How to make Ice Shards actually better

Sorcerer
1

I’m hanging onto a (heavily modified by now) old build that uses ice shards, frost nova, and blizzard (plus shatter.) Shako, pentitents, and icehearts.

The whole point is you have a ton of way to freeze things, nova applies vulnerable, and ice shards autocasts against frozen.

Over a year of using it and I can tell you the problem with ice shards was never it doing less damage after passing through enemies, but rather that it sucks at the one thing it basically is by default: single target damage.

While I appreciate that piercing cold is getting better, I don’t see it fixing anything.

What should be done imho is to massively buff its base damage, and have autocasts of it deal a percentage of base damage that would make it equal to where it is now.

That would make it far more useful against bosses and also in any situation where you can’t set off chain effect novas and shatters, and would prevent a lot of its autocast damage from being op against regular enemies.

2

3 things hinders me from using ice shards are:

  1. it need proper aiming
  • froxen orbs, lightning spears, chain lightning are enemy seeker
  1. no uniques associated with it
  • other skill has fractured winterglass, axial conduit
  1. even aspect associated with it is less powerful
  • ice shards should always ricochets, not just limited to frozen enemy. if we going to make enemy frozen, it means the skill hitting not hard enough and took long time to clear mobs.