Diablo 4 Sorcerer BuildIce Shards - Burning Frost

For Ice Shards we’ll be using the passive Destructive Ice Shards, to apply our vulnerability.

Ice Shards can play differently depending on whether you are speed farming or pushing High Nightmare Dungeons, If you are speed farming and have difficulty with Mana, you can switch Mystical Frost Nova for Shimmering Frost Nova as we will be applying Vulnerable with Ice Shards.

I prefer to use Destructive Ice Shards, over Greater Ice Shards because the uptime carries over to other things like bosses.

We’ll be using all 4 of the Sorcerer's defensive abilities, allowing us the ability to survive most situations.

• Teleport should be primarily used in my opinion to engage but can be used to retreat until you get used to the play style, this is also how you would commonly play when you don’t have the Raiments of the Infinite.
• Ice Armour should be used when initiating, we don’t take any passives, but it’s an incredibly strong defence on its own. We do have the option of opting into its passive Mystical Ice Armor which increases barrier size when attacking vulnerable enemies.
• Frost Nova is our source of Freeze, which is complimented with Frostburn, it can also be a reliable mana generator if we choose the passive for it.
• Flame Shield is our form of “Cleanse”, it allows us to skip out on control-impairing effects, and it also gives us a valuable boost of speed, I usually use it to break out of hard CCs that will kill me. It’s important to note here that Flame Shield makes us “Immune”, it’s an incredibly powerful skill that gives us the ability to avoid getting one-shot.

Blizzard is a reasonable choice here, it's great for keeping mobs frozen by passively applying Chill it also slows, which works well late game for cutting off areas. Its other use is for finding invisible units, in High Nightmare Dungeons most things will one-shot us, these invisible units especially as they do insane damage, laying down Blizzard we are able to catch them before they get us. We can also attach a Glacial Aspect into our kit to add a reasonable damage component to the skill.

Meteors and its passive Wizard's Meteor aren't as viable as they used to be after patch 1.1.0, due to the nerf to Aspect of control. The damage gained from using it in a combo is no longer substantial enough for it to be worth taking here.

Another reason why both of these options are chosen is for staggering bosses. Both Meteor and Blizzard can do it, although Blizzard is slightly better at it than Meteor, the Meteors benefit comes from its application of Immobilise.

Avalanche is our main Keystone, although it’s Lucky Hit, it’s basically a huge damage increase on top of massive help in resource management.

There’s an argument that Shatter may be better for clearing Elite pulls and trash but the resource cost increase for a decent clear might not always be necessary and in some cases overkill.

Something I’ve been asked a few times is how to deal with the heavy resource costs early to mid game, there are 3 Aspects I think are worth looking at, these would be placed in on your Rings, two are obtainable from dungeons, the first one is Prodigy’s Aspect, and the 2nd is Incendiary Aspect.

The first is self-explanatory, giving us mana when we use a Cooldown- this is worth it for us as everything besides our core has a cooldown, thus they all become generators. The 2nd is more of a passive generator, taking advantage of Fire Bolt Enchantment to passively generate mana, so we'd have to spec into this if we went this route.

Keep in mind that due to the Enchantment choice Fire Bolt, we can also take advantage of the passive Fiery Surge early game for an additional 30% mana generation if we kill a burning enemy, so place points into this passive and sacrifice something like Glass Cannon for it, being able to actually deal damage is better than a damage increase.

The 3rd option is from the Aspect Frozen Memories this increases our Avalanche's lucky hit by 1, giving us another free cast of Ice Shards when it Procs, running these instead of damaging Aspects when levelling and farming is a must.

If we're farming we do not want to be using a 2 handed weapon as a Wand + Offhand is more favourable over the raw damage of a Staff, the Aspects we'll want are the Aspect of Control and the Aspect of Piercing Cold, with some resource Aspects in our Rings.

A Staff should only ever be used if you really feel like you're lacking damage, but this season should be the case when using the Malignant Heart Barber.

• Wand - Aspect of Control
• Offhand - Aspect of Piercing Cold

• Ring - Prodigy (Or other Resource Aspect)

• Staff - Aspect of Control

• Ring - Aspect of Piercing Cold

We believe resistance will be significant this season and maxing them all will not be easy. Ideally, you want to switch out the Gems in your Jewelry to match the content you're combatting to get the most out of resistance.

• Ring of Starless Sky This ring has decent stats and is target farmable, the unique passive is great, a high-rolled one would just be perfect but all around a 40% reduction is spell cost is nothing to scoff at.
• Frostburn are great, my game changed when I got these, they provide a ton of extra Freeze and the stats on them, especially the resource generation is massive. They fall off for pushing in favour of Fist of Fate or a well-rolled Rare with the Concieted Aspect.
• Raiment of the Infinite changes our gameplay loop a little, allowing us to Initiate and group with Teleport easily, allowing us to use Inferno as an additional grouping ability to catch the entire pack. If we choose to use Raiment, you will have to take off Everliving, the trade-off is upto you.
• Fist of Fate needs a good roll for them to have value but are basically increasing your damage on average by 50%, this is a lot more than most other Aspects so it's huge and they're potentially great for pushing as they have the ability to just allow you to absolutely burst mobs, with that said a well rolled rare will still come out slightly ahead.

Ice Shards Enchantment is mandatory, it’s a massive DPS increase that honestly isn’t comparable to the other Enchantments, it’s basically what makes Ice Shards.

Teleport Enchantment is great for its mobility, I think it's the best enchantment right now considering how much mobility it gives as well as a stun to boot due to Raiments.

The Fire Bolt is here to take advantage of certain Glyphs and Passives, as well as item modifiers

Frost Bolt can also be changed with Ice Shards during Bosses for extra stagger.

Vampire Powers early will be a little hit or miss here until I get a good grasp of how they work & how powerful they actually are, Accursed Touch for example could be amazing but may also be bad so keep an eye out for changes here on release.

You can find a leveling version of this build here.

Here you can find the more "speed farm" focused version of Ice Shards, designed with the ability to on repeat teleport for huge mobility.