Ice Shards Sorcerer Leveling Guide (1-50)

Overview

• Ice Shards is a great leveling ability once you get things ramped up. We recommend going Chain Lightning until you grab you're core leveling aspects and hit level 15.
• This build scales quite well into the late game, so we highly recommend this build since it will be cheap to transition into the end game variation.
• This build has great survivability since it utilizes both Ice Armor and Flame Shield. It has good mobility with teleport, and also good CC with Frost Nova. This build is very well-rounded and will be good at clearing all kinds of content.
  

Skill Progression

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Enchantment Slots

• The first enchantment slot we are going to use is Fireball. This grants us some AoE that this build lacks. Leveling may feel a bit slow up to this point, but this is where we can start speeding things up
  

• The second enchantment slot is Ice Shards. This will also be another huge AoE bonus since Frost Nova is a large AoE that freezes everything. So, for every frozen target, we launch a single Ice Shard.
  

Leveling Aspects (Codex of Power)

These aspects can be grabbed throughout your leveling process and should be thrown on Jewelry slots when leveling.

Offensive

• The first aspect we want to pick up is the Aspect of Piercing Cold. This can be found early on in Act 1 in the Dead Man’s Dredge dungeon in Fractured Peaks. This will help with the lack of AoE that this build has. This will also benefit us greatly later on when we get our second enchantment slot. This should be slotted in a ring.
  

• Another important aspect for this build is the Aspect of Control. This aspect increases our damage to Immobilized, Stunned, or Frozen enemies by 30-40%. This has some cool synergy with Frozen Shards. The skill point we place for Greater Ice Shards causes our Ice Shards to act as if the target is Frozen whenever we have a Barrier Active. So, as long as we keep our Barrier’s up, we will get this damage bonus on our Frost Shards. This should be slotted in your Amulet.
  

Resource

• Another aspect that we can grab is the Prodigy’s Aspect in the Witchwater dungeon in Hawezar. This aspect grants us a burst of mana when we use a cooldown. Since we are using 4 cooldowns in this build, we can manage our mana pretty well with this aspect. This should be slotted in your Ring.
  

Other Useful Aspects for the Codex

Offensive:

• Another aspect that we can grab in Act 3 is the Storm Swell Aspect from the Onyx Hold Dungeon in the Dry Steppes. This aspect grants us a damage increase to Vulnerable enemies whenever we have a barrier. Since we have high barrier uptime and vulnerability with Frost Nova, we get a lot of value out of this aspect. We will not be using this when we are leveling since our 3 jewelry slots are already taken. Other gear gets replaced too often to warrant enchanting an armor or weapons lot.
  

Defensive:

• Aspect of the Protector can be found in Act 1 in the Lost Archives dungeon in Fractured Peaks. This aspect gives us a Barrier whenever we get damaged by an elite. It can only occur every 30 seconds but is an incredible power to use since you can pick it up early on and it is quite useful. Could fill a defensive slot while you are farming for a specific aspect.
  

• The Snowveiled Aspect grants us Unstoppable for a few seconds when casting Ice Armor. This is an important aspect since we do not have a source of Unstoppable. We can use this if we are in a tight spot that we need to get out of since it can remove Crowd Control and makes us invulnerable to CC for the duration. This can be found in Sarat’s Lair dungeon in Scosglen.
  

• Aspect of Disobedience is another fantastic aspect. This is an important one to grab since it is utilized by many builds in the game. This can be found in the Halls of the Damned in Kehjistan. Whenever you deal damage, you gain a stacking buff that increases your armor, ranging from .25-.5% per stack.
  

Other Helpful Aspects

These aspects could help us when leveling. You can equip these if they are on an item better than what you currently have equipped, but when you are ready to replace it, make sure to extract these powers since they will be useful later on in the game.

Offensive:

• Another aspect that synergizes well with Aspect of Control is the Conceited Aspect, which grants us a damage bonus whenever we have a Barrier up. Unfortunately, this drop is RNG, but if we find it, it can provide a substantial DPS boost.
  

• Another good aspect for this build is the Accelerating Aspect. This makes our crits with Core Skills grant a large attack speed bonus. This is a nice DPS increase that allows us to pump out more Frost Shards.
  

Utility

• Since we are running the Avalanche Key Passive, any increase to Lucky Hit Chance is welcome. A good option for this is the Aspect of Fortune. This sudoku grants us an increase to our Lucky Hit Chance when we have a Barrier active.
  

Stat Priorities

Gems

Alternative Leveling Guides

• Chain Lightning is a great build early game, but tends to fall of quite a bit later on. We recommend using this up until around level 15, when you can use the Fireball enchant with Ice Shards. If Ice Shards still feels slow, you can stick with Chain Lightning, but we do recommend switching to Ice Shards by no later than lvl 30.