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 assumes you 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.
Season 3 - Season of the Construct
In Season 3, you obtain the Seneschal Construct through the Season Questline, then collect Governing Stones or Tuning Stones to add attacks and augment them to support your build. Only certain Tuning Stones work with a particular Governing Stone. Look at the bottom of any Tuning Stone tooltip to see if it is compatible with your Construct's currently equipped Stones. Lastly, they can be leveled up by getting duplicates to max out their power. Check out our full Season 3 guide for more information.
Recommended Stones
- Flash of Adrenaline
- Duration
- Tactical
- Initiative
This stone gives us 20% multiplicative damage with 100% uptime. Plain and simple.
- Tempest
- Arcing
- Safeguard
- Efficiency
This stone gives us some Crit Chance and Damage Reduction.
Alternative Stones
If you are lucky enough to get either Evernight or Genesis from Uber Malphas, you want to swap them in instead of Safeguard and Initiative respectively.
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, as well as some healing.
- Deep Freeze is our last active skill; it's used to reset our other cooldowns and sometimes to avoid dangerous attacks.
- Fire Bolt is only here to be put into an Enchantment Slot.
- We put 1 point into Frost Bolt because sometimes we use its Enchantment.
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.
Lucky Hit Procs
Ice Shards have a pretty high Lucky Hit Chance, especially in multi-target situations where we get ricochets from Enhanced Ice Shards and pierces Aspect of Piercing Cold. There are 3 different Lucky Hit effects that help with our Mana:
- Avalanche plus Aspect of Frozen Memories
- Frigid Breeze
- "Lucky Hit: Chance to Regain Resource" rolls on Ancestral Gloves and Focuses
In the endgame we don't even need all 3 of these to have infinite Mana, but early on the situation can be very different, especially when fighting Bosses where Lucky Hits are not that good.
Prodigy’s Resource Aspect
This Aspect is very useful in the early game, as we have so many skills with a Cooldown, each giving us some Mana when activated. To make sure that you don't run out of Mana during the Boss fight, follow these tips:
- Always start the fight by casting Ice Shards once or twice before using your other skills, so that the Mana is not wasted
- Don't use your Cooldowns all at once for the same reason
Prodigy’s Aspect is available in the Codex of Power, but you can also find a much more powerful version of it randomly. Important: This Aspect is incredibly rare, so if you find a well rolled one, save it until you have a good item (Ancestral Ring with at least 3 out of 4 optimal stats). It's not uncommon to get all the way to level 100 without ever seeing this Aspect.
Tibault's Will
With this Unique item we can generate quite a lot of Mana because Teleport, Flame Shield, and Deep Freeze can all make us Unstoppable. This item lets us drop Prodigy’s Aspect to get a Ring with more damage.
Stats on Gear
And finally we come to the real way of solving all our Mana problems: just find good gear. Easier said than done but this is what we have to do. There are 5 different stats we are looking for:
- Cooldown Reduction (rolls on Helmet, Amulet, Focus)
The most important stat for any Sorcerer build, it's also technically a Mana stat as long as we use Prodigy’s. Get all 3 possible rolls as your number one priority. - Mana Cost Reduction (rolls on Amulet, Boots, Focus)
The roll on the Amulet is significantly higher than the other 2 so you always want to get it. - Resource Generation (rolls on Ancestral Rings and Focus)
This stat has the same function as Mana Cost Reduction but it's slightly stronger if you have to choose between the two. - Lucky Hit: Chance to Regain Primary Resource (rolls on Ancestral Gloves and Focus)
This roll is very useful but we only want one of them. If you get both rolls, then the proc will give you too much Mana and most of it will be wasted. - Maximum Mana (rolls on Helmet and Rings)
This stat is good but not mandatory. You get enough Mana from just the Helmet roll and Paragon and the Helmet roll can be skipped. - Lucky Hit Chance (rolls on Gloves, Helmet, Focus, Rings, Amulet, Wands)
This is the weakest of the Mana-related stats, we only pick it up when it doesn't conflict with anything else: Helmet, implicit stat on a Wand, and Gloves (if you already have Chance to Regain Resource on the Focus).
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
- Flamefeeder
- Reinforced
- Destruction
- Exploit
- Elementalist
Level 21
- Destruction
- Control
- Flamefeeder
- Exploit
- Reinforced
- 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)
- Elementalist's in Pallid Delve (Dry Steppes)
- Shared Misery in Oblivion (Hawezar)
- Snowveiled Aspect in Sarat's Lair (Scosglen)
- Find the following Legendary Aspects either as a random drop or by gambling with Obols:
- Conceited: Gamble Focuses
- Shredding Blades: Gamble Focuses
- Replaces Control
- Frozen Memories: Gamble Focuses
- Replaces Prodigy’s
- Fortune: Gamble Helmets or Chests
- Replaces Bounding Conduit
- 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)
- Raiment of the Infinite (Varshan, Zir)
- Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop (Varshan)
- 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 giving more damage than Shredding Blades and also Mana Cost Reduction on top of that.
Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.
Progression Setups
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
- Control goes on the amulet because at this stage you have neither the Mana pool nor Crit Damage to make Elementalist's good.
- Prodigy’s is a Resource Aspect and can only be placed on Rings.
- Storm Swell, Piercing Cold, and Elementalist's take up 3 out of 4 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 and Snowveiled Aspect go on Helmet and Chest.
At this point resources are scarce, so only upgrade items that have Mana Cost Reduction or Cooldown Reduction rolls on them.
Skills
At low levels we Struggle with Mana, so we remove 3 ranks from Teleport and get Fiery Surge.
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
- Replace Bounding Conduit with Fortune.
- Put Conceited in your last offensive slot.
- Replace Control with Shredding Blades.
- When you get a Helmet with Maximum Mana, move Elementalist's to the Amulet
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
- Raiment of the Infinite
- Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop
With only one defensive slot left, we have to move Disobedience to the Amulet and drop Elementalist's. Luckily we have Esu's Heirloom to fix our Critical Strike Chance. Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop replaces Frozen Memories but before you get Tibault's Will you might be too low on Mana, in that case drop Shredding Blades instead.
Skills
When our Mana problems are resolved, we can drop Fiery Surge and get our Teleport ranks 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.
Uber Uniques
Some Unique items are very rare and only drop from Duriel, King of Maggots with approximately 2% chance. If you are one of the lucky few to have these items, here's how you can use them in this build:
- Harlequin Crest - this is your Best in Slot Helmet. Use it instead of Godslayer Crown.
- Andariel's Visage - this item is subpar. Poison Nova procs quite often but melee damage over time is not exactly what this build wants. On top of that, losing CDR and damage hurts quite a bit.
- Ahavarion, Spear of Lycander is also quite bad, it has great stats but you lose a lot of damage and CDR and the random Shrine effect is not even that good most of the time.
- Melted Heart of Selig is a good defensive item, but using defensive Amulet means losing a lot of damage.
- Ring of Starless Skies is BiS for this build, providing a lot of extra damage as well as Resource Cost Reduction.
The Speedfarming setup makes you more efficient in farming the Open World, Helltide zones, Tree of Whispers, regular Dungeons, and Nightmare Dungeons below Tier 45.
Gear
- Replace Tibault's Will with Iceheart Brais
- Replace Raiment of the Infinite with Disobedience
- Put on Frostburn
- Repalce Esu's Heirloom with Shared Misery Boots with "Max Evade Charges" or "Attacks Reduce Evade Cooldown" implicit.
- Use Amulet with Movement Speed instead of Passive ranks.
Enchantment Slots
We replace Fire Bolt with Teleport. Without Burning we lose quite a bit of damage, but it's not really necessary to kill the monsters outside of Nightmare Dungeons.
Skills
Since we no longer have room for Fire Bolt Enchantment, we don't need Devouring Blaze. We also don't have much use for our Ultimate so we can completely unspec it. Instead we get Precision Magic and Snap Freeze to Freeze enemies more reliably. Finally we move one point from Frigid Breeze to Teleport.
Gameplay
The idea behind this build is to remove its reliance on Frost Nova. With Frostburn, Iceheart Brais, Shared Misery, and Snap Freeze. We can simply shoot Ice Shards once or twice into a group of monsters and they will all explode.
Paragon Board & Glyphs
Use Territorial Glyph in place of Flamefeeder.
This variant of the build gives up a bit of speed and convenience for more safety.
AVOID THESE Nightmare Dungeon Afflictions
Before we go into what you should change on your build, take a look at Nightmare Dungeon Afflictions that you HAVE TO avoid for a successful push:
- Unstoppable Monsters - For a Sorcerer, Unstoppable means Unkillable. This build deals about x4 times more damage to enemies that can be Crowd Controlled.
- Monster Cold/Vulnerable/Crowd Control/Critical Resist - These afflictions simply reduce your damage output by a lot. In some cases your push is limited by survivability rather than damage so these don't do much to stop you, but in most situations they should be avoided.
- Stormbane's Wrath, Lightning Storm, Drifting Shade - These afflictions just add one more thing for you to worry about on top of nearly every mob being able to kill you in a couple of hits.
- Armor Breakers - This affliction can be absolutely devastating in lower tier push where your Armor is still high enough to provide tons of Damage Reduction. In tier 100 it doesn't matter too much because our Armor is very low anyway.
Gear
We replace Raiment of the Infinite with Shared Misery.
Gameplay
Here you play a bit less aggressively. You don't have to Teleport in the middle of the pack and try and hit all the enemies with Frost Nova. You can just freeze a few monsters closest to you and then let Aspect of Shared Misery do the rest. Spam Ice Shards at everything that moves and use the rest of your skills defensively. Before you enter the Boss room, switch your Ice Shards Enchantment to Frost Bolt to build Stagger faster.
Hardcore Adjustments
Hardcore requires you to build into more defenses. Here are some tips to successfully navigate this build through potentially dangerous situations:
- Focus more on Defensive rolls on your gear, such as Total Armor on the Amulet, or Maximum Life on Rings.
- Use Royal Topazes in armor instead or Royal Rubies to prevent worst case scenarios.
- Drop Tibault's Will for defensive Pants with Everliving Aspect.
- If you insist on using Flame Shield Enhantment, your only real option is to drop Ice Shards Enchantment because without Burning you will become a lot squishier, which is not optimal for hardcore.
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 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 Cost Reduction, Resource Generation, and Lucky Hit Chance (to proc Frigid Breeze) in order to spam Ice Shards freely. Maximum Mana is also a very important stat, as it lets us utilize Elementalist's Aspect better.
- 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.
- 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 and Defensive Aspect of Disobedience. 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
Choosing the right stats for your gear can make or break your build. You won't always find perfect stats (also known as affixes or modifiers) though, and you may need to make a tough choice between two good pieces of equipment. Use the following list of priorities to compare your gear and pick the best.
- Helm: Godslayer Crown, look for high damage roll and CDR
- Otherwise Look For: Fortune
- Cooldown Reduction
- Total Armor
- Maximum Life
- Maximum Mana
- Intelligence
- Chest Armor: Raiment of the Infinite, look for high Stun Duration and Close Damage/Int rolls
- Otherwise Look For: Snowveiled
- Total Armor
- Damage Reduction from Distant
- Damage Reduction from Close
- Damage Reduction from Burning
- Maximum Life
- Damage Reduction
- Gloves: Piercing Cold
- Ranks to Ice Shards
- Attack Speed
- Critical Strike Chance
- Lucky Hit: Chance to Restore Resource
- Intelligence
- Pants: Tibault's Will, look for good roll on Unique effect
- Otherwise Look For: Disobedience
- Total Armor
- Damage Reduction from Close
- Damage Reduction from Distant
- Damage Reduction from Burning
- Maximum Life
- Damage Reduction
- Boots: Esu's Heirloom, look for high Movespeed and Crit Chance rolls
- Otherwise Look For: Shared Misery
- Evade Cooldown or Charges
- Movement Speed
- Mana Cost Reduction
- Ranks to Frost Nova
- Ranks to Teleport
- Intelligence
- Amulet: Disobedience
- Cooldown Reduction
- Mana Cost Reduction
- Ranks to Devouring Blaze
- Ranks to Glass Cannon
- Ranks to Icy Touch
- Ranks to Defensive Skills
- Movement Speed
- Rings: Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop, look for high CDR, Resource and Unique effect
- Otherwise Look For: Frozen Memories & Shredding Blades
- Resource Generation
- Critical Strike Chance
- Maximum Life
- Cold Damage
- Close Damage
- Off-Hand: Storm Swell
- Cooldown Reduction
- Resource Generation
- Critical Strike Chance
- Mana Cost Reduction
- Intelligence
- Main Hand: Conceited (Wand)
- Intelligence
- All Stats
- Close Damage
- Core Skill Damage
- Critical Strike Damage
This build benefits a lot from the following Consumables:
- Elixirs: Heady Assault Elixir, Heady Precision Elixir, Iron Skin Elixir
- Incense: Song of the Mountain, Sage's Whisper
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 Imbiber?
Mechanics
Learn all you need to know about how to scale this build in the endgame.
Ice Shards
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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