LoD Frozen Orb Wizard Guide

1. Do the Challenge Rift for the materials to cube Legendary Powers. You can complete this once a week for additional resources and we always update the guide for you!

2. This is a Legacy of Dreams build whose success is heavily dependent on this gem's rank. The first order of business is to equip a Legendary or Set item in every slot to take advantage of its power. Make sure to not have any Set Bonuses equipped or the gem will be nullified and you will deal no damage! Farm speed Greater Rifts (in under 5 minute clears) to find the items and get this gem as high as possible. Above Rank 25 ancient pieces of gear will give you even greater power.

3. Gamble from Kadala in this order:

1. Triumvirate
2. The Shame of Delsere, Goldwrap and Krelm's Buff Belt
3. Nemesis Bracers and Ashnagarr's Blood Bracer
4. Stone of Jordan, Unity, Halo of Karini and Convention of Elements
5. Hexing Pants of Mr. Yan and Blackthorne's Jousting Mail
6. Any Legendary Shoulders
7. Stone Gauntlets and Frostburn
8. Ice Climbers
9. Aquila Cuirass

4. Craft using Recipe 3 in Kanai's Cube in this order:

1. Wands to get Unstable Scepter, Wizardspike and Aether Walker
2. Amulets to get Squirt's Necklace
3. Anything from the Gamble list in Step 3 that you haven't already acquired.
   
   

5. Do Bounties to acquire several important items for this build:

• Act 1: Pauldrons of the Skeleton King
• Act 2: Gloves of Worship
• Act 3: Avarice Band and Pride's Fall
• Act 4: Can drop any bounty item from any act
• Bounty Turn In: Recipes for Sage's Journey and Cain's Destiny (for your follower)
  
  

6. At this point you can somewhat comfortably farm Nephalem or Speed Greater Rifts where you can find all the remaining items you need for different variants of the build. Spend your materials getting items with better rolls and/or ancient quality.

7. Use Primordial Ashes in Kanai's Cube with the new Curiosity of Lorath Nahr recipe to obtain a free Crafted Primal Ancient. Since you can only equip one of them, choosing the right item to focus matters! Great candidates are Weapons, Offhands, Jewelry or any item with an important multiplier. With that in mind, we recommend getting one of the following items:

• Unstable Scepter
• Triumvirate
• Convention of Elements
• Halo of Karini

• Legacy of Dreams is the Legacy of Nightmares Set in a gem, which frees up two ring slots at the cost of removing Zeis Stone of Vengeance. Due to the rings available to us this is a great trade-off to take.
• Bane of the Stricken helps us kill the Rift Guardian. As long as you don't need more than 2 minutes to kill it you can equip Bane of the Powerful instead.
• Bane of the Trapped is equipped since it grants us a nice 1.6 global separate multiplier procced by default with Frozen Orb.
• For Nephalem Rifts, Boon of the Hoarder is always a default include specifically due to its amazing synergy with Avarice Band.
• Lastly, Zei's Stone of Vengeance is a feasible choice, which, in contrary to its description, grants its first stage benefit at 0 yards and not 10 yards.

• Arcane Orb Frozen Orb is our main damage dealer.
• Spectral Blade Barrier Blades is necessary for the synergy with Triumvirate. It also adds additional shields for survival.
• Storm Armor is the activator for Halo of Karini. Without this buff you will be squashed like a fly, so make sure to keep it up. Typically you want to use the Shocking Aspect rune for pushing and Scramble for farming.
• Black Hole Absolute Zero is used in push to group and lock monsters while granting us a huge Cold Elemental Damage buff.
• Magic Weapon Deflection is a staple to protect our HP pool for Squirts Necklace.
• Teleport is your mobility skill, allowing you to position yourself at the right distance or get into Oculus Rings. You can choose either Wormhole or Safe Passage.

• Galvanizing Ward is a must-have for any Wizard build and synergizes with Squirt’s Necklace and Ashnagarr’s Blood Bracer.
• Power Hungry provides us with a 30% separate damage multiplier which perfectly complement our ranged playstyle.
• Other options can include:
  • Elemental Exposure for more damage.
  • Blur for some damage mitigation.
  • Illusionist and Dominance are good utility and defensive choices.
  • Glass Cannon and Cold Blooded are slight damage increase for speed content purposes.
  • Unstable Anomaly for a cheat death proc.

¹ Aim for a decent HP pool (~800,000 Life in Solo Push) as your Shields (Galvanizing Ward and Deflection) scale with it.

The Altar of Rites is a tree that grants tremendous powers to your entire account in exchange for sacrifices. It requires you to farm Bounties, kill the Ubers, craft the Staff of Herding, and more. Completing all 26 of these tasks, along with sacrificing 6 Primal Ancients grants you extra Damage, Defense, Quality of Life, Increased Drops and 3 Potion Super Powers. Read the full guides on Unlocking the Altar and the Altar Mechanics by Raxxanterax and Chewingnom to learn everything about this fantastic mechanic!

Optimal Path

Patch 2.7.0 revamped the follower system giving all 3 hirelings new powers and the emanate system. The first thing you should do is read our complete follower guide and remember the key takeaways:

1. The emanation system allows followers to share certain legendary and set powers with you. The most important ones are: The Flavor of Time, Nemesis Bracers, Avarice Band, Sage’s Journey and Cain’s Destiny. Click the guide above for the full list.
2. Follower’s powers are based on their main stat (maxed at 25,000, but they have a 2.5x multiplier so you only need 10,000). This means we stack Intelligence on the Enchantress, Dexterity on the Scoundrel and Strength on the Templar.
3. Guardian's Jeopardy (3) Bonus works for followers by improving their inherent stat multiplier from x2.5 to x3.5, making it slightly easier to hit the 25,000 main stat threshold if needed.
4. Followers share 20% of their Experience, Magic and Gold Find stats with you.
5. Legendary gems do not work on followers, except Esoteric Alteration and Mutilation Guard.
6. Cooldown Reduction does not work for any follower skill except the Templar’s Heal.
7. Followers never deal significant damage; you’re on your own to clear the content.

Select Follower

• At the start of a run, buff yourself with Storm Armor to enable the 80% damage reduction from Halo of Karini. Make sure you keep this buff up at all times. In most situations it will not require much attention, but be careful when there are only very few or one enemy as you need to hit something that is at least 15 yards away from you. When fighting single target Rift Guardians especially, make sure to walk away a few steps regularly. The damage reduction can be tracked on your buff bar. Don’t forget to re-apply this skill after 10 minutes when pushing.
• Keep up Magic Weapon Deflection
• Stack up Triumvirate and keep it up by using Spectral Blade at least once every 6 seconds. It also resets helps to stack up shields and Bane of the Stricken quickly on Rift Guardians.
• Pull enemies and then group them up at a safe distance before your nuke using Black Hole.
• Position yourself exactly 40 yards away from the center of the pull to cast Arcane Orb. This will maximize the value of Zei’s Stone of Vengeance and most importantly unleash the final explosion of Frozen Orb exactly on top of the enemies, dealing devastating damage. The Orb will shoot out shards in all directions as it travels, but by far the biggest portion is included in the explosion at the end of its path (which is also doubled by Unstable Scepter).
• Use Teleport for mobility and survival as necessary. With the Wormhole rune, generally try to make sure to use both charges before the cooldown begins.
• When possible, try to kill one small enemy before your big nuke during your Convention of Elements Cold damage cycle to spawn Oculus Ring. When it appears in the right spot, you can dramatically increase your damage by teleporting into one.

Rotate out Elemental Exposure for Unstable Anomaly. You are already insanely tanky; so technically speaking the switch is not needed. Check out our dedicated Hardcore Survival Guide to learn more about how to succeed in this game mode!

• This skill fires in a straight line from your character towards your cursor position and explodes precisely 40 yards away.
• The final explosion deals the most damage by far but its AoE is really small. It deals 950% weapon damage twice in succession because of Unstable Scepter, for a total of 1900% weapon damage.
• The main orb deals 635% weapon damage to enemies it passes through while the shards deal 315% weapon damage to all enemies along the path.
• Frozen Orbs spawned by Wizardspike benefit from all the damage multipliers but won’t deal Area Damage.
• When Wizardspike procs from your own Frozen Orb, they overlap so well that it is only noticeable from the higher amount of frost shards emitted by the two stacked orbs.

• In order to keep up your shields to survive while maintaining Squirt's Necklace damage multiplier, you need to learn to judge the incoming damage and how fast you can build those shields yourself, which requires practice.
• Shields have no direct UI indicator unless you mouseover your health globe.
• You can see that you have any shield up when you see a transparent blue bubble around your character (not the size of the shield, however).
• Because Wizard Shield values scale with your total life, Vitality and Life % stats become substantially better for toughness scaling compared to other builds.
• Galvanizing Ward is the main shielding mechanic used for most Wizard builds, which combined with Ashnagarr's Blood Bracer adds up to 120% of your total life as a shield. This shield will reset to its maximum value every 5 seconds if this shield in particular doesn't take any hit in the meantime.
• Spectral Blade Barrier Blades and Magic Weapon Deflection represent the secondary shielding mechanic of the Wizard and can be stacked as much as you like, but their shield value is set at 4% (up to 8% with Ashnagarr's Blood Bracer) of your total life and they only lasts for 3 seconds. The duration is counted for each stack individually.
• While Barrier Blades or Deflection (or any other shield in that matter) protect the Galvanizing Ward shield, it is possible to reset the shield gained from the passive to full even while taking hits.
• All of these mechanics make it so that when your shields start breaking or your Galvanizing Ward doesn't find enough time to reset, the whole setup will fall apart really quickly. Make sure you understand your limits and survivability in different situations.

• The damage bonus from Black Hole Absolute Zero is additive with your Cold Elemental damage. As a consequence, "Cold skills deal X% more damage" affixes (Mainly found on Bracers and Amulet slots), grants a lower relative damage increase to builds using Absolute Zero.

• The Attack Speed bonus of The Shame of Delsere is multiplicative with other bonuses.
• This can be used to stack Bane of the Stricken quite fast on longer boss fights. Try to use it a lot especially at the start of a long boss fight and when you are waiting for your Convention of Elements Cold cycle!

• Each stack is a debuff for one of the following elements: Arcane, Cold, Fire or Lightning.
• Each stack is unique and refreshes its own duration when reapplied.
• Any ability with a proc coefficient greater than zero applies a stack of its respective element. This inherently means that only selfcasted abilities grant stacks.
• The elemental range on the Weapon applies its respective stack with all abilities if the elemental range is of the type: Arcane, Cold, Fire or Lightning.
• Since the build already deals Cold and Arcane damage by default, having a Fire or Lightning damage roll on your weapon is the most optimal choice.
• The 5% damage from each stack is additive to each other adding up to a total of 20% separate damage multiplier.