
- ⚒️Cold/Vulnerable Damage ↑
- ⚒️Resource Generation
- Main Hand: Conceited (Wand)
- Intelligence
- Maximum Life
- Vulnerable Damage
- Crit Damage
- ⚒️Chance to double cast Ice Shards ↑
- ⚒️Cold/Vulnerable Damage
- Off Hand: Accelerating
- Cooldown Reduction ↑
- Critical Strike Chance
- Intelligence
- Maximum Life
- ⚒️Chance to double cast Ice Shards ↑
- ⚒️Cold/Vulnerable Damage
This build benefits a lot from the following Consumables:
- Elixirs: Elixir of Advantage II, Elixir of Fortitude II, Elixir of Precision II
- Incense: Reddamine Buzz, Chorus of War, Spirit Dance
FAQ & Mechanics
Once a guide is released, many players have questions on why and how we are approaching certain choices. In this section you can find the answers to the questions that have been asked the most.
Mechanics
Learn all you need to know about how to scale this build in the endgame.
Video Guide
Summary
The Ice Shards Sorcerer is a robust and powerful build, capable of dealing great single target damage and also able to demolish hordes of enemies with Aspect of Piercing Cold. The long range and high upfront damage of Ice Shards make this build very smooth and easy to play.
- Stack Cooldown Reduction, Mana Cost Reduction, and Resource Generation to get your Shatter back, and also acquire Burning synergies.
- Despite appearances, Frost Nova is the strongest offensive skill on our bar. A single use of it will usually clear the entire screen!
- Ice Armor and Flame Shield will keep you alive even in the most difficult battles.
Credits
Written by Northwar
Reviewed by Chewingnom
