Frozen Orb Sorcerer Endgame Guide
Welcome to the Frozen Orb Sorcerer Endgame Guide! This build focuses on using Frozen Orb to summon Lightning Spear.
The cornerstone of your build is Fractured Winterglass. This Unique amulet gives your Frozen Orb casts a chance to summon Conjurations on your Skillbar while also giving your Conjurations a Lucky Hit chance to attack with Frozen Orb, it also reduces the cooldown of your Conjurations when Frozen Orb explodes. Lightning Spear is your main source of damage but is mainly summon by Frozen Orb. Your Ultimate Skill Unstable Currents gives some extra attack speed to increase your damage and maintaining it helps keep up Ceaseless Conduit.
Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop is a large part of your gameplay, requiring you to stack your three different elements and then rotate two to maintain the stacks. Flame Shield is your only Pyromancy Skill and must be used at the beginning of combat. Enlightenment requires you to rotate two elements to gain stacks, with Lightning Spear and Teleport rotating with your Frozen Orb, this is easy with the cooldown reduction you get from Fractured Winterglass and Harlequin Crest.
- Enlightenment stacks the multipliers of other elements while active and applies them all to your main source of damage.
- Flamefeeder has a non-phys multiplier that stacks for each element while Enlightenment is active. You don't worry about the additive value or applying Burn.
- Familiar Enchantment provides all elements for Enchantment Master which stacks for Enlightenment. Don't worry about how often it activates it's effect.
- Use Ball Lightning for Crackling Energy and maintain it for Ceaseless Conduit and Convulsions.
- Check the Build Variants if you aren't ready for the Mythic setup. Click the picture of the Sorcerer on any gear setup to bring up a planner with a drop down to all variants.
This build guide assumes you have a Level 60 Character and unlocked Torment 1. To get there, level up with one of our Sorcerer Leveling Guides. See how this Build compares against others with our various Build Tier Lists.
Boss Powers
Season 8 is the Season of Belial's Return. It allows you to tap into Boss Powers obtained from World, Event, and Lair Bosses throughout Sanctuary. The new seasonal mechanic, Apparition Incursions, is available at any difficulty level and gives you the opportunity to unlock a subset of these powers very early on. Various Apparition Monsters appear in these special timed events throughout Sanctuary. Defeating these monsters spawns 1 of 10 Apparition Bosses to hunt you down and defeating them grants you their Boss Power. After defeating the first Boss, continue the event for a chance to fight a second Apparition Boss, after which Belial himself joins the fray.
There are 24 Boss Powers available and the first time you defeat one of these Bosses, you claim their power for yourself. Boss Powers each have Main and Modifier effects to boost your build. 13 are available in all difficulties (from Apparition Incursions and World Bosses), while 11 can only be acquired in Torment 1 difficulty or higher from Lair Bosses and Lilith. You can equip 1 Main Power and 3 Modifiers, and all powers can be upgraded up to Rank 20, increasing the potency of both the Main and Modifier effect. You use Spectral Ash to upgrade these powers, dropped from Apparition Incursions and by defeating any Bosses. Boss Powers also scale with your Paragon Level, growing stronger as you progress.
Best-in-Slot Boss Powers
Main Power
Beast in the Ice's Sleet - This adds extra Cold damage periodically from skills that can Crowd Control. It provides the largest damage bonus we can obtain.
Modifiers
- Beastmaster's Training - This provides a massive multiplier for your Summons.
- Hatred's Embrace's Haste - This gives a large amount of Critical Strike Chance.
- Sinerat's Flames - This provides a good multiplier that scales well with Enlightenment and is easy to activate without tempers.
Alternate Boss Powers
- Urivar's Lobbed Bombs - Main: This provides Cooldown Reduction for quality of life.
- Kirma's Sparks - Modifier: This provides Evade Cooldown Reduction for better mobility.
- Lilith's Wind of Hate - Modifier: This provides additional targets to increase your damage with Lightning Spear as long as they spawn close enough to your enemy. It also provides more triggers for Beast in the Ice's Sleet.
- Harbinger of Hatred's Volley - Modifier: This provides a good multiplier but doesn't scale as well with Enlightenment.
- Flesh Reaper's Disruption - Modifier: This provides a good multiplier but requires Crowd Control Duration utility tempers to activate.
Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.
Skills & Gameplay
- Frozen Orb is your primary skill to cast but is not your main source of damage, it produces Conjurations and reduces your Lightning Spear cooldown with Fractured Winterglass. You don't need to put a Skill point in this if you have Harlequin Crest or Ring of Starless Skies.
- Lightning Spear is your primary damage thanks to Splintering Energy, you can cast it whenever it's available.
- Charged Bolts isn't used on your Action Bar but can be triggered by Unstable Currents, since there isn't much else to do with these points you can get extra damage reduction from Destructive Charged Bolts as long as you have good uptime on your Ultimate.
- Ball Lightning is used to rotate elements for Enlightenment until you have enough Cooldown Reduction for your Teleport Enchantment to reset with one cast of Frozen Orb. You can continue to use this to easily perform the Roaring Lightning Spear snapshot with Wizard's Ball Lightning.
- Unstable Currents is your ultimate skill. It helps summon additional Conjurations along with providing additional attack speed with Prime Unstable Currents and maintaining Ceaseless Conduit with Supreme Unstable Currents.
- Flame Shield makes you Immune for a few seconds, a powerful mechanic to avoid any damage and also provides Unstoppable. You also need to use it for your Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop Pyromancy Skill.
- Ice Armor provides a large Barrier along with damage bonuses from Storm Swell, while Ice Armor is active you can reduce it's cooldown by spending more Mana thanks to Shimmering Ice Armor.
Skill Rotation
- Cast Flame Shield at the beginning of each area for Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop. You can also read about how to snapshot Mystical Flame Shield and Roaring Lightning Spear at the end of our rotation analysis.
- Hold down Frozen Orb and rapidly Teleport to maintain Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop and Enlightenment. Until you have enough Cooldown Reduction for one cast Teleport Enchantment reset, you can rotate Frozen Orb and Ball Lightning for additional attack speed and stacks of Enlightenment when it's not active.
- Use Ball Lightning for Crackling Energy.
- Use Lightning Spear whenever available.
- Use Ice Armor whenever available for Unstoppable.
- Use Unstable Currents whenever available to boost your attack speed, help summon Lightning Familiar, and maintain your Crackling Energy.
- Consider saving Flame Shield for dangerous moments to avoid death but you still need to stack Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop at the beginning of a new area or if the stacks fall off.
- You can choose to do snapshots for optimal pushing. When entering a new area you need to cast Ball Lightning four times to generate Crackling Energy and stack Roaring Lightning Spear to 8 on your Lightning Spear skill icon. Next you go near enemies and cast Flame Shield and let it end to trigger Mystical Flame Shield before you finally cast Lightning Spear. Now you can cast Skills and play normally as long as you maintain at least one active Lightning Spear. Suppressor Elites can destroy your Lightning Spear.
Sorcerer Enchantments
Teleport is your first Enchantment. It replaces your evade with a shorter range Teleport that does not make you Unstoppable.
Familiar is your second enchantment, provides all elements for Enchantment Master which stacks for each elements with Enlightenment. Don't worry about how often it activates it's effect.
Learn more details and how to unlock this system in our full Sorcerer Class Overview.
Paragon & Glyphs
Carefully check your Paragon Boards to ensure correct board rotation. Glyphs go from a radius of 3 to 4 at level 15 and from 4 to 5 at level 46. Some of them cannot be activated before reaching these thresholds! Progress through The Pit to rank up your Glyphs.
Use the slider to see the progression steps. At around Paragon 200, leveling slows down significantly and all important Rare clusters, Legendary nodes and Glyph sockets should be unlocked. Afterwards, you can min/max your build with minor tweaks and by picking up additional smaller nodes.
Frozen Orb Sorcerer Endgame Paragon
Some Glyph position swaps, board changes and other pathing adjustments may occur as you unlock your full potential. The setup displayed by default is the final version of the build before spending additional points that do not significantly impact your character's power.
Glyph Leveling Priorities
Use Eliminator until you have a Legendary Warding.
To Level 15
- Destruction
- Tactician
- Flamefeeder
- Elementalist
- Eliminator
- Warding
To Level 46
- Destruction
- Elementalist
- Warding
- Tactician
- Flamefeeder
Learn more details about the Paragon System in our in-depth Paragon Boards and Glyphs guide.
Runes
You can have up to two Runewords in your setup, each consisting of one Ritual and one Invocation Rune. Socket them in Two-Handed Weapons if your build calls for them, otherwise place them into your Armor pieces to replace normal gems. The Frozen Orb Sorcerer focuses on the following combos:
Best in Slot
- CirVex provides additional damage with ranks to and utility.
- CemXan provides access to Overpowering our hits and has great uptime once you have one cast reset Teleport.
Alternative choices
- Neo, Igni, and Ahu are good Ritual Runes.
- Qax can provide burst damage.
- Ohm can provide a damage multiplier.
- Kry groups enemies.
- Zec can provide Ultimate Cooldown Reduction.
- Mot can provide Damage Reduction.
- Grand Topaz provides additional damage if you don't have access to Runes.
Learn more about Runes and how they work in our dedicated Runewords Overview and Runewords Tier List.
Mercenaries
Mercenaries are unlocked during the Vessel of Hatred campaign and assist you in battle. There are 4 separate Mercenaries to choose from, each with their own skill trees and abilities. You can have one hired (permanent) mercenary during solo play and a reinforcement who assists you from time to time in certain situations.
Hired: Raheir
- Raheir provides Fortify to increase Overpower damage and Valiance is an amazing defensive tool that prevents damage from large hits along with give you Unstoppable. Take Shield Charge and grab Raheir's Guard for extra defense. Next you want Provoke with Mocking Lure. Valiance is a very powerful mechanic for pushing more difficult content or playing on Hardcore.
- Subo is a great choice for casual gameplay thanks to his passive Seeker that reveals enemies and objects, this is a nice quality of life addition and also gives some Mana sustain. Grab Wire Trap along with Ready At Hand for some mobility. Next you pick Cover Fire with the damage increase from Opening Fire.
Reinforcement: Varyana
- Varyana is a good choice to maximize offense. Bloodthirst gives some extra attack speed and you can set it to activate on any skill in combat.
- Aldkin can provide damage reduction with Field of Languish.
- Raheir potentially saves your character with his reinforcement Bastion. Setting this to trigger on Injured can keep you going in difficult encounters.
Learn more about Mercenaries and how they work in our dedicated Mercenaries Overview.
Stat Priorities & Item Progression
To enable the Frozen Orb Sorcerer build to perform optimally, hunt for these stats on your gear with good rolls and aim to Temper ⚒️ & Masterwork Crit ↑ them accordingly. The green arrow ↑ indicates which affix is most impactful to Masterwork Crit, and it does not indicate how many Masterwork Crits you need on that particular affix. Keep in mind that certain stats, such as Armor, Resistances, Extra Size Tempers, Attack Speed, and more, have caps that may affect your priorities according to the items and Paragon points available at that moment.
Recommended Endgame Stat Thresholds
- 50%+ Cooldown Reduction
- 40%+ Attack Speed
- 40%+ Critical Strike Chance
- Armor Capped 1,000
- Resistance Capped 70%+
- 5,000+ Life
- Damage Reduction Sources
Item Progression Goals
Before you dive into the Endgame with the Frozen Orb Sorcerer, take a look at this overview of the items used in the build. See below for further details about the different progression steps and variants. Some of your Skill Tree choices depend on what Legendary Aspects and Unique items are available to you. Keep in mind that while we can guarantee that everyone has access to the same Codex of Power Aspects, the exact progression is different for everyone.
Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.
Build Variants
This section is designed to guide your Frozen Orb Sorcerer from a fresh level 60 into the very late endgame using the three variants Starter, Ancestral and Mythic. At the final step, you should be fully decked out with a great all-rounder build. From there, follow the other min/max variants if you want to optimize around certain activities such as Pit Pushing, Speedfarming and more.
If you are fresh in Torment 1 coming from a leveling guide, this is where you begin. Since only some Aspects can be guaranteed from Dungeon unlocks for the Codex of Power, focus on acquiring the additional aspects via gambling with Murmuring Obols.
Gear & Skills
- Early on in your progression, focus on Armor & Resistances to survive. Each Torment difficulty adds a penalty of -250 Armor and -25% all Res and it's recommended to keep both capped (1000 Armor, 70+ Res) at all times. As you unlock higher power gear, masterworking levels and more Paragon points, you naturally scale your character into the higher difficulties and can start replacing some of these rolls with offensive or utility stats.
- Without Fractured Winterglass you rely on your Frozen Orb to deal damage.
- Avalanche provides more damage early Endgame until you upgrade your build.
- Frozen Orb Enchantment on this variant.
The goal here is to progress through the Torment difficulties as you unlock Ancestrals, Paragon points, all Legendary Aspects, Temper mods and the most important Uniques to pilot this build. Some Legendary Aspects are used temporarily to fill slots that may be replaced with more Unique items later on.
Gear & Skills
- As you upgrade your gear to Ancestrals with more masterworking levels and reach higher paragon, you can focus more and more on replacing Armor & Resistance rolls with better stats, but ensure to stay capped at 1000 Armor and 70%+ Resistances for the difficulty you're currently in.
- Fractured Winterglass is your priority unique to make the build function.
- Raiment of the Infinite will pull enemies near your Teleport location, making it easier to group enemies. Beware of being trapped in the enemies. If you actively move away from the direction enemies are mainly being pulled from then you can avoid the trap.
- Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop will require casting your Flame Shield for your Pyromancy stack at the beginning of combat and then rotating Shock and Frost to maintain it.
This is the final version of the build's progression, including all regular Unique items, Mythic Uniques, Legendary Aspects, Temper mods and Masterworking, leaving you with a great all-rounder build for all content in the game. Additional variants use this as a baseline to optimize around certain activities.
Gear & Skills
- Harlequin Crest will provide massive Cooldown Reduction and help easily solve your Defenses.
- Shroud of False Death still provides damage while greatly improving your Defenses over Raiment of the Infinite.
- Ring of Starless Skies provides great stats, a damage multiplier, and reduced Mana costs.
This Speedfarming variant optimizes the build for easy activities like Helltides, Whispers, Nightmare Dungeons and lower Pit Tiers after you have finished the Mythic variant and reached a plateau in your progression.
Gear & Skills
- Raiment of the Infinite can help group enemies quickly at the cost of Defense.
This setup optimizes the build to push the highest possible Tiers in The Pit after you have finished the Mythic variant and reached a plateau in your progression.
Gear & Skills
- You can choose to do snapshots for optimal pushing. When entering a new area you need to cast Ball Lightning four times to generate Crackling Energy and stack Roaring Lightning Spear to 8 on your Lightning Spear skill icon. Next you go near enemies and cast Flame Shield and let it end to trigger Mystical Flame Shield before you finally cast Lightning Spear. Now you can cast all other Skills and play normally as long as you maintain at least one active Lightning Spear. Suppressor Elites can destroy your Lightning Spear.
- Unfortunately, your Splintering Energy can inherit the Overpower of your first Lightning Spear in an area for another snapshot. It is a 3% chance (1/33) for this to happen and is how the highest clears can be obtained.
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.
The Skill Tree featured may gain Skill Ranks from different sources such as Harlequin Crest. Check the Build Variants for the correct setup for each step of your journey. Click the picture of the Sorcerer on gear setups to pull up the full planner and scroll through the variants with a drop down menu.
Enlightenment adds the multipliers that apply to each individual element together while active. This means you gain extra value from the Non-Phys mulitplier of Flamefeeder and you do not worry about the additive value on the glyph. Familiar Enchantment applies all elements for Enchantment Master to benefit Enlightenment. Elements provides a cold damage bonus or add both fire and lightning together depending on which is active when Enlightenment is active.
The build works really well when you decimate everything in seconds, but may get overwhelmed if fights are long against high level monsters. There are several adjustments you can make when you have trouble with more difficult content:
- Check if your Armor & Resists are capped.
- Use defensive consumables.
- Roll Maximum Life instead of offensive stats on as many pieces as possible.
- Kite enemies when they become Unstoppable.
Sorcerers have two primary sources of Unstoppable with Teleport and Flame Shield. You can also use the Snowveiled aspect to add it to Ice Armor. Teleport Enchantment does not make you Unstoppable.
Generally hardcore and softcore share the same builds. Outside of being more prudent in your gameplay, you can also tweak the setup slightly to raise your defenses:
- Focus more on Armor & Resists, making sure that they are always capped especially as you transition into higher torment difficulties.
- Focus more on maximum life rolls, for example replacing DPS stats like main attributes, attack speed, critical strike chance and additive increased damage rolls. Also masterwork life more than normal if no other crucial stats have priority.
- Focus on adding defensive skills, passives and paragon nodes first as you level up.
- Play on a slightly lower difficulty than normal, don't push into difficult territory. As long as you can deal with all enemies swiftly, they can't retaliate.
- Save a source of Unstoppable if possible to get out of crowd controls.
- Use defensive elixirs and incenses instead of offensive ones.
Permafrost's is currently visually bugged. It increases the damage of all your skills, not just Frost ones.
There are two benefits to Shredding Blades that are separated by a period. The second benefit gives you a multiplier to all damage dealt to Vulnerable enemies even if you don't use Ice Blades.
Mechanics
- Frozen Orb has three damaging components starting with the Orb itself dealing damage on contact. Second, Piercing Shards periodically deal damage to everything around the Orb as it travels. Finally, the Explosion that deals damage in a large area when Orb reaches its destination.
- Most of the damage comes from the Explosion, however, to get maximum performance out of your Frozen Orb you need to aim it slightly behind the enemy to get the Orb damage, maximize the amount of Piercing Shards hitting, and keep the enemy in the final Explosion radius.
- Conjurations are only summoned with manual casts of Frozen Orb by pressing the button assigned on your Skillbar. This doesn't include free casts such as Frozen Orb Enchantment or from your Conjurations.
- The temper "Chance for Frozen Orb Projectiles to Cast Twice" doesn't produce a free cast of Frozen Orb but instead modifies your current spell to throw two orbs at once. This means you can get two conjurations when a manual cast triggers this effect.
- The Conjuration summoned is chosen randomly from those on your Action Bar. If you already have maximum amount of conjurations of this type summoned, the oldest one is replaced.
- Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop provides a stacking damage increase for each of our elemental skills. After casting all three elements you only need to cast two different elements within 8 seconds to maintain all three stacks.
- Enlightenment is your key passive. This requires you to rotate different elements to quickly stack up to 100 for a buff called Enlightened. Enlightened gives increase damage by stacking your lightning, fire, and cold elemental damage ADDITIVES AND MULTIPLIERS with each other, it also increases your Mana regeneration and attack speed along with an additional 25 percent damage multiplier. While Enlightened your stacks deplete and you can't gain additional stacks until reaching 0 and then you need to start your rotation again.
- While all the exact mechanics are much more nuanced, there are two separate Attack Speed Bonus caps of +100% that apply to all builds for a total potential of +200%. For Sorcerers, these two caps are distributed in the following way:
Cap 1
- Moonrise
- Elixir of Advantage II
- Attack Speed (Gear Affix)
- Andariel's Visage
- Culler
- Swift Conjurer
- Ancient Flame
- Artillery Shrine (100% AS)
Cap 2
- Accelerating
- Rapid
- Prime Unstable Currents
- Basic Attack Speed (Gear Affix)
- Gloves of the Illuminator
- Pyromancy Attack Speed (Tempering)
Read up more on Attack Speed in our dedicated guide by Ava.
Bosses are immune to Crowd Control (CC) effects and instead take Stagger Damage when hit by one. The amount of stagger damage dealt depends on the type of CC and is proportional to its duration. After being hit by a CC effect, the Boss temporarily takes less Stagger Damage from a CC of the same type.
Effectively, this means that when you're just spamming one type of CC you don't need to spam any more of it than what you need to keep a normal enemy permanently CC-d. To stagger the Boss quickly you need to use as many different types of CC as possible. After the Boss is staggered it gains a certain amount of stacking Stagger Damage Reduction for the rest of the fight:
- After 1st Stagger: 20%
- After 2nd Stagger: 40%
- After 3rd Stagger: 60%
- After 4th Stagger: 90%
Bosses naturally regain 1% of their Stagger HP every second and when that regen is combined with 90% Stagger Damage Reduction it becomes borderline impossible to Stagger the Boss again unless you bring a serious amount of crowd controls.
Video Guide
Coming soon.
Summary
The Frozen Orb Sorcerer is a fun build that allows you press a lot of buttons without needing to aim besides where you're going.
- Check the Build Variants for the correct setup for each step of your journey.
- Rotate Frozen Orb and Teleport Enchantment.
- Use Flame Shield at the beginning of combat for the Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop stack then save it for important moments.
- Stay Unstoppable with Ice Armor thanks to enough Cooldown Reduction and Snowveiled.
Credits
Written by pandaglassjaw