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Season 8 - Belial's ReturnEndgame
Welcome to the Ice Shards Sorcerer Endgame Guide! This build was a Frost machine gun that has been upgraded to a shotgun.
Azurewrath is the star of the show in this build and it's focused around the Lucky Hit affix. Hail of Verglas was just added to the game and provides a large damage bonus. You will be casting Ice Shards combined with Teleport to easily move around the battlefield and stack Enlightenment. Ice Blades provides additional Attack Speed thanks to Invoked Ice Blades. Frost Nova will apply Mystical Frost Nova. Unstable Currents will provide an Attack Speed bonus and prevents your Crackling Energy from expiring to keep Ceaseless Conduit and Convulsions active.
The Ice Shards Sorcerer has great Defensive Skills at your disposal. Flame Shield will make you Immune for a few seconds to avoid damage along with providing Unstoppable. Teleport won't be on your skill bar but will replace your evade and will be used for Tal Rasha's Iridescent Loop's Shock Skill.
Ice Shards Sorcerer Endgame Setup
Season 8 - Belial's Return
Season 8 is the Season of Belial's Return. It allows you to tap into Boss Powers obtained from World, Event, and Lair Bosses throughout Sanctuary. The new seasonal mechanic, Apparition Incursions, is available at any difficulty level and gives you the opportunity to unlock a subset of these powers very early on. Various Apparition Monsters appear in these special timed events throughout Sanctuary. Defeating these monsters spawns 1 of 10 Apparition Bosses to hunt you down and defeating them grants you their Boss Power. After defeating the first Boss, continue the event for a chance to fight a second Apparition Boss, after which Belial himself joins the fray.
There are 24 Boss Powers available and the first time you defeat one of these Bosses, you claim their power for yourself. Boss Powers each have Main and Modifier effects to boost your build. 13 are available in all difficulties (from Apparition Incursions and World Bosses), while 11 can only be acquired in Torment 1 difficulty or higher from Lair Bosses and Lilith. You can equip 1 Main Power and 3 Modifiers, and all powers can be upgraded up to Rank 20, increasing the potency of both the Main and Modifier effect. You use Spectral Ash to upgrade these powers, dropped from Apparition Incursions and by defeating any Bosses. Boss Powers also scale with your Paragon Level, growing stronger as you progress.
Urivar's Lobbed Bombs - Main: This provides Cooldown Reduction for quality of life.
Ice Shards Sorcerer Endgame Boss Powers
Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.
Season 8 - Belial's Return
Ice Shards Sorcerer Endgame Skill Tree
Teleport is a useful Enchantment for adding more mobility and for Enlightenment. This replaces your evade with a shorter range Teleport than doesn't make you Unstoppable.
Familiar is for more damage, this helps scale Enlightenment with Enchantment Master.
Ice Shards Sorcerer Endgame Enchantments
Season 8 - Belial's Return
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.
← Use the slider for progression steps →
Ice Shards Sorcerer Endgame Paragon
To Level 15
To Level 46
Season 8 - Belial's Return
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
Alternative choices
Season 8 - Belial's Return
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.
Ice Shards Sorcerer Endgame Mercenaries
Season 8 - Belial's Return
To enable the Ice Shards Sorcerer build to perform optimally, hunt for these stats on your gear with good rolls and aim to Temper ⚒️ & Masterwork Crit ↑ them accordingly. The green arrow ↑ indicates which affix is most impactful to Masterwork Crit, and it does not indicate how many Masterwork Crits you need on that particular affix. 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
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.
Season 8 - Belial's Return
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.
If you are fresh in Torment 1 coming from a leveling guide, this is where you begin. Since only some Aspects can be guaranteed from Dungeon unlocks for the Codex of Power, focus on acquiring the additional aspects via gambling with Murmuring Obols.
Starter Ice Shards Sorcerer Gear
Starter Ice Shards Sorcerer Skills
The goal here is to progress through the Torment difficulties as you unlock Ancestrals, Paragon points, all Legendary Aspects, Temper mods and the most important Uniques to pilot this build. Some Legendary Aspects are used temporarily to fill slots that may be replaced with more Unique items later on.
Ancestral Ice Shards Sorcerer Gear
Ancestral Ice Shards Sorcerer Skills
This is the final version of the build's progression, including all regular Unique items, Mythic Uniques, Legendary Aspects, Temper mods and Masterworking, leaving you with a great all-rounder build for all content in the game. Additional variants use this as a baseline to optimize around certain activities.
Mythic Ice Shards Sorcerer Gear
Mythic Ice Shards Sorcerer Skills
This Speedfarming variant optimizes the build for easy activities like Helltides, Whispers, Nightmare Dungeons and lower Pit Tiers after you have finished the Mythic variant and reached a plateau in your progression.
Speedfarm Ice Shards Sorcerer Gear
Speedfarm Ice Shards Sorcerer Skills
This setup optimizes the build to push the highest possible Tiers in The Pit after you have finished the Mythic variant and reached a plateau in your progression.
Pit Push Ice Shards Sorcerer Gear
Pit Push Ice Shards Sorcerer Skills
Season 8 - Belial's Return
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.
Enlightenment adds the multipliers that apply to each individual element together while active. This means you gain extra value from the Non-Phys mulitplier of Flamefeeder and you do not worry about the additive value on the glyph. Familiar Enchantment applies all elements for Enchantment Master to benefit Enlightenment. Elements will provide a cold damage bonus or add both fire and lightning together depending on which is active when Enlightenment is active.
Ceh provides additional summons that make enemies Vulnerable for you and count as stacks of Primordial Binding to increase your Mana Regeneration. Ideally you combine it with Neo or Nagu but can get started with Cir.You need a Mana Per Second roll on your boots to feel the most comfortable while stacking Primordial Binding. Frigid Breeze and Lucky Hit Resource Restoration tempers on jewelry or as an affix on offhand can help if you don't have all the tools needed.
The Skill Tree featured may gain Skill Ranks from different sources such as Harlequin Crest. Check the Build Variants for the correct setup for each step of your journey. Click here or picture of the Sorcerer on gear setups to pull up the full planner and scroll through the variants with a drop down menu.
There are two benefits to Shredding Blades that are separated by a period. The second benefit gives you a multiplier to all damage dealt to Vulnerable enemies whether you have Ice Blades or not.
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:
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.
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:
Read up more on Attack Speed in our dedicated guide by Ava.
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:
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.
Season 8 - Belial's Return
Coming Soon.
Season 8 - Belial's Return
The Ice Shards Sorcerer Endgame build is an ice shotgun that is a fun and engaging playstyle where positioning matters.
Season 8 - Belial's Return
Written by pandaglassja****w