I’m a level 90 sorc playing ice shards and I don’t see my attacks go much further than 100k a shard with the average around 80-90k but I’ve seen videos of essentially the same build I use but hit much higher so my question is how do I get off the plateau I’m on?
I’m sure at least some of you were in the same boat but lept into the ocean for a air craft carrier so to speak.
stack the right bonuses , both from gear and your paragon board , there are plenty of videos about damage bucket in case you need to learn whose stat affect what , and also get a properly rolled 300% fist of fate .
I have a 290 percent fist of fate but I’m using frostburns for the freeze and mana regen…
Level 93 Sorc here, same question. Highest I’ve seen my shards reliably hit is 230k per shard against a staggered boss. I’m sure my gear covers the 3 damage buckets and Intelligence.
So I’m wondering if it’s my Glyphs that’s the issue. Got 6 glyphs equipped, 4 are level 15. Needless to say they’re a work in progress.
The other thing I’m absolutely confused about is the Wand. How do you decide the trade off between its base damage and good affixes? My wand is 819 with crit damage, CC damage, Core damage, and Intelligence. Ideally either CC or Core should be replaced with Vulnerable. But it’s so darn hard to find a 810+ wand with all the right affixes. Is it worth dropping down to a 790+ wand?
97 Sorc here running ice shards
seems to be so variable
my ice shard ticks vary anywhere from like 70k to like 700k
And with fists of fate they can get up to 1.5mil
It really depends on how many effects/buffs/monster debuffs are stacked up
ie, barrier, vulnerability, avalance passive, glyph bonus effects, monster crowd control effects etc
The biggest amplifier of all being CC effects
I’m not a min-maxxer, but you need to have a strong +3 passive bonus on your neck, with devouring blaze being the best. Ensure you have +crit damage, +vuln on all pieces of gear that can have it. Use Exploit and Destructive glyphs. Use fire bolt enchant to apply burning to make use of devouring blaze passive. Have the right aspects, especially Aspect of Control on your neck (or staff if you use 2-hander)
After that, just powering up with paragon board, getting all the +vuln magic and rare nodes, and getting a good ilvl weapon. You’ll see hundreds of thousands ice shards easily at that point even without fists of fate. But the mob has to be frozen or staggered to see those numbers.
And this is without stunning/immobilizing.
I hit 4/5m to 7m with each of the 5 ice shards from a cast depending on whether I have avalanche keystone instead of shatter, 4/5 m being the standard since I usually run shatter.
As a few others pointed out, +3 devouring blaze on the amulet is a massive damage increase, again as previously said, vulnerability and crit damage in both rings and on your weapon, make sure to get your crit chance to 40.
On top of these things, if you want the maximum achievable damage, you need to use a 2hander with control aspect on it. Control aspect gives you the listed multiplier for each of the listed effects, so you can get it 3 times if you youse immobilize, stun and freeze together, these multiply each other as well, so in a 2hander you’re looking at a 4.9 damage multiplier, making 2hander infinitely better than the alternative for raw damage output since no other aspect is remotely close to providing this kind of damage boost.
While firebolt enchantment was suggested before, I recommend using teleport enchantment over it, this both increases your mobility, solves some of the cooldown reduction problem you get from running a 2hander and also boosts your survival as you can sustain the 30% damage reduction from teleport if you run boots with the implicit “attacks reduce the cooldown of dodge”. This implicit also works from the shards from your enchantment, making it entirely reset on each pack. The reason for not using firebolt enchantment is that you want immobilize in your build and with the exception of fists of fate (which is a good dps on paper but a little unnecessary as the proc isn’t reliable enough and you get to kill elites in a single freeze window without them even in 100, making introducing randomness to your damage a bit undesirable), any source of immobilize you can get already gives you a burn, basically either flame shield with immobilize aspect, or in my case just ye olde meteor.
By running teleport enchantment, you also get to run 40% increased damage on stunned enemies instead of 20% on vulnerable enemies while you have a barrier on, since with this setup you never run out of teleport stuns.
Just more Crit damage and Vuln damage. These are the only stats Sorc care about. Drop all your lucky hit, it’s an absolute bait. Resourse gen on rings and Prodigy for bosses/Umbral for clear are enough to fuel the mana engine. However your damage won’t change much. Highest Sorc crits outside of CC are in the 200k-300k range, which when you compare it to other classes is 4-20 times less. Even when you stack all the damage multipliers of Frozen/Chilled/Stunned/Full HP/Burning and so on, you would still be doing less damage than Rogue, Necro,Druid, so what’s the point? Not to mention resists don’t work and Sorc literally has a single Paragon node with Armor and it’s not even 100+100, it’s Elite DR. My question to you is why bother? Just reroll to a working class.
Could be aspect of control. You need to stun, immobilize and freeze to proc the damage multipliers
I have control on my amulet at like 51 percent dmg
The 230k value is with 35% aspect of control on a staggered boss. If I were to move that to a staff and get 70%, that just bumps it to around 455k. If I throw in aspect of retribution (40% damage against stunned), then 455k goes up to 640k. It’s still a far cry from the 2m-3m.
I suppose what would help me is, those people doing ice shards in the millions, what’s your damage when the boss is not staggered?
You’re missing 40 paragon points and probably 2 glyphs
6 glyphs / 810+ weap + offhand. crit /vul / close / core /int where possible. You will reach about ~700k tick per shard with the enemy in nova. Its still like 1/4 of any other class tho and they don’t need the cc multiplier.
But at 90 if your target is froze and vulnerable you should at least hit around 400k-500k every elite up to nm60-65 should basically a (teleport → nova → 1 or 2 ice shard) away from exploding, assuming some bad gear and missing 1 glyph.
FoF is a trap to see high damage numbers while not actually increasing the DPS of your build.