Welcome to the Frozen Orb Sorcerer endgame guide! Frozen Orb has deep roots in the Diablo franchise. First making a spectacular appearance in Diablo 2, this devastating AoE attack takes no prisoners. The Frozen Orb Sorcerer unleashes an endless barrage of Frozen Orbs to decimate their foes from afar.
Runnin', Gunnin', and Teleportin', this Sorcerer melts open world Events and Helltides with ease. It is additionally a decent, safe Nightmare Dungeon pusher. Frozen Orbs make all enemies Vulnerable for a never-ending pain train. Frozen Orb comfortably shatters dense monster packs, and it's single target damage is also no slouch, provided you can stay at the right distance.
One of the best features of this build is that it function decently well without any Unique items. Feel free to play it from the beginning if you so choose. There are several possible sources of Mana generation and ways to customize the build in general for pursuits such as Hardcore mode. No matter the approach, this icy witch will freeze over hell!
This build guide assumes you have a Level 50 Character and finished the Campaign. Level up with our Firewall Sorcerer Leveling Guide. If you are looking for a different Sorcerer playstyle, check out all of our Sorcerer Guides.
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
- Frozen Orb is your primary damage source. Use this for big AoE damage against monster density and to apply Vulnerable to targets. To maximize your damage against single targets aim your Frozen Orb to explode slightly behind the Boss.
- Teleport makes you Unstoppable and is your main source of mobility.
- Ice Armor and Flame Shield are your defensive skills which make you almost immortal and literally immortal respectively.
- We pick up Ice Blades and Lightning Spear upgrades because these skills are produced Fractured Winterglass. Spam Ice Blades all the time for more Conjuration Mastery stacks.
- Unstable Currents is our Ultimate of choice. We use it because it has no animation and provides 25% Attack Speed from Prime Unstable Currents. Other Ultimates are not worth their cast time.
- We put two points into Fire Bolt to unlock the rest of the tree and to use its Enchantment.
Enchantment Slots
- Frozen Orb Enchantment greatly increases your DPS. More Orbs = More Damage. On top of that, Frozen Orbs cast by the enchant fly directly at a randomly chosen enemy and explode on top of them. They can go way further than normal Frozen Orbs and they can function well in tight spaces without flying off the map.
- Fire Bolt Enchantment is a lot less flashy but still very useful. It lets you use various stats such as Damage to Burning Enemies or Damage Reduction from Burning Enemies, as well as Devouring Blaze passive for a big damage boost.
Alternatively, we can use Teleport Enchantment while speedfarming to go faster.
Learn more details and how to unlock this class specification in our full Sorcerer Enchantment Slots Guide.
Resource Management
Frozen Orb Sorcerer can be quite Mana-hungry in the early game. Fortunately, we have a wide array of tools to tackle this problem.
Early Game
Here we have massive Mana issues so we pull out all the stops when going after Mana regen:
- Frigid Breeze
- Fiery Surge (with Fire Bolt Enchant instead of Teleport)
- Avalanche
- Prodigy's
- Umbral
- Mana Per Second on Helmet, Chest, and Boots
- Resource Cost Reduction/Generation tempers on all Jewelry
- Elixir of Resourcefulness II
With this we should have enough Mana to spam Frozen Orbs, but it's best to avoid fighting Bosses because Umbral and Fiery Surge both do nothing during the Boss fight.
Mid Game
From here we are working on getting items with more Mana Per Second, Cooldown Reduction and Resource Cost Reduction until we can drop Umbral and all the passives from the above list.
At the same time we are looking for two key Uniques: Tibault's Will and Fractured Winterglass. The former gives us 50 Mana when we press Teleport or Flame Shield, effectively replacing Prodigy's. The latter lets us use Conjuration Mastery passive, which provides tons of Mana Regen, letting us replace Mana Per Second Helmet and Boots with Godslayer Crown and Esu's Heirloom (You still need at least 6 Mana Per Second on your Chest).
Late Game
Frome here on out it only gets smoother as we gain Greater Affixes and more upgrades on Mana Per Second, Conjuration Mastery, Chance to cast Frozen Orb twice, and Cooldown Reduction. Eventually, we will reach a point where our Mana only goes down at the start of the fight while we are building Conjuration Mastery stacks.
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 last five 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
- Elementalist
- Destruction
- Flamefeeder
- Exploit
- Reinforced
- Tactician
Level 21
- Destruction
- Control
- Flamefeeder
- Exploit
- Reinforced
- Elementalist
- Tactician
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:
- Umbral in Champion's Demise (Dry Steppes)
- 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)
- Elementalist's in Pallid Delve (Dry Steppes)
- Snowveiled in Sarat's Lair (Scosglen)
- Find the following Legendary Aspects either as a random drop or by gambling with Obols:
- Frozen Orbit: Gamble Focuses
- Replaces Elementalist's
- Shredding Blades: Gamble Focuses
- Conceited: Gamble Focuses
- Replaces Control
- Accelerating: Gamble Focuses
- Replaces Umbral when you have enough Mana generation
- Everliving: Gamble Pants
- Concentration: Gamble Pants
- Replaces Snowveiled.
- Concussive Strikes: Gamble Boots
- Frozen Orbit: Gamble Focuses
- 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)
- Godslayer Crown (Duriel)
- Esu's Heirloom (Varshan, Beast in the Ice)
- Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop (Varshan)
- Fractured Winterglass (Lord Zir)
- 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 some utility.
Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.
Progression Steps
Once you have completed the Leveling Guide, only the Codex of Power Aspects are guaranteed. With this setup you can farm the Legendary Aspects you need for the next progression point.
Gear
- Control goes on the Amulet for more damage.
- Prodigy’s and Umbral are Resource Aspects and can only be placed on Rings.
- Storm Swell and Elementalist's go on Gloves and one of the Weapons.
- Bounding Conduit can only be imprinted on Boots.
- Put Disobedience on the Pants.
- Snowveiled Aspect goes on Helmet or Chest.
Skills
At low levels we Struggle with Mana, so we remove Conjuration Mastery and Lightning Spear to pick up Frigid Breeze and max out Teleport. We also switch our Key Passive to Avalanche to occasionally get a free cast.
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 Conceited in your last offensive slot.
- Replace Elementalist's with Frozen Orbit and put the latter on the Amulet.
- Replace Control with Shredding Blades.
- Replace Umbral with Accelerating when you feel like your Mana is good enough.
- Put Everliving in your last Armor slot.
- Replace Snowveiled Aspect withAspect of Concentration
- If you somehow get to 9,230 Armor before finding any Uniques, replace Disobedience with Concussive Strikes.
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 5 Uniques:
- Esu's Heirloom
- Tibault's Will
- Godslayer Crown
- Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop
- Fractured Winterglass
Warning: Esu's Heirloom and Godslayer Crown replace your Boots and Helmet, which normally have Mana Per Second on them. Before equipping both these items make sure that:
- You already have both Fractured Winterglass and Tibault's Will
- Your Chest has at least 6 Mana Per Second
Gameplay
These Uniques just make us stronger without drastically changing the build. With Fractured Winterglass we are encouraged to spam Frozen Orb even when there's no enemies around to keep our Conjuration count high.
Gear with Uber Uniques
In our final build we include only 1 Uber Unique: Harlequin Crest.
Ring of Starless Skies is worse than normal Ring with Shredding Blades because we lose a lot of Attack Speed and other stats and we don't really need the Mana Cost Reduction with enough ranks of Conjuration Mastery.
Skills
With Fractured Winterglass we can swith to our final Skill Tree, featuring Lightning Spear and Ice Blades upgrades, as well as Conjuration Mastery. We use Vyr's Mastery Key Passive just for damage reduction.
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
The only crucial change we need to make to our gear is replacing Esu's Heirloom with Bounding Conduit Boots that have "Attacks Reduce Evade Cooldown" implicit roll and Evade Cooldown Reduction temper.
On top of that, you can also switch to a different Chest with +Ranks to Teleport but it's not as important.
Enchantment Slots
We replace Fire Bolt with Teleport. We remove points from Devouring Blaze to max out Teleport.
Paragon and Glyphs
If you're willing to move some points, unspec your last board and drop Flamefeeder to pick up Enchantment Master Legendary Node.
This variant of the build uses Flame Shield Duration tempers and Summoned Ice Blades to achieve permanent Flame Shield. This allows us to discard all defenses to get more damage. However, perma Flame Shield on this build is not guaranteed, it requires a Vulnerable enemy and can be sabotaged by Pet AI. For this reason this build is only useful for high tier Pit pushing where you constantly have enemies to fight.
Gear
- The most important piece of gear for this build is our Chest Piece. We need to get Flame Shield Ranks and Flame Shield Duration temper on it
- We also remove Tibault's Will to get even more Flame Shield Duraiton on our Pants.
- Instead of Defensive Aspects, we put Concussive Strikes and Fortune on our Chest and Pants.
- We use Close Damage tempers instead of Cold and Vulnerable beacuse we play this build in melee range. (Still need to keep 1 Cold temper to max out Frigid Fate.)
- Finally, we get damage instead of defensive stats wherever possible: Intelligence or Damage% replaces Max Life, Rubies in armor turn into Topaz.
Enchantment Slots
We replace Fire Bolt with Ice Blades for more CDR and damage. All our Burning needs are covered by permanent Flame Shield combined with a more melee playstyle.
Skills
Here we drop all defensive to get more Flame Shield Ranks, Precision Magic, and Frigid Breeze. We also use Mystical upgrades on all our Defensive skills: Mystical Teleport to activate Charged, Mystical Ice Armor for free damage since we don't need any more CDR to make it permanent, and Mystical Flame Shield for Stuns, which lets us remove points from Lightning Spear.
Paragon Boards
Once again, we drop all defensive nodes to get more damage, replace Reinforced Glyph with Charged and add and 8th board with Winter.
Gameplay
Simply spam all your cooldown Skills to summon as many Ice Blades as possible, and if everything goes right, your Flame Shield will come off cooldown before it expires. With invulenrability unlocked, you can safely go into melee range to benefit from your Close Damage bonuses and to apply Burning to enemies.
Keep in mind that sometimes things might go wrong, and then your Flame Shield won't be up in time. Pay attention to its cooldown, and if that happens, Teleport away and try to dodge every attack because most of them will oneshot you. Things are especially likely to go wrong during your first Flame Shield reset because you don't have enough Ice Blades at the start. To prevent this, don't use Teleport and Ice Armor at the start of the fight. Wait for your Elemental Attunement to reset your Flame Shield and then start spamming everything. This way you get enough time to summon all your Ice Blades and get into the rotation.
Hardcore Adjustments
Hardcore requires you to prioritize defensive stats and gameplay. 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 Concentration Pants.
- Replace Flamefeeder or Exploit with Territorial.
- Take Skill Points out of Glass Cannon and put them into Align the Elements and Elemental Attunement.
- Only farm Nightmare Dungeons with monsters that are about your character level until you have near optimal gear.
- Immortal Setup is not actually truly immortal and can be easily oneshot when things go a little bit wrong. Don't fall for the name, it's a marketing ploy.
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.
- 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 more Mana generation via Prodigy’s and more uptime on Barriers which are needed to activate Storm Swell.
- Mana. We continue to chase our philosophy of being able to use skills = good. The next skill we want to use is Frozen Orb, which has a Mana cost, instead of a Cooldown. We need to stack enough Mana per Second in order to spam Frozen Orbs freely.
- Offensive Stats. We want all the normal offensive stats: Weapon Damage, Frozen Orb 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. 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.
- Damage Reduction (DR). We stack as much of it as possible, mostly going for Damage Reduction, Damage Reduction from Close/Distant Enemies and Damage Reduction from Burning Enemies. A lot of these stats can be found on Chests, Pants, Amulets, and some of our Paragon Boards. If we can stack enough to make our Barrier survive a hit then everything is easy, as we can just cast Ice Armor and not worry about anything for 6 seconds.
- 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 for the current level of monsters 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 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
- 6+ Mana Per Second (from Items)
- 5+ Total Ranks of Conjuration Mastery
Defense and Utility
- Armor Capped 9,230
- Resistance Capped 70%
- 20,000+ Life
- 50%+ Cooldown Reduction
- Helm: Godslayer Crown (prioritize CDR)
- Otherwise Look For: Concussive Strikes
- Cooldown Reduction ↑
- Mana Per Second
- Intelligence
- Maximum Life
- ⚒️Total Armor/Max Life
- ⚒️CC Duration/Barrier Generation
- Chest: Everliving
- Mana Per Second ↑
- Armor
- Intelligence
- Maximum Life
- Ranks to Teleport
- ⚒️Total Armor
- ⚒️Chance to Freeze/Immobilize/Slow
- Gloves: Frozen Orbit
- Ranks to Frozen Orb ↑
- Critical Strike Chance
- Attack Speed ↑
- Intelligence
- Maximum Life
- ⚒️Cold/Vulnerable Damage
- ⚒️Chance to Immobilize/Freeze/Slow
- Pants: Tibault's Will (prioritize Close DR)
- Otherwise Look For: Concentration
- Intelligence ↑
- Maximum Life ↑
- Armor
- ⚒️Total Armor/Max Life
- ⚒️CC Duration/Barrier Generation
- 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 Slow/Immobilize/Freeze
- Amulet: Fractured Winterglass (prioritize CDR and Conjuration Mastery)
- Otherwise Look For: Conceited
- Cooldown Reduction ↑
- Permafrost/Devouring Blaze/Hoarfrost/Glass Cannon ↑
- Attack Speed
- Critical Strike Chance
- ⚒️Cold/Vulnerable Damage
- ⚒️Evade CDR
- Ring 1: Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop (prioritize CDR)
- Otherwise Look For: Prodigy’s
- Attack Speed ↑
- Critical Strike Chance
- Intelligence
- Maximum Life
- ⚒️Cold/Vulnerable Damage ↑
- ⚒️Resource Generation/Cost Reduction
- Ring 2: Shredding Blades
- Attack Speed ↑
- Critical Strike Chance
- Intelligence
- Maximum Life
- ⚒️Cold/Vulnerable Damage ↑
- ⚒️Resource Generation/Cost Reduction
- Main Hand: Accelerating (Wand)
- Intelligence
- Maximum Life
- Vulnerable Damage
- Crit Damage
- ⚒️Chance to double cast Frozen Orb ↑
- ⚒️Cold/Vulnerable Damage
- Off Hand: Storm Swell
- Cooldown Reduction ↑
- Critical Strike Chance
- Intelligence
- Maximum Life
- ⚒️Chance to double cast Frozen Orb ↑
- ⚒️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.
Why don't you use any Conjuration-related bonuses?
Mechanics
Learn all you need to know about how to scale this build in the endgame.
Fractured Winterglass
Frozen Orb
Summary
- The Frozen Orb Sorcerer attacks from a distance with an endless stream of maxed out Frozen Orbs.
- Maintain your Mana! Find gear with the Cooldown Reduction and Mana per Second stats, and take advantage of Conjuration Mastery Passive.
- Cooldown Reduction is key for maximizing uptime on your Defensive Skills Teleport, Ice Armor, and Flame Shield.
- Having Barrier up at all times is essential to your success when pushing the hardest content in the game. Protection is instrumental here. Not only is it essential for defense, but also for offense along with Conceited Aspect and Storm Swell Aspect.
- The Frozen Orb Sorcerer is a highly versatile density destroyer, bringing a solid amount of damage and survivability to the table! It is capable of completing the hardest content in the game! Crush it with this iconic Skill!
Credits
Written by Northwar
Original post DarkHumility
Reviewed by Wudijo