Blizzard or Blizzard/Frozen Orb?

General Discussion
1

I’m kind of torn between these two builds. I’m currently doing Blizzard, but I don’t like how it doesn’t hit some enemies sometimes. Some enemies will just sit in the middle of the Blizzard and no damage will occur. I’m playing with a controller so I can’t place things perfectly. I currently have about 5500 damage with Blizzard/synergies. If I respec’ed to Blizzard/Frozen Orb I would have about 3900 damage with Blizzard and 700 damage with Frozen Orb.

Anyone have any idea which is better? I’m all out of respecs and don’t want to waste a token or two getting things right.

2

With cold sunder you don’t need fire skills anymore to go with orb, so you can just max it out and then put points into Warmth and EnergyShield + Telekenesis. Put 1 in Blizzard for prereq and then leave it alone. Now you have very powerful orb, no immunes, and great defense and very high mana recharge to help with shield. Just teleport about slinging orbs all day long. No reason to hassle with Blizz anymore. You can still use static to knock down bosses and then finish with orb.

3

You think that Frozen Orb alone is good enough damage? Should I also do Ice Blast, or is Frozen Orb enough?

4

I think it’s enough, now. Center cast on single targets and they drop. Put a few points into Mastery so if you hit a previously immune it drops resistance to zero-ish. Stack cold damage gear and jewels as you can afford to. The whole point is not having to have all those synergies or go deep into another tree. I think my orbs are around 800ish and I have no trouble anywhere. Not sure about higher player counts as I do mostly SSF ladder P1. I would think it would do much higher pX by the way stuff just dies.

5

I also assume cold sunder.
Answer would depend on if you’re p1 or joing groups. FO dosn’t scale as well as Blizz on higher player count.
Going BlizzOrb nowadays is fine.
17 points after skills in CM is bare minimum so that you’ll do full damage to enemies with 0 cold reistance. Ideally you want -195 after skills so that sundered cold immunes will go down to -100 reistance.
If you wanna go only Orb you certainly have the points to max Orb, mastery and synergy and still get ES.

6

I’m interested in doing P1 through P8. I sometimes play alone and sometimes join group games. So Blizzard is better P8? Thanks.

7

BlizzOrb rocks. Don’t need ES if you are careful and just melt things from a distance…

8

My only problem with BlizzOrb is that I will have less time to cast Ice Blast if I’m also tossing out Frozen Orbs. Is the DPS from Frozen Orb better than Ice Blast? I can get about 3000 damage on my Ice Blast.

Is there a way to calculate which has the highest DPS, Blizzard/Ice Blast or Blizzard/Forzen Orb?

1 Like
9

i think orb is pretty useless as is, even maxed out the wazoo.

some dude on youtube modified files so there was no cooldown and it still was meh. imagine with the cooldown…

id just do blizzard and take the no energy shield synergies hit.

unless you want to stick to p1 forever then anything works i guess.

here i found it again:

3 Likes
10

I ran a BlizzOrb on ladder, and you don’t really need the Ice Blast anymore. The whole point is that Orb is better than Ice Blast, and doesn’t share the cooldown with Blizzard any more, so you can cast both then tele to next spot and cast both again. Single target damage would still be Blizzard/Ice Blast on top, but for farming BlizzOrb is the best.

1 Like
11

I like orb more, its not as strong for groups of enemies tho and you need to aim it well, i fear that you will end up facing same issue, troubles to aim it well with controller. Just ask for token from friends or something and try it.

12

First of all, as some people correctly said, the question stopped being Blizzard vs. Frozen Orb because they no longer share cooldown. It’s like asking “Fireball vs. Meteor”.

So the true question is actually Blizzard + Ice Blast/GS vs. Blizzard + FO.

In my experience, Blizzard + FO yields faster clearing speeds because FO is an AOE, it goes through enemies and because of that it helps getting those that are not hit by Blizzard by either slowing them down so they don’t escape or flat out killing them. Ice Blast offers very high single target damage and freezes but it doesn’t go through the target and this is where FO shines.

To answer OP’s question: for P8 Frozen Orb starts to really shine when it’s about maxed, ie. around 1.4k damage per shard (pre Cold Mastery). You will be maxing your skills until the end so the more you level, the more powerful Blizzard/FO will be.

Now as for the skill points - depending on the level and gear, you lose more or barely anything at all.

You will want to max Blizzard, Ice Bolt, Ice Blast, Frozen Orb and then put points into Cold Mastery (as much as you want and are comfortable with, though I’d say go for a solid 160-170 pierce in the beginning). Then the rest goes into Glacial Spike.

Call to Arms helps immensely, not only boosting your basic damage but also the pierce by another 5%
With true GG gear and high level you will be getting something like -180-190 cold pierce with maxed Blizzard and FO, full Ice Blast and Ice Bolt and anywhere between 15-17 hard points in Glacial Spike - so your Blizzard will be close to fully developed as well.

As for the linked video by Dbrunski - with all due respect to him, he even says it there “now this isn’t a Death’s Fathom test…” - ask yourself why not? Why in a SP video with modified FO wouldn’t he use Death’s Fathom and Nightwing’s Veil? Why is he putting Full Tal’s as the “GG” option?

His message seems to be that FO wouldn’t be OP with 0 cooldown. Could it be that pumping cold damage to the max would actually skew this message? Could it be that the skill would absolutely destroy so better not show that?

He left a lot of damage on the table. Fathom+Nightwings would increase that DPS by over 30%, not to mention I didn’t see any facets.

5 Likes
13

Without tethered C/Ds I prefer moving 19 points out of Glacial Spike into maxing Frozen Orb from the old pure Blizzard build. The C/Ds don’t line up perfectly, but for trash clearing just lazily cast 1 Blizzard per 2 Frozen Orbs and for single target 105fcr do a cycle of Blizzard > FO > IBx4. Very easy playstyle with sunder. P8 96TZ no issue with mediocre gear and no inventory.

14

Just to add on what people said in this thread, frozen orb requires a bit of special gameplay and positioning, when you’re fighting only a few monsters, frozen orb shines if you launch it from enough range to make it explode into your targets and when you are fighting a ton of monsters, frozen orb should be launched from as close as possible to monsters so then almost no ice bolts are wasted until it explodes.

If frozen orb didn’t have cooldown, you could get much better performance than Dbrunski because he’s not playing it properly at all. But that’s pretty much every streamer, bad as a rock and carried by his fans. It’s ideal not to listen to their advice.

Also, ~180% cold pierce from mastery is more than enough. Most monsters don’t have more than 50% cold resistance and those immune to cold are brought to 95% by sunder, then facets pierce an additional 15% and that puts immune monsters in the 180% required pierce. I would argue for much less so you can deal with non-cold immunes faster and you’d probably not feel that much of a difference against cold immunes, but someone has to do the math here I guess.

15

I’d just stick with ice blast and worry about gearing the sorc to be more sturdy. That’s so you can get more aggressive with your sorc without worrying about dying. You should also have a A2 might merc with Obedience (damage)/Insight (mana issues) for raw physical damage. Dump the rest the points into firewall for cold immunes. Just go vita and no es.

16

With a decently completed build, say +18 to skills, I think your frozen orb would be strong enough as a 1 point wonder - contingent upon having death’s fathom and perhaps nightwing or ormus. Blizz > Orb on cooldown > ice blast

17

holy softcore batman.

This kinda bad building only works in SC

If you’re HC do blizz with Max teleken and 1 point ES. Even with crappy gear you can farm up to p5 anywhere with a sunder

1 Like
18

I run an extremely fun cold build right now:

Blizzorber.

Max Frozen Orb.
Max Blizzard.
Max Ice Bolt.
Max Ice Blast

…

You have three powerful skills.
Ice Blast benefits just as much from Ice Bolt and Frozen Orb as it would have gained from Glacial Spike.

Frozen Orb is a great crowd control skill as it chills almost everything in the quadrant of the screen you cast it at, and it easily kills smaller and weaker monsters.

Blizzard doesn’t lose too much damage from only having two maxed synergies, and still slays.
And honestly, killing a super-unique in one or two hits doesn’t matter that much when you can cast one Frozen Orb to secure that ‘second hit’.

Ice Blast is a great targeted damage skill that also freezes, and can be used to freeze dangerous enemies when chilling them isn’t enough, or just one hit kill fodder with a high enough level.

…

This is with full Tal set and a Sunder Charm.

19

These kind of bad builds need to be listed AS SC so hardcore players dont read this not knowing and try to run it in hc

20

…and why would using it in hardcore be bad? Offence is the best defense by far – especially when said offence is a crowd control element by nature.

Sunder charm makes it more viable than any dual element sorceress in harcore.