Ice Shards Sorcerer Guide - Destroys All Content in Diablo 4

all right there are many many ice shards videos and guides and all that out there why am I throwing my hat in the ring well I've been playing this build a lot since the beginning of the preseason whatever you want to call it since the launch and I've really experimented a lot here if you've seen my previous videos I have tried many many different things I did not copy paste this build from anyone else I kind of looked out there a little bit about some of the recommendations and you know getting some ideas but a lot of this came together kind of organically through experimentation trying a lot of stuff that you guys in the comments recommended and helped me with so I know that this is kind of late in the preseason you want to call it but this kind of is the culmination of me playing this build and my knowledge here and I think I have something to offer that you're not going to find in any other video because I sat here and I played this for hours and hours and hours for two weeks non-stop not giving up and trying everything I could think of and there's a lot of little modifications that you can do particularly at different gear levels for are doing content that might be harder than you know you're geared up for I have now successfully completed a tier 60 6-0 nightmare dungeon on my character at level like 82. that's what I did last night we can do that this is a very very strong character it excels in clearing it excels in crowd control it excels in having exceptional defensive buttons to be able to get out of trouble and it has respectable but not Godlike single Target this build really clicks for me it does exactly what in my opinion a magic Caster a master of the elements should do is be able to control the entire screen full of monsters and blow them all up at will and that's what this build does this is going to be a very deep dive you can't go wrong playing this build it does all of the content in the game except for Uber Lilith which you know basically nothing in the game can do right now so yeah just lean back grab a cup of coffee or a beer and uh let's start talking about it alright so first up just to decide if this build is for you what is the play style would you like playing this you go into playing a magic Caster or wizard whatever everyone has their own different preconceptions about what they want so yeah I'm in a tier 42 nightmare dungeon so these monsters are not absolute pushovers you can see they are Monster level 96 I am level 84. um you can see we have a lot of crowd control that is really annoying you can see they're hitting me really really hard lots and lots of poison and stuff so this is not an easy dungeon but I will show you how to play this build and why it's so strong the main reason is control and Mobility we have the ability to full screen chill and freeze everything Frost Nova this is our go-to Frost Nova currently on a 10 second cooldown 4 seconds are reduced from that if we kill four monsters that are frozen and this is an instant freeze it does zero damage but it's an instant freeze skill that then the main thing that we have going on here is we have the ice shards enchantment which around Frozen enemies almost the full screen if an enemy is frozen it will continually shoot a single ice Shard at it so the full screen of Frozen enemies every single one is going to be hit periodically with an ice Shard so the ice shards enchantment really to make the build pop is necessary but I do spec this out when I'm doing very very hard content right because it's like pretty mediocre for single Target and there's other enchantments that can you know give us more durability or more utility as well we'll talk about Fireballs a little bit later but it doesn't have anything to do with the play style and then on top of that this is not necessary to play the build but it's really really good for playing the build to the point where I think most sork builds actually really want this body armor it is a raiment of the infinite when you teleport into the monsters it will pull all of them in stun them up to three seconds and then you know that enables you to hit a lot of monsters in a single area Raymond of the infinite you can play without it but I don't recommend it you're gonna suck in a lot of monsters you're gonna freeze them with your ice Nova and then your ice shards will automatically hit them and then they will explode and shatter to Womble with that is I go back and forth between these when we talk about our passives I'll talk about all the subtleties here but one we're really looking to blow up the screen we use the shatter passive right here that says enemies explodes for 25 of the damage you dealt to them while Frozen which then ends so you know since you sucked in all the monsters kills everybody however I do switch to Avalanche here for single Target damage and better Mana sustain when it's necessary all right and that's basically it is teleport in Frost Nova basically everything dies right away but if it hasn't died right away if it's harder then we can manually cast ice shards which will do significantly more damage right because the enchantment Only Hits once but ice shards manually cast will hit five times let's show the play Style real quickly in here so generally you can even kind of just group up as many monsters as you want to suck them in and then I didn't even press any other button right all I did was teleport in and press frostinova and the enchantment itself will go off and kill them and then if I'm getting hit too much if I'm a little scared then I can press my deep freeze literally just take your hands off the mouse and keyboard it will do a continual chill which in this game builds up and freezes the monster which then also lowers your cooldown significantly since the monsters are already Frozen then you don't even have to worry about you know the ice shards is already going off and hurting the monsters as you come out of it and then your cooldown of your Frost Nova will be up no matter what afterwards and then the ice Nova just kills them doesn't even matter and that's really the simple part of it like there's a lot of positioning there's a lot of other buttons that you can use there's managing your barriers for more damage stuff like that but this play style knowledge alone is enough to make it dangerous even you see the scariest monsters you can kind of just go in here teleport in just an ice Nova and that's going to do enough damage by itself if I get a little scared then I can press my deeper freeze I can heal up during my deep freeze and then I can attack a couple more times if I really need to to kill the monsters I got my Frost node up again and it automatically just kills him and that's kind of just the build working for itself like I'm occasionally pressing some pots here if I did get really scared I can press my flame Shield here I also have one point of ice armor here from my amulet I do recommend always having just one point into ice armor and yeah if that playstyle looks fun and engaging to you and interesting and just like and what's your cooldown's you know dealing with Mana and cooldowns that's gonna be a lot about what we talk about today that's a really really big part of it once you've dealt with those problems and solved them for putting the build together it is incredibly rewarding to play you will have better clear than basically anyone else on the screen those pulverized Druids are sitting there waiting for their cooldowns to do their little Wombo Combo and yours is up like every six seconds you're gonna be you know you're gonna be the big AOE clear popping the whole screen on the Block you're gonna be looking and feeling really good all right so I didn't scare you off from playing the build so if you're still here assuming you still want to play it let's get go into the beginning so how would you level this build this is something that I usually don't address and I think in this game it's particularly interesting because leveling is kind of weird really the short of it is this build has pretty strict Mana issues to even be playable honestly besides that the cooldown will feel kind of bad until you solve that so without any cooldown and definitely without any of the Mana solving aspects you're going to be in a tough spot level 40ish I think is probably about the earliest you'd want to play it and that's really only assuming you got like two of the really good Mana solution aspects I'd really just want to spec into this build after you hit Level 50 and in fact for leveling I actually strongly recommend my shock and Sun sorcerer here this is what I leveled with and I've seen examples of other people leveling with a sork and I actually liked it the most and this actually looked better to me than how I saw other people leveling I would strongly just recommend level up to 50 and then respect after that this build care carried me as we can see I'm level 51 at this video this build carried me really really hard you know I played up to level 50 with this build I got into World tier four with it it uh it got the job done and honestly the great thing about it is it had zero Mana issues whatsoever this was a great leveling build and it's and this is what I recommend at the current stage of the game with what I know but really pick your favorite leveling sork build go with that you know find one of the Mana solving aspects that we're going to talk about in just a second and then respect at that point so after that we really just have to talk about Mana this has been a big topic with people that have been trying this build you can run out of Mana really really easily because we go for a lot of attack speed base Mana costs on Ice shards is 30. you can dump your entire Mana pool in just two seconds if you don't have anything to deal with the Mana cost here so starting off what you're gonna have no matter what when you first back into this build which is not enough unfortunately is you're gonna take frigid Breeze right here which gives you 20 chance unlucky hit to generate 15 Mana right so if you have a hundred percent lucky hit that then gets multiplied you know times the a 20 chance that then can give you the 15 Mana if the enemy is vulnerable so this alone you know doesn't really solve the solution even if you had 100 lucky hit it's only one out of five times that you get 15 Mana back it's still good enough to be worth taking especially until you get really good lucky hit this isn't really going to be paying too many dividends I actually advise making a b line straight for Avalanche right here what Avalanche does you know this is still lucky hit this is still only 20 but against vulnerable enemies this is a 20 chance on Lucky hit but this combined with frigid Breeze really will solve the first half of your Mana issues one out of five times on Lucky hits so after your lucky hit as long as the enemy is vulnerable your next cast of Ice shards Frozen orb or blizzard will cost no mana and deal 40 increased damage it is a noticeable boost in our single Target damage so between frigid Breeze and Avalanche right we get two 20 rolls on our lucky hit for you know saving our Mana when we're casting this is our basic solution for dealing with our Mana this is the first half this will make it so you can kind of fight a couple packs of monsters and then wait this isn't really you know the real solution here so the next thing to deal with Mana is aspects these are really the first thing that you're going to go for starting off you're probably going to need at least two of them to make your Mana feel pretty good later on you're gonna have at least one of them no matter what depending on your play style and depending on your gear you know Mana cost reduction you're going to find that in other places the first one we're gonna start off right here which also locks you into a certain passive is the Avalanche key passive now applies to one additional cast the aspect of Frozen memories this goes on a weapon gloves amulet or ring this will apply to two additional casts if you put it on a staff which is kind of neat we don't use the staff do not use the staff so what this does right is remember Avalanche makes the next cast of Ice shards cost no Mana this will make it that when you proc it'll makes the next two casts cost no mana and the nice thing here is it can snowball it can continue stacking right if you have two casts that have a chance to proc it again you can stack it back to two casts and with this alone this will mostly solve your Mana assuming you have enough lucky hit but if if you're lucky hit is low and you're not procking Avalanche you're relying on Lucky hit too much only for your Mana sustain this isn't really gonna totally solve your problem and so this one's really good and particularly once your lucky hit gets totally solved this alone can kind of just carry you but if you don't have amazing lucky hit this isn't really going to do it for you the other three that I recommend are unfortunately not very common and this is a reason why I don't recommend directly hopping into the build right away is you're going to want to try to farm for at least one of these I'm only using one right now my gear is also kind of good so I only really need one of them right now you're probably going to want to combine two of these when you get going at lower gear so the first one is prodigies this says using a cooldown restores between 15 and 25 Mana sorcerer only the nice thing about Prodigy right here is it's unlocked by completing which water and housar unfortunately right the ones that go into your codex that you get permanently those are bottom rolled so that means it's only 15 Mana if you're using the bottom rolled One You're Gonna Want to use at least two aspects no matter what what this does is when you use a cool down it will just restore up to 25 mana and we have a lot of cooldowns we have a lot of cooldown recovery rate we are popping those constantly and that is actually the only Mana sustain aspect that I'm using right now and my one that I have imprinted right here is actually a mid-roll that's how rare it is these are the only two that I found at all total so far playing this one's pretty rare but this is great right every time we use ice armor Frost Nova teleport flame Shield or deep freeze all of those will give you your Mana back and as long as you're paying attention to your cooldowns weaving them in intelligently you won't even notice that you're running out of Mana however if you're being super aggressive and you'd really need more Mana so unfortunately umbrella in the Codex you know is totally bottom rolled restore one primary resource when you crowd control an enemy so you know if you freeze 10 monsters you only get 10 Mana back now if that's four right you get 40 Mana back for freezing 10 monsters that's incredible so the roll on this makes a big big difference I use this one with three for a while it didn't totally solve my Mana but it was pretty good so you definitely want to look into that and and then the last one right here is called the incendiary aspect I actually have never found a good role of this unfortunately the bottom roll is five percent which is pretty bad but unlucky hit your burning damage which we are always burning enemies we'll we'll get into that a little bit later your burning damage has up to a 10 chance to restore 10 mana on Lucky hit this one is actually potentially really really good if you can get a good roll unfortunately I never have so I can't speak to how good it is but theoretically this is really really good for us especially once you get good lucky hit there's all of these aspects and then on top of that you want to be going from Mana cost reduction so the two main slots that you're going to find Mana cost reduction are on your off hand and on your amulet as you can see I currently have a total of 29.1 percent Mana cost reduction which brings my ice shards from 30 Mana to 21 Mana that's the main thing that you're really going to be looking for here is getting it on your amulet and on your off hand on top of that you're going to want to go for resource generation on your rings if you can get it what this says is gaining Mana from any Source Grants that percentage more Mana than normal so if you have 10 more Mana of your Mana regeneration and you get 20 Mana back from the prodigies that will go from 20 to 22 you get 10 more on top of that if you have good gear you can get over 20 very easily Mana generation and that can make a significant difference in all of your Mana restoration it Stacks with your Mana regen it Stacks with all of the recovery sources this is actually a very good mod that I think is undervalued when used in combination with these other aspects that will give you big chunks of Mana that's really all of our solutions for dealing with our Mana there are the four different aspects there's prodigies there's umbral there's Frozen memories and then there is the incendiary early on when your lucky hits not very high when you're not procking frigid Breeze and Avalanche very often you're probably going to want to get at least two of these aspects to really deal with your Mana once you get more Mana cost reduction on your gear then you can probably remove one of those aspects and go for a damaging aspect like I did here you're going to be always trying to figure out like okay you know over over compensate early make sure your Mana is solved and then as you find better gear that makes your Mana a little bit more comfortable try to remove some of those Mana generation things I'm at the point now where when I'm fighting regular monsters I actually spec out of avalanche and I go into shatter for better full screen clear but even with my current setup when I'm fighting single Target I do run out of mana and I want to go back to Avalanche right here I just spent 54 000 gold just for you guys I want to go back to Avalanche here it gives me 40 increase damage and it makes sure that my Mana sustain is a lot better in the single Target it's really this Balancing Act pay attention to what your Mana is these are the tools that are available to you use the ones that you need you know until the build feels comfortable for you all right next up is cool Downs cooldown recovery rate all that so cooldown reduction is very important why is that our entire build is based around cooldowns I currently have 39.2 cooldown reduction with much better gear I could get over 50 I believe which I definitely want I want as much as I can get this is a combo character it's all about teleport and frost Nova use all of your abilities pop the entire screen and then when your cooldowns are down if you're not using them properly this is a cooldown based character when you're your cooldowns are not available you are a wet noodle much like Mana cost reduction and this is going to be a pain point is your amulet in your off hand are a very big part of what make this build feel good I struggled to get good gear so if you saw my previous videos all of that was experimentation to try to make this build work what could I do when I have bad gear these are the two slots where your cooldown reduction really comes to play the big thing is your offhand has cooldown reduction on the implicit we do not use a staff do not you cannot staff no verboten as you can see my offhand is not incredible but with this alone I have 23.8 cooldown reduction and then on top of that I have another 14.6 percent which could go to 23 right I can get quite a bit more here nine percent more on my amulet right here if I had a really good amulet that's all of my cooldown reduction that's where you want to get it good amulet that has cooldown reduction Mana cost reduction and an offhand that's cooldown reduction in Mana cost reduction that's what you're looking for that's your main two things when you have those two pieces you're already like halfway done on the good gear for those care character as you can see a level 5 Frost Nova is 19.7 seconds and so since I have plus five to the rank of my Frost Nova 1 here and four here I have a level 10 frost Nova with then that 39 cooldown reduction which brings me down to a 10.2 second frostinova and frost Nova is our main priority here you know the more that this is up the more we can do our combo the more we just obliterate the entire screen you want to go all out in leveling up your Foss Nova it gets a lower cooldown with that and get that cooldown reduction on your build and then the last utility stat that you're going to be going for here is lucky hit champ now there are variations of this build that don't go for Lucky hit I am not a fan of that trying to be diplomatic here I'm not really a fan of that I think you're missing too much and the big reason for that is I do one thing that those builds don't do but just for the basis right off the bat right we get Avalanche for Lucky hit for Mana we get frigid Breeze for Lucky hit for Mana I also missed this mod sorry when I was talking about Mana earlier but this is kind of a bonus anyway this isn't really a Crux but up to a five percent chance unlucky hit to restore up to 20 of your primary resource so 5 percent of the time that you lucky hit you can actually get back 21 Mana as well this one obviously is also really good you can get this on multiple pieces of gear as well but yeah those are like the base things that we're looking at when it's talking about mana and then there's one thing that I do that the other bills don't do and that is I believe in snap freeze I am a snap freeze truther I've seen this proc enough times that I think is very valuable and I learned this by doing my weird off meta crappy versions of the build experimentation this is what I learned from playing around with Blizzard from playing around with ice blades and playing around with frozen orb is really leaning into trying to figure out ways that I could freeze monsters when I had bad cooldown right that was the journey that I was going down is my frostinova had a 20 second cooldown because my gear sucked what do I do how do I freeze the monsters I need it to make the build work and so I was experimenting with you know blizzard and everything and I saw the snap freeze here which on Lucky hit I have a chance to instantly freeze I'm already investing into lucky hit right now all right pretty cool so how often does this guy in a proc so when I have a barrier my ice shards has a 31 chance to Lucky hit and each ice Shard I shoot five of them has a chance to Lucky hit so there's only a 2.79 chance for it to proc for a single ice Shard that's not very good all right hopefully I did the math correctly here Newport brass faucet cartridges too are interested I need a better calculator on my computer so what we did here we multiplied nine percent times 31 that gives us 2.8 percent one minus 0.028 to the power five that's the probability of it not happening and then one minus that is the probability of it happening that means we have a 13.2 percent chance per cast of Ice shards assuming we have a 30 lucky hit of freezing the enemy but that means roughly one out of seven one out of eight times that we're freezing the enemy and that's not bad every single time that we freeze an enemy it is a gigantic boost to our character and I find that pretty cool you can get lucky hit on most pieces of your gear here you can see that I have it on my glove I would like it on my offhand if I could get it I have it on one of my rings ideally would would have it on both of my rings I think the resource generation while nice right I can use a different aspect to kind of deal with that I would rather just have some more lucky hit we just go for it everywhere that we see it everywhere we can get it I actually have a higher lucky hit than I thought because I am also using frigid fate right here which gives me an additional 15 lucky hit and then we're using Advantage right here for even more so let's actually see what my real lucky hit is after I hit some enemies I've actually never really looked at that is looks like my real lucky hit his 33 which is not too bad okay so that is the core stuff that really matters for this build that's like what goes into it that's the hard problems that you're gonna have to solve let's talk about the aspects in the gear and a little bit more nitty-gritty right there so for the helmet there's no unique helmet that we care about you just want to go for something like this life cooldown reduction the man is pretty nice I have some lucky hit chance while I have a barrier this is just really really good I am using one topaz you can see this gives me damage reduction while crowd controlled damage reduction is an absolutely incredible stat I strongly recommend it we'll talk about defenses and damage reduction in a bit but you can see that I have quite a bit in my build I had none two days ago and then I invested into it and yeah night and day it's really mandatory so yeah life cooldown reduction lucky hit right this is the general stuff that we're going for Max Mana is nice just helps us you know sustain our man a little bit better body armor Raymond of the infinite is best in slot There's Nothing Compares if you choose to play the build without this and you have one you are making a mistake like I said teleport in stuns the enemies just makes it so much better this is night and day I wish I had a better one but if you don't have one you can still play the build without it because the ice shards is hitting AOE it hits the whole screen as long as you're freezing the whole screen you're still gonna hit them you're still gonna shatter but it's just not quite as good but if you want to go tankier you can do that so in that situation I would go for a body armor like this life damage reduction a little bit of damage something like that I get significantly tankier when I equip this thing but I have way less control way less you know management of the monsters and it makes clearing the whole screen a lot more difficult so this body armor theoretically is significantly better right but the Raymond just feels that good that I find a pretty mandatory to you know take the bill to the next level the gloves prioritize rank of ice shards that's the you know the most important one four ranks on your level of ice shards really really big for your damage and then lucky hit Critical Strike chance you know we like to crit as well I haven't talked about crit too much yet crit is actually you know it's really good for our damage but we don't prioritize it as much like vulnerable is actually more consistent damage for us right now because we always make the monsters vulnerable with frost Nova and with ice shards so vulnerable is actually higher priority than Critical Strike after that you can use if you want to this is really fun to use and especially if you don't have arraignment yet this is a really good you know stop Gap to use until you get arraignment it kind of fills the slot a little bit of what the Raymond does for just helping your clear out however it really is a pretty weak item so you do want to swap out of this a little bit later because it doesn't really offer you any defense which you know is kind of bad what this says is enemies that die well Frozen have up to a 20 chance to unleash an additional Frost Nova that can just chain you know keep procing the whole screen really helps clean out your clear you know just like the body armor if you don't have the ice heart brace or you already have arraignment I would use something like this you know a little bit of Life regen if you haven't damaged recently I just like having my life up when I'm walking around town you know this is a very small number I have 8 300 life and it's only 146 a second it's just nice to have your life topped up you know between fights we have almost no sources of percent armor in this build just a little bit is actually like a more multiplier for our build so it's really really big you know armor is the best defense in the game so anything that gives you more armor is really good so you know that's a good value on us as well gigantic additional life pool the healing received is pretty mediocre I would rather not have that there I'd rather have something else but that's what I got yeah we'll go over the aspects in a second but you know the armor on top of that just goes hand in hand the boots really want that level of frost Nova I think that that's the number one thing you're looking for movement speed Mana cost reduction Mana cost reductions on boots as well I think I missed that that Fire Res unfortunately is a dead stat res is just so like I just view it as such a dead set look at this 53 Fire Res goes to 46 right I get five percent Fire Res from that stat okay and the Damage reduction is only half of that so I only have 2.5 less fire damage taken from that entire mod on my boots whereas instead I'd rather just get like you know flat damage reduction right I could go on a whole rant about it right now right but like this 10 damage reduction right flat damage reduction is I know those diminishing returns with the multiple sources yada yada but it is so much stronger than res it just reduces the damage flat up anyway I'd rather not have that rest at I would roll over every single rest hat the other thing is because we have very high intelligence you know we're smart cookies we actually have a lot of res already built into our build right and there's pretty diminishing returns into investing more into it you know the 50 increase right here remember it only gave me five percent more once you get really high intelligence res stats on your gear are particularly bad and then remember we do not use a staff remember guys no staff on our wand you're going to use a wand right on here we want to go for Critical Strike chance lucky it same priorities as we have everywhere crit chance lucky hit uh intelligence is very good you know all stats is actually pretty decent intelligence is its own more multiplier our intelligence alone this is giving me a 63 more damage multiplier int is really good and you are going to go for high int on your Paragon board you know if you look at my later stuff right here this requires 600 intelligence to activate so you are going to need a good chunk of it to you know use your last Paragon board and then vulnerable damage or Critical Strike damage Critical Strike chance stuff like that really rather those all stats I'd probably rather have Critical Strike chance uh my current setup right now my crit chance is lower than I would like it to be but you know this is the best one that I have right now and then on the offhand we already went over this cooldown reduction crit chance Mana cost reduction stats are decent this is not an incredible offhand vulnerable damage would be good as well you know all the stats that we already talked about that's what you care about in my other body armor pieces I'm using rubies there are diminishing returns of putting too many tow passes in so I just have one topaz here because I already have so much damage reduction and then the other ones are rubies for more life and then I have emeralds in my weapons because we are always attacking vulnerable enemies we're trying to create this is just 24 more crit strike damage in terms of the amulet rank of defensive skills is absolutely crazy for our build I wish this was rank three this is really really sad that this amulet is rolled so poorly rank of defensive skills this is actually giving me my one rank for my ice armor it saves me a passive point you know that's our ice Nova that is our flame Shield that is our teleport we actually use four different defensive skills in this build so rank of defensive skills is gigantic for this build Mana cost reduction cooldown reduction and rank of permafrost is actually really good but you know anything else that we already talked about is really good what permafrost is is this guy right here more damage to Elites this brings it from 15 to 30 so that's pretty good then in terms of the Rings I actually have been prioritizing Max life more and more as you can see I have 8300 Max life so I actually really like that stat lucky hit crit strike crit damage and then vulnerable damage as well restart first generation and yeah that is all the gear and all of the mods that you're gonna go for the gear now let's talk about aspects so in terms of the aspects I think this one's pretty mandatory we have so much stuff which we'll see on the passive tree that gives us value by having a barrier barrier is really the extra defensive layer that sorcerer is built around other builds have fortify other bills have other sources of damage reduction we don't have that we don't have permanent Unstoppable we don't have any of that barrier is our Lifesaver so we get a barrier from Ice armor we get a barrier from damaging Elite and then on our passive tree we actually get a barrier when we use a cooldown which is right here from protection I get a 2500 Max life barrier for two seconds every time I use a cooldown remember we have a bunch of cooldowns most of our skills are cooldowns barrier is what keeps us alive and so you know this rolls up to 7K right now I wish this was better rolled this is the best I got right now but yeah this is gigantic this is a 10 second barrier that happens every 30 seconds so so that's pretty incredible you know remember I get lucky hit I get resource generation while I have a barrier I do more damage while I have a barrier it's incredible you want to have more barrier stuff Rheem into the infinite right here there's a go-to and an additional one though I really like is ice armor makes you Unstoppable there is a lot of crowd control in the game racks actually put out a great video this morning right here called the biggest problem with Diablo 4 the entire video is about how crowd control is the worst thing in the game right now and I fully agree there is way too much crowd control I did a tier 52 nightmare dungeon today on stream that took me like 20 something minutes because it was the one with the spiders and it was cold Enchanted and it was constant I had to like really kite things around because there's so much crowd control I had to constantly just like run away anyway because of that I think this is an incredible imprint but unfortunately I can't fit it on my current build you deal 20 more damage to vulnerable enemies while you have a barrier we usually have a barrier enemies are usually vulnerable so this is a great mod this armor one this will give you up to 50 percent more armor right we have almost no other sources of increased armor I go from 5400 armor to almost 8 000 armor when this thing fully procs I only have to hit 20 times within four seconds to get that full maximum effect and since I'm hitting the entire screen constantly this is pretty close to fully active all the time when I'm fighting group big groups of monsters really really really good this one I think is pretty mandatory lucky hit chance is increased by 20 while you have a barrier we just saw how strong that was that brings me from 26 to 31 lucky hit that's pretty incredible this one you deal more damage to a mobilized Thunder Frozen enemies this one is absolutely mandatory why is that put this on your amulet it'll be 50 stronger it will actually be up to 50 more damage if it's on your amulet unfortunately you know I'm stuck with this right now what this does is we stun and freeze enemies all the time if this current setup right is 70 more damage all the time for our normal combo on top of that when you stagger a boss you know when that bar goes all the way to the max it turns blue and then you're in like the DPS phase of the boss they count as having all ailments so they they have a mobilized stun and freeze so you get an additional 35 or if it was on the amulet you would be at 150 more damage which is a huge increase in your damage when you're doing the DPS phase on a boss particularly now there are sources of immobilize there is an aspect that you can immobilize when you run through an enemy for three seconds with flame shield and then the other one is you can go all the way into Wizards meteor if you want to cast meteor I know people do it all it's doing is giving you that 35 more damage you know in the same multiplier if you want to do that more power to you I think the flame Shield one's okay because it's really easy to run through an enemy and you know you get that 35 more damage but investing three passive points and then casting that meteor waiting like the full one or two seconds whatever it takes for it to come down making sure that the monsters in that tiny little AOE just for 35 more damage I think that's a very extra like trying to scale a little bit more damage that's not necessary I'd rather make my build feel good anyway I don't really believe in the meteor Tech but you can do it it's viable don't let me uh yucker yum too much so on my amulet this one I would rather swap with my weapon right so the weapon went stronger but I take less damage from crowd control or vulnerable enemies unfortunately that amulet's properties won't show if I'm in town it's really annoying but you can see that my damage reduction from vulnerable my base for my Paragon tree is 18.5 and then I put on this aspect right here and it goes up to 49 damage reduction from vulnerable absolutely great aspect I think it's pretty mandatory for the build so yeah actually the more I think about it the more I'm talking through this I think I lucked into the right play right here because less damage taken is pretty darn good yeah I'm actually Gonna Keep it here thanks for letting me talk to you guys about that next up this one is absolutely mandatory ice shards Pierce up to four times dealing 20 less damage per subsequent enemy hit I think I have a perfect role in my stash I should uh I should just reimprint this what this does is usually ice shards will just hit one monster but with the Pierce it'll actually go through up to four monsters because we are grouping up the monsters in a tight group you know really really nice like we group them up and then it'll Pierce through all of them hit all of the monsters instead of just one of them that aspect's definitely mandatory for it to like release start feeling good next up I already went over all of the Mana ones I think these all kind of go in the same category so I'm not going to go over it you know you're going to want at least one of the Mana aspects possibly two of them when your gear is not as good and then on the offhand right here crit strikes with your core skills increase your attack speed by up to 25 for five seconds this is a huge quality life because we have no other increased attack speed in our entire build this is 25 more damage those are the aspects that I recommend for this build see what else for gear I do want to call an honorable mention here for the frostburns these can be pretty fun when you have good lucky hit but you don't have either of the other uniques if you don't have agreement and you don't have an ice heart brace you can use a frostburn on Lucky hit you have a 25 chance to freeze enemies this is okay we have that base nine percent I don't know if the stacks additively or not let's pretend it does that brings that nine percent up to 34 chance to freeze on Lucky hit that's pretty darn good right that's you're going to be freezing most of the time that you're attacking when you hit one monster so it's okay but you're giving up so much right you're you're giving up Lucky hit chance like a lot of Lucky hit chance to you know equip something like this that doesn't have any lucky hit chance on it which is kind of weird the main reason why I can't recommend actually using frostburns is because the plus four rank of ice shards if you look at the damage on my ice shards it says 3035 as I can continue killing all these fly swarms but if I take this off of 3035 goes to 2300 I lose exactly 20 damage if I lose that four levels so it's too good right that's just 20 more damage that you just you can't give up where are all these fly storms coming from so yeah that is the gear hopefully that is enough of an overview there's always tiny modifications that you can do this is my bias this is my preference I've tried the other stuff out there in my opinion for me this is the best I am very very happy with this basically I want exactly what I have but better I want more lucky hit more crit chance more crit damage vulnerable damage all that type of stuff and then speaking of this I really want to emphasize please watch this video if you don't understand how to exactly upgrade your gear I think it's a great video that uh should get some love go into a lot of detail of like hey you're trying to compare two pairs of boots this will help you get into the Mind space for for understanding that like I want to look at here I want to see like hey I got 136 crit damage but only 37 crit chance so my Critical Strike damage I'm only getting you know one third of the value for that investment right whereas I'm always hitting vulnerable enemies normally right if I have a 100 crit chance I would rather go for crit strike damage than vulnerable damage because the vulnerable damage is already a larger number and so proportionally I will get more percent increase by getting 30 crit damage than 30 vulnerable damage since I have only 37 crit chance if I get 30 crit strike damage actually only equal to like 11 crit strike damage all right speaking of which time to move on to abilities and let's uh let's teleport out of here before we get swarmed too much so remember we are specing into this build at level 50. we are not using these skills we don't actually use Frost belt or Firebolt you could if you really need to you know you could sit there and right click with your frostbolt I did this early on you don't really want to and the nice thing there is it does chill the enemies unfortunately the the way that this game works is if it doesn't say chill or freeze it does not chill or freeze so ice shards despite being called ice shards does not actually chill so frostbolt does chill although if you use the frostbolt enchantment it will but then we can't really fit that in the build too easily unfortunately you have to put two points in here so you can just put two points in a fireball and say screw it I don't care you know one point in the fireball one point into enhanced Fireball if you need to use it down here you want to put everything into ice shards and destructive ice shards you know five out of five all the way into destructive don't use greater greater's bad don't use it and then we want to level up our ice shards as much as possible after that one point into flame Shield going into shimmering flame Shield you don't really get that much out of flame Shield it makes you fully invulnerable it heals you makes you run faster it only gets 0.1 seconds per level one point in the teleport to go into shimmering teleport you get so little out of leveling this up that we just don't you know don't put more points into it we get more cooldown reduction from our gear than by putting points into it I have three points into Elemental Attunement crit strikes on Lucky hit I want to call this out like this is very optional but when it does Prock it's really nice you get that additional free defensive skill right we're using all four of these it is nice to get that sometimes 37 chance to crit then I have a 31 chance to Lucky hit and then there's a 15 chance if you lucky hit and you crit to reset a cooldown and then it has a 10 second cooldown that is a 8.2 percent right it's not nothing so we have an 8.2 percent chance on Lucky hit on crit for a 50 chance all the way going down to because we hit five times with uh ice shards 8.2 chance right now to reset a cooldown and we're going to end up attacking a lot right not to mention that you know we freeze the entire screen with our Frost Nova or with our deep freeze and then ice shards is just hitting the whole screen it's hitting a lot right 8.2 that's gonna proc enough that it will be noticeable so you know it seems really low but once your gear gets good this is procking at least like once a pack once every other pack one free flame Shield can uh can save your life and then the big boy Frost Nova this is basically our most important skill this is almost more important than ice shards we want to freeze as much as possible we want that cooldown as low as possible we go into mystical Frost Nova to make sure that we always make enemies vulnerable also makes bosses vulnerable for six seconds now we do make enemies vulnerable with destructive ice shards you know our Frost Nova is not always up sometimes we're really far away and we're just kind of cutting an elite like we just showed we get way more damage Ultra vulnerable it's 146 percent more damage multiplier with my current gear the monsters being vulnerable is too good for being able to to finish them off mystical Frost Nova is just a go-to when we kill the enemies the cooldown goes down so you know I actually have a 6.2 second cooldown here here if I kill at least four enemies one point and to align the elements this is pretty interesting one percent damage reduction against Elites for each second you haven't take damage up to 40. this goes up to three per second this would be pretty interesting if you like kite around enough the thing is we already have a good amount of damage reduction from other sources and I really don't want to rely on not taking a stray hit from a monster and I think like this is a really weird one I think it should base be maybe like two percent maybe make it do like two four six percent per point and then maybe there's a world there where it could get kind of interesting but it can save you from a single hit it's okay to have that one point but yeah I think this is kind of a really weird node and then protection like I said earlier using a cooldown grants 30 life barrier this thing is absolutely incredible this is uh yeah mandatory probably for every single sork build honestly to the point where it's like almost should be Baseline in the character after that icyville barriers last 50 longer and then the main reason for that is Frost kills then you know Snapchat series a lot of bills Don't Use SNAP freeze I explained myself earlier I think it's really really good when we talk about enchantments and Paragon boards we'll talk about devouring Blaze we just use this for the 30 more Critical Strike damage against burning enemies so which is pretty good but this is actually you know is this worth Four Points I'm actually really on the fence if this is actually worth me spending four points for 30 Critical Strike damage against burning enemies yeah you 100 could take these points out and put them into something else then down here deep freeze I don't know if you're playing this build without deep freeze you're me I really think you're missing out I really really do um like I actually just don't see a world or deep freeze doesn't make this build better yeah I just I'm trying to play Devil's Advocate right now and I just I get like maybe you'd want something else on the on the board I know some people like to play Inferno it's a little bit better than using arraignment I just don't think infernal is that good for this build D freeze hits the entire screen it freezes the screen which enables your passive I think it's too good Prime deep freeze here this is pretty good game 10 of your base Life as a barrier for six seconds for each enemy you froze big screen full of monsters you're in one of those rooms of it swarms you you freeze 10 monsters that's 4200 barrier for six seconds when it ends your non-ultimate cooldowns are reduced by 50 so your deep freeze goes for four seconds so you start off with 12 seconds on your flame shield and then after deep freeze fully ends then those eight seconds go down to four seconds boom your flame Shield's already almost ready and you're good to go then we go into permafrost icy Touch does 12 more damage to vulnerable enemies frigid Breeze here cold damage gives us Mana we already talked about that and then Frost right here which gives us nine percent damage to chilled enemies as well as 18 to Frozen enemies and then last up like I said before if you deal with Mana if you're doing single Target damage Avalanche is what you want to do and you can change this whenever you want but if you want to clear full screens shatters incredible but your Mana is going to be a little bit more dicey so that is the full skill tree regarding the Paragon board nothing is perfect I spend a lot of time with this I spent a full hour yesterday and probably about another half hour today looking at this I'm sure there's other stuff you can do I don't know if anyone's actually fully figured out a fully optimized Paragon board but I got a pretty end game on here and I'm happy with it I've done a lot of tuning right here obviously right I'm level 84. I have 16 more points that I can put in in the Diablo builds GG link I'll put in those final 16 points nothing is fully set in stone if you see something else that works for you you know feel free to use that this is what works for me so the baseboard this is what we're going for here I think airudite here is a hundred percent dropable I think you could drop these two nodes but you know a little bit more bass res why not but you could probably drop these if you need some additional points right here I think both of these are pretty good four percent max life is just really good in my first glyph socket I'm using flame feeder which does increase damage against burning targets I guess I'll just talk about the enchantments right now all right we'll do the enchantments first and then the Paragon board because this really leads into it so like I said before I shards Frozen enemy it automatically hit some mandatory for the build although I I will I do want to call this out for a honorable mention is if you are doing very very very hard content like if you're doing a tier 60 tier 70 nightmare dungeon and you're under leveled and you're not confident that you can survive enough if you're playing hardcore at all in a sork you're already using this flame Shield automatically activates when you take fatal damage only happens every two minutes you'll see a debuff happen on your bar you'll see the flame Shield go off you know boom okay I'm in danger that was my cheat death mechanic I actually recommend replacing ice shards this will make clearing way worse right the ice shards isn't hitting the whole screen Firebolt is also very defensive for us so I recommend putting flame shield in here if you are you know doing very very hard content this will save your butt many many many times uh the other honorable mention that you could use is frostbolt here direct damage applies up to 15 chill this allows you to chill with ice shards this is really good if you're fighting a boss if you're gonna fight a boss and you're just caring about that you want to use Avalanche and you want to use Frost bolt right here this is going to be your setup because more chill applies more of the Stagger meter to the boss allows you go to that DPS phase sooner but in the regular you know clearing everything you want to use the ice Arch enchantment and then the other one that is absolutely mandatory is the fireball enchantment you know I made videos about playing around with Hydra and doing other stuff but really this gives us Dependable burning damage which we need for our defensive layers so what this does is it means all of our direct damage will apply burning damage for eight seconds does very very little damage we don't care about this damage number what we care about is what it enables us to get like I said earlier is we do get diviring blaze 30 more crit strike damage against burning enemies whatever 75 if they're also immobilized yeah if you want to use meteor whatever 70 crit strike damage is not that much for how much crit strike I have right now however the Paragon board that it allows us to use right here is this one burning Instinct and we'll get into that in a second and that burning insect board is why we use the Firebolt enchantment entirely like to the point where probably most builds like probably the lightning build also does the same thing because of you know primarily the defensive layers that we get so yeah we're using flame feeder right here uh 10 more damage to burning enemies as well as increased damage to burning enemies per dexterity as you can see at my current level 15 glyph This is 43 increased damage with just 29 decks very very powerful second board here we want to go into frigid fate this gives us 15 lucky hit damage reduction from vulnerable enemies very very powerful damage reduction will save your butt lucky hit chance over here we get an additional 10 lucky hit chance between these three nodes this chilling node is very mediocre the only reason I'm going over here this is just nice like this works out nicely is I want this two dexterity nodes to activate the glyph but you know the chilling is okay the glyph that we are using here is destruction Critical Strike damage with core skills core skills are our ice shards as well as 12 more damage with critical strikes and then oppressive right here for more vulnerable damage as well as damage reduction from vulnerable enemies really really good for our builds with the extra points I'll take all these dangler nodes for more damage reduction so you know we get four plus four eight percent damage reduction right here pretty good so yeah we're using burning Instinct right here this is the big value that we get from using the fireball enchant what this is is Cinders right here big damage to burning enemies this one's gigantic damage reduction from breeding enemies right here we get eight percent here as well as another four for 12 damage reduction from burning enemies then we come around here to safeguard damage reduction from Elites so we get 23 damage reduction from Elites right here and a hundred flat armor this node is absolutely cracked it's one of the best nodes in all the Paragon boards for sork they have stacked this board to the point where yeah they basically make Fireball like a mandatory enchant if you're playing a fire build obviously you don't use that but yeah this board is absolutely incredible damage to burning enemies and damage to Elites so I get 36 damage to Elites from this one node and another five percent right here like absolutely crazy crazy crack nodes not to mention I can get you know another 16 plus 10 I can get another 26 with these four nodes right here and then up here another 12 damage reduction from enemies that are burning you know I will take those nodes when I get more points this board is super super overloaded and then the glyph that we're using here is control this glyph is pretty insane Lane this glyph says you deal increased damage to slowed or chilled enemies which we don't do we don't slow or chill due to the wording right you can tell slow is not chill chill is not slow that was a total mind twister to me that like doesn't make sense to me but yeah chilled enemies are not slowed stunned or frozen enemies we do stun and freeze enemies so that's 20 more damage as well as damage to crowd control targets we're crowd controlling all the time right so that's a 65 more damage at my current investment so crazy crazy setup right here and then the last board that we go for here is the enchantment Master sounds like an 80s Adventure movie big reason why we want to go into this is this is really the only tree that gives us anything of value actually icefall would be incredible I would love to use icefall but we don't chill now we could chill with the frostball enchantment we can't use icefall in this build I really wish like everything chilled if I was doing a cold skill is what it is because of that we are forced to use enchantment Master there is not another skill that we can use the nice thing about enchantment Master here though is Elemental is pretty good we get more max life we get non-physical damage element balance is pretty good more damage more intelligence really got to get a little bit more decks here I'll have you know in a few more levels so ruinous this is nine more points to me and then I have seven points on top of that this note alone gives me 36 damage so this is very high value you know against Elites which is what matters so that's probably where I'm gonna end up and then I'm just gonna fill out you know the nice to have nodes on top of that and then yeah right here for our final glyph we are using Elementalist the reason why I'm using this like we don't really care about the Top Line Paragon nodes get more bonus this one's kind of weird it didn't work for a lot of the nodes like this doesn't boost the damage reduction against burning enemies I don't know exactly what wording it needs to to activate but if we deal fire cold or lightning damage they all can increase by up to five percent here's the thing Firebolt enchant fire everything else ice shards well I guess your AFK when you're looking at Paragon board anything else that we do cold damage and then the nice thing teleport is actually lightning damage teleport hits so we can activate that and it actually lasts for 10 seconds so as long as we do do that full rotation every 10 seconds you know we're going to be teleporting on and off the monster all the time we're always going to be doing all three elements it's a 15 more damage multiplier it's 15 more damage that's you know really really good so exploit here is probably what I'm going to be leveling up as I run more nightmare dungeons this one's great right it's a dexterity one I have a lot of dexterity in here how the damage works out you know it's only 10 more against vulnerable targets it gets a lot more damage on the prefix than the elementalists that I have here so I think it's going to work out to be very very similar damage I have a lot more access to dexterity here than intelligence you can see I have like some janky kind of like one-off nodes here with intelligence and instead of that with my normal path I can actually get the full dexterity so exploit's just gonna be better on the points and I think the damage is going to work out to be the same so you know in the final build I'll put exploit in here that's what I'm going to level up next do you want to call honorable mention for a couple things that you can do like I said earlier if you really don't want to use the Firebolt enchant if you're using other enchants you can use Hydra up here with summon Hydra to guarantee burning the enemy obviously this isn't going to consistently burn the enemy for the damage reduction but it is really good for single Target you know getting that additional damage there you know and that opens up using like the frost bolt enchant and getting that consistent Chill on top of that for just one point you can use blizzard right here blizzard is a great additional point that you can use unfortunately right we run into the limit of our skill assignment and so you're probably going to have to drop like ice armor there's a world where you could drop teleport like I would not want to play it without teleport but if you don't have agreement of the infinite you know you have good enough movement speed you don't mind playing without teleport you could drop that use blizzard instead and use a lot more like patient kiting deliberate play style and that's a viable thing that you can do as well I would not drop any other skill if you're not using a Raymond I actually think teleport is probably the first to go sadly enough I think all the other ones are pretty darn mandatory oh and then the other thing if you are playing very very defensive drop devouring Blaze especially with how low my crit chance is this is not incredible for my damage you can put those points right one two three four squeeze a point out of something else that you think is kind of lower value get three points into warmth this one's pretty good right you heal point nine percent of your life for each nearby burning enemy you know if you're burning 10 enemies that's 10 of your life regen per second with no limit at all you're able to really keep your life up while you're fighting gigantic packs of monsters with warmth this is a thing that hardcore players are doing if you really want to play as safe as possible I think this is a great option to try to fit into as many builds as possible it is that powerful of a node okay that was over two hours of recording we'll get that a little bit shorter for you guys the video that you just watched thank you for watching thank you for the interest in watching my ice shards sorceress guide sorcerer sorcerer I'm always going to say sorceress um thank you for watching my I shards guide I know there's many out there this is like the meta sork build you know there's a couple things in here that I've worked through that you know I just want to share with you guys my thought process and what I've learned through my journey and I think that's what really matters as we try to learn and play new builds and you know go through our experiences we play these games so yeah thank you so so much for watching this and especially if you made it here huge thank you like comment subscribe whatever you want to do thank you so much of course to the patrons that make this all possible yeah hope you guys are enjoying Diablo 4. I'm really excited for season one we got a podcast coming up on this Sunday you know after this video is posted there's a lot of stuff coming up I'm really happy that this game is out and I really hope blizzard does a good job and helps it realize its final potential so yeah thanks for watching again and I'll see you later [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause]

Channel: subtractem

Views: 93,205

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Id: 0wnS-BR4asI

Length: 50min 50sec (3050 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 15 2023