The Sorcerer is a fantastic class for newcomers and Diablo 4 veterans alike. Their skills are easy to understand, deal great damage, and offer some form of utility that makes Sorcerers fantastic in a group. Arguably the most overlooked build archetype for Sorcerer is ice, focusing on freezing targets and generating massive Barriers to stay alive.

Related: Diablo 4: Rogue Leveling Build

Ice Shards is a fantastic skill to build around as an ice Sorcerer, giving you access to some absurd single-target DPS and clearspeed all at once. This guide will showcase how you can use the Sorcerer's Ice Shards to level through the campaign, progress to the endgame, and turn Ice Shards into a powerful endgame build with minimal changes.

Updated July 26, 2023 by Charles Burgar: Season of the Malignant has made some major balance changes to Diablo 4, most of which have hurt the Sorcerer's survivability and overall DPS. With that said, this season's Malignant Hearts are so powerful that it more than makes up for these nerfs, allowing our Ice Shards build to clear endgame content with little issue. We've updated this build with Malignant Heart recommendations, updated values for passives and Aspects, and updated our D4Builds link with recommended gems and item affixes.

Build Overview

This build focuses on making Ice Shards as powerful as possible, inflicting as much chill and vulnerability as possible to ramp up our damage. We'll be using Ice Shard's chain augment to have it ricochet while you have Barrier, something we easily acquire through Ice Armor and cooldown skill usage. You'll have access to four defensive skills, generate Barrier constantly, and clear hordes of monsters with little issue. The best part is nearly every core Legendary for this build can be crafted, making this fantastic for leveling.

Ice Shards is also a great build for endgame content with some investment. We use Frost Nova to inflict vulnerability on targets, allowing you to scale vulnerability damage sources to multiply your damage output against tankier Elites and bosses. And for content where that isn't enough, we scale critical stats through the use of the Fire Bolt enchantment and the Devouring Blaze passive. If speccing for critical damage isn't your cup of tea, you can also use Frozen Orb and its respective enchantment for easy freeze and vulnerability generation.

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Skills And Passives

Skill Explanations

Ice Shards is the star of the show for this build. It has solid single-target damage since each shard deals 35% weapon damage per shard, but we can turn this into an AoE skill quite easily. Enhanced Ice Shards give this skill a chance to ricochet when hitting a target. If they're frozen, it always ricochets. We then take Greater Ice Shards so enemies count as frozen while you have Barrier. This means your Ice Shards always ricochet and deal 25% more damage. If you pair this effect with the "Ice Shards pierce" Legendary affix, your Ice Shards will duplicate when you have a Barrier. This makes Ice Shards arguably the best add clear skill for Sorcerers.

While leveling, it's a good idea to pair this with Frozen Orb. You'll want to use this in your second enchantment slot once it's unlocked at level 30, as it will auto-cast this skill on occasion. We take the Enhanced and Destructive augments to let Frozen Orb inflict vulnerable through its explosion. You can use a Legendary affix to make Frozen Orb explode multiple times per cast, allowing you to reliably inflict vulnerability against bosses. Endgame players are better off unspeccing out of Frozen Orb and Frost Bolt, speccing into Fire Bolt and the Devouring Blaze passive to scale Ice Shard's critical stats instead. But for leveling, Frozen Orb is much less skill-point intensive and a great way to trigger your cold skill passives.

Frost Bolt is solely used for restoring your mana through its Glinting augment. The skill itself is mediocre.

Flame Shield is a panic button for when things go wrong. Cast this to break out of CC effects and become invincible for a couple of seconds. The Enhanced and Shimmering augments will buff your movement speed and restore HP when it's cast, respectively. For leveling, use Ice Armor instead, as you'll want as many sources of Barrier as possible while leveling. You can also opt to drop points from Flame Shield and invest them into more damage or survivability passives once you reach Diablo 4's endgame.

Ice Armor is great for leveling since it makes all of your damage generate Barrier, making Ice Shards always ricochet. In the endgame, you'll want to drop this skill and spec into Flame Shield instead. A "+X rank to defensive skills" affix on an amulet will let you use Ice Armor without investing any skill points into it.

Frost Nova is your main source of vulnerability against bosses, although Frozen Orb can do a surprisingly good job if you opt to use it. We use its Enhanced and Mystical augments to make this skill inflict vulnerability on all frozen targets, greatly buffing our single-target DPS against bosses. Put spare skill points into this skill to reduce its cooldown. With enough cooldown reduction and +Frost Nova affixes on your gear, you can drop Frost Nova's cooldown to just under ten seconds.

Teleport is a staple of all Sorcerer builds. It makes leveling much faster, gives you a CC cleanse, and lets you travel over obstacles and uneven terrain. Keep an eye out for gear that places ranks into Teleport, as we can lower its cooldown to roughly five seconds with some investment. This skill also acts as a CC tool if you use the Raiment of the Infinite Unique chest armor.

Deep Freeze is also worth mentioning. If you struggle with mana sustain and general survivability, grab this skill and its two augments. Use this as a panic button or a DPS setup to restore all of your core resources. Endgame builds that opt to use Shatter over Avalanche will also want to consider using Deep Freeze.

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Passives

This build is all about freezing targets, inflicting vulnerability, and gaining Barrier as often as possible. The endgame variant also focuses on scaling critical damage through certain burn-related passives. Crucial passives to this build can be found below:

• Elemental Attunement (1/3): Gives you a chance to reset one Defensive skill cooldown. This is great for resetting Frost Nova.
• Glass Cannon (3/3): You deal and receive more damage.
• Precision Magic (3/3): +15% Lucky Hit chance. Mandatory for triggering certain passives and affixes.
• Protection (3/3): Gain a 30% Barrier upon using any cooldown skill. This includes all Defensive skills, notably Teleport and Frost Nova.
• Snap Freeze (3/3): Ice Shards occasionally freeze targets, proccing the damage bonus of your Hoarfrost passive. This also has synergy with the Iceheart Brais Unique pants.
• [Endgame] Devouring Blaze (3/3): Deal +21% more critical damage to burning targets. If they're immobilized, this increases to 30%.
• All Ultimate Frost Passives (3/3): This buffs your damage against frozen targets, vulnerable targets, and Elites. You also have a chance to restore mana from hitting vulnerable targets.
• Avalanche (Key Passive): Cold skill damage has a chance of enhancing your next Ice Shards cast, making it cost no mana while buffing its damage by 40%.

In essence, we're grabbing a ton of passives that scale our damage while targets are frozen, vulnerable, or burning. All three effects are easy to trigger through Ice Shards and Frost Nova. So long as you get enough cooldown reduction and +ranks to both skills, you should be able to cast Frost Nova and Ice Shards whenever you see fit.

One point of contention with Ice Shards builds is if you should use Avalanche or Shatter. In our view, Avalanche is what most players will want to use. It almost single-handedly fixes the Sorcerer's mana sustain issues while leveling and even gives us a noticeable DPS increase. Shatter deals more damage in endgame content but requires multiple sources of mana sustain to remain consistent. If you have best-in-slot gear, Shatter will perform better. For everyone else, use Avalanche.

Paragon Board

This Paragon Board showcased above is on a level 83 character with max renown and every Altar of Lilith discovered.

Our Paragon Board focuses on scaling our Intelligence and Dexterity to increase our skill damage and critical chance, respectively. Intelligence is more important than Dexterity, but you'll end up with a fairly even spread once the board is fleshed out.

Why We Don't Use Burning Embers

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We don't take the Burning Embers Legendary node because we simply aren't doing enough burning damage for it to make sense. We inflict burn through Firebolt to gain access to Devouring Blaze's absurdly high critical damage modifier. It also lets us use the Flamefeeder Glyph over Tactician for more damage scaling. Our DoTs aren't doing any damage, even with this node allocated, so we avoid taking it entirely.

We start by inserting the Burning Embers board into our tree, as this gives us access to some amazing rare nodes and a great Glyph socket location for scaling Dexterity. We branch out to the left and right Gates on this board to socket the Frigid Fate and Icefall boards, respectively. Grab the Legendary nodes and Glyph sockets on both boards.

As for Glyphs, we're using four since we only have four boards. A level 90+ character can opt to socket the Enchanter board and grab yet another Glyph socket. We use the following Glyphs:

• Exploit (Starter Board): This gives a ton of Vulnerability damage, arguably the best damage bucket in the game. You can swap this Glyph with Enchanter when you're first speccing your tree.
• Destruction (Burning Embers): Heavily scales our critical damage on Ice Shards, allowing us to melt Elites and even bosses when we crit.
• Enchanter (Frigid Fate): Scales our non-physical damage by a whopping 65% with our setup. This is additive with most damage sources, but this bonus is too great to miss out on.
• Flamefeeder (Icefall): Scales our damage against burning targets, additive with the Enchanter Glyph's non-physical damage.

In essence, we scale critical damage, vulnerability damage, and non-physical damage. This allows us to pump out some amazing damage when we critically strike a vulnerable target, something we do quite often thanks to our gear setup we explain in the next section.

Enchantments

We'll be giving two enchantment setups for this build since the leveling and endgame variants are quite different. For leveling, Fireball is fantastic since it works off any kill, not just frozen enemies. This greatly increases your clearspeed with Ice Shards. We also recommend grabbing Frozen Orb since it's amazing at freezing targets and inflicting vulnerability.

Once you start to obtain ranks in Frost Nova and general cooldown reduction affixes, replace Fireball with Ice Shards to automatically damage frozen enemies with free Ice Shard projectiles. You'll also want to use Fire Bolt once you start scaling critical stats, as this will cause Ice Shards to inflict burn and activate your Devouring Blaze and Flamefeeder effects.

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Related: Diablo 4: Potion Upgrade Guide

Recommended Gear

For harder endgame content, replace Iceheart Brais with Legendary pants that have +Life and DR affixes. As for the Legendary effect, you can either use the Fortune or Frostblitz Aspects.

This setup is for the endgame variant of Ice Shards and is what you'll be trying to achieve for most of your leveling experience. While leveling, you'll want to obtain Piercing Cold from the Dead Man's Dredge dungeon. This is crucial for the build, as it allows your Ice Shards to pierce multiple targets. If your Ice Shards ricochet, both effects trigger simultaneously and cause your projectiles to duplicate themselves. This leads to some absurd burst DPS if you can clump enemies together.

We can achieve this by using the Raiment of the Infinite, a Unique chest item that causes your Teleport ability to pull nearby targets on top of you. This lets us duplicate our Ice Shards with a great deal of consistency. You can create even more projectiles if you install Piercing Cold onto a two-handed staff, but we opted to use a dual-wield setup for this build to scale our cooldown reduction through an off-hand focus.

Mana Sustain And Critical Chance

Mana sustain is a serious issue on Sorcerer, so we dedicate two Aspects to our resource economy. Prodigy's Aspect grants mana whenever you use a cooldown, including Teleport and Frost Nova. This is more than enough while leveling, but for the endgame you'll want to also use Frozen Memories to gain an additional free Ice Shards cast whenever the Avalanche passive triggers. You'll frequently have free Ice Shards casts and have a backup mana generator for when that doesn't work.

Our mana sustain is so good that we can comfortably use the Elementalist Aspect on our amulet. This gives a whopping 60% additive critical chance if we cast Ice Shards at or above 100 mana. Paired with some critical chance affixes on our rings and gloves, we always crit. Just be sure that you have maximum mana before you start blasting a boss.

Other Aspects

Beyond those core Aspects, the only other item worth considering is Iceheart Brais, a pair of Unique pants that allow you to trigger Frost Nova by slaying frozen targets. This is incredibly strong for small tilesets with dozens of enemies, but much of Diablo 4's content tends to have light enemy density. As a result, you might prefer to swap off these pants for a Legendary pair instead to benefit from more survivability stats. It's up to you.

Speaking of survivability, we use Ghostwalker to run through enemies we pull in from Raiment and Disobedience to greatly scale our Armor. This is always at maximum stacks since we release so many projectiles. The rest of our Aspects focus on raw damage. We always have Barrier and hit stunned enemies, so we recommend using Conceited and Control, respectively.

Malignant Hearts

For Season of the Malignant, you can socket Malignant Hearts into your jewelry in place of standard gems. These hearts are comparable to Legendary Aspects and can greatly improve the strength of your build, including Ice Shards. Here is what we recommend using this season:

• Tal'Rasha (Vicious): For each unique element you deal damage with, you deal 12% increased damage for 10 seconds.
• The Picana (Vicious): Critical strikes electrically charge the enemy for 2.5 seconds, causing lightning to arc between them and any other charged enemies. Damage scales with item power.
• The Malignant Pact (Wrathful): Cycle through a Malignant bonus every 20 kills:
  • Vicious: +20% attack speed
  • Devious: Core and Basic Skills have a 15% chance to fully restore your Primary resource.
  • Brutal: Every 21 seconds, gain a Barrier that absorbs damage. The strength of this Barrier scales with item power.

• [Alternative] Tempting Fate (Vicious): You gain 60% Critical Strike Damage but your Non-Critical Strikes deal 15% less damage.
  • Use this over Malignant Pact if you dislike rotating buffs.

Tal'Rasha is a massive damage boost if you can find a way to damage targets with cold, lightning, and fire damage. Ice Shards deals cold damage, and Fire Bolt allows us to deal fire damage at all times. This grants a 24% damage bonus, which we can boost to 36% thanks to our next Malignant Heart.

The Picana will electrocute targets you critically hit, releasing chain lightning to other electrocuted foes. Since Ice Shards ricochets between foes, it is incredibly easy to tag an entire pack of enemies with this effect. The damage from this heart is significant and further boosts the build's DPS against groups. This heart also counts as lightning damage, allowing us to reach three stacks of Tal'Rasha.

The Malignant Pact is a surprisingly powerful Malignant Heart if you're willing to micromanage its buffs. This heart will provide a potent buff to your character that rotates every 20 kills. While that might sound bad for dungeon farming, Ice Shards doesn't struggle in this department. We're mostly using this heart for the Devious bonus, giving Ice Shards a flat 15% chance to fully restore our mana. This is significant because it means we can reliably cap our mana during boss fights to maximize the benefits of the Elementalist Aspect and Elemental Dominance passive. It also lets you swap from the Avalanche key passive to Shatter for even more damage. Kill enough enemies to proc Devious, start the boss fight, then melt the target with your infinite mana pool.

If you hate rotating buffs, Tempting Fate is a great alternative. This gives you a sizable boost to critical damage at the cost of non-critical strike damage. The Elementalist Aspect ensures that we always crit, so the downside of this heart is fairly minimal.

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Leveling The Build

Leveling an Ice Shards build is fairly easy. You'll want to use Chain Lightning and Arc Lash for the first few levels, as these skills have aggressive damage scaling compared to your other options. Invest points into Chain Lightning itself to increase your damage.

Around level 15, you'll unlock the "Legacy of the Magi" quest that unlocks the enchantment system. Finish this quest and socket Fireball into your first socket. You can swap to Ice Shards now if Chain Lightning starts to feel weak. Grab Ice Armor and Frost Nova to generate Barrier and vulnerability, respectively. You'll also want to grab the Protection passive in the Conjuration section, as this passive grants a Barrier whenever you use a cooldown skill. This will allow Ice Shards to always ricochet.

Level 30 is when you'll unlock your second enchantment slot. Socket Frozen Orb, Ice Shards, or Blizzard depending on your setup. We used Frozen Orbs for our pre-release playthrough and it felt smooth. You'll want to grab the Frigid Breeze node near the Ultimate section and put points into Precision Magic in Conjuration. This will cause your Ice Shards and Frozen Orb to occasionally restore your mana. Grab Avalanche once you hit level 35.

At this point, you'll want to flesh out your tree by grabbing all the cold passives, investing points into Ice Shards and Frost Nova, and equipping useful Legendary affixes. Complete the Dead Man's Dredge dungeon and craft a Piercing Cold Legendary, as this effect is a game-changer for Ice Shards' clearspeed. If mana is becoming an issue, clear the Witchwater dungeon in Hawezar to unlock the Prodigy's Aspect. This will restore mana whenever you use a defensive skill, effectively half your skill bar.

Once you reach endgame and can't scale your damage any further, you'll want to switch to a critical variant of the build, equipping Fire Bolt as your secondary enchantment and speccing into the Devouring Blaze passive to greatly increase your critical hit damage. With enough investment into your Glyphs and Paragon Board, this build will have no issues farming Diablo 4's hardest endgame content.

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