Tal Rasha 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. Gather the full Tal Rasha's Elements set. Each piece can be gambled from Kadala for Bloodshards. Do not salvage any duplicate pieces you find! Instead convert them to another part of the set with Recipe 4 in Kanai's Cube. If your last missing set piece is Tal Rasha's Allegiance - don't gamble for it! Instead gamble for a cheap and easy item, like the Pants, and once again convert it with Recipe 4. If you have extra materials you can use Recipe 3 to craft the remaining pieces, but this is expensive and not recommended for new players.

3. Gamble from Kadala in this order:

1. The full Tal Rasha's Elements set
2. Triumvirate
3. Aquila Cuirass
4. Halo of Karini and Convention of Elements
5. Goldwrap
6. Ranslor's Folly and Nemesis Bracers
7. The Shame of Delsere

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

1. Wands to get Unstable Scepter and Aether Walker
2. Daggers to get Wizardspike
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: Ring of Royal Grandeur and Pauldrons of the Skeleton King
• Act 2: Gloves of Worship
• Act 3: Avarice Band
• Act 4: Can drop any bounty item from any act
• Bounty Turn In: Recipes for Captain Crimson's Trimmings, Aughild's Authority, Sage's Journey and Cain's Destiny
  
  

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. It's better to spend your materials improving your set pieces, getting ancient weapon etc.

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

• Bane of the Trapped is procced by default from our main damage skill and a very strong DPS choice, providing us with a 60% separate damage multiplier.
• Zei’s Stone of Vengeance is another huge damage increase for ranged builds, giving us up to 80% separate damage multiplier. Frozen Orbs explode at 40 yards distance and thus fully benefit from it by default.
• The third slot will be taken up by different gems depending on your needs and activities. Boon of the Hoarder is strong in Nephalem Rifts, Bane of the Stricken is necessary for solo pushing in higher Greater Rifts and Bane of the Powerful or Esoteric Alteration are useful in Speed Greater Rifts.

• Arcane Orb Frozen Orb is our main damage dealing ability.
• Shock Pulse Piercing Orb and Magic Missile Conflagrate are necessary to proc and maintain our Lightning and Fire Tal Rasha's Elements stacks, get the damage multiplier from Triumvirate and pull monsters from far away.
• 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 or Power of the Storm for farming.
• One of two abilities for grouping enemies must be used to be effective:
  • Black Hole Absolute Zero is used in push to group and lock monsters while granting us a huge elemental damage buff.
  • Energy Twister combined with Ranslor’s Folly is used in speeds and T16, mainly to avoid the Black Hole Cooldown.
• Teleport Calamity is our mobility skill and our way to proc the Arcane stack of Tal Rasha's Elements.
• Magic Weapon Deflection is used in T16 and speeds to protect our Galvanizing Ward shield and thus the Squirt's Necklace 100% damage multiplier.

• Power Hungry grants us a 30% separate damage multiplier, one of the best damage passives in the game.
• Elemental Exposure is a great passive for Tal Rasha's Elements builds, as you need abilities from the four different elements to get full benefit from the set anyway.
• Illusionist is a great mobility passive to reset our Teleport Cooldown while getting a short Movement Speed buff.
• Evocation grants us 20% Cooldown Reduction for more damage with Captain Crimson's Trimmings (3) Bonus.
• Galvanizing Ward and Dominance are used in T16 and speeds to maintain our Squirt's Necklace 100% separate damage multiplier.
• Unwavering Will, Cold Blooded or Blur can be used as fifth passive for slightly more damage or mitigation.

¹ Maximum Arcane Power is only advised if you are really struggling in resource to cast during your nuke.

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 few enemies 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 a few steps away regularly. The damage reduction can be tracked on your buff bar. Don't forget to re-apply this skill after 10 minutes when pushing.
• Make sure to keep up your four Tal Rasha's Elements stacks.
• Use Shock Pulse Piercing Orb and Magic Missile Conflagrate to pull enemies from distance and maintain your Triumvirate and Tal Rasha's Elements stacks.
• Group enemies at a safe distance before your nuke using Black Hole.
• Position yourself exactly 40 yards away from the center of the pull using Teleport to cast Frozen Orb. This will maximize the value of Zei’s Stone of Vengeance and most importantly unleash the final explosion of Frozen Orb directly 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 damage comes from the explosion at the end of its path (which is also doubled by Unstable Scepter).
• 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.

This build is relatively mobile but unfornately Tal Rasha's Elements does not provide us a decent damage reduction Bonus. You should use Unstable Anomaly at all times, but don't rely on it as it only protects you with a shield of 400% of your HP pool. If you lose the damage reduction from Halo of Karini, you will probably die. Make sure to be really careful with your defensive buffs uptime and you will be fine. Check out our dedicated Hardcore Survival Guide to learn more about how to succeed in this game mode!

• Each element (Arcane, Cold, Fire, Lightning) has its own unique stack with a 8 second duration.
• Once you have 4 stacks, refreshing any stack will additionally add 2 seconds to the duration of the three other stacks. This means by alternating two abilities of a different element (after hitting 4 stacks) you'll be able to continuously refresh the set buff.
• The 2,000% damage buff per stack is self-additive, for a total 8,000% separate damage multiplier.

• 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.
• The shards deal 315% weapon damage to enemies along the path.

• Frozen Orbs spawned by this item benefit from all the damage multipliers but won’t deal Area Damage.
• When you spawn one 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.

• 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.

• 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 damage with Frozen Orb, Lightning damage with Shock Pulse Piercing Orb and Fire damage with Magic Missile Conflagrate by default, having an Arcane damage roll on your weapon is the most optimal choice as Teleport Calamity is not a reliable source.
• The 5% damage from each stack is additive to each other adding up to a total of 20% separate damage multiplier.