Ice Shards Sorcerer Endgame Guide

Season 6 is the Season of Hatred Rising. It features the Zakarum Remnants faction which hunts Realmwalkers, massive behemoths that roam outdoor zones and beckon Mephisto's hellspawn. Participate in these zone events and take down the Realmwalkers to spawn a portal to a Seething Realm. There you can acquire Seething Opals, new consumables that stack with Elixirs for a XP buff and the chance to gather extra rewards when defeating enemies. The types of Opals are:

Use these Opals at all times to earn reputation with the Zakarum Remnants faction and unlock further rewards.

Skill Rotation

• Cast Hydra and Teleport into the fray or somewhere safe at the start of combat for your Tal Rasha. Use Ice Armor as you approach and cast some Ice Shards. Frost Nova nearby enemies. You will need to cast Hydra within 5 seconds of Ice Shards to maintain Enlightenment and Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop stacks.
• (On Elites & Bosses) Consider saving Flame Shield for dangerous moments to avoid death or deadly stacks from Pit bosses.
• (On Bosses) Keep an eye on the stagger bar and prepare to nuke right when it fills as many of our damage modifiers rely on crowd controls. Cast Frost Nova for additional stagger.

Sorcerer Enchantments

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.

Glyph Leveling Priorities

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 Ice Shards Sorcerer focuses on the following combos:

Best in Slot

• Tam + Wat for additional damage reduction combined with Xol + Ohm for additional damage.

Alternative choices

If you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top runes, you can also benefit from these options:

• Use Topaz Gems for additional damage.

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: Subo

• 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.
• Raheir is a great alternative if you don't mind dropping the maphack, Valiance is an amazing defensive tool that will prevent damage from large hits along with give you Unstoppable. Take Ground Slam and grab Raheir's Aegis for extra defense. Next you want Bastion with Inspiration. Valiance is a very powerful mechanic for pushing more difficult content or playing on Hardcore.

Reinforcement: Raheir

• Raheir will potentially save your character with his reinforcement Bastion. Setting this to trigger on Injured can keep you going in difficult encounters.
• Varyana is a great alternative to Raheir if you are either using Raheir as your hired or if you just want some extra damage. Bloodthirst will give some extra attack speed and you can set it on any attack.

To enable the Ice Shards Sorcerer to perform optimally, hunt for these stats on your gear with good rolls and aim to Temper ⚒️ & Masterwork Crit ↑ them accordingly. 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

Item Progression Goals

Before you dive into the Endgame with the Ice Shards 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.

This section is designed to guide your Ice Shards 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.

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.

What can I do to improve survivability?

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.

How can I trigger Unstoppable?

Sorcerers has two primary sources of Unstoppable with Teleport and Flame Shield. You can also use the Snowveiled aspect to add it to Ice Armor but is mainly used early game.

Which adjustments should I make on Hardcore?

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 survivability:

• 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.

Mechanics

Ice Shards

• Ice Shards Enchantment fires a single Shard at each Frozen enemy 1.66 times per second.
• Greater Ice Shards only affects the conditional Frozen bonuses that are default listed on the Skill and won't activate any other conditional multipliers such as Icefall.

Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop

• Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop provides up to 25 percent additional damage for each different elemental skill you cast, stacking up to 75 percent for a Pyromancy, Frost, and Shock skill. All stacks will remain as long as you cast two different elemental Skills within 5 seconds.

Enlightenment

• 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 with each other, it also increases your Mana regeneration and attack speed along with an additional 25 percent damage multiplier. While Enlightened your stacks will deplete and you can't gain additional stacks until reaching 0 and then you will need to start your rotation again.

Attack Speed Caps

• 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.

Stagger

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 will temporarily take 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.

Coming Soon.

The Ice Shards Sorcerer Endgame build is an ice machine gun that is a fun and engaging playstyle. Ice Shards Sorcerer takes some time to get started but scales well with gear and gameplay.

• Start with Teleport and Hydra for Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop and Frost Nova to apply Frozen.
• So anyway, I started blasting with Ice Shards.
• Use Hydra to maintain Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop and Enlightenment.
• Enjoy the great visual and sound quality of Ice Shards flying everywhere.

Written by pandaglassjaw