Cold sorc, im having an awful time scaling my dps, need help

Hi! Im a long veteran from the first beta of poe1, was a long time since the last time i played path of exile, with the launch of poe2 i was very exited, i tried to do a cold sorceress in a blind playthrough, not following any guides, im currently level 90 doing t16, and the character seems really underwelming, all my friends are playing deadeye lighting arrow, bloodmage detonate dead, a couple of them playing the infernalist with the raging spirits, no matter the changes i tried, i feel so left behind, they are facerolling content like its nothing, and im feeling like im struggling.

I tried to search on youtube any build of cold sorceress but there isnt anything really out there, as far as i know, is just ice really slow and sluggish? There is any build interesting with cold spells for endgame content? (Pinacle bosses and stuff)

There are some Frostbolt + frostbomb as starter

I'm playing Eye of Winter Stormweaver and have no problem clearing content.


The most important thing is to get your plus skills up and enough mana/mana regen to keep archmage on, as that is a crutch basically all sorceress' are leaning on atm.

I do Pierce, Elemental Focus, Considered Casting, and Inspiration as the primary gems for Eye of Winter. Inspiration is absolutely needed so you can spam down the EoW button. As the 5th gem I run elemental exposure on crit to save myself from having to press Frost Bomb when doing normal mapping so it was purely a convenience thing. If you don't need that convenience you can gem in Frost Mastery for even more damage.

Ascendancies are bonus to exposure, arcane surge, and the first nodes for elemental storm.

The exposure you generate is an insane DPS increase as it can push enemies into negative, with nodes/quality/Strip Away Gem Frost Bomb applies 90% exposure for bosses.

For mapping just put up a frost wall in front of you and spam EoW for a second or two and everything dies. If it's a stronger rare enemy you can fire a single frost bolt for the frozen ground and then EoW them to death. I have frost bold on slower projectiles and 2 additional projectiles so it sticks around forever leaving frozen ground

For bosses same thing drop Frost Bomb for the massive exposure, then spam Frost Walls on them until you are out of charges, hopefully freezing them for even easier clear. Then frost bolt once and spam EoW. DPS is about 750K on Pinnacle bosses with this setup. (I do have excellent gear though)

Stats to focus on are mostly Crit/Crit Damage which scales amazingly with EoW which applies crit weakness, increased skill levels, energy shield in that order.

If you have the divines to get a +20 gem and +7 on your weapon/focus (+5 on want, +2 on off hand) you are basically good to go already.

https://imgur.com/a/itljieA

Doesn't look like much but keep in mind that's per shard and shards can hit multiple enemies, it's +50% total damage going over a frostbolts frozen ground, your actual crit is MUCH higher than this due to how critical weakness works, and each cast fires off like 20+ shards. You're also basically doing true damage with the massive exposure.

Currently I mostly farm ultimatum with this build because you literally kill the bosses before they can get off a single attack and it's good money.

hey i'd be interested in knowing how to make it work with eye of winter, could you post some more info, like passive tree etc?

I googled it a bit, but don't find much helpful stuff on how to make it work, sorry im a new player XD

thanks!

Could really use some help with the passive tree as well, able to make Eye of Winter somewhat decent, but I can't clear anything past T13 - I just get off screened anything that hears me, or get rushed by something that instantly teleports on my position. Also, everything seems to instantly freeze me, regardless of what element they attack with?

General problem right now is that lightning damage is S Tier damage and the next best damage type is D Tier. Dont measure yourself with lightning builds is propably the best choice right now, because they are gonna get nerfed or all other builds need to be buffed.
If you want improvements now Archmage seems to be unavoidable right now, GGG kinda shit the bed on this one.

ungimmicked* direct damage spells do not do very good damage unless you use archmage

archmage scales exponentially (off mana), not linearly (based off gem level)
and because archmage is pure lightning damage and cant be converted due to being a 'gain', that means boosting lightning damage on your tree will always be the higher DPS by a long shot

pure cold can be scaled alright with crit and crit bonus, but those are expensive stats to fit into a build and onto a passive tree, and you get the same results from just running archmage...

Cold has a couple really excellent spells, namely Frost Wall - combined with cascade and spell echo, frost wall becomes a super powerful 'anti big boss' ability, despite its cooldown. Vs certain small bosses or weird hitbox bosses they have issues, but most endgame bosses that are challenging are large enough for frost wall do do lots of work.

Eye of winter is great and is extremely high DPS if you build it correctly, other players have already laid that out.

Frost bomb can be used to spread 2 types of exposure at once, which makes it prime for archmage usage.

Converting fire to cold gives you a fun option - fireball. You can still freeze things, but you have a much better screen wide clearing option that spreads a lot more than eye of winter, and has good interaction with your frost walls. It shares something in common with eye of winter, in that it proliferates projectiles which multiplies the power of archmage added damage.

Cast on freeze gives us some really fun abilities for clear, but isn't very good vs bosses. Try cast on freeze frost wall if you havent already (you can use 2 frost wall gems for hard cast and cast on freeze).

I do agree that cold on its own feels anemic. Im not a fan of eye of winter for clear (its great vs bosses).

Overall don't take it too seriously and remember this is an early patch of early access. Things are probably going to change a lot. There is nothing wrong with throwing in the towel and trying something else out and coming back later.

350 hours non archmage ice nova sorc here.

It's absolutely terrible, and can't clear 4th ascendency.

Mixed with ice wall + ice bomb + hypothermia (If someone has a 6link combo for these 3 skills while using all 3 of these skills let me know, there's not enough gems)

Every type of damage other than lightning is useless.

I just played archmage cold sorc to level 95 (~250 hours played). It's atrocious. With very high gear investment (~50 divine ish budget in current market), I got to where it clears T15/T16 maps with ~200% rarity and feels sort of OK, but it just doesn't feel good in any difficult content (scary maps, difficult breaches, endgame pinnacle fights, etc).


The only way I found to do DPS at any reasonable level was to invest heavily into Cast on Freeze while relying on manual Frostwall / Comet casting for single target DPS. And 10-11K ES with no other defensive layers feels super squishy.

The gear requirements are nuts to make this a barely functional 4/10 build. You need a high ES chest with 60 spirit to enable Archmage + Cast on Freeze. You need a crazy staff or wand/focus setup with a minimum of +6 to cold skills, 200+ mana, and as much spell damage and cast speed as possible. You need an Everlasting Gaze amulet for the ES boost. You need a minimum of FOUR jewels with 2% mana recovery on kill and >10% energy gain for meta skills.

Eye of Winter is absolutely awful. I wound up running 6L Frostbolt instead as the main clearing skill - Acceleration/Arcane Tempo/Wildshards/Controlled Destruction/Conduction as the supports. Comet with Unleash/Spell Echo/Considered Casting/Concentrated Effect/Overcharge for single target. Frostwall (Glaciation/Shock Siphon/Icicle) for general defense and for single target.


The build would be functional on medium-high gear investment except for three unfixable mechanical problems:
1) Frostbolt's projectiles are an order of magnitude too slow - mobs at range get too much free time to do things and it makes clearing slow. Eye of Winter has faster projectiles but is strictly worse at freezing things things and its damage is even worse.

2) The only way to do any real single target damage is to manually cast Comet. This is soooooooooo slow and many endgame bosses can and will kill you during the cast animation (or, you will constantly dodge roll out of the animation and never do any damage).

3) You cannot deal with monster packs that have enough health that frostbolt won't insta-freeze them and which won't insta-pop your frost walls. This is, for example, many mobs in level 81-82 breaches, or pretty much any mob in a +% monster life or +% monster resistances map.


Two final notes - I have not explored a crit build in endgame. I experimented with crit damage instead of ailments around level 70 ish, and it just felt bad. Maybe there's a way to make a crit cold Sorc, but I couldn't find it.

Also, it seems all spell damage in the game is balanced around running Archmage. Unless some other gimmick is found/used, Archmage is mandatory to get damage to acceptable levels on a sorc.