Diablo IV Season 1: Best Ice Sorceror Skills and Aspects

Diablo IV’s Season of the Malignant is upon us, the new patch notes are out and players are not happy. Nerfs galore have hindered many builds and rendered even more useless in their current state. Each class is going to need to adjust their builds as well as their skill tree in order to compensate.  The sorcerer was one of the hardest hit all things considered, so we’ll take you through the best new Ice sorcerer skill tree and why below.

Diablo IV Season 1: Best Sorcerer Skills

Sorcerers rely heavily on crit damage and vulnerable in order to make up for their lack of strength and HP. These two factors were hit incredibly hard in the patch notes. Critical damage went down 17% and vulnerable damage went down a giant 40%. Crowd controlled enemies damage (a huge number to the sorcerer) also went down 30%. In addition, you have total armor down by 30%, damage reduction from close and distant enemies reduced (meaning you take more damage) by 20%. Damage reduction from burning, poisoned and bleeding by even more at 25%. So, not only did we lose our armor, but we are taking more damage on top of it.

If that wasn’t enough, we are also doing less damage to enemies (yup, that’s on top of taking more damage on less armor) with the following:

Aspect of Disobedience maximum stacks reduced from 100 to 60, reducing maximum Bonus Armor % from 25%-50% to 15%-30%. Aspect of Retribution bonus damage to Stunned reduced from 20-40% to 10-20%. Exploiter’s Aspect bonus damage to Unstoppable reduced from 20-50% to 20-40%.

All of this, I almost forgot – our cooldowns have increased. Deep breaths, calm down. I have you covered. For all these changes, below I’ll walk you through how to allocate all 58 skill points (including those from max renown) and which two will be used for enchantments. Aspects will also be included. Take a look below.

1. Frost Bolt – 1 point apply chill to enemies. Upgrade to Enhanced to give a 15% chance to have the bolt explode on chilled enemies. Then Glinting to generate 4 mana every time it hits a chilled OR frozen enemy.
2. Fire Bolt – 1 point. Burns enemies. Use this as one enchantment as all direct damage hit to enemies applies burning to them. Works with our other skills to increase damage
3. Ice Shards – 5 points. Max this it’s our primary attack. Also upgrade it to Enhanced shards to make them ricochet off frozen enemies. Further upgrade to Greater shards to makes your barriers treat ALL enemies as if they are frozen. This makes shards bounce off everyone when you have a barrier, which we will a lot with this build.
4. Glass Cannon – 3 points to get the max increased damage. Our barriers will offset the damage we take
5. Ice Armor – 1 point only. Upgrade it to Enhanced to get the extra mana regen while active at 25 % faster.
6. Frost Nova – 5 points for the max cool down. Upgrade to Enhanced and Mystical to get more damage to vulnerable enemies with the bonus to bosses.
7. Align the Elements – 1 point only to get to Protection
8. Protection – 3 points to get the buff where a cooldown gives 30% life as barrier 3 seconds. Every time we use Frost Nova or Ice Armor we will have an extra barrier.
9. Icy Veil – 1 point to make barrier last longer. Skip any more to get the bonuses from Perma, Hoar, Frigid and Icy below as we’ll have a lot of barrier from others.
10. Cold Front – 3 points as hitting enemies while you have a barrier will apply 24% more chill
11. Blizzard – 1 point only to chill enemies. Upgrade to Enhanced to do 25% more damage to frozen enemies. Wizards Blizzard to make core skills use 20% less mana when a blizzard is active.
12. Inner Flames – 1 point only just to get to devouring blaze
13. Devouring Blaze – 1 point to get 7% crit damage to burning enemies. Since all our attacks doing damage will burn enemies, all crit attacks get the extra bonus.
14. Fiery Surge – 3 points to get us a boost as killing burning enemies gets us a mana regen by 45% for 3 seconds. Since enemies will be burning when we kill them, our mana will basically be increased by the 45% all the time.
15. Icy Touch – 3 points to get 12% cold damage to vulnerable enemies.
16. Permafrost – 3 points to get the max 15% damage to elites.
17. Hoarfrost – 3 points to get damage up 9% to chilled, 18% to frozen enemies.
18. Frigid – 3 points to get cold damage to vulnerable enemies give a 20% chance to regen 15 mana.
19. Deep Freeze ultimate. Upgrade to Prime to give you a barrier of 10% of base life for 6 seconds for each enemy it froze. Then Supreme which will reset ALL your non-ultimate cooldowns when Deep Freeze is over.
20. Precision Magic – 3 points to get max 15% more of a crit. chance.
21. Avalanche Key Passive to allow up to a 10% chance to have ALL your frost skills allow your next cast of Shards and Blizzard not cost any mana with it being 20% against vulnerable enemies. This gives you a free attack.

Teleport is not needed with this build. Even though most think it a necessary sorcerer attack, it really isn’t. The benefits from the Deep Freeze here outweigh the perks from teleport I believe especially with the cool down reset. If you are a fan of teleport, then I suggest swapping it for the Deep Freeze which will get you 3 points for it. You’ll lose the barrier but have it from other spots, while the cool down reset will be gone and you’ll need to wait. A 3rd, minor switch would be to remove the two upgrades of Deep Freeze and add them to Devouring Blaze. This will up the crit. damage from 7% to 21% against burning enemies and from 10% to 30% if they are immobilized. I wouldn’t recommend this unless you are hitting crit a lot with any boosts from gear. You can try this out and switch these two points at any time.