Diablo 4 Ice Shards Frost Sorcerer Build – Insane Early Levelling Sorcerer Build (Level 1-30)

I’m going to be covering my Sorcerer build that I’ve been using in Diablo 4 for early game leveling. Not only is it supremely effective, but it’s a ton of fun.

Sorcerers are the glass cannon class of Diablo. Damage isn’t a problem, but survivability is. So, being able to control the battlefield and Diablo 4 Gold effectively is extremely important, even at the early levels. 

This build has tons of survivability options while maintaining a great single target and AOE damage. And there’s no better build for crowd control with constant slows freezes which will help you survive the early levels even in World Tier 2.

Basic Skill

The first ability you’ll want to unlock is your basic skill, Frost Bolt, which not only damages your enemies but applies a chill, which slows them down. And repeatedly chilling an enemy has a chance of freezing them. You don’t want to level this beyond rank one out of five, as there are far more important skills and D4 Items to unlock and there’s very little return gained from that extra skill point.

Make sure you get Enhanced Frost Bolt, which gives it a 15% chance to explode when hitting chilled enemies or 100% chance against Frozen enemies.

Then, you should buy Diablo 4 Gold to get Glinting Frost Bolts so that you generate more Mana. Your base attack for any build is pretty weak, so you don’t want to be using Frost Bolt unless you have to. That is when you run out of Mana. So, when you do, you want to maximize your Mana again so you can use better offensive abilities.

Core Skill

*The first core skill you want to unlock is actually Frozen Orb, which you’ll be using early on to deal great AOE damage to large crowds of enemies in a single line of sight. We’re only going to be using this for the first few levels early on in this build as it’s decent straight out of the gate without much investment.

*Then, you want to unlock Ice Shards, which early on in the Diablo 4 functions better for single target DPS, but as you build more and more into it, it becomes the main offensive ability for the build and overtakes Frozen Orb pretty quickly.

Ice Shards launches five icicles towards the enemy, which does increased damage to Frozen targets.

Enhanced Ice Shards gives it a 40% chance to ricochet off enemies and it will always ricochet off Frozen enemies. 

Greater Ice Shards makes Ice Shards treat enemies as they are always Frozen when you have a Barrier active, meaning they will always ricochet and deal 25% increased damage. As we have two barriers in this build, it’s actually pretty easy to activate. 

At level 15, you’ll unlock Ice Shards Enchantment, which is a Sorcerer specific build crafting ability. It lets you socket one of your abilities into a passive enchantment. I highly recommend doing this quest as soon as possible when you unlock it, as Ice Shards Enchantment is unbelievably strong. It basically automatically summons Ice Shards whenever you have Frozen enemies nearby and it doesn’t cost any Mana. 

Ice Shards is also a very Mana efficient ability in comparison to something like Frozen Orb. You can constantly spam it and then with the passive enchantment, you’ll be raining Ice Shards into the field.

Defensive Skill

I see a lot of players making this mistake early on. And that’s unlocking tons of offensive abilities of which you won’t be able to use them all on the battlefield because managing Mana is a serious issue early on while leveling a Sorcerer. Instead, you want a wide variety of defensive skills, which don’t use Mana but are cooldown based instead.

*The first defensive skill you want to unlock is Ice Armor, which gives you an overshield that absorbs damage equal to 30% of your health for six seconds. 10% of any damage you deal with is added to the Barrier’s health in that time period. This is probably the single most important ability to help you survive early on while leveling.

Enhanced Ice Armor increases Mana Regeneration while Ice Armor is active.

Then, you want to go for Shimmering Ice Armor by using your Diablo 4 Gold. So, enemies have a chance of becoming Frozen around you.

*The other major defensive ability, which synergizes with this build and you want to make 5 out of 5 as soon as possible, is Frost Nova, which freezes enemies on cost. Combined with Ice Shards and its enchantment, the combination of Frost Nova and Ice Shards quickly becomes the staple for this build. 

Enhanced Frost Nova reduces the cooldown of Frost Nova by up to 4 seconds by killing Frozen enemies.

Then you want to go for Mystical Frost Nova. Because you make enemies vulnerable when you freeze them and then do up to 20% more damage against them. You can’t freeze bosses, but this vulnerability does apply to bosses so that extra 20% damage is super useful.

Shimmering Frost Nova is tempting for the Mana Regeneration. But honestly, when you start leveling up, more and more with the gear that drops, all of that becomes less of an issue and you want to start stacking damage bonuses.

*Our final defensive skill I recommend getting is Teleport, which is very useful if you’re in a bad position surrounded by enemies or if you’ve been walled in by an Elite. You’ll want to keep moving as a Sorcerer as you can’t really survive very many hits. This is another great ability to help you out.

As I said, I do replace Frozen Orb once Ice Shards becomes more potent and I replace this with Blizzard. At around level 15, which is just better at crowd controlling massive groups of enemies as well as doing some damage and applying chill.

Enhanced Blizzard boosts damage against Frozen targets and Wizard’s Blizzard makes it, so you can spam even more Ice Shards when you have a Blizzard active.

Once you have all of these abilities unlocked for your Diablo 4 builds, then I would highly recommend going for five out of five on Frost Nova and 5 out of 5 on Ice Shards, as those are the two main abilities of the build.

Aspects

There are two aspects I highly recommend for this build. The lucky thing is they are easily obtained early on in Diablo 4.

You can get the first one at level 6 near the starting point of the game. It is called Aspect of the Protector, which gives you another Barrier apart from Ice Armor. And it works with Greater Ice Shards, which I mentioned earlier.

The second one is Aspect of the Piercing Cold, which you get by completing the Dead Man’s Dredge dungeon, which makes Ice Shards even stronger and makes it pierce enemies three times, making it super deadly.

So, that forms the core of your build, which will probably take you to about level 30 or so. The best thing about this build is that the Ice Shards Frost Sorcerer build is actually a very good endgame build as well. I hope this guide helped you understand the basics a little more so you can step by step progress into that endgame version.