Ice Shards - Teleporting Frost

This build centres around the powerful AOE potential of Ice Shards, synergizing with specific Aspects and its own Enchantment, while benefiting from bonuses provided by Paragon Boards and Glyphs. The build utilizes Ice Shards' ability to apply Vulnerability rapidly. This build is versatile combining defensive and offensive options to fit the situation, with options to swap in Deep Freeze, Inferno or Blizzard to control and damage enemy packs effectively.

1. If there's an Elite pack we start off our combo with Inferno, Teleport in, and Frost Nova into Ice Shards.
2. Frost Nova will be a bread-and-butter ability when engaging, this skill really comes online after we obtain Raiment's of the Infinite as it helps us pull mobs.
3. Rotate defensives, Teleport initiates, using Ice Armor as we take damage, Flame Shield to break out of CC and avoid death.
4. Inferno is used as an additional grouping skill, use it to group before pulling the rest in with Raiment's of the Infinite, this helps with the AOE burst of The Barber.

The build revolves around our core skill Ice Shards and buffing it as much as possible, our passive AOE potential comes from the Ice Shards Enchantment generating shards for each enemy frozen, this can add up and becomes especially brutal when combined with the “Aspect of Piercing Cold”.

We want to jump into most packs, the reason for this is Frost Nova, the Freeze and activation of our Ice Shards Enchantment works amazingly well early game and can clear packs quickly.

The Raiment of the Infinite also forces us into this style of play of being aggressive, this is extra important as the Raiments give our Teleport a stun component.

This build is designed for characters in the Mid to Late game, if you're 50 and below check out -my Sorcerer leveling build.

Core - Ice Shards

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'll be applying Vulnerable with Ice Shards anyway, but exploding already Vulnerable packs with the Ice Shard Enchantment is usually a lot more viable.

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

Defensives

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 - Meteor

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.

Deep Freeze and Inferno

Meteor and Blizzard don't actually help us as much early game as they do late, for this reason, it's actually better to opt for an Ultimate instead.

For an Ultimate we actually have two options, in my opinion, Inferno is the objectively better choice, as it allows us to group packs incredibly well, this also acts as a form of “CC”, stopping monsters from retaliating and thus giving it as much of a defensive component as an offensive one. The damage also scales rather well, especially as it takes advantage of most of our modifiers.

Deep Freeze is the alternative option, it’s viable and makes us incredibly durable. I found I was using it a lot early and some parts into the mid-game to solve my durability issues as the Sorcerer can be rather squishy. Its damage component is nice and it Freezes at the end, I found this to sometimes be bothersome though as it would activate the unstoppable buff for mobs and elites.

Keystone

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.

Leveling Section

You can level with Ice Shards but the early game will be rough until you can bounce back to level 15.

You’ll want to pick up the Aspect of piercing Cold from the Fractured Peaks at around level 15 to get this build rolling fully, we are able to combine this to enhance our Ice Shards skill and its Enchantment.

After that aspect we want to be rushing for the Aspect of Control in the Dungeon Sunken Library, region: Kehjistan. We can grab this Aspect at around level 35, it’s a decent damage increase and obtainable without RNG so it’s worth pushing for.

We can check out the full levelling build here.

Mana Management - Aspects

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.

Offhand vs 2Hander

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

Uniques

• 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. - When we use Raiments, we will no longer need Aspect of the Protector.
• 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.

Enchantments

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.