I almost always make a blizz ice spikes sorc every season (except S7 since I didn’t play it).
It looks like the D4 design team decided to F things up again and make changes to Ice Spikes.
Anyway, have any of you been successful in making T4 feel like easy mode with Ice Spikes? If a build can’t do that, it’s trash to me.
The changes are great! Ice Spikes now scale with Blizzard ranks, and the Frozen Wake Aspect got a massive buff. It’s one of the strongest Sorc builds right now!
I can clear Pit 90 on the Eternal Realm with it—without seasonal powers or exploiting bugs.
Wow that’s really impressive. Glad to hear it’s still very viable in the endgame!
How much did you squeeze out of the build? I mean are all of your items highend or is there still room for improvement? Pit 90 is impressive btw., that’s the equivalent of pit 115 last season.
I’ve not hit T4 yet due to armor, resistance and glyph level using ice shards/blizzard. Running T3 speed and trash mobs gone instantly, increase health boss takes a tad longer than I would like but not enough to slow me down much.
The last pit was 35, two in the run where the second was a much weaker (this season) fireball. Carried in about 5 minutes. Strong damage on bosses.
My build is ice shards/blizzard the staples frost nova and ice armor. Fireball and ice shard enchantment. Verglas helm, talrasha ring, ice heart brasis pants. The rest is garbage legendary with meh tempers, mw to 4.
None of the build is from any meta that I’m aware of since I don’t follow any builds. But experience is good currently and the strongest pure cold I’ve seen since S2 or S3.
I uploaded a video to YouTube. At the end, you can see the build and the items.
Diablo IV S8 Blizzard Sorc - Pit 90 - YouTube
So, are you using the Mythic version of Lurkin’s build in your video?
Or is it your own build similar to Lurkin’s?
What I see in this season is independent of your build, you must have 100% critical chance.
I don´t know exactly why but you must have 25% crit chance + GAR rune (25%) + Hatred´s Embrace´s Haste boss power (50%).
Yeah, he probably uses Esu’s boots, has GA’d crit chance on helm, gloves, ring I’m sure. Doesn’t need seasonal powers to reach 100% crit.
The build is inspired by Lurkin’s work (he makes great builds!), but I’ve changed a few things — and so has he by now — so the builds are a bit different.
Instead of the Unleash glyph, I’m using the Winter glyph in the Fundamental Release board and I’m running Nagu/Kry and Cir/Thul. Personally, I find Nagu/Kry much more pleasant to play, as otherwise you’d have to stack Blizzard too often in different spots and would lose too much time.
Also, I’m not using the Familiar in the Enchantment slot, but Ice Blades instead. I might be losing some damage because of the seemingly broken interaction between the Familiar enchantment, Enlightenment, and Enchantment Master. As I said, it might be a bug — and if I don’t use it, I won’t be annoyed if it gets fixed later.
By the way, the build has 97% crit chance. It would actually be easy to go over 100%, but I’m not changing a roll just for three percent.
Is enlightenment itself not bugged and pushing builds past what they would do with how the tooltip of enlightenment suggests or it only is bugged with that enchantment?
It seemed unlikely to me when I was using Ice Shards with avalanche that it would do T4 level damage without insane gear, but with the enlightenment build they’re doing billions of damage with it.
Enlightenment is bugged and boosts damage via elemental damage. It adds all elemental damages together when fully stacked and is declining. To further squeeze out damage get non-physical damage anyway you can, elemental tempers, elemental gear, and aspect of elements.
When enlightenment is fully stacked and declining open you stats window and look at your elemental damage and wait for the stacks to go to zero. Then you will see your fire, cold, etc… drop way down.
Lightning spear uses this method with enlightenment plus primordial binding to further exploit the bug with enlightenment.
Its supposed to boost ele damage. It says so.
Edit: what is the bug?
Enlightment isn’t bugged, familiar enchantment is. The legendary node offers extra damage for every element tag in it. That’s why people are using sidhe’s binding instead of FoF.
Do sidhes have an effect on the enchant?
up to +18 to primodorial binding
+3 or more to familiar
chance to hit twice
explosion size
All of that is non physical damage.
Oh ok, its just good dps. Thanks; wasnt sure if it was further influencing the enchant directly, although i wouldnt expect so.
Edit: yo, the mw scaling is crazy on those gloves. Shouldn’t it just be 7 with a GA triple MW in primordial? (I read 18 when you posted it, but brain didnt brain lol) im running a cL/LS and 18 primordial is strong enough to just try to get stats like atkspd and crit elsewhere as required just to run these for the one affix, and i dont think ill need familiar slotted anywhere; it will take silly drops like a ga atk speed triple MW starless, but i dont care; unless my napkin math is off which is possible
I’m thinking of further abusing 18 ranks of primodorial with the ceh rune. You get more summons who freeze and make everything vulnerable while at the same time increasing the bonus of primodorial binding. I think with Nagu or Cir rune you can have multiple of them up at the same time.
I am thinking whether to use RSS or blue rose for the endgame build. I know ice spikes scale with the blizzard ranks but do they apply to the explosions of the blue rose ring?
Nagu will self replicate as long as you start off with a couple summons of your own, but it also bugs out and stops doing anything seemingly at random(this is accurate as of last patch, havent tried it recently)
Its pretty interesting when it works; you can stand still and just have a crowd of wolves lol